Nowadays, I communicate alot with people remotely (e.g. my family who lives overseas and people I outsource work to). Sometimes what I want to say cannot be communicated via email or even chat. That’s when screen captures and video captures really help.

I’ve been a huge fan of TechSmith’s Snag-It. The $49.95 cost is well worth its capabilities.

I’ve also tried TechSmith’s Camtasia video capture utility. And while I did find it useful, I just found the $299 cost to be just too high for the few times that I’d actually use it. Every so often, I’d smack my head and seriously consider buying it to solve a particular problem, baulk at the price, and then figure out a solution without needing Camtasia.

Earlier this week, a fellow geek pointed me to Jing. Jing, which interestingly enough is a product from TechSmith (makers of SnagIt and Camtasia), is totally free. It has screen capture and video capture capabilities. While the user interface is slightly different from SnagIt and Camtasia, the functionality is the same plus more! With Jing, you also get free access to Screencast (where you can host the videos you make). It’s not time limited, but it is bandwidth limited. So if you’re doing a serious amount of sharing, you will have to pay to upgrade your account.

But you don’t need to upload your captures to Screencast. You can easily save them as local files or you can move it into the clipboard (so that you can paste it on-the-fly to programs such as Photoshop).

I’m just totally amazed that such an awesome program is free. Check it out now!

I switched from Internet Explorer to Firefox many months ago. Although I test my web development with both Internet Explorer and Firefox, I do most of my casual testing using Firefox only.

In recent weeks, I’ve been trying to move my website image formats from GIF and JPG, to PNG (Portable Network Graphics) . PNG provides better color shading (can store many more shades in a file), better transparency (the only format that can handle gradient transparencies), and outstanding compression. It’s supposed to be supported by all the major browsers, and as the name implies (”portable”) it is supposed to display correctly across all browsers, platforms and computers.

Much to my dismay, I belatedly found out that Internet Explorer does not display PNG files correctly. In the examples below, I’m not even using transparency (the image’s background is a solid color, set to match the web page’s background). This is what it’s supposed to look like (and does look like in Firefox):

This is what it looks like in Internet Explorer (same page & graphics file, just viewed with a different browser) …

So, in summary, thanks Microsoft. You screwed me again!

While I love the Redoable skin, I started to get a little bored with the shades-of-white on gray look. So I decided to liven it up by introducing some shades of orange

Anyway, to match this scheme, I also re-worked the wandering.net logo!

Since the last update, I’ve been using Adobe Photoshop alot more, and while still no expert, now do most of my graphics work in it. The logo is a simple Web 2.0 style, using a color gradient, outer glow and below-the-line reflection. I’m making the PSD (Photoshop source file) available, if anyone wants to see how it’s done: wandering.net Web 2.0 logo

Looking wandering.net’s previous “traditional’ Web2.0 style, I decided it was a little too bland for me. It was basically comprised of 1 color with multiple levels of shading, creating a clear-white reflection.

I wanted to make the shading a slightly different color. To all intents, I wanted a “real-world” relfection with color bouncing off a third object. Here you’ll see the a section of where the logo as it appears on this blog…

Basically it’s the purple logo, with a shading gradient mixed with yellow. So the yellow bar below the logo looks like it’s reflecting against (and mixing with) the purple logo. At least that’s what it looks like to me

Here are Photoshop and PaintShopPro format source files for those who would like to play with creating their own logo using my modified/evolved Web 2.0-style.
Photoshop format
PaintShopPro format

I bought Adobe Photoshop CS2 (the latest version) a few months back, tried to use it, but am still sticking with PaintShopPro. I can’t seem to find anything in Photoshop that PaintShopPro doesn’t provide. Oh well, that was $300+ well spent

I decided to freshen up the look for this blog.

I’ve noticed that there’s a move away from light-backgrounds to what I would consider a “dark polished” look. After a detailed serach, I came across Dean J Robinson’s Redoable skin for Wordpress 2.x.

You might also notice that I am now using a new wandering.net logo. This is my “evolution” of the standard Web 2.0 reflection graphics, creating a small “bright” area and a shaded gradient for the rest of the logo.

Oh, and finally managed to get the tag-cloud working again, thanks to Dean’s Ultimate Category Cloud 2.0 plugin.