One of the most useful software accessories you can install on your computer is a good, reliable screen capture utility. Screen capture utilities let you grab a portion of whatevet’s on your computer screen. They are helpful for storing snippets of information in Onfolio, grabbing a portion of your computer screen to email error messages to the appropriate technical support address, and capturing content to redisplay it (as I did with my Firefox problem).

My favorite screen capture utility is Snag-It. It’s easy to buy online, easy to install and easy to use.

It integrates seamlessly with Internet Explorer and places these buttons at the top of Internet Explorer that allows you to instantly grab all or part of a screen (this image was captured with Snag-It). You can configure how much of the screen to capture (I use the “Region” setting which allows me to draw a box with my mouse and capture everything in the box) and how to output the image (I output to my Windows clipboard so I can paste the image wherever I want it).

It is also a stand alone program, accessible from the Start Menu, that allows you to capture any desktop content, whether internet content or otherwise.

My only mild complaint about Snag-It is that the developer updates it very often and you have to pay for significant upgrades (“maintenance upgrades” are free). It seems like I get an email every month or so offering me an updated version for a price. It’s a great program, so I pay to upgrade to every other version or so.

Snag-It is $40 for new users. Upgrades are cheaper.

Technorati Tags:
software review, screen capture

The web is in a tither about the pending release of Google Talk, an IM program by everyone’s favorite company. IM, or instant messaging, programs allow users to text message and share files over the internet more or less instantly. Increasingly, these programs are expanding their features to add audio chat, video chat and even VOIP telephone calls.

I’ve used IM programs a little. I started out with ICQ a few years ago, then migrated to AOL IM (or AIM for short), and ended up using Windows Messenger (now called MSN Messenger to fool the feds into thinking that it’s not embedded in Windows). Yahoo also has a widely used program. Now there’s a new player in the game, and anything by Google will quickly become a force to be reckoned with.

Why did I keep changing IM programs? It’s simple, I was chasing the user base. Since these programs do not communicate with each other, I kept changing programs based on which one I thought most people I wanted to communicate with were using. Let me be clear about this: generally speaking, these programs use proprietary protocols that only allow you to communicate with other users of the same program. If you’re using MSN Messenger, you can’t send an IM to someone who uses AIM, etc. This is why these programs have not and will not be widely accepted by adults and businesses. Some businesses use security risks as the reason not to implement IM, but companies said the same thing about email back in the day.

Why don’t they allow interconnectivity? Because they are competing based on user base and not on features and reliability. AIM has most of the AOL users (though you do not have to be an AOL customer to use it) and a large base of other users. Yahoo (the only company that can compete head to head with Google based on anything other than a large war chest of dollars) has a big user base. Microsoft has a program that is embedded into Windows, a large user base and a war chest of billions it can use to remain in the game. Each of these companies wants to win the user base war. Sharing protocols and allowing interconnectivity would turn IM programs into a commodity. These companies who are competing to become the one-stop internet shop for the masses do not want IM programs to become a commodity.

Kids are better at technology than adults and will go to great lengths to communicate away from the ears and eyes of adults. While this creates headaches for parents, it ensures a regular supply of users for all of the major IM programs. If a kid has to install 2 or 3 IM programs to communicate with her friends, she’ll do it. If the IT department at my firm has to do that, forget it. I’ll be told to use email and forget about the 2 minutes that I might save if I could use an IM program.

Then there’s the over-40 problem. For most people over 40 sending an email attachment or uploading a photo to Flickr is a major technological accomplishment. Trying to get these same people to understand and install an IM program and then to deal with it when they can’t communicate with Aunt Jane, who uses a different program? That’s a recipe for failure.

Until IM programs become like telephones, where the provider and the manufacturer of the telephone have nothing to do with who you can and can’t call, IM will simply not be adopted by grown-ups and businesses. At least not until today’s teenagers grow up and run companies or, more importantly, IT Departments.

So I may install Google Talk when it’s released tomorrow. But if I do, it’s only because I am curious. It won’t be because I think I’ll be able to communicate with anyone I know. To do that, I’ll have to use the telephone.

Dwight Silverman is blogging about Google Talk and Download Squad has a review and some screen shots.

Technorati Tags:IM, google talk

One of the problems with having a web site is that what looks good today looks awful tomorrow, as tastes and technology change. There is nothing more depressing than knowing that you want to change the look of your site, but also knowing that you have hundreds of pages that will have to be changed individually to facilitate the new look. Yes, CSS (which I now use religiously) can help a lot in this regard. But many older pages, including until last month all of mine, either don’t use styles at all or have the styles embedded in the page itself (talk about defeating the purpose).

So when I decided to update the look of Newsome.Org, that was one thing, since it only has about 3 pages to worry about. But when I decided to update the look of the Err Bear Music page, that was another thing altogether. The EBM pages contain a main page, 5 index pages and literally hundreds of song pages, one for each of my songs. It would take days and days and days to reconfigure each page individually- I know this because I have done it twice in the past. This time I decided to see if technology could make it easier, and boy did it.

There are a number of search and replace programs that will work with html files. I tried several of them and found Alias Find and Replace to be the best. It made a 30 hour job a 2 hour job, and the only reason it wasn’t a 30 minute job is because I had to figure out what to tell the program to replace to get what I was after.

The hard part was the individual song pages. Those pages are identical except for the lyrics part in the middle. After a little trial and error, I changed hundreds of my song pages in a few minutes in 3 steps. First I used “Search & Replace Blocks” to remove all of the header tags and embedded styles in favor of a uniform header and a reference to a remote style sheet (which will now allow me to globally make any subsequent changes to all pages merely by modifying the style sheet). Second, I used “Search & Replace Blocks” again to replace everything in each page before the beginning of the lyrics with the new code from my new page template. Third, I again used “Search & Replace Blocks” to replace everything after the lyrics with the new code from my new page template. Worked like a charm.

Alias Find and Replace works with all kinds of files, so it’s not only a time saver for html files, but also any other files where you need to make the same change a lot of times.

It’s a great timesaver and I highly recommend it.