Some months ago, my cell mate contacted me and ask if I could help him and his group to get their site moving. This group, MCX (Marketplace Christians Xchange), is a group of people that comes together to meet up and encourage one another in each other workplace. They were originally known as protem, and commonly gather with a common vision to connect Christians in their workplace.

I believed God had brought me into this group for a purpose of helping them to get things moving. In fact, things are really interesting in that

1. I was brought into their group discussion to propose some idea on how to get it moving. I had the intention, initially, to charge for my service. Somehow later, another middle age guy popped in and took the limelight. Oh well, I guess if God closes the door, who can force it open. And so I went back to my usual work…
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2. About 3 months later, my cell mate contacted me again on this job. We met up in Starbucks cafe and had a long discussion only to find out that the guy do a bad job, and they will like me to assist them again. I had the urge to charge them service & consultation fee, only to realise that the guy who did the job for them, left them stranded with an irrecoverable cost. So I had decided to not charge them. After another round of discussion, I thought I wanted them to fall back on their parent organisation for long term support – this will help them save some support & design costs. Somehow, things didn’t go so well with their organisation support. In the end, after a long struggle (3 weeks of unproductive email conversation), I decided to take over the support & design
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3. And so I went ahead to set things up for them, and everything went well…. until… another guy popped up. I guess they really want to save cost which I can understand that pretty well. However, I thought if this guy can assist them well, it will be good; if not, they are going round-the-bush again. Sometimes, it all boils down to knowing what you need and what you had to forgo in order to achieve your goal… In any case, I do hope that things will go well for them this time

“Aren’t there any free good ones out there?” This is a question that many of my friends popped out, whenever we discussed about using Adobe Photoshop.

Indeed, many of us know that Adobe Photoshop & Lightroom are the best image editing softwares created to date. Yet we are being kept away by the hefty price tagged to it. It is also so fully packed with features that 95% of us don’t need – which bring up the question of “Why should we pay so much for a software that we will be using about 10% of it’s functionalities?”.

This brought me to start my search of a good piece of software that either costs much lesser or free.

Summary of Editors :-

Basic Editors:
SplashUp Light (http://www.splashup.com/light/download.aspx)

Features Packed Editors:
Artweaver (http://www.artweaver.de/)
PhotoFiltre (http://photofiltre.free.fr/)
Paint.NET (http://www.getpaint.net/)

Advanced Editors:
The GIMP (http://www.gimp.org/)

Splashup Light
I have recently review another software, Splashup Light. It is surprisingly an easy to use application that does the job well. In fact, in just 3 clicks, you can easily transform a Day-Light photo-shoot into an Evening photo-shoot. Of course, it has other adjustment tools too. Very neat for a basic editor.

Artweaver (Highly Recommended)
I have re-review this piece of excellent software today. It has similar features to Paint.NET and the menu + interface is arranged to resemble that of Photoshop Element. The website is available in English language as of today 15th October 2009, so you can visit their home page or download it off at the location: http://www.artweaver.de/direct/Artweaver.exe.

It has one significant advantage over Paint.NET, and that is, it allows you to re-edit any text in any layers. Very cool. I will highly recommend this over Paint.NET. As for user who prefers a simpler interface and does not need too many features, Paint.NET is still good.

PhotoFiltre
Although the software has not been updated for a long while, I still find it a neat piece of software – it has batch processing installed with it as well, cool! One of the best thing I like about this software is, most of the commonly used tools are being placed in 2-rows of toolbars on top. I have been using it to process my every day tasks of cropping, resizing, color/contrast enhancement.

Although, I must admit that, the interface should be further improved to be less daunting for the average users.

Paint.NET
This is yet another featured packed software that I have used to enhance and touch-up photos before I uploaded it to facebook and other blogging platform. It does it’s job decently fast. Like Adobe Photoshop, it has layers for you to move things around

It is a very neat piece of software that I have used the last 2 years.
I have only one complaint – it does not allow you to re-edit any text after it has been finalised. I am looking forward to version 4, and hope that they will fix this issue then.

This software name itself is not the address to their website, but a way that the developer termed it to be the advanced-level of WinXP default Paint software, developed with Microsoft .NET technology. You will need to install the .NET framework 3.5 (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=AB99342F-5D1A-413D-8319-81DA479AB0D7&displaylang=en) to use this. If you are still using Paint, then it is time to upgrade to Paint.Net

The GIMP (Highly Recommended)
The most advanced of image editors available on the web today. And best of all, it’s an open source application that is still evolving as of now. It has been said to be the best alternative to the paid Adobe Photoshop.

I have it installed in all my PC, and have really appreciated the hard work put together by the developers. It has tons of features that you can find in Photoshop too.

And it is able to open up Photoshop PSD files (Photoshop 7 as most compatible), although it has some issues with opening PSD files that have layers grouped in folders. If you have used Photoshop before, and do not want to pay for it, then you got to try this out.
(I find that it has many other features that Adobe Photoshop Element 7.0 does not have yet)

We have added in a live chat support under our ‘Contact Us’ page.

It works similarly to instant messaging (IM) programs such as MSN Live, Yahoo Messenger, Skype & AIM etc. It allows simple smilies & text messages. It is currently in beta release. If it does not work, you can still contact us via email too.

Wow, I must say web is definitely the way to go. The website has been upgraded from a “simple” website to a workflow portal, and I believed the ladies are probably planning to transform it into a multi-users interaction portal.

Some time ago, this client approached me to assist her in creating a portal to help her and her staffs in their daily work. She needed a system that will assist her in creating different quiz for her students. Now creating quiz scripting system is not a problem to me, but this one needs to create Mathematic equation on the fly and it must allow her to sort the questions and print it out with proper page breaking (something like what you would do with Microsoft Word).

Now the REAL Challenge – She must be able to type out the Mathematic equation at ease. She wanted to unify all the different type of question styling created by different authors. She wanted to preview, sort the question order, add page breaking all on the fly.

It took me a long while to research (read: no-weekend-break), and came up with 2 approaches to solve her needs. In fact, if I remembered correctly, I googled for many nights and I couldn’t find any solution references. I was on the brink of giving it up, when God shone His blessing on me.

Tada! Today, it is complete. I have to really thank you Lord Jesus for His kindness on me. Of course I have to thank the lady for her confidence in me ^_^.

No more microsoft?

Well it has really took me long consideration to go into open source wholly. In fact, I started playing around with Linux desktop some 16 months ago, yet it is until today that I have decided to go into Open Source environment fully.

Thinking back, I was stuck with microsoft Windows XP and other paidware for a long long time ~ I remembered that I was also frustrated with how expensive it would cost me to buy an operating system, standard office suite, other software necessities and an email server (referring to the Windows 2003 server). Now my days revolves around CentOS server (Apache, Postfix, Dovecot), Ubuntu desktop, MySQL database, PHP programming & GIMP.

If you haven’t try out Open Source and still have worries, do drop me a mail, I will see if I can be of any help.