We have a wide range of selection to help overcome the issue, but we’re going to use the cheapest and quickest one around: CutePDF Writer.

Installation

First we’ll download the free version of CutePDF Writer here, and then run the installer.

The installer will then prompt to download and install PS2PDF converter from CutePDF’s website, click yes and wait for the download and install to complete. Note: this requires working internet connection.

Done and done, now you can check your Control Panel > Printers and Other Hardware > View installed printers to check if the PDF Writer has been successfully installed.

How to use

Using PDF Writer is very simple, since it is installed as a printer what you have to do is to print your document with it. Do as you usually do to print (Ctrl + P) and select CutePDF Writer as your printer.

Proceed to the next printing step and you will be asked where you’d like to save the .pdf file. Choose a location and click save. That’s just about it, pretty easy huh?

Now you can print .pdf files from any application (given the app has the print functionality) in Windows :)

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Find and organize

After you install Picasa, it asks if you’d like to scan you entire computer or just the desktop, my pictures and my documents folders. Feel free to choose one of those options and Picasa will automatically scan your entire computer for JPEG, GIF, BMP, PSD even for movie files. And with just a couple of minutes your photos already organized by date and initially retained same file structure as your hard drive. The main area shows thumbnails of the images, and along the right side is a scroll bar to navigate. It’s pretty neat and simple.

Picasa gives you easy and powerful way to search your library. It’s has tag feature that allows you categories each photo and give them caption if you like. Looking to your albums or photos is not difficult anymore, you just type on the search field or you can filter them by showing only photos with faces or specific colors.

Create, edit and share

In Picasa you can create many ways to share your photos. By selecting some of them, you can create photo collage, video clip presentation, gift CD, or export it to another folder. All of those features are presented in simple and elegantly especially for photo collage which is I really love it.

If you double click a photo, you can enter an editing room to crop, fix red eye, straighten photos, adjust color, and apply special effects like film grain or soft focus. The editing room even has an I’m Feeling Lucky button, just like the Google search engine, which automatically applies recommended effects.

Sharing photos to your friends, family and to the world in Picasa is easy. You can select photos and email them as attachments. And if you’re Blogger user, you can post photos directly to your Blogger account. Picasa resizes the photos for the web for this, if you wish. You can also tell where you shot each photo and view them in Google Earth by using Geotagging. Uploading and synchronizing to the Web Albums is instant also.

Miniview

One of great feature that I really like from Picasa is Miniview. It is embedded to Windows Explorer and it represents nice preview for your picture even PSD. It’s really good feature because it’s avoids you from launching Picasa every time. On miniview you can zoom, rotate, slideshow and favorite your photos. And if you want to edit with it, just simply click Edit in Picasa and Picasa will be launched. Nice.

Overall

Picasa is very intuitive and well designed for amateurs and basic editing package. Its gives you a new experience for exploring your images library and it’s the best photo organization tools I’ve seen at any price. Picasa is a must-have application and most of all, it’s totally free.

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Granted, you have the need to check your website/web app in popular browsers: Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox 1, 2, 3, Chrome, Safari and Opera. Installing Chrome, Safari and Opera is a no-brainer, but those multiple versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox can be tricky. Here’s how we can do it.

Note: in this article I am using Windows XP with IE6 as a default browser. If you’re on Vista and you already have IE 7 installed you can skip the IE7 installation section.

Before we start, these are the installers we’re going to need. Don’t worry if you don’t have it yet, we will discuss about where (and how) to get them as we go.

Installing Internet Explorer 6 and 7

First we’re going to install IE7, this is also a no-brainer. Get it here and experience Microsoft’s long-ass installation and an unnecessary restart. Done and done with IE7, now we’re going to setup IE6. Download the Multiple IE installer, it’s free and it’s superuseful :)

Run the installer and keep going next until you see a checkbox selection like this:

If your target audience includes the good old Windows 98, 95 and Windows 3.1.1 users then definitely select them all. If that’s not the case then just leave it all unclicked except Internet Explorer 6.

Installing Firefox 1.5, 2 and 3

Thanks to this article, installing these browsers can be done easily. First you have to get all Firefox installers. Firefox 3 can be downloaded from this link, Firefox 2 here and Firefox 1.5 here.

I’d start with Fx 3 because that’s my favorite. Do a custom installation, choose where you want to install Firefox 3. In my case I want to install it here:

Next we’ll launch Firefox Profile Manager. This part’s a bit tricky so let’s pay extra attention here. What we’re going to do is we go to the Mozilla Firefox start menu folder by right-clicking the shortcut on the start menu.

Explore the Firefox start menu folder

Then we’re going into the duplicated shortcut’s properties by right-clicking the shortcut and select Properties. These are the values you’re going to change: in the Target field, add the following string: -profilemanager.

Shortcut Properties

Rename the shortcut to Profile Manager and launch it. We will need to create 3 different profiles for each Firefox installation. Here are my Firefox Profiles:

Firefox Profiles

Now you can install Fx 2 and 1.5 with custom installation, just remember to change the install directory. Your installation directory should look similar to what I have on the left side screenshot. We’re almost there, it’s a pretty long journey but we’re getting there.

Hang on.

Next step is the finishing strike. We’re going to put all the application shortcut to one place and modify the target just like we modify it on the Profile Manager section up there.

Here’s what we do, we add this string to the target field: -p “Fx 1″ where Fx 1 is the profile we made for that version of Firefox. Take a look at this screenshot for an example.

Et voila! That’s it! Now you have 3 Firefox installations running with different profiles. This means they can have different passwords saved, different bookmarks and so on. Please take a note that you can only run one Firefox instance at a time.

Have fun developing your website! :)

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