Rick Yaeger : 2 Mac Apps that give your Blog pics more Oomph!

Do you have a blog? It seems most people do these days. What about a Flickr account? Or maybe you frequent an online forum or two. If you’re involved in any of these popular online activities, you have probably needed to post an image at one time or another. (I can’t imagine why anyone would have a Flickr account if they had no intention of posting images!) I’m going to show you two Mac applications that simplify the process of creating images for blogs and one that will even help you upload and post the images after they’re created.

PICTURESQUE
First, we’ll start with Picturesque from Aqualia (ah-KWAH-lee-ah). The program’s chief function is resizing and beautifying images for your website. You can add borders, fades, shadows, glows, rounded corners and reflections and adjust each effect to your liking. The interface is very clean and straight forward and it takes all the fiddling out of making your blog graphics consistent. You might even be able to develop a combination of effects that can become your blog’s “look.”

Speaking of a consistent look, Picturesque allows you to batch process a group of images so that they all have the same effects and scaling applied. You can drag multiple images to the Picturesque window and apply the same scaling and beautifications to them all before saving them all out to the desired image format.

SKITCH
Skitch has some of the same features as Picturesque, but not many. Skitch resizes, but not in the same way that you resize in Picturesque. Here all you do is grab the corner of the Skitch window and drag. It looks like you might merely be zooming in, but you are actually scaling. This method makes it difficult to work with images larger than your screen resolution, but if you’re using Skitch for its intended purpose you really wouldn’t be using images that big.

To crop an image, you just drag from the edge of the image inward until you find the cropping you like. Skitch crops in on the image and resizes the Skitch window to accommodate you.

Skitch’s left edge is populated with drawing tools so that you can mark up your images with shapes, lines arrows and text. Embellishments made using Skitch’s drawing tools are movable as individual objects after you draw them and are vector-based so that if you decide to scale the image up after making notations, your drawings will not lose detail or crispness. Skitch even works with WACOM tablets and allows you smooth pressure sensitive drawing.

When you’re done with your image, you can just drag it out to your desktop, to your email client or you can configure Skitch to upload to your web space, Flickr account or Plasq’s own MySkitch service. When you enter in this account information into Skitch’s preferences, you can also ask the program to automatically put the URL, HTML or forum code into your clipboard so that you can immediately go about posting your new image to your blog or that forum you lurk in.

Skitch is integrated with iPhoto, so you can Skitch your latest pictures of your dog. And it even keeps a record of all the images you’ve made, posted, emailed or archived so that you can continue to manage them if you need to.

RELATED WEBSITE LINKS
Skitch: http://plasq.com/skitch
Picturesque: http://www.acqualia.com/picturesque

PRODUCTS SHOWN
Skitch (Price unknown, public beta available now or very soon)
Picturesque (USD$19.50, free watermarked demo)

Jim Rutherford : Uncluttering your Desktop in Mac AND PC

It’s very easy in today’s interconnected computer world to become easily distracted as you work. Between having multiple applications open (like Word, Excel and Outlook), web browsers, audio players and instant messaging clients it doesn’t take long before one of these applications are begging for your attention. All of these open windows make it hard to bunker down and get some work done. One solution is to simply close all of your open applications, but then the problem still exists that you are only a Start Menu or Dock click away from once again becoming distracted.

Today we’ll look at a number of free applications that will help you manage your open windows and hide your distractions from view.

On the Mac OSX side, there are two programs that provide excellent distraction free environments. Think (www.freeverse.com/think) lets you limit your attention to one application—any application—at any time. When Think is first you’re your screen goes blank, and you are shown large icons that represent the open applications you have. Click on one of these icons, ant that application is shown above the black background. You can easily change focus to another application when you have to by clicking on a transparent control box which once again displays a list of open applications.

Doodim (http://www.lachoseinteractive.net/en/products/doodim/) is another simple and free application that does one thing and does it well. It dims your background and all applications except the one that has focus. When you switch to a different application, it becomes active and your old windows dim. You can dim the background completely or just make it darker.

If you happen to use a PC, there are a couple of excellent free applications from the Lifehacker (http://www.lifehacer.com) gang that can help cure your desktop clutter.

Swept Away (http://lifehacker.com/software/downloads/lifehacker-code-swept-away-wind...) is a simple utility that runs in your system tray and automatically minimizes applications that you aren’t using after a specified number of seconds. If you get working with many applications at one time, this application is well worth the download!

Dropcloth (http://lifehacker.com/software/distraction/lifehacker-code-dropcloth-win...) is much like DooDim. It is a utility that overlays a solid colored window on top of your desktop. If you regularly make screencasts or take screenshot of your desktop, Dropcloth can help hide your desktop. It’s also great for just getting rid of all the distraction in front of you so that you can focus on just one application without closing out of anything or clearing off your desktop.

Finally, one last tool is especially great for those of us who spend a lot of time writing. JDarkRoom (http://www.codealchemists.com/jdarkroom/) is a full screen text editor for Windows, OSX and Linux. Its job is simple – hide everything except a screen with a cursor. Type to your hearts content and never be distracted! It’s a no frills text editor, but is great for just pounding out text. When you’re done, you can take the text and copy into your favorite program for formatting.

RELATED WEBSITE LINKS
Think
www.freeverse.com/think

DoDim
http://www.lachoseinteractive.net/en/products/doodim/

Swept Away
http://lifehacker.com/software/downloads/lifehacker-code-swept-away-wind...

Drop Cloth
http://lifehacker.com/software/distraction/lifehacker-code-dropcloth-win...

JDarkRoom
http://www.codealchemists.com/jdarkroom/