Diagrams are a great way to get over your message and are very effective at representing very complex ideas.
I just found a fantastic and for the most part free piece of online software that can make the most awesome charts.
Even if you don’t have the slightest bit of design skill inside you .. you will be able to make professional charts with this.
Enjoy
I found this excellent piece of software the other day that can make Videos From Pictures.
Every now and again you come accross something that is truly awesome on the internet. This is one of them. I was helping someone promote their holiday home and I made this slideshow with the software in about 45 mins.
If you want to find out how to make these things I made a squiddo lens explaining how to make videos from pictures
Gosh every now and again one comes across a little GEM of a piece of software. It’s a thing called The Jing Project. Totally free at the moment and it comes with 200 mb of space at screencast.com.
I wasn’t very sure what this software did until I actually download it and tried it out. I thought it was just another screen capture gizzmo that loaded up to your flickr account but after playing around with it for a few minutes I saw that it does 90sec video clips too. Being a web designer this is really handy.. to be able to show clients something that they are having difficulty with. OK, sure, in 90 secs you are not going to show something in a great detail. You would need camtasia for longer videos but for very quick snapshots of something it’s just perfect.
Once you have registered and download the software you need to set up some pe sets. When you install you are already given a screencast account and user name. You need to set up your own flickr account details and if you want to save to file or even ftp the movie/screenshot for storage on your server you will need to set that up with your user details.
OK so now it’s installed lets take an example. I’ll do a little movie about scribe. It’s a beautiful little extension that you can add to Firefox and blog directly from your Firefox browser. (This is another very handy utility that everyone should have by the way).
I simply clicked on the Jing button that sits on the top of the screen. Selected capture and drew out a window on the screen. Pressed the video button and started talking. After the video is complete you get an option to pick a url, which is just a direct link to the file on screencast.com, or you have the option of selecting the embed code. (You can save to a file or ftp to your server as well). I choose the embed code from screencast.com so that I could put it on this blog post.
Here’s the little video that I did. Completed and uploaded automatically to screencast.com in about 3-4 minutes. The embed code is copied into the clipboard and all you need do is paste the code into the blog.
That’s all there is to it. Sure, the video is not very polished as I did it very quickly for the demonstration, however, perfect for showing someone how to do something quickly.
The other thing you can do with Jing is take a screen capture and annotate it. You can then send the screen capture straight to a file, to ftp, or to your flickr account. Here’s something I did and sent to flickr. Then used the embed code from the clipboard to paste in here.
If you have the need to share screenshots and small videos I highly recommend you take a look at Jing. Heck it’s free 
Here’s a fantastic free software program to help you control spam and keep track of all your email accounts. Keeping track of several e-mail accounts can be annoying. Thankfully, ePrompter’s bare-bones yet effective approach helps you solve this hectic problem.
Utilizing an uncluttered interface and stone-simple setup, ePrompter does one thing and does it well. You can set the application to check up to 16 password-protected e-mail accounts, including Hotmail and AOL. Notification consists of a flag in your system tray–color coded for each different e-mail account–and a choice of five screensaver options. When you get a new message, you simply click the icon and start reading. Composing a new e-mail or responding is just as easy.
ePrompter automatically and simultaneously checks and retrieves your e-mail messages from e-mail accounts, such as AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, POP3, Earthlink, Excite, Juno, GO, Gmail, Email.com, Mail.com, Mindspring, MSN, MyWay, OneBox, Rediffmail, USA.net, and hundreds of other e-mail domains.
ePrompter not only lets you compose, forward, and reply to your retrieved messages, but also gives you the ability to delete unwanted spam or suspicious-looking mail without having to launch your e-mail program or having to go to your Web mail’s site.
ePrompter notification features include a unique rotating tray icon and a choice of five screensavers that let you know at a glance the number of new messages in each account, as well as audio alerts for new messages. ePrompter also includes autodial for automatic message retrieval.
Version 2.0 build 2 adds supports for Gmail.
For those of us that watch the news blogs you will have seen that Google has announced a Premier version of their online collaboration tools.
If you already have a gmail account you get a free version of the applications and will have probably seen links to them at the top of your gmail account. Basically you get access to a Calender, Google Talk, Spreadsheets, Documents, Photos and Easy Web Design. The main software, spreadsheets and docs, are like excel and word with the idea being that you can share and update your documents with other gmail account holders.
The apps are all pretty good and I’d say a great idea to have all your documents online so you can access them from any computer – All you need is an internet connection.
With the recent announcement of the Premier Edition of these tools I had another look at them. There is still a free version but the Premier Edition costs $50 or around £27 per person per year. I kinda thought to myself – if there is a free version why would anyone want to spend $50 for the Premier stuff!
When I read Google’s introduction pages it got me thinking. This actually is a pretty good deal for any business. When you think on the costs involved in setting up computers and software for even a small team, the costs are pretty high. You have to look at things like servers and software etc. Using Google Apps you could do away with that. As long as you have computers and an internet connection, each person in your organisation can log in and use the software. If you apply for the Premier Edition you even get your own domain attached to gmail – so anything@yourdomain.com goes to your gmail account and google are offering 99.9% uptime and support telephone numbers.
So all in all I’d say it is a great budget option for any individual or any business – especially a small start up business – to get software at rock bottom prices. For the most part the free version that comes with a gmail account would do just fine however for $50 per person per year to get domain, admin tools, support etc it’s certainly not going to break the computer budget and is worth looking into.
To get the free version all you need to do is sign up for a gmail account at www.gmail.com
If you are like me and find photoshop a hard slog. I found a great resource the other week. 101 photoshop Tips, Tricks and Tutorials on DVD.
The video DVD is done by a guy called Mark Monciardini who has won a few awards over the years. The DVD costs $97 but the great thing is you own it and it is not one of those online tutorials where you have to pay a monthly fee. Mark is a bit “hyper” shall we say – but one thing is for sure – he can certainly get the point over and you will learn all the ins and outs of photoshop from him. He does know what he is talking about.
