Atul Karmarkar.Com» Software

New Photoshop in Adobe CS5 – Mind Blowing preview

Atul Karmarkar — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 16:32:38 +0000

Adobe Creative Suite 5 is all set to be launched on 12-Apr-10, and as usual, it is expected to raise the bar in terms of additional features graphics and web design. Here’s a video with a short preview of some really breathtaking stuff, and how the new version is expected to reduce time drastically for some tasks.

As John says, jump to 2:50 for the really droolicious stuff if you’re short on time. The only thing left for us now is to wait and watch – for availability in India, and more importantly, the price!

29-Mar-09: Ok, now here’s some more mindblowing stuff… drool drool…

Windows XP and Windows 7 dual-boot config

Atul Karmarkar — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:51:44 +0000

Ok.. So Windows 7 is here.. finally ! And there’s a lot of stuff on the net which basically says, Upgrade N O W !! So should you go ahead and upgrade for the heck of it or wait till the bugs and flaws are ironed out?

Personally I’ve been using Vista over the past couple of years and haven’t really come across the “numerous” problems that seem to plague users.

A majority of people I know seem to have stuck to good old WinXP, adding service packs whenever they are made available. They also find XP running like a well oiled machine now, and are reluctant to upgrade. However, there is also a degree of anticipation thanks to the hype generated by Windows 7, so they are eager to get a taste of it, but without totally junking XP.

So what’s the way out? Well, one way to do so is use both in a dual-boot config, so you can do your testing as well as regular work without any compromises. Once you’re comfortable with Windows 7, you can set Windows 7 as the primary OS and remove XP.

Here is a nice article on how you can create a Windows XP and 7 dual-boot system for an easy migration. Hope you find it useful.

For the moment though, I’m still sticking to Vista..

Make Decisions Faster and Easier with Zapproved

Atul Karmarkar — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 10:42:02 +0000

Have been looking up various tools to enhance collaboration and productivity the past few days and chanced upon Zapproved, an interesting tool to manage decision making online.

Zapproved, according to the blurb on their site, is the first web app that focuses on making decisions faster, easier and more accountable. It is an intuitive tool for managing decisions that can be adopted instantly.

A user creates a proposal and can send it to anyone with an email address. The recipients receive a formatted email that requests a specific response by clicking either the “Approve” or “Deny” buttons. The group can collaborate in a single place online and the decision is stored in a trusted repository for future reference.

It is simple, all emails have a clear subject line, and provide a call-to-action and deadline. There is clear accountability – Who agreed to what and when, it allows for multiple approvers, tracks versions of documents and maintains a secure audit trail.

There is complete transparency among all members of a project team and this introduces an element of peer pressure to the decision making process by adding focus and driving the team to a concrete decision. There is also no scope for any blame game as it clearly shows who is holding up any process.

It is extremely accessible as a web application, and participants only need an email address. Ironically, email is the very reason there are delays in the decision making process, with multiple cc’s and keeping even unnecessary people in the loop.

With Zapproved, all this is done at a single place, making it easier to track each approval. It also works securely across firewalls, and can be used not only with employees but even customers and vendors.

You can look up some of their case studies to know how others are implementing Zapproved.

Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference – Free Download

Atul Karmarkar — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 00:55:38 +0000

Ubuntu has been gaining ground on a host of other competing systems and is now among the most popular Linux distros out there.

If you’ve always wanted to give it a go and were looking for good, well written and free documentation, well, your search just ended…

A handy reference guide, Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference is a very good read and available from Amazon for just under $10. While I’m sure many would call that value for money, here’s where it gets even better.

You can get the full version of the book as a pdf, for free from the web site !! Go ahead and download your copy now.

Opera 9.6 released

Atul Karmarkar — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 17:06:29 +0000

One of my favourite browsers, Opera, announced that they’ve released the latest version of their browser, and I hopped over to download it and have a look.

Having done that yesterday, I spent some time going over the enchancements. Among the interesting ones;

Speed: I like it mainly because I find it to be among the fastest, and among the least of the memory hogs. This has only got better with the latest upgrade.

The email client Opera M2: In case your net connection is giving problems, Opera switches to a lower bandwidth mode that disables automatic attachment download from IMAP connections. It has a more intelligent way to manage mails, which means keeping tabs on important threads and ignoring less important threads with a single click.

RSS feeds: This is fantastic. A beautiful and improved 3 column interface, which is a newspaper/magazine style layout that looks quite pleasing to the eye.

Opera Link: Allows you to synchronize “every part of your life”, according to Opera, which basically means you can sync Speed Dial, Bookmarks, Custom Searches, History and Bookmarks between your home and work PC, as well as take them on your phone.

Pretty decent upgrade, I’d say.

Download a free copy of iSpring Pro 3.5

Atul Karmarkar — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 17:43:05 +0000

iSpring Pro is a nifty PowerPoint add-in which creates Flash movies from your PowerPoint presentations with an outstanding quality and considerable reduction in size.

The program integrates with your PowerPoint toolbar allowing you to publish your presentations with just a click.

I’ve used the free version and found it quite good. Here’s an opportunity to get iSpring Pro 3.5 free of cost, thanks to Giveaway of the Day. You can download it from here. As of now, you have around 13 hours to do so.

Do remember however, that once you download it, you need to activate and install it within this period, or else the offer is no longer valid.

Try iSpring Pro 3.5, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.

Windows Vista SP1 RC expires on June 30

Atul Karmarkar — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:46:47 +0000

In case you’re seeing a message on your computer saying Windows Vista is set to expire in a week’s time, don’t panic, especially if you’ve already activated your copy. It is quite likely that you have installed Vista Service Pack 1 (Release Candidate) from one of the computer magazine CDs or online. This is set to expire on June 30, 2008.

To confirm that you are indeed running an evaluation version, you can also hit Start->Run and type ‘winver’ in the dialog box. It should give you the OS name, version and build. If you see an expiry date, you know you have a trial copy.

In order to get rid of this message, you can uninstall this version by simply navigating to the Control Panel->Programs and Features->View installed updates. Identify the Windows Service Pack in the list, select it and hit Uninstall, and voila!, your OS is back to normal.

Opera 9.5 rocks

Atul Karmarkar — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 01:57:08 +0000

I’ve been a long time fan of the Opera browser, from when it was among the first to support tabbed browsing, had the cleanest interface and was ad-supported. My biggest grouse was that it never got enough support from developers and companies so it always lagged the big boys, Internet Explorer and Firefox, when it came to protcols and support for other third-party apps. The latest version, 9.5 aka Kestrel, is simply mind blowing and fantastic to use.

It now has a redesigned smart address bar, better download and content management, and much better memory and performance management. Above all, it looks awesome when compared to it’s peers. It combines a browser, mail client, rss reader, IRC chat client and newsgroup reader into one neat package. All these applications can be accessed from the side panel so there is minimum intrusion while you are browsing. The address bar of course, is similar to Firefox’s Awesome bar, which searches for words typed in the address bar, not only in the URL’s but also the entire webpage content, which sometimes leads to information overload. Some other nifty features are;

Speed Dial: A feature that has been around for a while it lets you quickly access upto nine of your favourite or often visited sites from the same page.

Security: Opera is security concious as well, and has it’s own protection mechanisms to ward off phishing and malware attacks. Fraud Protection is enabled by default.

BitTorrent: Opera also acts as a BitTorrent client, which no other browser has on offer. I’m not much of a torrent freak, so haven’t really tried out this feature.

Paste and Go: One of my favourites. This comes in handy when I’m feeling too lazy to hit the Enter key on the keyboard to visit a link. All I need to do is copy a link, right click in the address bar and select Paste And Go, which pastes the link and also fetches the page. You can also use Ctrl+Shift+V to do so. Wish other browers had it too. I tried it with IE and FF but no luck. However, one feature present in these two but not in Opera is the ability to reload / refresh all tabs, which was a bit surprising.

Using Ctrl+Z: Has been around for a while now, and lets you restore the last page you closed, especially if you do so by mistake.

Earlier, there were some issues when accessing sites for financial transactions, like netbanking or online trading, but that is also now a thing of the past. All in all, a pretty decent upgrade, though not without some issues, which I’ll touch upon later.

Ubuntu launches Version 8.04

Atul Karmarkar — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 01:45:15 +0000

Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distributions, has launched Version 8.04, codenamed ‘Hardy Heron’. I’ve read a lot about it and have fancied the idea of tinkering around with it, but always kept putting it off as I wasn’t keen on messing around with my existing system.

However, this new release comes with an installer that allows Ubuntu to co-exist with my Windows OS without the need to partition or format the hard disk.

Find out more about this latest release here and refer to more documentation and the Ubuntu Guide too.

You can download it if you have a fast net connection, else request them to send a CD, or if you’re patient enough, wait for it to be shipped with any of the numerous computer magazines.

Twhirl and Alert Thingy look good, could be better

Atul Karmarkar — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 02:37:19 +0000

Being on Twitter has been good fun, especially with all the apps that are being written around it, such as Twhirl and now, Alert Thingy respectively. Both these desktop clients use the Adobe Air platform.

Both are fantastic, and look sexy in black when placed together on one side of the desktop.

However, the fonts are just too small, and secondly, Alert Thingy should have been more opaque. If you have several apps open at the same time, trying to read the stuff on Alert Thingy can be a real strain due to it’s transparency. There also seems to be very little by way of customization that one can do like changing the font size, resizing the app window etc, that would make it a more enjoyable experience.

Today, as I started it up, I got a notification saying an upgrade was due, and I thought, “Wow, that was quick”, but on closer look, these grouses are still not taken care of. I guess I’ll use Twhirl but continue with friendfeed via the browser. Much easier on the eyes.

Look forward to meeting you on Twitter.

Atul Karmarkar.Com» Software

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