ON Computers
BOB & JOY SCHWABACH
Viewzi.com is a new visual alternative to Google. Instead of text descriptions of sites that correspond to your search terms, you get pictures.
What you see is a moving carousel of choices, each showing a different way to view your search results. You can see results as a timeline, which shows the latest to the right and then backwards to earlier ones. You can view videos that concern your subject (lots of stuff here from YouTube). But the view we liked best was clusters of thumbnail pictures. Click on any of those and you go to that site.
We used the search word "trains" for a test run. Up popped thumbnail screens for everything from "Seat61.com", which shows you the view from a train window as you move throughout the world, to information about the New Jersey State Transit System, including a map of Hoboken Terminal.
Clicking on other parts of the carousel turned up train songs, train pictures, train shopping, train news, train books, and so on. Next we typed "nuts" into the search box, and clicked on recipes. The results showed pictures of the dishes as well as recipes. Yummy.
Searches with Viewzi are slower than standard search engines like Google or Yahoo! but they're more fun.
The big picture
The maker of Snap Art says the September 15 cover of New Yorker Magazine was done with his program. "I'd recognise my baby anywhere," he says. The New Yorker is famed for its artful covers and many people have them framed. The editors are silent on whether that particular cover was done with Snap Art, a plug-in program for Adobe Photoshop. But what if it was? Artists use whatever tools they can.
This all comes up because of a new set of Photoshop plug-ins from Alien Skin (AlienSkin.com). The one that impressed us the most was BlowUP 2, which took even our tiniest pictures and was able to blow them up to eight by ten size or larger. Some of these blow-ups were nearly perfect, while others were restricted by the lack of definition in the original version. Blowing up a single head in a large crowd may not work perfectly. Nonetheless, the enlarged images were quite recognisable.
If you start with an image that is high definition to begin with, like their example of a close-up shot of a lady-bug, BlowUP begins to show its true value for photographers and researchers. Blowing up a high definition photo by 300% revealed details that could not be seen in the original picture. In short, you got more information - much more in this case - than you thought you had in the original. This would be particularly useful for nature, medical and scientific photography. The best new feature is the crop tool. Joy dragged a box around her nephew's face in a prom photo. It looked great blown up.
Other plug-ins in the new AlienSkin series are Image Doctor 2, and Exposure 2. The plug-ins work with Photoshop, Photoshop Elements or Corel Paint Shop, Mac and Windows versions. More info at AlienSkin.com.
Incredible lightness
For computer users who travel a lot, the new netbooks are small and lightweight. And they cost a lot less than notebooks.
One reason they're cheap is they typically lack CD drives and have small screens. They're used mainly for email and surfing the Web, which puts them in direct competition with handheld devices and smart phones like Research In Motion's BlackBerry, Apple's iPhone, Google's new Android, and many others coming down the road.
Unlike smart phones, however, netbooks come with keyboards you can use with all your fingers, instead of just your thumbs, and they have Windows or Linux operating systems. Major netbook makers include HP, Dell and Asus, starting at $400. Most come with either a regular hard drive or a solid state drive.
By the way, a solid state drive is the same as a flash drive. They're called solid state because they have no moving parts, hence there's little that can go wrong and they can take a lot of mishandling. We've watched videos of Sandisk's flash drives being run over repeatedly by heavy cars and trucks, and then plugged into a USB slot and work like nothing had happened.
Dell chose to equip its new netbook, the Mini Inspiron 12, with the Vista operating system. The Inspiron 12 is almost exactly the same size and weight as Apple's new MacBook Air but costs $600 instead of $1800.
The Inspiron has a built-in web cam and microphone but admittedly is not as sophisticated as the Air. Either one of these computers would fit into an envelope. Don't forget to buy extra stamps.
Books
Scientific Imaging with Photoshop; Methods, Measurement and Output, by Jerry Sedgewick; $75 from New Riders Press, newriders.com.
The author is director of the Biomedical Image Processing Lab at the University of Minnesota and many of the examples in this book are drawn from those areas of research. Still, the imaging techniques apply to almost any discipline. He shows you lighting tricks for microscope stages and how to apply what's called false colour to make parts of an image easier for the eye to distinguish.
Readers can search several years of On Computers columns at our web site OnComp.com. We can be contacted by email at JoyDee@OnComp.com and BobSchwab@gmail.com.
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