October 22, 2021

🖼 Some fun with CollageIt Pro from PearlMountain

Before you furrow your brow and decry, “Scrapbooking??” let me explain. CollageIt is a very useful program for putting together panels of pictures. It can create a mosaic, a grid, or throw together images to create a scattered effect. It’s also very easy to create Before/After image sets. The panel images are very neat so you can see examples of multiple photos within a single image. CollageIt has a lot of presets, quite a few templates and configuration options. Images can have borders or masks. You can easily slip in a background. Add text. Adjust the spacing. Create margins. Add anywhere from a couple to several dozen images The past few JixiPix articles have used CollageIt to display examples of the effects. I find it very easy to use with just enough features to be powerful for the task at hand. At $9.99 it was well worth getting. I’m starting to wonder if I shouldn’t print some of these examples […]

October 21, 2021

⌘ Hot snippet action with Snippety

Snippety is a tool I stumbled across by accident, and it’s a little gem. I don’t know why I didn’t find it sooner. Snippety performs simple tasks like converting text from upper to lower to proper (title) case. It can store code fragments. It can store long blocks of text. While that sounds like SnippetsLab and TypeIt4Me, there is a neat little trick that makes Snippety a worthwhile tool in the toolbox. It can prompt for input, then perform text substitution. This falls right inline with form letters, variable substitution in code, and generating custom text within a template. For example, Snippety can prompt for a name and include that name in your text fragment. Snippety can offer a custom dropdown, such as products, then use that selection in the output text. It can also drop in the date and grab the clipboard content. It combines some of the features of SnippetsLab, with TypeIt4Me, and TextSoap, sprinkling in a dash […]

October 20, 2021

💾 The continual maintenance of Windows

Windows isn’t my choice when it comes to OS, it’s company decision. Fair enough, I can get around its shortcomings, except its hunger for hard drive space. It’s a decent Dell laptop, but the hard drive is only 512GB. That’s minuscule. 1TB should be bare minimum. But, there we are. After all the apps are installed, there was 250GB left. Not a lot to work with, but I’m not downloading files, creating content, editing videos, etc. The main tool is Visual Studio, SQL Management Studio, a web browser, and Jira. The database I use is 350MB, so you would think I could get by on that last 250GB. Sadly not. Windows continually caches and stores temp files all over the place like an ill-behaved monkey. And it never cleans or goes back and recovers that space. Now it’s a problem. I’m running out of hard drive space, so each week I have to check different folders to see if I […]

October 19, 2021

🎨 Some fun with Portrait Painter from JixiPix 🖼

Another really fun tool from JixiPix is Portrait Painter. As the name suggests it takes a photo and gives it the look and feel of a painting complete with brush strokes, stroke length, canvas texture, and color palette. As with other JixiPix tools, there is a series of Presets available. Those can give great results or can be a starting point. Using the sliders for the different strengths and lengths, you can turn a landscape image into a painting. For example, trees and clouds will have a brushed effect. The Eiffel Tower will have a suitable painted effect. Hard edges and crisp lines will be blended together to give a textured look. I’ve tried quite a few apps and plugins to achieve a painted look, including Corel Painter. They aren’t bad, but I think Portrait Painter gives the best results and is far cheaper than any other choice out there. Portrait Painter by JixiPix

October 19, 2021

👎 Intel CEO Hopes to Win Back Apple?? 🖕

I just saw this laughable comment from the Intel CEO, as reported by MacRumors. “I got to make sure that our products are better than theirs, that my ecosystem is more open and vibrant than theirs, and we create more compelling reason for developers and users to land on Intel-based products. So, I’m going to fight hard to win Tim’s business in this area.” Ridiculous. If there was even the slightest chance of this happening, in order to win back customers, the first order of business is to stop insulting them and their intelligence. Second, that ship has sailed. Apple isn’t coming back, and certainly won’t be coming back after spewing all this abuse. Apple is making chips that run circles around Intel. They have no chance of making better chips. Not only have they fallen behind Apple, they have fallen behind AMD. Intel has fallen, they need to accept that. They aren’t the dominate force they think they are. […]

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