Picnik is an excellent web-based tool for editing images online. But this application has more features than what meets the eye. The Firebox browser extension for Picnik allows you to take a one click screenshot of any webpage. This feature might fail to impress at first glance. But ask yourself a question. How difficult is it to take a screenshot of a website that does not fit in your browser window. Instead of taking multiple images of different sections of the website use the Picnik Firefox plugin. After the install simply right click anywhere on the page and click Picnik. Firefox will load a new tab which takes you to Picnik with the image pre-loaded. Edit it if you wish and download the new image to your computer. This is one of the best ways to take screenshots of long webpages.
OpenX is an open-source ad management platform. I wrote an overall review of OpenX (aka OpenAds) in my last post which discusses the benefits of the platform and also points out some of the cons. One of the most important uses of OpenX is rotating banners. Banner rotation is very easy with OpenX. But unless you know how to do it you might find yourself lost in documentation. It consists of 2 steps.
STEP 1: Launch Your Advertising Campaign
Follow steps to launch your first advertising campaign. This is explained in details in the presentation from OpenX (aka OpenAds).
STEP 2: Banner Rotation
After you have your first ad campaign up and running proceed to this step. Create a new advertiser and create a new campaign with the proper banner-size. Then select the publishing spot where you want to display the banner. If the spot already has another ad running then OpenX will automatically enter the new ad in rotation with the old one. Based on the weights or costs defined you can control how often any particular banner is displayed.
Everyday a few more applications move to the web. Image editing has seen above average trend in moving the service online. Picasa, Flickr, Image Shack have pioneered the online image editing and sharing market for quite a while. Adobe has arrived late to the game but is trying to muscle in with Photoshop Express. Photoshop Express is a ‘light’ version of Photoshop the industry wide leader of image editing applications. Using a Flash based user interface Adobe Photoshop Express looks to easily fix common problems with pictures.
Adobe Photoshop Express allows users to upload up to 2GB of photos on to one account. Categorize the images in galleries and present the galleries in cool templates. Editing features include – crop, rotate, auto correct, red-eye removal, changing brightness, contrast, focus and sharpness. It also allows you to include a few effects in one click. Some of the effects such as pop color and tint will give your pictures a bit of professional feel without any of the image editing headaches.
Photoshop Express might be backed by huge investments and several brilliant programmers. But like all other programs it needs time to reach its potential. Till that time I will continue to use Picnik.
