Proud Programmers Blog

04.27.2009

Software I can't live without - FinePrint - the premium front-end to printing

One of the tools I really use a lot, is FinePrint from FinePrint Software. It is a printer driver, which can accept any print-jobs you may have by using standard print functionality in your software.

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Instead of sending the output directly to a printer, you will see the output in a separate window, where you have many cool features available;

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Amongst the features are;

Print multiple pages on the same sheet. In the sample above, I have selected to print one of my Blogsphere articles with 4 full pages on a single sheet! This is great if you want to just print something to bring along ...
Delete unwanted pages. No need to include all pages if you don't want to
Combine multiple print jobs into one. You can for example first print something from Notes, and then a Excel spreadshet. FinePrint combines them as you go!
Stamp you pages with transparent stamps, such as "Company Confidential". In the sample above I have done just that. You can just as easy add page number etc, in a much better way than Notes. I often skip Notes ability to "control" (ha ha ha) the footer and header, and use FinePrint instead. You can of course save your own stamps!
Archive print jobs. FinePrint can easily save the jobs as own .fp files, which can be printed later.
Convert to grayscale - and/or remove images if you want to do that.
Use electronic letterheads
Export the print as JPEG etc
Finally, super tight integration with another FinePrint product; pdfFactory, which makes it a breeze to create PDF documents. This is pretty similar to Adobes PDFWriter, but I like the look and feel similarity to FinePrint.

My verdict: Run a buy!

Posted by Robert Ibsen Voith At 10:26 AM Location Nøtterøy, Norway | Permalink | Comments (0) |

12.12.2008

Using Blogsphere? Use Windows Live Writer to write blogs!

Tags: Blogsphere Cool Tools Lotus Notes Software

I have been using the amazing Blogsphere template by Declan Lynch for a while now, and boy am I impressed!

Here the other day I was looking for a way to let my friends add blogs to a common blog of ours. First I was thinking about ordinary web editing, without the need to install anything. Whilst web-editing is on the way in future versions of Blogsphere, we're not quite there yet. The other options included e-mail (!) and something called MetaWebLog API.

At first the e-mail interface looked simple enough. All users have an e-mail client, but at the flipside they have to cope with "blog formats", like the following;

<auth>some secret code</auth>

<location>Nøtterøy, Norway</location>

<category>News</category>

<body><p>This is where your entry text goes</p></body>

<readmore>Some more to read</readmore>

Additionally the biggest problem with the e-mail interface is that you don't see what your blog-entry will look like until you actually e-mail the blog-entry. Another issue is of course all the possibilties for error. One small mistake in the above tags, and the post may go haywire!

Then I discovered that Blogsphere has code to support both the Blogger API and the newer MetaWebLog API. After googling around I found that several nice looking clients exists, such as from Wordpress or .... Microsoft... yup, the cleanest and most nice looking in my eyes where Windows Live Writer (WLW).

I downloaded the installer and started to configure WLW. Specify the homepage of your blog, your username and password (both kept in the User Profile in Blogsphere), and WLW initiated communication with my blog. Looked like a lot of back-and-forth messages between my blog and WLW!! After a short while, I was opted to post a temporarily message to retrieve even more information about my blog, so that I did. After approximately 1 minute, WLW was finished, and I could - WITHOUT HASSLE AT ALL - post my first small blog entry!! Amazing!

Of course happiness doesn't last too long - neither in the front of new software ... As soon as I tried to post a blog entry with a larger image embedded, I got an error message from WLW, complaining about problems with the response from my blog. It looked like this;

Since I had already volunteered to add some code snippets to Blogsphere, I took a quick dive into the Java-agent responsible for the MetaWebLog processing. I quickly discovered that the code had an issue with the Request_Content-field. From the Lotus Knowledgebase Technote #1240370 (titled "Using REQUEST_CONTENT with Web agents and large POST data") you learn that Domino 7 and onwards lifts an old limit of 64 kB by introducing multiple Request_Content_nnn fields, such as Request_Content_000, Request_Content_001 and so forth. I am not that fluent in Java, I was able to quickly assemble some code to retrieve the values of all Request_Content_nnn fields. Voila - that worked!! I could instantly post large images, tables and files with WLW after that!! Amazing!

I believe that WLW has really lowered the bar for new users to blogging, and I am very eager to learn what my friends think of WLW! I'll keep you updated!

PS! Did I mention that WLW easily can connect to several Blogs! Cool!

Posted by Robert Ibsen Voith At 9:16 PM Location Nøtterøy, Norway | Permalink | Comments (1) |

11.21.2008

Remote Support System - Try Lotus Unyte Share

Tags: Cool Tools Software

Here the other evening my brother needed some IT support, and my options was either the travel to him - or finally dive into the world of Remote Support Systems. I didn't really have the time to travel down to him that evening, so I opted for the later. Read on to see how the new cool - and free - tool Lotus Unyte Share solved the problems which tools like Remote Desktop Connection and Windows Remote Assistance couldn't.

Posted by Robert Ibsen Voith At 6:30 AM Location Nøtterøy, Norway | Permalink | Comments (0) |

05.18.2008

firstObject XML Editor - a cool and fast XML editor

Tags: Cool Tools Software

Do you need a super-fast and nice XML editor? Do you mind if its completely free? Take a look at firstObject XML editor from firstObjec.com

Posted by Robert Ibsen Voith At 2:55 PM Location Nøtterøy, Norway | Permalink | Comments (0) |

03.03.2008

Tool #1; Lotus Notes - my favorite tool of all times!

Tags: Cool Tools Software Lotus Notes

My favorite tool of all times is without doubt Lotus Notes!

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I use this tool for almost everything. All from working with e-mail in a fancy new user interface, to storing all kinds of information. Lotus Notes has become completely indespensable.

Posted by Robert Ibsen Voith At 9:31 AM Location Nøtterøy, Norway | Permalink | Comments (0) |

02.28.2008

EditPlus - Small and fast Notepad-replacement with many cool features

Tags: Cool Tools Software

Notepad is OK, but has some severe limitations such as not being able to open large files. I have used EditPlus for many years now, and one of the intial headsups for just this editor, was the great ability to copy and paste with columns in addition to rows. Also it's extremely fast and can work with files of any size. This is one of the first additional applications I add to new systems.

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