Organize your digital photos - I have recently had the chance to try two cool products for organizing photos, which some people liken to iPhoto for Windows computers. Of the two, I like Picasa the best. It lets you quickly assemble photos into albums and keeps a chronology of all of your pictures. Reorganizing photos is very easy and intuitive. Not many editing features, which is a bummer (although you can rotate pictures, fix red-eye & contrast). But the slideshows are crisp and just what you want for viewing pictures and sharing them with friends and family.
If you are less interested in displaying and organizing your pictures, and more interested in editing them then try Photomeister. Photomeister lets you crop, resize, adjust brightness and contrast, and the fix for red-eyes seems to work well and create natural looking results). You can also easily create a slideshow. But it is a more time-consuming process with this program compared to Picasa. One thing that is cool is it lets you export a group of pictures to your Palm device. Also, you can create a PDF album (the quality of the PDF album I created came out poor). And Picasa lets you use GIFs, BMPs, and TIFFs. Obviously, you can use JPEGs (Picasa handles only JPEGs, which is not a big limitation in my view since most digital pictures these days are JPEGs).
Both programs can be downloaded and tried for free for a limited period of time (30 days for Photomeister, and 15 days for Picasa). Picasa is only $29.95, and is simpler and seems to work faster. I got a free copy when I went to PopTech, but I can tell you that I would pay for Picasa in a heartbeat. And I'll probably buy Photomeister too; it's $35 for the standard edition, and $55 for the "professional" version that lets you create the Palm snapshots, and some other supposedly advanced things. I don't think I'm willing to pay $55 for the "advanced" stuff , although I wish that the Palm transfer feature was included in the $35 version.
Picasa is definitely the better deal, especially if you don't tend to edit your photos much, but just want a quick, easy way to organize them and view them. And, like I said, it seems to move faster in displaying the images. Quick, easy and cheap. That's a winning combination for me.
Wi-Fi That Follows You Around - Paul Boutin of Wired News reports from San Francisco on a new type of Wi-Fi system connects existing laptops and other computers by directing beams of coverage through hundreds of tiny antennas. Glenn Fleishman also discusses this development and points out that it may be a boon to deployment of Wi-Fi at airports. If that's the case, then this definitely represents a breakthrough.
12:08:37 PM
Internet Marketing for Lawyers - I have just received my copy of "The Lawyer's Guide to Marketing on the Internet" and since Rick Klau is one of the co-authors I'm eager to read it. A quick perusal of the introduction makes me think this book is a valuable resource for any law firm that has a website (i.e. any law firm, period). The authors even have a weblog set up. And with an RSS/XML feed no less. The book is available through the ABA by phone (800-285-2221) or at their catalog website.
11:32:45 AM
