In which I not only don’t bash Microsoft, but praise them. Who knew?
Microsoft is a company every geek loves to hate. And, really, what’s not to hate? I’ve railed in the past about their operating systems and I still think that for the datacenter there are better alternatives. Their productivity software, on the other hand, has been maturing steadily. If you’ve not had a look, let me highlight a couple of unsung gems:
Windows Live Writer – I use this tool for blogging to my WordPress blog. It’s an excellent, minimalist editor on one hand and a complete blog management tool on the other. It gets out of the way and lets me write. It has a simple interface and automates a lot of the tasks associated with blogging. Things like automagic photo upload, drag and drop text and image insertion, links to the WordPress management page—these are all handy features that just work. I’ve edited a ton of entries on various blogs and it’s been rock solid.
Windows Live Photo Gallery – I am a huge fan of Picasa. I use it to manage my photo library and Picasa Web is where I keep my photos for sharing. Picasa makes it simple to tag photos with faces and geolocation, then upload them to my Picasa Web account. Having said that, there are features that Picasa lacks and Windows Live Photo Gallery takes up the slack. The most notable missing feature in Picasa? Stitching.
It’s hard to tell, but this photo is a composite of 9 photos in a grid (3×3). My camera only has a stitch assist mode for horizontal strips, so the 9 pictures were shot without any kind of in-camera stitch assist. Point, shoot, move over, shoot. Eyeball it all the way. In Photo Gallery, all I had to do was select the 9 photos and select “Create Panorama Photo” from the right-click menu. Photo Gallery chewed on the pictures for a while, then gave me the results. A little cropping and the final photo is as you see here.
Classic strip photos work well too:
This panorama is almost 270 degrees of arc and consists of 7 individual shots. This time, I used the in-camera stitch assist. The panorama function of Photo Gallery was able to generate almost a complete 7 shot stitch. Only minimal cropping was required.
I’ve not given up on Picasa. It’s preview function (for viewing photos in Explorer) is fast and rich. It’s integration with Picasa Web is excellent, of course. I’ve really only used Photo Gallery for the Stitch Assist/Panorama features, but for that it’s truly an excellent tool. I plan on playing around with it to see how it compares with Picasa for more basic functions. Expect a post about that soon.
So. Two Microsoft productivity tools that don’t suck. There are more, and I’ll write about them as I get around to using them.
