Size Matters - Foxit PDF Reader

Continued...

As I said in the last post I hate blotted big programs.

Adobe is famous for this kind of memory hogging applications. Adobe Acrobat 6 was another sheer winner of slowness. How long does yours take to load?

May be this is because of their Plugin Architecture just like in Photoshop. Sure, plugins are handy. But how many do you need just to read a PDF document?

I wonder why Adobe had to keep all its programs so big. Why all the plugins are enabled by default? Why at least Acrobat Reader can’t be small and fast? Version 6 was a pain and the new Adobe Reader 7 is still 19 MB in size. So, like Photoshop I gave up that too.

Insted I use a small program called Foxit PDF Reader. Highly recommended piece of work.

Total installation is below 1MB mark. It loads furiously fast and got all the features an average user ever need do with a PDF file. what are the things I missed when I am not using Adobe Reader. Nice graphics? functionality ? I recall none. It's only the Adobe name if I missed anything. Go figure here

I love Adobe and respect what they have brought to the industry as PDF.

But again I don’t use Acrobat.

Features galore but... - Adobe Photoshop

As long as I can remember I was very particular about the size of the software I use. The bare bone size of the installation, the application and the heap exe allocation when it runs make all that matter to me to favour one app over the other.

I know we’ve got Ferrari speed breaking machines nowadys but I still get bugged if an application exe grows bigger than 2 MB limit. Remember the notion “Small is Beautiful” It sure is. For this argument some further reading can be found here

Welcome to Adobe Photoshop.

It’s truely a marvelous piece of work. It may be the Industry Standard. I respect and I have a fair for what its capabilities are. But its application exe size was 15MB when I last saw it. Installation is some 165MB. Oops!

So I don't use it.

I can give you hundreds of good examples that how can an application be developed in small, streamlined and effective manner. I did a search in my local machine and found nearly 120 odd various utilities smaller than 100 KB. Not bad. Assembly Language is one hech of a way to write these blistering applications.

I love and want to use Photoshop but still don’t because of this. It's too BIG, too SLOW to work on, features full but a simple selection is cumbersome. As a result I get all my graphics needs done elsewhere. No pain.

Words Breeze - IntelliComplete Pro

Wow! This is a total surprise! I am thrilled!

I’ve been using CIC WordComplete in my Palm PDA for faster typing for years. Since I do these most of blog typing with my CLIE SJ33 I missed this WordComplete feature whenever I do my typing in the PC. Those days are over.

Look at the demo here.


Today by surprise when I was looking for something else I found this exact replica of WordComplete as IntelliComplete for PCs. Done by a company called FlashPeak. Thank you guys, from today onward don’t ask me that how I ever lived without this.

From DTP to Web Design - NetObjects Fusion 1998

I was into web design in 1998.

All the design tools I've known were Aldus Freehand & Adobe Photoshop by then. They were purely for Desktop Publishing and offered nothing else. So designing for web? I was wondering where to start from. Even the term “Web Design” was not heard of. Graphics king Photoshop didn't know how to ''Save for Web'' in either JPEG or GIF standards properly. I've used to the Freehand's freedom and the precision for layouts. So HTML layouting was a daunting task. WYSIWYG editors were none or hard to come by. I call it the Dark Age. I could have almost given up my future career unless this sheer beauty came along.

Welcome to NetObjects Fusion. It has secured me a future and a way of life which I once dreamed. Bingo!

Though later I was switched to Dreamweaver for my design work, NetObjects Fusion was really a good tool for any new kid into the web design.

Purify your noisy images - PureImage

Consumed and obsessed with Digital Cameras, then you’d probably need this. Specially if you take many shots in low light conditions, or else that your camera has a taste for noise and heavy image compression algorithms. It is messy that how noisy our images can get sometimes.

Well, meet PureImage. I’ve been looking for this baby for years and Mediachance has just released what I’ve been looking for in a light package. Just as the name says it will make your images much more purified, enhance colours and saves some disk space for you. Go give it a shot. Let the images speak for themselves.

Ones and zeros, bits and pieces of my digital lifestyle

Years have elapsed since I started my love affair with computers, or I would rather say with the software which reside in those. I have grown up with these weird combinations of bits and pieces, ones and zeros that eventually forms a world of possibilities.

From Justin Frankel’s WinAmp to industry mammoth Adobe Photoshop have paved my way to a passion which I never figured that how far this rabbit hole would go.

Well, I ain’t complaining.  Since it was a nice journey and I am still continuing. So this is gonna be a lovely  appreciation for all those code writers, software makers who have made possible my life unimaginably joyous ride.

I have spent years, searching, finding, installing and learning those. So I may comment, give links, post reviews of those software which I found irresistible hoping that it would be helpful to someone, someway.

Enjoy!