Tag: GRAPHICS

While the bulk of the buzz about HTML5 still seems to be focused on the video tag, there are plenty of other awesome developments cropping up. Things like drag-and-drop attachments in GMail and all those crazy Internet Explorer 9 Test Drive samples. Then there's the work of developer Joe Huckaby. Joe has taken images created by graphic artist Mark Ferrari to produce some incredibly cool, ...

Valve's Steam Hardware Survey for May 2010 is in! And it's interesting. The site itself seems to be broken -- check out the '0%' May 2010 figures at the bottom -- but fortunately someone on the Steam forums took some screenshots. Here are the Windows numbers -- and the Mac numbers. The first thing that jumps out is the average amount of RAM: a lot of Windows Steam users are still stuck with ...

First off, I must say that I am a total IrfanView addict. A key part of my workflow is based on the fact that IrfanView can include a filename's full path right in the title bar; that's very useful for AutoHotkey automation. FastStone Image Viewer doesn't have this particular feature, but it's still a nice viewer. As a whole, it is more comprehensive than IrfanView, not less. For example, when ...

Screenpresso, my favorite free utility for taking screenshots, has just updated to version 1.1. The most notable change in this version is that Screenpresso can now "clean" transparent title bars in screenshots; this means that even if you take a screenshot of a window in front of another window, it would still come out crispy-clean. This was one of the major features which "Goliath" Snagit had ...

Clip art can be useful for more than just boring presentations; if it's high quality and in a vector format, it can be used as a basis for other projects, such as T-shirts, stickers, gig posters, etc. OpenClipArt Library is a large site that features thousands of bitmap and vector clip art images. As can be expected, the content is quite often crappy. I'm sorry, I'm not going to sugarcoat it; if ...

I love freehand painting. While I have absolutely no talent, I love the freedom of working with paint or even crayons. It just feels nice, even if the result is nothing to write home about (in my case, at least). If you're looking to replicate the same experience on a computer, there's always Corel Painter. But on the off chance that you don't have hundreds of dollars to spend just to doodle, ...

I love IrfanView this no-frills image viewer/editor is one of the first applications I install on a new computer. It seems I'm not the only DownloadSquad writer who admires this program, as we've previously featured the 4.10 release and the 4.20 release. At its core, IrfanView is a nimble, powerful and very fast image viewer. But over time, the developer seems to have added more and more features ...

Okay, first thing's first: this is not a physics game. In fact, it's not a game at all. The closest thing that it reminds me of is one of those "desk toys" for executives. You know, you hit a marble and it sets things in motion, and you just sit there and stare at it while you zone out and contemplate taking over the world... or so I've heard. Ahem, getting back to the matter at hand ... ...

IOGraph is a Java application that traces your mouse movements while you work. The screenshot above shows about 1:20hrs of my work, during which I took a break (it shows up as the large blob near the middle). The reason there's a large blank area on the right side is that I have a dual-monitor setup. I usually use the right-side (secondary) monitor for displaying information, while keeping ...

I can't believe we've never covered ffffound.com before. This website is one of my favorite resources for inspiration, ever. On paper, it's an invite-only image bookmarking service. Only, unlike most other "invite only" services, it's not using that label as a PR shtick; it really is exclusive, and that works very well. The images bookmarked are actually interesting, and there is no spam at ...

Okay, so maybe Hot Spot Studio is not the best name for an application creating colorful backgrounds using virtual "spotlights". It's kind of a bad name, really -- almost a misnomer, because "hot spots" used to refer to the areas in an image which could be clicked on to generate different actions. This is ancient web technology, but that was the name, and that's the first thing that came to mind ...

Repper Lite is a really fun tool that lets you create endless tiled backgrounds. It works like a kaleidoscope: you have one "master image" (which you can select from a small, existing catalog, or upload from your own collection), and you have a little frame that you can resize and move around the image. The frame is the kaleidoscope, and you can select one of three patterns for it. As you ...

Tipster Juan Camargo sent us a hot one: This Chinese page purportedly features a couple of leaked screenshots of IE9's new GUI. I don't know if it's the real thing, but if it is, Microsoft are doing something very bold here. The general design is reminiscent of the new Windows Phone 7, with a clean, angular look and graphics that are "cut" on the edge of the window (like that back button in the ...

Unlimited Detail is definitely the most interesting technology demo I stumbled on today. In a nutshell: current 3D technology is based on polygons. Each 3D shape you see on the screen is made out of multiple straight facets (polygons). The more polygons (or facets), the rounder and more natural it seems. The current battle is all about polygon counts -- how many polygons can a certain graphics ...

Aviary, makers of awesome web graphics applications which recently went free, have now started offering Google Apps integration, via the brand-new Google Apps Marketplace. This means you can create Aviary graphics from within Google Docs, and save your files there as well. This is aimed at Google Apps users (as is the whole marketplace, currently), so you need to be the domain administrator to ...