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Filed under: Google, Search

Google Image Search adds search by style feature

Google Image Search
You know that feeling you got the first time you realized you could search for images on the internet using Google Image Search? You know, the one that made you waste three hours of your day looking for pictures of yourself, your friends, that kid you went to school with that you always had a crush on but never worked up the courage to talk to. Yeah, well now you can look for them in clip art form.

Google has added a new search by style feature to its Image Search page. You can search for pictures from news items, pictures with faces, clip art, line drawings, or photos.

For some items, like "Apple" the results are impressive. If you click faces, you get pictures of Steve Jobs. If you click clip art or line drawings, you get cartoon-like images of apples. But some queries return funnier results. For example, a clip art search for "juice" returns plenty of drawings of juice boxes and glasses of juice. But when you click on the news content tab you find pictures of OJ Simpson, among other things.

Filed under: Design, Office, Freeware, Open Source

WPClipart offers 23,000+ royalty free images

Locating real royalty free images on the web can be a real pain in the tuckus. Thankfully, Paul Sherman has assembled a massive collection that he's happy to share with all comers.

WPClipart currently boasts 23,872 public domain images covering just about every subject imaginable. Most are offered as lossless PNG files.

You can browse or search for images on the site, and the five main categories (animals, holidays, history, signs and symbols, and cartoons) are available as individual downloads.

If you'd prefer to grab everything in one fell swoop, the entire collection is available as a single download. It weighs in at about 740mb and can also be downloaded from Freeware Files.

The full download also includes WPClipper, a handy viewer/editor application. It's also available on its own from the downloads section.

[ via gHacks ]

Filed under: Design, Fun, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Web services, Commercial, Beta

ComicBrush lets you create your own comics, or does it?

ComicBrushComicBrush is a new online tool intended to allow regular people like you and me to create cartoons quickly and easily, even if we don't have any artistic talent. So far, so good, seems like a great premise. I was excited to give it a try. Excited, that is, until I found that I needed to create an account just to kick the tires.

Creating an account isn't that big of a deal, I suppose, but these days that's a pretty big commitment for something that is likely to be just a momentary curiosity online. Personally, a tool needs to be pretty compelling before I'm willing to take the time to register and give up personal information, even if it is only my email address, location, time zone and birth date.

But the registration process goes off the rails with the license that you must read and agree to. It turns out that ComicBrush is not free (though it's not made clear on the homepage), but that you must purchase Points that can then be used to acquire Assets on ComicBrush. Assets are essentially graphics that you can use in your comics. Okay, fine, what's the big deal, you ask? Well, in the Terms of Service that you have to agree to, there are not one, but two check boxes to agree to. The first one is the complete contents of the TOS, and the second one pulls out the most important element from the TOS (since ComicBrush knows that most of us don't bother to actually read big long legal documents on signup pages).

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The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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