It’s summertime and we’ve got some fun software to recommend and home projects to suggest to help you make the most of those long summer days.

1. Create Home Movies

Pack your camcorder for your summer vacation so you can capture some special moments.  Then you can create entertaining, professional-looking home movies with the help of Adobe Premiere Elements 9. With instant movie creation tools and tutorials, you won’t need any video-editing experience in order to create your own movie masterpieces. Premiere Elements makes it easy to add fantastic special effects, transitions, and music soundtracks. Share your movies with friends and family on DVD, Blu-ray Disc, mobile devices or upload to Youtube & Facebook in a matter of minutes.

2. Home Entertainment

For the ultimate home theatre experience with your PC and TV, we recommend popular media playback software, Cyberlink PowerDVD 11.  This powerful application plays DVDs, Blu-ray and Blu-ray 3D discs, and supports any media format (including photos and music) stored on your PC, smart devices, DLNA server and online social media sites (Youtube, Facebook & Flickr).

PowerDVD’s TrueTheater technology improves the playback quality of your media. It upscales standard definition video to HD quality, and the fun 2D to 3D conversion tools brings life to old movies and photos. Film fans will enjoy Cyberlink’s MoovieLive community where they can find movie info, reviews and trailers as well as share their own movie reviews.

3. Animation

Keep older kids busy this summer while developing their creative side, with Smith Micro Anime Studio Debut 8.  This program provides easy tools for creating fun animation projects. Beginner’s Mode, how-to videos and wizards will get them animating characters in no time. Photos and drawings can also be imported into the software to create animations.  Anime Studio lets you record your own sound clips and provides an automatic lip-syncing feature for more life-like characters.

4. Landscape Design

Summer is also a great time for those long-neglected home improvement projects. Idea Spectrum’s Realtime Landscaping Plus 2011 can help you plan and design your ideal outdoor living space, and add value to your home. A user-friendly interface, tutorials and guides means even beginners will find it easy to use this landscaping software.

Create full 3D designs for a garden, decks, patios and more. Built-in search tools for over 4,000 plants help you pick the right ones for your climate. The program provides useful cost estimates so you can keep on top of your project.

5. Learn a Language

If you’re vacationing abroad this summer (and even if you’re not), this could be an ideal time to learn a new language. Rosetta Stone software offers a powerful, interactive teaching method which immerses you in the language of your choice. You’ll learn in a more natural way, with word and image association.  Rosetta Stone lets you study at your own pace, and also provides a mobile app so you can learn on the go.