It seems that most of the time on my quest to find­ing excel­lent appli­ca­tions, my jour­ney to a prod­uct hap­pens upon chance. Case in point; while skim­ming through Nick Bradbury’s blog I found a track­back com­ment to an arti­cle deal­ing with soft­ware piracy.

The track­back com­ment described how one soft­ware devel­op­ment team had to uti­lize prod­uct activ­i­ta­tion to thwart the ongo­ing dillema of soft­ware piracy. That team was the guys at Con­stant Time and their prod­uct was the won­der­fully pol­ished appli­ca­tion Elec­tric Shoe­box.

Con­stant Time describes E-Shoebox as the “eas­i­est way to share your pho­tos online. Share pho­tos with friends right from your PC and broad­band con­nec­tion. You don’t need to deal with upload­ing pho­tos to online ser­vices, like Ofoto, with size lim­its and slow upload times or strug­gle with send­ing emails with large attachments…”

One of the best aspects of the soft­ware is the built-in image edit­ing capa­bil­i­ties. Within a few moments after import­ing my pic­tures into the soft­ware I noticed a few of my pho­tos (due to the lack of using the flash) were either too dark or for that mat­ter, too light. The process of tweak­ing pho­tos is sim­ple. You just adjust the bright­ness and con­strast slid­ers until you’re happy with the results.

Elec­tric Shoe­box is hands down a solid and pol­ished piece of soft­ware that already shows great potential.

Rat­ing:

I?m typ­ing this entry from the hotel (free wire­less con­nec­tion), so please bear with any spelling mis­takes or incoherency.

Some things in life are bet­ter left unsaid, or for that mat­ter you should always keep at least one thing to your­self that no one knows. More or less, I?m refer­ring to not reveal­ing too much of your­self to a stranger.

You see, it all started after we (my brother-in-law and I) boarded the train for Chicago. The first part of the trip con­sisted of a bit of game­boy play­ing, mag­a­zine read­ing and the occas­sional nod off ? con­sid­er­ing the trip would result in a 12 hour trip. The sec­ond half of the trip, how­ever, was some­thing strange and at the same time intriguing.

On our train were these two women in their mid-twenties. They had spent the last 5 months vis­it­ing the ?states? and were eager to return to their home­land of Aus­tralia. They were con­vers­ing with the cou­ple in front of us, who looked to be in their late-50s. The cou­ple seemed to be curi­ous and were ask­ing sev­eral ques­tions in accor­danance with the Aus­tralians? trip.

After a cou­ple of hours of straight chit-chat, one of the Aus­tralian girls informs her Amer­i­can audi­ence that on their trip to Yel­low­stone they saw a weird-looking crea­ture. They described it as a cross between a cow and a deer and then after a few moments she paused and laughed to her­self say­ing, ?I sup­pose it was a Dow.? Of course, this wasn?t funny in the least but who­ever said writ­ers travel alot to obtain mate­r­ial for their lit­er­a­ture were correct.

”…too much infor­ma­tion, espe­cially given to strangers can result in dire con­se­quences.“

On the way to Glen­view, IL (which admit­tedly had a bet­ter train with awe­some hos­pi­tal­ity from the crew), we were just sit­ting there enjoy­ing the scenery when we noticed something.

A col­lege stu­dent was car­ry­ing on a con­ver­sa­tion with a stranger, reveal­ing every­thing about her­self ? includ­ing where she worked, her love life, her school, address and every­thing else that is stalker wor­thy. At which point my brother-in-law and I both looked at eachother and shook our heads. Some peo­ple should not be so naive.

Granted, being naive to a cer­tain extent is a part of our nature. We as humans are some­times pulled into some­thing, hook line and sinker, with­out think­ing twice of how we got there.

How­ever, I believe that some­where in the law of the land ? or soci­ety at that ? too much infor­ma­tion, espe­cially given to strangers can result in dire consequences.

Yet, it does make for good obser­va­tion material.