thingoid

I’m sure I’ve got a short attention span. And I guess I can be easily distracted by pretty, shiny things. So although I haven’t really begun to get to grips with Zotero (still trying it out), I’m already moving on…

My latest distraction is a handy complement to the Snipshot online image editor that I thumbsed-up in June. Gliffy is a tool for making vector diagrams. You know, all that flow-charting / floor-planning / UML-ing / network-diagramming / general-jiggery-pokery that you can do with Visio, OmniGraffle and the like.

There’s a reasonable set of shape templates, all the usual features for editing properties of shapes, and being an online tool, it’s got the collaboration and online publishing features that you’d expect. You can also export diagrams as JPEG, PNG, and very cool SVG.

They don’t have a pricing model as yet, but it appears that there will be a subscription version with all the attachments (including the thing for getting stones out of horses’ hooves) for the corporate presentation-making power user, and a free, ad supported Gliffy with limited feature set for the miserable skinflints like me.

Now this looks very, very good:

Zotero is a free, easy-to-use research tool that helps you gather and organize resources (whether bibliography or the full text of articles), and then lets you to annotate, organize, and share the results of your research. It includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote)—the ability to store full reference information in author, title, and publication fields and to export that as formatted references—and the best parts of modern software such as del.icio.us or iTunes, like the ability to sort, tag, and search in advanced ways. Using its unique ability to sense when you are viewing a book, article, or other resource on the web, Zotero will—on many major research sites—find and automatically save the full reference information for you in the correct fields.

Will it have the folks at EndNote shaking in their shoes? Probably not. But for many a struggling scholar, the price is certainly right!

Seriously have a look at this thing—it may not be the EndNote-killer but if it’s half as good as they say, it could well be the killer extension for Firefox 2.

Unfortunately I don’t have Firefox 2 setup on the office beast just yet, so I’m leaving right now to install this beauty at home…

[via Linux.com]

Well Photoshop it aint’, but Snipshot doesn’t intend to be. It’s just a site that provides “Basic editing tools like crop, rotate, resize”.

Keep this one in the toolbox.

[via templatedata]

Well it looks like I was right: old adventure games never die - they just get a facelift and come back as freeware.

A mob calling themselves Infamous Adventures has just released a remake of the classic Kings Quest III graphical adventure game with the following new features:

• All 16 color backgrounds remade into stunning VGA graphics
• Enhanced Close up cut-scenes and dialogue pictures help immerse you into what is known as the first plot driven chapter of the King’s Quest series.
• Original music by professional music composer(s)
• Re-experience the adventure with a stunning new interface (no more typing) And if you never played well, you’ll probably enjoy it anyway.

Personally I don’t see that “no more typing” is necessarily an improvement, but I’m sure they’ve come up with a good interface that will still allow for a rich player experience. The screen images are certainly pretty lavish:

Infamous Adventures claims to be

a game development group focused on bringing adventure games back into the mainstream by updating classic adventure games as well as creating new masterworks of our own.

Their site also points to a group called Anonymous Game Developers Interactive, a “team of dedicated members … devoted to bringing adventure games back into style”, who have a couple of older projects I hadn’t heard about previously: remakes of Kings Quest I and Kings Quest II.

Cool.

If you’ve never played the Kings Quest games before, here’s you chance to have a bash at some genuine gaming history, as the AGD Interactive folks explain:

King’s Quest: Quest for the Crown, a revolutionary game designed by Roberta Williams and released in 1984, epitomizes the adventure gaming experience. This game was the first of its kind that allowed the player to interact in an entirely original 2.5D world, and can be credited as the game that started graphic adventure gaming on the PC altogether. King’s Quest was not only groundbreaking, but also history in the making, and was followed by seven more games bearing the King’s Quest title.

So download ‘em and have a go – they’re tons of fun.

Hmm, I think I can see another wasted weekend (or three) coming up…

SketchUp is one of those cool tools that even design-impaired plonkers like me can get excited about. It’s a 3D modelling tool that’s not quite CAD, but much more than a toy. But no matter how interesting it sounded I was never quite excited enough to fork-over the US$500 to get hold of it.

Liked it so much …

Well it appears that Google also liked it. In fact they liked it so much that they bought the company (@Last Software). And yesterday they released a free-for-personal-use version of SketchUp (more…)

An arbitrary top twenty

Here is a collection of twenty programs that you might want to try. Are they “the best”? Well, that all depends on what your priorities are but they are all pretty good. (more…)

Free PDF!

Most Windows applications that can print can also produce PDF files. Here is a way to produce PDF files for free. The secret is that a PostScript printer driver produces a PostScript file as output. Freely available utilities can then be used to convert the PostScript output to PDF.

It’s even easier on Linux and Macintosh. And OpenOffice.org does it too. (more…)

An arbitrary top twenty

It’s great to hear about some handy tool or program that you haven’t tried before. And it’s all the better if you can get it gratis. This top twenty was collected from the opinions of friends and workmates who were asked to suggest their favourite useful programs. The top twenty were chosen from those that:

• cost nothing,
• don’t require “registration” of any sort,
• are fully functional and may be used indefinitely, and
• are not known spyware (or any other nasty).

The list is completely arbitrary - it is neither review nor recommendation - but hopefully there’s something here that you will want to test-drive.

(more…)

Are you thinking about taking the plunge and installing an open source operating system? Or would you prefer to enter open source waters more gradually? Either way, you need to consider a few issues before you do. (more…)

Making webpages available offline - How to save websites to your hard disk for later viewing (more…)