What are the alternatives to make annotations on images, using ASP.NET?
We are using http://www.atalasoft.com/products/dotimage, but I wonder if there are free alternatives, or perhaps better.
[Disclaimer: I'm the author]
The ImageResizing.Net library offers watermarking which can pull strings from the image querystring.
About 60% of the library is free and open-source (MIT style) - the core and about 20 plugins. The other 20 plugins are nearly as free (in terms of restrictions and source availability), but require inexpensive licenses.
Watermarking is part of the paid Design bundle, which includes 13 plugins and requires a $99 freelancer or $249 enterprise-wide license. The bundle includes PSD & RAW support, about 20 image filters, seam carving, automatic whitespace trimming, and a bunch of other features.
I think you'll find it is very competitive with Atalasoft's offerings for a fraction of the price. The source code for everything is publicly downloadable and permits modification and many kinds of redistribution.
Related
We are building an m-learning solution[IOS and Android compatible] at our company. The product needs to be SCORM compliant. I would like to know whether it should be developed in-house by the developers or other paid options should be pursued? What are other ways of making our product SCORM compliant? We are not rally positive about using SCORM Engine for this due to its high cost solution to our problem here.Any suggestion/help is appreciated.
You can include SCORM within content using a number of open source options available on GitHub.
Getting SCORM in the content (free) is step 1.
Packaging, bundling and deploying is really step 2.
This typically has a close relationship to how Curriculum defines a structure of lessons, modules, units etc. Not knowing exactly how they want to organize this, I can speculate that you may just have a simple "I want to know that the student viewed the content" approach. If you get into a more rich dependency on how the student performs dictating what they see or do next, that requires a much for up front design so you can bridge the design, development, and deployment of your content.
Including SCORM Support in content -
Like mentioned if you search google for my SCOBot project or Pipwerks you'll hit the ground running.
Requires JavaScript friendly developer and some base SCORM knowledge attained thru reading. This could be outsourced.
Knowing the version of SCORM you wish to support can help. Consult the LMS to find out that info.
Far as presenting / creating content; if you are doing this from scratch you'd need a HTML/JS developer or if its more interactive your dipping into WebGL, Canvas or beyond. There are other paid services like iSpring, Captivate and others that offer content creation with SCORM Standards support. They may even take care of the packaging for you (covered below).
Packaging -
This requires a zip (CAM content aggregated model) which includes a imsmanifest.xml file to describe a one to many relationship of a TOC. Again simple is 1, many begins to allow you to group tiers and add objectives and other things increasing complexity but doable.
You can perform creating this package with XML, Zip and specification knowledge. I have a Packaging app on my site and a Mac (free) applescript which can also perform very basic packaging. I am not away of any other free options.
Deployment
Commonly performed thru FTP/FileShare by uploading these CAM (zip) packages. LMS decompresses and reads the manifest. Sometimes you can just copy the raw files up to the LMS thru a media / content server but this greatly depends on the options.
There are a number of questions regarding attribution in the various open source licenses and the consensus seems to be that attribution is required for binary distributions. Is this also the case if you go one step further and you are using an unmodified binary distribution in one of your projects?
For example, Google Analytic's Unity plugin is licensed under the Apache v2 license. Does this mean that every game that uses the plugin needs to include a copy of the Apache v2 license? I'm sure that Google would be willing to make an exception here in either case but I don't see this explicitly mentioned anywhere in the project (and I'm positive that I've seen many games using the plugin and not including attribution).
Another potential scenario is in the use of the Apache Thrift project. The binary libraries are licensed under Apache v2 and any code generated using Thrift depends on them. If you use a binary plugin that in turn uses Thrift then does your project need to include the Thrift attribution and license as well?
My guess would be that it's the same and that you do need to include attribution and the license. I'm only asking because it seems to go against the spirit of the license in these cases where the purpose is more to protect the code than to require attribution for anything using plugins. I'm curious to hear any thoughts from somebody who knows more about the subtleties.
Is there any free dictionary I can use for i18n?
Free as in open source / creative commons, ideally also for use in a commercial product.
Looking at the KDE i18n projects, they have translated a lot of applications in many languages. Is there a way I can use their dictionaries for a standard Qt (non-KDE) application - and am I allowed to?
You should contact the KDE localization team if you have questions about licensing of their translations.
I don't think that the l10n support of KDE applications will help yoiu directly -- they ship as a catalogue of strings, as appears in a particular context in the original application, and the translated form. There is a long way from that to automatically using the data in the context of another application, and that's also the reason why machine-generated translations have such a low quality. If you cannot speak a language and don't have anyone who could do the work for you, you won't be able to ship a working localized version in that language.
I work in a shop that is mostly .NET based, and we're trying to pick out a content management system to use. This means we mostly likely won't be able to use any of the common open source CMS projects (Plone, phpNuke, anthing not based on .NET, etc.).
Since I'm a huge usability nerd (just finished reading The Design of Everyday Things by Norman), I've been looking at them from that point of view. Frankly, I haven't been too impressed. This quote sums it up:
Most open source content management software is useless. The only thing worse is every commercial CMS I’ve used. - Jeffrey Veen
Here's a short list of our requirements:
Has to be .NET based
Prefer open source or on the inexpensive side
Limited feature set (we don't need too many features and they make things harder to use)
Does need Active Directory integration and robust permissions
Should be focused on web standards and usability
I know it's probably an impossible feature list, but are there any content management systems that kinda sorta look like they might not suck more than a Dyson?
Edit:
Here's the current situation:
I'm going to push for N2. I've got Active Directory integration working well (I even wrote a custom role provider). The only thing missing is workflow functionality. Hopefully I can get something going with that since it's the last sticking point. The N2Contrib project might provide a starting point if I can figure it out.
I would still love to check out Stencil CMS if/when it gets off the ground.
One of my co-workers was trying to get Umbraco going but wasn't having much luck.
Thanks for the help!
Self-plug is lame, but what you're describing is pretty much exactly what I am getting ready to release for $79 a pop. If you're still looking in a few weeks, take a peek. If you'd like, shoot me an email (rex#stencilcms.com).
I've heard both positive and negative feedback about Umbraco. A lot of people like Graffiti, but it's more blog-oriented than a full-blown CMS.
Check out N2 (http://n2cms.com/). I think that it covers most, if not all, of your requirements (I don't think it has Active Directory capability at this time). We are using N2 and I have really enjoyed how flexible it has been.
My company just completed a review of several commercial .NET-based CMS/portal platforms and, while I can't reveal who was in them (thanks, NDAs!), I can tell you that IMO they all sucked very, very badly.
Good luck on your search. I'll keep an eye on this thread in the hopes that there's something we missed.
We had a similar set of requirements and chose Telerik Sitefinity. It's got it's faults but overall I've been happy with it so far.
Unfortunately Jeffery speaks the truth. Which is probably why I build a new custom cms from the ground up every few years. Basically, the motivation for "boxed" CMS packages is to have every feature on earth and be everything to everyone and therefore do nothing particularly well for anyone. With the feature bloat comes the usability nightmares. Unless you start customizing and then you usually end up forking the project and losing the advantage of community updates.
Kentico CMS according your list:
Has to be .NET based
It's .net based, .NET Framework 2.0 or later
Prefer open source or on the inexpensive side
Free edition which can be used for commercial purposes is available, paid license starts at $750, source code is an option
Limited feature set (we don't need too many features and they make things harder to use)
Many built-in modules/features, anyway they can be easily disabled to keep the UI simple to use
Does need Active Directory integration and robust permissions
AD, Forms and Live Id! Integration
Should be focused on web standards and usability
UTF-8 Support including RTL languages, WAI Compliant, XHTML Compliant, XML, XHTML, HTML, XSLT, CSS.
Instant on-line demo or download available at:
http://www.kentico.com/Download.aspx
I want to serve a lot of big files in a Plone site. By big files I mean around 5MB (music) and a lot of them. I've already do it straight to the ZODB, not a good idea. I'm running Plone 3.1.1 and Zope 2.10.6.
Zodb blob support is the best, most integrated way to deal with large files. Big files are stored transparently on the filesytem instead of in the zodb object database. "Transparently" in this case means that you won't notice it in your actual programming work after initial configuration.
The blob functionality has been backported to current (halfway 2008) zope versions and can be used in plone 3. Use plone.app.blob in your project for this: http://plone.org/products/plone.app.blob.
Yeah, you shouldn't use anything else than the ZODB BLOB support at this point. It works fine with the 3.x series of releases.
More information in ticket #6805
— Alexander Limi, Plone co-founder
Clarifying, to the best of my knowledge:
from various candidate technologies in a PLIP (Plone Immprovement Proposal), plone.app.blob is the lead contender with widespread support
-- for exceptional use cases, we sometimes find something other than BLOBs recommended
4.0 is currently the most likely milestone for plone.app.blob to become a product within Plone core
in the meantime plone.app.blob is a recommended add-on product for current 3.x versions of Plone
-- for use cases that suggest BLOB-like technologies.
As you may already know, the long-term solution for this is supposed to be the ZODB BLOB support. Ticket 6805 is probably the most authorative source on this. Unfortunately, the milestone is set to 4.0, and running it in production on an older release is perhaps not a good solution.
There has, historically, existed a lot of Plone products for storing files externally, keeping only metadata in the ZODB. I have tried several of them, and from my experience, there is not a single one that works well with current Plone/Zope releases. Don't trust me on this, though, I have not tried any products of this type the last year or so.
Personally, I would go for a solution that is as simple as possible and doesn't involve Plone more than neccesary. Storing the music files on disk, serving them directly from apache/whatever web server you use, keeping only metadata in Plone - in a product you write yourself, will give you a robust solution with good performance. That is, your product should produce links to a path on your web server where the music files are available.
If you require authorization for download of the music files and assuming that you run lighthttpd or apache in front of your Zope, looking at a solution based on X-sendfile is probably the best option. With X-sendfile, you keep the files on disk, and add a header (X-sendfile) to the response when a music file should be sent to the client browser. The web server will pick this header up and send the file to the client, without Plone being involved.
Some pointers:
http://tn123.ath.cx/mod_xsendfile/ (The apache module)
http://john.guen.in/past/2007/4/17/send_files_faster_with_xsendfile/ (Ruby example)
I have plone.app.blob installed on some low-traffic sites and installable (ready to roll, if you like) for my busier production sites in the same instance.
There's the 4.0 milestone but I'll certainly review (and probably click the install button for plone.app.blob on my production sites) around 3.4 time.
A couple of references:
http://n2.nabble.com/PLIPs-I%27d-love-to-see-for-Plone-3.3-tp1123218p1130015.html
http://dev.plone.org/plone/ticket/8629#comment:2 highlight
… 3.4, when we'll probably have blob filestorage specification
support added to plone.recipe.zeoserver and zope2instance. That will
give us a standard location for whatever owner/permission fixups the
installers need to make.
In context: I'm playing roughly with plone.app.blob and a very mixed bag of other add-on products with versions 3.1.7 and 3.2a1 of Plone based on standard and experimental installers. In these environments, without me treating things with kid gloves, Plone sies behave remarkably well and when (as expected) experiments lead to oddities, the support from the community is paced and proper.