New Products

Visualization Sciences Group (VSG) calls the new version 8.1 of its popular object-oriented 3-D graphics development toolkit, Open Inventor, an “essential release”. VSG says that v.8.1 brings “even greater performance, more high-quality graphics, more interactivity and more robustness to interactive applications”. Thanks to numerous optimizations, generalized use of the latest OpenGL techniques and finely tuned memory consumption, Open Inventor 8.1 delivers a display rate that is now nearly equivalent to the peak performance of graphics hardware. This new release also introduces a dynamic display resolution mechanism, whereby advanced rendering effects are progressively applied during interaction, refining image quality on the fly, without sacrificing interactivity. Open Inventor 8.1 is now available for C++ and .NET, on Linux and Windows 32- and 64-bit platforms.

www.open-inventor.com

Fulfilling its mission to expand access to cross-platform systems through Active Directory, Centrify Corporation has released Centrify Express, a “free and easy on-ramp” for establishing a single sign-on experience for Linux and Mac users based on their existing Active Directory credentials. The concept is to leverage existing infrastructure that many firms already have deployed—that is, Microsoft Active Directory—to secure their heterogeneous computing environment. The product, a subset of the company's Centrify Suite of identity and access management solutions, is a set of free software applications and tools, content resources and community forums designed to help organizations improve security and compliance of data center and desktop systems. Centrify Express is currently available for free download from Centrify's Web site.

www.centrify.com/express

Selling your widget to every corner of the planet will be a snap with the new version 1.3 of PrestaShop, a popular open-source e-commerce solution for Linux, UNIX and Windows. Now with more than 40,000 active sites in 50 countries and a community of more than 85,000 members, PrestaShop offers more than 200 functions that cover all the needs of e-commerce sites in all business sectors. The developers tout PrestaShop's flexible and simple code, as well as its light server footprint. The freshly baked version 1.3 offers a 30% performance upgrade following an advanced SQL optimization and 15 new functions. For instance, retailers now can accept payments in more than 200 countries via 42 currencies and 100 payment options. Other features include enhanced cross-selling capabilities for improving per-customer sales.

www.prestashop.com