Send a Photo Image with Google's Gmail

Done creating an image and want to send it to a friend? You've set all the frame's, composed the image to your liking and saved it to you computer?

Google's email software, Gmail, now offers the ability to send image's within your email. Here's their release post: Official Gmail Blog: New in Labs: Inserting images.

Follow these simple steps to send your new photo:

• Open up your Gmail account and click Settings along the top right.
  
  
• Then click the Labs tab.
  
• Scroll down to where it says Inserting Images.
  
  
• Enable it, and then scroll to the bottom ...
  
• and click Save Changes.
  
• Now compose an image as you always have, insert your new image and then send it to your friend.
  

Don't have a Gmail account? Go here.

Custom Desktop Wallpaper Solution

In my last article, I mentioned the thought process that started me on the journey to building my desktop wallpaper program, FrameIT Freedom. What I want to get from is what is important to you in a desktop wallpaper program?

If your a professional photographer or play around with a pocket camera, is a simple to use editor that can right (rotate to upright) editor something you'd find helpful? And in what increments, 90 degrees or something smaller, something that could be fine tuned?

Feel free to write anything, I'm curious to what features you'd find helpful.

Desktop Wallpaper Made Easy

My first thoughts for FrameIT Freedom came when I bought a new computer that had Vista as the operating system. For a long time I'd used WWPlus32 that'd I'd bought to use on Windows 95/98 and had been using ever since. But with the move to Vista it didn't work any longer.

I tried out several trial desktop wallpaper solutions, and of course Vista comes with one. Everything I was seeing was small windows with a few check boxes for presentation. What I needed was an environment that was easy to manipulate the image I was viewing.

I'm a computer programmer and was now using C# for a client. I decided to have a go at creating a desktop wallpaper solution for Windows Vista. Using C# for .NET 3.5 as the base it wasn't too long before I had a rudimentary desktop wallpaper program up and running.

I had the basics, Tile, Center, Stretch, Resize (to fit the screen) and Seamless Mirroring. What was needed was a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. It's not as easy as you might imagine to populate a list of images and give them their sub-titles that is the file name. But once that was done, I already had buttons that were nondescript for resize and reset. What I needed to do was transform them into true WYSIWYG photos.

So now these photo images give a look-ahead view of what the image will look like were you to click on them. This method went towards the seamless mirroring images on the top right of the editor as well. Now looking at any image gave the WYSIWYG that I was going for. From there though was to add the true magic of the ideas I'd been churning over.

These were lines, borders, frames that could be moved individually (Patent Pending) to manipulate the image from. Unlike traditional drag a box to grab a section of an image, using these methods you can move the right side of the box over one pixel, you would have to redraw the whole box. Now just move that border/frame and all the other frame's of the crop (if there is any) stay where you positioned them previously.

Using this tool an image can be cut in half with the single frame border line. No longer do you have to try and get say the upper left corner and drag to encapsulate the part of the image you want, which is half and have all the way to the edges. You get this automatically with FrameIT Freedom.

Later following community feedback was the ability to Print, Rotate and Flip the image. All following the standard that had been set to this point, keep the original image intact.

Years ago I found, using another image editing program, that images degrade when manipulated and you could lose parts of the image over time, unaware of this until you tried to undo the changes. FrameIT Freedom keeps the original unchanged. All manipulations do nothing to the original, but every setting is remembered. Just as in photo-copying, the original is best to copy from than those gather defects as copy after copy is made. So FrameIT Freedom does the same drawing from the Original for every view.

This is really handy for photo images taken with a camera because often those images are taken when the camera is held vertically and the resulting image needs to be rotated for best viewing. So using FrameIT Freedom, the image viewed is rotated for viewing but the original remains unaffected thus keeping its integrity.

I think you'll find that FrameIT Freedom is revolutionary for a desktop wallpaper solution. I enjoy using it every time I want to manipulate a photo and position it to the desktop. I foresee that this could be used for other professions that need to project images using projectors, to rotate and or crop them to position their focus for everyone to view for best effect.

The Domain Name Game

You might think that when creating a domain, that it would be the easiest thing to do. If you've ever tried it, you will certainly have found that your first choice, and your second on down to your last choices have all been taken. That is unless you are going for something on the order of, "ThisIsMyMeChuckSavageDomain.com" name.

When I started my search, I found that every name that I could possibly think of Dot Com, was already taken. So I started a mental, emotion and spiritual search for names that meant something to me. Of course many of these were taken and some, even though available, well they were just wild thoughts and didn't have any real validity.

If I were to go at it again, I might take some current experience with the current name and maybe have a go at something else. Though now that I have a name and a company behind it, I wouldn't change, even though sometimes I'm tempted to go for something maybe a little easier to communicate.

Try telling someone you work for me, is that Crisen pronounced see-risen, or is it See-risen as I just used, or sea-risen which in fact it is. I can count on pretty much with every new contact that I have to spell the name several times before someone actually understands on the other end exactly what letters I am actually using for the name of the domain.

I like the name Searisen. My brother Steve, who is the CEO of EcoProducts Inc., asked me when I came up with the name, why those words run together. I explained that pretty much every picture in my home shows water and the sea. I love pictures of sailing, an old picture of an F-20 prototype reflected against water, or a picture of a surfer making life look simple while skimming some tube. Water is deep rooted in me, and so is the other half of the word, Risen. It's spiritual to me and implies triumph, victory and other very symbolic values.

What I was finding though was that Searisen, was being pronounced Sear-Isn by those that read the name without hearing it first, not the desired pronunciation. I'm not sure why mentally people see Searisen and come up with Sear-Isn, so I've had to go and make the R capitalized to better communicate the company's name.

I like the name SeaRisen and I'm sticking with it even with the difficulties. It might have been out of thin-air when first created, but it has meaning and substance now.