A-PDF Split 3.6
Release Type: $27.00 (restricted trial)
Official Site: www.a-pdf.com
PDF files have been the bane of many an
existence for close to decades, not least because of their heavily restricted
capacity for editing. You can copy text from them – some of the time – but
that’s about it. If you want to change the contents of a PDF file after it’s
been created but don’t want to pay for Adobe Acrobat, your only options are
kludged software that tries to interpret PDFs without violating the PDF
licence, typically with poor results, or similar expensive PDF suites.
A-PDF
Split 3.6
However, the ‘A’ in the name of A-PDF Split
stands for ‘affordable’, and that suggests that it attempts to provide a more
wallet-friendly alternative to an expensive PDF editor. It’s fair to say that
it’s not entirely successful – at $27.00 for what is essentially a single feature,
one can only wonder what the expensive version looked like.
How
A-PDF Scan and Split work
Application-wise, it does at least work.
A-PDF Split allows you to edit PDF files, splitting them into multiple
documents based on the existing bookmarks and page separations. You can select
ranges and multiple outputs, creating new files while retaining existing
metadata, including passwords, assuming you have the correct one to hand. All
of this is available without any need to install Adobe Acrobat.
But that’s literally all it does.
Admittedly, at $27.00, it’s far cheaper way to split PDF files than paying for
the full version of Acrobat (which clocks in at $228.00), but its stripped-down
simplicity hides a deeply cynical marketing strategy.
You see, while this software isn’t capable
of anything more than splitting up PDFs, others from A-PDF are. There are
separate applications available in case you want to merge PDFs, watermark PDFs,
renumber PDFs, convert them into e-books, and do far more besides. Each of these
applications costs the princely sum of $27.00 or more, meaning that if you
bought the whole suite you’d have fewer features in a way that’s more expensive
and less convenient.
It’s a bit like creating a photo-editing
program that can only rotate images, and requiring buyers to purchase another
if they want to resize them. It’s like selling separate word processors for
spell-checking and printing. Technically and financially, you could package
these features together and have almost no extra overheads, but then the
price-per-feature would go down. As an exercise in squeezing money out of
consumers, it’s almost unique, and for that we should be thankful. But the last
thing we need to do is encourage this, and for that reason, if you’re not
absolutely desperate, we can only recommend staying away.
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Pros: It
does, indeed, split up PDF files and is (reasonably) affordable.
Cons:
Absolutely no other features worth speaking of.
Rating: 
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IsMyLcdOK 1.66
IsMyLcdOK
1.66
ReleaseType:
Freeware
OfficialSite: www.softwareok.com
There’s no doubt that LCD monitors have far
surpassed their CRT forefathers – lighter and more compact, much better-looking
and far less harsh on the eyes. But they also have their own problems, not least
of which are the twin blights of stuck and dead pixels.
In many ways, dead pixels are the kind of
fault you’d rather no see. Once you know they’re there, they stick out a mile,
almost mocking you with their stubborn refusal to do what every other pixel on
the screen is doing. But at the same time, you need to know – especially if
your hardware is still under warranty. After all, the last thing you want to do
is send a monitor off to be repaired only to find that it was just dust on the
screen or a glitch in your desktop wallpaper.
This is where the sympathetically names
IsMyLcdOK application comes in. Running a variety of tests on your hardware,
this simple application can help you determine whether a malfunctioning pixel
is stuck, dead, or simply the product of your oever-eager imagination. With
mere keypresses the only required input, you can run through a variety of
stress tests, patterns, lines and gradients, colour fills and more designed to
help you conclusively isolate any flaws in your monitor’s display.
It really is no more complicated than that.
In fairness, there are ways it could have been improved, such as by offering a
step-by-step guide to comprehensively testing your monitor, or highlighting
problems to watch out for with example. It’d also be nice if, having helped
identify dead or stuck pixels, it explained what you can or should do about
the. So in that sense, it’s not a program that complete lay-people will get
much out of except a grim knowledge of the problem.
Nevertheless, if you ready know what you’re
looking for, this software will help you weed out any problems with as much
certainly as is technically possible. Thankfully, it’s a free application,
which is good because in many ways it does very little that you couldn’t do
yourself with a copy of Paint and 15 minutes. Indeed, testing monitors for
pixels is the kind of activity that most of us will perform only once or twice
in a device’s life, so any price more than a few dollars would seem
unreasonable.
Still, if you’re going to do it, you might
as well do it properly. IsMyLcdOK ensures that you do, and is a good advert for
the developer. While it’s unlikely to interest most of this magazine’s readers,
you can also use the software in a variety of languages. Ultimately, its
usefulness and compact, portable size makes it a solid addition to anyone’s
toolkit.
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Pros:
Idiot-proof testing sequence, compact package, priced appropriately.
Cons:
Offers very little advice or explanation to help beginners understand what
they see.
Rating:
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