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AutoCollage Application from Microsoft Research

I came across an interesting graphics application recently from Microsoft Research. It’s called AutoCollage 2008. It meshes a variety of your photos together to create an interesting and custom collage from those photos.

 microsoft-autocollage-2008

AutoCollage is a fairly light (7MB) download and installs easily on your machine. Once installed, you simply open the application and point it to a directory of photos you’d like to collage together. The program searches through the folder and pulls in the specified number of photos you’d like to use in your collage.

It works nicely, very straight-forward and has a variety of options you can use to customize how your collage is created.

If you’ve already got other advanced graphics programs installed, you can create these yourself fairly easily, but for beginning users the software provides a quick way to share a meaningful photograph with family and friends.

You can download a trial copy of AutoCollage 2008 that’s good for 30 days. I believe this should just be incorporated into Windows Live Gallery, which maybe they’ll do.

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Microsoft Kills SMS Link Service for Outlook

I’m not sure how many people were probably aware but you could use Outlook to send and receive SMS notifications right to your computer. The service was provided by a feature called SMS Link. It worked fairly well, although I had some general user functionality issues I think could have been improved.

Microsoft-Outlook-SMS-Link

Microsoft has announced via email that they will be discontinuing this service on August 26, 2009.

Microsoft’s SMS Link service will be discontinued effective August 26th, 2009.  Once this service is discontinued, current users will no longer be able to send SMS messages through Office Outlook 2007 using SMS Link.  There are several service providers worldwide who offer similar services, and if you wish to continue using this feature in Office Outlook 2007, you should consider switching to one of these providers.

The available service providers to switch to if you would prefer not to lose this functionality are the following:

These services allow users to continue to send and receive SMS messages into Outlook as they have enjoyed in the past with SMS Link.

Image: Screen shot of SMS Link account website

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The Support Details Website Gives You the Basics… EASY!

How many of you out there are the alpha-geek of the family like me. The badge of honor also extends to most of your friends and sometimes friends of friends too right? Have you ever gotten frustrated by the amount of time it takes to try to get some of the basic support information out of the way?

support-details

The Support Details website collects all of the following information immediately when a user visits the site. They can then add their name, email address and your email address and send a report of all the settings.

The email that comes to you and the other person has the following details, which are also displayed on the website shown above.

support-details-specs

Quickly grabbing OS, screen resolution, IP, Flash, Cookies and all of this other information becomes very helpful when initially working with a new client and their machines.

Oh, and just to make things even more helpful, you can download all these details to a CSV or PDF format for keeping around as an archive of settings as well.

Uncover all the quick details with Support Details about your new users