via Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 9/12/07

The marketplace is flooded with non-Adobe PDF writers that promise to convert practically every file format into PDF.
Like Acrobat, you can install these third-party PDF generators [ 1 , 2 , 3 ] as virtual printers and create PDF files from any application that has the Print button. Some services go a step further – you send them a file as an email attachment and they’ll mail it back to you as a PDF.
That’s not all. WordPerfect and OpenOffice have in-built PDF printers. Microsoft released a free PDF add-in for all popular Office 2007 programs except Outlook. Then there are online suites like Google Docs and Zoho Office that allow you to save documents as PDF inside the browser without requiring any add-in.
When there a zillion Acrobat alternatives for creating PDF, why spend a few hundred dollars for buying a single license of Adobe Acrobat? Rick Borstein of Adobe offers some official reasons [PDF] for using Acrobat PDF software:
1. Adobe supports PDF files opened in the free Adobe Reader only if the PDF was created by an Adobe product.
2. Adobe makes the best, most compact, most accepted PDF files. Clones often don’t do everything necessary in all cases to meet court standards.
3. Adobe PDF is structured (tagged) allowing your firm to meet government Section 508 accessibility requirements.
4. Only Adobe allows you to Reader-enable a PDF so that users of the free Adobe Reader can fill and save PDF forms locally for offline use, review, comment or markup, type anywhere in the PDF document using the Typewriter tool and digitally sign PDF documents.
5. New standards around PDF will always appear in Adobe products first. One recent example: PDF/A (PDF for Archive), an ISO standard adopted by the US Federal Court system, the NARA (National Archive and Records Administration), and the Library of Congress as the standard format for archiving digital documents.
6. Adobe offers OCR, creation, watermarks, redaction (delete sensitive or confidential text and images), bates numbering, review, etc. all in one package, not spread across several packages or requiring additional products.
So should you uninstall that free PDF converter and shell out $300 for Acrobat Professional ? Well if you are an enterprise user or in the legal industry or work in teams gathering comments and reviews from colleagues and customers, the answer is mostly yes. ISO has ratified PDF/Archive as the standard for long-term preservation of electronic records
But if you are like most of us and create PDFs for personal use because they retain the formatting and layout or just because PDF files are safe from editing, then the free Acrobat clone in your computer can stay without problems.(c) 2007 Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal | labnol | Message Board

via Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 9/13/07

If Google every wanted to add a Microsoft Visio like flowcharting application to their Google Office suite, they’ll have plenty of good options to choose from.
Draw Anywhere is a new web based tool for creating flow charts, org charts and other drawings online. Like the Picnick image editing, DrawAnywhere is done in Flash and sports an extremely responsive interface.
You can either save your Flowcharts online or export the diagrams as images and PDF files. drawanywhere.com
(c) 2007 Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal | labnol | Message Board

via Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 9/10/07

Spotlights are commonly used in concerts and musical theatres to focus an audience’s attention on a performer as he moves around the stage.
MouseLight has borrowed the concept from theatres and applied it your computer where the actor is the mouse cursor and the stage is the desktop screen.
When you are doing a PowerPoint presentation or a software demonstration and want the audience to focus on some specific area of the screen, MouseLight puts a circular spotlight around your cursor and highlights that area allowing your audience to follow you – the rest of the screen outside the spotlight circle is dimmed automatically.
There’s another advantage of MouseLight – If you are work on a large screen or a dual monitor, it’s so common that you keep losing track of the mouse pointer. With MouseLight, just press the hotkey and you’ll immediately know where the cursor is placed on the screen. No guesswork required.
MouseLight is available for Windows only, Mac users have a similar application called Mouseposé . MouseLight for Windows is available for $20 while the Mousepose for Mac costs only $10.
Not to be confused with Apple Desktop Search Software which is also known as SpotLight.
Related: Do Live Presentations without a Projector (c) 2007 Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal | labnol | Message Board

via Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 9/14/07

SlideShare , an online service for hosting PowerPoint and PDF documents, has registered an extremely impressive growth ever since its debut last year . (see this recent Alexa snapshot)

Related: Comparison of PowerPoint Hosting Services
SlideShare have added some new email+web based options for uploading PDF and PPTs that makes the service all the more attractive.
For instance, if you want to move your presentations from Scribd to SlideShare, just type their URLs here and SlideShare will automatically make a copy in your SlideShare account.
[Like Scribd, Slideshare also lets you upload Presentations anonymously.]
Another addition is the email based uploader (a similar feature exists in Google Docs ). You just have to send the presentations as email attachments to a specified address for uploading them onto SlideShare.
Wishlist – Now that Slideshare has bulk upload, they may consider adding another feature that allows members to download multiple presentations in a batch.
Related: Upload PDFs to Scribd Directly from the Web (c) 2007 Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal | labnol | Message Board

Bamboo Fun

(Credit: Wacom Technology)

In technology circles, hitting the quarter-century mark makes you positively ancient. That may be the impetus behind Wacom’s decision to update its logo at the same time as it jettisons the Graphire brand for consumer pen tablets, redesigning and rechristening them with the trendier …

via Crave: The gadget blog by Seth Rosenblatt on 9/14/07

In the turbulent, choppy waters where P2P networks and copyright law chomp at each other’s fins for dominance, there’s at least one beast that thinks it has a solution to keep everybody happy. Its name: Grooveshark . Their tagline? “Everybody gets paid.”

As content distribution has mutated from analog …

A group of kids from one of our local elementary schools has formed a “mini-laptop club.” They don’t use electronic machines. Instead, these first-, second- and third-graders draw their own laptops on construction paper and pretend to e-mail each other. They dedicate a surprising amount of time to this activity. I once had a chance to examine one of their “keyboards.” I was fascinated to learn which Internet functions had sunk into the minds of these kids, who are just getting their first exposure to computers from watching their parents work, and from using kid-friendly sites. Follow the page jump to see one of their designs.

via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow on 9/13/07

Toronto’s Seneca College is throwing its sixth annual Free Software/Open Source convention — admission is as cheap at $20, and this year’s speaker lineup includes Bob Young, Co-founder, RedHat and CEO and Founder, Lulu.com; Ross Turk, Community Manager, Sourceforge.net; Chris Blizzard, One Laptop Per Child Project; and Marc Kwiatkowski, Senior Software Engineer, Facebook.

Welcome to Seneca’s 6th Annual
Free Software and Open Source Symposium
October 25-26th, 2007 – 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Seneca@York Campus, Toronto
The Symposium is a two-day event aimed at bringing together educators, developers and other interested parties to discuss common free software and open source issues, learn new technologies and to promote the use of free and open source software. At Seneca College, we think free and open source software are real alternatives.
Want to present? The deadline for presentation proposals for this year’s symposium is September 1.

Link

via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow on 9/13/07

A lone quixote in Seattle is suing Autodesk for sending copyright infringement notices to eBay, where he is a professional seller. At issue is Tim Vernor’s listings for used copies of Autodesk’s AutoCAD software — Autodesk says that when you buy its software, you only “license” it and so you don’t get the right to sell it after you’re done with it. Vernor is seeking $10 million.

Autodesk is using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to have legal copies of their software removed from eBay so they can sell more new copies. The latest version of AutoCAD software is around $4,000 a copy. Autodesk’s lawyer, Andrew S. Mackay states “AutoCAD software is licensed, not sold and that license is not transferable.” AutoCAD software is available for purchase at most major software retailers. There is no indication your purchase would be different from any other until you get it home and open the box. There is a piece of paper tucked inside that says it is a licensing agreement with the statement “by opening the sealed software packet(s), you agree to be bound by the terms and conditions of this license agreement”. This is called a “shrink wrap” contract. It cannot be read until you open the package which according to the contract constitutes agreement. US courts have not held a “shrink wrap ” contract to be valid. Furthermore the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is only intended to enforce copyright violations, not breach of contract.
The lawsuit also alleges perjury since the notice that was sent to eBay is required to be signed under penalty of perjury and fraud. Using illegal means to make a legal gain (i.e. sell more new copies) is a civil definition of fraud. Autodesk’s attorney Andrew S. Mackay is currently under investigation (# 07-24456) by the California State Bar Association for his actions in this matter.

Link ( Thanks, Bruce )