by Martin Heller
Your seventh grader has a report due and the library is closed. What do you do? I fired up Encarta 95 and she quickly found the material she needed without any help from me. This updated multimedia encyclopedia has 26,000 articles, 8,000 photos and graphics, 2,000 audio clips, 100 minutes of video and animation, innumerable cross-references and five "Interactivities.'' Fly-out menus are a welcome interface improvement, as is the Pinpointer search tool. Encarta is recommended for ages 11 and up. The seventh-grader's review: "It kicks.''
Price: $99.95 (street);
Microsoft Corp
800-426-9400, 206-882-8080.
by: Jonathan Karl Matzkin
All the slick editing features and fancy formatting you get with a word processor can't dispel the cold-sweat terror of staring at a blank screen and searching for an idea. Writer's Edge can. This brainstorming tool from the folks who created IdeaFisher is designed specifically to fuel your creative fires and help you hurdle writer's block.
Writer's Edge is a sort of conceptual thesaurus. It not only dishes out synonyms, it also offers thousands of linked concepts, phrases and words related to any word you enter.
The Writer's Edge concept database is the core of the application. It's organized in a three-level hierarchy. The top level, Topical Categories, is a list of concept categories related to your query word. One level down, Section Titles rounds up words and phrases from the selected Topical Category. You choose a Section Title and move down to the third level--an evocative list of ideas, words and phrases. Any of these elements may suggest a different way of saying something or send you off in a novel direction.
Writer's Edge suggested a variety of concepts related to my original search word, and led me off on new tangents. "Concept," for instance, yielded "controversy," "debate" and "dialectic," among other terms. But it also suggested "afterlife," "beauty in the abstract" and "enigma." I used ideas at the third level as a jumping off point for new top-level searches, and came up with new, linked ideas. Some ideas were good and easy to latch onto, but others were considerably more elusive--a bit too outré to grasp.
The macros in Writer's Edge will install the program in Word, WordPerfect or Ami Pro so that it's available from within those word processors. In Word, it works like a spell checker. I highlighted a word, chose Writer's Edge from the Tools menu and immediately began my search for ideas.
Writer's Edge didn't make me an instant Hemingway, but its guidance helped focus my creative process.
--Info File--
Writer's Edge
Price: $39.95
Disk Space: 5MB
System Resources: 7%
RAM: 4MB
IdeaFisher Systems
800-289-4332, 714-474-8111
by: Diganta Majumder
Now we know why this guy considers himself an "experience designer." Explora 1: Peter Gabriel's Secret World--the PC edition of the Mac CD-ROM released last year--is an astonishing journey through the human experience. With warm flashes of Gabriel's childhood, backstage antics at the Grammys, the secrets behind the performer's music videos, and searing images of torture and execution (it's Amnesty International's best recruitment poster yet), this CD-ROM will appeal to everyone from music fanatics to news hounds.
Price: $49.95.
Real World Multimedia
800-969-GAME, 714-553-6678.