Dr. Dobb's is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.


Channels ▼
RSS

Tools

Winners of the 18th Jolt Product Excellence Awards & Recipients of the Jolt Productivity Awards


VMWare Workstation 6 (VMware)
Reviewed by Mike Riley
VMWare returns yet again with another Jolt award, this time for the impressive features in their latest version of the product that started it all for the company, VMWare Workstation. In its 6th major iteration, VMWare Workstation manages to deliver outstanding multi-monitor (this has to be seen to be believed), high-speed USB 2.0 and even built-in VNC support. And don't forget its proven ability to virtualize numerous 32-bit and 64-bit flavors of Microsoft Windows (including Vista) and various Linux distribution environments within 64-bit or 32-bit Microsoft or Linux host computers. VMWare's consistent level of product excellence has elevated this product to achieve Jolt's highest honor, induction into the Jolt Hall of Fame.

ANTS Profiler v3 (Red Gate)
Reviewed by Mike Riley
The ANTS Profiler is no stranger to the Jolts and this year is no different, given its continued dedication to assisting developers with locating performance bottlenecks, memory leaks and other annoyances that would be extremely difficult to identify without such a tool. Unlike other commercial .NET profiling utilities, ANTS Profiler is quite reasonably priced and delivers a feature set typically found in competing products that are at least three times more expensive. Besides the native Visual Studio context-sensitive code integration, ANTS line-level timing feature provides valuable performance details on a one-line-of-code-at-a-time basis - excellent for zeroing in on trouble spots that are keeping an application from performing at its peak.

Captivate 3 (Adobe Systems)
Reviewed by Jon Kurz
Adobe Captivate 3 blurs the line between demo tool and visual development environment for creating demonstrations. Captivate is well suited for anyone who wants to create presentations, training videos, quizzes, and even podcasts. The branching feature allows you to create highly interactive presentations by having multiple paths that the demo can take, instead of just one. Usually one slide simply goes to another, but other events are available, such as sending an email or linking out to a web site. The editing features are very powerful. For example, while viewing all elements of a slide, you can open an edit window for the audio and make changes without the need to edit in an external tool. If you use background music, it intelligently blends the primary audio with the background, adjusting volumes as needed. Finally, with multiple publishing options, you can not only create Flash files, but standalone executables files as well.

DemoWorks (Component One)
Reviewed by Rick Wayne
Any phone support vet can testify that talking someone through software is as frustrating as using a robot to play ping pong. Blindfolded. After Phone Hell, seeing a moving, talking, captioned demonstration of a program seems miraculous, and DemoWorks provides a delightfully straightforward way to capture precisely that. Its innovative "timeline" interface mimics nonlinear video editors, letting you reduce the raw "take" into a tight presentation. And, the demonstration need not depend on Flash at the other end; you can produce a self-contained Windows EXE or a Java application, or even pack the video into an animated GIF.


Related Reading


More Insights






Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Dr. Dobb's encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Dr. Dobb's moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing or spam. Dr. Dobb's further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

 
Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.