The iPhone OS 3.0 software update is here. While I must admit I havent played around to check every little update feature yet, the Spotlight search in itself is a big time saver. Cut, Copy & Paste alone save a lot of retyping and mulling over dreaded typos. That is a mega saver, add to that the fact you can type in Landscape which implies lesser typos. Voice Memos – brilliant idea, Internet …
Archive for the 'Software' Category
Having had a bit of a trouble with Apache + PHP configuration and many trials and re-trials I decided to give MAMP a try. I had heard about MAMP a while back but never really thought of trying it until just about half hour back. Everything is up and running in less than a minute. Yes there is truth in that entry.
Continue reading ‘Mamp for your mac’
HDR or High Dynamic Range is an imaging technique used in (mostly digital) Photography where more than one exposure of the same frame is merged together using software to boost the final image with a higher tonal range. In Photoshop lingo, more gamut. This technique allows greater control of light and hence far more accurate representation of the image to the real scenario when HDR is produced. View the details in the larger version of the above image.
WordPress undoubtedly is one of the most loved Opensource personal Content Management Systems for running a site but like any software its not without its share of much needed improvements. I’m also aware that die hard WordPress enthusiasts are burning the midnight oil to take it to the next level of finesse at Shuttle which encompasses a whole range of changes in terms of user-interface, design, code. I am listing down a a few things that in my opinion could make WordPress go a step further, Feel free to add yours. Some of the points mentioned may have been discussed elsewhere.
I had downloaded a copy of CSSEdit software last night and been playing with it a bit. I do like their site — Macrabbit.com. Clean and crisp! But what made me LMAO was the nagscreen. Here is a screengrab! Enjoy. Jan, it works!!
Flock Developer Preview is now available. Go on give it a whirl. I love it already. Yes well I’m easy pleased BUT if you are anything like me and like technology ( I think ‘geek’ is over-rated) you’d know what I mean. Head on over and have a muck around.
Continue reading ‘Get Flock!’
The new Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is a professional photographers software. It provides one easy application for managing, adjusting, and presenting large volumes of digital photographs all in the one workspace. Watch the 10 min Flash video.
I’ve only just waded through a few bits and pieces of the wealth of features the new Adobe Photoshop Lightroom has to offer. My trial copy is still good for another fortnight and at this rate I’d surely consider buying Lightroom. I have put together a list of Lightroom resources and will be adding more in time.
What is FTP?
File Transfer Protocol — A way of transferring files over the Internet/Intranet from one computer to another. When this process occurs in a secure or encrypted way its called SFTP. You can read more about FTP on Steven Frank’s blog.
Continue reading ‘FTP Clients on Mac and PC’
Max Lyons’ digital imagery has always impressed me. While most digital SLR are still learning and trying to cope with deficiencies of the good ‘ole 35mm SLR Max seems to have found methods that not only work in the present scenario it even yields more. Mind you he is not using the very latest camera or the very latest piece of lens either. Over the years of his digital photo wizardy he has developed some tools and some outstanding software like PTA Assembler( for stitching panoramas) Image stacker — a great software to make composite imagery at low light… this gave birth to his outstanding star trail idea I suppose. Absolutely stunning indeed! Max’s Digital gallery is a must see. I could spend hours there and go back for more..and more… and I have already done that so many times.
Macintosh is not only the preferred platform for professional web developers but almost most certainly for Professional photographers or most that do dedicated media work! It is true to say that serious photography and print and media work only ever happen on macintosh…not windows! Sorry Bill. This is because when you are on macintosh you get a lot of inherent advantages (native to mac OS X) working your graphics or photography there than you would elsewhere. I recently came across Rawshooter, from Pixmantec ApS a new RAW processing software. The premium package of this software sells for about US$99.00 Not too bad! Certainly competetive and boasts of a lot of features that photographers like myself would love to have… so I did sign up for a trial and to my amazement RawShooter is only available for windows WHAT!! Exactly!
UPDATED 16th March 2006: Capture a Screencast with a Mac — tutorial on how to organise yourself before doing a screencast by Miraz Jordan.
Mac OS X comes with its own screen grabbing tool called Grab and it is fairly comprehensive but I needed something more powerful as I intend using this a whole lot more. On doing some quick searches I landed up here at Pure-mac with 26 applications to choose from. Holy Moly! Jeremy helped me pick the best one and I tell you this is one kick ass screen capture software. Wow!
Oh such a lovely weekend went by so quick again… from the lovely huge meatosaurian meals at Ribs and Rumps to the very home cooked BBQ with friends… don’t weekends roll on too fast?
Now speaking of food and trying out good receipes… thought I’d try some of the software that is available for mac. There are a whole heap here at Pure-mac but some of those webpages look fairly out of date. I have tried Mac Gourmet and Connoisseur and neither take my fancy. Am off trying Organized Gourmet and Kitchen. Whats your favourite gem to this end?
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!
If you’re a photographer of any description and use Lightroom this is definitely for you. Adobe has released Lightroom 3 beta. Yes its beta so its not a fully working copy but had a lot of good little touches from the last released version which is Lightroom 2.
Scott Kelby and Matt Klowkowski have put together a Learning Centre for Lightroom 3 beta. A couple of videos that run you through the basic changes and whats new and they are well worth a watch. All up about 20 minutes but a very neat little set of videos. Definitely watch it if you use Lightroom or are planning to get the software and try it. Adobe Lightroom 3 beta can be downloaded from here.
Photography is a passion of mine. My leisure is often consumed in photography, or in digital photo-processing of some form. I enjoy this process very much. I use Canon gear though am getting a hankering for Nikon stuff lately. You might like to look through the Photography Category to see some of my photos.
My Gear
| Cameras Bodies | Camera Lenses |
|---|---|
| Canon EOS 40D |
EF 50mm F1.4 USM EF 17-40mm F4L USM EF 24-70mm F2.8L USM EF 85 F1.8 USM EF 70-200 F2.8L IS USM |
| Other Hardware | Software |
| Cokin Filters HOYA HD Circular Polariser Canon Speedlite 550EX E-TTL Kenko Extension Tubes Manfrotto Tripod Canon Remote Switch RS-809N Sandisk CompactFlash® Cards Multimedia Storage Viewer P2000 Expodisc Spyder 3 Pro |
Adobe Lightroom Adobe Photoshop CS4 Topaz Photomatix |
There are a lot of great Apps on the Macintosh. Listing them all would fill this page up quick. Instead, I’d share with you the ones I use often.
- AppZapper — absolutely priceless app for zapping your apps and keeping your mac clean. When you install apps on your mac it write files on different parts of the hard drive to make the app work seamlessly. When deleting apps the normal way there associated files are left orphaned. AppZapp finds all relevant links and cleans them up should you uninstall using AppZapp
For regular update of Mac software, try these. or if you are looking for an app but cant remember the name. This is the one for you.
- Mac Update — very cluttered site but gives a daily update of apps with user comments and ratings. Useful if you are trying something new
- Pure-Mac — simple but doesn’t show ratings or user feedback.
I couldn’t have been happier when Nancy (lovingly Nan) called to tell me that she joined the Follette International Library Resources. It was a long sequel of events that led her to meet Chuck Follett, at Follett International in McHenry, Illnois. Nan’s primary reason to get in touch with Chuck was to see if some help be available from Follett Library for her Rotary International project in Dhanbad, India. Nan is also the president of Maysville Rotary, in North Carolina, USA. Subsequent weeks that followed led to an exciting trip to Chicago to get inducted to the Follette resources and the workings of the group. Even though she has put up an entry about her jottings of the Follettes and pics on her flickr I thought this needed a worthy mention. Educating the future, gratis, without seeking any in return is a very noble and worthy call and seen far and few between in this day and age. In fact its reaching out beyond ones social scene and cultural peripheries — that in itself is a call very few can answer. Well done Nan! Very proud of you!
Perhaps a better place to hold this tutorial would be my Graphics blog. But that has been out of date mainly due to lack of sufficient free time. Although I have been in the process of rejuvinating it gradually.
For some of you who are more concerned than the rest about putting your images up on the web you might like to try your hand at putting in your signature, trademark or copyright on your images. There are MANY ways of doing this little excercise. There are many software that do it, they all have their own approach.
I’m so excited with my new toys 
(: I have long been planning to buy my 20GB iPod but it just didn’t happen until last Wedensday. It is one fine piece of music player in fact it is the best in the market. Nothing beats it to-date. The other reason why I was so happy was also because it was my first ever buy in the mac line of things. I do have a lot of respect for anything Apple. Apples are luscious — remember Eve! Yes they are expensive, there are fewer software available. Their products are aesthetically superior, software are robust, design and product architecture is top of the range. My next major computer buy probably will be a mac. Bit fed up and tired of Windows constant catching up on security patches, even Longhorne doesn’t do it for me!
UPDATE: Yojimbo widescreen view hack from HicksDesign. This will help the 2 column Yojimbo app to work in 3 columns which in my opinion is a tad more user-friendly if you have a wide screen.
BareBones has done it again!! Another great app with yet another daggy icon. Egh! You’d need 3 shots of tequila to look at it for more than half a second! So RED! So Ninja! (I don’t dislike Ninjas ) but so ‘not’ macish! Was the iconist working in dim light in an underground garage, with pirated software and more specifically designing on a Windows machine? C’mon Barebones!! Hire some good icon makers!!!!
I am getting ready for a big move in a matter of few days to a week or two… I would be switching platforms. Mac OS here I come. After long discernment and weighing out my options I have made this decision and am really looking forward to this move. Perhaps the only thing that is taking time is the purchase. Wish they were cheaper! My eyes are more or less fixed on the Powerbook 17″/1.5Gz with 128MB Graphic Memory and 5400 rpm ultra ATA drive. To start with I would only have the 512MB RAM but will max it out in a few weeks hopefully.
Things you should be aware of before buying prints of digital photos online
Can you tell if the resolution of photo prints are going to be as good as the online galleries you view?
Well, the simple answer is no. There are very few guidelines, little documentation and digital photography is just not upto speed, yet! This is where knowledge of digital darkroom techniques and photo tools(software and hardware) used play a humungous role. Before you buy photos online inquire if:
TeamSite is a CMS produced by Interwoven Inc. And an approximate listing says about 1000 clients across the globe use it for pushing content both within the local Intranets and different extranets worldwide. Most sites that talk about Content Management process and architecture like CMSwatch.com, www.cmsmatrix.org and Oscom hold TeamSite in high esteem. But I have always been skeptic about it because I haven’t seen a single site deliver clean, valid code! As a website developer, designer and website consultant I am very pedantic about valid, clean and semantically correct code. But my view about TeamSite changed since David, Ruth and I started working on building a Template for a website.
Youth Ambassador, Ruth Gould, a great friend and colleague has just returned after successful completion of her nine month long development program in Cambodia. Ruth was working at the Women’s Media Centre(WMC) and helping women expand their computer skills, creating Video, Radio databases and Web Site development with in-house software updates. She spend a few years of her childhood in PNG (Papau New Guinea) where she grew up following which her family moved to Australia. She spent a good amount of time backpacking through Europe following her Bachelor of Art Hons from the University of Sydney. The adjoining picture is of Ruth and Hean climbing 100+ steps to temples at Phnom Chisor, Takeo Province.
Do you like taking photos? Do you have a Yahoo account? If the answer to the above are ‘yes‘ chances are you also have a Flickr account and post photos there. Yahoo lets you sign on to Flickr using your yahoo ID. My main weakness to Flickr is that there are lots of enthusiast photographers posting photos and discussions to better their skills and knowledge. Looking at other peoples photos often gives me a perspective into the photographers world of image composition, layout and execution of the process. Its very addictive and informative and caught unaware you can spend hours even before you know it. And this quest surely corroborates to heighten the photographic eye.
UPDATE: Google chrome is now available for download. The Speed and functionality on the beta software is noteworthy. Still working out the beta browser before I write more. It looks promising.
Canon EOS 50D
2 items hot off the press — well actually one of these is no longer hot as I let this sit in my draft way too long. Canon has indeed released its EOS 50D last month. and is already making some news. This would be one fantastic upgrade… for previous Canon DSLR users. There is a huge jump in the image resolution to 15.1 megapixels and a maximum burst for 90JPGs, ISO expandable to 12800, Face detection technology! I was a bit surprise to see that the 50D didn’t come with a 1:1 CMOS conversion. Would have been nice but good still.
I have been an Adobe Lightroom fan since the early days and having dabbled in it a bit I could tell the power this piece of software had over others in the market — Capture One, iPhoto, iView MediaPro and so on. Still remember buying the first version before I headed to Perth for a holiday last year and then came version 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 all with progressive changes until beta 2 landed on the threshold with some very promising additions. Since using beta 2 of the program I have found it IMPOSSIBLE to go back to Lighroom version 1.x so I literally stuck with it right until yesterday when Lightroom version 2 was released! I was quick to buy the upgrade after a quick look at Matt and Scott’s review and my own experience of working through Lightroom beta 2.
WordPress already is a world class product. In fact free and the best personal CMS solution to date, but like any other software a few tweaks and add-ons go a long way in making your page/site effective.
I’ll be listing a set of links on this page for your consideration soon. Here are a few to start with…
- Optimise Page Titles, URL Structure, Meta descriptions and more. Very effective writeup.
- List of Ping Services — let others know you’re posting.
- Verify your site with Google, and notify Google. You need a google account(free) to use their services.
- Feedburner Feed Replacement — is another must have plugin for WordPress. while WP’s own RSS out of the box kinda works, FeedBurner makes sure you deliver content to your RSSed subscribers and even get statistics to that end. Some features require $$ but a free account with Feed Burner will give you a lot. Another reason why!
- Create a Sitemap (there are numerous ways of doing this, here is my write-up). You can use WordPress Sitemap generator plugin.
- If you’re not happy with the theme you currently have you can always build your own or chose from a wide range of readily available ones. Or more at OS Skins, simple minimalist themes, Planet WordPress… and very recently added WP Theme generator if you like sinking your teeth into a bit of web design.
- Add meta description to your post automatically through Head META Descriptor plugin from guff. Increases Search engine visibility if your first few lines have good keywords.
- Search_Hilite plugin search results can be highlighted for easy readability.
- Priceless WordPress Guides by Pods
- A lot of words, a lot of text, not very well presented but has links to some good SEO related tools for WordPress
- Role Manager is particularly useful whenthere is more than one author and different levels of permissions needs to be implemented.
- Crawl Test at SEOMoz — this is currently available to premium members only but due to launch in April 2007. This tool helps quickly diagnose search engine crawling issues like areas that have potential issues such as if there are a numerous pages with the same title tag (keyword cannibalization?), bad HTTP response codes such as 404 or 500, or a high number of pages that aren’t being spidered by the search engines. If you’re curious to find out how the results look, here is a sample that was run for http://web2.0awards.org.
The listing below is in no particular order. There is a 180+ Free Presets Collection discussion thread on Flickr and ProPhotoshow freel list you might find handy. Enjoy the preset fever!
| Presets | Description | Pricing |
|---|---|---|
| Pixel Fairy Princess Photography | Lightroom Presets from Pixel Fairy Princess Photography. Some very good Coffee tones there. | Commercial |
| Punch the sky | 4 punch graduated filter preset from Beardsworth | Free |
| Spot Light Preset | Joop Snijder has more presets listed here | Free |
| Grainy B&W | Automagisk blog Grainy B&W has amazing potential, I really like the film grain it produces. | Free |
| Basic and 2 Colour Flickr Group |
Mark Elkins Photography | Free & Commercial |
| Matt Kloskowski’s Presets | Lots of good tips to be had on his Lightroom Killer Tips Blog too provided you have the time. | Free |
| Hardrocker | A Lightroom preset for a harder look | Free |
| Giovanni Antico | Giovanni Antico’s B/W presets | Free |
| OnOne Software | 85 gorgeous presets to simplify and speed up your Lightroom based workflow. Designed by the Photoshop Guru Jack Davis. Unfortunately you have to register and tell your whole life history to download these presets. Sucks! But worth the pain. | Free — needs registration |
| Albert de Bruijn’s Free Presets | These are divided into 2 major categories: the creative and normal ones | Free |
| Preset Heaven | Some good presets there & a nice blog by Pierre | Free |
| Splittone & Green n White | Home Baked. My very own |
Free |
| Rachel Devine | ||
| Lightroom Preset ver 0.1 | The Moment of Light | Free |
| KRK Photography | Free | |
| ProPhotoshow | Seim Black and White Effects and Power Workflow Lightroom Presets | |
| Sharpen like the Rawshooter Default | ||
| Heather Green Presets | A whole collection of Presets including her own | |
| Stellar presets | Dustin Stellar wonderful presets | Commercial |
| TB Preset | Travis Ballard Photography entails: Blurpy, Blurpy Dark, Big Softie BW, Blondie, Toosa, Golden Toosa, Golden Toosa – Vignette, Puntrasty, White Wash, Figment |
Commercial |
| Graduated Filter | Sean McCormack’s Gradualted Filters | Commercial |
| The 300 Look | Mike Lao Photography — The 300 Look presets by Mike Lao. Here are some examples on Flickr. | Free |
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet. CSS is a standard for specifying the appearance of text and other elements on web pages.
CSS Showcases Sites
- CSS Cream
- CSS Heaven
- Web Creme
- CSS Remix
- CSS Elite
- CSS Mania
- CSS Tux
- Screenalicious
- CSS Design Yorkshire
- CSS Vault
- CSS Reboot
- CSS Showcase
- CSS Container
General CSS finesse and trickeries
- Creating Stylish Web 2.0 CSS driven menus, try these:
Five web 2.0 CSS menu tutorials, Navigation Menus: Trends and Examples and Russ Weakley’s Listamatic - Markup Maker — takes a simple list of page ids entered and converts it to a valid XHTML document. It also creates the shell of the CSS.
- CSS Optimizer — web tool for reducing the file size of cascading style sheets.
- Time Sensitive CSS using PHP — serving dynamic, time sensitive CSS with PHP
- Position is everything — Big John and Holly Bergevin explain some obtuse CSS bugs in modern browsers
- Listamatic, Selectutorials, Floatutorials & Listutorials — Russ Weakley’s obsession with lists and presentations
- Mid passs Filter — sending styles to IE5* Win only
- How to attach an IE/Win Bug
- IE5/Mac Band Pass Filter — sending styles to IE5 Mac only
- IE5 Mac oddities — miscellaneous bugs in IE5 and how to fix ‘em
- FOUC — Flash of Unstyled Content
- The CSS and XHTML Lab (RSS) — from Roger Johansson at 456 berea Street
- Eric Meyer’s CSS Edge
- Western Civilisation – CSS guidelines
- Your HTML source > Stylesheets
- The Layout Reservoir
- The noodle incident — Problem & Workaround Set for a series of CSS Boxes going from a simple single box, through 3 columns with a full width top box, all with variations
- Agitprop
- Mako 4 CSS — The CSShark Answers FAQs and CSS Tutorial
- CSS Homepage of W3C — World Wide Web’s CSS starting point and current status
CSS Optimisers
A worthy read if you plan to use the following to optimise your CSS
- Clean CSS — CSS Formatter and Optimiser
- Icey’s CSS Compressor
- Flumpcakes CSS Optimiser
- CSS Optimizer
Cascading Style Sheets for PDA’s (Handheld Devices)
CSS Editors
There are many CSS editors out there… I have used a few over the years and the one that has been my favourite so far above all is CSS Edit. Extremely fast, luscious graphic interface, easy to use. Of-course there is no substitute to handcoding but its not always handy if you are looking to pick up colours etc…
- CSS Edit | news — I prefer this as its really lightweight and extremely fast. My everyday app! (Mac)
- Style Master — software| XRay any page | courses | Blog (RSS) (Mac/Win) — great tool, loads of tutorials, great links.
- Top Style — only when I’m on Windows. (Win)
I have got a little surprise for you all wonderful people. John Allsopp, Maxine Sherrin and I have been talking a bit about Style Master 4 lately. Especially John as I bug him a fair bit with minor changes and CSS nags(ask him 
. I have been looking forward to the Style Master 4 upgrade and am so excited its here. I would very strongly recommend you go buy a copy if you don’t have one or atleasy try out the demo. Here are a few questions I decided to ask John and I hope you will enjoy reading them as much as I did.
UPDATE: 31st July 2008: Lightroom 2.0 was released worldwide on 29th July 2008. Remarkable improvements. Really love the new version. However, Adobe is selling the donwloadable upgrade version of the program by jacking up its pricing for international users. Really unfair to Lightroom users outside USA. The Australian price for the upgrade should be around AU$ 106.00 but Adobe is charging users AU$165.00. More here and here. Make sure you make your voice heard.
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