Writing a book, a research paper, or a script may seem intimidating when sitting in front of a blank word-processor window, trying to figure out where to start. Yarny is a cloud-based, distraction-free editor that can help writers stay organized and focused on their work.

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Foxit Software's PhantomPDF (in both Standard and Business editions) make a good choice for basic office needs, but it suffers from an identity crisis once you get to the high-end features. Foxit's download page makes the bold claim that it is "Better than Adobe Reader and Acrobat," but a more accurate statement would be that it might be better, in very specific circumstances that may or may not apply to you.

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Windows 8 has changed the way we navigate the desktop, so it’s not surprising that Microsoft has a pair of new wireless mice designed specifically for Windows 8 (they’re also compatible with Windows 7 and the Mac OS X OS).

Sculpt Mobile Mouse

Microsoft’s Sculpt Mobile Mouse will fit into the tightest backpack or pocket while you’re on the go, and it will keep you from swearing at your notebook’s annoying trackpad or touchscreen when you reach your destination.

Microsoft

The mouse is very small—in fact, it’s almost as long as it is wide. As such, the mouse isn’t the most comfortable to grip if you have large hands: Your palm will drag over the surface, but the high arc will keep your fingers resting happily. Those with smaller paws will appreciate its ambidextrous design and the rubber sides that provide a good grip.

The mouse uses Microsoft’s BlueTrack laser technology, which enables it to track over any almost any surface (except for clear glass or mirrored surfaces). When you’re on the road, the only available mouse pad might be the fabric covering your leg, and the Sculpt Mobile works just fine in that scenario.

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FreeSpace 2 and other space combat classics kept the genre alive, albeit on the back burner, for years Then indie game studio Born Ready Games came along and decided to create a modern space combat simulator: Strike Suit Zero ($20).

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Even great game franchises fall prey to mergers, acquisitions, and the vagaries of the game business. Such was the fate of FreeSpace 2, a space simulator originally released in 1999 to great critical acclaim, as part of the Descent and FreeSpace franchise. Due to business circumstances, it was the last in the series—but it can still be played today for the price of $10. and its source code, released in 2002, has been adopted by an active community of coders and modders.

The original game remains commercially available to this day through GOG, a service specializing in old-time games. While the original FreeSpace 2 offered very impressive graphics for its time, it can't hope to match modern space-sim games in the visauls department.

Fortunately, it has a lot to offer in terms of gameplay and depth. Cockpit and HUD controls are intricate and well thought out, from subsystem targeting, through automatic speed matching, to smart indicators on your HUD showing a target's distance and bearing even when it's out of your field of view. FreeSpace 2 also makes good use of the keyboard, with an interface that expects you to memorize many keys.

If you enjoy FreeSpace 2's detailed gameplay and only wish for some updated graphics, you're in luck: Open-source, free mods dress FreeSpace 2 in updated graphics from franchises you probably already know, and include new storylines and game mechanics to boot. I tried Diaspora, a mod based on the Battlestar Galactica 2004 remake, and was impressed by its slick graphics. It was nice to find myself in the pilot's seat of a Viper, trying to prove myself as a nugget (and badly failing).

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Plenty of applications help you show off your photos, and plenty help you show off your videos. But too few tools exist that allows you to show them off together. Enter Fantashow Pro, a $50-per-year (or $5-per-month) application allows you to combine still photos with videos to create a custom video slideshow.

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The Livescribe Sky pen marries old-school pen-and-ink with the cloud. If paper remains a core part of your workflow, this is the best pen of its kind on the market. You can save notes and audio recordings to your Evernote account via Wi-Fi, or you can plug in a Micro-USB cable and save your work to a PC or Mac.

The pen is fairly bulky, but it's pretty comfortable to hold. It would stick out from inside a pocket but it slips easily into a travel bag. The pen cap is easy to lose and hard to put on, so I usually left it off (and the tip didn't suffer from the exposure). Livescribe makes smart use of its tiny LCD screen, displaying Wi-Fi and battery indicators as well as the time and date. Dive deeper and you can play with the display: Use your handwriting and the interactive "buttons" in its supported paper notebooks to play simple games, run equations on a calculator, and translate words. There's even an ecosystem of apps, including dictionaries.

Other smart pens, such as the Adapx Capturx, let you write on any type of paper, but I've found those better for paper-form input versus freehand writing. Livescribe requires special (and pricey) paper, with tiny dots on the page that track your writing with precision.

The Livescribe Sky pen is designed to be paired with Evernote, so it won't be of much interest if you don't use that app. It's a plus, though, if you enjoy Evernote's productivity features (and you get an Evernote Premium account for a year). Use tidy penmanship with your Livescribe pen, and Evernote's optical character recognition can translate that into digital text.

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Microsoft Flight is the current incarnation of a long and illustrious franchise of games, dating back to 1977. Unlike SimCity, you can start playing Microsoft Flight for free: Simply download the game and embark on a series of missions planned to both teach you the basics of flight, and hook you into buying later missions and additional aircraft. Microsoft Flight is the last of its kind: Microsoft permanently stopped work on the game in July 2012, just a few short months after releasing it.

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Beyond the Hotspot software that comprises the bulk of their business, Connectify Inc. makes another utility for laptop enthusiasts: Dispatch.

Connectify Dispatch works by simultaneously leveraging the multiple network adapters and high-speed USB ports available on modern systems to boost bandwidth and reliability. Each Internet connection you add to Dispatch's list of active adapters increases potential download speeds and provides automatic failover in the case one of the connections fails. For the most part, this works swimmingly. However, there's a bit of the devil in the details.

Setup is straightforward and largely automatic. Users are presented with a window that lists available adapters and indicates whether or not they are bound to Dispatch. A graph charts the combined bandwidth on tap, and settings allow for customized application routing, bandwidth caps for metered Internet feeds, and various routing strategies that maximize efficiency in marginal networking situations.

The first prerequisite is an obvious one: You need access to multiple, separate Internet connections for Dispatch to work as advertised. The hidden detail here is that combined bandwidth isn't directly additive. Two 20 Mbs connections won't yield a 40 Mbs single-socket download, for example, but they will allow for loads to be balanced and intelligently routed to an available adapter with the most suitable bandwidth. BitTorrents and other software that utilize multiple sockets will allow downloads to reach full combined speeds, however.

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I never thought a truck-driving simulator could be fun, but Euro Truck Simulator 2 proved me wrong. There is something soothing in watching the world go by from the high and mighty cockpit of a Volvo FH16 Globetrotter XL. If you are used to more traditional racing games, getting used to the way trucks handle in the game may take some time. They really do feel like trucks: Slow to accelerate, jarringly fast to brake thanks to air brakes, ungainly to maneuver, and immensely powerful.

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There's a lot to be said for software that just works. That isn't to say that Adobe Reader doesn't work, but it has a lot of baggage attached to it that Foxit Reader doesn't. As a result, Foxit is significantly smaller and faster.

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Each year, the list of "green" gadgets gets longer, from solar-powered coasters or networked light bulbs. But some are a lot more useful than others. If you're looking for more than a novelty item, we've spotted ten devices that can save your company money by improving its energy efficiency. Some of them offer nifty, time-saving automation features and mobile apps too. Whether you're working from home or in a high-rise headquarters, these tools can put some energy dollars back in your pocket.

HTML is the lingua franca of the Web. If you publish anything online, that's the format your text will end up in. But while easy for browsers to render, HTML isn't always easy (or fun) to compose. Some content management systems, like Wordpress, solve this problem by offering a WYSIWYG editor that lets you edit visually. For those who prefer the simplicity and ubiquity of plain text, Markdown is the way to go—and MarkdownPad Pro is a simple editor that lets you compose Markdown and view your results instantly.

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Toshiba's luxurious Kirabook is the first Windows laptop to feature a display rivaling Apple’s Retina technology. The Kirabook is also thinner and much lighter than Apple’s MacBook Pro, and it’s outfitted with a touchscreen. While I wish I could report that Toshiba has crafted a masterpiece that fully justifies its $2000 price tag, this machine suffers from a couple of significant flaws.

With a native resolution of 2560 by 1440 pixels, the Kirabook’s 13.3-inch display delivers a pixel density of 221 pixels per inch—just shy of the 227 ppi that Apple packs into the 13-inch MacBook Pro’s 2560-by-1600-pixel display. If you think Apple’s computers are overpriced, consider the fact that a 13-inch MacBook Pro with a 3.0GHz Intel Core i7-3540M processor sells for $100 less than the Kirabook, which runs on a 2.0GHz Intel Core i7-3537U CPU. Apple, however, doesn't currently offer any full-blown computers with touchscreens (the iPad doesn't count).

Clock speeds aren’t everything, of course. The processor that Toshiba picked boasts a TDP (thermal design power) of just 17 watts, versus the 35-watt TDP of the chip that Apple uses. (Thermal design power refers to the maximum amount of power that a computer’s cooling system must dissipate. A lower TDP is desirable for a mobile computer, because it improves battery life. In our test, the Kirabook’s battery lasted an impressive 5 hours, 14 minutes.) The Kirabook’s other key components include 8GB of DDR3-1600 memory and a 256GB solid-state drive. I’ll get into the Kirabook’s performance in depth later.

Photos, movies, and documents look gorgeous on the Kirabook’s display. But when I compared the Kirabook to a 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display (Apple doesn’t offer its high-res display on its thinner, lighter MacBook Air line), I found that Apple’s product delivered far better contrast. Both machines rely on the Intel HD 4000 GPU core integrated into the CPU, so I don’t know whether the Kirabook’s problem is due to Toshiba’s choice of Corning Concore glass (which is specifically formulated for touchscreens) or due to the fingerprint-resistant coating on the glass. Whatever the reason, it was no contest: The Retina display produced much deeper blacks.

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I love password managers. When they work well, they make browsing the Web easier, faster, and more secure. And SafeWallet does, indeed, work well. It's not perfect, but SafeWallet has become my new favorite password manager.

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You're away from the office when you get that sinking feeling. Maybe that file you need is locked on your desk PC in London while you're visiting Shanghai. You don't need to sweat, thankfully. Remote desktop apps let you log on to your PC or tablet and access a faraway computer as if you were there in person. Here are 5 options for Windows 8 slates and PCs. Read on to find which app is the best fit for your business.

Remote Desktop

If you’re looking for a full Windows 8 experience from a remote location, you could do worse than turn to Microsoft’s Remote Desktop app (free, Windows Store). Promising a touch-friendly user interface, Remote Desktop lets you see all your remote connections on the home screen. It even shows your five most recent connections and published resources as Modern-style tiles.

You can switch, copy and paste between RDC sessions, connect to multiple remote desktops, and continue to multi-task with the Windows 8 Snap feature. In addition, you can use the Remote Desktop app (via a Remote Desktop Gateway) to connect to a corporate PC without having to establish a VPN connection.

TeamViewer

One of the first remote desktop vendors to jump on the Windows 8 bandwagon was TeamViewer, which rolled out an app of the same name back in October. It’s no surprise that the TeamViewer app is one of the simplest and fastest solutions available, allowing for desktop sharing and file transfer, all while behind any firewall.

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Email notifications are like coffee: Some people can't stand them, while others are addicted (and, yes, even use them to wake up in the morning). If you're of the latter camp, you may like Checker Plus for Gmail. Like every other mail checker, it lets you know when new emails arrive... but that’s where other email checkers stop and Checker Plus is only just getting started.

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Daemon Tools' disreputable younger days as a hacking tool seem a speck in the rearview mirror now. Arriving at what appears to be the new top of the pyramid for single users is the $45 Daemon Tools Ultra, but there's more, and less, here than meets the eye.

You've got to imagine the word "Diversification" is mentioned frequently over at Disc Soft Ltd these days. After years of static prices and singular release schedules, they've gathered an armful of new products under the Daemon Tools banner and have their market segmentation tuned finely enough to impress a Toyota executive. A cursory glance turns up 10 titles on the products page, some with prices close to $250 for corporate site licenses.

In the plus column, Disc Soft Ltd has added Virtual Hard Drive support to Daemon Tools Ultra, allowing users to create and access hard disk drive files as if they were physical devices attached the system. Protocol support is expanded as well, including iSCSI implementation for networked image hosts via either Disc Soft's own Daemon Tools Net or other iSCSI compliant hosting solutions. Operation is swift and reliable, with Ultra mounting a wide variety of images during testing and new features working as expected. Popular optical emulation modes perform as robustly as here as in other versions. However, that's not the case with features across the board.

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Das Keyboard promotes the sound of their peripheral more than anything—their tagline is "The Mechanical Keyboard That Clicks." Now they're going after the market that craves the sweet benefits of a mechanical keyboard but can't stand the constant commotion that comes with it. Meet the Professional Model S Quiet: The quietest mechanical keyboard around.

In the beginning keyboards were loud, mechanical and everlasting (IBM Model M anyone?). Soon a cheaper solution came and took the click-clack away with plastic and a domed-shaped membrane.

Yet, like all good fads the mechanical keyboard came back into style for typing enthusiasts and gamers alike. It's now a must have—and with the Das Professional Model S Quiet you don't have to choose between an awesome keyboard and not annoying your coworkers (though some consider that a benefit).

The video below compares the IBM Model M to the Das Keyboard rival, competing for the most "clicky" keyboard. It gives you an idea of the click that they strive for—but can quickly get on your cubicle neighbors nerves. The Professional Model S Quiet's sound is nearly undetectable in comparison.

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I have been using Gmail as my sole email client for years now, and I'm a big fan. But there's one key thing I need my email client to do that Gmail doesn't offer: Follow-ups. When I send an email, I often want to be reminded if the recipient hasn't replied within a few days, so I can resend my message or find out what happened. To me, this is absolutely crucial, which is why I was so happy to find Right Inbox for Gmail.

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Following in the footsteps of 2010’s Metro 2033, Metro: Last Light improves upon the gameplay of its predecessor without destroying what made the series great in the first place: the setting. Last Light takes you back to the post-apocalyptic Russian wasteland, employing an excellent soundtrack and bleak, desolate imagery to deliver a first-person shooter with surprising pathos and one of the most genuine game narratives in recent memory.

Boot up Last Light and you'll be dropped into the boots of Artyom–a man haunted by memories of his mother, or lack thereof–as he attempts to leave the Russian Metro to capture “a dark one”, monstrous remnants of the world before it was devastated by all-out nuclear war. Of course, nothing goes smoothly for Artyom, and along the way you'll be captured by other survivors and work together with another captive, Pavel, to orchestrate an escape. Arytom's quest ranges across the Russian wasteland, ultimately leading you through areas devastated by nuclear destruction and nests of enemies mutated by the apocalypse before culminating in one of the coolest and most intense firefight finales I've ever experienced.

But frenetic, fast-paced combat is tiresome without a meaningful reason to fight, and Metro: Last Light tells a meaningful story through emotionally-charged flashbacks to the moment the nuclear missiles struck, and how that moment affected the Russian people. It’s a series of powerful scenes scattered throughout the 9-12 hour campaign that don’t force themselves on you, allowing different players to experience as much–or as little–of the narrative as they like. That’s one of Metro’s greatest strengths: it doesn’t force anything on the player. There’s plenty of optional areas to explore at your leisure, allowing you to intuitively control how long you spend in Metro: Last Light's bleak alternate reality.

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I recently tried Wondershare's MobileGo for iOS, a handy tool for managing your iOS devices from your PC. MobileGo for iOS gives you a lot of freedom over your iOS device—something noticeably lacking when you use iTunes. I liked it a lot, but was admittedly turned off by its $40 price tag. That's why I'm so fond of SynciOS, an application that does a whole lot of what MobileGo can do, and does it for free.

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The Web interface for Gmail has a very distinct look. Your office mates can probably recognize it at a glance. This Chrome extension, however, might cause a few double-takes in your office: Gmail Offline, an extension by Google, puts a completely different face on Gmail, making it more similar to the tablet version used on Android tablets.

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When I first heard that Notion Music had dropped the price of its musical notation editor and scoring package from $249 to $99, I thought that the company was getting ready to close shop and having a fire sale. Or they'd gone crazy. Apparently, however, the company's experience with the iPad version of Notion has convinced them that selling more programs at a lower price might make them more money. Whatever the reason, it's nice to know that the slickest score editor on the planet is safe, sound, and improving.

The first thing you'll notice when you run Notion is how good-looking everything is. The interface, the pages, the notation, the musical symbol palettes, etc. are all rendered in a very inviting style. The program simply makes you want to compose.

It's also easy to use compared to most of the competition. I have a long-standing beef with the notation software industry's lack of true drag-and-drop editing. Notion doesn't support it either, but its editing methods are slightly more intuitive than those employed by Sibelius, Finale, or MuseScore, so editing is easier with Notion.

Notion 4 has three excellent virtual instrument grids: a guitar, a piano, and a drum pad which allows you to enter notes. Notion Music's more guitar-oriented Progression featured a guitar, but these are new to Notion. The piano and guitar feature a preview mode so you can try things before you enter them, and both let you enter melodies or chords. If you're instrument-dependent, these are very useful features. The drum pad features a library of rhythm patterns you can drag to your score, but doesn't have a preview mode as the piano and guitar features.

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Acer got a few things right and a number of things wrong with the Predator (specifically, Predator model AG3620-UR12). On the “right” side of the ledger, it has one of Intel’s better processors—a 3.4GHz Core i7-3770—and 32GB of DDR3/1600 memory. With those components, the asking price of $1299 is very reasonable.

On the “wrong” side of the ledger, the Predator has an AMD Radeon HD 8760 video card (the OEM version of the milquetoast Radeon HD 7770), a chintzy custom motherboard with just one PCIe x16 slot (occupied), and a miniscule 16GB SSD that serves as a cache to the 2TB, 7200-rpm mechanical hard drive.

The all-steel case is wrapped in painted satin black, with glossy black accents on top. Three doors in its face flip down to reveal 5.25-inch drive bays. Of these, one is occupied by a 16x DVD burner, and a second has a slide-out tray with SATA power and data connectors in the rear of the bay. Though this isn’t a hot-swappable drive bay, it does provide an opportunity for data backup that you can remove to an offsite location.

Also included are two empty 3.5-inch drive bays (accessible only from inside the case), but you’ll need to supply your own SATA cables and Molex-to-SATA power adapters if you decide to populate them (leads from the 500-watt power supply are available).

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Gmail doesn't offer you much in the way of formatting to make your emails look more attactive. That's fine for most emails, but sometimes you need a bit more pizzazz—like, say, a headline. Then again, maybe you often email code snippets, and could use some automatic syntax coloring. Markdown Here is an unobtrusive extension that can help convert your text into well-formed HTML.

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The idea behind Virtual Piggy is solid: This cloud-based service, which is designed to help children shop online safely and securely, allows for communication between parents and children, and protects children from many of the dangers lurking online without zapping their sense of independence. But right now it suffers from a few glitches that may make it hard for some kids—especially those on the younger end—to use without frustration.

Virtual Piggy is free to use. Parents sign up for an account, and then create profiles for each child they'd like to use the service. This requires entering the child's name and date of birth, and then creating a username and password for that child.

The parent can set certain parameters for the child's online shopping, such as transaction limits (both in dollar amounts for individual transactions and per day or week), and approval settings (which means the service will notify you whenever your child makes a transaction that is either above a certain amount or with a certain merchant). You also link a payment method—a credit card or a PayPal account—to your child's profile and set a monthly allowance, which is the maximum amount the child can spend each month.

Virtual Piggy has relationships with a group of online retailers that sell everything from games and books to clothes and more. These retailers, which include big-ish names like Ty.com (maker of Beanie Babies) and lesser-known sites like R&R Games, have agreed to allow children to use their Virtual Piggy accounts for checkout.

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Lenovo’s ThinkCentre Edge 92z is a handsome all-in-one with a 21.5-inch, IPS, 10-point touch-screen display and several business-class features, including Microsoft Lync-qualified VoIP features. Opt for the discrete graphics option, as our eval unit was equipped, and you have a pretty good gaming system, too. Curiously, the graphics option isn’t available direct from Lenovo. We could find such a configuration available only through resellers such as Amazon, Best Buy, and New Egg.

Design, Input Ergonomics, and Ports

Styled in shiny black, the Edge92z is a looker, if not quite in the same league as an iMac. It's thin and quite light for an all-in-one. That’s an important characteristic if you plan to take advantage of the unit's VESA mount point and attach it to an articulated arm. The 92z's two front feet can be removed for a cleaner appearance in that configuration, and Lenovo sells the ThinkCentre Extend Arm, which clamps to your desktop, for a reasonable $90.

In its default configuration, the 92z sits on the aforementioned feet, leaning back on a spring-loaded kickstand. This leaves enough room to slide the keyboard between the feet, but the stand blocks much of the rest of the area behind unit.

Robert Cardin

As is typical of business-oriented desktops, the mouse and keyboard are of the wired USB variety. Consumers will likely prefer wireless peripherals, which are a $39 option if you buy the machine direct from Lenovo (but then you can’t get the discrete graphics option).

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Automation is the name of the game these days for web apps, and Wappwolf aims to combine automation with the power of cloud computing.  Available for Dropbox, Google Drive and Box, Wappwolf offers on-the-fly file conversion, as well as automatically moving the files to other folders, email notifications, tweets, FTP uploading and more. And once you've set the rule, everything gets done behind the scenes.

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When you’re multitasking like mad, one monitor doesn’t provide enough real estate to display every open window without many of them overlapping and obscuring each other. For this reason alone, most PCWorld editors and designers use more than one display. Constantly rearranging multiple browser, text editor, chat, and photo-editing windows as you search for the one you need saps productivity and invites frustration.

But using multiple displays isn’t a panacea, either. First, you need a graphics card that can support two displays. That isn’t an unusual feature for a desktop PC, but it’s hard to find on older notebooks. Second, multiple video and power cables add clutter to your work environment. Third—and most important—a gap between the displays is inevitable, no matter how carefully you arrange them. Even the narrowest bezel will create a blind spot as your mouse pointer crosses from screen to screen.

So the new 29-inch, ultrawide displays featured here—each delivering a resolution of 2560 by 1080 pixels on a single screen—are a welcome addition to the market. They’re just the ticket for productivity apps, and they’re not bad for gaming, either. When we ran BioShock Infinite’s built-in benchmark at these displays’ native resolution (using settings of Very High) on a PC outfitted with a midrange AMD Radeon HD 7790 video card, we experienced a very playable frame rate of 41.1 frames per second.

The contenders 

Three such models recently passed through the PCWorld Lab: the Dell UltraSharp U2913WM, the AOC Q2963PM, and the LG 29EA93P UltraWide IPS Monitor. Each of these monitors measures 29 inches diagonally, with an aspect ratio of 21:9. That’s much, much wider than the 16:9 and 16:10 aspect ratios you’ll find on more-conventional monitors (or the 4:3 aspect ratio that old-school displays deliver).

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