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Sunday, June 8, 2003

Random thought:

Paint Shop Photo Album

The folks at Jasc have created a market by offering high-powered software at a low shareware price. Paint Shop Pro has been around for quite a while and it gives both Corel PhotoPaint and Adobe's market-leading Photoshop a good run. But now Jasc has something designed just for people who use digital photos.

No, you don't have to own a digital camera. You can use Paint Shop Photo Album 4 to organize images taken with a film camera and scanned. If you do own a digital camera that you can connect to your computer, there's a good chance that you'll be able to use Photo Album to view and download the images.

This is a $45 application that makes it possible to quickly and easily correct exposure or color problems. You can open up shadows, enhance detail, crop or zoom in, change the image to black and white or sepia. Oh -- and there's even a "Thinify" tool. I could use that. Or, if you're too thin, you can turn the Thinify filter around and Thickify the image.

What else? Well, you can make a slide show that includes a player with the full-resolution images. That means the slide show will be large (not suitable for e-mailing) but it's perfect for writing to a CD. The resulting file will play in any Windows computer. Those who have Macs or Linux computers will still be able to view the images, but not the slide show, if they have a JPG viewer.

You can also plan ahead when taking pictures and create a series of images that will fit together as a panorama and then use Photo Album to stitch the images together. Or maybe you'd like to enhance an image with a frame, special edges, borders, captions. Photo Album can do that, too.

If you're looking for a program that will let you do heavy-duty photo editing, this isn't it (but Jasc's latest version of Paint Shop Pro might be.) Even so, Photo Album is offers some robust features, including a 1-click "fix this picture" function that does a surprisingly good job.

Other features include the ability to read the EXIF data that most digital cameras record along with the images, to rename ad resize multiple images simultaneously, to add music to a slide show, and even to store more than one slide show on a single CD or to upload images to many of the on-line photo sharing service.

What you can do, and how

Here the camera's flash fired, but the room was bright enough that some of the room light influenced the color. I used the "quick-fix" function to obtain the image on the right.
Next I cropped the image, but then I noticed that there was a bit of a red-eye problem. It's not particularly visible in an image at this size, but a quick 1-click red-eye removal (well, 2-click -- once for each eye) improved the image.
The top left image was taken using "available light" and the outside light overpowered the camera's light meter. Quick-Fix (top right) failed to provide much improvement, but a little manual tinkering (right) produced a much improved picture.
Quick-Fix did a fair job with this picture, but it's still suffering from the greenish cast that indicates the room was lighted with fluorescent tubes. Manually adding some magenta would help.
Here's an image that suffers from multiple light sources. The outside light is blue, the fluorescent tubes above the model railroad cause the image to have a greenish cast. And there are some incandescent light bulbs that are reddish-orange. Quick-Fix was stumped, but I manually added some magenta and yellow. The resulting colors still aren't right, but they're a lot more pleasing.

For $45, this is quite value. For more information, take a look at http://www.jasc.com/products/photoalbum/.

How big a threat is Linux to Microsoft?

Windows XP Pro costs close to $200. Linux costs $0 (or more, if you want a manual, an installer, and support). Windows XP has thousands of well known programs certified to run on the operating system. Linux has thousands of programs, too, but most of them are applications you've never heard of designed to do things you don't want to do.

Yet Microsoft says Linux is its biggest threat.

Steve Ballmer sent a long e-mail to Microsoft employees this week to say that IBM and Linux are Microsoft's primary rival.

Ballmer said that he feels Microsoft is well positioned for long-term growth, but that many business customers have the goal of doing more with less. Since Linux is "free", there's corporate interest in the operating system.

Ballmer also says that Microsoft would rather delay the release of the next major upgrade of its Windows operating system if there is any question about its reliability. The new operating system (Longhorn) is current scheduled for release to manufacturing in 2005.

The message is one that Ballmer sends annual to the company's 54 thousand employees -- a State of Microsoft report.

Copyright in the Internet Age

What should industry, consumers and government do to promote vibrant markets in online digital content and reduce piracy? Are Steve Jobs and others rendering these questions moot? Should Washington weigh-in or bug-out? Those are some of the topics that will be up for discussion this coming Tuesday in Washington.

No, it's not a Congressional hearing. But the Promoting Markets for Creativity conference will hear from Rep. Lamar Smith, chairman of the House's Courts, Internet and Intellectual Property Subcommittee.

The presentations will provide fodder for a book.

One of the hottest topics is likely to be Apple's iTunes Music Store and formats like Movielink, Rhapsody, and Pressplay. Speakers will explore the legal, economic, technical and policy aspects of the changing digital marketplace.

The program is sponsored by the Progress & Freedom Foundation, a non-profit think tank that studies the impact of the digital revolution and its implications for public policy.

Nerdly News

Webshots: If you like photos on your phone!

Webshots, a popular photo site, has launched Daily Photo, a service that will automatically change the screensaver and wall paper for AT&T Wireless mMode wireless customers.

This is an extension of the service that's used by 25 million users on their PCs. For a small fee, the system provides a new photo every day for your computer from a category you choose.

Remember when phones stayed put and were used just for talking?

Customers can decorate their phone with photos of tropical islands, adventure sports, waterfalls, and mountain sunrises -- all in full color and new every day. Users are alerted daily on their phone to let them know that a new photo is available. Users can adjust the alert to appear daily, weekly or not at all. Oh, and they also have a cats category. And dogs.

Subscribers can download as many photos as they wish during each monthly subscription period. Daily Photo by Webshots costs $3 a month with billing to the user's AT&T Wireless phone bill.

Details are at http://www.webshots.com/attws/.

A little spring in your Palm?

The boards of directors of Palm and Handspring say they each have unanimously approved a definitive agreement for Palm to acquire Handspring to form a new, stronger market leader in mobile computing and communications.

Palm invented the market, but Handspring has been the primary innovator in the market. Some observers have even suggested that Palm should get out of the hardware business and concentrate on software.

Instead, Palm plans to spin off the software division, PalmSource, and concentrate on hardware. After that happens, the merger will occur and the two companies will merge. A new name will be announced later in the year.

How about "Palmspring"? "Hand2Palm"?

Handspring's shareholders will receive 9-hundredthss of a Palm share and no shares of PalmSource for each share of Handspring common stock owned.

The companies say the merger will create a stronger competitor in handheld computing and communication solutions. Palm Solutions will become better able to realize its stated objectives of growing the market, maintaining industry leadership, and achieving consistent profitability.

We'll see.

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