Adobe Air

Adobe Air products create applications that were previously available only on the internet to be downloaded to your desktop. I'm not sure what the advantage would be for myself, because at work and home I easily have access to the internet. My work at the library includes a variety of work at different library branches, so I can work at up to eight different computer terminals. With having an application on the internet, I can do something at one terminal at work and access it at another, or at home or another computer outside of work. Also at the library I would need our network administrator to install anything on our computers because I don't have administrative privileges. This makes it cumbersome for myself and creates a lot more work for him as well. I'm also not crazy about downloading a lot of things to my home computer, for security and space reasons.

So, when I was looking at an Adobe Air application to try, I looked for something that was more like a traditional desktop application. One application I decided to try was Shrink O'Matic. Shrink O' Matic is an automatic image re sizer and batch processor. Drag an image or multiple images into the program and it will automatically re size it for you. You select the size limits and the destination folder. You can also save it in different formats.

I was hoping this would be a like a free version of the batch processing option you have in Photoshop or Fireworks but it has some limitations. It appears that you cannot re size anything larger than 800 x 600 pixels. I was not able to re size any photo immediately after I've taken it with my digital camera because the size was too large. I had to find a smaller image that had already been re sized to try it out. Because there are no instructions in the program it took me a while to realize that I could not re size larger images. At first I thought the program wasn't working, but a user had left a comment about the sizing on the Adobe Air site, so I figured out that was the problem.

Shrink O' Matic does work very quickly so it may be useful for making batch thumbnail images from images that have already been resized and altered in an image editing program. I will have to see if this will be a useful program for me.