Well, many friends asked to stay current on my adventures outside the cubicle farms, and though it’s early days, here is one thing I’ve been up to: I spend one day each week working with a start-up called Semantinet. It is an attribute of start-ups that they both empower and expect every person in their … Read more
It’s hard to speak ill of Adobe Photoshop. Even its painful price tag is well justified by this application’s incredible power, which I’ve been barely scratching in my many years as a faithful user. Still, there is one inexplicable sin its designers have committed. Tastes vary, which is why Microsoft have included in their Windows … Read more
Two of the least pleasant-to-use GUI controls are the scrollable list box and its cousin the drop-down list, especially when they have many items listed. Of course, that’s exactly when they are indispensable… you can’t use radio buttons for 50 choices, so if you need to let the user choose a state of the union, … Read more
A few months ago I wrote about the surprisingly good customer service I received when my CardScan business card scanner died. Well, this was no accident, it seems. The other day I installed the CardScan software on another computer and I noticed on the welcome dialog during installation the following fine print: I was impressed. … Read more
These days nobody is surprised to see a software product expect tens or even hundreds of free Megabytes on the disk – a far cry from the frugal eighties, when entire operating systems would fit on a floppy or two, but this is life and we accept it philosophically. But when a piece of Hardware … Read more
I needed a screen grabber, and based on recommendations from a friend downloaded the trial version of Snagit 9. I was impressed and disappointed.Impressed, because this is one potent package. It can do everything you may ever want to do about image grabbing. I particularly liked the “Scrolling window” option, for capturing a web page … Read more
Photoshop rules, and gets more powerful and more useful with every new release… but it will never recreate the joy of using Deluxe Paint. Now, Electronic Arts’ Deluxe Paint was a raster graphics paint program released for the Commodore Amiga in 1985, which fast became the standard on that venerable 16-bit platform. It would typically … Read more
I was in Berlin, where they have a subway system that, though it dates back to 1902, is as effective as it is pleasant (part of this last may have to do with the fact that the tunnels are close to the surface, so there is less of the “going down to the bowels of … Read more
Every commercial piece of software we use comes with an End User License Agreement (EULA), which we all merrily accept without reading. After all, who has time to read a rambling document of barely decipherable legalese that we can’t do anything about anyway? Sometime I do glance through them, and my blood pressure shoots up … Read more
