Sometimes you want your mouse to be zippy as possible, allowing you to scroll back and forth across a screen for a quick game of Pong or Arkanoid. But when you're trying to make precise movements in an image editing application, precision might be more important than speed. If your mouse is too fast, you might have a hard time drawing straight lines, for example.
That's where SlowMousion comes in. This free Windows utility allows you to select a hotkey on your keyboard or your mouse to hit when you want your mouse cursor to move very slowly. When you try dragging your mouse with the hotkey depressed, no matter how quickly you drag, the cursor will move veeerrrry slooowwwly.
There does not appear to be a way to make the slow movement the default and hit a hotkey for faster motion, so it doesn't look like SlowMousion will do you much good in the practical jokes department. But if you need all the help you can get trying to draw straight lines, this little app could come in handy.
Speech bubbles are great way to add commentary to pictures. To do this just fire up a graphic program like Photoshop, import your photo, make a new layer, select a shape, draw a shape, create another layer, select the text tool, type what you want, move it around and then save it. In the mean time, that fantastic comment that you wanted to share has gone passé. Of course you could have avoided all this nonsense by using Kyolo.
Kyolo has just one purpose in life, to place speech bubbles on your pictures. There are no layers or strokes here, just upload your photo, choose from 3 different speech bubbles and type away. It couldn't be any simpler.
But for those wanting just a little more control over their bubbles you can certainly rotate the bubbles and increase or decrease the font sizing.
Once you are happy with your artistic creation you can choose to save the photo locally or email it off to your friends to spread a little sunshine to their otherwise dreary day.
Fine, it doesn't really takes names, but you won't care after you download and install this do-all media converter. FormatFactory's simple interface and broad file type support make it an excellent weapon of choice for media file junkies.
What could be better than a program that will convert audio, video, and image files from and to just about any format you can think of? How about one that does it all batch-style with minimal clicking? FormatFactory doesn't care what files you want to swap in what order, just feed it your sources and watch it go to work. Unlike a lot of similar apps, this one doesn't limit you to only video or audio, or even to one file at a time.
Geeks aren't always the best artists, but there are plenty of ways to use technology to get around that and create some stylish graphics. One of the easiest of these is Viscosity, winner of the Best Art award at this year's SXSW. We would have posted this sooner, but we were having too much fun playing with this satisfyingly simple little app.
Your Viscosity image starts out as 9 shaded horizontal stripes, but a few clicks will make it bloom into a multi-colored, semi-transparent, almost sculptural piece of transcendent web-stuff. We put together this attractive blob in Download Squad's color scheme in a matter of minutes. We're sure you can do better than we can, too.
Viscosity has just a few controls. You can slide your brushes from mushy to angular, and change sizes, colors and opacities, but that's about it. It's a basic interface that produces unexpectedly complex results.
The Download Squad team got really excited this morning. When we contemplated installing Paint-Mono, we pictured it and GIMP arming themselves with swords, screaming "There can be only one!" We thought there would be an epic battle, and the victor would lop off the other's head in a firestorm of light.
Instead, we ended up compiling Mono.
Paint-Mono is a Unix port of Paint.NET. To install, it requires Mono 1.2.6, your favorite flavor of Unix (OSX, BSD, Linux, or Solaris), and a Subversion client. (Here's a little warning: if you're running Ubuntu Gutsy, you don't have the right version of Mono. Deb packages for this version are hard to find, so that most likely means compiling from source. The Mono installer didn't work for us).
So is it a GIMP killer? At this point we'd have to say no. We couldn't get Paint-Mono to compile (even after installing Mono 1.2.6). According to Miguel de Icaza, most of the features in Paint.NET have been ported over to Paint-Mono, with more to come. It might be a nice alternative as it develops, but we'll have to wait and see. Right now, it could have all the features of GIMP and more, but we'd still recommend GIMP to our friends just because they'd actually be able to install it and run it on their Windows, Linux, or even Mac computers.
There are a number of ways to sort and deal with the huge volume of read and unread e-mail populating your inbox. You could organize your messages using tags like those in Gmail, or folders like those used by Yahoo! Mail and Microsoft Outlook. For some reason, you can even download a graphics-intensive program that represents your e-mail as people wearing skimpy outfits and frolicking on a beach.
Carolin Horn and Florian Jenet took a slightly more whimsical (and decidedly impractical) approach with Anymails. The program, developed as part of an MFA thesis, represents e-mail messages graphically. Each message fits into one of six categories, family and friends, school, job, e-commerce, unclassified and spam.
Each message is assigned a picture depending on which group it falls into. The image swims around the screen interacting with your other messages. The images also pulsate. The size, speed of movement and of pulsation depends on the message of a condition. Newer messages are large and opaque, older emails are small and transparent. An unread e-mail is hairy and swims quickly while a message you've already read has less hair and swims more slowly. If you've responded to a message it practically sits dead in the water.
Overall, Anymails is an interesting way to look at your e-mail. But it's certainly not practical. Even the makers of 3D Mailbox realized that the quickest way to deal with your inbox is by presenting a block of text at the bottom of the screen.
Got a fetish for free? Datamation published a list of 100 open-source downloads that is sure to make your day (and your pocketbook) a little better.
Spanning the spectrum from 3d modeling apps to desktop productivity, there's almost certainly something on this list you've not seen but would scratch your itch.
I like Tab Effect, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it's useful. It's an extension for Firefox that adds a sort of rotating cube effect when you switch tabs. It's powered by DirectX 8, so it'll only work on Windows, and how well it performs may depend upon the quality of your graphics card. My graphics card, for example, is a piece of crap, which may be why Tab Effect performs a tad sluggishly. There's a slight delay after clicking on a tab and when the effect kicks in, and the rotation is a slower than I'd like.
Like I said, I'm not sure how useful Tab Effect is, but it's definitely a cool concept. We've seen this sort of effect with desktop-switching before, so tab-switching is a natural progression, but as it stands it's pretty limited. But it's only 1.0, so maybe after a few revisions it'll be mind-blowingly speedy, intuitive, and useful.
ImageChef is a family-friendly site that allows you to create custom images for your blog, forum signature or general amusement. Without having to register any kind of account, you can modify text in a variety of image templates. The resulting pictures can be easily saved or emailed to friends.
ImageChef will host your pictures if you're a registered user (registration is free), and provide the snip-its of code so that you can embed your artwork in your MySpace, Friendster or TypePad account.
Though sometimes cheesy, the provided image templates do allow for some creative Tom Foolerly. If you find yourself wasting a lot of time, please feel free - no, encouraged! - to post a link to your creation via the comments.
I love Photoshop tutorials. I like them even better when they're not six pages long and produce great results. I'm guessing you can guess from its name what 2 Minute Photoshop Tricks is. It's a text, video, and audio blog that shows gives you tips, tricks, and tutorials for Photoshop, each in about two minutes. Unfortunately it's not updated especially frequently, but there's a lot of good stuff there, from adding a dept of field effect to a photo to giving text a shiny Web 2.0 look. They've got feeds for their videos, podcasts, and blog posts, so you never miss a tip.
The Inquirer says it has "confirmed" that 3D graphics giant Nvidia is hard at work building its own x86 processor with integrated graphics to compete with the offerings of Intel and AMD. Both Intel and AMD--which acquried ATI back in July--have been busy strapping integrated graphics on their own chips, it seems logical that Nvidia would want to play, too. Their efforts would be bolstered by its recent hiring of a bunch of engineers from Stexar, a now-defunct company that was founded by ex-Intel brains. The Inq says development is already underway, and we'll be seeing a new CPU from Nvidia sometime in 2006 2008.
Ulead is a company that specializes in powerful yet easy-to-use software for the masses. Their products come pre-bundled with many digital cameras and scanners, because they are so easy to use. Ulead's latest software release is no exception, making powerful image editing as easy as a flick click of the wrist. PhotoImpact 12 costs $49.99 for the full version, but there is a 30-day trial edition available for download. Beware, it is a 92MB file, so it may take you a while to download. The biggest new feature is "ExpressFix" which helps beginners fix their photos very easily with a bunch of one-click fixes you can apply to your photos. PhotoImpact 12 has tools to create DVD menu buttons, web and video projects. If you don't use photoshop or know someone who doesn't because it is too complicated, Ulead's PhotoImpact 12 is a nice alternative.
nVidia, the graphics tycoon, has developed a graphics chip (nVidia GeForce Go 7700) made with the first 80nm manufacturing process, the thinnest to date of any graphics card process used. Nvidia's older chips with very similar specs were made via a 90nm process (nVidia GeForce Go 7600). There isn't a huge increase in performance in the chips yet (that I can tell), but the less energy consumed by the chips may help the prices drop a little for consumers and game-fanatics. Lower prices or even a slight decrease in heat is always welcome in the gaming business, and you never know, the new process may lead the way for smaller, better chips in the near future.
Got a Flickr Pro account? Then you'll want to take advantage of the new Flickr MiniCards being offered by MOO. The MiniCards are customized calling cards, each one featuring a different photo. If you work in a creative field, this could be a great way to give your business cards a unique flavor.
MOO is giving away 10,000 free packs of 10 MiniCards to Flickr Pro users, so get yours now. Or, if you want to go all out, you can order a pack of 100 MiniCards for $19.95. MOO is also offering free international shipping on all other orders through the end of September.
Yes, it's another Web 2.0 app that has dropped the 'e' a la Flickr - and this one has also capitalized that final R! They're definitely kicking it up a notch.
Okay, all joking aside... ResizR is definitely a handy utility. It'll save you approximately 10 seconds in image resizing, since you don't have to fire up your graphics program and use the "image size" feature (or whatever it's called in the app of your choice). Use the slider to specify the image width (or just type it in the text box), select your image, and click the big 'ResizR' button. Voila! Your image has been resized.
Image resizing niftiness aside, the ResizR web site is, if nothing else, a one-stop shopping destination to see all the latest Web 2.0 tricks in action. It really feels like a developer who just learned AJAX decided to show off his or her new skill set. It almost feels like self-aware satire.
The Download Squad team got really excited this morning. When we contemplated installing Paint-Mono, we pictured it and GIMP arming themselves with swords, screaming "There can be only one!" We thought there would be an epic battle, and the victor would lop off the other's head in a firestorm of light.
Ulead is a company that specializes in powerful yet easy-to-use software for the masses. Their products come pre-bundled with many digital cameras and scanners, because they are so easy to use. Ulead's latest software release is no exception, making powerful image editing as easy as a 
