Free Video Software

We saw this press release and want to pass it on:

Free HTML5 Video Player and Converter is a newly released application designed to fully use HTML5 technology providing any website owner with cross-browser supported videos and players which are flexible in design.

The main object of HTML5 specification is to transfer playback of multimedia video and audio to the browser itself without installing additional plug-ins. However, browser developers cannot decide on the video formats which are to be supported by the HTML5 specification and there is no unified player's interface agreed upon.

This is where Free HTML5 Video Player and Converter will work. The program converts any video to both *.mp4 and *.ogv formats which are compatible with HTML5 and which will play in all contemporary browsers.  HTML5 video player developed by DVDVideoSoft easily integrates in any browser and any web page. The player will automatically choose the necessary format depending on the browser which is used by the website visitor.

DVDVideoSoft has performed a bulk of work in order to unify the player's look and make it  function in a best way in all browsers. The program creates several types of player, e. g. classic player, simple player and one-button player. All the players are available in different colors. Moreover the source code of the HTML5 player is open thus it is easy to adapt it to the current needs and even improve.

Free HTML5 Video Player and Converter possesses a self-explaining functional interface. The user just needs to browse for input files, choose the type of the player and its color and then push the "Convert" button. As the output, the user gets *.mp4 and *.ogv videos, a player and an example page with HTML code which are to be copied to the website.

Free HTML5 Video Player and Converter is available for direct download from the company's website www.dvdvideosoft.com. The company plans to continue development of the application thus any feedback is welcomed on Forum and Facebook pages.

New Tablets are on the way

This should be an interesting week in the Tablet computer wars. Sony will be introducing their Xperia brand tablets that are meant to compete in features and price with iFruit tablets. Sony’s efforts in the past to capture a large part of the tablet market have fizzled so we’re taking a wait and see what happens.

Sony executives have set a high goal for themselves, they want to become number one in the market in a year! Kunimasa Suzuki, an executive vice president at Sony, said "It was important to set ourselves the target of becoming number one”. We honestly wish Sony good luck because it means more competitors in the market and that’s always good.

The iFruit company Innovates Again

The iFruit company is doing what it does best, “innovating” by going to court. They have been spurred on by their latest court victory and have decided to add a buch of additional devices to their suit. The Devices added are the Galaxy S III and its special Verizon edition; Galaxy Note; Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet; and the Galaxy S II in both its basic and carrier-independent forms.

The fantastic sales of Samsung’s phones must really bother the iFruit company. How dare someone else make a better product and sell it at a lower price! After all, we can’t have everyone using iOnly products if anyone else is selling anything.

Personally I’m rooting for Samsung to win their appeals. I prefer honest competition over court orders and monopolies any day of the week.

WordPerfect Office X6: the Other Programs Part 2

By Bayle Emlein

Presentations completes the standard office suite trilogy. The analog is PowerPoint, which has become a common noun and verb the way Google and Xerox have. The creation page offers both gridlines and cross hairs. Under View, one can set up options for gridlines spacing (as well as whether or not to have either or both visible or hidden). From my untalented perspective, cross hairs in a drawing program are critical–as  important as Reveal Codes and right up there with a good spell checker and sliced bread. Of course, there are features in Presentations that are missing (or at least really, really hard to find) in other brands, and vice versa. The Tutorial built into Presentations makes it easy to master the functions of the program and create a competent slideshow presentation.


The suite includes two more unheralded applications: Presentation Graphics and Lightning. Presentation Graphics is a respectable bitmap drawing and editing application, useful for do-it-yourself graphics–for copying to slideshows, for example. Presentations Graphics is not to be confused with Presentations, any more than Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer or Outlook and Outlook Express should be confused. It’s the user who’s confused. Users of the Corel Graphics Suite will feel familiar with the toolbar for bitmap drawing (including grids and cross hairs). Charts, text art, and organizational charts are new; maybe just newer than my version of the graphics suite. I appreciate the ease of finding the org chart templates since updating them is another chore I’d delegate if I had the authority.


Lightning is an example of a relatively new kind of application that is most frequently promoted as a study tool. However, given the long history of WordPerfect supporting the needs of the legal profession, this kind of tool is not surprising. Lightning is a tool for aggregating and organizing notes from a longer document, in WordPerfect or Word. The product has just three tools: a Viewer, a Notes window, and a Navigator window. You see your document in the Viewer Window, create notes in the Notes Window and organize them into projects in the Navigator. Much more elegant than the old-fashioned way, copying and pasting into a separate document and organizing files and folders from the menu tree.

Templates–legal and other, eBook publishing to the Mobi format are tucked into the New From Project tab under the WordPerfect File menu. Once you figure out where they are, they’re easy to find and require no extra opening of applications to complete the task.

As noted several times, the Corel products are nicely integrated with each other, reducing learning time and keeping focus on task completion. Formatting options and Reveal Codes put the core word processor in the market to compete with low- to mid-end desktop publishing applications without the need to buy and learn a new program. Excel and Presentations round out the suite, with support from Lightning and Presentation Graphics, resulting in a robust package that is well worth consideration.


WordPerfect X6 (Suite) $249.99
Estimated Shipping $9.00 for CD version, or download

WordPerfect Suite X6- The Other Programs Part 1

By Bayle Emlein

What’s with the mixture of Roman and Arabic numerals in the title of X6? This started with the version after 12. Apparently the folks in Marketing were concerned enough about triskaidekaphobia that they didn’t want to include 13 anywhere in their title. They should have been much more concerned way back at the version after 3: the number Four is considered bad luck in most Asian cultures. Version 4 was a disaster for dBase and for DOS. Use Google if you think that DOS is just the number after uno.

Quattro Pro is spreadsheet component of the Corel office suite. It comes with the package, so it’s included in your $249 list price or whatever your shopping efforts find you. Spreadsheets are used to manipulate numbers, including things like payroll. I use one to balance my checkbook. I think of it as a printing calculator on steroids and find it hard to get too excited about any of them, mainly because I find it hard to get excited about the tasks I use them for. And I don’t use them routinely for very fancy tasks, basically as list-makers in which I can perform arithmetic functions, and have the computer do my searching. I noticed early on that I couldn’t find a way to search in a Notebook (Corel-ese for Workbook) across multiple Sheets (Corel-ese for Worksheet). Maybe it’s there, somewhere.

On the other hand, formulas seem to work exactly as in Excel, which reduces the learning curve and facilitates sharing with Microsoft devotees. I imagine this is because XML below application interface details. No problem importing various versions of Excel or saving as Excel from ‘97 to 2010, dBase (II, III, or IV) or Lotus–among others.

I found the Search All Worksheets in Excel by accidentally bonking something. Looks like I’ll have to stumble blindly in Quattro also. “Help” has not been at all helpful. The discovery method (professional-speak for “random poking”) doesn’t work for spelling, but it seems to be the way to go for data management.

On the other hand, Quattro does have a few nice features. The keyboard shortcut is the same as it is in WordPerfect, rather than a dive through menus. The Lock Titles feature sets the columns titles in stone, so to speak, so that I don’t accidentally scroll into the wrong part of the window or otherwise mess up my Notebook’s GPS system. Not the paradigm shift of Reveal Codes; but with my talent for getting lost in my own data, it’s pretty close.

In another Quattro feature, the Notebooks open with Sheets tabbed out to IV (that’s the letter after H plus the letter after U). Not quite to infinity–but definitely as much as I’ve ever needed. As long as they’re empty, I couldn’t see that the extra Sheets add significantly to file size.

Quattro Pro is part of the Corel suite and is a perfectly serviceable spreadsheet application that interfaces seamlessly with other applications on the market. It is well-integrated with the word processing application in the suite, WordPerfect, reducing the learning curve. That in itself makes it worth considering.

End of Part 1

Labor Day Treat

We have a treat in sure for everyone on this holiday weekend. We're taking a couple of days off and won't be running current news articles. Instead we'll be running some great reviews.

Watch for the next installments of our Corel WordPerfect review startling tomorrow.

New Phablets

Both Sony and Samsung have announced new Phablets (PHones and tABLETS) recently. What makes the new products interesting to us is their operating system, all of them are Win 8 products.

Would many of these new products have used Android if it hadn’t been for the iFruit company victory over Samsung? It takes a long time for a product to go from design to market so Sony and Samsung clearly had these new products in development long before the verdict came down. Both of them also knew MSFT had Win 8 due soon and will want to take advantage of the market enthusiasm when it’s released.

We wish them both luck with their new products, they are providing real competion for iProducts.