Cool Mac Gear

DEVONtechnologies' ThumbsUp is a simple and fast Mac OS X drag-and-drop utility to create thumbnail images of graphics files individually or in batches It supports all image popular graphics formats including Quicktime and PDF documents).

This is useful for anyone who needs to make quick thumnail images, but with version 3.0, ThumbsUp adds the happy facility of also being able to convert images full-sized from one format to another -- notably OS X 10.2 PDF screenshots to more useful formats like JPEG, GIF, or PNG.

In addition size, quality and antialiasing are configurable.

To install ThumbsUp, mount the downloaded disk image and drag ThumbsUp into the Applications folder or whereever else you like. If you're going to use it a lot, it's convenient to ad ThumbsUp to the Dock or to create an alias on the desktop.

To use ThumbsUp, just drop a an image or a batch of images onto the application icon in the Dock or the Finder, and thumbnails or copies will be created to the size and filename extensions specified in the program preferences. Quality, JPEG compression, sharpness, and antialiasing are also configurable. The copied images are created in the same folder as the original images.

Preference settings include:
• General:
- Extension added to the name of thumbnail files
- Image format of thumbnails (TIFF, JPEG, GIF, PNG)
- Quit when done (only if the application is launched by a drag & drop operation)

• Sizing
Maximal width and height of thumbnail images or scale images by percentage If you set scaling to 100%, you're able to use ThumbsUp to convert PDF screenshots easily to other image formats

• Compression:
JPEG compression (the higher the quality is, the bigger the resulting files are)

• Antialiasing:
No, low or high antialiasing of scaled images

• Sharpen:
Light, medium, strong or no sharpening of images

• If you want to modify the preferences and"Quit when done" is active, launch the application without dropping images onto it. Cicking on the Dock icon of ThumbsUp displays to preferences panel.

Known bugs & limitations:
• No progress indiciation, no log, no support for folders

New in version 3.0:
• Version 3.0 saves thumbnails as TIFF, GIF, JPEG or PNG and let users scale images not only by absolute width and height values but also by percentage. When set to 100 percent, as this makes ThumbsUp a powerful automatic image converter.
• TIFF, GIF, JPEG and PNG formats for thumbnails available
• Option to sharpen thumbnails (light/medium/strong) added
• Clicking on the Dock icon displays the preferences panel
• Default thumbnail size changed to 128 x 128 pixels
• Preferences and ReadMe revised

I tried ThumbsUp last evening, and it works perfectly. It sttarts almost instantly, and the conversion/copy process is quick. This screenshot of the preferences window was converted from PDF to JPG using ThumbsUp. Since it's free, only a tiny download, and uses minimal system resources, there is no reason not to have this slick and useful little utility on your hard drive, ready to convert those pesky PDF screen captures.

System requirements:
Runs on Mac OS X 10.1 or higher

ThumbsUp is freeware

For more information, visit:
http://www.devon-technologies.com

Updated My iBook to OS X 10.2.3

Following up on my comments yesterday on the lousy USB input device support inder OS X on my iBook, I tried upgrading from Jaguar version 10.2.1 to 10.2.3 yesterday afternoon. The upgrade went fine, but effected no change in the system's ability to support tandem dragging and clicking with two pointing devices simultaneously (which has worked under all Jaguar versions I've used on the Pismo PowerBook). The next step will be maybe to install 10.2.6. Versions 10.2.4 and 10.2.5 were widely reported to be problematical on iBooks, causing problems ranging from broken batteries to modem instability. I haven't heard a whole lot about such issues with 10.2.6, so perhaps the bugs have been squashed.

Floppy

From Peter Vanacore

Hi Charles,

I believe some of your readers were looking for a floppy drive for OSX. I had not used my USB floppy for a while, but I needed it the other day for my Pismo. I have an USB Omni Floppy Disk Drive, Model No: USB-F3501. I just plugged it in and to my surprise, it worked great. I picked up the drive a bout 18 months ago at CompUSA when it was on sale. It worked fine in OS 9. I did not need to add any drivers.

Pete Vanacore

Hi Pete;

I’m actually the one looking for a floppy drive for my iBook. :-)

Charles

Re: Attachment Trouble

From Jay Scheuerle

Hi Charles.

My experience with AOL is that it accepts files well that are encoded with either Windows (Base64/MIME) or Unix (UUEncode). It does not handle AppleDouble or Macintosh (BinHex) well at all.

Apple's Mail program uses one of the latter and gives you no option to change it. That's the sole reason I gave up using it.

- Jay Scheuerle

The OS X Odyssey archives may be accessed here:
http://www.applelinks.com/news/odyssey/

CM

Charles W. Moore