Magix Fastcut

Too busy doing something dangerous to edit your GoPro footage? Magix has you covered

Magix has developed and sold video and image editing software for many years, yet it's not that often that it introduces a brand new product. Now, though, it’s launching Fastcut, a video editor designed specifically for editing footage from the fast expanding range of action cameras (in particular the GoPro, which I guess is currently the most popular).

Clearly you could use any video editor, but Fastcut is optimised for speed of use and includes templates designed for the sort of action movies produced by GoPro users. Let's see if it can live up to the task.

Seagate 2-Bay NAS 8TB

Seagate crashes the NAS party with a user-friendly dual drive solution

A while ago we covered the Seagate Central, a simple NAS box that offers a single preinstalled mechanism for basic media sharing duties. In the summer Seagate gave me a presentation of its new NAS hardware, using a totally new embedded OS, and these products have now been released into the big wide world beyond the technology press.

These two- and four-bay NAS boxes use the NAS OS 4 (embedded Linux) operating system, based on a concept that Seagate subsidiary LaCie came up with, and it serves to elevate its NAS range to the next level.

Acer Iconia Tab 8 A1-840HD

Acer takes on Google, Amazon, Samsung and Tesco in the small tablet arena

The market for small Android tablets is rather full, if not overflowing (see this week’s Component Watch for confirmation of this), so I was curious to see what Acer might bring to this party. The Iconia Tab 8, as the name suggests, is a 8" widescreen aspect tablet that's competing directly with a plethora of other small sub-£200 Android tablets.

This one, specifically, offers a 1280 x 800 display, runs Android KitKat 4.4.4, has 1GB of RAM and 16GB of internal flash storage. Where Acer went in its own direction with the Tab 8, though, is in choosing Intel’s Baytrail instead of using an ARM architecture. This tablet is built around a quad-core Atom Z3745 1,86GHz - an interesting choice but, given it’s not aiming to run x86 code, a curious one.

The Network Switch

Mark Pickavance gives a crash course on understanding your network's critical component and why it's so important to have a good one

When I first got involved in networking, most PCs communicated by means of a networking technology called Token Ring.

Its popularity stemmed from it being used by IBM and it being the default network protocol for Novell Netware. Initially it offered good performance, reliability and an easily implemented topology.

But it had a major flaw: it wasn't routable. By that I mean it was very difficult to have more than a certain number of users on a token network without requiring some expensive connecting hardware, and managing 100+ users was a bit of a nightmare. It was also really expensive for the token adapters and cables.

What Can We Expect From Windows 10?

Microsoft will launch Windows 10 later this year, replacing both 7 and 8, but what difference will it make? David Crookes finds out

When Microsoft unveiled more details of Windows 10 at a recent special event, one thing really stood out: this is a company that can keep secrets. Although a good many of the details had been second-guessed before the curtain went up on its CEO, Satya Nadella, Microsoft still managed to throw in a fair few surprises while setting out its vision for the immediate future of computing.

The years to come promise much: a pleasing operating system that will put to bed the issues surrounding Windows 8, a major belief in gaming and (most eyebrow-raising of all) the launch of a holographic computing concept that has the potential to be the basis of GUI for decades. It all seems to add up to Microsoft being a force to be reckoned with yet again.

Scrolls

Mojang’s card and board game fusion is no idol pursuit

As second games go, Scrolls isn’t a departure for Minecraft maker Mojang so much as a full-on transatlantic flight with no return ticket. Minecraft is the everygame, simple enough on the surface to be accessible to all, and with endless creative potential inches beneath its cuboid topsoil. Scrolls is a niche-bynature marriage of card and board games where creativity is expressed through mastery of a rigidly defined ruleset, and with labyrinthine tactical depths. Just about the only things that link them are a Mojang account, and that both can soak up as many hours as you can spare.