Ever heard of Pixelmator? It’s a recently released image editor for Mac, with a cool Leopard-friendly interface and lots of tools and effects to work with. I’d probably consider it just a notch under Adobe Photoshop, because it doesn’t have as many effects, plugins or tools to work with, but it’s probably a little more user friendly and still achieves great results. What I really like about it is that it seems to have been designed specifically for Mac, so it works great with features like Automator or iSight and features that nice dark grey Cocoa interface. Pixelmator can be used to edit pretty much any sort of image or photo. If you’re interested, the developer even has a blog, where he regularly writes about updates and new features for Pixelmator.
I recently found a cool tip on how to make an Aurora Borealis with Pixelmator, which looks great as wallpaper. What’s an Aurora Borealis you might ask? It’s a luminous display with strange shapes and vivid colors, usually reds, purples and greens, that you sometimes see in night skies. In the Northern Hemisphere, aurora borealis are called northern lights and in the Southern Hemisphere….southern lights. They mostly occur during equinoxes. Aurora Borealis are a real phenomenon to see and very much studied by researchers and scientists.
Check out the easy step-by-step guide from the Abduzeedo design blog to making an Aurora Borealis in Pixelmator. You’ll learn how to use tools like the lasso or gradient and filters like gaussian blur or zoom blur in just under 10 steps and 20 minutes. Some will say that it pretty much resembles the default wallpaper on Leopard. True, but at least here you can tweak the color, intensity and shape of the Aurora Borealis. Also, it’s a great way to learn how to use the Pixelmator image editor.
If you’re a frequent software downloader, then you’ll be aware of terms such as “Freeware”, “Shareware”, “Beta Version”, “Demo” etc. But do you really understand what they mean? Licenses are certainly nothing to be taken lightly as the the UK National Consumer Council recently 
Yesterday, Nick listed what he considers as the 
I watched 
How far are we from the day when your neurons control your favourite games rather than your keyboard or mouse? Maybe not that far at all according to US/Australian firm Emotiv who say they have developed a neuro-headset which will enable gamers to interact with games using their thoughts and emotions alone. This opens up all kinds of exciting (and frightening) possibilities. The one thing it definitely means is that games will require your full concentration because any variation in what you’re thinking – such as “I need a toilet break” or “I should be working really” – will affect your gameplay. The headset will go on sale later this year at a cost of just $299 and will surely add a whole new dimension to games such as 
So it’s official – Blu-ray will be the next generation of disk that we watch all our movies and audiovisual entertainment on. Just like when VHS eventually triumphed over Betamax, Toshiba has 
They say there are two types of people: those who break their computers and those who try to fix them. However I believe everyone, to a greater or lesser extent, has a natural tendency towards computer destruction.
Coming to work on this lovely rainy morning, I turned on my PC and started running my usual applications, only to get a memory usage error message for ‘ctfmon.exe’. Now as an everyday PC user, I’m quite accustomed to having issues with my PC (who hasn’t had the normal.dot file issue?), so I didn’t get alarmed and decided to look up just what this ‘ctfmon.exe’ file was.
Eyedroppers are the design term given to those apps or features within them which allow you to select any colour on your screen and reproduce it exactly. Although it should come as standard with any serious paint or graphics app, it sometimes doesn’t in which case the only solution is to use a third party app to complement your design software.