Messages

1

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Powerpoint shrinker

« on: February 26, 2008, 08:44 PM »

Looks good--too bad the license won't let me use it at work!  I downloaded the GAOTD version but haven't installed it yet--will try it out next time I get the chance at home.

2

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Powerpoint shrinker

« on: February 26, 2008, 06:59 AM »

No need for the PM--I subscribe to comments on this thread.  Thanks for the link, Darwin!  I'm downloading now, although it appears to be licensed for personal use only, which does me no good at work where I make all my powerpoints.  You can see by the number of comments out there that this is a popular style of app.  Are the donation coders out there sure they don't want to put up an improved, ok to use in business-settings donation-ware version?  Might draw a lot of attention to the site.

Jason

3

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Powerpoint shrinker

« on: January 31, 2008, 07:53 PM »

I'll check it out.  I was really hoping to get someone here to write a coding snack that seems like it would fit the bill of A-easy, B-has no free substitute, and C-seems to have a broad appeal, but I guess no one wants to bite.

It's less the money than the principal of paying for software (outside of the Donation Coder model).  I've only paid for a couple of programs in the last few years that didn't originate on this site--everything else is freeware on my machine at home except for media monkey (worth every penny at first, but now not being supported as much as I'd like).  I've switched to linux a half-dozen times but keep coming back to windows because the learning curve is too steep and I like to be compatible with my stuff at work.  Mostly, I find that free software is not only better-written/more functional, it's got better support.

Anyway, like I said, it's not a big deal for me to just keep emailing large files back and forth to my bosses and clogging up our mail servers, which is my free alternative--it's easier to delete mail than it is to use any of these powerpoint shrinkers, I was just trying to be a bit more productive and help out at work.

But thanks for your help, all!

Jason

4

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Powerpoint shrinker

« on: January 31, 2008, 07:02 PM »

There are any number of reasons not to spend the money.  One is that I have downloaded literally hundreds of programs over the last couple of years, and if I paid even $10 each for them, I'd be broke.  I do a lot of stuff on the computer--I'm on it 10 or more hours a day, every day.  A program that gets used for 10 minutes a month isn't worth that kind of money.  And often, when I DO pay for a program, I end up finding that it either doesn't do everything I need, or that there is a better freeware version available (like the star office version which is superior to NXPowerLite in interface and options, only it doesn't work for M$).

Second, I would always rather use free and/or open source software, and I'd rather pay someone here at DC $5 or $10 in credits and have it available to the world.  Plus, if I get someone here to do it, I can ask for specific features and get the warm fuzzy feeling that comes from beta-testing.

Third, I would use this mainly for work.  I'm technically prohibited from installing ANY software on my machine (or even plugging in a USB drive, for that matter).  But my IT people are pretty cool and won't hassle me as long as I don't screw anything up on the network.  Still, there's not a snowball's chance in hell that I'd ever be given approval to buy non-authorized software.  And the only reason I use this is because our IT people have arbitrarily capped our email storage limits to about 450 mb, so I'm just saving my workplace money in storage anyway and saving my coworkers the hassle of having to constantly go back and delete these big files.

And no, I most definitely would NOT pay someone $4 or $5 to do this for me.  I just wouldn't do it at all, network storage limits be damned.  That's what I do now (er, don't do, I guess).

Jason

5

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Powerpoint shrinker

« on: January 31, 2008, 06:17 PM »

Thanks--looks awesome for my home computer (open office), but won't work at work where I'm restricted to MS Office, and where I do all of my work on Powerpoint.  Still, it's a start.  Anyone out there know of a way to port this to M$?

Jason

6

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Powerpoint shrinker

« on: January 16, 2008, 08:37 AM »

Yeah, the NXPowerLite works really well, but it's $45!!!  I couldn't even sell my 5-year old PC for $45, why would I want to pay that much for a program I will use maybe once or twice a month at most?  Plus, I feel that the coders here could probably do it more elegantly and with less space than the commercial versions.  Wish I knew how to do this kind of stuff myself.

7

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Powerpoint shrinker

« on: January 15, 2008, 09:52 PM »

Thanks both for your responses.  I know that shrinking my pictures can help, and powerpoint's built-in compression tools also help a bit, but what I need is a tool that will work on presentations that are already built with a minimum of fuss.  I do a *lot* of work on other people's powerpoints (unfortunately--maybe I should find a better job) and just want a simple 1 click solution to shrink them down quickly with a minimum of fuss.

Jason

8

Post New Requests Here / IDEA: Powerpoint shrinker

« on: January 15, 2008, 08:05 AM »

Hi all-

I constantly have to send and receive powerpoints, which are often loaded with unnecessarily high resolution images that balloon the size up to many dozens of megabytes.  Today I went digging for a converter and found several, all pretty pricey.  They're best summarized in this list:  http://www.freedownl...ompression_software/

I tried NXPowerLite and liked it, but at $45 for the full version, there's no way I'll ever buy it.  It's a 1.7 mb exe file--it shrinks images and optionally flattens embedded documents and spits out a renamed file about 90% smaller than the original.  If anyone can create a free/donationware version, I'd be forever grateful!  It would also be nice to be able to do the same thing to word docs with pictures to create web-optimized docs.

Thanks!

Jason

9

General Software Discussion / Re: A Simple Database Program? (Or is that an Oxymoron itself?!)

« on: October 30, 2007, 09:28 AM »

Zoho.com has two online offerings that are both pretty simple and easy to use.  I like zoho creator better:  http://creator.zoho.com/

There's also zoho database and reports.  Not sure why they have two offerings, but so it is:  http://db.zoho.com/ZDBHome.cc

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General Software Discussion / Re: Help needed (again): Miro "destroyed" all my videos!

« on: September 06, 2007, 09:57 AM »

Got this message from Janet at PCF--I'm reposting here and have told Janet to swing by the forum since I didn't want to post her email addy without permission.

Jason

Jason - I am sorry you have had a bad experience - but I am pretty sure
this is all recoverable.

First - can you right-click on one of your music videos and select the
"Open With..." option.

Then choose the application you were previously using and check the
"Always use the selected program for this kind of file" box.

That should reset the default application for your files.

Then - in order to find out what happened to the Miro installation - can
you please look in your Temp directory (Documents and Settings\<you>\Local
Settings\Temp and send me the Miro.log file.

It is a hidden file so you may have to unhide it.  There are more detailed
instructions on this here.

https://develop.part...racy/wiki/TestingDtv

Email me back and let me know how this goes,

Janet Dragojevic

ps - the approval process is manual for the forums, but it is checked
regularly and is only to prevent spam which was a huge problem on our old
forum.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Help needed (again): Miro "destroyed" all my videos!

« on: September 06, 2007, 08:31 AM »

I happen to know the guys and gals at the PCF and forwarded your note along.  They're a particularly awesome group of people--look for a response of some sort soon.  I've already ribbed them for their cruddy forum management, hopefully they'll fix that soon

Jason

12

Post New Requests Here / Re: DONE: simple app to make a window always stay on top

« on: March 01, 2007, 08:04 PM »

Finally got the hang of winroll, it looks pretty useful. 

I like gridmove, and I could see the utility if I had dual monitors or even one decent sized monitor, but on my little 17" jobbie it's not quite as useful.   Just another reason for me to get a couple of 22" widescreen LCDs when I win the lottery!

Will have to check out AHK, hadn't used it before. 

Thanks again, all!

13

Post New Requests Here / Re: DONE: simple app to make a window always stay on top

« on: March 01, 2007, 10:15 AM »

Thanks all!  Don't know how this stuff didn't turn up when I searched the forums. 

I'm trying winroll now, seems easy enough, if that doesn't work I'll do the AHK thing and/or try gridroll.

Jason

14

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: simple app to make a window always stay on top

« on: March 01, 2007, 09:44 AM »

Thanks, didn't see that when I was searching.  It does look very nice.  Problem is, I installed it, but I can only seem to make it work on firefox.  It doesn't do what it says it will on my other open applications--in fact, doesn't seem to work at all, except on firefox.  Not sure what's going on, and don't really want to spend hours trying to figure it out, since this is a program that's supposed to make my life marginally easier, not harder!

Also, it's way more complex than I need.  Really just want to keep a window on top, preferably with one click or hotkey.  I'm pretty sure other people out there want to do this, too, judging by the number of pricey shareware apps out there.

I found heldup (http://www.johnmacintyre.ca/HeldUp.asp), but even though it's free it has mandatory registration after 20 days and a strict EULA that is not very friendly.  It does what I want, but with those terms I can't say that it's really freeware.  A competitor to this would be perfect.

Jason

15

Post New Requests Here / DONE: make a window always stay on top

« on: March 01, 2007, 08:52 AM »

I often want to make a window stay always on top, for instance when I'm copying un-OCR'd text from a scanned PDF document to a word processing document by hand.

I used to use a nifty little freeware program called GIPO windows manager (http://www.gibinsoft...s/deskutil/index.htm) that did this along with a couple of other features I don't use.  I recently did a fresh reinstall of XP and when I went to reinstall GIPO, I got a warning from AVG Antivirus saying that there is a trojan horse (Generic2.ewv) in the file.  This is surprising, since the publisher seems to be pretty reputable and sells many other commercial products, but it looks like this is a real trojan from my googling around so I don't want to reinstall it.

I can't seem to find any other true freeware utilities that will keep a window always-on-top, although there are plenty of expensive shareware options.  Anyone want to step up?  I've got a few donation credits left...

Thanks,

Jason

16

The Getting Organized Experiment of 2006 / Re: Alternate online to-do list and GTD software

« on: September 12, 2006, 03:23 PM »

While doing the GTD assignment 2 today, discovered that I really don't like the way backpack works for GTD.  Tried two more web-based apps, one of which I really like so far (4 hours use!)

App 1-GTD Tracks--you have to try it to see how it works.  Might work for some, but not quite perfect for me:  http://tracks.brightpool.com/login

App 2-GTDMail, a firefox plugin that adds a lot of functionality to GMail.  Since I already live on GMail (it's like oxygen to me now, privacy issues be damned), I am instantly addicted.  This should work well for me:  http://www.gtdgmail.com/

Enjoy!

Jason

17

The Getting Organized Experiment of 2006 / Alternate online to-do list and GTD software

« on: September 05, 2006, 08:39 AM »

App103 is busy improving his already impressive to-do list program.  This looks great, but for people like me who work on four or five different machines throughout the week (at work, at home, laptop, school, girlfriend's house), the installed software approach doesn't work. 

Fortunately, there's a good free online alternative in Backpack.  You can use Backpack for any number of things, but I use it for simple todo lists.  It functions perfectly.  It's one of my home tabs on Firefox, right between Gmail and my Markaboo bookmarks, at home and work.  The folks who designed this also offer a whole bunch of other great software for people into GTD. 

Linky:  http://www.backpackit.com/
Other great web-based software stuff:  http://www.37signals.com/

18

The Getting Organized Experiment of 2006 / Re: What is the Great DonationCoder.com GTD Experiment of 2006?

« on: September 05, 2006, 08:31 AM »

Just found out about this--I'm in!  Have had GTD sitting in my room for almost 2 years now, but have never been able to get myself to read it.

19

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Flickr Batch Downloader extension for Firefox

« on: August 13, 2006, 07:32 AM »

That's a great page, but my search didn't turn up anything better than the three I listed.  All of the solutions seem to rely on the .net framework or else are otherwise platform-specific.  But at least there are a few options.  Thanks for the reply-
Jason

20

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Flickr Batch Downloader extension for Firefox

« on: August 10, 2006, 04:03 PM »

I use FreeDownloadManager with the Flashgot extension, which I find superior to DownThemAll.  But FDM/Flashgot/DTA only let you download the thumbnails on a flickr page, not the full size images that those thumbs link to.  And none of these are set up to let you choose (via checkboxes or something similar) which images you want the full size versions of.

21

Post New Requests Here / IDEA: Flickr Batch Downloader extension for Firefox

« on: August 10, 2006, 09:00 AM »

I went on vacation to Sri Lanka and uploaded dozens of pictures to my Flickr pro account from a public PC to make room on my camera's memory card.  Then I got home and found out that there was no way to batch download these photos (although Flickr will sell them back to me on a DVD for $22.95).  Turns out lots of people at Flickr want a batch download feature, and a few people have developed some apps:

FlickrDown:  http://greggman.com/pages/flickrdown.htm
FlickrAide:  http://members.liwes...flickraide/index.htm
FlickrBackup:  http://sourceforge.n...mp;release_id=388388

The first two are windows only and require .net, the third one is pretty good but has limited options.  It loads your entire photostream (takes a long time if you only want a specific set) and doesn't give you the option of downloading a smaller size than the original.

Seems like it would be useful to have an OS-independent solution to this problem, something like a Firefox plugin that would add some checkboxes or something to let users download multiple photos.  Would also be nice to download multiple photos from other users' accounts than my own.

Anyone up for the task?

22

Official Announcements / Re: Should we add graphics (and other) challenges to the self-teaching school?

« on: August 10, 2006, 07:09 AM »

I'm all for free tutorials of any kind.  BTW, I've got a bunch of free programming books up over at http://textbookrevol...org/tag/programming/ if you're looking for help on a particular topic.

Jason

23

General Software Discussion / Re: New software request: Automatic digital delivery post-sale tool

« on: January 13, 2006, 05:39 PM »

Sorry, not trying to be rude.  As an occasional end user (and paid member), I simply find most of the discussions on these forums to be over my head, and I am active on several forum boards already and have to limit how many I check every day. 

Figured out that "notify" was the same as the "subscribe" box I'm used to looking for after I posted.  I was confused because the option to subscribe isn't available when you are writing a new post, for some reason.  You have to subscribe after posting.  A small flaw in otherwise good forum software.

So now I'm subscribed.  If you want more info about the suggestion, email or post the question here.

Jason

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General Software Discussion / New software request: Automatic digital delivery post-sale tool

« on: January 13, 2006, 05:17 PM »

Hi all-

I've been participating in a lively discussion over at the e-books community group on yahoo's boards (http://groups.yahoo....oup/ebook-community/).  It seems that we have uncovered a glaring hole in the software world:

Many authors are experimenting with self-publishing and the use of ebooks as a delivery method.  Many of them are struggling with automatic delivery of the ebooks after payment.  There are plenty of services that offer this, but all of them are pretty expensive--some charge $30 or more a month, others want as much as 15% of every sale.  Some of the better open source shopping carts offer digital delivery, like zen-cart.com, but these are database systems aimed at stores with multiple (hundreds or thousands) products.  It seems like overkill to install a whole mySQL/php setup just to sell one book, which is what most authors have.

I figured there must be a product out there that will do this, but in half an hour of googling, I found none that were affordable.

Does anyone out here want to take on the challenge of designing a simple, easy to use, easy to integrate shopping cart system that will do auto-delivery of books or other files post-sale, both directly from the author's page and via ebay, without a database?  Seems like it shouldn't be that hard for the talent we have here!  I can bet that it would be a top seller or drawer of new members to DC. 

If I haven't been clear enough, let me know.  I don't frequent the boards, so shoot me an email:  [DELETED]

Thanks!
Jason

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General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox Extensions: Your favorite or most useful

« on: January 13, 2006, 04:52 PM »

brother8-

Way back in December you said that you were looking for a program to save your bookmarks for viewing anywhere.  I swear by wurldbook (www.wurldbook.com), a FREE web-based app that has changed my whole computing experience for the better. 

WB is a little clunky at first, but try it for a week and you'll soon be hooked.  It's a combination RSS aggregator and bookmark manager, but it will also spin out your added bookmarks into RSS feeds if you want, for easy blogging, and let you take notes about your bookmarks, and lots more.  It does everything that power users like the people on this forum will want and a good deal more.  Far too many features to list.  The only thing it doesn't do right now is take snapshots of pages you're viewing, like furl, or do social bookmarking stuff, like del.icio.us, but there are plenty of ways to integrate those tools with firefox extensions.

My favorite part about WB is that its developer, Olav Anderson, is a truly nice guy who isn't in this for money.  If there's a bug or you want a feature improved, just shoot him an email and chances are he'll fix it for you right away. 

www.wurldbook.com  Enjoy!