David Hollingworth

The course is run by The Social and Health Education Project in Cork, lasts six months from September to May and consists of a 2 1/2 hour meeting each week plus several weekend workshops. The groups are a reasonable size (the one I attended started out at 17) and there are two trained facilitators. The course starts gently with introductions and setting the ground rules for the next six months, things like confidentiality and respect for the other group members, before moving on to develop listening skills.

Over the next six months we studied a wide range of areas including managing emotions, assertive communication (three full days on this), stress, exercise, interplay of relationships and the super-ego. All the work is experiential, there’s no note taking and very little in the way of handouts; but I found that this did not detract from the learning experience.

Personally I found the course immensely beneficial. I’ve gained a much deeper understanding of myself and the ways in which I interact with other people. I’ve gained more confidence and now have strategies to recognize and deal with my super-ego when it criticises or judges me. All in all I would thoroughly recommend this course.

Warning: this is a fairly long review; but then the product has a lot of features.

This review is based on Paint Shop Pro version 9, the last version to be released by Jasc Software before they got bought out by Corel. Corel don’t (or didn’t at the time) allow online purchases using American Express cards and so prevented me from upgrading, though I did trial version 10. More of that later.

I do a fair amount of photography in my spare time and so need a tool that will allow me to edit images and prepare them for printing or display online. I also do a bit of design for web sites and so I need a tool to create and manipulate gif, Jpeg and png images. I use Paint Shop Pro (PSP) as my tool of choice.

PSP has a full set of image editing and manipulation tools for the digital photographer. Once you’ve opened your image there’s a simple “One Step Photo Fix” button for inexperienced users; but there’s also full control over all aspects of the images composition including:

• Brightness and contrast
• Saturation, hue and luminance
• Colour balance
• Sharpness, softness and blur

Within each category there’s a number of different tools and approaches you can use depending on your level of experience and personal preference. For example within brightness and contrast you can, amongst others;

• Do an automatic contrast enhancement
• Use sliders to control brightness and / or contrast
• Use curves
• Correct shadows, mid-tones and highlights
• Use a full histogram (see the image at the start of this review)
• Use levels

Other sub-menus give a similar level of choice. So much choice is there that it can be a little confusing for a beginner; but even the “Enhance Photo” menu lets you perform each step in the “One Step Photo Fix” manually so you can see what effect each step is having. This is a great way of learning how the different tools affect the image.

As well as adjusting images there’s a number of cropping and selection tools. The latter include lasso (Freehand) and edge (Magic wand) selectors. You can create and save selections and masks either to file or to the alpha channel.

Defects in your photographs can be simply edited out using the clone tool. One issue I face taking photographs in towns where I live is that all the electric cables are on poles strung across the street. I’ve spent many a happy hour cloning these out of choice photographs. This is also very useful for removing dust specs from an image. There’s a great red eye removal tool too for those ghastly flash images.

In addition to all the photo editing features you can use Paint Shop Pro for creating raster or vector graphics from scratch. I’ve only dabbled in this area; but I have created by own business cards using this software and I think they’re quiet acceptable. There is also an “Art Media” image type that allows you to ‘paint’ images. Again I’ve not used this extensively as I found it very processor hungry; but I did have great fun producing an oil painted version of a photograph of my daughter. Given more time I think this tool could be used to produce some very attractive ‘painted’ images.

How do I think Paint Shop Pro stacks up against the other image editing contenders? I’ve tried other software packages and this is how I feel PSP compares;

• Adobe Photoshop - PSP seems to have all the features of Photoshop and many are much easier to use in PSP. For example PSP has a live preview feature so you can preview the changes to the image before committing them. I couldn’t find this feature in Photoshop. Also Photoshop is vastly more expensive that PSP.
• Adobe Photoshop Elements - A version of Photoshop with fewer features and so also fewer features than PSP. OK for a casual photographer; but check the price against PSP which has many more features.
• The Gimp - is free under the GPL, it has a host of features; but I found the user interface to be very difficult to use and it was a struggle to find commands like image resize.
• Microsoft Photo whatever - great for novices, hopeless for anyone with even half a clue what they’re doing.

If I had a criticism of PSP it would be poor handling of raw files. It did open my Canon CR2 files after I upgraded my camera; but required a huge computing resource to do it and then did a very poor job on converting them. This may have improved since version 9.

Which brings me on to version 10. When Corel bought Jasc Software I wondered what plans they may have for PSP, I even thought they might dump it in favour of their existing products; but they came out with a new release reasonably quickly. What a disappointment!

Corel had managed to completely dumb down the user interface in an attempt to make the product appeal to a less experienced audience. As far as I could see there was only one new feature for the experienced user and the rest was a tacky attempt at automating the image editing process. The results were pretty awful. This offered me nothing at all.

In summary Paint Shop Pro version 9 gives me all the non-raw image editing capabilities I could want in a package that’s a fraction the price of Adobe Photoshop. The same features are in later versions, you just have to fight a little harder to get to them.

Because it’s so well featured and such good value for money I give Paint Shop Pro five stars.

I came upon Goalpro (5 as it was then) when I first started to look for some software to manage my personal productivity. At that time many software packages only offered a very simple to-do list with limited or non-existent nesting of tasks. So I was very impressed with Goalpro’s feature list which allowed me to set goals, break these down into tasks and then to schedule these tasks in a built-in calendar that synchronizes with Outlook. It seemed to have everything I needed.

When you first start the program you’re introduced to the subject of goal setting through a Goal Setting Wizard. This takes you through the stages of setting goals and the defining the support structure for the goals. The support structure includes defining the tasks that will accomplish your goals and also adding a rounder definition of the goals by identifying the challenges and resources that will be required if you’re going to achieve your aims. Finally you can add personal and corporate mission statements and values to your plan.

Having set up your goals using the wizard you’re free to add or modify these at any time using an outline tree of all of your goals and tasks. As part of your daily routine there’s a configurable set of reports you can display or print, a management screen that displays tasks that have passed their due date and a very useful “Sufficient Support” wizard.

The concept of Support in Goalpro is that every goal and sub-goal must have a number of tasks assigned to it in order to achieve the goal. By default, when you create a new goal, it is set requiring at least two sub-goals or tasks. If a goal doesn’t have the required number of supporting sub-goals or tasks then the Sufficient Support wizard will flag this goal as requiring attention. You then have to create new tasks for the goal or reduce it’s required support. This is a great way of ensuring that all goals have a valid next action assigned to them.

There’s various motivational tools built into Goalpro including a chart that shows how efficient you are at maintaining your Goals support, completing tasks on time and doing your daily reviews. It’s a great boost to get those lines up to 100%. You can also create goals that are activity based, like “Run 2 miles a day” and then track your progress against your targets.

As well as the whole goal and task setting and scheduling side of things Goalpro also has a built in journal with topics and a very useful scratch pad for doing brain dumps. Items in the scratch pad can then be highlighted and turned into goals or tasks at the click of the mouse.

Goalpro6 has a great many things going for it and there’s not much I don’t like about it. One of the things it definitely lacks from a GTD point of view is that there’s no contexts. Tasks are just tasks and there’s no simple way of splitting them according to where they can be done. Whilst you can filter the task list by major goal you can’t filter the tasks by context.

Another thing that’s a bit of a turn off for me is the rather cludgy interface; it really doesn’t look like a modern Windows application. It works OK; but I don’t find it very appealing to look at. It’s also very restricted in terms of data interchange between applications. You can synchronize with Outlook OK; but there’s no import / export features to exchange data with tools such as MindManager or even MS-Project.

Another mark against Goalpro6, and this is a big issue for me, is that there doesn’t appear to be any on-going development. This version has been out for some years now and even though there’s been a couple of maintenance releases in that time there’s not been any new functionality added to the product. Based on what I’ve seen I have to ask myself, “Has this product reached the end of its roadmap?”.

The final criticism I have of Goalpro6, and I feel this really underlies the previous point, is that I reported a very annoying bug that causes the application to crash whenever I lock my desktop. You don’t loose any data because everything appears to be saved as you type it; but it’s still very aggravating to have to restart Goalpro every time I leave my desk unattended, which is pretty often each day.

All round it’s a very useful tool and stood me well for a long time and I’d probably still be using it today if there were better import / export facilities, the user interface was nicer and I thought the product was going somewhere. However, based on these criticisms, I can only give it three stars.

I’ve been using The Journal from DavidRM Software for many years, so many years ago that I can’t recall the original reason for downloading it. Since then it’s become a true companion with a wide variety of uses.

The Journal has two main layouts. Firstly there’s the traditional calendar based journal which you can configure to create entries as page per day, a page per week, a page per month or, in fact, just about any date range you can think of.

For example one of my main uses for The Journal is as a weather almanac. In here I have three calendar journal categories. First journal has daily entries as a brief summary of the weather each day. Secondly I have a weekly category that has one entry for every week starting on a Saturday. Finally I have a category for the monthly climate reports that creates an entry on the first of every month.

As well as the calendar based entries The Journal also has looseleaf entries that can be used for general note taking or, in fact, to record any information that isn’t particularly date related. These entries can also have sub-entries to create a nested structure for organizing your information.

The Journal comes with a host of additional features. These include:

• Stop watch & count down timer for timed writing exercises
• Colour coded ‘topics’ for categorizing and filtering information
• Posting direct from The Journal to a number of popular blog engines
• Full rich text entry into the journal with ability to create your own format styles
• Spell checker and thesaurus
• Full search capabilities
• Set events, tasks, appointments in the calendar and get pop up reminders

The list is pretty much endless so I suggest you go try The Journal for yourself. You get a huge 45 day trial period and the eventual purchase cost is very low.