New Products

If you just know enough Autodesk Maya to be dangerous, pick up Eric Keller's new book Mastering Autodesk Maya 2011, and take it to the next level. In this book, Keller offers professional-level Maya instruction, exploring topics such as modeling, texturing, animation, visual effects and other high-level techniques for film, television, games and so on. Included are pages of scenarios and examples from some of the leading professionals in the industry so that the reader can master the entire CG production pipeline. The book also covers the very latest Maya tools and features, including Dynamics, Maya Muscle, Stereo Cameras, rendering with mental ray and others.

www.sybex.com

Silicon solutions provider Marvell recently rolled out its new ARMADA 628 processor, which the firm bills as the world's first 1.5GHz tri-core application processor, delivering dual-stream 1080p 3-D video and graphics for smartphones and tablets. The ARMADA 628 incorporates a full SoC design with three high-performance, ARM-compliant CPU cores. The tri-core design, with its two high-performance symmetric multiprocessing cores and a third core optimized for ultra low power “is analogous to a hybrid muscle car”, says Marvell. The ARMADA 628 can perform like a racecar engine on demand, but it relies on the frugal third core for routine user tasks and system management. In real-world terms, this enables the ARMADA 628 to play more than ten hours of full 1080p HD video or 140 hours of music on a single charge while still providing 3GHz of raw computational horsepower. Marvell also says that the ARMADA 628 is the first mobile CPU to provide high-speed USB 3.0 connectivity.

www.marvell.com

Adeptol's new Text Extraction application is designed to extract text from documents in more than 150 file formats, which then can be processed by content aggregation tools and used for storing, publishing, archiving or searching. Adeptol's Java-based software mines text at up to 15,000 words per second and can be deployed on Linux, Solaris or Microsoft Windows. Some of the more than 150 file formats include Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org and PDF. The software's output can be exported to a text file or text stream, which can be saved into a database or passed on to other applications. Developers also can leverage Text Extraction to build text extraction capabilities directly into their applications.

www.adeptol.com

Knocking down remaining barriers created by incompatible operating systems is the mission of Paragon Software Group and its upgraded Paragon NTFS and HFS 8.1 for Linux Combo Professional. Paragon calls the application suite “the industry's highest-performance kernel driver for NTFS and HFS+ filesystems with advanced read and write operations for all types of files”. Tested on Linux kernels up to 2.6.33, Paragon NTFS and HFS for Linux demonstrates read and write performance similar to Linux native Ext3FS with up to 80MB/sec read/write speed. Version 8.1 offers innovations, such as a 40% performance gain on NTFS filesystems, support for compressed NTFS files, full read/write support for HFS+ and HFSX, and creation and repair of HFS+ volumes. Paragon also says that its NTFS driver is more robust than native Microsoft's own. Personal and commercial editions are available.

www.paragon-software.com

Timesys Corporation is calling on Linux application developers to test-drive Web Factory, a new and free cloud-based application that gives platform and application developers an easy-to-use tool for building Linux applications. The Web Factory application combines the Linux kernel, toolchain, debugger, the TimeStorm Eclipse-based IDE and how-to documentation to provide a complete embedded Linux build system. Everything is included that developers need to test and evaluate a processor without having to set up host build environments and before finalizing hardware selection. An easy-to-use wizard guides them through each step. Developers also do not need to spend time learning each free BSP/SDK provided by board vendors while testing boards. Key processor architectures including ARM, MIPS, Nios II, Power Architecture, SuperH and x86 are supported. Users can upgrade to Timesys's Desktop Factory subscription anytime if they need live, expert Linux support or advanced features and in-depth customization on a selected platform.

www.timesys.com