By Wade Herman, Tampa PC Users Group
wherman1@tampabay.rr.com

Firehand Technologies makes two basic products to assist you in organizing, editing, and displaying your graphics and multimedia files. The company only markets it products on the web at http://www.firehand.com/products/. The first thing I appreciate about their products is that you can download a fully functional trial copy. I especially appreciate this feature because over the past year I have purchased two pieces of name brand software that were so buggy on my machine that I have had to remove them. Another program did not meet my requirements. Leaving me stuck with over a hundred fifty dollars in useless software. For me, try before you buy is hard to beat.

The first product “Firehand Ember” is a graphic file viewer and editor. The edit function is quite limited and does not include any Red Eye Removal function, which is most needed for anyone who takes digital flash photographs. The program’s main claim to fame for me is that it is a comparatively small, rapidly loading program that produces excellent quality displays of almost all file formats. What I like most is that you can set it to automatically adjust the image size to fit on your screen. Quite often I receive pictures taken in a resolution that exceeds the resolution of my screen, and, thus, to see the entire image without scrolling you must resize the image in a program such as PhotoShop, which is very time consuming. With this program the resolution of the file is not changed but it will automatically fit your screen. Try it, I think you will like it.

The other program is “Firehand Lightning.” It allows you to create versatile slide show presentations of collections of photographs. This program creates a single highly compressed file containing all of the images with the viewer as an integral component. Thus, the file can be viewed on most any PC without the need for any other program on the receiving computer. You can send the file over the net or burn a CD ROM. In addition, you can imbed printed or audio annotation. With this function you can record the voice of your little darling and have it automatically play when the picture appears or you can add background music. Pretty cool. The program allows you to select from a variety of transitions between images, such as dissolves and wipes. My only complaint here is that the transition apparently must remain the same for all images in the presentation and the time on screen cannot be adjusted for individual images. There is much more, so if this sounds interesting go to their site and peruse the features, or better yet download the trial and get some hands on experience for free.