I know you’re going to anyway [especially after I've given you so many yummy drink recipes] but be careful.

Please?

Image|Dano

Post from: EveryJoe

Why You Shouldn’t Drink and Play with Fire

My Top Graphic Program Icons

• Macromedia Fireworks MX 2004:
  Granted Macromedia was purchased by Adobe at the end of 2005, this was the last version of the software I purchased before Macromedia and Adobe joined forces. I use it for any major graphic design work that requires some special effects, or layering of images. I’m not the highly skilled professional, but this program does more than I’m even coming close to maximizing what can be done.
• Snagit from Techsmith:
  Snagit has become a core application in my toolbox of development work. It’s so much more than just a screen capture utility. It helps me grab images for mock-up work, practicing with edits as well as documenting the work and efforts I’m taking for my clients.
• Irfanview:
  This is a free tool that has also become a worthy addition to the list of applications that have been added to the short list of must-install software on a new computer or a rebuild.
• Paint.NET:
  Another free tool that I think starts to really expand the features and functionality of what can be expected to be found in a free application.
• Picasa3:
  Although I wouldn’t really classify it as an image editing program, it does have some features that a beginner user would find helpful. However, I include it in my list because of it’s image management and library functionality.

I haven’t gone into detail about the features and functionality of each program, I’ve just listed them here as a heads-up for some applications you may want to read more about yourself if you’re not familiar with them already.

If you already use these programs or are just starting, let me know what you think about each of them in the comments.

Post from: EveryJoe

My Favorite Graphics Programs

I was reminded today of a real annoyance of mine when I’m trying to work with Outlook. Somewhat frequently in my week I receive an e-mail with a graphic or image in it that I need to do some editing. It’s not really any serious editing that needs to be done, just a notation or illustration to help a client or something.

Here’s where the challenge presents itself.

The images are usually embedded in the HTML message and aren’t seen as an attachment. If if right-click on the image I get a nice context menu as shown above in the illustration and choose the option for “Copy” to copy the image to my clipboard. The problem is that I can’t go open my graphics editing program of choice. Usually that would be either IrfanView, Macromedia Fireworks or SnagIt 9.

Depending on the task at hand, the graphics program will change. The problem is that I can’t go into IrfanView or Fireworks and just paste the image from the clipboard and start editing. There’s always an error. What’s the deal? The only exception is SnagIt. If I open the SnagIt Editor application I can paste directly into it.

All the advice I’ve received is to just open a Word document or PowerPoint document and paste it into that program, which will work from the clipboard. THEN! If I right-click on the graphic again in one of those programs I can then paste the graphic in the original graphics program and do what I need to do. How annoying is that!

What is Outlook saving the image file information as for the clipboard? Why can’t my graphics programs access it?

Post from: EveryJoe

Copying Images Out of Outlook

Former Adobe Photoshop developer Mark Hamburg has been hired at Microsoft and will be spending his time working on a new Microsoft product “SmartFlow“.

Mary Jo Foley reports that SmartFlow is a new graphics program that, with this recent hire, seems to be going after the higher-end photo editing crowd that focuses on what Adobe is doing in graphics.

Graphics and image manipulation is actually one of the largest areas that I’ve consistently not used Microsoft products. You might as well uninstall Paint and Draw from my machine because I will always download and install a collection of graphics programs now that I use exclusively.

My personal choices depending on my needs include IrfanView, Fireworks MX 2004 (back when it was still developed by Macromedia), and now SnagIt. For photo organization and manipulation I’ll use Picasa2 as my preferred source.

Is Microsoft Developing Any Useful Graphics / Image Software?

Because of this I haven’t really paid much attention at all to what Microsoft has done in that area of development. Are they doing anything interesting really?

On a side note, one thing that really irritates me is that you can’t easily change the image editing program specified in Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. That’s gotten really annoying to me in the past.

Post from: EveryJoe

Ex-Photoshop Developer Moves to Microsoft SmartFlow

I’ve been pounding away at a client application I’m developing and have been very happy using Dreamweaver 8 for everything I’m working on for the project. I’ve been using Macromedia Dreamweaver since version 2.0 and have always done the Dreamweaver / Fireworks together.

However, I’ve found that for this project I’m needing to display images in BLOB format from a SQL server database and I’ve been unsuccessful in finding a component or extension in Dreamweaver that allows me to do this easily. In my searching for potential solutions I came across ImageDraw from Neodynamics. The support from Neodynamics has been astounding too. I haven’t even purchased the product and their tech support, specifically Gabriel, has been amazing. He has helped me try to work with their product and integrate the capabilities into Dreamweaver.

This product seems to do exactly what we’re needing it to do and THEN SOME!, just not with Dreamweaver. So, I’m downloading and trying again. I don’t expect Visual Web Developer to replace my use of Dreamweaver 8, but it may pair up nicely for this project. If anyone has any application that integrates with Dreamweaver 8 and allows me to manage and develop applications and pull images from a database dynamically, then please let me know in the comments.

Post from: EveryJoe

Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition