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Software Review: Vertus Fluid Mask 3

Charles McNally — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:00:27 +0000

I was a little hesitant when I signed up for this review. A masking program? I’ve seen quite a few masking programs that were hard to work with, with steep learning curves, bad tools, poor quality and more. I went in to it with pretty low expectations, to be honest, so I was blown away when I encountered the level of quality in Fluid Mask.

Most of the time I create cutouts using photoshop layer masks and spend a lot of time zoomed in up close. It’s seemed to work pretty well — I thought I was doing a good job, and fairly quickly. That was before I tried Fluid Mask…

Wow. Just wow. All that time I wasted! All those images that could’ve looked so much better! I wish I’d discovered Vertus Fluid Mask 3 sooner. (...)
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New Searchable Scanned Docs and a Common Screw Up

Michael Alexander — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 14:06:05 +0000

I mention Google so often that many people must think I’m getting paid by the company. Just for the record, they don’t pay me. I just can’t help myself–Google is always doing cool things.

Recently, Google said it is now able to use optical character recognition to index scanned documents stored as Adobe PDFs. Previously, the company rarely scanned docs because it couldn’t be sure of the search results. According to Google’s blog:

While we’ve indexed documents saved as PDFs for some time now, scanned documents are a lot more difficult for a computer to read. Scanning is the reverse of printing. Printing turns digital words into text on paper, while scanning makes a digital picture of the physical paper (and text) so you can store and view it on a computer.

To take a test drive of this new-new thing, click on this search query–Steady Success in a Volatile World–and you’ll see an excerpt of the PDF doc in the search results followed by the View as HTML link.

Convert scanned PDFs to text

Tech site Digital Inspiration has an angle on this new feature worth mentioning:

If you have scanned PDF files on your hard drive but lack OCR software, you can still convert them into recognizable text, DI says.

Create a folder on your Website (say, your site is abc.com) and upload all your PDFs to the same folder. Then, create a public Web page that links to all the PDFs. Wait for the Google searchbots to spider your stuff. After that’s done, type site:abc.com/pdf filetype:pdf to see your PDFs as HTML.

Lifehacker adds this twist to converting PDFs to HTML:

You can use Google’s Webmaster Tools to reign in what gets scanned and indexed on your site, although you should assume anything you put online can be found by those looking for it.

Can you tell what’s wrong with Lifehacker’s sentence above? Read “21 Words That Sound Alike but Mean Different Things.” What wrong in this picture?

Lunascape 5 Genisis. Yep, It’s a Browser!

Jim Creech — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 23:00:39 +0000

OK, who here enjoys developing for all the browsers out there? Especially CSS and IE6! What a match made in heaven. I’ve been developing now for almost 12 years and nothing has ever irritated me more than having to develop for so many browsing platforms.(...)
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Forum Software

Oli — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 17:33:18 +0000

Just a quick post to ask if there would be interest in a forum here at Tutorial Blog, its something I’ve been thinking of adding for a while to let our readers converse better as the blog comments aren’t an ideal solution. Here we roundup the possible options for adding a forum to your site.

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Top 10 Wordpress Plugins

Oli — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 17:15:21 +0000

Wordpress is a great content management system (CMS), I love it so much I chose to use it on tutorialblog. Out of the box it works great but you can add so much functionality to it via the use of plugins. Here we round up the most useful to you …

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Web Applications for Designers

Oli — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 13:27:30 +0000

While working as a web designer I have come to rely on a number of web applications that make my job easier, they are simple to use, need no software installed on my machine and provide value – here I cover some of the very best tools that you should know..

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Font Management Software

Oli — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 14:57:16 +0000

Font Management Software is a utility that facilitates the handling of the font on your computer. A font management software can give the user a detailed overview of all the fonts installed, make installing or uninstalling fonts easier and much more.
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