Archive for May, 2008

Curl Border Effect in under one minute

Posted by admin on May 16, 2008  |  No Comments

Sometimes, certain photo effects grab your attention to the point of mesmerizing you. That’s pretty much what happened when I saw the Curl Border effect, as illustrated below:

Curl Border Effect with Drop Shadow in under one minute with PhotoScape

If you like this effect, let me tell you how you, too, could create this kind of visual beautification (in my humble opinion):

1. Go to the Photoscape web site.

2. Click the Free Download tab to get to the Photoscape download page.

3. Download and install the latest version of Photoscape. (At the time of this writing, the latest version is 3.0.)

As far as I can tell, there’s no adware, no malware and no kind of annoying reminder or marketing message associated with this incredible photo editor. The good folks from Photoscape would appreciate a donation, but they are not being obnoxious about it.

As soon as you have Photoscape installed and opened the photo to which you want to apply the Curl Border, start your timer.

With the Home tab selected (next to Object, Crop and Region), click on the frame effects drop-down and select Curl Border.

Stop the timer. You’re done.

Yes, I know, the topic of this blog entry could probably be somewhat misleading if you’re a die-hard Photoshop whiz who wants to manipulate every single pixel by hand…then again, why would you want to do that when you could just fire up Photoscape and let it do the hard work for you?

Just for fun, click CONTROL-Z to undo the effect you just applied to your photo. Then scroll all the way to the top of the frame effects drop-down (No Frame) and select that option. With the focus still being on the frame effects drop-down, press the down-arrow key on your keyboard to step through one effect at the time. Each effect gets applied individually; you won’t be adding effect onto effect onto effect, etc. Doing this will give you a great idea of what’s possible within Photoscape.

Of course, there’s so much more that you can do with Photoscape, for example, take screen captures, batch-process photos, resize and rename photos, print photos, combine and merge several photos into one…and much, much more.

Note:  Currently, Photoscape is only Microsoft Windows compatible (Microsoft Windows 98/Me/NT/2000/XP/Vista).

PS: The photo used in this blog entry was repurposed from http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/imageservices/. The name of the photo is Happy Mother’s Day from the Powerhouse Museum. The photographer is Paula Bray. To the best of my knowledge, using the photo for educational purposes should bnot violate the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0.

 

JavaScript String Functions . . . the easy way

Posted by admin on May 14, 2008  |  No Comments

Has it been a while since you’ve had to reverse a string in JavaScript? How about counting the number of occurrences of a specific sub-string within a string? Or converting a string to hex? And vice versa?

If you’re like me, you don’t deal with JavaScript string functions all day all the time, so you tend to forget some of the specific JavaScript string function syntax from time to time. Especially when you’re dealing with C#, T-SQL, VBScript and ActionScript at the same time.

Thanks to Marianne Wartoft, you can get just about all of your JavaScript string function needs fulfilled at www.string-functions.com.

The gist of it: For any JavaScript string function, there is an online tool that will perform the desired function right there in your web browser. Obviously, if you’re really desperate, you can always View Source the page code in any of those online tools to see how it’s done.

Hats off to Marianne for maintaining such an awesome niche site. The JavaScript string functions on her site include:

Reverse a String
Calcualte String Length
Count the Occurrences of a Substring within a String
Convert a String to Uppercase or Lowercase
HTML-Encode a String
HTML-Decode a String
Convert a String to Hex
Convert Hex to String
URL-Encode a String
URL-Decode a String
Convert Hex Values to RGB
Convert RGB Values to Hex