Picture This, Easily
As you may know you can make icons manually out of ordinary JPEG and bitmap images, by fiddling around with the size and format. It’s easy enough, just a bit time-consuming but why bother? Here’s a simple one-click solution, called Easy PictureIcon. Just select your image and it is automatically converted to the three commonest sizes (16 x 16, 32 x 32 and 48 x 48 pixels). All you have to do is decide if you want to compress trim or fit, select background transparency, and where to save it. Go on, give your desktop a makeover, and don’t forget, you can change the icons in most applications simply by replacing them with one of your choosing, providing it’s the same size and has the same filename.
New AVG Annoyance
It’s hard to get too upset with AVG, after all they have been providing us with top-notch virus protection for free these last few years, but the release of AVG version 8 has annoyed a lot of otherwise loyal users. Over the last few weeks popups have been appearing that appear to suggest that AVG was no longer free and to stay protected you had to upgrade to a paid-for version. The fact is AVG 8 is still free for personal use, but of course AVG would rather you purchased the better-specified commercial version – well, you can’t blame them for trying. For the record the free version can be downloaded from http://free.avg.com
The latest problem is a component in AVG 8, called Link Scanner, which has been driving some website owners potty. The idea is when you do a web search it pre-checks all of the links, looking for malicious sites. The trouble is websites get bombarded with fake hits from PCs running AVG 8, clogging up the web with pointless and wasteful traffic. Some users also suggest that the Link Scanners slows their PC down, which could well be the case on older machines. Read more
Fast Batch Resize Crop and Watermark
Here’s a solution looking for a problem. Let’s suppose you have a quantity of images that you want to crop and resize in a hurry, and at the same time, convert them from one image file format to another (jpeg, png, gif or tiff), and while you are at it, you also want to add a time/date stamp and a copyright watermark.
We’ve all been there and usually the only way to do it is one at a time, using an image editing program, well not any more! All you need is iKnow Batch Crop, and that’s really all you need to know. It’s incredibly easy; there are just three simple steps. Step One asks you to create a folder to store your modified pix in. In Step Two you select the picture you want to process and in Step Three you decide the shape, picture format, time/date and watermark, click OK and it’s done!
