New Horizons Part 1

I’m sure you all missed me this past week…right? while I was attending New Horizons 2012. One of my favorite sessions was present by David Halpin, on 7 useful free tools on the Internet. Most of the time when I go to sessions like these I already know of and use the tools (that was so 10 seconds ago!), but David had some nice additions. Here are some of his recommendations, as best I can recall, since I wasn’t taking notes.

Dropbox at http://www.dropbox.com: I do already know of and use this one, but I highly, highly recommend it. Is your file too big to email? Is the recipient in another state so you can’t hand her a flash drive? No problem. Dropbox will give you 2GB of space to start with, and you can drop files into it on your desktop or by using their web app. If you have a Dropbox account and multiple computers, you can get to any files in your Dropbox folder from any one of those computers. And you can share your folder with others.

Jing at http://www.techsmith.com/jing.html: Another I’m familiar with and love using. This bit of software will let you make videos of your computer actions quickly and easily, and save or share those videos. Perfect for when someone is just not seeing that button on a webpage, and you can’t jog down to his office to officiate.

Pixlr at http://pixlr.com/editor/: A pretty powerful web-based image editor. It can do a lot of the basic functions that Photoshop does, without the need to install any software. Yeah, we here at NOVA have access to free Photoshop in our offices, but when you just have a quick edit to do, there’s no need to use a cleaver to slice butter. And if your computer is running the way mine is, you’ll want a more lightweight option than Photoshop.

That’s it for Part 1. These are all free, so check them out!