Sometimes I see the name of a new piece of software that someone tips us off to, and the name conjures up something completely different from what the reality is.
PhotoTiles, for instance, brought to mind the ability to create those cool pictures that are made up of all of your other photos. You know, like having a TUAW Logo that is made up of 2,500 thumbnail pictures that are chosen for their hue and intensity, then placed in the proper location.
Well, PhotoTile doesn't exactly do that, but this small program from Limit Point Software is a handy utility. Instead of doing what I imagined, it basically takes a folder of image and turns that into one grid-like "über-image."
For example, I took my Photo Booth folder, added a TUAW logo to round up to an even number of pictures, and dragged it onto PhotoTile. In a few seconds, it created the image that you see at right.
This is great for creating contact sheets of photos. PhotoTiles is donation-ware. If you use it, make a donation and you'll get an unlock code that unlocks all utilities from Limit Point Software including PhotoTiles.
If you're bored silly with the typical theme backgrounds in Keynote, pop on over to iPresentee's website and check out Keynote Motion Themes 2.0. These themes, which were released today (7/7/08), add five more motion themes to iPresentee's product line.
All of these themes provide moving backgrounds to catch the eyes of your audience. The five themes -- Money, Curtain, Rain, Story, and Exercise Book -- include 14 or more master slide layouts each.
Motion Themes 2.0 is available online for $25, or you can purchase individual motion themes for $10 each. And by the way, the free Keynote Objects icons are still available on the iPresentee site.
Keynote Objects is a package of 100 attractive icon-like objects that can be used not only with Keynote, but also with Microsoft PowerPoint and Word. All of the objects have a transparent background, and are easily resized, rotated, made more or less transparent, or shadowed.
I'm actually going to use several of the objects as icons for a new web site that I'm designing, simply because they offer an attractive and cohesive set of art objects. What will you use your free Keynote Objects for?
Ralf Herrmann recently took a look at the new typography features found in Firefox 3, pitting them against what's been available in Safari 3 for a while. The results show some major advances, and some major problems. The current OpenType or Apple Advanced Typography features in Firefox 3 include promising features like basic ligatures, which is exciting to those who live and breathe typography, but it fails in some non-English languages. Overall, it seems there are a lot of would-be nice new features that don't quite provide enough detail to be universally helpful. But it's a step in the right direction.
Another product announced at Macworld Expo, Extensis Universal Type Server, is now shipping. Universal Type Server is designed for corporate font management, requiring Mac OS X or Mac OS X Server 10.4 or 10.5 on a G5 or better machine. My personal opinion is that this would be a perfect application to run on a headless Mac mini.
There are two flavors of Universal Type Server - Professional, which is scalable to any size workgroup, and Lite, for workgroups of up to 10 users. The server and client applications are cross-platform, running on Windows as well as Mac.
Migration paths are available for users of Font Reserve Server or Suitcase Server. The Lite package is available for $1395 directly from Extensis, but you'll want to contact a reseller for the Professional version. If you want to kick the tires before you buy, you can download 30-day free trials for both Pro and Lite.
PopChar X, the little utility that gets all of those funky symbols, accents, and other special characters into your documents without having to remember arcane key codes, has been updated to version 4 for Mac.
PopChar has been around for over 20 years and is a favorite of editors and designers. To type a special character, you click on a P in the menu bar and a list of characters appears. Selecting the character you want drops it into your current document. Sure, you could always use Apple's Character Palette tool, but it's slow, and difficult to search for a special character in a particular font.
PopChar X 4.0 adds a new feature for searching Unicode characters by name across font boundaries. Ergonis, developer of PopChar, provides an example of searching for a "cubic meters" symbol in Helvetica. Typing in "cub" produces no results, but you can click a new "All" button to search across all Unicode fonts.
Side Effects is bringing Houdini, their professional 3D software, to OS X for the first time with the release of the Houdini 9.5 beta for OS X, Windows, and Linux. According to the company, Houdini "brings the 3D industry's first node-based workflow to the Mac ensuring that 3D artists can collaborate seamlessly in a multi-platform environment." This modeling and rendering platform has been used on a number of high profile projects like Spiderman 3 and Resident Evil: Extinction.
Houdini will come in four editions:
a free Apprentice edition for learning that includes watermarks
a non-watermarked Apprentice HD for $99
Houdini Escape "with modeling, animation, characters, lighting, rendering and compositing" for $1995
Houdini Master "with all of Escape's features plus particles and integrated dynamics such as rigid bodies, wire, cloth and fluids" for $7995.
Right now only the Apprentice and Apprentice HD editions are available for download, with the others expected July 15. Houdini is 64-bit Leopard-only.
Mac Pro users -- it's time to power up the graphics capability of your machine! ATI has announced the new Radeon HD 3870 Mac & PC Edition. Whether you're a serious gamer or a graphics designer, this new card features 256-bit 512MB GDDR4 frame buffer memory, 320 stream processors, twin dual-link DVI ports to run two 30" Apple Cinema HD displays, PCI Express 2.0 support, and more.
One of our readers pointed out that you can even use the HD 3870 in Windows running in Boot Camp on a Mac Pro. The Radeon HD 3870 runs in any Mac Pro and will be available in late June for a MSRP of $219.
I don't design websites very often (I've done maybe five or six total), but whenever I do, the first thing I do isn't anywhere near the web: I grab a pad of paper and a pencil and sit down somewhere away from the computer to sketch out my ideas for how the design will go.
Lots of developers will do the same thing with applications, and so, to help those developers, the folks at Labs.Boulevart were kind enough to put together sketchpaper versions of the iPhone. It's a free download (in PDF or Photoshop flavors) of just a bunch of images of the iPhone, left completely blank (sometimes with the MobileSafari and/or carrier bar on there) for designers of all kinds to sketch on and imagine with as they will.
Very cool idea, and the number of different setups and implementations they've thought of is impressive -- just the kind of thing to get the iPhone creative development juices flowing. If you're doing any kind of design for iPhone applications, native or on the web, this should be a cool tool to use.
Hasselblad makes high-end professional cameras that produce some of the largest digital images commercially available at up to 39 megapixels raw. It took until March for Apple to natively support the Hasselblad raw format and now the Swedish company has released Phocus for OS X, a dedicated raw processing application which provides digital lens correction, color adjustment, and Moiré removal together with tethered shooting and metadata control with geotagging for its entire line of cameras and backs.
Phocus is Leopard-only and available to registered Hasselblad users. In a lovely change of pace the OS X version is available now with the Windows version to follow later in the year.
Looks like Snoop Dogg wants you to have some Apple goodness. Crestock is hosting a wallpaper design competition with the Dre protégé where the prizes over four rounds are, respectively: an iPod classic 80GB, an iPod touch 16GB, an iPod touch 32GB and a MacBook Air. The top three entries in each round also get placement on snoopdogg.com (and his mySpace page... in case anyone with enough taste to hire you actually goes to mySpace) and a load of Snoop Dogg merchandise with a street value of $500+.
With or without the d-o-double-g action, it's a chance for the design-inclined to get some work out there and score an iPod or an Air. Of course, it's essentially on spec, which might get you some flak, but you're not competing for a job. You're competing for internet glory and a MacBook Air, so it's really just good clean fun(izzle).
Visit the contest homepage for more information. The contest is running now, so if you're interested you should scoot.
Quark Inc. announced QuarkXPress 8 at the Drupa printing exhibition in Düsseldorf today, the latest version of the high-end design tool for Mac and Windows. Many of the changes to QuarkXPress are in the areas of user interface and workflow, which were criticized by many users after the long-delayed release of QuarkXPress 7.
Some of the interface enhancements include:
A picture content tool for moving, rotating, and scaling images in real-time
New Bézier Pen Tools
An enhanced measurements palette with new controls for modifying drop-shadows
Drag-and-drop from the desktop, Adobe Bridge, iPhoto, MIcrosoft Word, and the hundreds of other applications that support drag-and-drop
Instant access to master pages and exports to PDF, SWF, HTML and EPS
QuarkXPress 8 offers improved typographical controls for designers, including hanging characters with multiple presets. There's also built-in support for Flash content creation, which formerly required the purchase of Quark Interactive Designer
Quark also noted that designers who purchase QuarkXPress 7 at regular price between today and August 1, 2008 and those who purchased QuarkXPress 7 or an upgrade between May 1 and today will receive the upgrade for free. The package is expected to ship within 60 days, and no final pricing has been announced.
Thanks to Ling for the tip!
Update: Jay Nelson has a huge writeup of QXP8's features at Planet Quark.
One of the nicest features of the latest round of OS X image editors like Pixelmator and Acorn is their use of GPU acceleration. They use your Mac's graphics processor to radically speed up various image tools like filters and transformations, etc. Now it appears that the big boys are finally getting ready to play.
TG Daily is reporting that Adobe recently previewed the next version of Photoshop (CS Next / CS4) with GPU acceleration. And as expected it made for an enormous improvement in speed. They they observed "the presenter playing with a 2 GB, 442 megapixel image like it was a 5 megapixel image on an 8-core [Intel] Skulltrail system."
There was no specific mention of the Mac version (the demo seems to have been done on a Windows machine) and also no discussion of if and how the 32-bit limitation of CS4 on the Mac might affect this GPU assisted performance boost. Nonetheless, the addition of GPU acceleration is a big deal, and perhaps will push Apple into getting more high performance graphics cards into its systems.
We've all seen our fair share of Photoshop, whether we know it or not. The PhotoshopDisasters blog, however, is compiling the most bizarre (and funny) examples of extra limbs, flipped text, and heads that don't belong to their associated bodies. Not that I'd know anything about that.
This year, the iPhone and aluminum iMac both took home the top award. The iPod touch received second prize (a Yellow Pencil), and the iPod nano and aluminum keyboard were each nominated. Apple has won six Black Pencils since 1999.
This year, six Black Pencils were awarded, though some years D&AD hand out zero (Graphic designers, for example, were a littlemiffed this year that none of their work was good enough). Sixty-four Yellow Pencils were handed out, among 143 total nominations.
Sometimes I see the name of a new piece of software that someone tips us off to, and the name conjures up something completely different from what the reality is. 
If you're bored silly with the typical theme backgrounds in Keynote, pop on over to 
iPresentee
Ralf Herrmann recently 
Another product 
Side Effects is bringing 
I don't design websites very often (I've done maybe five or six total), but whenever I do, the first thing I do isn't anywhere near the web: I grab a pad of paper and a pencil and sit down somewhere away from the computer to sketch out my ideas for how the design will go.
Hasselblad makes high-end professional cameras that produce some of the largest digital images commercially available at up to 39 megapixels raw. It took until 
Looks like 
Quark Inc. announced 
One of the nicest features of the latest round of OS X image editors like Pixelmator and Acorn is their use of GPU acceleration. They use your Mac's graphics processor to radically speed up various image tools like filters and transformations, etc. Now it appears that the big boys are finally getting ready to play.
We've all seen our fair share of 
