8. Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8: With digital photography and PC image editing now household pastimes, two and a half years was too long to wait between upgrades. But the new version of Jasc Software's $109 alternative to Adobe's $649 Photoshop managed the feat of both adding power and boosting ease of use — it's still too intimidating for casual snapshot dabblers, but a terrific value for anyone else.
7. Bayesian spam filters: This is the year spam got out of control, but it's also the year spam-fighters got smart, with dozens of programmers and products — from retail Outlook add-ins like InBoxer to freeware filters like Spamihilator — abandoning the fruitless game of playing catch-up with naughty-word and -sender blacklists in favor of the intelligent, on-the-fly content analysis suggested by Paul Graham, with a tip of the mathematician's hat to the Rev. Thomas Bayes's 1763 "Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances." Bayes never had to determine the probability that a message containing the word Viagra was unsolicited, but his theory is almost a miracle cure.
6. Adobe Photoshop Album: Adobe didn't invent this consumer category -- last year we mentioned Kodak digital cameras' bundled EasyShare software, and impressive entries this year ranged from Jasc's Paint Shop Photo Album to new HP home PCs' Image Zone. But the $50 Photoshop Album sets the pace as an easy, friendly way to organize, search, touch up, print, e-mail, or do just about anything else with your collection of digital images. Which would you prefer — an ever-growing pile of files with names like DSC031114012, or an elegant, at-a-glance browsing and editing center?
5. Dragon NaturallySpeaking 7 Preferred: ScanSoft has kept a pretty low profile since saving NaturallySpeaking from its former owners' implosion two years ago. That's a shame, since version 7 of the pioneering speech-recognition package is a simply remarkable advance in convenience and accuracy: In exchange for $200 and half an hour's setup, you can truly dictate to your PC, rattling on in your normal voice and enjoying versatile shortcut commands, surprisingly smart and quick error correction, and about a two-thirds reduction in keyboard use. If Microsoft bought this software and issued it in a new release of Windows, Time and Newsweek would be running cover stories about a new millennium in human/computer interfaces. It's that good.
