Photoshop is probably one of the most well known software for the computer. Almost everyone knows what’s it for. Heck, even my grandma has a retouched picture of herself hanging on her walls. She would tell you that the picture was taken 30 years ago. Obviously nobody believed her! ;)
Adobe just launched a free web service called Photoshop Express. It gives you 2GB of free photo storage so you could store all your favorite Yua Aida pictures. Of course, that’s not what made Photoshop Express special, rather it is a web app that allows you to store and do simple edits to your photos. Tasks such as cropping only require a few clicks. If you frequently crop your pictures for your Facebook profile, then Photoshop Express is your best friend. Sure, you can probably do the same task with MS Paint, but Photoshop Express has integration with Facebook, PhotoBucket and Picasa. This means that you can edit your stored photos in any of those mentioned web services right from Photoshop Express!
Here you can see cropping and rotate feature in action. It’s really simple.
Photoshop Express may not be for the expert users, but if you’re someone like me who needs to crop or touch up images every now and then, Photoshop Express is the perfect tool.
However, one thing I didn’t like about Photoshop Express was it didn’t accept PNG files. I mean, come on, how hard is it to support PNG files?
If you wanna try out Photoshop Express, click here.
P/S: Sorry about the poor quality screenshots, looks like I’ll never use Resize ‘Em All again.
Yesterday I received an email from Evernote saying that I was invited to beta test their app. Evernote is an app for both Windows and Mac platforms that allows you to keep both text and image notes in Evernote’s servers. You can then refer back to them when needed.
What attracted me about Evernote was not that it allows you to keep your love letters from your ex-lovers. It was the text in image recognition technology. Initially, I thought that this tech is built into their app. However, after using the app itself I was slightly disappointed because the text in image recognition is actually done server-side, meaning all those tech stuff is actually being done on Evernote’s servers and not right on their app.
How it works is every few minutes your app synchronizes with Evernote’s servers uploading changes (such as additions of new notes). It takes a while before those text in image recognition process is done on your newly uploaded pictures. I’m guessing every few minutes the servers undergoes the process of “tagging” all the newly uploaded images by users. So it’s actually a matter of luck how long it takes for your images to get synced.
However, I don’t think the “few minutes delay” thing matters because the use of this technology is to allow you to search images that contain words that you remember. Unless your memory span is less than a few minutes, then you shouldn’t be worry about this.
This is how Evernote’s Mac app look like.
To test out how Evernote recognizes text in images, I used the “New Snapshot Note” feature and took a quick webcam shot thru my built-in iSight. I took a picture holding up Uncle Toby’s “what I eat for breakfast when I’m running late for classes”.
Right here you can see that it recognizes the word “Apricot” very well and highlights the word Safari-style. Other words that worked was “Uncle”, “Yoghurt” and the first few numbers of best before date. Anything smaller than the word “Apricot” was not recognized. Fair enough, those words are too blurry anyway.
Next, I took a picture of my book shelf with my digital camera and made sure the picture wasn’t too blurry.
As you can see, the smaller words such as “Socks” could be recognized.
Here, you can see that even vertical words can be recognized! This holds true for most of the words that appear on this picture except for those that are half-shadowed.
Just for fun, I typed in all alphabets a to z in the search box to yield all alphabetical results. Here you can see what words were picked up by Evernote’s text in image recognition system. It’s not too bad for a consumer-based product!
Of course, this is just one of Evernote’s many cool features. If you’re interested to know more, head on to www.evernote.com!
If you’ve read my previous posts, you would know that every MacBook comes equipped with a motion sensor. The primary purpose of this sensor is to quickly stop your hard disk from operating when it detects that your laptop is falling. This is done to minimise the damage of the hard disk.
Technical stuff aside, the motion sensor also brought a new breed of apps. These apps utilise the motion sensor to give various feedback.
Got another friend with a MacBook? Then try playing MacSaber!
Imagine you’re Luke Skywalker, and your friend, Han Solo stole your TV Remote and you would like a revenge.
MacSaber simulates your MacBook as a lightsaber by playing lightsaber swing sounds as you swing your MacBook. How cool is that!
Another cool app is LiquidMac. This app basically simulates liquid orientation, so if you tilt your MacBook to the left, the liquid will flow to the left and vice versa.
Lastly, this fun app is a dream come true for Pong fanatics.
Enter Wally Bally, the brainchild of a very talented designer Julius Eckert. Wally Bally is a game that allows you to bounce a ball to the left or right, and the rule of the game is to only bounce the ball when the wall turns green. If you bounce the ball on a red wall, it’s game over!
Lately, I’ve been writing mostly tips for Mac users. So, I thought it would be nice for me to show some love to the Windows users. After all, they’re the majority.
I will showcase two apps that I’ve used for years that help me keep my Windows machine speedy.
Introducing CCleaner, a.k.a Crap Cleaner. If you’ve never run any rubbish files/cache cleaner, you have no idea how much space they occupy until you see the screenshot below.
A staggering 2,358.6MB worth of files has been removed. That’s enough for three dvdrip’s from the pirate bay, fellas.
Although there are probably better registry cleaners out there such as RegSupreme, CCleaner comes equipped with a rather modest cleaner, but it’s enough to keep your computer running well.
CCleaner is available as a free download from CCleaner.com
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Next app is Diskeeper 2008. I’ve been using Diskeeper for years. From the days of Windows 2000 till now. I sworn by Diskeeper for hard drive defragmentation.
For those of you who do not know what defragmenting does: it’s basically a process that moves data around in your hard disk in a collective manner. It’s like categorizing all the books in the library so that people can find what they want. This is basically what it does, it speeds up the process of finding data.
This app is responsible for allowing me to switch between two of my level 70 WoW characters in just 5 seconds. ;)
So, what makes Diskeeper so special? When it first started back in Win2k days, it was just another defragmenting tool – but with better technology.
Diskeeper has a small service that runs in the background, collecting info such as what games do you play all the time and which is your favourite porn. When you start defragmenting your hard drives, it will move those games and porn to the front of your hard disk so it allows your computer to fetch those data quicker the next time you launch them again.
Now, it’s even better. It defragments your hard drive while you use your pc! That’s pretty much what Mac OS X does nowadays, and that’s why Mac’s don’t really need maintenance.
As shown in the screenshot below, it’s defragmenting my hard drive automatically while my computer is idle (meaning I’m not doing anything intensive that requires my computer to throttle at full horse power.)
They call this technology InvisiTasking.
It’s amazing. I don’t need to defragment it manually anymore. It defrags while I’m surfing the web or chatting with friends.
Diskeeper is available from Diskeeper.com in several editions – Home, Professional and Pro Premier at $29.95, $49.95 and $99.95 respectively.
Every MacBook comes with a technology that dims your display when it thinks you’re not around anymore – to save power. However, ever find it annoying when the screens dims on you when you’re watching your favourite cam whore video on youtube? You had to move the mouse once in a while to keep the screen fully lit. The guy next to you probably thought you were a mouse fettish.
Fret no more, enter Caffeine. No, it won’t order Starbucks for you so you could stay awake for more cam whore videos. This little app stays in your menubar with a coffee icon, clicking on it will switch it between two modes. When the icon shows an empty cup, your MacBook will act normally as described above. When the icon shows a cup filled with coffee, your MacBook suddenly feel the need to stay awake. Not that it needs to burn the midnight oil to install huge software updates, but rather it needed to stay awake to give you the pleasure of enjoying cam whore videos on youtube without getting a wrist injury.
P/S: This app also prevents your laptop from going to sleep, or screensaver mode. Pretty handy for presentations too I guess.
Next, this trick is pretty much an internal blog post I did when I first started writing. This trick allows you to display text messages on your Login Window so that if your laptop ever gets lost, some good samaritan should be able to find out who the laptop belongs to with the info written on the Login Window when he tries booting it up.
Next up, ever wonder why on earth is your MacBook Pro so hot? If you’re using the first generation MBP like me, chances are the heat from your laptop got you fantasizing if you could cook bacon and eggs on it. Make sure you don’t put your MBP on your lap for more than 5 minutes unless you’re not planning on having babies in the future.
A good solution to this issue would be to get a laptop cooler, or… you could crank up the fan speed inside your MacBook.
Enter smcFanControl 2, this app allows you to set your minimum fan speed from 1000 rpm up to 6000rpm. Personally, I set mine to 2500rpm when the weather is cool but most of the time I find myself cranking up the speed to 4500rpm especially when my MBP gets into heavy usage.
smcFanControl 2.1 can be downloaded from the following link:
Next, this app will turn your MacBook into a BMW. Ok, you must be wondering, what the heck am I talking bout?
Enter iAlertU, this app allows you to make use of your (LOL $19) Apple Remote as a…… CAR REMOTE!!?!?!?!
Technically, when this app is run and you hold your Menu button on your Apple Remote, your MacBook will get locked (with some PEWP BMW sound in action). When your MacBook gets moved (as detected by motion detector), it will go….
PEEWEWEWEWEWEWEWEW@#@@$!@$#$#
Ok, I’m bad at sound-to-text translation – but you know what I’m talking bout. Not only it pumps out a loud noise, you can even set it to send an e-mail with a picture taken with your iSight cam. Pretty cool eh?
Hold your menu button again and your laptop will go.. PEWP PEWP! Just like a BMW!
I haven’t used much of this app but I think it could be useful for some people. The only time I used this app was for showing off purposes ;)
This final app will be an app that you WILL love. Ever wonder if you could speed up the sleep and wake process of your MacBook? Look no further, SmartSleep is here to save the day.
To briefly explain the need for such an app is:
Ever since Apple implemented the hibernate feature onto their laptops to allow people to swap batteries while their laptop is asleep, laptops now take ages to go into sleep mode because it copies all your RAM contents into your hard disk so that everything stays in tact just as it is before you let your MacBook go to sleep and you swap out the battery for another one.
After installing SmartSleep, my laptop sleeps in THREE f**king seconds! Amazing. Before I used SmartSleep, my laptop would take the same amount of time I went to pee and return.
Also, what makes SmartSleep so special is that it helps you to switch back to hibernate mode automatically when your battery level reaches a certain treshold that you’ve set. If you don’t need that, you can even set it to plain sleep mode.
