a4apphack

Optimizing images would always be a tedious task if you are not utilizing a good image processing tool. Certain resizing tools promise that the output images to be optimized, but what they really do is to reduce the clarity of the image and hence its size. But there are certain tools like RIOT, which goes into depths of resampling to perform the actual image optimization.

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I was hunting badly for the best screenmockup or prototyping softwares available for several years. A tool which has tons of drag-n-droppable UI components, categorized, easy to use, light weight, are the features I was looking for.

Balsamiq Mockups is a rich mockscreen creator app which has tons and tons of UI components available (If you still want more, there are options import components! ). This app is available in Online(free!) as well as in Desktop version(79$), and other versions for Confluence, JIRA, XWiki.

I had previously reviewed a portable screen mockup software, Pencil, but Balsamiq Mockups definitely stands out as it is powerful and fully loaded compared to its alternatives. This app is loaded heavily with 75 built-in UI controls and more than 100 icons. Additional controls can be downloaded from MockUpsToGo Site which has many user contributed controls which can be imported to our editor and reused.

MockScreen Controls

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You might have seen ‘Enter the characters displayed in the image’ and so would you have seen some audio Captcha.

But some think beyond usual…

Pet Captcha Screenshot (Click to Enlarge)

This captcha is found in Tablefy. (On 21-Feb-2009). Here, we are asked to select all the cat photos to prove human. When you hover over the thumbnail you can see the enlarged image from petfinder site and a link to click, ‘Adopt Me’. These guys should definitely be animal lovers

So if you are planning to integrate captcha in your site, try some new ideas. (And not one of these )

Comparer is a tool which compares properties of the two files and displays the results. The advantage of this tool is we can choose the properties used for comparing the files. It uses Total Commanders content plugins like image size, digicam exif, crypto hash calc, etc. as parameter which displaying the comparison results. This tool can help people who keep multiple versions of the edited files at different folder locations and with the same name. Read the rest of this entry »