Computer Sales Store – Workstation Computers and Desktops

Quicken 2011 is one of the biggest new releases in the recent history of the venerable Intuit, personal finance package, and for anyone still interested in managing their finances on the desktop, it’s worth a look.

Besides a major overhaul that makes setup easier than ever and updates from the app’s look and feel, supports Quicken 2011 downloads transaction data from more than 12,000 financial institutions. That is about 2.5 times the 5000-odd institutions supported in Quicken 2010, so if you’ve been holding off on personal financial software, because your local bank does not cooperate, you might find that things have changed. The ability to automate data entry is one of the most useful features of a personal finance package as they see where your money goes and, by extension, the planning for the future so much easier.

Quicken 2011 supports not only thousands of new institutions, but also simplifies the task of setting them to download data. If you have an account, the software gives you an overview of the top 20 institutions that type of account (and autocompletes as you type in the name of an institution not on the list). If you already have an online account with the institution, all you need to do (in most cases), enter your existing log in information (username and password) to complete the installation.

This is pretty much how Mint.com works, and the resemblance is no accident. Intuit Mint.com its online personal finance brand and put Mint.com ‘s leadership team responsible for the Quicken desktop editions. In fact, Quicken starts to look eerily Mint in many ways and more than ever, the basic editions of theQuicken 2011 offer similar features. Given that Mint is a free service that Quicken editions seem to be designed for people who do not want to entrust their financial information to a web application that stores it in the cloud and are willing to pay for the privilege.

However, the higher end Quicken Premier 2011, which I tested in late-beta form, offering a fair amount of functionality with respect to investments that do not get Mint. This is the package for people who enjoy a close eye on their wallet and wants to hold tools to the tax consequences of analyzing a stock sale, or to their asset mix to balance.

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Other editions with special functions include the Quicken Home & Business, which everything in Premier plus includes extra help for self-employed people who wish to maintain their business and personal finances in a single application and the Quicken Rental Property Manager, for small landlords.

Regardless of the edition of Quicken 2011, the designers’ web sensibility is immediately evident in their use of graphics: If you want to see your financial life provided pie charts, your Quicken 2011′s ability to make them love not only for transactions in a single account but on all accounts (much more useful to obtain a real world picture of what’s going on). Drilling down for more information as easy as clicking a graph segment and when you view the registry, you can set the column width to suit your needs and add or remove columns as you like.

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Intuit Quicken 2011′s is also touting better able to accurately categorize downloaded transactions, claiming a 90 percent accuracy. In my tests, I could not verify this claim. Several came with no transactionscategory label, and I still have a few correct. But certainly the software such as discounted software had many categories right, which considerably less work for me to do. Assigning categories of expenditure is important if you want to see where your money goes and where you could cut back if you want to save toward a goal, for example.

Longtime Quicken users have to spend a few days to adjust to the new streamlined user interface, which is a lot less cluttered with menus and toolbar items than the old. I liked it and thought it was pretty intuitive.  The app had no trouble importing data from my previous Quicken file, so people interested in improving (if only to reduce transaction download support, which expires on the editions over three years to maintain) shall not be find the transition too painful. (Quicken 2011 still supports importing Microsoft Money files, even if Microsoft has stopped and the product will support online services in January to end.)

For everyday snapshots of your children, your dog, and your road trip to the world’s largest ball of twine see your Mac comes with iPhoto, a simple way to organize and edit your photos. But pro shutter bugs and photography enthusiasts need far more serious tools for growing libraries of tens of thousands of images to manage. latest iteration, Adobe’s Lightroom wants talks with the pro-level organization and photo management, editing and powerful answer for perfecting your images.

In fact, 3 Lightroom’s editing tools are the real strong point. Operations are nondestructive, so you can go back and tweak (or remove) one of the adjustments you have made or multiple versions of the same image with different treatments. Lightroom does not support layers, masks or other sophisticated tools of Photoshop, but for many photo enhancements, it’s faster than pulling out the big gun from Adobe.

One of the best new features is the automatic lens correction that can correct for distortion, chromatic aberration, vignetting and for each of your lenses. Downloadable profiles are available for popular lenses, and if there is not one of your favorite glass, you can create and save your own for later reuse. The RAW conversion process is improved, enhancing fine detail. New noise reduction tools to produce smoother images at high ISOs without serious loss of quality, and sharpening is improved. By using both functions, you need a bit of skill to get the balance just right, but that’s always been the case with noise reduction and sharpening. Other changes are a natural grain effect, perspective correction tools for fixing things like converging verticals in tall buildings, and a more natural-looking vignette effect.

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On the back end, Adobe Lightroom is redesigned 3 to improve overall performance, and this is especially noticeable with large catalogs and high-resolution images. Even on a modestly powered MacBook with 2GB of RAM, our test library of 30,000 images loaded noticeably faster than the previous version of Lightroom.

Some other dramatic changes to improve input and output. Adobe has a streamlined importing photos, and the new tethered shooting you can connect directly to some cameras to your Mac, sending photos in Lightroom as you go – perfect for studio photography. On the output side, Lightroom supports three visible watermarks, multi-image print layouts, and exporting slideshows with photos and HD movies, complete with soundtracks. Lightroom can now sync your photos to a Flickr account for automatic web sharing.

So Lightroom 3 is a seriously powerful professional tool. But is it better than Apple’s Aperture 3? When comparing the two, Aperture is much better at organizing images. It has a clean, unclutteredinterface, it cycles through the thumbnails a little more snappily than Lightroom, and its ability to albums stored both inside and outside projects offers more flexibility than confusing folders Lightroom’s (hard disk) and Collections (virtual albums), which not really mesh well. While Aperture excels as a cataloging tool, Lightroom has the edge when it comes to editing.

It’s a no-brainer for Lightroom 2 users thinking of upgrading, but Lightroom vs. Aperture 3 3 is a different story. If cataloging is more important to buy software online, then Aperture is the way to go, but Lightroom is beefier editing tools offer more flexibility for professional photographers and advanced amateurs.

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