Archive for December, 2009

We’ve covered PDF conversion tools in the past, but given the inconsistent performance of such tools, it’s always worth pointing out potentially better ones. PDF to Word by Nitro is just such a tool, and given its claim as “The Most Accurate PDF-to-Word Converter”, I had to give it a shot.

And you know what? It does remarkably well. Based on the test documents I tried, I really didn’t run into any serious issues, other than the elephant in the room: uploading your documents to a third-party for conversion. I can’t imagine using a service like this for real-world heavy lifting with business-related documents. I can’t hand over my sensitive documents to a third-party.

However, for business users with the same issue, there’s good news. Nitro’s PDF-to-Word conversion technology is what powers their Nitro PDF Professional desktop application, and it has recently been marked down from $99 US to $69 US, with a free 14 day trial available.

Blam! Just like that: you can now reply to Facebook status updates via email. Just hit ‘reply’, type out your response, hit ‘send’, and voila!

I have no idea if it has just been enabled for the entire Facebook userbase, or if it’s steadily rolling out as I speak, but three things are for sure: I’m using it right now; it works seamlessly and it’s fast. Please let me know if it’s enabled for you or not — I’ll try to keep this post updated with the news.

It’s been a long time coming, that’s for sure. Might this also mean that we’ll soon be able to reply to Facebook mail via our email accounts? I sure hope so. Anything to avoid ads that remind me of my continued bachelorhood.

Update: It’s a gradual roll-out, so not everyone will have it enabled yet. It also works for any status ‘thread’ that you are a participant of, not just your own.

You can sleep well at night knowing it’s a perfect fade-in, though. Google tested 10 different versions of the fancy new transition, and ultimately chose one that was “positive or neutral on all key metrics.” According to Google, the new fade-in does slow users down, but it also improves their efficiency at using the homepage over time. Apparently a few extra-milliseconds to stop and smell the features actually makes a difference.

Looking for an easy way to keep your children (husband, staff, boss, dog, or anyone else) from viewing adult websites? If your systems are using Firefox to handle web browsing duties, take a look at the ProConn Latte addon.*

Latte enables you to filter by keywords and comes packaged with an extensive, preconfigured list of blocked terms and sites. You can, of course, add and remove words and import and export entire lists. Settings can also be password-protected to ensure that no one is making changes without permission.

The addon also supports whitelisting so you can ensure certain sites are always available. You know, just in case you want to make sure your users can access, say, Download Squad pages containing words you’ve marked as taboo. Without the whitelist enabled, even Google/Bing/Yahoo/etc. search results for off-limits terms won’t be displayed.

ProCon Latte is compatible with Firefox versions 2+ including 3.7a1pre.