Feed aggregator

When you want seamless phone coverage in countries outside the US, these plans give you the best international options.

The Supreme Court kept access to the abortion pill mifepristone available via telehealth. And, Trump says he made multiple trade deals during his state visit to China.

(Image credit: Natalie Behring)

Raspberry Pi boss says AI technology could put young people off tech jobs and hurt the economy

We've found a sneaky way to stream Dutton Ranch for free from anywhere in the world.

A report claims OpenAI is considering suing Apple over the AI partnership between the two tech giants.

Can't get your hands on the Fujifilm X100VI? The new Panasonic Lumix L10 could be the premium compact camera you're looking for.

President Trump returns to the U.S. after wrapping up his whirlwind trip to China.

(Image credit: Evan Vucci)

Adobe InDesign is the industry-standard desktop publishing and page layout software. And it's been that way for many years now, ever since the tool stole the crown of QuarkXpress to become the best DTP software.

So, with some new updates, I wanted to take a look at some of the new features I feel will be valuable to most of our workflows. As changes do occur to the software over time, the version I explored was 21.3.

Adobe InDesign: Pricing & plans

• Subscription-only
• Creative Cloud discounts for students and teachers

Adobe isn’t cheap. It’s high-end professional software that comes at a cost. On top of that, you don’t buy your software with Adobe, you merely rent it. Stop paying and it no longer works.

Yes, initially it’s cheaper than purchasing software outright, but over time that saving becomes questionable, as it is for all subscription services. You do get the advantage of enjoying the latest features as and when they’re released though.

Subscribing to InDesign on an annual contract will cost you $23 a month. Scrolling through the available plans, you might think getting the Creative Cloud Pro plan would be a better deal: after all, it’s $35 a month for over 20 apps, including InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and more. That’s just $12 more. But bear in mind this price is only an introductory offer. After three months, it jumps to $70 a month on an annual contract.

If you’re curious about the software, a free 7-day trial is on offer, and if you decide to go for a subscription, Adobe won’t charge you for the first 14 days.

Additionally, students and teachers have a sweet deal: $20 a month for the entire Creative Cloud Pro portfolio.

• Pricing & plans: 3.5 / 5

Adobe InDesign: Performance & online work

(Image credit: Adobe // Future)

• Improved performance on PC
• A refined experience when working with files online
• The collaboration tool shows promise, but somewhat glitchy

Let’s take a look under the hood first, shall we? Not the most glamorous of new features, but InDesign now makes use of your computer’s GPU to help render your files. Usually, renders are done in low-res to help speed up document manipulation and scrolling, but by using the GPU, these previews should be of higher quality, while freeing up the CPU to handle text layout and general multitasking, thereby improving performance.

This feature is on by default as long as your graphics card is compatible, but you are free to disable it should you want to. You’ll find a tick box in your Settings, under ‘GPU Performance’ to do just that, but if the new rendering works as expected for your needs, why disable it?

Designing on your computer is one thing, but what if you need to work on the go and use a different machine while doing so, or better yet, collaborate with other member of your team?

All that’s been improved in the latest version of InDesign. Take organising, and sharing your work online. You can now do this within the app itself, by using the Creative Cloud app, or by login online and perform the same actions from a web browser. You’re able to create new folders, move docs around, rename, duplicate and delete them. All standard fare.

What I quite liked was the ability to “Sync for 7 days” - say you need to work offline for a while. This allows you to grab those files and the moment you reconnect, they’ll sync up once more.

Then there’s the Share options. The most interesting one is being able to ‘Share for Text Editing’. This allows you to collaborate with others as they make modifications which will be reflected instantly on your own version. Sounds exciting, right? And I’m sure in time it will be, but there are some pretty big caveats.

For one thing, as the command suggests, you can only perform edits to the text. You can’t alter the layout, change images, or anything else. It still has its uses, but it is limited. Next, this service is still in Beta, so there will be glitches, and I encountered a few, like not having permission to edit my own document online because apparently, I didn’t have the right to access it.

Thankfully a bit of swearing and repeated annoyed reloads of the page eventually got it to work. And lastly, this service only works on Chrome. I tried it with other browsers such as Firefox and Safari, and just got an error message.

• Performance: 3.5 / 5

Adobe InDesign: New features

(Image credit: Adobe // Future)

• Welcome addition of compatibility with complex math symbols and PDF editing
• Some new tools are a puzzler through
• Why link to Adobe Express templates if you can’t use them in InDesign?

On InDesign’s Home Page, you’ll find a ‘Templates’ menu in the left sidebar. This allows you to browse Adobe Express templates directly from within InDesign. Pretty cool, right? Except… not really. You see, once you select a template, it launches your web browser and takes you to Adobe Express online.

You’d think if you can browse the template inside InDesign, you should be able to work on it in InDesign, but no. There is a cumbersome workaround: download the template from Adobe Express as a PDF, and load that PDF in InDesign, but why would such a step be necessary is a mystery to me (at least you’re not restricted to Chrome here).

Opening a PDF in InDesign is a pretty big deal, especially since everything in that document becomes editable. You’ll find that most of the formatting is preserved - your mileage will vary, and I suspect depends on the complexity of the original file - but in my experience, the results were brilliant. Whenever you need to make alterations to a PDF, InDesign may well have become your go-to app.

And rounding up this list, is support for maths equations. You can work with complex equations and symbols and they will all be displayed as they should inside an InDesign document. There’s even a ‘Math Expressions’ panel for you to manually add said symbols to your document (you can also copy and paste them from elsewhere). This’ll no doubt be great for scientific papers.

• New features: 4 / 5

Adobe InDesign: Flex Layout

(Image credit: Adobe // Future)

• A great way to create a responsive layout inside your document
• Big potential to quickly create alternative layouts in seconds
• It’s only let down by the feature’s inability to resize the objects within it

But perhaps the biggest new feature for this version of InDesign is Flex Layouts. Its purpose is to make it easy to create different layouts in seconds, and a great way to provide options for your team or clients. You get to select a number of assets on your page and link them together by ticking the ‘Create Flex Layout’ box. This essentially makes a responsive design inside InDesign.

The selected items are in a bounding box. Resize the box and the items will move around according to set parameters you control. You can alter the spacing between objects, and the orientation that they will take within the boundaries. It gives you great flexibility.

The only downside I found is that the Flex Layout cannot alter any selected asset’s size, which does limit its usefulness somewhat: you have to resize them manually, should you find the resulting space too big or too small for them.

• Flex Layout: 4 / 5

Should I buy?

(Image credit: Adobe // Future)

Buy it if...

If you’re in the market for a feature-rich desktop publishing application, with a series of useful new features, and are already wedded to the Adobe ecosystem.

Don't buy it if...

You’re not a fan of Adobe, or of subscriptions, and are looking for an alternative that isn’t as expensive, even if it doesn’t have all the features InDesign has.

For more design tools, we tested the best Adobe InDesign alternatives

• ^ Back to top

I doused more than a dozen BBQ sauces over a plate of grilled chicken. Here are the sauces I'll be slathering on food this summer.

Quantum computing is nearing a tipping point where software unlocks its true potential.

AI is accelerating decisions faster than ever, making CIO–CFO alignment essential for real business impact.

Most AI failures stem from broken foundations, not flawed models or capability.

The Honor Robot Phone is landing in Q3 2026, and ahead of that release window, it's been shown off at the Cannes Film Festival.

Regular readers of my reviews will know I’m not a big fan of renting software (developers erroneously refer to those as ‘subscriptions’). I prefer to purchase - and therefore own - my software.

But what’s better than paying for stuff? Getting it for free of course! So what do you do when your budget’s just too tight, not only to afford expensive ongoing monthly commitments (like Photoshop), but even just one-off costs (like Pixelmator Pro)? You set out on a search for free alternatives, such as GIMP, that’s what.

GIMP: Pricing & plans

• A free image manipulation tool. What’s not to like?

GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program - an acronym within an acronym! GNU is the backbone of the free software movement. it's a massive collection of free software designed to create a UNIX-like operating system with a focus on user freedoms. GNU stands for ‘GNU’s Not Unix’.

GIMP has massively evolved since those origins, and has been multi-platform, available on Linux, Windows and Macs, for a while.

It’s a free and open source raster-based photo editor. Raster means you’ll be working with and can manipulate pixels, just like in paid-for alternatives such as Photoshop, Affinity, and Pixelmator.

You can grab your own copy by clicking here.

GIMP: Interface

(Image credit: GIMP // Future)

• Simple and similar to its competition
• But it can be totally customized to fit your style

Launch the app and you’ll find an interface that’s very similar to most other image manipulation software. You’ve got a sidebar on either side, containing tools, inspectors, layer and channel info, and more.

But you’re not constrained by that layout. In a way similar to Photoshop, you’re able to move those panels to other locations on the interface, or close them altogether. You’ll find a list of all available parameters by going to Windows > Dockable Dialogs.

This flexibility can be very welcome to set up an interface exactly as you want it - the flip side of course, is that it can make it tricky when using the exact same software on another computer, although admittedly, that would only affect a small number of users.

Another way to customize GIMP is via its Settings options. From there, the colour theme can be altered - which means this is where you choose between a white, grey or black interface, or have this be linked to the general preference you set in your operating system. Icons can be bigger or smaller than the default (which can be useful when working on very large displays).

If you prefer coloured icons as GIMP used to have, rather than the new mono-colour minimalist look, reverting to them is but a click away.

GIMP: Tools

(Image credit: GIMP // Future)

• A vast collection of tools for altering and improving photos
• You can create complex layer-intensive projects

When it comes to the available tools, pretty much everything seems to be there. You have selection tools, both rectangles and elliptical ones, a lasso tool, and a wizard wand.

There’s a crop tool, transform options, including distortion and smudge capabilities, colour application tools like a bucket, pencil, pen, gradient, and eraser, a healing brush, text options, and the ability to create paths. Basically, this is everything you’d expect from a modern raster-based image manipulation program.

As for Layer work, your project can have as many of them as you need. You can move them around, lock or hide them, apply filters to each of them, and there’s even a handful of composite modes you can apply to them (although not as many as other programs).

Speaking of filters, you have dozens to work with, from the basic blurs and sharpen tools, to more artistic ones. Again, there is nothing there that I haven’t seen before, and they’re all most welcome. The same can be said about all colour correction parameters.

All in all, on paper it looks great, and if that’s not enough for you, GIMP is compatible with 3rd party plugin, including Photoshop-compatible ones. With them, you could import hundreds of new brushes for instance. The most popular plugin collection comes from G’MIC, which brings over 600 filters to GIMP (and other compatible software). These plugins are free, and you can get them all from here.

GIMP: In use

(Image credit: GIMP // Future)

• A good selection of tools, but some appear to be missing
• Scrolling through a zoomed in image can be a serious struggle
• Room for improvement

How all this will work for you in a real-world workflow will be greatly subjective, so here’s where I’m coming from so you can understand my own perspective: I regularly use Affinity, Adobe Photoshop, and Pixelmator Pro.

Although GIMP provides most of the tools I’d need, like 98% of them, there were a handful of things which made it tricky for me to use. The absolute worst for me was zooming in and scrolling through an image. I use my trackpad a lot for this and with any of the other image manipulators I’ve used regularly, I could do this and move through the canvas effortlessly.

Not so with GIMP. Zooming in and out was fine, but scrolling through the image to get to where I needed was practically impossible - unless I needed to go to an edge or corner - it did that in a flash - but it was impossible for me to slowing move around and make the alterations I needed up close.

Sure, I could do it by grabbing the handle bars to the right and bottom of the image, but that’s far from an intuitive way of altering projects. I’m not sure why this wasn’t working, but it was a serious hindrance.

As for the tool I missed the most: background removal. It’s a relatively modern one, and it’s never perfect when the background is complex, requiring a lot of touch up, but it’s so much faster than any previous methods… yet GIMP doesn’t appear to have it in its portfolio. Instead, you need to do it the old fashioned way, by manually selecting the object and clean up the selection.

OK, that’s what I used to have to do in the past, but I shouldn’t expect to have to do it now. A part of me hopes such a tool is present and I just missed it, because not having it sure is a chore, even if the app itself is free.

Having said that, what tools GIMP does have are well designed, easy to use, and effective. If you’re looking for an image manipulator with simple to moderate tools, you really have nothing to lose by checking out GIMP. Who knows: it might meet or even exceed your expectations, and will save you a bunch of money in the long run.

Should I try GIMP?

(Image credit: GIMP // Future)

Buy it if...
You’re looking for an image manipulator program that provides a wealth of tools, is compatible with third-party plugins, and won’t cost you a dime.

Don't buy it if...
You need a workspace that is way more forgiving than GIMP is, and you’d rather have access to some advanced tools, instead of doing it “the old fashioned way”.

GIMP: Also consider

For alternatives to GIMP, I recommend Affinity by Canva, Adobe Photoshop, and Pixelmator Pro.

GIMP // FutureGIMP // Future

From the more affordable Pixel 10A to Pixel 10 Pro and the foldable Pixel 10 Pro Fold, these are the best Google phones we've reviewed.

The start of GTA 6's marketing campaign seems imminent, according to a new 'leak' from Best Buy, but it's best to remain sceptical for now.

The main factors you need to know about Bluetti's new Balco series launch.

Researchers spotted an updated version of the FDMTP backdoor being deployed through DLL sideloading.

How exploits used to be built and how AI is rewriting those rules

You don't have to twist your arm to make sure you get everyone in frame any longer. Do this instead.