What I like about Jing

I actually know someone with the name Jing kinda odd. Anyway, I’ve been searching for an easy to use screen capture tool for Windows for a while now. I’ve used a few over the years but none of them as easy as Jing. What is Jing you ask? From the Jing site: “The concept of Jing is the always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video…from your computer to anywhere”. You can read more in the FAQ. Anyway, I’m always helping people to do one thing or the other at work or trying to explain what is wrong with a program to send to tech support so I needed a program that could take a screenshot of my desktop and allow me to annotate quickly and send it to someone. Jing will allow me to do all this and more. What I like about Jing:

• Ease of use- a few mouse clicks and you can have a screenshot with annotations or video if you like
• Jing sits unobtrusively in the upper right hand corner of my screen, under the menu and out of the way
• Quick annotations- Jing includes a box, highlighter, text and an arrow for adding annotations to an image
• Jing runs on both the Mac & Windows platform so I can use it at home and at work
• Nice UI- the sun is cute and the buttons are large- would be cool if this could be skinned

Be sure to download your copy of choice and check out the Jing Blog. Nice thing is that you don’t have to sign up for a beta and wait to be invited to try it out.

MS Touchscreen laptop demo

I have to say that I’m quite intrigued about the products leaking out of Microsoft’s Live Labs of late. First I got a look at Surface that yet to be released $10,000 (not a typo) touch screen table computer aimed at the business market. Then I got a chance to see photosynth at the NYS geospatial summit now they are showing off a demo of a laptop with a multi-touch display. This was just a matter of time. Looking at all three products I can’t help but thinking that I’ve seen this stuff before. First off Surface looks a lot like a gigantic table iPhone (at least the interface). Even the way the album covers were shuffling around looked a lot like cover flow to me. The zooming being done both there and in the laptop demo also looked a lot like the iPhone zooming. Photosynth looks a lot like some of the stuff demoed in Core Animation and to some degree time machine. I know its different but that was what I thought about when I first saw it. I find it interesting also that Microsoft is releasing info on all these projects now before the iPhone releases. Its as if they said hey the iPhone is cool but look what we’ve been cooking up in our labs. I think the folks in Redmond is realizing that once the iPhone has been unleashed on the World there is no turning back… people will expect this type of interface on their computers too. I can definitely see Apple plowing right ahead and incorporating the same/similar multi-touch technology that’s in the iPhone now into their computer products. Perhaps the iPhone was just a test to see how the masses would react. New multi-touch laptop from Apple in the Fall perhaps? Hey maybe Microsoft will beat them to the punch

Some Microsoft & Apple love for us stuck in-between

Yesterday Microsoft released a patch to allow iPods to disconnect without getting corrupted. Apparently, some users were having corrupted iPod issues when they select the operating system’s (Vista) Safely Remove Hardware option to eject the music player. Well today, Apple released Boot Camp Public Beta 1.2 which supports the 32 bit version of Windows Vista. If you actually want Vista on your Intel Mac for playing games and testing those websites then head on over there and download it. Drats I don’t even have Vista on my PC at work thanks to Novell. I find it interesting though that the two companies are releasing updates for each others products especially with all this Mac vs. PC flaming going around these days. Nice to see they are getting along.

Just reading my newspaper

I ventured out in the cold today… Had to get a few food related items so I jumped in the car and drove in the sleet to stock up on a few good things. On my way back in the comfort of my pad, I noticed that my mailbox was full so I decided to pick up my mail. I came back in unpacked my groceries, cooked up a fine meal and sat down to eat all in that order. Since the paper was on the table I decided to see what was in there… I passed the usual coupons and noticed a Walmart catalog. Yes after holding out for so long we now have a Walmart in town. The Samsung 32″ HDTV for under $900 on the front did catch my eye… Then I turned the page and I saw some laptops “pre-loaded” with Vista Home Basic and some boxes of various Vista flavors on the bottom of the page. I think they had 4 different versions of home. I shook my head in utter annoyance as to why a company would sell 4 different versions of an operating system, tossed the paper aside and finished up. I think that the cartoon above says it all.

A Honest Review of Vista

Now that my work computer is back from the dead with a new motherboard and 1 more stick of RAM I’m as happy as a pea in a pod. The word Vista came out of my mouth a couple of times mainly because I’m running a theme on my desktop that mimics it a little and I was having a brief conversation with one of our IT staff about it. Making a joke about the problems that IT will have with the new widgets and other stuff like that. These things just don’t fit into our security/ bandwidth model. Anyway, I came across this pretty straightforward review of Vista which I thought was a pretty honest review. Being a mac user at home I was glad to see someone acknowledge that ” yes, many of Vista’s features are pilfered directly from Mac OS X, and in general Apple has shown itself to be far more efficient and innovative in the operating systems market …” I also got a kick out of this line “The fact that it took Microsoft over five years and $6 billion dollars to create Vista is — and I mean this quite seriously — an embarrassment to the good name of American innovation…” Anyway, give the article a read some goods points were made and well taken.

The above picture is of CompUSA employees checking out the new Vista display and is found here.

No Vista for Another 2 Months or So

I was all excited at the prospect of unleashing Windows Vista on my machine. The IT folks installed it on one test machine and I took a quick look at it. It seemed a whole lot more useful than WinXP to me already. I was honestly a bit excited despite the fact that I was thinking OS X rip off the whole time but I was glad to see the OS modernized since I’m forced to use it at work. Then I got the call… Sorry we can’t deploy Windows on any of the machines coz there is no Netware client for it yet. The IT person found this out after trying to register Vista and it would not pass through our proxy. Apparently, Novell has yet to release a Vista compatible client. I looked at Novell’s site and they are listed as a Microsoft business partner. I’m thinking why would a Microsoft business partner not have a client that many businesses rely on ready when the Business version of the partner’s OS is ready? This is so crappy. If one of the Apple business partners pulled this type of mess there would be some serious flaming going on all over the place. Anyway, I find the whole thing annoying but I guess I just have to sit back and wait until Novell get the client out.

Hard Drive Reformatting Time

I spent the better part of my afternoon today reformatting the hard drive of my PC at work. Although I haven’t reformatted a HD in a year or so since I don’t have a Windows PC at home anymore I was surprised at how much I remembered. It wasn’t as daunting as I thought it would be and everything worked like a charm. Its one of the easier reformats I’ve done mainly because the HP computers came with a restore CD that you stick in and it walks you through the process. The only thing that I didn’t like was that the utility only allow you 2 hard drive partition choices Fat 32 @32xxx or NTFS at 76xxx my HD was 80 GB and I wanted three smaller partitions. I created the three partitions and finished up the rest in the Windows XP environment. I made sure that I got that antivirus on there really quickly in fact I got some paranoid-about this I disabled my network card and forgot to enable it after I installed the Novell Client which meant that I couldn’t find any of my servers. I figured it out soon enough and now all seems to be well. Tomorrow I have to reinstall the rest of my software oh all the work… put in the CDs wait for Windows to fatten up my registry again. I am amazed at how much faster the system is without all those programs on it though…

In Search of a Windows version of Quicksilver

I use Quicksilver on my Mac like any other Mac user that knows about this gem. Want to find a website, file, folder, application , etc. just fire it up, type the first couple of words and you have a slew of choices to pick from. I wanted this really bad for my PC at work but didn’t have it. Then I fired up my favorite search engine and did a search and voila! I got a few choices. The first software similar to Quicksilver was Approcket. I didn’t actually get to download this one (it cost $1 and I don’t want to pay for this feature as helpful as it is. The second software I found was Colibri this one I did download. I tested it out and and like the interface. Its a bit more like Quicksilver in that it has what you searched for including an icon for the program, folder, etc. Next up was Launchy which I downloaded and tried out. The first issue I had was that I clicked on it and it seemed to disappear. Then I read the instructions which says you have to press the ALT SPACE to get the bar to popup. Its skinnable and fit in with my desktop quite well. Anyway, after pressing ALT SPACE I typed in my favorite program and it popped right up icon and all. It is really fast and you get a nice list of other possibilities. You can configure it to search specific folders o your computer. I was very impressed with it actually and it reminded me more of Quicksilver a bit more than Colibri did. make sure to check out the Tips and tricks section for what you can index including all your bookmarks. Quicksilver automatically index all this stuff but its also nice to be able to have some control over what is being indexed. I have to say that I’m pretty happy with Launchy and I’ve already made good use of it. Colibri and Launchy are both free.

Life Changing Software

As a follow up to a question asked by one of my favorite mac related blogs, I thought I would put my list of life changing software here. I came up with more than a few although most people had 5 or so. Here is my list in some particular order.

• Arcview got me interested in GIS as a profession (too bad ESRI stopped making the Mac version) I use the more robust version now for work.
• OS X- the reason I switched back to a Mac
• Acrobat- portable documents at its best
• Imagestyler/Livemotion- I’ve designed tons of banners and website graphics with these over the years

If anyone out there have a copy of Livemotion 2 for the Mac that they aren’t using let me know).

• Dreamweaver- allow me to design websites the way I like to (from scratch) and I love the workflow
• Firefox on the PC- my first tabbed based Browser and I found it faster and safer than IE 6 (on the PC)
• Safari- I’m using it right now need I say more?
• Object Dock- allows me to have a Dock on my PC similar to the OS X dock
• Thunderbird- I like this app a bit more than mail even the Junk mail filter is really good
• iTunes- I love it and hate it at the same time…
• iWeb- for a quick website it doesn’t get any easier than this… save me tons of time

Flocking

I’m away from my Mac this week and was getting annoyed with IE 6 mainly due to the lack of tabs so I decided to give Flock a try. I have to say that its really growing on me and I especially like the Blog this feature which is what I’m using right now. You just select a block of text or image that you want to blog about on the web and it pops it in a new blog page editing window graphics and all. You can style your text, add links and even check your spelling. Its fast becoming my new blogging tool, I actually find it a bit easier than Ecto. You can download flock and give it a try. It does a lot of other sun stuff that I haven’t had time to try yet. Will be adding this to my Mac to replace Firefox. BTW the ArcSDE training course is coming along. We are still going at a fast pace and I learned more than I thought was possible about Spatial Index, tracing and dbtune today… Useful stuff though and it was a beautiful day. The instructor allowed us to sit outside for a bit and get some sunnage a while. Nice Instructor!

Blogged with Flock