Anyone who’s ever hired an architect or had a general contractor remodel a home knows that modifications to plans can easily cause the price to skyrocket, especially if you (or the person you’ve hired) can’t visualize what you want. Home Designer Suite ($99, buy-only) can help you plan and communicate your interior and exterior design or remodel project in 2D and 3D with a simple one-click, drag and drop process.

Home Designer Suite’s dollhouse view allows you to visualize your plan from above, a great help when redecorating or remodeling. Home Designer Suite offers templates as jumping-off points, including layouts for interior rooms, exterior landscaping, and entire home plans of various sizes and styles. In addition, you can set home styles that define the defaults for the design components, like certain cabinetry or flooring styles.

Outlining your basic room is as simple as selecting the wall tool and drawing the correct dimension– the feet/inches or meters/millimeters display as you draw. Then, drag and drop details such as appliances, cabinetry, fireplaces, and furniture from Home Designer Suite’s library. Home Designer Suite can specify the location of the tiniest and most mundane of items like bathroom fittings, electrical outlets, and individual plants.

Home Designer Suite can also help you plan and visualize your outdoor rooms–patios, decks, pools, and landscaped spaces, including terrain. The extensive database of plants comes with Plant Chooser that helps you filter the more than 1,500 items by flower color, bloom time, leaf color, size, climate needs, and other characteristics.

Home Designer Suite’s library is inclusive enough that an advanced user, with the know-how to tweak the defaults (and enough knowledge of local building and construction codes) could almost create an architectural plan detailed enough to hand over to a builder. ‘Almost’ is the key word: You’ll need to upgrade to the $495 Home Designer Professional edition to create blueprint layouts, CAD, cross-section elevation, plan views, or to print on 18″x24″ paper (the architectural standard required for a permit in many locales).

For a small or medium-scale general contracting business, Home Designer Suite could help nail down details, especially with clients who aren’t entirely sure what they want; or who need to visualize their options. Home Designer Suite quickly and easily creates 3D models of floor plans, renders a 3D walk-through or a doll house view, and can even print out your model for assembly. Changes are relatively easy once you get the hang of making finicky tweaks. But even for the most advanced user, the rendering is still going to look like a 3D model–no CSI magic here.

Home Designer Suite may leave home improvement fanatics feeling shortchanged. The program is great at communicating big ideas visually to a spouse, general contractor, or even over the counter at a home improvement store, but is no help in turning the idea into reality without the help of a professional. For example, Home Designer Suite does have a “Plan Check” feature that will review your layout and point out errors based on basic construction principles (like a room without a door), but unlike the $495 Home Designer Professional, Home Designer Suite does not review your design against national building codes.

Home Designer Suite is fun, easy to use, and perfect for visualizing your home improvement project or planning your landscaping, but that’s really all it’s going to help with. The program easily gives you the ability to design your dream home or remodel, but without adequate knowledge and construction experience, you’ll need to hire the architect or structural engineer anyway, just to make sure the dream becomes a reality.

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Sometimes it pays to talk to your computer–particularly if you’re running a voice-recognition program such as Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.5 Professional. With this software, you can create documents and email messages, navigate the PC, and search the Web, all with your voice. This version comes less than a year after the release of Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11; the underlying voice-recognition engine remains unchanged, but this update is replete with a handful of useful interface tweaks, and it adds functionality that iPhone users and social networking hounds will fast appreciate.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.5 Professional ($600 as of July 26, 2011; free upgrade for existing users of version 11) lets you turn your iPhone or iPod Touch (4th generation), running iOS 4.2 or later, into a dictation microphone. This arrangement frees you from having to stay chained to your computer with a headset. You can also post updates to Facebook and Twitter using simple commands. In addition, Nuance expanded the Dragon Sidebar, a desktop helper screen that sits beside your work, offering an index of commands and tips based on your active window.

Nuance includes the Andrea Electronics NC-181 headset microphone (priced at $25) in its package. As bundled adjustable headsets go, I thought that the unit’s comfort level was satisfactory. The wide band helps anchor the headset, and you can position the boom on either the left or right side of your mouth. The NC-181 plugs into your PC’s audio jacks. (No on-off switch or other in-line controls, though.)

Desktop Dialogue

After installing Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.5–and before you can start yakking at your PC–the software urges you to complete some “training.” This painless process involves reading a series of paragraphs aloud for about 5 minutes (in my case); I chose the set of excerpts from President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address.

I took version 11.5 for a spin on a Windows XP system and a Windows 7 PC, after completing the minimal training on both machines. Even though accuracy was not the focus of this new release, I still wanted to revisit the software’s recognition and accuracy performance, starting from scratch. After I chattered on for a few thousand words, Dragon delivered the goods just from the basic training–as version 11 did. With long documents, accuracy peaked at a bit over 98 percent, while shorter dictation spurts (such as quick and conversational email messages) required barely any editing or corrections at all.

I speak reasonably quickly when I dicatate, and Dragon kept up. For example, in my haste, I tripped up on the word “telecommunications” and raced through “it’ll.” Dragon nailed those two, and other words and phrases like them–punctuation and all–almost every time. I liked how easily I could use my voice to browse the Web and post updates on social networking sites: Spoken commands such as “Search maps for 1602 Walnut Street, San Carlos, California” and “Search Amazon for universal laptop charger” behaved as advertised.

Misrecogntion and Correction

Overall, most of the errors that Dragon made were minor. A few examples include “in” instead of “on” (or vice versa), “to” instead of “do,” singular nouns instead of plurals (or vice versa), and “pen” instead of “PIN.” That said, some Dragon interpretations made me giggle: The software heard “pile-driving” when I said “while driving,” “cigarette” instead of “figure out,” and “year hoax” instead of “earhook.” It also added the phrase “excavation point” at the end of my sentence when I really wanted to insert an exclamation point!

In the new version, Nuance refined the spelling window–something I use a lot, particularly for unusual names–making it easier to correct words that Dragon mistranscribes. You can now resize the window so that the list of spelling options is more readable. The benefits end there, however: I still found that completing the correction steps is labor-intensive, especially when spelling out or typing the correct word is necessary. (I freely admit it: I am impatient when donning a microphone.)

iPhone as Microphone

I was curious to see how well the iPhone would work as a remote microphone. (I did not test Dragon’s integration with the iPad or iPod Touch.) The verdict: The iPhone handled its role just fine. But setting things up, in my case, proved to be a rocky road.

After installing the free Dragon Remote Microphone app (available via the Apple App Store), I needed to pull up my existing Dragon user profile on my PC, indicate that I wanted to add a new dictation source, and make sure that my smartphone and computer were connected to the same Wi-Fi network. I manually entered the necessary info, which Dragon displayed for me on my PC’s screen, into the iPhone’s settings–my user profile name created with the Dragon software, plus the IP address and port details. At that point, the iPhone should have connected to my PC. But it did not. In fact, after I tried three different wireless networks, the iPhone and my computers suddenly refused to “talk” to each other.

After I made a couple of calls to Nuance’s technical support, we determined that the XP machine’s security restrictions were probably blocking the connection. Frustrated, I switched gears and turned to the Windows 7 system; after a little tinkering, the Windows 7 test system and the iPhone finally joined forces. (Nuance’s documentation makes it clear that the Dragon Remote Microphone app may not work in all cases: For instance, the company warns, the iPhone feature might not function in certain coffee shops or offices.)

Finally free of a headset’s cords, I held the iPhone a short distance away from my mouth, tapped the mic button on the phone’s screen to turn it on, and completed my training. After that, I dictated a bunch of email messages, and the accuracy results were similar to what I got when using a headset, as described above. It was tempting to walk far away from the PC and start blabbing into the iPhone, but I found that I wanted to be at the computer anyway to view the words on screen as I dictated them. So I was tethered to my PC, but without a contraption on my head.

As for the Android operating system, the company does not have a Dragon Remote Microphone app offering at this time. But a spokesperson says that Nuance expects to support that platform in the future.

Dragon Varieties

The $600 Professional version is aimed at customers who need enterprise administration tools and advanced custom commands. If you’re looking for more-affordable speech dictation, consider the $200 Dragon NaturallySpeaking Premium or the $100 Dragon NaturallySpeaking Home. (Note: The iPhone feature is not available in Dragon Home.)

Be aware that if your PC is more than a few years old, your hardware may not be up to snuff for running the software. Dragon NaturallySpeaking requires machines with a 1GHz CPU, along with 1GB RAM for Windows Vista and XP, and 2GB RAM for Windows 7; what Nuance recommends, however, is meatier than that. See Nuance’s site for the full system requirements.

Whichever version of Dragon Naturally Speaking you opt for, you’ll quickly be navigating by voice. And if you choose the Premium or Professional versions, you can dictate more naturally now by using your iPhone as a microphone.

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When shopping for kitchen utensils, one piece of advice I hear time and again is “don’t get a unitasker.” A unitasker is a gadget that’s good for just one thing, as described by “gastrophysicist” and Food Network star Alton Brown. I find the same concept applies for software too: When it comes to GUI applications, I generally try to avoid tools that do just one thing (scripts and shell commands are a different matter). In the case of free utility Folder Axe, I might make an exception.

Folder Axe can slice and dice a folder with thousands of image (or other) files according to several splitting schemes.In a nutshell, it’s a folder splitter. You know all those utilities that split large files? Folder Axe is the same thing, just for large folders. If you’ve ever struggled to manage a folder with 8,000 image files, you might see why this can be a useful thing. Actually, a folder with thousands of image files is an easy case: How about a folder full of thousands of random files, with no rhyme or reason at all, like a typical downloads folder?

Folder Axe can make short work of any such folder, using five different slicing (or “axing,” if you will) systems. First, it can split folders by the amount of files. You can just point it at the folder you’d like to split, and specify a number like “50.” On my system, Folder Axe took less than five seconds to make a folder with 617 images into 12 folders with 50 images (and one with 17). That was fast.

You can also split a folder by size: This is very handy for backing up files. Let’s say you have a folder with 8,000MB of files, and want to burn it onto a bunch of CDs. No problem: Just dial in a preset folder size (CD, DVD, Blu-ray disc) or specify a custom size, hit Split, and you’re done. Folder Axe was amazingly fast here, too.

Another way to split a large folder is by filename: Folder Axe can create a subfolder called “A,” which will contain all files that start with A. It doesn’t just have to be the first letter, either: You can have AAA, AAB, AAC, etc. And if you don’t have files starting with AAB, Folder Axe is smart enough not to create an empty folder by that name.

If you have a folder with a hodgepodge of random files, perhaps splitting them by type would be the most sensible way. This takes just a single click with Folder Axe, and you get folders with names like “.JPG folder,” “.xml” folder, and so on. The case is preserved: If your files were called “something.JPG,” the folder name would be all-caps as well. You can also configure the suffix for something other than “folder” (“.JPG files” for example.)

Last but not least is the File Group feature. Here, Folder Axe gets smart and splits your files into multiple folders with names like “Archives,” “Documents,” and “Audio.” All MP3 and OGG files would go into the Audio folder, while PNG and JPG files would go into a folder called Images. It recognizes a wide range of file types, but was tripped up by the fact that my JPG files had all-caps suffixes (JPG rather than jpg). It failed to recognize them as image files, and instead filed them under “Miscellaneous.” When I changed the extension to lowercase, Folder Axe recognized them correctly.

Like I said at the outset, Folder Axe is a unitasker–but it’s a capable one. If you ever find yourself having to deal with thousands of files, give it a spin.

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How many times have you sent an email to someone, but forgotten to also send an all-important attachment? If you’re like most people, you’ve most likely done it a fair number of times. CatchAttach (€2) aims to make sure you never do it again–in Outlook, at least–but only partially succeeds at the task.

CatchAttach tells you if your Outlook email lacks an attachment, but only if the word “attach” is present.CatchAttach integrates directly into Outlook 2007 or Outlook 2010, so that you don’t need to run it as a separate program. It looks for keywords in any email you send that indicate you plan to include an attachment. By default, the only text it scans for is the word “attach,” although it will also look for “attachment,” “attached,” and so on, because those words contain the text “attach.” If it finds a match for the text, and sees that there’s no attachment, it warns you that there’s no attachment. You can then send the mail as is, or attach a file.

It’s extremely easy to add your own key words or phrases. You can also change the text that CatchAttach displays when it finds out that there’s no attachment.

CatchAttach is only moderately useful, though, because it’s not likely that every time you send an attachment you will include the text “attach,” or any other specific text in your message. So yes, it will flag some instances in which you forget to send attachments, but not necessarily all of them.

In addition, CatchAttach is guilty of intense nagging until you pay for it. Until you pay for it, every time you send a message, whether the flagged text is in the message or not, it nags you to register.

If you do pay for CatchAttach, expect it to find some but not all instances of forgetting to send attachments.

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Why is that puny game crashing your power rig? Which component is getting pushed over the edge? Is it your watt-thirsty video card? The overclocked CPU? The interleaved banks of exotic RAM? Finding out the limits as you fine-tune a system can be harder than you might expect. HWMonitor (free) can help.

Some configurations can play hard to get, even with HWMonitor.Newer motherboards provide helpful feedback when things go wrong, but gaining access to the diagnostics often requires a reboot into BIOS or some other disk trickery. Stability problems that arise in demanding, high-load situations aren’t likely to reveal themselves during idle diagnostic states. This is where HWMonitor steps in, providing real time, dynamic feedback on the temperature, voltage and operational status of system’s main board and subsystems, such as video cards, fans and batteries.

You can run HWMonitor side by side with a stress-test benchmark (such as Cinebench) or suspect game, watching the temperatures rise until a crash predictably repeats. Is the video card showing a spike before the blue screen? Does your CPU get hot enough to make s’mores? Chances are you just found your problem. HWMonitor also maps out power usage in detail, allowing an easy means to determine whether a particular component is overwhelming the system; for example, a new video card that draws more current at peak load than an old power supply can reliably provide, triggering intermittent reboots.

Has your system suddenly become stealthy when it used to groan and moan? Don’t be happy; be worried. That newfound silence might be an ill omen. HWMonitor helps here by telling you if a crucial fan has gone offline or is running abnormally. Remedying the situation can be as simple as unblocking a vent, reseating a cable, or clearing out a dust-choked grill–a small price to pay given the consequences. The cost of cooked CPUs and replacement motherboards adds up fast.

Handy as it is, there are eccentricities in the code. Some hardware configurations pose problems for HWMonitor. For example, several AMD processors stopped reporting internal temperatures on an ASUS test system when the motherboard core unlocking feature was enabled. This problem disappeared when default CPU settings were used. For the most part however, operation was flawless.

A pro version for IT professionals features remote operation, superior logging capabilities and graphing, but weighs in at a steep €19.95, almost $30 USD at the time of this writing. For most users, the free Basic version has all the information and features they will ever need. Given this goodness, recommendation is an easy call. HWMonitor is a utility that belongs in every computer user’s toolbox.

Files can be messy, and music files, doubly so. When ripping CDs into MP3 files, not everyone takes care to rename the files accurately–and even if they do, different people may have different naming and filing schemes. When that happens, MusicBrainz Picard (free) can help.

MusicBrainz Picard’s utilitarian interface can quickly and accurately identify and tag thousands of files.Fourteen years ago, I ripped several Faith No More CDs to MP3. At the time, I used a naming scheme that made lots of sense to me–I called the files “01.mp3,” “02.mp3,” and so on. I felt quite clever at the time, because by adding a leading zero I could get Windows Explorer to sort the files correctly.

Today, that naming scheme doesn’t really work for me. I carefully file my music collection according to artist and album, with each filename containing the complete track name preceded by its number (“05 Tremendous Dynamite.mp3″). Converting my ripped MP3s to this scheme manually would take a long time, and could be a frustrating experience.

One step above completely manual conversion would be tagging the files using the CDDB database or FreeDB.org. These are both old, established projects (the latter based on the former) that work to recognize music according to its “digital fingerprint.” However, they’re both focused on complete CDs rather than individual tracks. In contrast, the MusicBrainz database (which Picard queries) is built around tracks, with each individual track getting its own fingerprint.

Another issue is that both systems employ user-generated content with no filtering. That means you can get ten listings for the same CD, or listings full of typos and strange capitalization. MusicBrainz lets users edit content, but other users must vote on it before it gets entered onto the database and served up in reply to queries. This makes for better results and less duplication.

Getting up to speed with MusicBrainz Picard can take a few moments. The first step is to “throw” your files into the app–you can literally drag and drop them in, or do it with a built-in folder tree. You then need to “Cluster” them, which divides them into sensible groups (by album, usually).

Once you’ve clustered the files, you can either click “Lookup” or “Scan.” The difference is that a lookup is done on an entire cluster at once, and uses whatever existing metadata is already in the files to query the database. It’s quite fast.

Sometimes Picard’s lookup doesn’t work, and then you need to scan the files. Scanning is done on a file-by-file process, and uses each file’s audio fingerprint. It takes much longer, but it works well.

If you already know what files you’re trying to tag (as in the case of my Faith No More album), you can also just manually query the server. Just type “Faith no More” into Picard’s search box, and you’ll be taken to a page in your default browser listing all of their releases. It takes just a click to pull the info back into Picard.

Once you have the correct album information, it’s just a matter of dragging the files onto the album. Picard usually matches each file with its metadata correctly, but you can make corrections if needed.

Picard uses the metadata to update each file’s tags, but you can also have it rename the files and even place them in folders according to any naming scheme you see fit. All in all, MusicBrainz Picard is a very efficient, high-quality way to bring some order into your vast, sprawling music library.

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Sprint and Motorola announced its renewed partnership about a month ago, and so far we like what we’ve seen. The Motorola XPRT is a solid BlackBerry alternative, while the Triumph (on Virgin Mobile, which uses Sprint’s network) is an impressive prepaid phone. The Motorola Photon 4G ($200 with a two-year contract from Sprint; price as of July 29, 2011) is the most impressive of the bunch, however, with a cool design, excellent accessories, and a healthy mix of business and entertainment features. The camera produced mediocre images in our tests, however, and the screen has a slightly bluish tint.

Unique Design and Features

The Photon looks unlike any phone we’ve encountered this year. Motorola chopped off the corners of the phone, creating sort of an octagon shape. It’s a subtle design detail that gives the Photon a futuristic, angular look. The Photon feels extremely solid in the hand–not cheap or plasticky like some of its competitors. It has a nice, rubberized backing, which helps you get a good grip. Weighing just 5.57 ounces, the Photon won’t drag you down, either.

The Photon has the standard Android touch-sensitive buttons and the usual ports, jacks, and hardware buttons, but it also provides a few standout features. One is an HDMI port, a crucial feature when you use the phone with the media dock (which we’ll cover later in this review). You’ll also find a dedicated camera button–a small but necessary item that is missing from the majority of this summer’s smartphones.

Notable as well is the Photon’s kickstand, which you’ll find on the back. We had a bit of a hard time popping the kickstand open (use your nails), but we were impressed with how Motorola optimized its software for the phone in kickstand mode. In kickstand mode, the phone automatically enters landscape orientation, and the clock becomes the largest and most central widget. Around the clock, you’ll see widgets for the alarm, the screen dimming controls, your music, and your gallery. You can always customize this screen if you prefer to have other widgets appear in kickstand mode. You can also easily switch back to the regular home-screen view.

The 4.3-inch qHD (Quarter High Definition) display looks very sharp and clear, but in our trials it seemed to have a slight bluish tint. We’ve noticed this issue with the last few Motorola phones we’ve reviewed, including the Triumph and the Droid 3.

MotoBlur and Multimedia

Like most of the hot new smartphones of the summer, the Photon runs Android 2.3 (Gingerbread). And, like the Droid 3 and the Atrix, it also runs the Motorola MotoBlur service. This version of MotoBlur is quite similar to the versions you’ll find on the Droid 3 and the Droid X2. We’re not huge fans of MotoBlur, but Motorola is steadily making improvements to its user interface and cloud service for Android.

We’ve covered MotoBlur quite a bit in our other Motorola phone reviews. It offers some useful connected widgets: For example, you can aggregate status updates from Facebook, MySpace (really, does anyone still use MySpace?), and Twitter, and display them in a single widget on your home screen. The result isn’t as obnoxious as you might think–MotoBlur doesn’t just blast new status updates one by one. Since your social networking accounts are connected to the server, MotoBlur will show your friends’ updates in groups, updating every few minutes or so. You can also post status updates across multiple networks from another widget, which Motorola has smartly made to resemble a chat bubble.

This version of MotoBlur also comes with Motorola’s new Music app, which presents recommendations, concert event listings, and music news based on your library. It also gives you access to a nice selection of Internet radio stations as well as various podcasts. You can buy music directly from the app via Amazon MP3. You might not use MotoBlur as your primary music app, but it’s worth trying out. We’re also huge fans of the mSpot app for Android, which gives you access to Internet radio stations as well as your own collection.

The Photon has a lot of business features, as well, including Exchange support, enterprise security, and 3LM’s Ready for Business software. All of that–coupled with the fact that the Photon is a world GSM/CDMA phone–makes it ideal for business users.

Call Quality, Data Speeds, and Performance

The Photon ships with an Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, plus 1GB of RAM and 16GB of on-board storage. It can support a 32GB MicroSD card, too, so you’ll be able to store all the photos you shoot with its 8-megapixel camera. And, as its name implies, it can connect to Sprint’s WiMax 4G network.

Although the Tegra 2 processor made scrolling through menus and opening apps lightning fast in our tests, we encountered some lag when scrolling through home screens (especially if they had widgets running). It was really noticeable after we came out of an application, but it wasn’t so bad as to completely slow the phone down. We tried running Cordy (a dual-core optimized game) and Angry Birds to see how the phone performed as a gaming device. After playing both games for a few minutes, we’re happy to report that both games ran smoothly and looked great on the Photon’s 4.3-inch display.

Browser speeds are what you’d expect over 4G. We loaded the image-heavy desktop version of Gamepro.com in less than 10 seconds, and streaming videos played without buffering. The screen on the Photon was very responsive, though it was a bit difficult to see outside (like the displays of many other phones).

Doing an informal test using the Ookla Speed Test application, we managed to get 6 megabits per second down and 1.5 mbps up from our offices in San Francisco. While such results aren’t as crazy-fast as the numbers we’ve seen from Verizon’s LTE network, such speeds are more than fast enough for downloading movies, grabbing apps, and browsing Web pages without a hitch.

Call quality was nice and clear, though we did find the default earpiece volume to be a little too high. Voices came through nicely, and people on the other end said the sound was very clear as well.

Camera

We’ve never been blown away by the image quality on Motorola cameras–the white balance tends to be off, giving photos and video a bluish tint. The Photon 4G’s 8-megapixel camera suffers from these issues too, unfortunately. Again, white balance looked off, and details weren’t nearly as sharp as they were in images from other 8-megapixel phone cameras. Our outdoor photos looked a bit hazy, too, even though the sky was quite clear outside.

We always rag on the MotoBlur Gallery, but the latest version adds

some welcome improvements. You can see images from your own library, in online libraries (Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket, and finally

Picasa), or in your friends’ libraries on assorted social networks and

on DLNA servers.

Like just about every high-end phone to come out this summer, the Photon also has a front-facing video camera for making video calls. However, the Photon 4G does not have the latest version of Google Talk, with video chat. For your video-chatting purposes, you’ll have to download Qik, Tango, or any other app that allows it.

Media Dock and Other Accessories

When you connect to the webtop dock, you can access the full Firefox browser as well as a slew of specially made productivity apps. The dock features three USB ports, so you can connect a keyboard and mouse to the phone for increased productivity. Certain apps (such as the aforementioned Angry Birds), can run at full screen on a larger display.

The dock itself looks nice, though it feels like cheap plastic once you get it in your hands. Unlike the webtop dock that launched with the Atrix, this media dock is more for turning the Photon into a desktop rather than a laptop.

The dock uses a cable (Micro HDMI to HDMI) to connect to a larger screen, and you’ll want to plug in a mouse and keyboard to navigate on that bigger screen (you can use the phone’s touchscreen to move the pointer, but it isn’t nearly as nice as a good old-fashioned mouse). In our tests, the webtop dock worked well in tandem with the Photon. Using the phone’s 4G connection, you can play Flash videos from the Web and manage your phone on a much larger screen. You can launch any app installed on your phone, as well as send text messages and adjust phone settings.

The dock comes with a remote to control the setup from afar, and it charges your phone while the handset is plugged in (it comes with its own power supply). The dock retails for $99 with an HDMI cable.

In addition to the webtop dock, the Photon is launching alongside a new car dock as well. The car dock comes with a USB car adapter (so that your phone can charge while you drive), a USB cable, and a 3.5mm audio cable to hook up your phone to your car stereo. Alternatively, if your car comes with Bluetooth, you can connect your phone that way.

The car dock is adjustable, and meant to be stuck on your windshield. Once you lock the Photon into place, the car dock app will launch automatically. The app is designed to allow you to quickly perform tasks on your phone without being too distracted while driving. You have two screens through which you can swipe, and the icons are all nice and big so you can tap them without having to be precise.

The screens have spaces where you can add any app you wish, though I wouldn’t recommend adding games. You can use voice commands to get directions, dial a contact, or just perform a regular Internet search. The car dock retails for $60 and seems pretty useful for anyone who is on the road a lot.

Bottom Line

Of all the Motorola phones we’ve seen this year, the Photon is definitely the best of the pack. The design is one-of-a-kind, and the Tegra 2 processor paired with Sprint’s 4G network is hard to beat. But the Photon 4G suffers from some issues we’ve seen across multiple Motorola devices, such as the bluish tint to the display and the uneven camera. The much-anticipated Droid Bionic (which we saw way back in January in CES) seems like it keeps getting pushed back further and further. Could Motorola be addressing these issues before its release? We shall see.

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Giddy-up partner, Visual Search Pony is riding to the rescue. Rescuing your hard drive space that is. This handy free utility identifies duplicate video files so you can free up space by helping them git along to the Recycle Bin. Better yet, it identifies them even if the if the format, name, or resolution are different–the program uses other criteria–so it finds copies that other duplicate finders miss.

Visual Search Pony uses an ultra-simple, but efficient three-paned interface. Visual Search Pony’s interface is simplicity itself: a preview pane, search pane for adding locations to search, and a pane that lists the results of your search. I keep a folder of video files which contains the same videos in a number of different formats for testing the players I review. Dag gum it if VSP didn’t up and find all my diversely-named AVI, WMV, DivX and MP4 files and list them as duplicates.

Unfortunately, VSP doesn’t understand OGG Theora or Quicktime though it also handles SWF, MKV, and FLV with the proper DirectShow codecs installed. There could be a bit more information on the VisualSearchPony.com Web site about where to find the codecs, but that’s not the program’s real job. Only five years ago duplicate videos wouldn’t have been a problem. Today, with uploading and downloading video from cameras, recorders, flash drives and the Internet as common as brushing your teeth, it most certainly can be. Visual Search Pony is great tool for culling the herd. I wish it supported Ogg Theora and Quicktime, etc. but it’s handy enough as is.

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When using an application or browsing a website, few people ever pause to consider the colors used. If they do notice, it’s usually because the designer got something wrong–either a jarring combination, or a lack of contrast that makes text difficult to make out. But for the designer, picking the right colors to use is not an easy task, especially if the brand already has a base color which they must use. ColorSchemer Studio ($50, 15-day free trial) offers multiple tools that aim to make it simpler to come up with attractive, usable schemes.

ColorSchemer Studio offers a panoply of tools for selecting colors that make sense, and also lets you preview them in real-life layouts.At first, ColorSchemer Studio may feel a bit overwhelming. There’s no Wizard you step through to get to your perfect scheme. You start by selecting a Base Color that would serve as the anchor point for your scheme. You can select it out of a library of named colors, feed it in directly as an RGB or HSL value, or use an eyedropper to pick it from anywhere on your screen.

Once you have a Base Color you can easily tweak it with RGB and HSL sliders, or using handy buttons that let you quickly change saturation and brightness. Fortunately, you don’t have to go through this entire song and dance for every color on your palette (although you can, if you really want to). Extrapolating a palette out of that single color is what ColorSchemer studio does best.

You can start off by using the Color Wheel, which lets you quickly find matching colors as Complements, Split-Complements, Triads, Tetrads and a bunch of other color-theory terms. If you require finer control over your palette, you may want to use the LiveSchemes feature. Here you start off with your base color and add harmonious colors, but retain full control over each hue. Also, moving your Base Color moves all harmonious colors along with it, so your scheme retains the exact same color relationships while using different hues.

ColorSchemer’s Mixer feature allows you to reach from color A to color B via a succession of colors arranged either on a gradient or as steps on a color wheel (clockwise or counter-clockwise). As you may expect, you get to set the exact number of steps from A to B (i.e, how fine the gradient is going to be).

There are several other color selection tools, but even with all of them at your disposal, you may not be completely happy with the color scheme you end up with. Perhaps you can draw inspiration from some other designer’s palette (or just use it). ColorSchemer’s GalleryBrowser feature hooks right into ColourLovers, which is a community of designers sharing and rating palettes, patterns and individual colors for other people to use. You can use this feature to pull countless beautiful schemes right into the app and tweak them as needed.

When a scheme is presented as a few color swatches, it is not always easy to imagine what it would look like on a finished layout. The QuickPreview tool offers a plethora of pre-baked layouts (“Blog,” “2-Column” etc.) letting you drag-and-drop colors out of your scheme to see how they really work together.

At the end of the process, when you finally have that perfect scheme for your project, ColorSchemer can easily export it into numerous formats, including HTML, CSS, ACO (Adobe Photoshop Color Palette), and just about any other palette interchange format imaginable.

ColorSchemer Studio is nothing if not comprehensive. With its many tools, you can spend hours tweaking colors and mulling over your choices. If you’re the type of designer who feels the need for fine-grained control over color, this is one of the best tools around.

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I have been using Total Commander ($46, 30-day free trial) since the days it was still called Windows Commander (before Microsoft’s legal team made the developer rename it). This Windows Explorer replacement is the one window that is constantly open on my desktop. Whenever I need a file, I instantly reach for it.

Total Commander’s interface can be heavily customized, right down to the colors and shortcut keys used.In fact, Total Commander’s streamlined interface makes traversing directories so fast that when I save a file in some application I often switch to Total Commander, quickly navigate to wherever I want to save it, copy the path and paste it into the application’s File Save dialog. It’s that much faster than Windows’ own dialogs.

Much of Total Commander’s power lies in its utter flexibility. I changed the default color scheme to use darker shades; I also changed several of its default shortcut keys, so that copying the current path takes a single keystroke now. You can decide how complex the interface is going to be: Use the default menus, or change them to your liking by adding or removing options. And while Total Commander offers a comprehensive interface for editing the different settings, it also lets you edit the settings file manually if you really want to geek out.

To select all ZIP files in a given folder you need only hit the + key on your number pad and type “*.zip” into the dialog that appears. All ZIP archives are instantly selected, and you can then copy them, delete them, or just see how much space they take in aggregate.

Speaking of ZIP files, Total Commander has built-in support for creating and extracting ZIP archives, as well as TAR, GZ and TGZ archives which are common on Linux and UNIX systems. Using plug-ins and external utilities, Total Commander can work with any number of additional archive formats, such as the excellent 7-Zip format.

Total Commander’s old-school dual-pane interface hides tremendous power: Each pane can house multiple tabs, and Total Commander can use background processes for time-consuming operations so that copying large files never makes the application unresponsive. It even has a setting for making a “ding” sound when a lengthy background operation completes, so you’d know it’s done. If you’re viewing a folder that has very long filenames, a single keystrokes switches to horizontal mode, where the panes are placed on top of each other (rather than side-by-side), affording twice as much space for each filename.

You can use Total Commander for accessing remote file systems, as well: It can access shares across your local network, and also features a built-in FTP client. The FTP client is seamlessly integrated within the interface, so that working with remote servers feels just like you’re working on your own computer, with the same familiar interface and keyboard shortcuts.

Finally, Total Commander can save its settings and preferences in an INI file. This means that you can take your carefully constructed configuration with you wherever you go.

To me, Total Commander is absolutely indispensible. It is one of the defining applications for my Windows experience. If you’ve ever felt the need for a powerful file manager, this is it.