Carol Gering » Widgets and Tools

Cool Iris as a presentation tool

carol — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 21:08:39 +0000

I admit it: I love Cool Iris. It’s just so elegant and beautiful.

If you’re unfamiliar with Cool Iris, it’s a browser plugin that currently works with Firefox (Windows XP/Vista, Mac, and Linux), Internet Explorer, Safari (Mac) and Flock. It allows you to preview images and video on an “infinite wall” and then enlarge any that catch your eye. The interface is an approximation of scrolling through items on an iPhone. A key benefit is the speed with which you can sort through a large quantity of images and enlarge specific images—much faster, for example, than clicking through sequential photo pages on Flickr.

Web sites have to be enabled to work with Cool Iris (examples of enabled sites are Flickr, Hulu, Facebook, Google Images, YouTube), but you can also use Cool Iris to view images on your own computer.

As enamored as I am with the interface, it hadn’t yet occurred to me that one might use it as a presentation tool…until I followed a link from Chris Lott’s blog to the Open Ed Conference presentation by Alan Levine. What a great idea! This could be useful in either my digital photography class or my desktop publishing class when I’m lecturing on elements of design or composition. Besides being significantly faster than the media tools I normally use for presentation, it will let me easily jump from image to image rather than (only) viewing them sequentially. I’m excited to give it a try!

Using Acrobat for OCR

carol — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 21:21:09 +0000

I was fortunate to participate in the National Education Computing Conference (NECC) at the end of June. As to be expected, the sessions I attended were a mixed bag—some useful and informative, others not so much. The most practical session I attended was a 3-hour lab on Delivering Curriculum and Building Portfolios with Acrobat PDFs. I’m looking forward to more experimentation with Acrobat Portfolios! In the meantime, here’s a quick tip that I learned…

Acrobat Professional comes with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) built in! Amazing… and why didn’t I know that before?!

Here’s how it works:

open a pdf document
from the Document menu, select OCR text recognition > recognize text using OCR
choose the page range you want to read and click OK

You get a series of slider bars that indicate activity, and then…nothing. At least, nothing apparent.

go to File > Export > Word Document
save the file

Voila! When you open the file using MS Word, you’ll see the OCR results. In the simple test I did, it seemed to work pretty well. Note that you can also export from pdf to a word document without doing optical character recognition, but you only get an image of the page rather than editable text.

Color Scheme Based on a Photo

carol — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 01:30:57 +0000

I love this! Adobe Kuler—an online color-scheme generator—now allows you to create a custom color palette based on a single photo. You can upload a photo directly into Kuler, or use photos from Flickr (your own, your contacts’ photos, or other people’s photos). To access this feature, go to the Kuler web site and click on “Create.”

Here’s an example of one of my photos and the matching color scheme:

Adobe Online Tools

carol — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 03:19:53 +0000

Adobe made news last week by releasing a beta version of a web-based photo editor, Photoshop Express. They also created a significant stir with over zealous terms of use—implying that Adobe can use your images in any way they please. According to multiple sources, Adobe heard the outcry; they’re currently working with their legal department to rewrite the terms document. Photoshop Express follows other online photo editing tools like Picnik, and photo storage sites like Flickr. They trumped Picasa by offering more storage space (2 GB of free storage), but neglected to add the capacity to organize with tags. I haven’t yet found any compelling reason to create a Photoshop Express account, other than pure curiosity.

While I was looking at Photoshop Express and reading assorted reviews, I came across this article on ReadWriteWeb about Adobe’s growing set of online tools, like:

Buzzword (a competitor for Google Docs)
Share (a competitor for Scribd)
myFeedz that uses rss feeds to make customized reading recommendations based on your interests
Brio web conferencing software

Adobe Labs has been busy! I had no idea. As with Photoshop Express, none of these tools appear to be the first on the block. They do have a certain elegance in design, but I’m not sure that elegance and the Adobe name are enough to attract throngs of users. As ReadWriteWeb speculated, combining all these tools into a one-stop suite might, however, give them a significant edge over single-tool competitors. Several of these tools have potential for educators…something to keep an eye on.

Handy-dandy web tool

carol — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 01:46:01 +0000

Snapmania has a web-based tool for removing unwanted people from your photos. Titled Tourist Remover, it promises to clean up your vacation shots. Take multiple photos of a monument or landmark—ignoring passing cars and people. Upload your photos into Tourist Remover, and presto! The web-based tool identifies which things stay the same in all photos and which things change, then removes the transient elements.

This tool has been around for awhile…I just hadn’t come across it yet. Sure, you could do the same thing in Photoshop, but not in such an automated fashion.