Last year I wrote RIP: Corel PaintShop Pro on this blog and made the following comments:
Unfortunately, After Corel took over Paint Shop Pro - they appear to have applied their vaunted Corel Reverse Midas Touch [think PhotoPaint, Picture Publisher and Word Perfect franchises]. Right now, Paint Shop Pro V2 is in a contest [...]
The Winter Olympic games have been quite exciting and picturesque - inspiring this series of Olympic Plugins reviews that highlight some of the best free and for fee plugins available. The improvement in plugins capabilities over the past 3-4 years have been quite dramatic. Here are two from the AutoFX that are both free and quite compelling. [...]
Another Example of “free” widgets - this one from Google. They have 2000 of these.
Issuu.com is more than a website for publishing your PDFs - it takes displaying Adobes PDF’s to anew level. And it shows how to display PDFs with the greatest panache:
Now as Honourable Father would say - “How do you like them marbles??”
There is an absolute flood of image viewers and slideshow scripts that one can add to a website or blog - here is one from TripTracker that seem rather nifty and clean and most important, fast:
For Slideshow-Click Me
See me in the show
The virtues of this slideshow viewer is the simplicity of its implementation and [...]
Well we spent most of the weekend trying to figure out our benchmarks results - would Windows 7 be able to beat Windows XP in raw speed and performance? Here is that tale of the table:
Speed Comparison: Windows 7 versus Windows XP
Test
Windows 7
Windows XP
Copy 800MB file from USB
29sec
27sec
Copy 800MB file to USB
59sec
52sec
Copy 800MB file [...]
I am still looking for an inexpensive fast, easy to learn photo editor. Don’t get me wrong - Adobe has the top 3 bitmap photo editors in Lightroom, Photoshop Elements and Photoshop CS4.
But all of these Adobe photo editors have 4 consistent problems with the biggest 2 being price and a huge learning curve. So [...]
What becomes immediately evident working with a Gateway NV74 with a 17.3″ screen in Windows 7 is that its is lovely to have so much extra room - now there is plenty for PS panels:
The response time seems reasonable but I shall have detailed comparisons by days end hopefully. One complaint on the keyboard [...]
Well a graphics-oriented client currently running Windows XP wants to try to make the transition to Windows 7 from XP - so I have been commissioned to test out a Gateway NV74 17.3″ 4GB RAM, 500GB hard disk@5400RPM [Passmark rating of 1.243]. The OS is Windows 7 Home Premium. I think this PC Model [...]
Apple is getting a stranglehold on the evolution of computing devices, particulary for consumers. iPod + iTunes dominates the media playing world. iPhone + iAppStore dominate the phone plus highly portable app and messaging world. But Apple missed the boat despite a huge technology leads on the PC desktop and laptop world back in [...]
Just as Apple’s Snow Leopard hits the streets I just saw the Microsoft attack ad material - Apple 13.3″ MacBook 2Ghz procesor, 160GB Drive for $1200. $Twelve hundred when Walmart is offering on its website for $348 for an Acer Aspire 11.6″ Netbook :
Operating System: Genuine Windows XP Home Edition
Processor: Intel Atom Processor Z520 [...]
The NYTimes technology section is getting to be one of my favorites for finding out about the last electronic bling. With the exception of Apple topics, the coverage is not breathless fanboy scrapings of every detail of the Palm Pre or HP Mini Netbook seen on many other gadget sites; but rather fairly well measured [...]
RIA - Rich Internet Application are designed to show off what is possible to do both online and offline with the latest Internet enabled programs and interface design tools. Many designers and graphic artists are often on board to add design flare to the apps. But sometimes the functionality gets missed despite the good [...]
There are a huge number of really interesting and free Open Source programs in the graphics field. Many run in Linux and MacOS; but a goodly number are also ported to Windows. They run the gamut from albums through DTP to photo or video editors of varying interest. This series of Open Source reviews will [...]
It is Spring!
So color is on mind. And so exploring what is available in color wheels and creative aids followed in interest along with a web blog development project. And in the process I came across a … uhhh color tablet from GenoPal:
Get the genopal widget and many other great free widgets at Widgetbox!
Now this [...]
See the latest in this saga with review of PaintShop Pro Version 3
Corel Paint Shop Pro has been one of my favorite Paint editor tools for the past 10 years. Jasc, the original developers, understood that users wanted a lighttable-like interface to their images-> a browsing windows of thumbnail images from which users could [...]
Sitegrinder is a Photoshop plugin - not an ordinary photo-effects oriented plugin; but rather a Web Development tool. SiteGrinder allows graphic artists to layout the design for a website page (or pages) in Adobe’s Photoshop. Using the extensive Layer and Layer Comp facilities in Photoshop one can add sophisticated buttons, links, page transitions, galleries, and [...]
The above screen shot is of Snipshot, another very good online photo editor. In a small but deliberate array of tests on a 900 x 600 pixel image, I found the response time from Snipshot to be very good and the array of commands at my disposal very useful for the quick image retouching or [...]
For the past 3-6 years, the facilities in graphics programs have improved such that it is simple to create very good looking galleries on the Web. The programs do all the major taks:
1)help gather together the photos into a collection;
2)allow simple resizing and/or watermarking of the images;
3)provide many templates for the basic Web Gallery design;
4)allow [...]
RIP JPEG2000
JPEG2000 has shrivelled and not quite died but certainly is not what it promised to be as a replacement for the JPEG image format. Here are the ugly facts:
Graphics Support in the Major Browsers
Web Standard
IE8
Firefox 3.x
Chrome 1.
Opera 9.6
Safari 4
JPEG2000
No
No
No
No
No
SMIL
Dropped?
3.1
No
No
No
SVG (see here for browser tests)
None
60.4%
61.9%
94.2%
64.2%
Flash Support
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Browsers used in these tests (except SVG) [...]