Sometimes MSpaint just won’t cut it, but you can’t justify spending the money for Photoshop. What are your other options?  Take a look at Splashup, a free web based image editor with many of the most commonly used tools for tweaking images for the casual user.

The left side toolbar has crop, rotation, marquee, type, erase, and many shape tools, just like a real image editor! You can choose foreground and background colors and it preserves multiple undo/redo states.

Across the top menu bar there’s (of course) “File” with such favorites as “open”, “save”, “close”, etc. “Image” let’s you set the image and canvas sizes, “Layer” and “Selection” let you manipulate the layers and your current selection respectively.  Filter (see below) let’s you use some of the most often used Photoshop-like filters and control such elements as contrast, color, and hue.  Finally “View” let’s you go from windowed mode into fullscreen and manage your zoom level. continue

Google and Microsoft are two of the more visible companies that are pushing the cloud computing frontier.  There are several advantages to computing in the cloud; your files are available from whatever computer you’re on as long as you have a network connection, you don’t have to worry about backups, etc.  There is a downside to the cloud though.

Basically cloud computing is using applications for productivity that live on the internet, not on the computer you’re working on.  Google Docs and Microsoft’s soon to be released internet based version of it’s flagship product Office are modern examples of cloud computing, but really any webmail (gmail, yahoo, hotmail, etc) could loosely be referred to as a cloud application.

My biggest concerns has always been privacy.  Your email, financial information, business contacts, etc are all saved on a third party companies servers.  There is always the possibility that there could be a security breach from the inside, or someone uses the password reset feature (these are sometimes very insecure) and gains access to your information.  What if the service is interrupted or you can’t log in or something goes missing, who can you call to fix it?

continue