Tag: IMAGE

I've been using Gmail for years now, and while it's been a dependable workhorse for me sometimes it feels a little on the spartan side. Themes are nice, but it'd be nice to jazz up the conversation threads in some small way... For example, by letting me see the profile picture of the person who sent me the message I'm reading. Well, would you look at that! Someone put together a Google Chrome ...

If you've ever encountered a CD or DVD image that you just couldn't convert -- except with paid software -- DVD-Ranger's ISO Buddy is a free tool you'll want to check out. It's a disc image conversion and burning program, and it supports more formats than you can shake a spindle at. Apart from more run-of-the-mill formats like Nero's .NRG, .BIN, and .ISO files, ISOBuddy can also handle images ...

Flickr Image Search does exactly what you might think -- mostly because it's a very early beta version and doesn't actually do anything other than search Flickr. Install the Chrome extension, click the Flickr icon, search... and voilà! Quick and easy thumbnails. Click a thumbnail and the Flickr page opens in a new tab; neat! It's certainly not without issues -- for some reason it ...

Following on from a New Scientist article that was written a few days ago, I ended up on the website of Taeg Sang Cho -- a graduate student at MIT. He's been working on a bunch of advanced imaging algorithms -- with gifts and grants from big names like Microsoft, Adobe and Google. His recent work -- three research papers -- is all about content-aware manipulation of photos. I'm struggling to ...

There are still a couple features that keep GMail from "feeling" like a desktop email client, but Google obviously has their sights set on making it perform as much like a native app as possible. Recently they added drag-and-drop file attachments, and now they've extended that ability to image insertion. Need to remind someone it's peanut butter jelly time? Grab your favorite dancing banana ...

Like having a stash of beautiful wallpaper images on your computer? Dream Desktop has several thousand to choose from, and their free Desktop Agent program makes it easy to download and enjoy your favorites. Install the Agent and head to its configuration screen. There you can choose which images you want to display -- either random selections from those you mark as favorites in the search ...

ImgBurn is an excellent, free application for all kinds of burning tasks. Its developer Lightning UK has built a number of improvements into recent versions -- making an already good program even better. Version 2.5.1 is now available for download and the changelog is a typically lengthy one. Two key alterations are worth noting. First, ImgBurn's disc layout editor view now includes an ...

DummyImage.com is a great time saver for web developers laying out a quick page. It receives arguments in the URL, and returns an image of the exact size, colors, and file format specified. The image at the top of this post is not a screenshot; I merely entered the following line into my editor: <img border="0" src="http://dummyimage.com/580x400/444/e0e.png"> As you can see, it's ...

Liquid Scale is an iPhone / iPod Touch app that allows you to resize images by removing unimportant elements in the photo, leaving the important ones untouched. It's a technique called seam carving that we've previously mentioned, but what's interesting here is that it's now available to be used on the iPhone. For those that are unfamiliar with it, the seam carving technique analyzes images to ...

Kenji Kojima's RGB MusicLab is an app that does the neat trick of converting images into MIDI music. As Kojima points out in the app description, this isn't some subjective or artistic interpretation of an image, it's an algorithm based on the RGB (Red, Green, Blue) values in the image itself. It creates a pixelated mosaic of the original image, and adjusts notes up and down from middle C based ...

Google Image Search is already a great way to find images from all corners of the Interwebs, and it just got more interesting with a new way of visualizing results. It's called Image Swirl. Searching for an image with swirl will give you a list of 12 images, and clicking on each one brings up a cluster of related pictures. Picking one of those will spin the wheel around and give you even more to ...

Spectives is a new way of following sites visually, by filtering new images as they're posted. You can subscribe to one site, or create a themed collection. When the sites update, your collection will update. Clicking on any image takes you to the source page, so you can read the post that goes along with it. It's a simple idea, and the execution is well-done in terms of both usability and visual ...

If you want a bit of text to be human-readable, but not read or indexed by bots, TxtNinja has got you covered. It converts your text to a GIF, with customizable size, font and color. Potential uses include concealing your email address from spammers, sending sensitive information over IM, and getting around text filters on forums. The downside of TxtNinja is that the choices of fonts and colors ...

Adobe is ditching the free version of Photoshop, the Album Starter Edition, and promoting its web-based version of Photoshop at Photoshop.com instead. The move is sure to annoy devotees of desktop apps, who now have to shell out the money for Photoshop Elements, which is now the cheapest (supported) desktop version of Photoshop. On the other hand, the web app can be used from any machine, and ...

SmillaEnlarger is a single-purpose app that enlarges images without leaving them blocky and indistinct. Its algorithm obviously isn't going to do a perfect job of filling in the details, but it draws smart curves that actually look good at large sizes. Just as importantly, it eliminates the artifacts and pixelation that usually show up in enlarged images. The display features the original image ...