UX Design – Stop monkeying around

Remember when you first got your hands on a digital VCR? When I was a kid when my dad bought a National G10; jet black, front-loading box beaming of technological excellence. It could digitally tune channels, had a cool LCD screen that showed playback time and icons when I fast forwarded to the good parts of the movie. The thing that stood out the most was its amazing ability to do timed recording. YSet the channel and  time of recording. It would magically turn itself on, tune to the channel and start recording. It felt like having your own version of knight rider at home (black with an LCD interface). One problem though, it was incredibly difficult to get the damn thing setup for recording in the first place! I am not exaggerating when I say I had to read the manual everytime I had to setup timed recording so that I don’t miss McGyver using his Swiss Army knife.

Did I ever complain? well… I didn’t think I had the right to do so. Why you ask? Well it was a breakthrough technology and I was an average kid. I didn’t have the right to say that the design was faulty. It was too great and I wasn’t worthy

Snagit 9 Review – The screen capture and editing tool you always wanted

Ever wanted a cool simple tool to aid you in those small yet painstaking image manipulation tasks at work? Cropping your *friend* from your college graduation party photo before sending it to your folks (because he was ruining the color balance and not because he was drunk and butt naked), removing the facebook browser windows from your software demo screenshot (because you wanted to be professional and not because you posted on your wall 100 times since 8am) and finally the classic case of forging a photo of you standing next to Britney Spears (oh ok, so that was just me). Ok so not all of them classify as image manipulation tasks one would do at work (or atleast would admit to), but don’t worry, this review is about a software that does help you at work.

As a software product manager, I have to work with screenshots and wire-frames all the time. What I need is a light weight tool that lets me take screenshots, crop them, move things around and then let me copy paste them in to MS Word where I am working on my next gen, take over the world, killer app.

When I started as a QA some 6 years ago, I used a software called Snagit. I wondered at that time why would someone use a special software just to take screenshots, why not just use PRINT-SCREEN and then use MS PAINT to cut the unnecessary things out. If you have ever used MS PAINT (read ‘AM ASS PAIN), you would agree that is a big mistake. So evolution came and I move to using Photoshop. Now thats a great tool, but sometimes too great a tool to do these small things in. Then came irfanView, light, run fast, no bullshit features… everything worked out.

Been using the combination of Print-screen and IrfanView since. Whenever something complex came in, there was always Photoshop to save me.

Recently, I don’t remember exactly for what reason, I thought I’d check out SnagIt again. Since I was running Vista, I dared not to install the old version. So I downloaded the latest version of SnagIt, SnagIt 9 (Don’t ask from where ). During installation it said “Behold the new user experience of SnagIt”, or was it something more professional and less World of Warcraft, anyways, So I thought, yeah right. What could they do with a screen capture tool right. Wrong!

I will let the following screenshots put you in tranced state of endless awe, and then I will get to the cool new features.

Pakistan in top 7 of oDesk providers

In oDesk‘s December 2008 report, Pakistan is amongst the 7 leading outsourcing providers with 5,960 providers, average hourly rate of $11.13 and average feedback score of 4.36 (much higher than India’s 3.99 and close to Ukraine’s 4.39)
oDesk Best Countries for Outsourcing Report