Design

I would like to announce a slight shift in how we handle our image and design-related tips here at Download Squad. As a multimedia student myself, and with all the new talent we’ve been so fortunately gaining over the past weeks and months, we realized that we have a lot of general design talent to share with you readers that quickly surpasses the boundaries of mere ‘imaging.’ So as of today, our Imaging Tips series has evolved into a new, twice-weekly Design Tips series that will allow us to stretch our mice and expand our minds into video, illustration, web, motion graphics and a whole lot more. Look for tips, techniques, apps, plugins and linkage surrounding the whole world of design from here on out.

With that said, I present you the first post in our new Design Tips series which involves Photoshop and filters that can give your images that oh-so-cool worn look. Machine Wash filters from Mister Retro are three separate volumes of 60 filters apiece, all with their own unique attributes, that can apply texture, age and weathered aesthetics to Photoshop layers.

These filter sets are now at version 2, which was a very nice upgrade from v1. The first series were actually PDFs that were applied with a somewhat clunky custom action. Version 2 of these filters introduces a full-blown filter GUI for optimum live-previewing and application. Mister Retro also supplies a sample gallery online, which operates as a testing grounds for each filter set so you can get a good idea of just what you’re paying for.

Speaking of money: as a happy customer, I personally recommend all three sets. They sell for $50 each, with volume licensing and bundle discounts available. The filters work in versions of Photoshop starting at 6.0 all the way up through CS2 (as well as Photoshop Elements 1.0 and above), with a free upgrade patch on the way for CS3 once Adobe officially releases it.

Tweaked the look of your XP system to the very edges, and left with nowhere to go? FrontMotion Login takes on the last frontier of XP uber-customization, allowing animated Flash-based login screen themes to be applied to XP/2000. Free for non-commercial use, FrontMotion Login comes with three pre-built themes.

For the Flash-savvy graphics pro, templates and docs are available for designing your own fully customized themes. Additional themes and support are also available in FrontMotion’s somewhat active forums.

As reported earlier, Launchy is a quick and light launching application for the Windows platform. With the quick press of your Alt Space Bar keys, a tiny little window will appear awaiting your command.

Wit this new release, Launchy is now better than ever! It comes with a large hand full of skins and you can also choose a different skin by downloading one from the Skin Forums. So you can choose to have that sleek Vista look or that old school Windows Notepad look. Either way, you will be able to get everything up and running in no time now that you do not need to search your computer for that freshly installed application. But the fun doesn’t stop there with this newly released full version. Launchy now supports plug-ins as well! It already comes with four plug-ins allowing you to do extra functions such as searching your computer, entering a web address and then being taken to that site and Launchy also automatically catalogs your Firefox bookmarks. The creators will also be creating more plug-ins and they anticipate that other users of the program will create additional plug-ins as well.

I’ve been tinkering around with the Mac version of that new Photoshop CS3 beta Adobe unleashed, and I have to say that so far it feels like a more significant and worthy upgrade than CS2. Adobe has packed a lot of new goodies in CS3 which we’ll be covering in our Imaging Tip series, and today’s tip praises the return of true memory management to Photoshop.

As you can see, the Performance tab of PS CS3’s updated Preferences display brings back complete control over how much RAM Photoshop gets to play with, and the scratch disk UI has received the steroid treatment as well. These are both great improvements for fine-tuning Photoshop’s performance, especially for those either on older, slower systems or those blessed with desktop powerhouses.

I just got back from some much needed R & R, and since I left before the most recent Homeland Security PR campaign terror scare, I spent a lot of time on the TSA website the last few days of my vacation trying to figure out the ever-changing array of prohibited items. It wasn’t much help. It seemed like they were updating the regs hourly, but the website only every couple of days, and then in English taken from a Chinese takeout menu. “These items are permitted, but to physical inspection” was a particular favorite that seems to have stuck. It’s okay, though, TSA love you long time.

Now they seem to have redesigned the site, which was badly in need of an overhaul. Unfortunately, there aren’t many changes, and they seem to have given the job to FBI programmers. They certainly haven’t made the site more useful to travelers, or anyone else for that matter. It features the same contradictory information–beverages are not permitted except when they are. Unless you’re a diabetic who needs juice; then juice is permitted except when it isn’t–now in a new, less user-friendly layout. Every single page is now one huge iframe centered in a useless striped gray background, guaranteeing that you will have to scroll not once but twice to access any useful information. Assuming you even notice the information you want has scrolled off the bottom of the iframe. And, of course, the navbar is in the iframe, so it scrolls off the top any time you scroll down the page. Add to that some of the usual Firefox and Safari rendering errors, and you can have the full airport checkpoint experience without ever leaving your keyboard.

There are some improvements, though. We now have a new slogan–”TSA…Vigilant, Effective, Efficient”–some nice pics of mountains to remind us the TSA is “strong” and “formidable,” a puppy gallery, and a nice graphic of the layered security model that implies the most important site for security is the airplane cabin. That’s right folks. All that fancy new screening is wonderful, but when it comes right down to it, in-flight security is up to the overworked, under-trained flight crew, that woman next to you with the screaming toddler, and “YOU–THE PASSENGER.”

[via 27B/6]

That didn’t take long. Yesterday in our post about the release of Google Earth for Mac and Linux commenter Tim wrote, “Now they just need to make sketchup for Mac and Linux.” You wish has come at least half true, Tim, because today Google released SketchUp 5 for Mac OS X (sorry, Linux users, maybe next time). It’s a direct port of the Windows 3D modeling app and has all of the same features, and its hardware requirements are fairly modest. I’m disappointed to report that SketchUp 5 for Mac is PowerPC-only, but it can’t be long before a universal binary comes along-can it? Head over to the Google SketchUp site to download the standard version for free.

[Via TUAW]

Today this year’s winners of the annual Apple Design Awards were announced. The awards aim “to recognize technical excellence and outstanding achievement on Mac OS X” in eight categories. Here are the winners (uh, spoilers):

• Best Developer Tool: TextMate 1.5.2
• Best Use of OS X Graphics: modo 201
• Best Dashboard Widget: iClip lite 2.0
• Best Automator Workflow: Build Real Estate Catalog/Ultimate Productivity Action Pack 1.0
• Best User Experience: iSale 3.1
• Best Game: The Sims 2, 1.0 Rev E
• Best Scientific Computing Solution: EnzymeX 3.1
• Best Student Product: Lineform 1.1

You can go to the Apple Design Awards 2006 site for more information and the runners-up, which is mysterious absent of links, or you can head over to Phill Ryu’s blog where he lists them all with links and some commentary on the award ceremony. Ryu runs Widget Machine and co-developed iClip lite (winner of Best Dashboard Widget above) with Inventive.

Back in
October we reported on
graphics company Xara’s plans to open the source code of their flagship product Xara Xtreme and bring it to Linux and
Mac OS X. At the time no actual code had been released and only a "proof-of-concept" build was available. As
of last week, however, the full source code is
available under the GPL, paving the way for anyone to run the full-featured vector graphics suite for free,
assuming they run Linux or OS X. Xara still plans to make money by selling the Windows version and a commercial version
for Linux or Mac if the demand exists, but I wonder how long it’ll be before someone backports this open source version
to Windows. Head over to Xara’s open source site for videos, screenshots,
FAQS, and of course the download.

[Via Chris Dickman via Simon Willison]

Geeks and designers alike have been grumbling about the fact that Adobe hasn’t released, and won’t be releasing (PDF) universal binaries of the
current versions of their apps, in particular Photoshop, and Adobe’s answers to the cries of "Why?" have so
far been pretty unsatisfactory. So what’s really going on? Over at Adobe’s Photoshop blog (who knew they had blogs?),
engineer Scott Byers explains. Basically,
porting a huge legacy app like Photoshop isn’t just a recompile like Steve Jobs said, and much of the problem lies in
the fact that XCode, Apple’s development environment, just isn’t as mature as the tools Adobe’s engineers are used to.
Of course, Byers makes it sound a lot more convincing than that, so you should just head over to the Photoshop blog and
hear it from him.

[Via TUAW]

Another day, another Google acquisition. Just in time for Pi Day, Google has scooped up @Last Software, makers of SketchUp, a 3D drawing app for Windows and Mac OS X. The
@Last web site describes SketchUp as a "deceptively simple, amazingly powerful tool for creating, viewing, and
modifying 3D ideas quickly and easily." In the announcement on the Official Google
Blog, @Last’s Jeff Martin describes how SketchUp can be used to create 3D models that can be imported into Google
Earth, which I suspect has more than a little do to with this acquisition. For more insight, read the official announcement and FAQ at the SketchUp web site. SketchUp
has a price tag of $495, but will Google start giving it away for free as it has so many of its other acquisitions?

[Via the Unofficial Google Weblog]