Paul Anderson's blog

I’ve just started using the Freeway web design software. This seems to produce good code from a GUI interface, but includes all the flexibility that I want. This is the first time I’ve found something which seems to fit the bill between the extremes of Dreamweaver and iWeb.

The Unison File Synchronizer is great for synchronising files between two systems – it handles things really well when files have been changed at both ends. It runs over ssh, so it works well for backing up changes when travelling. I always used to use this for synchronising my laptop with my Linux desktop, but the older version didn’t work too well on the Mac. I’ve just installed 2.27.72 on the Mac and it is great – seems very robust and has a more Mac-like interface.

I came across this really neat algorithm for resizing images by eliminating (or duplicating) the “uninteresting” bits. This allows you to change the aspect ratio without significantly distorting features like faces. You can also mark certain features manually to be preserved or eliminated. Watch the video. There is a port for the Mac with a GUI.

I’ve been using BibDesk on the Mac for a long time, but I guess some people don’t know about it. It is very good GUI interface to bibtex but it stores the data in ordinary bibtex files so you can easily alternate between the GUI and manual editing. The latest version allows arbitrary aliases and URLs to be added and these display as thumbnails.

A while back, I wrote a quick script to tag photos with the GPS locations by matching the times of the photos with the log from the GPS. I just found the application GPSPhotoLinker which does this really well.

I’ve been using PDFpen for a while to fill in PDF forms. This is pretty good, but it does cost $49. Recently, I found Skim which does a similar job and is free.

I missed not being able to print ”booklets” on the Mac in the same way I could under Linux – ie. 2-up, double sided, but arranged so that you could just fold the whole lot in half and get an A5 booklet with the pages in the right order. Then I found CreateBooklet which does exactly that.