The time of paper based forms is almost over. But still we need forms to collect structured information for many different tasks. Some organizations have online forms you can fill and submit right in your browser. But in some cases, you have to download a PDF form, fill it and submit via email or manually.
This is where the problem begins. You can view PDF in any simple PDF viewer. But to edit them you need special tools and they might come with a price tag.
To get out of this mess what you really need is a simple yet effective PDF editor. The solution you are looking for is PDFescape.com. Yeah, it’s a web app, so you don’t have to install anything. And the best part is, you can use this even without creating an account and put your credit card back in pocket. It’s totally free to start with. Let’s go and get hands on.
Getting Started with PDFescape
Go to PDFescape.com.
Click on Edit Your PDF Now.
There you have several options to open a PDF. Most probably you will have to go with upload.
It might take some time and then it will open the PDF editor.
In the top right corner you can find PDF editing tools.
There you can insert text, images, erase, draw freehand and add annotation.
If you like to append, move or delete pages, you can do those in third tab.
Once you are done with editing, click on save and download PDF.
PDFescape is very simple yet powerful tool which can be used by anyone to fill forms and other PDF editing needs. Remember, here you can add new content to a document and play with pages, but you can’t edit existing content.
Try this tool for your simple PDF editing needs and never forget to share your experience with us.
If you are talking about PC gaming, you have no way to ignore the brand Nvidia. They were producing innovative GPUs for several decades for us to enjoy awesome gaming experience. On last May 30th they announced a brand new GeForce GTX 770 GPU with lots of promising features as well as price tag. Let’s go and take a look.
New Features in GeForce GTX 770
Faster Memory
Gaming is all about how hast your hardware renders it. So you need a GPU with much faster memory and GTX 770 knows that. It comes with 7 Gbps DDR5 memories, the fastest in the world. Standard memory size is 2 GB or it could be increased in to 4 GB depending on manufacture.
More CUDA cores
Nvidia is very popular for their CUDA architecture for ultimate parallel processing. GTX 770 comes with 1536 CUDA cores and that’s equal to previous GTX 680. That’s a lots of processing cores. Gamers and even video editors would love this.
Cool and Quite
With all these performance GTX 770 still operates with much lesser temperature and noise compared to its predecessors. In order to achieve this Nvidia is keeping fan speed fluctuation to a minimum level with Adaptive temperature controller.
Software Enhancement
All these hardware goodness is backed up with very powerful software. GPU Boost 2.0 is increasing CPU clock whenever system is demanding more processing power as long as the cooling system can handle the heat. In addition it has 3D vision, Adaptive V-Sync, PhysX etc supporting software to make it even more powerful.
Cheaper
Here we are talking about GPU sitting between GTX 680 and GTX TITAN. So you must be thinking that price also would be the same. Surprisingly it’s not!
GTX 680 (2 GB): $499
GTX 770 (2 GB): $399
GTX TITAN: $999
GTX 770 packs all the goodness in GTX 680 and little bit more, yet price tag is $100 lesser. It doesn’t need a genius to say that this is an awesome deal.
Finally
GTX 770 is only an incremental upgrade. It’s still using Kepler architecture. What they have done is pack up more CUDA cores, faster memory and better cooling fan with unbelievable price tag. For sure it will work like magic for any gaming or video applications.
Once this comes in to market you won’t have any reason to buy a GTX 670 or 680.
Google recently release Android Jelly bean, the best update Android ever had. In previous cases most of the user had to wait weeks and months to get OTA. Developers had to wait even more to get the official release of source code.
This time they made an improvement and release OTA in very short time. Not only that they resale official source code and binary within matter of days. They could solve this problem because they had Nexus Branded series of Handsets and Tablets. Nexus 7 originally came with Jelly bean and Galaxy Nexus also got OTA update within few days except few carrier specific versions.
If you are using previous Nexus S, you might say I also have a Nexus, where is my Jelly Bean OTA update? Yes, the whole point of getting a Nexus Branded handset is avoiding Android fragmentation. And you will never have to regret, Google started rolling Jelly bean OTA update for Nexus S as well. This must be great news for Nexus S users.
Will Jelly Bean Work Well on Nexus S?
The entire devices got Jelly bean is having at least Dual CoreProcessor and 1 GB RAM. In Nexus 7 tablet, it’s having Quad core processor. With all those facts you must be having a doubt whether Jelly Bean will work well in Single Core 1 GHz processor and 512 BM RAM in Nexus S.
When Android ICS came out for Nexus S, It worked pretty well on that same as originally ICS powered devices such as Galaxy Nexus. If you dig deep in to technical details, its having dedicated GPU, hence it could support all the new technologies that come with Android Jelly Bean such as Triple Buffering. I don’t see any reason to Jelly Bean to give trouble in Nexus S.
However, you can’t expect the fluidity of Galaxy Nexus or Nexus 7 in Nexus S due to its lower hardware configuration. Still you will be able to experience better performance as well as new features.
If you are a Nexus S user, and update your device to new Android Jelly Bean, share you new experience with NOG community.
If you think about Android tablets the very first brands that come to your mind are Samsung and Asus. Samsung is the king of Android Smartphone yes, but they didn’t do well with Tablets in past few months. In the meantime Asus was working so hard to be the king of Android tablets and today they have reached there.
The concept transforming tablets became a blast and they got lots of media attention after its first appearance. It’s Quad core processor and brand new ICS was the key features by that time. Best thing is for the first time Android world got a full HD display with Transformer Pad 700. With this success Asus got the chance to be the manufacturing partner in latest Google Nexus 7 tablet which is the very first Jelly bean device in the world.
Android Fragmentation Issues
One thing many people hate about Android is its fragmentation. Many of the handsets are running with Android 2.3 even today. Android ICS have reached 10% of devices so far. Regardless of powerful hardware muscle, Transformer series also have to face the same destiny. Android jelly bean is out there, but still it’s only for Nexus 7, Galaxy Nexus and recently for Nexus S.
Official Jelly Bean Release for Transformer Family
However, there is good news for Asus Transformer Pad 300 users and who are looking forward to buy Transformer Pad 700. Asus has officially announced that they are going to release Android Jelly bean for Transformer series except original Transformer.
Unfortunately there is no certain time frame given says only within few months. ‘Few months’ is a very long time for Android world. No matter what once it come out Transformer series will be the best Android tablets ever on the earth with their powerful hardware, built in camera, GPS and full HD display in Transformer Pad 700. They will easily beat Google Nexus 7 except its price factor.
Couple of months ago whole online news sources was filled with Facebook phone and Facebook OS. Then Mark sends out invitation to the big event “Facebook Home” on Android. It clarified some of the concerns we had. But still many people expected that Facebook will release an Android powered phone.
But they are smarter than that. No point of putting tons of money and effort to manufacture a new phone/OS and make it popular. They decided to plug in to a popular, well established system with millions of phones.
Finally Facebook home was announced officially as an Android launcher, a new theme for Android OS. The idea is to make your phone about people rather than apps. In other words, in this new theme, once you unlock the phone you can see people, your Facebook friends, their status updates and images etc, not app shortcuts.
Currently Facebook Home launcher is available for selected few phones including HTC One X/X+, HTC First (has Facebook Home off the box), Samsung Galaxy S III and Galaxy Note II.
Features in Facebook Home
Cover Feed
Lock screen is not a lock screen any more. Once you lock the phone you can see time for a while and it will fade away. In full screen you can see your Facebook cover feed with status updates, images and other news. Images will be scrolled slowly to left or right and you can swipe to see the next item.
You can double tap to like and access comment as a pop up. If you press and hold the phone it will zoom out to see the whole thing. For all these events there is a nice sound effect.
Chat Heads
Once you receive a Facebook message it will appear as a bubble with senders profile photo. You can move this bubble around, but it will always get anchored to the nearest edge. This bubble stays on the screen till you close it no matter what app you are using.
You can tap on the chat head to open the conversation and tap again to minimize. Drag it to bottom corner to close it. All these are accompanied with very interesting physics and sounds.
Do We Really Need Facebook Home?
You will definitely ask this big question. Do I really need it? I already have Facebook app and it works just fine. The answer is simple.
If more than 90% of your Smartphone contact time is spent on Facebook, this would be a great idea for you. Once you unlock the phone, Bam! There you have Facebook cover feed.
If you consider Facebook only as an app which you access occasionally this is certainly not for you. You may use this for few days, but I’m pretty sure you will go back to stock launcher.
Adobe Creative Suite 5 is the latest multimedia design and web development software package released by Adobe Systems on 30th April 2010. Adobe Creative Suite 5 is the 7th edition of this package.
Version History
Creative Suite 1 – September 2003
Creative Suite 2 – April 2005
Macromedia Studio MX – May 2002
Macromedia Studio MX Plus – February 2003
Macromedia Studio MX 2004 – September 2003
Macromedia Studio MX 2008 – September 2005
Creative Suite 3 – March 2007
Creative Suite 4 – October 2008
Editions And Software
Adobe Creative Suite 5 comes in 4 editions. Adobe Creative Suite Design Premium and Design Standard are designed for the professional multimedia printing and designing purposes. Among them, Premium Edition contains more software than Standard edition. Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web Premium Edition contains the multimedia applications that can be used for web designing and other web development purposes. Adobe Creative Suite 5 Production Premium edition contains the applications that can be used to design rich quality production for movies, cartoons, DVDs, Blu-Rays. Adobe Creative Suite 5 Master Collection contains all the software that comes with the Creative Suite 5 pack.
What’s New In CS5
Adobe Dreamweaver CS5
A set of HTML5 tools comes with the Dreamweaver CS5. It also provides the support for CSS3. There are several other new in-built features also comes with the Dreamweaver CS5. Multi screen preview, which enables the designer or the developer to view the site in three different ways are the one of the most attractive features among them. Media query reports and HTML5 tag library for code hinting are also very much significant features. Live view rendering for CSS3 gives a fresh experience for the developers. Live video updates support both video and audio formats.
Adobe Illustrator CS5
The stroke width can be resized with the new width tool. The special feature in this is that it can be used to resize a specific part of that stroke without changing the whole stroke if the designer tools is not an alter brush tool. The designers can save those strokes and use in the future. The art and paint brushes can be adjusted as it wants to be. Vector images are not that natural in its appearance usually. Bristle Brush can be used to apply much natural effects for the vector images. Attractive web graphics can be done with the text anti aliasing feature in the Illustrator CS5.
Adobe Photoshop CS5
Most highlighted features in Photoshop CS5 are the 3D tools available in it. Adobe Repousse, the 3D extrusion tool gives the ability to convert the 2D images and arts into 3D objects. Depths, scale, bend and shear properties also available with the new Photoshop CS5 edition. A special 3D tools also available for 3D materials. The HDR Pro function gives a great facility for the users to remove the ghost. Ghost means the carbon copy images that are being made due to the slow frame rate of the camera.
Adobe Flash Catalyst CS5
Adobe Flash Catalyst is a tool developed for the people who draw their artworks with tools like Photoshop and Illustrator to transform them into interfaces. It includes more than 250 new tools for users to make their work done simply and smartly. It is a good tool to manage the content without writing codes. This tool is specially developed for the novices who need to provide interactive graphics. The Catalyst projects can be edited with the Flash builder and the used coding language is MXML.
Adobe InDesign CS5
Adobe CS5 InDesign CS5 can be used not only for the printable format of the documents. It can be used for e publishing and apple apps usage as well. This can be a great challenge for the leading multimedia application developer in the world for apple related programs.
Adobe After Effects CS5
There are 4 main new features available with the Adobe After Effects CS5. Rendering high-resolution images, HDR memory intensive feature and easier to use floating-point colors, less re-rendering and virtually elimination of low-memory errors. In addition to those availabilities, the faster functioning is a very much highlighted option in the After Effects CS5 edition.
System Requirements
Windows
Intel Core 2 or AMD Phenom II processor with the support for 64-bit Operating Systems
An Operating System later than Windows Vista
RAM more than 2GB, 4GB for optimum performances
More than 10GB hard disk space
Mulicore Intel Processor
Operating System Released after Mac OS X 10.5.7
More than 4GB RAM recommended
More than 10GB hard disk space
MAC OS
Multi-core Intel Processor
Operating System Released after Mac OS X 10.5.7
More than 4GB RAM recommended
More than 10GB hard disk space
Final Cut Studio vs. Adobe Creative Suite 5
Final Cut Studio is the main competitor from the Apple Inc for the Adobe Systems. The Final Cut Studio consists of 6 new tools that can be used to do the multimedia editing for Apple Products. According to the experts view, those tool are so far minor than the Adobe Creative Suite tools. There are more than 100 new tools available with the latest release of Final Cut Studio. Final Cut Pro 7, Motion 4, Sound Track Pro 3, Color 1.5, and Compressor 3.5 are the tools for the Final Cut Studio.
Future Development
There will be a very much better future for the Adobe Products as they display a rapid growth of development. The next implementation would be an HTML code generator in Photoshop. The whole structure of the webpage will be coded with HTML as the designer designs it with boxes and other shapes. This will reduce the design time of the web pages. The next best implementation will be the internal server including in the Adobe Dreamweaver. It is a common factor in other IDEs such as Netbeans and Visual Studio. Most of the Dreamweaver users question why they do not provide an in-built server. The edition based release would be a great marketing strategy and its already been implemented up to some extent. Because of that the people don’t have much strong financial background also will be able to afford a scale down version of these exceptional software for a start. At the same time it will reduce the software piracy as well.
Microsoft Office is one of the most popular and most used applications in many PCs around the globe. It has become a day to day application for techy people as well as people in other professions. Down the time they improved the package by adding more software in to it and adding new features while polishing up the existing. Now Microsoft has come up with next evolution of Office Package which is Office 15 aka Microsoft Office 2013. Now you can try out its customer preview.
In Office 2005, it had a conventional menu based navigation system. In 2007 package, they introduced revolutionary ribbon interface. This is the first step they took to prepare their users to work with forthcoming office online. In 2010 Package they took it further and connected your document with cloud storage on request. In 2013 it will be tightly integrated with Office 365 cloud services. Microsoft engineers are very careful not to make drastic updates which gives a significant learning curve to their users. They do it slowly in style.
How to Download?
Go to official Microsoft Office Download page.
In order to precede you will require a Live account. If you don’t have one, get one for free.
You will notice that you have 5 installations and all the installed copies are tightly integrated with Office 365 service.
Your OS should be Windows 7 or 8 to install new office package.
Click on install button and download the setup wizard.
This is an online installation. Therefore you need active internet connection during the process.
Once it done, you can enjoy new office package.
What’s New In Microsoft Office 2013?
The main thing you will notice in Microsoft Office 2013 is its new UI. Entire UI is revamped to new metro look. Colors are flat and no embossing in ribbon UI. Overall look is pretty neat and cleaner than before. This is good news for people who are spending hours and hours every day with office package. Even if you take a look at application logs, they are also revamped to match with metro theme.
You can integrate office 2013 with office 365 online services and SkyDrive cloud storage. Then your entire document will be stored online and through office 365 you can easily share them and even enable collaborative editing with your co workers.
When it comes to feature update there is advanced PDF creation module in built. Using this you can simply open and edit PDF documents. Resume reading, new advanced bookmarking system is also added to new office. Other than that there are few updates for multimedia handing and chart.
If you want to install Microsoft Office 2013 in a Windows 8 tablet, yes it’s ready to work with touch responsive screen. This update is all about birding the previous version of Office Package to new Metro UI and Cloud integration. Other than that most of the common operations continues same as previous package.
Asus previously introduced an amazing concept to Android Tablet world which is Transforming Tablets such as Transformer Prime. They could transform between tablet and Netbook with keyboard docking stations. This is of course a brand new concept which made Asus the best Android tablet manufactures in the market.
They didn’t limit these radical designs only for Tablets. They expanded it to Smartphones as well. In 2012 February they introduced a very different kind of Smartphone called Asus PadFone. They brought the concept of “Transformer” back into play and this Smartphone could transform in to a Tablet and then to a Netbook as well.
Device Configuration
Design
Design is simple Candy bar as any other Android Smartphone. Built quality is great and materials are Aluminum and Poly carbonate. This is great plus point compared to other plastic built Smartphone. It’s coming with on-screen keys same as Google Galaxy Nexus. The best thing is it’s very light, only 129 g and probably having the lowest weight compared other Android Phones.
Processor and Storage
Processor is 1.5 GHz Dual Core Karait running on Qualcomm MSM8260A Snapdragon chipset. GPU is Adreno 225. This is very different configuration compared to other phones in the market.
RAM is 1 GB, usual configuration and internal storage is 16 / 32 / 64 GB. There is microSD card slot for you to expand storage up to another 32 GB.
Operating System
Asus PadFone originally comes with Android 4.0 customized versions. They had several features to support transforming such as dynamic switching. In addition there are controllers which required operating the device in Tablet mode which is pretty similar to Asus Transformer Prime.
Display
This device is having 4.3 inch Super AMOLED display with 540 x 960 pixel resolution which will give you 256 ppi pixel density. It’s a capacitive screen that supports multi-touch inputs and protected with Corning Gorilla Glass.
Connectivity and Interfaces
Device supports all major connectivity technologies such as 2G, 3G, HSDPA, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. There is an in-built GPS device to pin point your location. There is a USB 2.0 interface to connect the device in to computer as well as to Docking station.
Camera
Primary camera is 8 MP with LED flash and capable of recording 1080p video. Front facing camera is VGA designed for video calling. In addition it’s having other standard options such as auto focus, color correction and geo tagging.
Battery Life
Phone comes with 1520 mAhLi-ion battery which can practically power it up for 6 hours. But there is another 6600 mAh battery in docking station. With that device can go for nearly 10 hours. If you have the keyboard dock as well, you can go definitely more than 16 hours even with heavy usage. This kind of battery performance is not there in any other Android device.
What is PadFone Station Dock?
PadFone station is optional device that comes for PadFone and this is the magic here. If you take a look at the hardware, it is a 10.1 inch tablet with 1280 x 800 pixel resolution. In addition there is a 6600 mAh Li-ion battery as well. There is a pocket, where you can dock PadFone and then whole device become a tablet. In the pocket there are two holes kept for phones camera and LED flash.
In this setup, PadFone is the brain and dock is only the battery and display. Once you dock the phone within few seconds it transfers the display to dock using dynamic switching. It matches the resolution and other controller during that.
If you want to type things faster in this device you can get a keyboard dock as well. It’s almost same as original prime’s keyboard dock and it will give you more battery power as well.
Wrapping Up
PadFone is a great and path changing concept in Android devices. If you want to get the maximum experience with it make sure you buy the whole package with docking station as well as keyboard dock. Software is carefully optimized to work with all those transforming.
There was an issue with Dynamic display switching in some applications. However Asus released a patch to solve this issue as far as possible. There is a special mechanism to install tablet optimized app on the phone and activate them only when the device is docked to the station.
No matter how amazing this device is, it’s not a good fit for everyone. If you need Smartphone, Tablet and Netbook at the same time, this is your only option. But there will be very few people who are having that kind of requirement. Therefore target market for this device will be very limited.
Most of the modern web browsers sync your data in to a cloud, so that you can access them from anywhere in the world as long as you have an internet connection. In order to get this done you should sign in to the browser or any 3rd party plug-in you have installed to manage bookmarks.
What if you are using a public computer? When you are accessing internet sometimes you have to use public computer, especially when you are a student. When you are at work, yes you have a separate computer and login, but system administrator could login to that any time for maintenance. In this kind of environment, login to browser could be a cyber suicide. Without login you won’t have your bookmarks.
In order to solve this, what you need is an online bookmark manager and that should have the facility to bookmark pages you like without using Plug-in or the browser itself. When I was looking for a solution I came across with this web site called Instapaper.
How to use Instapaper as Your Online Bookmark Manager?
Go to Instapaper homepage.
There you will have to create an account before you start using it.
For that click on Create account link, provide your email address as username and provide a password to create account.
You will be automatically sign in once you create account.
You are done with your registration and it will take you to Instapaper dashboard.
Now you have to setup Instapaper bookmarklet to bookmark pages while you surf. For that drag and drop this “Read Later” link to your browsers bookmark bar.
Now you are good to go. Whenever you see a page you need to read later, simply click on Read later bookmarklet.
It will notify you that page is saving and within few second it will be saved in Instapaper dashboard.
You can access Instapaper dashboard and access your bookmark any time, from any place in any browser.
This is a universal, globally accessible and browser independent method for you to save your bookmarks. You can setup Bookmarklet in any browser without compromising your online security. You can access your bookmarks online in a web interface and finally you can clean wipe your personal data once you leave the computer.
This Bookmarklet is not the only way to use Instapaper. There are many other ways such as iPhone, iPad app, Android app and Email link. You will be able to see all the option to use Instapaper by following this link. If you are an application developer you could use Instapaper Developer API.
Google search engine is getting smarter day by day. The algorithm they use to rank pages has improved significantly in past few years. As a result you are getting the most relevant and high quality content at the top of the search result. Google is smart enough to identify all the black hat SEO techniques and keep those fake contents away from us.
Now they have taken it another step ahead with Google Handwriting for mobile search. With this the total web interface in Google mobile search becomes a scratch pad where you can write and draw things with your fingers. A very advanced OCR engine convert them to text and symbols, then feed it to usual Google search. You can use this on your Smartphone as well as with Tablet. Let’s see how you can use this brand new revolutionary concept to save your day.
How to Use Google Handwriting?
Before you start using Google Handwriting you must enable it. Remember it’s still in beta stage.
Go to Google search from your mobile browser and tap on settings under search box.
There you can see several search settings. Enable handwrite and tap on save.
Now you are good to go. Go back to Google home page.
Now you can see a small handwritten “g” letter at bottom right corner. Tap on that to enable handwriting.
It will give you an on-screen space bar and now whole screen is a scratch pad.
You can write letter by letter or may be whole word at once.
Google will identify what you are writing and feed them in to search box. Click search button after you finish writing.
Tips and Tricks
This OCR engine works in two different ways. You can write letter by letter or whole word at once. Either way you have to manually press search button to submit the query. Google has advice you to use block capital letters to make the handwriting identification more accurate. However, it worked reasonably well with lowercase letters and even for cursive writing as well.
This is not only for letters and numeric. It can identify symbols as well. I tried to submit a mathematical query to Google using handwringer and it worked like magic. Sometimes it misidentifies “+” as “t” which is nothing to complain about. Below is a list of symbols tested by me which are working great with Google Handwriting.
Surprisingly Google handwriting could convert symbols to text as well. However this feature is still in experimental stage. For now you can draw a heart shape and Google Handwriting will convert it to text “Heart”. More symbols will come in future releases.
Soon Google handwriting will expand its service to other Google products as well. After that we will be able to chat, add a calendar entry, add a task and do many more work with handwriting, without even touching keyboard.
