Performance speed and platform stability are critical measures of any software application. However, when you’re dealing with school districts, seasonal deadlines, and students, the software is expected to move along at a swift pace.

To determine the relative speed of the software, we tested core operations on a PC running Windows Vista Home and an Apple iMac running Windows XP Professional on Parallels Desktop. The software was installed and timed on both machines, with multiple trials run on each application.

We found that LumaPix YearbookFusion operated significantly faster in use (at least 30-40%) when performing key album operations once a project has been created. Those functions, in aggregate over the duration of the album, amount to a sizable amount of time. However, the argument could be made either way that the intuitiveness of Pelican Software's Yearbooks! Desktop 2010 earns back some of that time since the bulk of users will be able to jump right into album production immediately, without expending too much time watching videos or scouring through the user manual to get up to speed and into production.

It should also be noted that Pelican Software’s is slightly faster when installing and uninstalling the .exe program file. The actual difference in time, however, is nearly negligible, particularly when the response times are taken into account as well as subsequent uses of the programs once data has been saved (drastically slowing down Pelican Software).

At their core, the different approaches the programs take with respect to information storage and previewing/rendering graphics on-the-fly, draws a sharp distinction in the comparative speed and response times of the programs. Pelican's application performs significantly slower once images have been loaded into the yearbook project.