Graphics Archive

When you have 20 or more windows open across nine virtual desktops, the complexity of window management can become overwhelming. A number of new tools are now available to facilitate effective window management. Elsewhere, you can tile your desktop windows in full screen no-gap layouts to simplify copy and paste, drag and drop, and visual comparisons. WindowSizer's window management engine will automatically resize neighboring windows to maintain a tiled layout.

The Inkscape Team is pleased to deliver its newest version, 0.40. The development cycle has been particularly long and intense this time, but we feel it's our best release yet.

Ideally someone else would write this article since I'm connected to DesktopX. But with all the enthusiasm over "widgets" lately and Konfabulator's release on Windows today, I've written up my best attempt at neutrality in looking at the pros of each program.

Over the last few weeks there were a lot of articles and discussions about how to manage a project well. From commercial success to user support nearly every subject was set on proof. However, after I've read the comments to the articles my conclusion was very plain: some minds will never change!

Bryan Clark is discussing what a good "Find" dialog would be to be used with applications.

With pro features like 16-bit per channel support, camera RAW and the healing brush, Adobe announced Photoshop Elements 3.0 today. Digital photo users in particular now have the choice of this powerful application that has little competition in its range, be it the free Gimp or the similarly priced PaintShopPro. Picture Window Pro is the only photo application that can outfeature Elements (and depending on the case, even Photoshop itself sometimes). Picture Window Pro is one of the favorite applications of photography professionals and it's at the same price range as Elements, 90 USD.

Usability expert Jacob Nielsen was interviewed by Builder AU. When asked about the 3D interfaces of the future Nielsen says "As long as we’re stuck with a 2D computer screen that means the information needs to be in a 2D medium. Complete article.

I thought some users might be interested in the editorial I wrote on my blog about Icon Based Menus. A new idea for freshing on the menu system since MacOS 1984. The same site includes more UI articles.

WindowSizer, the tiling window manager for Microsoft Windows, was released this summer and continues to mature.

The Human-Computer Interaction Lab.University of Maryland, has released new versions of the Piccolo framework for Java and .NET and came up with a new web site.

While virtually all computer graphics professionals use Adobe Photoshop to do their artistic work, Photoshop is a pricey and proprietary application. If you're looking to do graphics design on a budget, or perhaps want a software package that is less resource-intensive than Photoshop, check out open source alternatives -- the GIMP, SodiPodi, and Inkscape. Our Take: While these apps are extremely valuable for Unix users, they can't compete in the professional marketplace with Photoshop or Illustrator. They just don't do as much or they don't always do it in an expected way. More here and here.

When in the 2.5 builds the GNOME project changed directions of the ever infamous Nautilus to make the interface spatially oriented I was one of the skeptics. Yet, over the years I have used almost every type desktop configuration imaginable with very few that I found not to like or learn from at least at some points. With this in mind I was bound and determined to find the positives of the spatial file paradigm and, glean what I could from it.

There is a certain thing about skinning. It's just relaxing. Changing skins, browsing for skins, adding icons, trying out different color schemes in order to find the best match. The skinning community is quite large, ranging from people who change only their WinAmp skin, to people who use different DE's on Unix-like systems. In fact, you are also skinning when you don't use a DE; since the command line is in fact a type of 'skin' as well.

Microsoft and Apple Computer are searching for the same thing with their next operating systems: a better way to find stuff on an increasingly cluttered hard drive. The article fails to mention the similar Beagle & Storage projects for GNOME (albeit not as integrated to the filesystem) and the original effort (that Apple's Spotlight is inspired from as it is developed by the same engineers), Be's BFS & Tracker.