I was surprised right off the bat, Fusion was a breeze to install, and even easier was installing Windows 7. I entered in my license key, and within 30 minutes a copy of Windows 7 was on my Mac. Even cooler my same desktop from my Mac was right there on Windows, my CD/DVD Drive worked, and I was connected to the internet. I didn’t have to setup anything! Windows 7 runs great on my MacBook Pro and I can use pretty much any software I need on my laptop now. If you are considering installing Windows 7 I would absolutely recommend installing it with VMWare Fusion.

Learn more about VMWare with our VMWare Guide.

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1. Office 2010 Home & Student – Hands down, no questions you will use Office every day at school. Whether you are typing papers, or working on projects programs like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel will help you get all your work done. The new tools and features in Office 2010 will help you get your work done quickly and easily (…maybe that depends on the person). If you are equipped with a Mac check out Office 2008 For Mac.
2. Adobe Creative Suite – If you are headed into a degree in any kind of design, or art then programs in Adobe’s creative suite will be truly beneficial to you. A majority of classes are taught on Photoshop and Illustrator. Keep up with the latest edition of CS5 to take advantage of all the great new features.
3. Kaspersky Internet Security – Let’s face it, if you’re headed to college you are going to be on the internet a ton! (wheatear or not you’re doing homework is up to you) Protect your PC with one of the best protection suites available. Kaspersky’s Internet Security 2010 will keep your PC running in tip top shape all year long so you can keep studying (and use facebook.)
4. Chrometa Time Management Software – Chrometa 2 is an incredibly useful for staying organized. Use Chrometa to track your daily work habits, and fine tune them to increase efficiency. You’ll start noticing things about your habits that you would have never paid attention to before. Check it out now to find out how you can stay more organized.
5. Search & Recover – Tired of losing reports, and other important assignments? Search & Recover is here to help you. Not only will the program comb your system for what you are searching for, it also features powerful recovery tools. Don’t worry about losing anything again with the powerful TotalRecovery wizard included with Search & Recover.

What will keep my using iBank however is its support for iPhone. Using MobileMe and iBank you can track your finances on the go, add new transactions, and monitor your spending. If you are using an iPhone and a Mac iBank is definitely the go to program to track your finances.

The Timeline

The Timeline in Vegas is very straight forward with very easy to access tools. Controls for volume for each specific clip are easy to modify, there is also an easy way to fade audio or video in and out without using an extra effect. You can just choose the area you want to fade and drag the fade control line to the desired starting location.  Shortcuts in the timeline also allow you great tools for modifying video and audio effects.

Effects and Transitions

Vegas makes choosing and adding effects and transitions incredibly easy. One of the main panes of Vegas is dedicated to its effects. In the respective browsers you can preview effects and then drag and drop them on to your media. Once you choose your effect you have a lot of control over its speed and any other options the specific effect has, in a spate effect editor window.

Trimmer

Vegas’ trimmer is a great tool for modifying video clips and audio. Trimmer allows you to isolate a specific clip and control which part of the video and audio you want before dropping it into your timeline. This keeps things a bit more organized when dealing with lots of clips in your timeline

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Take your summer vacation memories to the next level with the best in creativity software.

Summertime, and the living is easy. I hope you are enjoying summer as much as I am. I feel as if the bustle of spring and early summer  has quieted down a bit and now we are into those hot and lazy days. It’s prime vacation time. Here is a photo I took while kayaking at the Bear Lake National Wildlife Refuge last week. It was nice to get away and be forced to stop and see nature, in the form of a White Faced Ibis, Sandhill Crane, Snowy Egret, Kestrel and a Huge. White. Pelican.

It was beautiful, but I digress.  I am not much of a design software buff, but since I do work at a software company and have access to all sorts of programs, I decided to edit some of my vacation photos into more usable and interesting depictions.

In my first attempt I wanted to remove the photographer’s kayak from the picture so that all you see is yours truly. To teach myself how to do this I used an article from Layers Magazine outlining how to remove elements from a photo. (If I were using CS5 I would have tried out the Content Aware Fill feature Brian wrote about back in May.)

Original Photo

Edited Image

I’m betting the Photoshop experts out there will have some criticism of my editing skills, but for my purposes this will work perfectly.

For my second editing effort I created a “painting” with my photo using Corel Painter. For this I used Kevin’s Corel Painter Tutorial, which I must say was very easy to follow.

Original Photo

Painted Image

It’s amazing how you can preserve your memories in unique ways with computer software. At SoftwareMedia.com we carry such a variety of design and creativity software programs. Curious which programs rank best of the best creativity software? Find out which programs fared the highest in our user tests (user ratings are coupled with popularity to determine the best of the best).

Best of the Best: Creativity Software

Best for User Friendly Photo Editing

Photoshop Elements
Make your photos look extraordinary with Adobe’s pared down version of Photoshop. This is a great way to get your foot into the door editing photos. It is both powerful and simple, and allows you to change a photo’s size (without distortion), fix photos, whiten teeth, adjust color and give your photos a fresh look with artwork templates. MSRP $99.99.

Runners Up: Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo, Roxio Toast Titanium

Best for Professional Photo and Image Editing

Adobe Photoshop
This one may seem a bit obvious, but when you’re the best, you’re the best. Adobe continues to innovate and be the industry-leading standard in professional image editing software. It is used worldwide by professional photographers, serious amateur photographers, and designers who want to perfect their digital images. MSRP $699.00.

Runners Up: Photoshop Lightroom

Best for Cool Photo Effects

Corel Painter
Make your photos look like they were illustrated with unique brushes, materials, and textures that mirror the look and feel of their traditional counterparts. This program is fun to use and with some basic instruction it is also very intuitive to learn. MSRP $429.00.

Runner Up: Autodesk Sketchbook Pro

Best Scrapbooking Software

My Memories Suite Digital Scrapbook Software
Build beautiful pages from scratch or make a page using one of the templates provided within this affordable software. Print individual pages, create a professionally-printed hardbound book or create a movie which you can view on DVD, iPod, online and more. Download it instantly or have it shipped to you. MSRP $39.97.

Runner Up: Scrapbook Factory Deluxe

Best for Home and Small Business Publishing

Microsoft Publisher
If you are used to the Microsoft Office interface, using Publisher will be a breeze. You can easily create a myriad of publication types, such as brochures, newsletters, postcards, greeting cards and more, without needing any prior graphic design experience. Get started easily with built-in templates and font and color schemes. MSRP $139.99.

Runner Up: Encore Print Shop

Best for Professional Desktop Publishing

Adobe InDesign
With InDesign you can design professional layouts for print and digital publishing. You get precise control over the elements of your design down to the tiniest pixel. Built-in tools help streamline design, preflight and publishing, while included interactivity, animation, video and sound in page layouts help to fully engage readers. MSRP $699.00.

Runner Up: QuarkXPress

Best User Friendly Video Editing

Sony Vegas Movie Studio
Produce spectacular HD movies with powerful tools for video composting, color correction, and surround sound. Edit video in nearly any format including HDV and AVCHD, working simultaneously with standard and high definition in the same project. Customize window layouts, burn DVDs, create slideshows and more – all within an easy to use interface. MSRP $99.95.

Runners Up: Adobe Premiere Elements, Corel VideoStudio, Roxio Creator

Best Professional Video Editing

Adobe Premiere Pro
Offering breakthrough performance for video production, Premiere Pro enables you to work dramatically faster. Eliminate transcoding and rewrapping with tapless workflows. Move from script to screen faster with Adobe Story (offered online), among dozens of other new time saving improvements. MSRP $799.00.

Runner Up: Sony Vegas Pro Production Assistant (plug-in for Vegas)

Best Priced Design Suite

CorelDRAW Graphics Suite
This suite has it all, and for less than a third a cost of the cheapest Adobe Creative Suite. You get tools for vector illustration, page layout, photo editing and tracing, web graphics and animation – all in one tightly integrated suite. The programs and easy-to-learn high quality design tools that let you do more than you thought possible. This suite is perfect for professional and aspiring designers alike. MSRP $499.99.

Best Overall Design Suite

Adobe Creative Suite
Once again, Adobe proves to be the best, but not without a price. Of course if price were not a consideration, the Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection would be the ultimate suite for a professional designer. But with a suggested retail price of $2,599, you may be wise to choose your edition based on the features you need. (Try our CS5 version comparison). Adobe has provided six different editions to address the creative need of a variety of different disciplines.

A lot of improvements have been made to how you work with Visual Studio as well. In 2010 a new code editor makes it easy to zoom in and out on specific parts of code, highlight method references, and overlay features. Tools are built in that will also help your applications run more efficiently on new advanced multi core processors. One of the biggest time saving features is the inline call hierarchy in Visual Studio 2010, which cuts down on time debugging. Pick up Visual Studio 2010 Professional right now, and stay tuned as more editions are released.

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1. Photoshop Elements 8 – Photoshop Elements has always been popular seller in our catalog, the program gives you some of the great industry standard features in Photoshop, in an easier to use, more straight forward photo editing program. If you don’t need everything Photoshop offers, this is an affordable option for great photo editing software. It’s available on Mac or Windows.
2. Photoshop CS5 – Photoshop needs no introduction, it’s been around for years and is the industry standard for Photo Editing. In CS5 you can find great new features like Content Aware Fill and more. Check out Photoshop CS5 for Mac or Windows today.
3. Corel Painter 11- If you are looking for editing software with better tools for drawing and painting look no further than Corel Painter 11, both designers and our customers agree this is an awesome program for working with photos. Check it out for Mac or Windows today.
4. PhotoImpact Pro 13 – PhotoImpact is an affordable solution for those looking for great photo editing tools such as retouching and raw editing, without paying the high price tag for Photoshop. There are also great organizational tools included to manage your photos. Check it out on Windows today.
5. iPhoto as part of iLife ’09 – iPhoto is Apple’s great photo editing and managing program included as part of the new iLife suite. In iPhoto 09 there are new ways to organize photos, by geo tagging them, or sorting by date. It even has facial recognition capabilities meaning it will automatically organize your photos by person. Check iPhoto out on your Mac today.

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Ever wanted to re-design your home or yard, but didn’t want to deal with a costly consultant. Well now you can design your dream home or yard easily with Punch Home and Landscape Design. Featuring QuickStart the program allows you to start dragging and dropping rooms into place in seconds. This is truly one of the easiest programs to see what your dream home looks like. One of my favorite features is the “Building Green” tips; these are awesome suggestions for saving energy and money by going green. By choosing Go Green you can find out which energy efficient materials and objects will help you accomplish your eco-friendly goals. With tons of 3D objects built in, and even more available with built in support for Google 3D it’s never been easier to see your plans as if it were designed professionally in an advanced CAD program. When you’re done designing you can even print out a large format plan of your design, just like you would get from an architect! Think this program can’t get any cooler? …Well maybe not, but in July you can receive an additional $5 off from SoftwareMedia.com.

Check out this video we made a little while ago highlighting the features of Punch Home and Landscape Design.