Accusoft's Blog

Huge photos are all around us, not just on our phones.  From web designers wanting to get faster page load times to my wife wanting to more easily share full resolution photos with friends and family, the ThinPic photo reducing service is needed in a lot of other places. JPEG Wizard and ThinPic have teamed up to provide a free online photo shrinking service. The best part is this service is free. If you are interested in the products that made this happen keep reading. If you just want to know how you can start shrinking your photos then skip down to Get Started.

What is ThinPic?
ThinPic is a simple and easy-to-use mobile app that reduces photo file sizes on an iOS mobile device without compromising resolution or image quality. iPhone and iPad users can store three times more high-resolution photos on their devices and cloud services and then share those photos up to three times faster using the ThinPic app. Read more about ThinPic or download it from iTunes.

What is JPEG Wizard?
The JPEG Wizard desktop software has been around for many years as an interactive end user program that provides a variety of image manipulation and editing functions. JPEG Wizard now offers an online edition of this product for reducing your photos file sizes.

Read more to see how they work together and how you can get started for free.

"To transform our culture by creating a world where science and technology are celebrated and where young people dream of becoming science and technology leaders."

~Dean Kamen, Founder of FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology)

Most high school students actively participate in extracurricular activities whether it is sports, band, or cheerleading. At a local high school in Tampa, Fla., students have expanded those traditional activities to participate in a very competitive organization. No, it’s not football or basketball, but robotics.

The Middleton High School Robotics Team is home to Masquerade, the 2012 World Champions. Bob Howard, Sales Engineer at Accusoft, is one of the Masquerade coaches who became involved because his son joined the team. “Robotics has become more popular because of the evolution of automation,” said Bob.  “It has been going on for years, but now the computers have gotten much more sophisticated and so the robotics evolution is speeding up.”

Being a part of the robotics team “the kids learn about teamwork, how to talk over ideas, and come to a team decision when it is and is not something they agree with. Robotics is a growing field and robots will take over many jobs during the next 50 years. It’s a great field to be in for a job in the future. One of the bigger lessons that these students learn is that they are building something with their hands and seeing it work. They realize how hard it is to do simple tasks with a robot, and then they can determine if they enjoy it and want to make a living at building them.”

Read more to learn how one robotics program helped a disabled kitten.

Imagery Concepts developed the m.i.l.k. ^® Digital ID software at the request of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and is the first recorded digital ID designed to aid in the recovery of a missing child. It provides parents and caregivers a convenient location to store a digital photo and identification information regarding their child. This vital data is stored in the privacy of the user’s computer.

Since 2007, Accusoft has been proud to provide an integral component to Imagery Concepts for their m.i.l.k. Digital ID Software. The use of ImagXpress within the software makes it so parents can scan a copy of their child’s photo into theirm.i.l.k. Digital ID. Thousands of parents have created a m.i.l.k. Digital ID for their children using the ImagXpress SDK. 

Jack Berlin, President of Accusoft says, “We are excited to be able to contribute to such an important product. Here at Accusoft we value family very highly and are happy to be involved in projects that help protect families and especially children.”

Read more to learn how law enforcement uses m.i.l.k Digital ID.

Every Friday since somewhere in 2007 or 2008, developers and other co-workers at Accusoft come together for Tech Talk during lunch and watch a video presentation centered around topics of interest.  These are usually videos from conferences likeTechEd, Google I/O, or any of the other numerous technical events that happen each year.  We also watch inspirational videos from TED or other business, management or general interest videos.  Accusoft is nice enough to supply us lunch during the videos and everyone has a good time sharing in the new information. 

November is the last month that I show Friday videos since December is often filled with people taking various days off. Since it’s hard work finding videos every week, having a month off to build up a stockpile of videos is actually relaxing.

We started the month off with a video from TechEd North America 2012, then a few videos from the Microsoft BUILD 2012 conference that just completed, and finish the month with some thought-provoking TED Talks.

Metrics That Matter: Improving Lean and Agile, Kanban and Scrum
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2012/DEV339 
It discusses some of the general problems with metrics and gives a pretty good introduction to the different things measured in Kanban and Scrum.

SignalR
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2012/3-034 
SignalR looks like a great abstraction layer over something that is becoming more and more common, real-time web communication.  I love that they’ve built various fallback implementations, allowing you to seamlessly use WebSockets all the way down to Long Polling with the exact same code.

Read more for videos from BUILD 2012 and TED.

Visual Studio Magazine has awarded Accusoft two Reader Choice Awards for ImageGear for .NET and Barcode Xpress for 2012.

“We’re honored to once again be recognized by Visual Studio Magazine for our image processing and barcode SDKs,” said Jack Berlin, President of Accusoft. “ImageGear and Barcode Xpress have been staples of our organization and I’m excited to see them continue to receive such accolades.”

ImageGear for .Net, awarded the Reader’s Choice Silver Medal, is an imaging sdk with ASP.NET HTML5 controls that can be used to display images and thumbnails of over 100 different file formats including Microsoft Office formats and PDF files.

Barcode Xpress, awarded the Reader’s Choice Bronze Medal, is a barcode sdk for 1D and 2D barcode recognition, writing and reading.

Accusoft has received several Readers Choice awards from Visual Studio Magazine dating back to 2003 when ImagXpress won. 

The Visual Studio Magazine Readers Choice Awards are based on the responses of hundreds of select VSM subscribers. The online ballot, which was compiled by the editors of Visual Studio Magazine, included more than 400 products. 

The full list of winners is highlighted in the November 2012 issue of Visual Studio Magazine. Visit Visual Studio Magazine to see the full list.