In the brawling barroom of PDF editing programs, Corel’s PDF Fusion is a punchy product that bears itself well but fails to deliver a knockout blow.

Best known for its CorelDRAW application, Corel has used its graphics software skills to design PDF Fusion, a program that’s intended to make it easy to manage PDFs.

In an online world full of file formats, Adobe’s PDF (Portable Document Format) is an open standard for exchanging documents, delivering a fixed-layout format for text, fonts and graphics.  By ensuring the integrity of a stable document, PDFs are a boon for sending legal, technical or specialist documents by email.

Part of the PDF success factor is that they are rather hard to edit. This has spawned a large number of PDF management programs, although none of them is a standout choice for the average user – a problem that Corel does not solve with PDF Fusion.

The rolled gold standard for managing PDFs is the full Adobe Acrobat solution, which is expensive and overblown for all but the most demanding users. More affordable options include Nuance PDF Converter Professional Pro and Nitro Pro, which have their respective pros and cons.

The latest contender is Corel PDF Fusion, an easy to install program that’s visually attractive and simple to learn. What I liked first was how quickly Fusion loads, distinguishing it from the Nuance program, which is quite sluggish to start up.

Apple Computer faces a crisis of confidence after yesterday's death of its visionary co-founder and long-serving CEO Steve Jobs.

This is not the first time Apple has lost Jobs' insprirational influence.

After Jobs was ousted by "professional" management in the mid-80s, Apple lost its way over the next decade, delivering increasingly mediocre products and coming close to failure.

Meanwhile Jobs built successful businesses including animation trailblazer Pixar and Unix workstation specialist NeXT Inc - which laid the foundation for Apple's Mac OS X.

Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 as "interim CEO", the role he relinquished only a few weeks ago. During this "temporary" tenure, Jobs transformed Apple from also-ran to the world's most valuable technology company.