Was at a demo of various impressive (though expensive, for me) software today. I really liked the integration behind Open Mind, the ways that a mindmap can easily transmogrify into an eportfolio or a Gantt chart or whatever. It’s a real timesaver if you know the direction you want to go in. Also on demo were Screenshot and Mediator.
Such joy. An online image editor. There have been problems recently with the school network, which means that the software I want installed for creating vector graphics hasn’t been installed. But there’s this clever Ajax app called AjaxSketch that allows graphics to be made online and then saved to the local machine as a scalable vector graphic - the format can be changed with your friendly graphics editor eg GIMP. Trouble is, it needs Firefox to work, which ain’t on the network (yet). Curses, foiled again. ‘Course, there’s still Gliffy.
While I’m at it, I have to say that I like the latest version of paint.net. Very usable and not at all like Paint. I really don’t like Paint. Another favourite image processor is ArtRage, now in version 2. I even paid for the pro version, I like it so much and I felt the need to support the developers. And here’s another great toy - remember those photomosaic posters that were all the rage a few years back? I’ve recently been playing with AndreaMosaic, a freeware application for creating these fascinating works of art. One great thing is that you can tell the software to create a web page, which links to the original image when you hover over the mosaic cells that contains it.
Old standards for me, I can’t do without Photofiltre and Irfanview for simple image processing. Another useful tool is Resize-o-matic for resizing images with a right click. I’m slowly getting used to Inkscape for vector graphic editing, and it has a great function for converting a raster image to a vector with various controls that can be set to make it dance to your tune.
One thing I can’t wait to get on the school system is Scribus. Waving goodbye to Publisher will be the best day of my life.
While talking about image processing, I can’t fail to mention GIMP again. I had Year 7 using it a couple of weeks ago to create logos. Some folks think it’s really hard to learn, but it’s all a matter of approach (as with anything. HTML is really hard to learn but we still expect kids to learn a bit).
