Dreamweaver has always been the best application for web designer. Macromedia was the first to introduce this software which was named as Dreamweaver MX. Later on Macromedia became a part of Adobe and now Dreamweaver latest version is known as Adobe Dreamweaver CS3. The CS3 has several features added like ‘Spry’ which enables user to add most commonly used scripts like for menus and forms to a webpage without any knowledge of coding, after all this is what a user wants from WYSIWYG editor. However I am not satisfied with this ‘Spry’ thing and find it a burden on software added just to increase the list of features. The best upgrade that one can notice in CS3 from CS2 version is stability. This software is much more stable now and hardly ever crash. Previous version used to crash while editing codes in web pages which was very much annoying. After the stability, there are two big updates which mean a lot for a web designer like me who didn’t have spend much time in reading books on HTML and CSS. So here are the big three updates I have summed up:

1. When you make a webpage using Dreamweaver, the codes are now valid XHTML. Earlier versions were making the codes dirty and invalid but now this software works like a champion in producing valid codes. Further using options from command menu, one can clear useless codes if gets in.

2. Better CSS. You make a separate CSS file and then if you edit the web page, all the changes are done automatically in the CSS file and attached CSS file is automatically opened for saving or undoing any changes.

3. Increased stability even while editing complex codes and designs.

Latest CS3 range of software’s like Photoshop and Flash get integrated with Dreamweaver very well making the design job which require heavy use of Photoshop easy and much quicker. One feature in Dreamweaver which was seen only up to 2006 version was the ability to add codes directly from Design section just by right click but Adobe removed later on. It was a very handy feature I must say which I still miss.

Business is not started any day with no proper planning. People, who don’t plan well and start a business with no goal, will surely fail to develop a good successful business. A new approach to strategic management was developed in the early 1990′s by Drs. Robert Kaplan (Harvard Business School) and David Norton. They named this system the ‘balanced scorecard’. The balanced scorecard is a management system (not only a measurement system) that enables organizations to clarify their vision and strategy and translate them into action. It provides feedback around both the internal business processes and external outcomes in order to continuously improve strategic performance and results. When fully deployed, the balanced scorecard transforms strategic planning from an academic exercise into the nerve center of an enterprise. Today implementing balanced scorecard to your own business is very easy by use means of computer. The Balanced Scorecard Designer (BSC Designer), software by Strategy2Act is one such good example of a computer application which allows creating scorecards. This software simplifies the process of creating and managing Balanced Scorecards.

Modern businesses depend upon measurement and analysis of performance. Measurements must derive from the company’s strategy and provide critical data and information about key processes, outputs and results. Data and information needed for performance measurement and improvement are of many types, including: customer, product and service performance, operations, market, competitive comparisons, supplier, employee-related, and cost and financial. Analysis entails using data to determine trends, projections, and cause and effect — that might not be evident without analysis. Data and analysis support a variety of company purposes, such as planning, reviewing company performance, improving operations, and comparing company performance with competitors’ or with ‘best practices’ benchmarks. Balanced scorecard incorporates feedback around internal business process outputs, as in TQM, but also adds a feedback loop around the outcomes of business strategies. This creates a “double-loop feedback” process in the balanced scorecard. The balanced scorecard framework is designed in such a way to carry out the entire necessary task easily. The simple yet powerful interface of this software let user to create scorecards, categories and goals. Performance measurement and calculation can also be performed at no time using this software. For all your balanced scorecard management, BSC Designer is highly recommended and just don’t go on my words and try this software yourself free for 30 days and then decide. You can download the trial version from the website right away, no questions asked and no long forms to fill. System requirements are also very less so it would run on most of the computers without any problem.

Compare Suite is a kind of software which makes life easier and saves lot of time for other productive use. How? Have you ever saved several copies of a file and worked on them and then you can’t decide which file is modified in which way. Comparing files also becomes impossible if numbers of files are large for example for a web designer, the numbers of files can be quite more. A typical site may have 200 files and checking these files manually for changes can not only be a tedious job but also time consuming. The Compare Suite file compare utility does the job of comparing any number of files so easy and beautifully that you will simply love this software.

This file compare utility compares files by many ways. You can simply compare text in case of word files, Excel spreadsheets, PDF or html files and the software highlights the changed and matching text so that you can differentiate easily, it also gives detailed information on number of lines modified, when they were modified and percentage of similarity between two files. It highlights the changed, added and deleted text in three different colors which is yet another powerful feature of this software. Blue denotes added line/text, red for deleted line/text and green tells about modified line/text. The text file compare function is further enhanced buy the ability to compare one format of file with another like word file can be compared with PDF and other combinations as well.

While comparing two files you may want to edit files like copy pasting text from one another and this can be done very easily with few clicks and you are done. Not only files but you can compare folders as well. This is very important as comparing folders with large number of files manually one by one is almost impossible. The software created a detailed report when two folders are compared and now it becomes quite easy to make out the difference between the files of both folders. With a function called FolderPrint, you can print the content of the folders for a manual look and this is again easy as once the content of folder gets printed on pages, what you all need is a pen and some eagle eyed people. With this feature you can also browse files in a better way than you would do on a regular file explorer. With so many features, this software is a must try and you can download a 30 day trial and try it without any risk.

Opera 9.5 (currently at Alpha stage) is going to be fastest browser in rendering web pages and it was proved from a test conduced by cybernetnews which show page load time of their site:

Internet Explorer 7: 18 seconds
Firefox 2: 15 seconds
Opera 9.23: 12 seconds
Firefox 3 Nightly: 11 seconds
Opera 9.5 Alpha: 8 seconds

Opera 9.5 is clearly the winner and hope to improve even more when final version is released. Some new features include CSS3 support, improved AJAX compatibility and HTML layout algorithm.

It has come to notice that torrent clients: uTorrent and BitTorrent may spy on you on what you are downloading and provide information to some anti-piracy group. I am not against this anti-piracy group as piracy in any form is not good. It causes a big loss to software industry every year. However I feel that every one has a right to his / her privacy and by sending information on what user is downloading; these anti-piracy agencies is just breaking that rule. Torrent is a very good medium for legal file sharing and but some people use this network for warez too. Every thing in this world can be both used for good and bad, take example of knife which is used to cut vegetables can also be used to kill someone; similar is the case with torrent network. Stealing information on what people are downloading does not make good sense; something else should be thought of to stop piracy thru torrent. For the time, I’ll say to everyone not to use uTorrent and BitTorrent. Torrent websites like TorrentSpy and BitTorrent.com are also connected with this anti-piracy group so don’t use these websites too.