Note:
I use Paint.NET 3.36 on a Microsoft Windows XP Professional 64-bit workstation with 2GB of DDR2 RAM and ATI FireGL V3300 Dual-head display adapter. Installing a plug-in is a snap. Just copy the plug-in DLL to the relevant directory. For example, if the installation path of PDN is C:\Program Files\Paint.NET, then effects plug-ins should be copied to the Effects folder and file type plug-ins should be copied to the FileTypes folder.

1. Buttons

Forum | Author | Download

2. Rounded Corners

Forum | Author: dan9298 | Download

3. Borders and Shapes

Forum | Author | Download

4. Checkerboard

Forum | Author | Download

5. Multi-Color Gradient

Forum | Author | Download

6. Gradient Bars

Forum | Author: Pyrochild | Download

7. Water Reflection

Forum | Author | Download

A man goes to a store, sees something nice (say, a teddy bear), checks whether it is available elsewhere for a better price and eventually buy it for the lowest price available. A man sees a computer game, checks its price, if the price isn’t lower than a few bucks, pirate it over his internet connection or borrow a copy from a friend. That’s the background of most modern software pirating stories. The teddy bear analogy is used here for the sake of simplicity and proof of concept whist regardless of the commodity we may use in comparison, software pirating is happening at an unbelievable rate.

A respectable member of the society will never attempt to steal a teddy bear from a department store although he may be well pirating software over the internet at home. But there must be reasons for this dualistic human-behavior for the same type of action; the same type of misbehavior. Read through my analysis as to why people steal software but not teddy bears in the modern society.

Tangible vs. intangible

The concept of stealing has a strong association to the tangible nature of an item. Software is intangible; you do not feel it. It is just an arrangement of bits and bytes on your hard disk or other type of media. You would feel wrong to steal a teddy bear from a department store but not to illegally download a copy of a software title over the internet. This intangible nature is also the reason for most other reasons why software is pirated.

A Replica

People do not feel wrong about replicating. On this forum post at Mininova.org the user has posted an interesting argument on stealing a cow versus replicating the same: if you steal a cow, then the owner of the cow will suffer from the los of it; if you replicate the cow instead, then you don’t actually take away anything from the rightful owner. It’s the notion ‘I’m just replicating – not stealing’.

Who gets hurt?

It is the software giants that get hurt with pirating and they already have ample amount of money in their pockets. People often think ‘the 50 dollars I do not give them are negligible in sight of their current wealth’. Even for tangible items, if the party is in concern is filthily rich; people assume that the items stolen will go unnoticed due to the ample amount of resources the wealthy claim. Remember Robin Hood?

I pay for my internet connection

Most software pirating is domestic and people often download software using their own internet connection. For this reason the notion ‘I pay for my internet connection’ renders a thought of justification in downloading software. This holds the same for duplicating software titles on removable media such as CD or DVD as the recipient has already purchased the blank media himself.

Readily available

Pirating is readily available and can be done from home. An internet connection, a mechanism to pirate (such as BitTorrent) and the knowledge on completing the process is all it takes for the completion of a successful pirating cycle. The flip side of this is that unlike other commodities, a software title cannot be evaluated at a store because of its intangible nature. People prefer to first try it at home and then but it legitimately; which to the most part end up remaining ‘evaluating indefinitely’.

Lack of pricing model

Software doesn’t have a proper pricing model. Often people believe that software titles are pricy. The same kind of software comes in various price bands. Since there is no proper gauge to measure the value of a software title, people recent to pay the right amount of money the developer deserve.

OneNote strengths

Although EverNote has managed to surpass Microsoft OneNote in some areas, OneNote is still strong in formatting text, etc. OneNote’s ability to automatically tabulate content as soon as it detects a table like structure is severely missed in EverNote. The default colors and fonts on OneNote goes nicely with the rest of the Microsoft Office suite to the extent where a note entered in OneNote is no different to a document typed in Microsoft Word.

EverNote strengths

The latest version of EverNote is as mighty as you want it to be. Write once, access from anywhere in the world (which requires a registration on the EverNote server) is the best feature you can cheer upon. The new user interface is very simple and user-friendly. Unlike the OneNote UI which is a candy jar in its appearance, the new EverNote UI has a unique touch and a soothing green shade to it. Once you start working on it, you wouldn’t want to go back to another note taking tool ever.

The bottom line

Many note taking tools roamed but none prevailed to be the best among the rest until the days of OneNote. The introduction of OneNote damaged every other note taking tool’s reputation and took note taking to another level with sophistication and novelty. The lessons learnt from OneNote’s arrival have been put in to practice nicely with the introduction of EverNote 3. The next big thing will be to see how Microsoft strikes back with their next version of OneNote. Or will it be just Microsoft Notes?

When I say regular people, I meant to classify those who do not belong to the school of designers and related disciplines. The five top reasons why Paint is the choice of graphics editing program amongst the common can be stated as follows.

• Paint has an extremely simple user interface and strictly follows the desktop metaphor. Because of this, there is no way a user can go wrong with Paint. There is one window, one canvas and one toolbar to deal with. There is the pallet area too; but most users aren’t afraid of it as they are with other parts of a window.
• Paint starts fast: you don’t have to wait until the next epoch to use Paint. It has such a small footprint and will start before you are done doing a double-click. Another benefit of the small memory footprint is that you don’t need a fancy computer to run Paint on.
• You can only use the most common file types with Paint. Here again, you do something, and save the file in your format of choice without being presented a handful of post-save options. The file is just saved and ready to be used in a few milliseconds.
• You will never rip apart Paint by accident. Most modern software are designed with ‘total UI flexibility’ in mind so that there are 101 toolbars and menus to a density where people are scared to move the mouse pointer across the screen with the fear of moving one part of the UI and sticking it in another area rendering a total mess in the GUI. Paint doesn’t have this prevailing silliness and hence you are a happy user.
• You can buy a new computer and Paint will be there; you can go to a friend’s PC and still Paint will be there. Paint is ubiquitous; it’s installed by default on every computer since Windows 95. It’s totally available to you during the lifetime of your computer and will never expire asking you for a new serial number.

It seems like the main reason for regular people to like Paint is its simplicity. A normal user doesn’t fancy sophistication in software. They want their job done, in the easiest way and in the shortest timeframe.

Usage

My preferred way of using portable apps is to use them on a different partition where I usually keep my documents, music and other stuff. I use the PortableApps Suite that has the well designed start menu like UI. There are three flavors to the PortableApps Suite installer and my choice is the Platform Only edition as it is all what’s required if you prefer to hand-pick the software titles that will be installed later on.

Organization

The PortableApps Suite installer creates two folders (Documents and PortableApps), an executable called StartPortableApps.exe and an Autorun.ini file on the root folder of the partition.

The Documents folder is similar to the Windows My Documents folder and has three sub directories for Music, Pictures and Videos. This is where I keep all my files, music and videos. You can also point your Windows My Documents folder to this folder so that when you save in My Documents, you are really saving instead here.

The PortableApps folder is where the apps are installed. This folder will grow as you install applications. All portable apps are installed in a sub directory under this directory. If you ever need to uninstall an app, just remove the relevant folder from this directory.

The StartPortableApps.exe is the application that initiates the PortableApps Menu. If you install the suite on a portable device (such as a USB Pen Drive) the Autorun.ini file will make sure that this file will run automatically when you connect the device to your computer. Since I’m installing this on a fixed device I make a link to the StartPortableApps.exe on my desktop and run it every time I start Windows. The PortableApps Menu puts an icon on the system tray and hence you access your favorite portable applications.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Most portable apps do not use the Windows registry. They save settings on a file on their own folder. This is a key feature of portability. The other main feature is that they have minimal disk utilization. This makes the applications run slightly faster than their counterparts.

A major disadvantage is security. The partition you have selected to install portable apps may be accessible to others who have access to your machine and hence your files are exposed. This is not a major issue if you are the only person who’s using the computer or you have set proper privileges to prevent others from accessing the partition. You may also go that extra mile and use TrueCrypt to create an encrypted volume so your data is totally out of sight for others.

Conclusion

Life becomes a lot easier when using portable apps since managing your favorite software and files becomes a matter of copying and pasting. Although I have written this post with Windows is mind, please note that most portable apps have Mac and UNIX distributions. The list shown below is my favorite set of portable apps.

• AbiWord Portable
• Audacity Portable
• InfraRecorder Portable
• Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition
• Mozilla Thunderbird, Portable Edition
• Notepad++ Portable
• Pidgin Portable
• PNotes Portable
• Sumatra PDF Portable
• ToDoList
• VLC Media Player Portable
• WinMerge Portable
• WinSCP Portable
• WordWeb Portable

Mini FAQ

What if I want to use the same set of portable apps at home?

Copy the folder PortableApps along with the StartPortableApps.exe to your home machine. Use a partition that is not the system partition to prevent data loss in the case of a reinstallation.

How easy is it to install a new portable application?

Open the PortableApps Menu and select ‘Options -> Install a New App’. If you manually copy the application folder inside the PortableApps folder then select ‘Options -> Refresh App Icons’; the PortableApps Menu will pick up the newly installed/copied application and show it in the list.

What if I want to move all the content on this partition to another partition? Will portable apps still work?

Yes. Almost all portable apps use relative paths to store data and do not depend on where you save files. Just copy the contents of your entire partition to the new partition and run the StartPortableApps.exe from the new location and you are good to go.

I reinstalled Windows. Do I have to reinstall PortableApps Suite?

No. Just run the StartPortableApps.exe on the portable apps partition. For convenience you can create a shortcut on your desktop to this file.

Do I really have to use the PortableApps Suite Menu?

No. The PortableApps Suite Menu is just a launcher application with a few other handy features (like backup/restore) to make your life easier. You can absolutely be on your own and run individual apps by going in to the relevant folder.

I experienced this as I was installing the Windows Live Mail program on my laptop. After I started the setup program I notices two very interesting messages appear on the setup dialog box that actually made me smile.

The first one showed up as the setup was taking longer than expected to download the packages from the Internet:
“Sorry, this is taking a little longer than expected. Please bear with us just a few more minutes”

And the second one showed up when it was installing the downloaded packages:
“Installation may take a few minutes. Feel free to do other things while you wait.”

This way of acknowledging the user is very important for a better human-computer interaction. I think the traditional 3 limits for response times have to be altered to facilitate the sophistication available on modern hardware. Nowadays, the time limit for keeping the users attention on a given context is way below 10 seconds. This value continues to shrink down if feedback is further delayed from the machine. You may have heard people say ‘my computer is so slow’ if the software has lack of appropriate feedback. Software installation packages that download certain parts of the package from the Internet are notorious in breaking users’ patience. This eventually leads the user disliking and discontinuing the software. The move towards providing friendly messages certainly help people to bond with their software better than they are now.

Factors like legibility, etymology, syllable structure, familiarity, significance to real-life objects and events; easy pronunciation, the letter count and the shape of the name when printed on paper are often overlooked by many software professionals. Most software names are coined just by looking at few of the above mentioned factors and the trademark value. Although trademark/brand¹ value is very important in the highly competitive modern day world, it should not be given 99 percent weight when naming a software package.

However, careful craftsmanship can lead to a unique name even if the words constituting the name are unrelated and out-of-context. The Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird are best examples for unique names that have super-brand attributes. But constructing such names are often time consuming and tricky. It leads to a lot of iterations in changing the name which is not healthy for the brand’s wellbeing.The bottom line is that software packages must be named judiciously. The name must be non-ambiguous. It should be a description of the software package’s usage. The name should bear the characteristics of the software. If a puzzled user asks the question ‘what does your software do?’ after seeing the name, then it’s time to consider re-naming.

• A trademark protects any sign or symbol that allows your customers to tell you apart from your competitors. You can register a name, logo, slogan, domain name, shape, color or sound.
• The brand name is a company-specific name for a particular product or service, usually used to differentiate that product or service from competitor offerings. French: nom de marque.

2 – The Name Cartoon source: http://wesclark.com/ubn/name_cartoon.jpg

I despise Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA). Even cooperates are uncomfortable with the extra burden. In my opinion WGA is an annoyance to users. The simplest update or hot-fix available on the Microsoft website requires a validation.

There have been numerous gigs on “what if Microsoft made …” – the most circulated being a notable urban legend with a comment made by General Motors in response to the Bill Gates’ COMDEX address where he compared the auto industry to the computer industry. This post is about what if Microsoft made automobiles with WGA.

• You need to validate your vehicle with WGA after purchasing.
  • Without validation, you may only drive for 300km. After the 300km limit the vehicle will immobilize. The vehicle will start again, but you may only drive for 10mins. You have to start again to drive it for another 10mins and so on.
  • You will be prompted to validate every time you start the vehicle until validation.
• After a successful validation a new dashboard indicator appears. This tells you that your vehicle is a genuine product.
  • The dashboard indicator blinks every time a new update is received to tell you that your genuine vehicle received an update.
  • These updates may occasionally restart the vehicle to apply themselves regardless of the speed or other critical aspects of your drive.
• You need to re-validate if you decide to change tires, lubricants, filters, wipers, or battery water.
  • You have to buy all those components from Microsoft or otherwise your vehicle is considered non-genuine. However if you decide to upgrade to a high performance component (ex: high-performance air filter) the validation process might think you are cheating. You need to call and convince customer support that this is the same you that bought the vehicle from them.
  • If by any chance the revalidation process fails, the vehicle will run for 10mins and immobilize. This time, certain functionalities will be disabled.
• Engine modifications are strictly prohibited. If you install/replace any engine part, a convincing call to the customer support division is a must. Chances are that you may have to buy a new license and re-validate it to drive your already purchased vehicle.
• If the validation process has a bug or an error in the program, then the vehicle will refuse to start until Microsoft fix the error and you perform a revalidation manually.