Strokes of Genius
259 words
That grammar checking thing was of course a collaborative achievement with
Gary. I’m pleased to say that Ruth’s Dave appreciated it too. However I
had another stroke of genius all of my own. This time it’s not funny, it’s
good.
I frequently want to drag and drop images into applications, but while
the images are likely to be stored at 5 Megapixel resolution — about 1MB –
for the purposes of this application I would like them at some lower resolution.
A good example is when showing the image to someone on MSN Messenger. A 1MB
file takes far too long to transfer, and a 640×480 picture at under 100KB
would be fine.
Currently, I therefore have to resize the image in some other application,
save the smaller image in a temporary file, drag this to the application, then
remember to delete the temporary file.
It would be a much nicer interface if I could browse full size image files in
an Explorer window (or something that looked like one), and when I dragged
and dropped, the image would be resized on the fly. The exact nature and
parameters for the conversion would be set in a dialogue available from
the menu bar.
I am not a Windows programmer. Does anyone know of any software that does this,
or nearly this? Or does anyone know how one would approach writing such a
beast? Is Explorer extensible enough that it could be made to do this?
Edit: Apparently if you right-click an image in Windows XP, and select
“send as email”, it will prompt you to either send the file as-is or scale
it — so that’s a step in the right direction.