Alternatives To Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Acrobat Reader (Free)

Yes, the Adobe Creative Suite is quite expensive. If you want to download free alternatives to Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Acrobat Reader, then give the following tools a try

TIP: If you are already familiar with Adobe’s great products, you should consider that their software is a long-term investment that will pay off with big dividends if you use it efficiently. Also, getting more familiar with Adobe’s Suite will give you skills that are wanted by advertising and marketing agencies around the world

As mentioned above Adobe Creative Suite is an excellent choice for graphic designers, photographers and anyone who does any form of image editing or manipulation, but if you decide that you want to try some alternatives we’ll help you with that. The good news is that there is a wide range of alternatives for the Adobe Creative Suite that have proven themselves to be just as effective while costing just a fraction of the price of the original Suite.

Paint.NET: Alternative to Photoshop

• Website: www.getpaint.net

This is an ideal alternative to Photoshop as it is an easy to use editing and bitmap drawing program. It offers many of the same features as the more costly alternatives such as curve drawing, layers and a wide range of built-in filters that are able to deal with virtually any photo or image editing request. It caters for virtually any picture file format and allows various features to be used together in order to create unusual graphic effects. This feature-packed Photoshop alternative is also compatible with Windows Vista and Windows 7 operating systems. Paint.NET is also advertised to be among the fastest and most responsive photo editing programs available.

Kompozer: Alternative to Adobe Dreamweaver

• Website: www.kompozer.net

This is a feature-packed alternative to Adobe Dreamweaver. It offers users an all-encompassing WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editing mode when designing websites as well as the usual HTML and CSS formats. Because it is easy to learn how to use, it is an ideal website designing platform for beginners who want to learn how to design websites. One advantage of this software is that users don’t need to know all of the ins and outs of coding in order to design a professional-looking website. Designers can choose from a wide range of customizable features to add to their websites such as an automated spell checker, customizable toolbars and an FTP site manager.

Whether a website needs to be designed or a photo needs to be touched up, there will always be an alternative to using any of the programs that the Adobe Creative Suite has to offer. Users should always read online reviews to ensure that the program they are installing is suitable for their editing needs and that it doesn’t conflict with software that they currently have installed.

Sumatra PDF: Alternative to Acrobat Reader

• Website: http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/free-pdf-reader.html

This alternative to Adobe Acrobat Reader is unique in that it is able to be run from a USB drive instead of having to be installed on every PC you use. One of its main advantages is the fact that it starts up and displays PDF documents a lot faster than many other PDF readers. Being an open source application, users who are experienced with coding can adapt the program to suit their needs. Another advantage of Sumatra PDF is the fact that it is simply a minimalistic PDF reader which means that it takes up very little space on a hard drive if it is installed on a pc. The only disadvantage to Sumatra PDF is the fact that it doesn’t support PDF files that contain digital rights management protection.

Speed Up Your PC Using ReadyBoost

If you want to Use ReadyBoost in Windows 7 and 8, refer to the instructions below.

ReadyBoost can turn any portable drives into additional RAM. The advantages are obvious – you can add a lot of RAM for no additional expenses, because you can simply use your existing flash cards from your camera or your portable USB flash drive.

ReadyBoost can handle large sequential read requests, so once you enable ReadyBoost you can possibly speed up your PC. However, keep in mind this is only useful on PC’s with low amounts of RAM (e.g. 512 MB RAM)

Steps to to Setup and Use ReadyBoost

1. First make sure that a removable disk is inserted in the USB port. Now go toComputer-> Right click and click on Properties.

2. Now go to ReadyBoost tab-> Check the option Dedicate this device to ReadyBoost in order to turn ON ReadyBoost -> click Apply.

3. Now you’ll get a a message like the following. When it’s completed, click OK.

4. To configure its storage space to reserve for system speed. Move the slider to set your desired value-> Click OK.

compress a picture without losing quality

Did you know that you can compress pictures and make them considerably smaller without actually reducing the image quality?

Today, we are starting a new series of posts exclusive to windows7themes.net titled “Did You Know”. Here is the first one!

• Part 1: Compressing picture without losing quality
• Part 2: Editing and writing into PDF files (coming)

Reduce Image Files By Stripping Metadata – Works Great!

1. Download imageworsener – a free utility for lossless image compression:

• Download Image Worsener 32-bit 
• Download Image Worsener 64-bit

2. In the ZIP file you find the imagew.exe – extract it

3. Copy and paste the following text into the notepad editor


SETLOCAL
set CURRENTDIR=%CD%
echo %currentdir%
FOR /f "usebackq delims=|" %%f in (`dir /b "%currentdir%"`) DO (
set str1=%%f
echo %str1%
set str3=%str1:~-4%
echo %str3%
set str2="thumb_%str3%"
IF NOT EXIST "thumb_%%f" CALL C:\images\imagew.exe "%%f" "thumb_%%f")
ENDLOCAL

4. Save the file with the extension .bat and select “All files” from the dropdown when saving the file (or it wont actually create a bat file). You could give it the name lossless.bat

5. Open a command prompt

6. Use the CD command to change the directory to C:\images or your own path and copy all of your images that you want to compress there as well. If the directory does not exist create one

7. Now run the script lossless.bat and it will compress all images in the folder.

If something does not work you may have to tweak it a little, I use it in combination with the following script


Set CURRENTDIR=%CD%
CALL C:\images\lossless.bat %CURRENTDIR%
pause Do you want to continue?

8. You could, if you want to go one step further and become more productive, add the code above into a batch file called losslessA.bat and then add this to your context menu

Check Problem Reports in Windows 7 and 8 via Reliability Monitor

If you frequently have PC problems you may want to test the built-in Windows 7 reliability monitor that can help you to find the actual causes of your problems. A great diagnostics tool generating XML problem reports

What is the Reliability Monitor?

The Reliability Monitor is mostly used for diagnostic purposes. If you have a severe computer problem, you can use the reliability monitor to find possible causes. It can easily check your hardware and collect various information that will help you to find possible problems and culprits. It also calculated a stability index – the higher that number the more stable your system (range 1 – 10)

TIP: It’s faster to simply enter Reliability into the search bar and click the first option View Reliability History. If that doesn’t work, proceed with step 1-4 – If it does work, click here to skip step 1-3

1. Click on the Flag in the Taskbar to go the Action Center. (If you don’t see that flag, go to the Control Panel first and then to the Action Center)

2. Click on Action Center.

3. Click on Maintenance to expand and view more options.

Check the reliability history to see problems that occurred previously

4. Click on View Reliability History.

5. Generating the report may take several seconds.

6. The Reliability Monitor Opens.

7. Click View All Reports to view reports on various installations, services. The link Save Reliability History is very useful – it saves this report as a .xml file!

Zip each files in a Directory

Sometimes you may want to ZIP a lot of files but create separate archives for each file in a directory. In that case, read on

1. Download WinRAR

2. After downloading and installing Winrar (winrar.com) you will see new options on your right click context menu

3. Select all files you want to create archives for

4. Right-click (while all files are selected) on a selected file and click Add to archive

5. Go to the tab Files and check the option Put each file to separate archive

6. Go back to the tab General and select ZIP as your archive format and finally click ok

As you can see this is quite easy to do. You could also write a batch script for this using WinZIP but it’s a lot easier this way

Other zipping tools may also have this feature, but I haven’t tested them

How to add or remove Windows 8′s sleep and hibernate buttons

We all want to customize our PC’s and remove certain things – for example did you know you can quite easily remove the sleep/hibernate buttons? Let’s check it out

Add and remove sleep or hibernate buttons in Windows 8 easily. At times you might have wondered how to put your system to sleep or hibernate but unfortunately the option doesn’t seem to exist in Windows 8. Please note that you would not be able to add sleep or hibernate buttons if you are running Windows 8 as a Virtual Machine on Virtual Box or VMWare. If you want to enable these buttons, have a look at the following steps:

1. Open up Control Panel by pressing the Windows Hot Key + R

2. Open up Power Options

3. Click Choose what the power buttons do

4. Click Change settings that are currently unavailable

5. Under the Shutdown settings, check all buttons that you want to add to the PC shutdown option

lusrmgr.msc to add or remove file types / extensions from the Windows 7 index

The Windows 7 index makes your searches faster by caching paths, but in some cases you may want to remove certain file types from this index to pre-filter your search results. You can do this via lusrmgr.msc  - more below

1.Execute Run, type Control Panel and press Enter

2. Click Indexing Options

3. Click Advanced

4. Click on File Types tab and check/uncheck any and all file extensions that you want to index. Moreover if you are unable to find any specific file extension, add it by entering the extension and pressing Add. For example, doc and click on Add

1. Execute Run and type lusrmgr.msc and press Enter.

2. Now in the left pane, click Users and then right click Administrator in the right pane

3. Uncheck Account is disabled. This way you would be able to enable the admin account.

Nokia AdExchange Program : Earn Money From Your Free App

Dear App developers, rejoice! Here is a great News for you. You are going to make money from your free apps!

Nokia has introduced Nokia Ad Exchange (NAX) - a biggest mobile in-app advertising exchange. With one API and one partner, you'll get access to over 120 ad agencies and networks worldwide. Nokia Ad Exchange offers very attractive features for budding and premium mobile app developers.

Nokia Ad Exchange (NAX)- At A Glance

• NAX is free for developers.

• Registration is open to all developers in all countries.

• Revenue payment enabled in over 200 countries across the world

• You can use NAX on all Nokia platforms, including Windows Phone, Series 40 / JavaME, and Symbian in addition to other, non Nokia platforms such as iOS, Android and BlackBerry.

• Banners, full-screen ads, and text ads are supported by NAX.

• The revenue share between an app publisher and NAX is 70/30.

• Optimization across 120+ ad networks

• Smart, contextual ad servicing for optimum effective cost per mile

• Easy to implement – just one line of code

• Manage your own ad campaigns to promote your app

NAX will launch on October 30th 2012. You can register and get more information on the NAX site: nax.nokia.com

Windows 8 Phone Developer Account for $8

Microsoft has announced a very limited time offer for Windows 8 Phone Developers. Individual developers can register for a Dev Center account for just $8 (a 92 percent savings)for the next 7 days

 Developers will be charged $99 USD or equivalent in their local currency. Microsoft will refund the difference in the next 30 to 45 days. Visit http://dev.windowsphone.com/en-us for more details.