November 30, 2011

Alfred for Mac hits 1.0

The brilliant little utility Alfred has reached v1 status after a couple of years of public testing.  For me it’s an invaluable way to launch apps & start Web searches quickly (in my case I hit Opt-space from any app, then start typing a name or query) and to get multi-clipboard functionality.  For some reason I could never get into the command-line Quicksilver or other multi-clipboard tools, but Alfred hits a sweet spot.

The app is free, but the paid Powerpack (which enables multi-clipboard support and numerous other features) is well worth the £12 price.

“Photoshopped or Not? A Tool to Tell”

My longtime boss Kevin Connor left Adobe earlier this year to launch a startup, Fourandsix, aimed at “revealing the truth behind every photograph.” Now his co-founder (and Adobe collaborator) Hany Farid has published some interesting research:

Dr. Farid and Eric Kee, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Dartmouth, are proposing a software tool for measuring how much fashion and beauty photos have been altered, a 1-to-5 scale that distinguishes the infinitesimal from the fantastic. Their research is being published this week in a scholarly journal, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Check out the interactive presentation of before & after images. Details are on the NY Times.