Technology Bites recently brought my attention to two different online PDF creation tools: PrimoOnline and Acrobat.com.  To choose between them I took them for a quick test drive.

Acrobat.com is by far the more appealing site of the two.  The site usability is as polished as you would expect from an Adobe product, despite its beta status.  It also provides storage space for your documents and the ability to share them with others.  Its achilles heel would appear to be the 5 PDF conversion limit quoted in both the Technology Bites post and the Acrobat.com user guide.  Whether by accident or design this limit is not enforced at this time.  During testing I converted 6 documents in 15 minutes with no issues.

By comparison the PrimoOnline interface is spartan but functional.  It provides a basic web form to specify the file to convert and the email address to send it to, and quickly sends the result to your inbox.  Its claim to fame is having 300 formats it can convert into PDF.  Upon reviewing the list most would be readable by MS Office applications so I’m not sure how useful this will be for most people in practice.

The proof of the pudding is in the tasting, as they say.  I ran the same test document through both services (Acrobat.com output and PrimoOnline output) and here are my observations about the results:

• PrimoOnline does not honour the fonts used in the source document.  If you compare the test documents you will find that Acrobat.com’s output is near identical to the input document, while PrimoOnline has substituted fonts and looks noticeably different.
• As expected neither service coped with the Enhanced MetaFile (EMF) included in the document.  For some reason the most space efficient way to copy Visio objects into Word documents is also the most difficult to convert into PDF form.  The Device Independent Bitmap version of the diagram converted successfully on both services and demonstrates how the EMF version should have looked.
• Acrobat.com consistently output smaller files than PrimoOnline.  It was also the only service to include a Bookmarks list, though both services do generate clickable hyperlinks in their output.  This feature is one of the main advantages these services have over a PDF printer based solution.

Based upon the test results Acrobat.com is a clear winner, provided that Adobe continue to ignore (or remove) their quoted 5 conversion limit.  Given its difficulties maintaining document formatting I’d find it hard to recommend PrimoOnline unless you were purely looking for a universal document converter so aesthetics were less critical.

Via Technology Bites

Simon over at Download Squad recently drew my attention to the Capster utility:

Capster is a small executable that allows you to select applications that will start upon boot-up only if Caps Lock is on. And by small, we mean small, as in 5 kilobytes.

What is great about this is you now have a way to chose between three different PC startup profiles through holding a single key after the logon dialog:

1. Shift key = ignore applications in Startup folder
2. No key = run applications in Startup folder, excluding those using Capster’s Caps On setting
3. Capslock key = run applications in Startup folder, including those using Capster’s Caps On setting and excluding those using the Caps Off setting

Why would you want to do this?  In my case I use these for quick PC startup, offline startup (no network) and online startup (networked) respectively.  This brings my laptop to operational status in the quickest time with the major applications I’ll be needing on the day.  e.g. There is no point in me wasting RAM, CPU cycles and time waiting for twhirl to start if I’m not online at the time!

Capster is easy to use.  Simply start the application, browse for the program you want to control, select whether Caps must be on or off, then hit the Create Shortcut button.  This will add the shortcut to your Startup menu for execution the next time you start your PC.

By default most users will probably replace each shortcut in their Startup folder they want to control using Capster, which is a little cumbersome.  My preferred approach is to create a batch file listing all of the "Caps Only" startup applications and calling them that way.  For example I could create a startup-capson.bat file that contained the following entries:

start notepad.exe
start calc.exe

Please note the "start" entry at the beginning of each line.  This ensures the batch file doesn’t wait for Notepad to be shutdown before starting Calc.

Simon obviously didn’t have much use for Capster’s "Caps Off" setting but I can see situations where it would be useful.  In the scenario above I could easily have my offline startup launch a thick client to manage my Google Calendar (e.g. Outlook or Sunbird) and when online launch a thin client (e.g. Google Calendar as a Prism webapp) instead.

If you have applications that you often, but not always, want run at PC startup, download a copy of Capster and save yourself a little time every day!

This morning I clicked on a link in a newsletter from Sun and was presented with a "server not found" error.  Odd, especially given I would expect a company of that size to have better QA than that.  When I found the same issue with a Software AG newsletter later in the day it was time to investigate.

Turns out this wasn’t a coincidence.  Both emails were using links passing through the same tracking server: promo-manager.server-secure.com.  I suspected our Corporate firewall was blocking the tracking server, but the content itself would be OK. 

Upon inspecting Firefox’s location bar it was obvious that the latter part was an encoded destination URL:

https://promo-manager.server-secure.com/pm/mail/link.php?id=98027102 &link=http%3A%2F%2Fau.sun.com%2Fedge%2F2008%2F02 %2Fentry_level.jsp%3Fcid%3D921839

This is good practice by the web developer but I hate manually trying to decode those things.  %3A is ":", %2F is "/", but anything beyond that is a struggle.  There had to be an easier way.

I’ve been tinkering with some Javascript recently and it occurred to me a bookmarklet should easily be able to tackle this task.  A quick rummage through a language reference and voila – the following bookmarklet was born.  Install it by dragging the link onto your toolbar.  Use it by opening the bookmarklet when on a page with an encoded URL.

Decode URI

The code isn’t rocket science.  It does exactly what I needed.

javascript:location.href=decodeURIComponent(location.href);

After I ran the bookmarklet the location bar contained the following.  All I had to do was discard everything prior to the "link=" entry and I was back in business!

https://promo-manager.server-secure.com/pm/mail/link.php?id=98027102 &link=http://au.sun.com/edge/2008/02/entry_level.jsp?cid=921839

Note: The initial URL above is currently working so it would seem our Corporate security guys are getting a little over zealous.

The recent release of DisplayFusion 2 was a timely reminder of how much I rely upon this program.  I use a dual display configuration at work and not a day goes by where I don’t find myself relying upon its capabilities.  The reason?  It adds keyboard shortcuts allowing you to take full advantage of multiple monitors without reaching for your mouse.  

I’ve found out the hard way that Windows level of multi-monitor support is highly dependent upon your video chipset vendor.  My previous system had an ATI chipset, and their Hydravision utility allowed me to perform similar windows management functions to DisplayFusion out of the box.  My current Thinkpad T60 includes an Intel chipset and while its display profile support is much better, its multi-monitor application management capabilities seem to be non-existent.

I tried a few alternatives but stuck with DisplayFusion because it does everything I need (and some things I don’t… yet) at the right price.  To give you an idea of its capabilities I’ve listed the default hotkeys for the standard version’s functionality.  I’m sure the Ctrl + Win + X key combination must be hard wired into my brain by now!

To be honest I haven’t even looked at the wallpaper capabilities – I usually have so many windows open I can’t even see the desktop!  But when I do get around to using the aesthetic side of the utility I’ll probably pay the $10 to upgrade to the pro version.  Working out of different offices means the resolution of my second monitor changes and it would defeat the purpose if I had to manually reconfigure my wallpaper when I booted up at new site.

via gHacks