RealPlayer has a reputation for selling itself too hard and for making changes to a computer system without informed user consent. Real has reformed but the reputation continues. Apple’s iTunes, which installs QuickTime, Apple Updater, Bonjour and lots of other crapware without explicit user consent, seems immune to criticism.
The RealPlayer media player is an extremely useful tool. It has one feature that I find compelling – PerfectPlay. This feature allows you to buffer streaming audio, to pause and restart where you paused. You can set RealPlayer to cache up to 12 hours of an audio stream. When the phone rings or you need to temporarily leave the room you can pause the audio. When you return, you can restart the audio exactly where you paused.
I am designing a website for a store, The Optical Shop of Westport (CT), that sells beautiful eyeglasses, sunglasses, sports eyewear and fashion accessories. Their logo was designed 15 years ago and only exists in paper form on their stationery and business cards. We need the logo for the website. The printed form of the logo has the store’s name running through it, as can be seen below. 
I had to convert the logo to digital form and remove the shop’s name. The process was:
- Scan the stationery to create a raster image.
- Erase the text that bled into the logo and clean up stray pixels.
- Convert the raster image into a vector image that could be manipulated so that the jagged edges created by the scan could be smoothed into lines.
Raster images are a set of pixels. Vector images are small programs, mathematical equations, which describe an image’s shapes. Vector images scale well. Raster images do not.
- Export the vector image back to a raster image.
- Clean up imperfections in the raster image and fill in the letters’ outlines.
- Create four sizes of the black raster image.
- Color the logo, trying to match the screen color to the stationery’s, and create four sizes of the colored logo.
I was unfamiliar with converting raster to vector images. I asked several friends for advice. I have a copy of Adobe Illustrator CS2, which I thought might work (since confirmed) but I am tyro using AI and easily confused by it. I found Inkscape, a free program and more modern than my copy of Adobe Illustrator, did the job.
That was painful. I am glad I don’t deal with graphics often. What a black hole of time! Of course, most of what I do is a black hold of time as well.
Here is the finished product in black and color –
