Frequently when talking to them about how to get started I begin talking about some other great tools that I use to organize your thoughts and create your posts and pages for your website. Most of these tools are free, or free with premium versions as well. All of them have been incredibly useful to me over the years (or months and days that I’ve been using them).

I’ve written about my use of programs like Evernote, Picasa, IrfanView, Windows Live Writer, Firefox and others on this site at some point or another.

I’m curious though, what other tools do you use regularly that you don’t think you could live without these days. If you’re not a blogger, don’t worry about it. Just let me know what programs you have installed on your machine that you use on a daily basis. Daily would be a good cut-off, perhaps at least every other day at the most.

Looking forward to hearing what you share and giving a few a try if I’m not already using them on my machine.

Image: sxc.hu

Post from: EveryJoe

The Tools of Blogging

Let’s talk about the size difference of these photos.

Reviewing Image Properties in Windows

In the example image above the attached photo would be almost 2.5MB for a single photo. I’m not sure what the limits are in most email programs or what the restrictions are by ISP’s, but this is a chunk of file weight to be flying around the Internet.

Take a moment and resize your images before sharing them with family and friends. You can use tools within Windows, or my preference for quick, dirty and FREE resizing is IrfanView. (I wrote recently about my Favorite Graphics Programs here.) There’s also a nice Windows PowerToy utility Image Resizer that also makes it very easy for casual computer users.

Let’s look at the difference that can be achieved with resizing and resampling a picture that’s better for appropriate sharing via e-mail.

Copyright 2009 - Jason Bean

The image above has been resized to 500 x 375 pixels dimensions and to 81.5kb in size. As you can see the quality is still good and anyone reviewing  the photos should be able to get the full enjoyment of the photo. On the other hand the original image is 3072 x 2074 pixels dimensions and the 2.41MB in size. That’s a reduction of more than 95% of the original size of the file, while still maintaining a high quality view of the image for your friends and family.

Of course the other option would be to not send anything through email and instead share your photos on a variety of free photo sharing sites that are available like flickr, Picasa, Photrade, Windows Live Gallery and many others.

Post from: EveryJoe

Attention People: Resize… Then E-mail

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