SimonWaldman.net

I’ve been playing round with Picasa for Mac since the beta launch a couple of weeks ago. I was keen to try it because I’ve started to use Picasa to back up all my photos. For some reason, Flickr feels like more of an open/ communal area, while I can keep all my family photos nice and tucked away on Picasa.

Anyway, there’s plenty of reviews out there – but the simple truth is it costs you nothing to install, and it doesnt’ require you to copy all your pics into a new folder structure. However, in terms of usability, you find yourself flying around uncontrollably from one ‘roll’ to the next.

However, it does have a killer feature in its collages – see above, with a load of old pics from the Grove in Hertfordshire. You just select a batch and press the button. It works even better when you’ve come back with 100 family pics and can’t quite work out what to do with them (as with an iPod on random, the results can feel eerily edited).   And it’s dead easy to make your collage in Picasa and then import it into iPhoto so you can use it as a page in a book or calendar. Which saves hours of effort and gives you a little more freedom than some of those rather limited iPhoto templates.

Still not sure about whether to upgrade to iPhoto 09…but for now, I have a new toy to keep me happy,

I’m holed up, with a to-do list the length of a football pitch, a load of writing to do (yes, real writing, not just powerpoint!) and a sprinkling of childcare thrown in. Just enough time then to find a bit of software to reduce some of the apps clogging up my hard drive by taking out the non-Intel code out and all the silly non-English language options.

Yes, thank you XSlimmer – which does just that, effortlessly and for about £8. That felt like a hugely productive hour and Firefox already feels that little bit more sprightly as a result.

Although, to be honest, I could have saved as much disk space just chucking out some of the crappy music I never listen to. But, we all know, you can’t actually throw out music, can you?

I think I’ve mentioned it before – but if you find yourself having to read lots of .pdfs on screen, and you want to mark them up in some way, but can’t afford a full version of Adobe Acrobat, can I utterly recommend Skim - which is free: a .pdf reader which lets you highlight text, add notes, arrows, diagrams etc . I’ve been using it for a while, but the most recent version (1.1.2) is infinitely more intuitive than before. Well worth checking out….

To be combined with Yep for complete .pdf nirvana.

So – you know that your hard drive is filling up. And you also know that as you’re not going to take all your music, video, powerpoint stuff off, you need to look elsewhere to create a bit of space.

You know there’s all sorts of stuff built up over the years – but you’re just not quite sure where it is, and what’s really massive and what you can live with.

The problem is that going through the finder to work out how big everything is just takes for ever. And you can’t really get folders to sort themselves by size etc, so you have to keep pressing Ctrl-i. So boring.

Anyway – here is WhatSize just to make this whole process a bit easier. It quickly weighs everything on your harddrive -and gives you a finder-like interface where you can see the size of every folder instantly. And all of a sudden Gigs of space are cleared as you get rid of those unused GarageBand Loops etc. Yippeee. Well worth the $12.99 they’re charging.

Back at Seedcamp in the Summer, I met the guys behind what was then a very wizzy little app called Zemanta. They went on to win it, which was great, even though I felt is was a solution looking for a problem. But then, hey – what do I know?

It effectively scanned a piece of copy and then recommended tags for it, looked up relevant pics on Flickr and also found relevant stories from around the web and articles on Wikipedia.

Anyway, this morning, I got an e-mail announcing that Zemanta is now ready to try out. It works as a Firefox plug in and then provides suggestions along side the editing window for Blogger, or WordPress (yes, even WordPress when you’re hosting it yourself). The screen grab above gives you an idea of how it looks.

It also has a terribly neat thing – that you can see above where it provides links to Wikipedia articles or company home pages, and you just click ‘Apply all’ and they all get edited in.

It’s terribly neat – and unsurprisingly seems to work much better as your posts get longer.

Definitely worth a try.