Adobe Joins the Web App Battle With Photoshop Express

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.

Evernote First Impressions: Text in Image Recognition for the Masses

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!

P/S: Evernote is currently invitation-only beta.

MagStay PRO: One Dumb Invention

So apparently some people didn’t like the magnetic power connectors (MagSafe) on MacBook’s.

Then, some “geniuses” came to the rescue:

More Info: http://thoughtout.biz/MagStayPRO

Not only it effectively removes one USB port from your MacBook, it shall put your MacBook to a toughness test when someone trips over the power cable.

What an “awesome” product, well thought out indeed (the company calls themselves THOUGHT OUT Company, LOL!).

Long story short, if you still could not detect the sarcasm of this post, just stay away from products like this. May the magnetic force be with you.

IE8 Beta Comes With RSS on Steroids, Among Many Other New Features

So I’ve been playing around a bit with IE8 Beta 1 since yesterday. I’m not much of an IE fan but being a curious cat got me to install it. Part of the installation requires scanning your pc for malicious software, no idea how effective was that because it was quicker than a commercial break.

IE8 came with many new features, but only ‘Activities’ managed to impress me. As seen on the screenshot below, I was able to translate my blog from English to Chinese with just a click of a button (ok, maybe not one click but two). There are many other languages available for translation as well such as Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Korean and who knows maybe in the future they’ll add translations for Klingon as well.

IE8 also came with what’s called WebSlices, from what I gather this is just RSS with more advanced features. It allows webmasters to put content such as Video as a ‘WebSlice’. This is nothing new actually, IE8 only made it easier with a one-click-view-all interface. Haven’t really tested this feature BECAUSE…. There wasn’t really any site that came with WebSlices. Maybe they should have just mimic’d Mac’s Web Widget feature, that requires no implementation on the website’s end.

Also, the zoom feature in IE8 is improved just like the ones in Firefox 3, allowing both Image and Text to be scaled. However, it is way too buggy and laggy for usage. As seen below is how the website Digg f**ks up when I zoom it up. Even though the zoom actually worked on sites such as this one, the zoom process is not smooth yet as it felt like playing quake at 3 fps.

IE8 also crashed on me when I attempt to hover links on my site to bring up the SNAP window.

So, is IE8 poised to defeat the upcoming Firefox 3? Probably not. Much work has to be done before that can happen, we won’t be seeing an IE8 fan base anytime soon. In the meantime, keep wagging your foxy tail.

If you’re interested in trying out IE8 beta yourself, head on to:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/readiness/Install.htm

And The Best BitTorrent App Goes To…

None other than… uTorrent.

Some say a picture is worth a thousand words.

This one is worth a thousand and five.

And the best ISP in Australia (and possibly, the world) goes to Internode. :)