Lightly Toasted

Have you heard of PicLens? if not, this will really make your day! Its a simple way to enjoy your digital media that is images and videos right on your desktop in such a way that you’re not tied down to viewing it within the scope of the browser window. Its clickless browsing, with interactive previews at your finger tips. And most of all its a great way to view media on a big screen… and oh so suave

Not convinced? Watch the Demo here.
Download Piclens from Cooliris and give it a whirl. You won’t be disappointed.

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Its Firefox party time again. Can a browser really make the Web better? Try Firefox and see for yourself. Learn more. If you want to get a quick update on whats new in Firefox 3.

1. Download your copy and install in case you haven’t.
2. Once installed, follow these instructions from Mikelao Photography to set your colour management to True(in case it is Flase)
3. Colour management plug in can be downloaded from Sean Hayes website
4. Once you have done the above steps confirm its all good by visiting the International Color Consortium.

Firefox away!

Update: If you wish to run both Firefox 2 and 3 simultaneously from your Mac or windows. And in case you want to enable kerning here is hope. If you’re unsure what Kerning is, read up at Wikipedia.

For those that Firefox on a daily basis you already know that Firefox 3 beta has been out for a while. And if you haven’t you can always download it from here. But very specially for those that use Gmail a lot and are sick and tired of the look and feel Gmail offers, there is a nifty little extension that re-skins the horrid gmail interface. You can download it here. Its called Better Gmail 2 by Gina Trapani. It has useful extra features and skins to Gmail, hierarchical labels, macros, signatures, file attachment icons. If you are a regular Gmail user, this is for you.

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If you shoot, catalogue and process photos and wish to jump on Adobe’s Lightroom 2.0 bandwagon and need an invite — all you have to do is leave a comment here for me and I’ll send you one. Do check out the Adobe Lightroom 2.0 Forum here. I have been using Lightroom since its beta stages and Lightroom 2.0 beta over a month now. Obviously no software is perfect and does all you need in one go but Lightroom comes pretty close to what most professional and amateur photographers need and that is from my own everyday experience. Try it!

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I do have a copy of Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Fireworks on my mac which gets used every now and then but I’d still like to use a lightweight vector app that does quick easy draws on demand. To that end 2 worthy vector apps stand out: Lineform from Freeverse or DrawIT by Pieter Omvlee.

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I like to deal with my mail as it arrives and depending on priority and response deal with the reply or stow away for later or just simple trash it.

In other words I’m more or less diligent with keeping my Inbox clean and tidy and therefore one would hope simple and lightweight. It give me sense of achievement and quite literally peace of mind when my Inbox has less than 5 mails. But overtime every mailbox grows and therefore gets sluggish. Well, if you’re on Mac (Tiger or Leopard) there is a free nifty little program that does an amazing little trick of optimising your mail. Its called SpeedMail. It compresses the Mail SQL database and restores Apple Mail to new life and did I say its free!

Download Speedmail here and give it a try.

Over the last few months I’ve come across articles claming Camino (a browser on the mac) to be the bees knees of speedy browsing on the mac. Sure enough its brisk baby as Om Malik puts it Not many come close to the speed performance of Mozilla’s Gecko 1.8.1 rendering engine, but I still wouldn’t use Camino as my default browser for my everyday use. One major annoyance being rendering colour profiles.

Most sites have some form of graphic image, design, pattern or even a gradient. In fact its hard to find a site doesn’t use a photo or colour of any form. What was your last visited site that had no photos or colour? Hard to spot one isn’t it? When browsers donot render colour appropriately it means that the photos you see or the colours you view are less life-like. They are in most cases a flatter, less charming less punchy version of the real thing. Technically they are less saturated, less contrasty and the blacks do not converge at #000. They appear washed out. See the image below. The same picture viewed in 2 browsers (left is Camino, on the right is safari)

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I was sent a Mircosoft Word document with 12 pages of information to go out on a website. Normally I don’t print unless I really really need to but I did this time.

The file printed almost successfully, in 13 pages all up and at the bottom of the 13^th page, the page counter in the footer of the document read:

Page 13 of 12

Gotta love Microsoft! Life on Earth would perish otherwise.

The mind boggles…

I have had a registered version of Disco app for a while now almost since Disco app beta was available for download. A brilliant little app indeed and with just US $14.95 you just cant go wrong. Give it a whirl and if you head on over to Glenn Wolsey’s quick enough you might even get a discount coupon!! Or head on over to read about the interview with Austin Sarner, Developer Of Disco.

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