FastStone Image Viewer Version 3.9 Software Review :
Where do you view your favourite images that you take with friends and families ? How do you enjoy navigating through various wallpapers that you have in your DVD ?
The basic tool that is available by default in Windows is the > Windows Image Viewer. In Windows Image Viewer, you can view an image to its actual size, rotate the image in the available angles, Zoom the image to view details, edit it in Windows Paint only, View many images in a slideshow, copy the selected file to a particular location, delete here directly, and print here directly. These features seem sufficient, but why settle with this when you have a lot more additional features available in the User friendly Image viewer software, FastStone Image Viewer ! The name simply says Image Viewer, but i think the the creators are being too modest about their work. It has a nice array of features that include image viewing, management, comparison, red-eye removal, emailing, resizing, cropping and color adjustments. Let me introduce to you, the COMMON features that are useful in performing everyday activities. This is a Combo pack of group of softwares like > Windows Image Viewer, Microsoft Powerpoint, Paint, Keyboard Print screen, etc. You can view images in the format Jpg, bmp, Cur, Gif, Ico, Pcx, Png, Psd, Tiff, Wmf, Camera Raw, etc.
Fastest Image Loading :
When i insert a DVD with say 200 wallpapers, it takes a lot of time for all the images to load completely, if you try to view the images by opening the folder containing the wallpapers in the DVD. It was very irritating, and i could not locate the desired picture i wanted because of the time taken to load. Later, when i tried to open the images in my external hard drive, because of the excellent quality of my hard drive, the images load very fast. How to load the images in the DVD and view them in the same manner as that of the hard drive ? The solution is the FastStone Image Viewer software. The loading time is Excellent even compared to my hard drive. Whether you are loading from a CD, DVD, or a pen drive, containing thousands of high definition wallpapers, the speed is enormous and you will not regret it. I was very happy the first time i viewed it.
Browsing and Viewing Images made convenient :
There is a browse menu unlike, Windows image viewer, to directly browse to an available folder containing pictures. You do not have to individually locate for images to view them. There are two types of menus for brosing the folders. One is the Browser present at the light side containg all the drivers in the system and the folders and sub folders under them. This is very convenient. Another one is the Quick browser, where the list of drives and folders that have been opened in FastStone Image Viewer recently appear. This do not contain any list of drives if no drives are opened and you are using for the first time. Once you select the particular folder and lot of subfolders, appear and now you can view the images. You can view them in the form of Thumbnails or list view or list view with the details about the files. Once, you click an image file, its preview is available in the bottom left side corner. You can adjust the preview size also varying from 10 % to 1000 % ( it is not hundred but upto thousand percentage). Then you can click the Full screen option to view the images in the full screen. You can view them in the slideshow also and adjust the slide timings. There are over 150 transition effects for the images during slideshow. This you might have seen in Microsoft Powerpoint.Even during a slideshow, you can use various features.
Managing the Images Files :
You can select multiple files in a particular folder and use various functions when you right click them such as copying them and pasting them in different location. Deleting them by sending them to recycle bin. Email them, and the default email browser appears to directly send the file in mail. Directly print them with full page layout control. You can also acquire images from a scanner and manage them here. There is also a Select all option to select all the items to perform a particular action. You can also arrange the files in order of their names / size / type of file / Dimensions / and Date created. You can directly create a new folder in any drives or folders and move files.
Tools > Batch Image Converter and Rename :
Right click an image file and there is an option called Tools. Under that, you have few special types of tools.This is a very useful software to convert/rename large or small collections of images. The feature is called Batch convertor as you can convert a group of images in the form of a bundle rather than single image at a time in formats like *.bmp, *.gif, *.tiff, and *.png. You can also rename the files here. Not only that, you can also resize the files in Bulk here. Another interesting tool available is that, you can add the time and date to images like in photos and also alter existing details. There is also a tool called Compare, wher you can select more than one file to compare. This is useful if you want to compare the features of two images with little variations. You can directly set a particular file as wallpaper for Desktop here.
Adding effects and adjusting colors of images :
You can select a particular image file and sharpen or Blur the image, you can reduce the colors from 256 colors(full fledged color image) to two colors (Black and white), Very interesting feature is that, you can count the number of different colors used in a particular image file. Is that not fun ? You can convert the image to grey scale or negative form. You can add Drop shadows and also remove red eye from photos. There are also special effects like Edge detect, that remove the fill and enables only the edges, Bump map, Lens and Morph. I have included the results of these effects below.
Screen Capture :
This is the major advantage of this software. Instead of using the Print screen option in the keyboard and pasting them in paint and cropping them to remove the excess area, you can use the Screen capture option in FastStone Image Viewer. This option is available in the File menu. There are different methods of screen capture.
- Capture Foreground Window > This is to capture any window, (that is a program, or a folder or an image, anything) that is open and is present in the FRONT of all other open windows. Only one window that is present in front is captured.
- Capture Window / Object > This is to capture a particular window or a particular portion / component of a windoe like the title bar, or the browse bar etc. Try opening multiple windows to see the effect.
- Capture Rectangle region > You can manually select any rectangular region of a open window to capture.
- Capture Freehand Region > Instead of drawing a rectangle, tou can draw a freehand drawing including curves just like drawing with a pencil. The region within the drawn area is captured. The drawing should be closed drawing (all sides are closed and there is no opening). The captured image, can be either simply viewed in the FastStone Image Viewer, or stored in the Clipart to view them, or save it to a file in a particular folder / location. You can save the captured images in the format > Jpg, bmp, Cur, Gif, Ico, Pcx, Png, Psd, Tiff, and also Adobe Pdf file.
Additional Unique Features :
- Edit in External programs > In Windows Image Viewer you can edit it in Windows Paint only, Here, you can choose any software that is installed in your system to edit a particular image file. For example, select an image file and edit in a program like Photoshop directly from here, instead of opening Photoshop first and searching for the image file to edit.
- Draw Board > Select a file and in Edit menu, you will have an option called, Draw Board. This is like the Paint program available in Windows. You can add text and one additional feature it has compared to Paint is that you can add Drop shadows also.
- Crop Board > This option is also available in Edit menu. Using this, you can crop a particular part of an image and save that cropped part.
Hence, FastStone Image viewer is an All in one Pack for Imgae viewing, Screen capture, Photo adjustments, Album creation and slideshow.
How To Install Chrome OS - Complete Guide
As per request of some members. I am writing a walk through on how to install Chrome OS. But first of let me tell you, I am a complete noob at VMware. and am still figuring to work out how to use it . So if i do something silly, do tell me .
so what you will need?
1. Chrome OS
2. VMware
and you might be asking, what is VMware?
Layman answer: Just like Virtual CD, its a virtual PC. and like you can insert cd images in virtual cd. you can install OS inside VMware. which means you can try mac while still being on windows.
so after downloading, install VMware. (normal click next etc.)
and extract .bz OS file using winrar
now fire up your virtual machine
and click new virtual machine
and click typical
then select I will install OS later and click next
after that choose linux ubuntu and then next
then name ur mahcine and spacify its location
after that give it some size. though it says 20 but it doesn't matters
we are gonna delete this anyway
now before finishing spacify ur hardware
go to network and unselect NAT and click bridge and opion below it as shown
i tried messing with resolution here.. though it didn;t work.
anyway i'll show u how to change later
so you can skip this step
here was something that i did.. though it didn't made any sense.
i was getting logging in error so i removed my CD-ROM and Floppy
and it worked..
so you might also wanna do same...
as shown below
so click ok and finish
and you will notice new virtual pc is made..
no click its settings to load chrome
select that hard disk which we created earlier and remove it
click add
select new hard
and click next
browse for your OS which u downloaded and select it and also convet it to new format
if it asks
click ok and go back
now we are good
make ur your hard size is 2.8GB (if not then u didn't loaded file properly)
and lets start this much awaited OS
and bingo you are in
to full screen click here
and to access apps go here
press ALT+CTRL+T
and enter
/usr/bin/xrandr
this will show you the available resolutions
after that select one
/usr/bin/xrandr --size ABxYZ
and enter
exit
as shown below
so that was it...
here are some useful shortcuts:
http://dev.chromium.org/chromium-os/how-\74wbr\76tos-and-troubleshooti
FINAL TIPS
if it gives error during booting
make your your hard is at IDE 0:0
(go to machine setting>>harddisk >> advance)
if error still comes then go to ur virtual machine folder and image folder
and delete the .lck folders
e.g Chrome OS.vmx.lck
If it gives error then make sure you clicked bridge and not NAT
and also go to network connects and play around with these.
e.g i changed one to from 192.168.54.1 to 192.168.1.8
my pc also has same subnet (192.168.1.*)
hope it helps
THATS ALL
Can u imagine –you are just talking to your computer and computer writes all the things without you touching the keyboard. No, it is not a magic but a magic of software. This is the promise of Dragon Naturally Speaking 10, the latest in voice–recognition software packages. This company improves this software a lot.
One of the great benefits of getting started with this software is that you don’t really need to train it for basic understanding of your speech. It has remarkable accuracy. For top performance it is required a little bit of training, but this version is remarkably accurate & faster also. Only thing is that it consumes significant system resources when use it in high accuracy mode.
There are many new features. Naturally Speaking opens your default browser (also supporting FireFox) and searches the web for you. And also the number of hands free commands that let you navigates your PC without touching the keyboard. This is useful for those who don’t want to type.
Price: Rs.5990 (for standard) and Rs.11990 (for pro)
Computers were designed to make our lives faster. Modern day computers have so many facilities that many of us would not have been dreamt of fifteen to twenty years back. Modern day software packages give us the liberty of downloading data into any formats of our choice thereby giving the option of sending huge files through email in a few seconds which years back had to be printed packed and couriered which was a colossal waste of time and energy because we never had a choice at that point of time in our lives.
There is always a flip side in every aspect of our lives and computers and in this regard computers are no exception. The flip side to computers comes in the form of its own advantages often misused by people especially in applications like winword and in emails. Some flip sides are:-
Editing Facility:- Prior to advent of applications like Microsoft word letters used to be hand written by us or typed on a typewriter. We were accustomed to finish letters handwritten or typed within fifteen minutes or a maximum of half an hour. The handwritten letters had a draw back in the sense there were too many scratches and over writing. Software applications in computers give us the facility to edit and therefore we have become greedy and tend to use this facility much more than what we need. Any number of editions to the data we are not satisfied. We not only waste our time in repeatedly editing the data, but also waste others time in getting the edited versions verified time and again.
Spell Check and Grammar:- Users are more concerned than ever before on getting the spellings right which was never a priority earlier. Also the focus is too much on grammar than on completion of data or sending it before the stipulated time frame.
Beautification of Data:- Many people are more concerned with beautification of data as they waste lot of time in changing fonts. the choice of fonts offered by most software makes users greedy craving for more thereby resulting in deviation of primary motive of typing out data to beautification of data.
Saving Facility:- One of the best facilities offered by software's is saving for we have the option to save what is already typed so that we can type the balance at a time convenient to us. Because of this facility to do things in convenience in installments we never try to finish of typing out the entire data at one go. The facility to save makes us lazy and this is one of the reasons why work gets pending in most organizations as clerks tend to take too many breaks in the midst of typing data like chatting over phone, taking lunch before completion of data and so on.
This article is not to blame facilities offered by computers but to point out how excessive choice corrupts us and generates a desire in us to crave for more leading to lack of satisfaction. When we have too many choices we get spoilt for options and in the end we end up doing nothing.
I have already published an article named "Coding standards in C language". Some concpets in C++ are same in C. So i have not repeated those here.
In this article i have explained some guidelines especially for C++ .
1. File Structure
Rule 1 (Required)
Implementation files in C++ always have the file name extension ".cpp".
Rule 2 ( Required )
An include file should not contain more than one class definition.
2. Naming convention
Rule 3 ( Advisory )
Variables representing GUI components should be suffixed by the component type name. Eg. submitButton, mainWindow etc.
Rule 4( Required )
All private member variables names should be preceded by an underscore
All MFC Class Wizard member variables names should be preceded by ”m_”
Local Variable -> variableName
Private Variable -> _variableName
MFC Class Wizard Variable -> m_variableName
3. Control flow
Rule 5 ( Required )
Follow each non-empty case statement block in a switch statement with a break statement.
Rule 6 ( Required )
Do not alter a control variable in the body of a for ,do or while statement.
Rule 7 ( Required )
Do not use 'goto'.
Rule 8 ( Advisory )
For functions with non-void return type, ensure all paths have a return statement that contains an expression of the return type.
Rule 9( Required )
Avoid the use of continue.
Rule 10 ( Required )
The break statement shall not be used (except to terminate the cases of a switch statement).
Rule 11 ( Required )
A switch statement must always contain a default branch which handles unexpected cases.
Rule 12 ( Advisory )
A switch expression should not represent a Boolean value.
Rule 13( Advisory )
Only expressions concerned with loop control should appear within a for statement.
4.Classes
Rule 14 ( Required )
The public, protected, and private sections of a class are to be declared in that order
Rule 15 ( Required )
No member functions are to be defined within the class definition.
Rule 16 ( Required )
Class data members should be explicitly declared to be private by using the private keyword
Rule 17 ( Advisory )
Every class should have a constructor, a destructor and a copy constructor defined
Rule 18 ( Required )
Organize class member functions in the source code in the same order they are declared in the class interface
5.Functions
Rule 19 ( Required )
Always provide the return type of a function explicitly
Rule 20 ( Required )
Pass arguments of class types by reference or pointer.
Rule 21 ( Required )
Specify the name of each function parameter in both the function declaration and the function definition. Use the same names in the function declaration
and definition.
Rule 22 ( Advisory )
Use pass-by-reference in preference to pass by value or pass by pointer.
Rule 23 ( Required )
Functions shall always be declared at file scope.
Rule 24 ( Required )
Functions shall always have prototype declarations and the prototype shall be visible at both the function definition and call.
Rule 25 ( Required )
Identifiers shall either be given for all the parameters in a function prototype declaration,or for none.
Rule 26 ( Required )
Functions with no parameters shall be declared with parameter type void.
Rule 27( Advisory )
A function should have a single point of exit.
Rule 28( Advisory )
If a function returns error information, then that error information should be tested.
6.Variables and Constants
Rule 29( Required )
Initialize all objects at definition. Never use an object before it has been given a value.
Rule 30 ( Advisory )
If possible, always use initialization instead of assignment.
Rule 31 ( Required )
Constants are to be defined using const or enum; never using #define.
Rule 32 ( Advisory )
Use suffixes L, U, F,and UL for all constants of type 'long', 'unsigned int' ,’Float’and 'unsigned long'.
Rule 33 ( Required )
There shall be no unreachable code. Examples of unreachable code are given below:
- Code after a goto or return.
- Code in a switch body, before the first label.
- Code after an infinite loop (a loop with a constant controlling expression that evaluates to true).
- Code after a function call of a function that is known not to return.
- Code after break in a switch clause.
- Code after an if statement that is always taken where the end of the dependent statement is unreachable.
- Code after an if statement where the ends of both dependent statements are unreachable.
- Code after a switch statement where the ends of all clauses are unreachable.
7. Memory Allocation
Rule 34 ( Required )
Do not use malloc, realloc or free.
Rule 35 ( Required )
If memory allocation is done for an Array using new operator. Be careful that you delete the whole array .
8. Thread Handling
Rule 36 ( Required )
If global variables can be accessed by more than one thread, code altering the global variable should be enclosed using a synchronization mechanism
such as a mutex. Code accessing the variable should be enclosed with the same mechanism.
Rule 37 ( Required )
Always design a Thread Safe Class
Whenever threads are used proper synchronization should be done.Since one thread could be updating the contents of a structure while another thread is reading the contents of
the same structure. It is unknown what data the reading thread will receive: the old data, the newly written data, or possibly a mixture of both. To avoid accessing incorrect data
always use Critical Section (Lock and Unlock functions)
9. Synchronization
Rule 38 (Required)
It is important to release the locks in the same order they were acquired to avoid deadlock situations.
10. Optimization Techniques
Pass Class Parameters by Reference
Passing an object by value requires that the entire object be copied (copy ctor), whereas passing by reference does not invoke a copy constructor, For strings, passing
by reference is almost 30 times faster! For the bitmap class, it's thousands of times faster. Passing a complex object by reference is almost 40% faster than passing by
value. Only ints and smaller objects should be passed by value, because it's cheaper to copy them than to take the dereferencing hit within the function.
Postpone Variable Declaration as Long as Possible
For maximum efficiency, declare variables in the minimum scope necessary, and then only immediately before they're used.The only time where it may make sense to declare an
object outside of the scope where it's used is in the case of loops. An object declared at the top of a loop is constructed each time through the loop.If the object naturally changes
every time through the loop, declare it within the loop. If the object is constant throughout the loop, declare it outside the loop.
// Declare Outside (b is true half the time)
T x;
if (b)
x = t;
// Declare Inside (b is true half the time)
if (b)
T x = t;
Prefer Initialization over Assignment
Initializing an object invokes the object's copy constructor. Defining and then assigning an object invokes both the default constructor and then the assignment operator.
Reduce the number of parameters
Function calls with large number of parameters may be expensive due to large number of parameter pushes on stack on each call. For the same reason, avoid passing
complete structures as parameters.
Don't define a return value if not used
The called function does not "know" if the return value is being used. So, it will always pass the return value. This return value passing may be avoided by not defining
a return value which is not being used.
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