graphics posts

Filed under: Games, Video, Features, Microsoft

Windows 7 and DirectX 11 - not just good news for gamers!

by Sebastian Anthony Oct 23rd 2009

Let me begin with some common knowledge to put us on some common ground. Vista sucks. By association, DirectX10 sucks. In fact, you might not even know what DirectX is -- and you would be forgiven!

DirectX is the piece of software that sits between your computer, and your video games. If you don't play games, you won't have heard of it. When you play a game on your PC it goes through DirectX. And until now, that's all DirectX did.

It's true: DirectX 10 premiered some nice new technologies. But because they were only available on Vista, which as we all know sucked more than a Hoover with a fresh, high-suction bag, DirectX 11 will be the first time most of us get to experience these new, funky technologies.

Tags: directx, directx11, dx11, games, gaming, graphics, technology, windows 7, windows-7, Windows7

Filed under: Mozilla, Browsers

WebGL support makes first appearance in latest Firefox 3.7 nightly builds

by Lee Mathews Sep 20th 2009

Google Chrome and other WebKit-based browsers aren't the only ones getting improved 3D graphics handling capabilities. As of September 18th, Firefox trunk builds include support for WebGL.

Developer Vladimir Vukićević refers to the project as "essentially a way of accessing OpenGL from within the browser, through the HTML5 canvas tag." Together with the recent leaps in Javascript performance, it's hoped that WebGL can a whole new - pardon the pun - dimension to our experience of 3D graphics on the web.

Progress is coming quickly, but there are still plenty of issues to address before WebGL support is ready for prime time. Vukićević cites security and portability issues with shaders, as well as the problem of what to do on platforms where OpenGL is not available. He also promises some simple demos that will arrive in the near future. If you've seen some already, we'd love to hear about them in the comments! Apart from the Webkit globes, cube, and teapot, that is.

The Minfield (currently Firefox 3.7) builds are available from the Mozilla FTP. To enable WebGL support, head to about:config and change the webgl.enabled_for_all_sites value from false to true (double-clicking the value will change it).

Tags: 3d, firefox, gaming, graphics, opengl, web-browsers, webgl

Filed under: Developer, Games, Browsers

WebGL: bringing native 3D graphics to your browser

by Jay Hathaway Sep 14th 2009

One of the most-anticipated features HTML5 promises for the web is the canvas tag, which allows for dynamic rendering of 2D images. If you can use HTML to draw a 2D image, can native 3D graphics be far behind?

The WebGL project is making that a reality by combining the canvas element, a bit of JavaScript, and the OpenGL 3D drawing engine. OpenGL has been around for years, and you might know it because of its use in many popular desktop video games - if this project is a success, you could be playing 3D games in your browser.

WebGL isn't that far along, though, It's just started turning up in developer builds of Webkit -the engine behind Safari and Google Chrome - and isn't even enabled by default in the nightly builds yet. Webkit is just the first test, too. It's only one segment part of the market, that doesn't include IE and Firefox. For native 3D games to really take off on the web, they'd have to be supported for a much larger percentage of web users. Google, Mozilla and Opera are all on board for the WebGL working group, but Microsoft hasn't said anything. MS doesn't have a history of playing nicely with web standards, but they might be forced to offer some support if everyone else is doing it.

If you want to see WebGL in action, check out the video after the jump.

[via Slashdot]

Tags: 3d, browsers, games, graphics, opengl, webgl, webkit

Filed under: Design, Windows, Freeware, Windows x64

Fotografix is a simple, free Photoshop alternative in under 1MB

by Lee Mathews Apr 15th 2009

While graphic design professionals probably wouldn't be able to substitute Fotografix for Photoshop, it's certainly a capable free alternative for the average Joe.

In addition to being totally portable, Fotografix has a ridiculously small footprint. It's a 370Kb download and about 700Kb once extracted. Despite its size, most of the features I rely on in Photoshop are available. Fotografix supports layers, masks, and scripting, comes with a few key blur and stylization filters, and type layers are editable (unlike some other editors where text is a one-shot deal).

The usual editing tools are also provided, like rectangular and elliptical marquees, magic wand, rubber stamp, eyedropper, and gradient tool. For me, the only glaring omission was the lack of grid and ruler options. Regardless, I didn't have any trouble accomplishing my daily blog-editing tasks with Fotografix.

No, Fotografix isn't a replacement for Photoshop, but its good range of features, small size, and portability make it an excellent option for quick edits on the go. The price is hard to argue with, too.

Since the author's site is hosted by GeoCities and he allows redistribution, I took the liberty of mirroring the app with RapidSpread - just in case he hits his traffic limit before you get a chance to download.

Tags: graphics, photo-editing, photoshop, portable

Filed under: Design, Photo, Macintosh, Productivity

Pixelmator 1.4 adds new paint engine

by Jay Hathaway Feb 20th 2009

Pixelmator has earned a following by doing the tasks most people use Photoshop for, but doing them much cheaper. That's truer than it's ever been in the new version 1.4, which adds a new painting engine, new brushes, and support for Photoshop brush formats. If you're a professional photographer, Photoshop CS4 might be worth $700 to you, but if you're someone who just needs powerful drawing and image editing tools, Pixelmator's $60 price tag looks pretty tempting.

With Pixelmator's existing tablet support, and the new brush customization features, you should be able to use Pixelmator for just about any drawing task. It's compatible with practically every image format, and has lots of intuitive little shortcuts that make it behave the way you'd expect from a good Mac app. The main gripe I've seen from commenters on the Pixelmator blog is the lack of a Photoshop-like "save for web" feature. Word on the street is that it will implemented in the next version, but that one feature should hardly deter you from checking out this great app.

Tags: brushes, editor, graphics, image, photoshop, pixelmator

Filed under: Design, Office, Freeware, Open Source

WPClipart offers 23,000+ royalty free images

by Lee Mathews Dec 10th 2008

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 ]

Tags: art, clip-art, graphics, images, royalty-free, stock

Filed under: Design, Utilities, Windows, Freeware

SlowMousion: For when mouse precision is more important than speed

by Brad Linder Aug 28th 2008

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.

[via Lifehacker and Freeware Genius]

Tags: graphics, mouse, slowmousion

Filed under: Design, Fun, Photo, web 2.0

It's all bubble talk

by Joey Celis Jul 9th 2008

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.

Tags: bubble, graphic, graphics, photos

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

FormatFactory Kicks Media Conversion Ass and Takes Names

by Lee Mathews Jul 5th 2008

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.

Tags: conversion, convert, dvd ripper, dvd ripping, DvdRipper, DvdRipping, file conver, FileConver, graphics, media

Filed under: Design, Fun

Viscosity: award-winning abstract image generator

by Jay Hathaway Mar 12th 2008

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.

Tags: generator, graphics, illustrations, viscosity

Filed under: Developer, Photo, Utilities, News, Macintosh, Linux, Open Source, Unix

Paint-Mono - A GIMP alternative?

by Kristin Shoemaker Dec 23rd 2007

Screen shot of Paint-Mono from Paint-Mono Project

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.

[via Digg]

Tags: compile, editors, gimp, graphics, linux, mono, paint-mono, paint.net, subversion, unix

Filed under: Design, E-mail

Anymails: what your sorted email would look like swimming in a petri dish

by Brad Linder Aug 2nd 2007

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.

[via Uneasy Silence]

Tags: anymails, graphics, inbox

Filed under: Utilities, Office, Productivity, Open Source, P2P

100 open source downloads

by Grant Robertson Jul 17th 2007

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.

Tags: graphics, open source downloads, open source software, OpenSourceDownloads, OpenSourceSoftware, tools, utilities

Filed under: Fun, Windows, Mozilla, Freeware, Browser Tips

Tab Effect for Firefox

by Jordan Running Jan 10th 2007

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.

Tags: addon, browser tip, BrowserTip, directx, extension, eye candy, EyeCandy, firefox, graphics, tab effect, tabbed browsing, TabbedBrowsing, TabEffect, tabs

Filed under: Fun, Internet, Kids, Time-Wasters

ImageChef - Today's Time Waster

by Ross McKillop Dec 22nd 2006

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.

Tags: art, blog, clip, clipart, custom, customized, graphic, graphics, image, images, myspace, personal, personalized

Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

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