Design

Last week we told you that TechSmith was offering a free version of the Camtasia Studio screencasting software for free. As luck would have it, TechSmith is also giving away free licenses for SnagIt, the company’s popular screen capture utility.

The only catch is that just like with the Camtasia Studio offer, TechSmith is offering an older version of SnagIt for free. If you want all the latest features, you’ll have to upgrade to SnagIt 8.2, which will set you back $20. But SnagIt 7.2.5 (the free version) is still quite a few steps up from the Windows print screen button. Here are a few of the features you get with SnagIt:

• Capture a region
• Capture a file
• Capture a scrolling window (like an entire web page)
• Capture a freehand region (draw a shape around the portion of the screen you want to capture

SnagIt 8.2 adds Vista compatibility, the ability to save a file to an application like Word, Excel, or even Flickr, and new printing options.

[via Digital Inspiration]

The YouTube team has a surprise in store, a YouTube redesign is in the works. Please get your sunglasses ready though, it tends to be a little hard on the eyes.

YouTube will incorporate user feedback into the changes throughout the site. That’s something that a lot of companies neglect to take into account when undertaking website changes. Over the next few months new additions will be rolled out, and will include improved categories, dropdown menus to get to where you want faster, and a new look and feel for tabs and video browsing pages.

All that new red seems a little too distracting for us, and the dropdowns can be a little distracting, but it does seem quicker to get around the redesign.

A preview of what YouTube will roll out is available live here. What are your thoughts on the redesign?

Image compression technology has come a long way since the JPEG standard was set in the 90s. But JPEG is still the standard used by most digital cameras.

Microsoft has been lobbying hard to make its HD Photo format (also known as Windows Media Photo) the new standard. And it looks like the Joint Photographic Experts Group, the group behind the JPEG file format, have approved a plan to rename HD Photo “JPEG XR” and to make the format a new standard of sorts.

We don’t expect old fashioned JPG images to disappear overnight, but HD Photo files can show a higher range of colors, supports in-camera image processing, and offers more advanced compression techniques than today’s JPEG files.

[via Thomas Hawk]

Firefox 3 is going to have a whole bunch of new features, including a new rendering engine and a new way to organize bookmarks. But probably the first thing users will notice is the new skins. And those skins will be designed to integrate smoothly into your operating system.

In fact, as of right now, the proposed Windows Vista skin looks a lot like Internet Explorer’s, while the proposed OS X skin is reminiscent of Safari. There will also be two separate sets of Windows icons: one for Vista and another for XP.

Mozilla is also working on a standard theme for Linux, but this is a bit trickier, since there are many different Linux distributions and desktop-styles.

Honestly, it’s nice to see the team working on a visual refresh for Firefox 3. But we kind of like the standard Firefox look and feel. We can open Firefox on a Mac, PC, or Linux machine and pretty much know where the menus are without struggling with a new menu system. Of course, most computer users don’t find themselves switching back and forth between 3 or more operating systems on a regular basis, so we might just be in the minority here.

If you’ve been thinking it’s been a while since GIMP 2.2 was released, you’re right. It’s been three years since the GIMP team has pushed out a major update to the open source Photoshop alternative. This week, GIMP 2.4 was released, with a new icon set, and a whole slew of other features:

• Redesigned crop, selection, and align tools
• Scalable bitmap brushes
• Reorganized menu layout
• Improved display when zooming in or out
• Support for more file formats
• Full support for color profiles
• Improved printing
• Auto red eye removal tool

There are a ton of other new features and updates. You can read about them in the release notes.

[via Slashdot]

Microsoft has partnered with Dassault Systems to launch a 3D building application for Virtual Earth. In other words, the new application called Virtual Earth 3DVIA is a direct competitor to Google’s 3D Warehouse for Google Earth.

The application lets you create 3D structures that can be placed on Virtual Earth maps or shared with other users. Virtual Earth 3DVIA is free to use, which makes sense, because users are essentially adding value to Microsoft’s mapping services.

We highly recommend creating completely unrealistic models of your home and nearby buildings and uploading them so that Virtual Earth users will get the sense that you live in Rivendell and not Poughkeepsie. We’re equal opportunity here at Download Squad, so we recommend the same activities for Google Sketchup users.

Everyone most likely knows about that little shack in the woods in the Seattle suburb of Medina on the shores of Lake Washington that Bill Gates created in 1997, but have you ever been inside?

The $53 Million dollar, 66,000 square foot estate has all the technological goodies that you might not even be able dream up. With tons of centrally controlled music, lighting and video you can bet that this is the one of the most technologically advanced homes in the world. US News has put together a tour of the estate, from the pool building, to the library, to the underground garage so that you can drool over where the Forbes number one billionaire lives.

Some interesting tidbits:

• 104 electricians used
• All timber used in the house are perfectly finished and nearly perfect with almost no knots.
• All woodwork is flawless
• Acoustics were a big concern. Woods and fabrics were used to ensure perfect acoustics throughout the house.
• Flooring is heated, even in the driveway and walkways throughout the estate.
• Security system is monitored from the Microsoft campus.
• There is a salmon hatchery on the estate.
• 52 miles of communication cable
• Hidden cameras are everywhere, including some hidden inside stone walls.
• Floor sensors can track a person within 6 inches.
• The bathtub can be filled and temperature can be controlled by Gates as he drives home from work.

Was the Bill Gates estate designed on a PC? Well, not exactly, we can thank rival Apple for having a hand in it. (Not to worry, doesn’t Microsoft own a small % of Apple anyway.) Check out some additional pictures of the estate here.

Also, check out the money face off, Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates on Blogging Stocks.

You don’t need a tank to drive down the street. And sometimes you don’t need Photoshop to edit a photo. IrfanView is one of our favorite light weight image viewing/editing applications. Need to open an image, view a slideshow? Check. Want to crop, resize, pixelize, blur, or brighten a photo? Check.

This week IrfanView released version 4.10. The latest update includes support for even more file types and comes packed with new editing features:

• New paint plugin that lets you draw lines, circles and boxes on an image (just hit F12 to bring up the paint menu)
• Support for embedded color profiles in JPG/TIF files
• Lossless JPG Crop added
• Support for FLV files
• Auto adjust colors on selected portions of an image
• A bunch of other bug fixes, tweaks, and new features for editing, opening, and viewing images and multimedia files.

And best of all, you can open and close IrfanView a few dozen times in the amount of time it would take you to load Photoshop. Oh yeah, and it’s free. That’s nice too.

[Update: As readers are pointing out, the iPhone is appearing in various other, though sometimes obscure, areas of AT&T's site. We stated in our post that this could simply be nothing, so that fact should probably be reiterated given that this does seem to be a false alarm. Guess the version of the site in our screenshot could have easily been a fluke, capped in the middle of a redesign or who knows what else. Thanks for keeping us on our game everyone, as for now, there doesn't seem to be anything else to see here. Let's all move along.]

Rumors that Apple is wearing the pants a little too often in their iPhone relationship with AT&T have received a boost, now that the wireless carrier seems to have stopped promoting the pricey phone on their main page barely a month after its June 29th launch. While we know that Apple negotiated an unprecedented deal for a percentage of every iPhone customer’s monthly contract, many suspect AT&T is becoming less and less happy with the rest of Apple’s plans. Note, for example, the iPhone’s lack of any integration with AT&T’s profitable video, audio and ringtone offerings - all things that Apple either sells through their iTunes Store right now or, in the case of ringtones, is widely expected to with a future software update. The more software and media-based services Apple prepares to unleash, the more monthly, revolving revenue passes by AT&T’s bottom line.

Of course, another possibility here is that the iPhone has received all the promotion it needs from AT&T. The device has arguably succeeded in Apple’s marketing efforts to get it inserted into all the major media hubs, from the Today Show to Steven Colbert. Still, after adorning the pages of Cingular-turned-AT&T during the six month period since its announcement in January of this year, the iPhone’s sudden disappearance from the main page and even the phone-specific page is raising our eyebrows.

There’s a really cool video that’s been making the rounds on the interwebs for the past week or so. It shows a next generation image resizing method that lets you stretch or shrink a picture without greatly altering its composition.

One of the guys behind this technology is Shai Avidan, a former staff member of the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories. Adobe’s John Nack writes that the company has hired Avidan, which we hope means we’ll be seeing this sort of image resizing in Photoshop and other consumer applications soon.

We’re pretty certain that if Adobe hadn’t snatched up Avidan, Match.com would have done so. Just imagine the potential for tweaking profile pictures in personal ads. A little too short, or a little too round in the belly? Go ahead and make yourself thinner and taller with just a click of the mouse.

[via TechCrunch]