b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Adobe, Brother, Fujitsu and the Written Page
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Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Firefox to Support SVG
Nice tip courtesy of Tiffany B. Brown. SVG has been slow to take off but it holds a lot of promise for business and information graphics that need to be used in different mediums. One of the problems today is a lack of tools – no one wants to shell out $500 for Adobe Illustrator or $350 for CorelDraw just to play with SVG. We need are plug-ins and import/export filters for Visio, Mindmanager, ConceptMapper, and all the other apps we use to create our business graphics. The article indicates Opera is supporting SVG in their latest browser. This is progress, but until IE has support you can’t call it mainstream.
I’m going to try out Inkscape.
Firefox 1.1 to support Scalable Vector Graphics
And this makes me smile. Read the story. You can get started with SVG in a number of ways, including by hand, with Adobe Illustrator 10 and CorelDraw, or by downloading the open source SVG editor Inkscape. Previously: Fun with Scalable Vector Graphics.
Saturday, April 9, 2005
Why Research From Jupiter is Worthless
Continuing the tradition of "industry analysts" pandering to whoever pays their fees. Found via Ditherati:"We're going to see that the Internet and television are really two sides of the same sheet of paper."
Jupiter Research analyst Gary Stein, Wired News, 7 April 2005
Friday, April 8, 2005
Adobe, Brother, Fujitsu and the Written Page
A while back I wrote about two very cool products I use - Adobe Acrobat 7 Profesional and the Fujitsu ScanSnap. (Someone wrote me shortly after those posts to ask if ScanSnap and Acrobat 7 work together. Yes, they do. Swimmingly.) Both of these products represent state-of-the-art paperless office technology. Acrobat 7's comment tracking feature and its ability to flow comments and changes back into Word for further editing are "must-have" improvements for anyone who does lots of document reviews.
But the little ScanSnap is what really amazes me. I used to work for IBM and we developed page scanning solutions for book publishers and printers. What we struggled to do for $100k can now be done, better, for $400. The ScanSnap software is extremely intelligent. It recognizes blank pages and leaves them out. It's de-skews (straightens) a page that scans in crooked. It detects whether the page has been inserted head-up or head-down and automatically rotates it if needed. In short, it does everything you can imagine, and at a rate of 15 pages (30 images) per minute! It also ships with a little PDF Thumbnail viewer that lets me see the contents of PDF files in a Windoze Explorer window.
This thing is so fast and so painless to use I've changed my note-taking strategy. I used to attempt to enter everything into some sort of computer - PC, laptop, PDA. But there were many times when that was either impractical or improper. Now I don't worry about it. I carry a notepad everywhere I go. I write stuff. I draw stuff. I scribble. When I get back to the office I tear out the pages, drop them in the scanner, punch a button and have all my notes in a nice PDF file.
Then I toss the notepaper in a shredder. If I have a critical original I file it away but usually I just shred the paper. If I need the note in paper form again I print it out. If I need to change it, I mark up the printed copy, rescan it, and throw the paper away again. Sometimes I still need to convert the notes to text and have to type them in, but not very often. I'm working on getting my voice recognition software trained well enough I can just read it in, but I have a ways to go with that.
One more device that makes this easy is my Brother HL6050DN laser printer. This 25 page-per-minute device prints on both sides of the sheet and has great software that lets me shrink pages to fit 2-up (or more but it gets really small) on a sheet, which means that a 100-page document can be printed out in about a minute on 25 sheets of paper. All of this makes the paper-to-digital-to-paper-to-digital cycle a quick and relatively pain-free exercise which, for me, is about as good as it gets.
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Terry Frazier at 12:00 AM
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This Page was last updated: Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:06:57 GMT
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