‘Design Thoughts’ : rjslade

Last day of May – don’t let anyone say there is nothing to do in retirement – I seem to race from one thing to another and this blog somehow works its way to the bottom of the heap.

I used to try out a lot of applications, over the last 25 years things have evolved a lot and I always kept abreast of what was happening – If I was going specialise in the use of computers to solve design issues, and educate others in that, as well as carry on a design practice, I felt I should be aware of what was developing. I used to beta test software for a number of companies, and any time a program appeared that solved a particular problem in a elegant way – or could do so, I supported the developer with my dollars. My motto was if I could recoup the software expense on one clients project – the software had merit… I also made it a matter of honour to NEVER use software in my work that was not paid for.

Here a nice clip of the Visual History of iTunes

and here on www.thoughtdifferent.com a visual history of Apples homepages since 1997

Recently Jack Nack , a product manage for Adobe who has an excellent web blog had a particular article entitled Meet Adobe Illustrator (1987) that included this video of the then new Illustrator Version 1.o – the first Adobe product I ever owned.

I found a wonderful set of applications by http://www.ironicsoftware.com/

If you are a visual person who thinks a desktop or a single folder is a repository of all your files, these products are for you. They are search tools that visually order a variety of file types, visually, and provide you the tools to hunt for them. I have tried them all, even all at once, but the load on my iMac was a bit much – Maybe they would be better as a series of additive plugins rather than individual applications.

Below the Leap Interface which brings the Apple Leopard QuickLook to a unified window for easier search

Deep does something similar but only for image files, adding some image specific criteria to the search data – size, colour and tags

My personal favourite was Yep . While specific to pdf files, what it adds is astounding. As you probably know, your print dialogue allows you to save any item that you can see and print as a pdf. That pdf is a cross platform file and if you have the Acrobat application can be modified in some very interesting ways.I addition to the normal ability to add tags, view the file info, see the Quicklook preview, the files can be internally scanned and create a wordcloud, visible to the left of the screenshot below.

The fourth application , Fresh will help those that forget to look where they are saving files to and I gather from the web site there are now some free item – I must note that all the applications are available as fully working downloads

Like the trio of programs above, the second company I would like to mention is js8media.com I have been using the program ReelBean for clip viewing and conversion. The other program of choice for me was/is VisualHub but that program is no longer supported.

They have two other video related programs, ReelNQ, a batch video converter and MovieChapterizer for adding chapters to quicktime movies using quicktime player.

The other two applications they have, that I think are of interest, are AudioReferb and AudioLobe . With these two programs one can modify audio soundtracks, adjusting speed, pitch and adding effects

This company have a few other products but the three I have provided screenshots of, are in my estimation, worth a look if you deal with video formats or audio files. Like the applications of IronicSoftware above, JS8Media market elegant looking applications that fill specific use niches and do so at a reasonable cost.

If you do any screen documentation, you might find you money well spent on Layers .

I quote from their website:

Layers: Screen forensics

Capture your displays as a Photoshop layered image

Don’t waste time capturing each window separately, importing them in your favorite PSD editor, naming the layers, positioning the images, etc.

Do it with Layers in no time! Press the capture hotkey or customize your capture in the inspector. You’ll obtain a full fledged PSD file with one layer per window, including menu and desktop icons, dock and menubar.

This screen shot below sums it up – the output is a layered Photoshop file!

And now for a few less expensive applications that I thought were interesting.

Poladroid , not to be confused with Polaroid , which is easily done! This little application sits on you desktop as shown below, and will spit out up to 10 slowly developing images, cropped and bordered like the instant prints of yore! Why only 10 you ask – that was how much film was in the cartridge! so below the application interface and the output.

It is probably not too obvious by there is a texture to the creme coloured surround area of the finished print, a a fingerprint – nice little touches bringing back some old memories. Some you who will have read my previous posting will have seen some more pristine Polaroid look images before

Continuing with the idea of less money spent, we have JetPhoto Studio . from their website:

JetPhoto Studio is a feature-rich and easy-to-use digital photo software. With just a few clicks, JetPhoto Studio can turn your digital photos into beautiful Flash galleries with a professional look. JetPhoto Studio also makes fantastic web galleries quickly and easily.

25$US Pro version

• No JetPhoto promotion text is on the generated Flash movies or web galleries.
• More customization options to generate Flash gallery (size, color, label etc.).
• No limitation to generate Lightbox web galleries.
• No limitation to locate photos with GPS and generate Google Map gallery, KML, KMZ files.
• An EXIF tool that allows to merge Notes, Keywords and GPS metadata into JPEG files.
• Importing camera raw files into albums.

JetPhoto Server (Pro version 38$US)

JetPhoto Server is a full-featured digital photo publishing service software using PHP. You can establish a photo gallery website quickly and easily. JetPhoto server allows customizing templates for web albums, and presents your photos in thumbnails, picture story or Flash-based slideshow.

This software offers a great feature set for free and the ability to extend it if you want, for some payment. A similar product also free that I use often is JAlbum . Give it a look at well. In this case if you like the program and use it, they will very happily take a donation. With the 15-30 day demo’s, donation ware and partially featured, non pro versions of these applications you can try and use before you decide to support and buy. Please do support to programmers – they do need to eat!

AlternativeTo an interesting site. Need an alternative to Adobe PhotoShop that you can afford? From their website:

Find better Windows, Mac, Linux and online applications. AlternativeTo is a new approach to finding good software. Tell us what application you want to replace and we give you suggestions on great alternatives! Instead of listing thousands of more or less crappy applications in a category, we make each application into a category. Think of it like forever evolving blog posts about good alternatives to the software that you’re not satisfied with. And the “blog posts” are generated by you through suggestions, comments and votes.

Well that completes this entry. I will close off with a graphic from core77 , one of the many site I view daily. It is of coffee, something you will probably have needed to stay awake through all of this. I have a lot more to post but will wait till another day

all for now – R