The New Mainstream Guides

The long silence had to mean something, right? We've been busy, and now we can finally show you the results of the effort.

Obviously, the site has a new look. You can thank my wife and partner, Kathy, for that. She has joined the effort in recent months and she's a terrific designer. Also, I've introduced some changes to the Guides, themselves. The changes are much more than cosmetic, as I think you'll see:

  • The Guides pop out of the screen, and can be moved around to see what's behind them. This allowed us to gain valuable screen real estate for both larger videos and more supporting written material, even for lower resolution monitors.
  • We will often use some of this new space in the video window for a table of contents that remains in front of you, tracking your progress through a range of topics as you watch. When the video is fully loaded, you can click on these topics randomly to move directly to the pieces that most interest you, or that you want to review.
  • The new videos (and perhaps some of the older ones, as I get around to it) can go full screen, to provide a much better view of the action.
  • We're introducing closed captioning to make the Guides more accessible to the hearing impaired.

We're introducing the notion of membership. Basic membership is free, but will provide benefits -- including bonus Guides -- not available to non-members. In the not too distant future, we will introduce Premium membership, which will introduce even more benefits, for a very small fee. Basic members who sign up now will be our Charter members, and will get a break on that fee.



We have five new Mainstream Guides that continue with the theme of getting more from your digital pictures. I mentioned that this would be a real project, and it has certainly turned out to be that. I intended to do a Guide on Picasa, and it turns out that the program is so rich in functionality that I had to do two. But that was just the beginning.

For a number of reasons, I have settled on a strategy of doing Guides on two pieces of software for a given category, rather than just one. Usually, every application area that has proven value spawns competition, and the competitors try to add value to the original idea, by adding features or addressing weaknesses of the original.

It took me a while to find a worthy competitor to Picasa, which is a program for organizing, editing, and sharing your digital photos. Late in 2007, Microsoft introduced its own entry in this field called Windows Live Photo Gallery, which is really quite good. So I did two Guides on WLPG, as well.

Finally, I wrote a short Guide to introduce the whole genre and set the stage for a face-off between these two programs.

Oh, yeah... Do check out the video at the top of the page that shows you how to get the most from Mainstream Guides!