Maarten van Stam - Soft As In Software :-)

For 2010 we (the magazine team on the Software Development Network, Dutch developer user group) decided that it would be a good thing to bring the pedal to the floor and speed up with our magazine.

In previous years we provided four magazines distributed to our user group member delivered by mail (handed over by the mailman). Four magazines in a year will bring only one magazine in about 13 weeks. For the world we live in we thought this to be a tad too slow.

These days we are seeing a burst in eReader-deliveries all over the place, gadgets of all kinds and we decided this to be a good time to double our magazine count per year but to distribute fifty percent of the magazine count as digital magazine where possible optimized for eReader devices. That all sounds easier than it is as we are now experiencing. We need more input from our authors, advertisements but most of all we had to double our magazine tasks such as collecting and editing texts, working on the layout, verify the content etc.

One of the goals we have planned for our new setup is to change our layout a little bit and provide space for small editorial announcements to be supplied by whoever wants to announce something related to Software Development. Now that we deliver eight magazines a year these small announcements bring more up to date relevance to the magazine but for that to work we need your assistance.

If you have news on your software products, new releases, feature enhancements, hardware reviews related to software development, book releases (maybe you want -us- to review your books, soft- or hardware), maybe you want to share your research results from your software labs, announce your whitepapers, event, code projects, architect info ... send us your information and we'll try to fit it in our magazine!

Whenever you think you fit in this description (or you want to provide larger articles or want to discuss sponsored editorials-larger articles discussing products allowing to emphasizing on your product/business) just contact me on my contact page: http://blogs.officezealot.com/maarten/contact.aspx and one of our magazine members will contact you to work things out.

Oh, one more thing ... we accept content in two languages: Dutch and English. Being a Dutch magazine of course we prefer the text to be in Dutch but we understand not everybody is able to provide the text in Dutch leaving the other option to provide an English text.

The Dutch Information Workers Usergroup (DIWUG) powered by the Dutch Software Development Network (SDN) has published an SharePoint eMagazine free for download.

For your convenience Microsoft posted an overview with all the Visual Studio 2010 options and features compared over the available editions (VS 2010 Professional, Premium and Ultimate).

http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010/default.mspx#compare

Check it out and decide what your favorite edition will be. Remember the launch is announced for March 22, 2010 so that’s only about 4 months from now!

About two weeks ago I did some presentations at the Nationale Office Dag 2009 to show some tips and trips on Word, Excel and Outlook.

One of the tips in the Word presentation was how to create a stack of dummy text in order to check out your document layout by using the ‘Rand’ feature.

To test this, just open up a document and start typing ‘=rand(3,5)’ without the quotes and hit enter. Now you’ll notice that your document is provided with a bit of random text over 3 paragraphs containing 5 sentences.

Today I learned that when you have Word 2007 (or up) installed you can do the same thing with Lorem. Try it, do the same as with rand and start typing ‘=lorem(3,5)’ without the quotes and hit enter. Now you get the Lorem text you often see in Microsoft demos.

I promised to add some more Tips and Tricks information that I discussed at the presentations, but it has been extremely busy so this one is just a starter to begin with ;-) 

Have fun!

Update: IconWorkShop is now updated to 6.51, and you now get up to 50% discount on various bundles Read more at: http://www.axialis.com/promotions.

About nine months ago I blogged about one of the products that I use to create the icons to be used in my applications. Right now IconWorkshop is updated and added several new features:

• Ability to edit bitmap images - Now you can open, edit and save bitmap images in different formats. This feature permits creating UNIX icons in PNG format as well as illustrations for websites in GIF or JPEG format.

• Photoshop plug-in compatible with CS4 - The transfer plug-in is compatible with the latest version of Photoshop CS4 in versions 32 bits and 64 bits. You must re-install the plug-in if you upgraded to Photoshop CS4.

• Welcome window - Now you can save images as JPEG and specify the JPEG compression ratio with instant preview.

• New filter - The gaussian blur filter has been added.

• New image enhancement - Now create Hot and Disabled effect on an icon, image or image strip.

• Enhanced Drop Shadow - The drop shadow feature has been enhanced. Now you can adjust color, angle, size, distance and opacity.

• New Objects Packs - Five new ready-to-use object packs are added in this release: Functions Icons (488 icons), iKon Icons (269 icons), Bright Icons (296 icons), Milky Icons (257 icons) and Rinoa Toolbars (183 icons).

• Visual Studio Addin bug fixed - The problem related to the addin toolbar has been fixed (just upgrade to fix the issue).

• Other enhancements and bug fixes

And the best thing is that you now get 50% discount (through August 31) on all the Axialis products making it really cheap to buy you an icon toolset that integrates with Visual Studio.