Aviary beta testing

I recently got an invite from someone at the kirupa.com forums to some Aviary tools. I only have access to two tools at the moment (Phoenix and Peacock), and only tested Phoenix (Peacock was a bit too complicated to test).

All I’ve got to say is, wow. This toolset is quite impressive. It has some very nice basic features, a few filter effects, hotkeys (!), and it is very smooth (it’s slow at times, but that’s because of my limited CPU). The interface is very nice, although the icons and panels are a little too big and take a lot of real estate IMO.

Still, it’s a little buggy, and there a Feedback menu on the toolbar for easy, well, feedback. I’m going to play more with Phoenix and try to make something cool. I really want to test Hummingbird (the 3D editor), but I don’t know how to sign up for the beta or even if it’s available.

I have a few invites remaining, so if you want to try them, just post.

Drawing Day

Today is 6-7-08, the day selected by some people as Drawing Day. The people on the site want to reach 1,000,000 drawings online, and I would love to be a part of that. I have marked this day on my calendar, but somehow I forgot about it and I haven’t drawn anything! But no worries, the day isn’t over yet and they say it might go on for at least a week, and besides, it still isn’t June 7th on the other side of the world.
So, if you haven’t yet, start drawing and upload it on anything, anywhere! I’ll porbably post it on this blog, and my DeviantArt account too.
Happy Drawing Day everyone!

On a completely unrelated side-note, I’ll be changing themes often over the next few days until I find one I really like, so expect  some changes.

May 1st Rebootion

May 1st just went by, and all the participants now have their rebooted sites up. There must be at least a hundred participants for this. I registered on the site last month, just for kicks, but I never really got around to making my site.

Head on over to the site and have a look at all the new sites that went up at the same time, and cast your votes for your favorite.

http://www.may1reboot.com/2008/

[Learn] How to use StumbleUpon for interesting search results

I use StumbleUpon a lot. Everytime I am bored, I just click away on that little icon to just see what I stumble on. But apart from having random interesting pages ranging anywhere from sex book reviews to funny pics to Flash tutorials, I don’t have any control with what I will get. I think that’s one of the best features of this cool plugin.

Only recently have I discovered that SU has a “Stumble with query” feature. You type in the search query you want, and just stumble away. You might end up with something you had no luck googling, or just end up with something interesting, and still within your search terms.

To start “query stumbling”, just click the ‘All’ dropdown menu on the StumbleUpon toolbar, and click ‘Search’. Enter your search terms, and click on ‘Stumble!’.

Here’s a screenshot. Notice I’ve already started stumbling for “actionscript”.

FontStruct

Here’s a cool site. It’s main feature is an RIA that allows you to create fonts and share it with the community. That’s right, creating fonts online for free. I am so impressed with what people can do with the web these days.
You could create any font you could imagine. From simple pixel fonts, to dingbat style fonts.
The gallery is very impressive. There’s some really nice fonts there, all created with FontStruct and free to download and use. You could even “clone” someone else’s work. To download a font, click on the font name or double-click on the preview.

The application itself is a work of art. Its interface is very intuitive, its tools adequate, and it’s just so comfortable playing/working with it. You could save your work, it even has hotkeys for undo, redo, tool selection, etc. Although you are limited to the “bricks” provided, they are more than enough to create a wide variety of fonts.
Go to http://fontstruct.fontshop.com/ to get started in creating your own fonts. You need to register for free though to use the fontstructor and download fonts.

Demonoid is back!

My favorite bittorrent site is back with a vengeance. It has been down for several months, I was afraid that it would never come back. But now it has. I could again download torrents that I know would work. Woot!

I think I might have a few invites with me, so if you want some, just post.

[Learn] How to batch resize several images on Mac OSX with iPhoto

Have you ever need or have been asked to resize several images and had to resort to a photo editing software to individually resize those images? Well, it is an effective way of doing that, but what if you had to resize a hundred of them?

Well, today I had to resize 40 photos, and thought that doing it in Photoshop would be crazy, so I did a little research.

Turns out iPhoto has this function. It is indeed very nice and useful.

First you need to import your photos into iPhoto by going [ File > Import to Library... ], then just select your photos or the folder you have your photos in.

After importing,  your photos will be in the “Library” folder of iPhoto, so you have to search for it and sort them into different sub-folders if you want to. Unfortunately, you cant specify a sub-folder while importing. You have to do it afterwards.

Select the photos you want to resize, then go [ File > Export... ]. You will be presented with a dialog box. Choose a format you want to export to (not Original), and click the “Scale images no larger than: ” radio button. Specify the width or height you want, the aspect ratio will be preserved(!). Then click “OK”. Select the directory you want, wait for a few seconds, and voila! Instant resized images, with preserved ratios, at the specified maximum width or height.

Tip: When your images have different aspect ratios (some of them are much longer than others, or wider), select the ones with similar ratios first, export them, and export the longer/wider ones later.