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Anyone Can Be An Artist: Great Creativity Apps

June 15, 2016 by Caren

Adults often forget the great lesson of elementary school art class, that – as the famous artists that work with Turnaround Arts and Park West Gallery always teach – anyone can be an artist. Instead, work and daily responsibilities tend to dull the creative tendencies, resulting in an attitude that art is best left to kids and “real artists.”

Luckily, the increasing popularity of adult coloring books is bringing a little creative energy to those who thought their days of arts and crafts were behind them, and apps are even letting us take those projects on the go. Here are 5 of our favorites, for both the serious artist and the margin doodlers among us. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Apps, Gadgets, Handheld, Software, Software Features Tagged With: creativity apps, Get out your brushes, picture perfect art projects, sketch it out, watch it on loop

Top 5 Apps for Creative People

February 27, 2015 by Caren

In today’s fast paced world, people across disciplines are seeking technological solutions to their needs. Creative people are no exception. Finding time to pursue one’s creative interests can be difficult between work and personal obligations. Smartphones and tablets bring a solution to this time crunch, allowing creative to work at any convenient time during the day or night with a number of creative apps.

Creative-Apps

The number of apps continues to grow, with over a million apps available to iPhone and Android users alike. Many of these apps are specifically for artists. What are some of the best apps for you and other creative people?

Best Creative Apps

1. Artsy. It can be difficult to keep track of the arts and culture events happening where you live. Particularly if you live in New York City or a similar art metropolis, there are events happening every day. Keeping up to date on new and interesting work can be difficult without help. Artsy is the answer. Called “the Pandora of art,” Artsy creates visual art “playlists” according to your interests. Search by artist or keyword to find new art you’ll love. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Apps, Featured Articles, Reviews, Software Features Tagged With: apps for creative people, artsy, best creative apps, field, NY art beat, typendium

Silverlight – Is This Going To Be Web 3.0?

August 21, 2008 by Mr Butterscotch

Microsoft Silverlight
It’s not that often when a technology comes along that leaves me amazed. You know, the sort of thing when you look at it you think “wow, this is good. Not just good, but perhaps is going to make a difference to websites in a very real way in the near future”. I got this impression when I sat in on a Silverlight demonstration today. Whilst Microsoft sometimes does things in an odd way, this is clearly a technology that they’ve taken time and effort to think out. Here’s what they have to say:

Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. By using Expression Studio and Visual Studio, designers and developers can collaborate more effectively using the skills they have today to light up the Web of tomorrow.

Still not sure what they’re going on about? I wasn’t either, so I wanted more. I went to Wikipedia and dug this up:

Silverlight provides a retained mode graphics system, similar to WPF and integrates multimedia, graphics, animations and interactivity into a single runtime environment. It is being designed to work in concert with XAML and is scriptable with JavaScript. XAML can be used for marking up the vector graphics and animations. Textual content created with Silverlight would be more searchable and indexable than that created with Flash as it is not compiled, but represented as text (XAML). This, however, will become less true as more search engines (currently only Google) adopt the new Adobe flash player for search engines. Silverlight can also be used to create Windows Sidebar gadgets for Windows Vista.

So, it’s powerful right? Well, let’s take a look at some of the showcase applications/sites that are using this proprietary Microsoft technology to excellent advantage. Bear in mind that a lot of this is still in beta build and only on version 2, so things can only get very much better from here on in.

http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/
This site features memorabilia images from the Hard Rock cafe, in the form of various items such as clothing, guitars and accessories belonging to musicians current and past. What Silverlight allows is the amazing ‘deep zoom’ facility. Go take a look at the Beatles section. You see how you can zoom right in and the image quality is lossless? That’s damn amazing.

http://demo.themsteam.com/videopuzzle/
How about this site? You get access to a video that’s playing on a jigsaw puzzle – with the video continuing to play in each of the pieces! Staggering! Not only is the video continuing to play but each piece is non-uniform in shape and size. Something that would be extremely difficult to pull off using any other alternative technology on the market today.

http://www.mscui.net/PatientJourneyDemonstrator/
If you’re a doctor then this demonstration is for you. It shows exactly how powerful Silverlight is, with each screen being programmed and giving access to a range of information.

“The Microsoft Health Common User Interface (MSCUI) Patient Journey Demonstrator is a vehicle for Microsoft thought leadership in state-of-the-art User Experience for Healthcare applications. It provides exemplar implementations of Microsoft Common User Interface guidance on a Microsoft platform. It is our showcase for new ideas, experimentation and an artefact for learning and thinking about future developments of the MSCUI program.”

http://cookingwithxaml.com/meals/financials/default.html
The final demonstration site shows a full program being run – bear in mind that this is through browser only so it is extremely impressive indeed. It shows potential for the sort of thing that could be produced in the future across a range of business areas.

I’m sure some of you will have noted the name. There’s no doubt that Silverlight isn’t a coincidence, in light of Macromedia’s ‘Flash’. However, does it offer something genuinely different as an alternative runtime environment for useful and interesting applications? Absolutely. I can see great things are going to come from it, and websites will become far more featured and media-rich as a result.

Filed Under: Software Features Tagged With: microsoft silverlight, web 3.0

Microsoft Doesn’t Want Yahoo

May 5, 2008 by Mr Butterscotch

The software giant Microsoft has finally dropped the three month bid it held to buy the search giant and internet company Yahoo – in what has essentially comes down to the cost of the sale. The current chief executive of Microsoft (a certain Mr Steve Ballmer) rejected the offer with a formal letter to Yahoo CE Jerry Yang.

Apparently, Microsoft had raised the original share price offer from $44.6 billion US to $47.5 billion, about $33 per share and certainly enough to give the company the controlling stake required. However, this was not enough for Yahoo who were looking for more – perhaps it was a case of Microsoft trying to play given that the US is almost in recession, but Yahoo’s shares remain boyant and so they didn’t choose to sell.

Microsoft was hoping to cut a deal to be able to compete with Google, who currently holds the dominant position both for search and market share revenue from advertising (that naturally comes with the increased number of users) along with their exceptional Google Adword and Adsense programs, something that Yahoo has actually been recently experimenting with. This led some to believe that there may even be more integration of technologies in the future, for a market that is currently worth more than $42 billion.

For those of us who are regular web users, we’re no doubt sure of what Yahoo and Google’s technologies offer both in terms of benefits and limitations. Whether the features of Yahoo would have changed if Microsoft had of succeeded in the purchase remains to be seen, but I’m sure that Yahoo is going to continue to offer a viable alternative to Google without becoming a Microsoft company.

Filed Under: Software Features

Yahoo Going 3.0?

March 27, 2008 by Mr Butterscotch

yahoo.gif
Yahoo has recently announced that it is adopting some of the key standards of ‘semantic web’ search functionality. This technology is seen as the next step for the world wide web as it involved a much greater understanding of the data placed online by the search engines and thus providing end-users more of what they want – relevant content.

Yahoo has stated that it will start now to include some semantic web identifiers when indexing the web for their search engine users. This could well mean that there’s a big boost (and an uptake) for the technology that has previously been slow on the uptake. Of course, if Yahoo were to suddenly do much better, perhaps Google would refine its’ own semantic technologies.

Google (for instance) at the moment identifies relevance of sites based on the links on a site as much as the text and content. Semantic web search and indexing on the other hand helps to apparently ‘capture the meaning of data on a page’ so that indexers and spiders can work out relevance to a particular topic rather than just guessing.

Of course, as mentioned, semantic web is new. Luckily however there are those who are taking it up – which means that tags are starting to appear that helps search engines work out exactly what they should be doing with the content and how it relates to other sites.

I’ve no doubt that this will be, along with a range of other technologies, part of the search engine and web technologies of the future. It does get me thinking though. If technology keeps advancing in this way, will it be the end user who is in fact the weak link in the chain?

I wonder this already when people ask ‘how can I find a telephone number’ for instance – there are so many sites that you can do this with they have a wealth of options. What it does show though is that along with the technology evolving, people’s understanding must develop hand in glove with it to make the most of the new abilities it provides.

Filed Under: Software Features

BBC iPlayer Available On iPhone!

March 8, 2008 by Mr Butterscotch

iphone.jpg
If you live in the UK and you have an iPhone, you’re about to have a nice little treat added to the usual software functionality of your (probably) latest little gadget. The BBC is launching a version of their iPlayer software on the handheld as well as the iPod touch.

Both the iPhone and the iPod touch are able to stream shows from the normal iPlayer website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/) over wi-fi (or from a computer sending the signal). At the moment, the iPhone can’t stream BBC video over the cell network however.

Apparently, the reasoning behind choosing the iPhone was that it is a device that most readily supports high quality video programming – something that the BBC was concerned about in terms of output from the player.

The software itself is available in two versions – one that allows users to download and store to their PC, whilst the other is made for streaming. A version (sorely waited for by me as well as many others) will be hitting Virgin Media customers soon.

As always, this serves to highlight how much of a monopoly that Apple has on the market – as well as the quality of the product that they produce. It isn’t that often, after all, that the BBC jumps into bed with any other company.

Filed Under: Software Features

Downloaders Face ISP Ban

February 13, 2008 by Mr Butterscotch

A new proposal put forward by the government here in the UK could see people who log on then illegally download music and film may have their internet access cut. This would mean that ISP’s (Internet Service Providers) would be required to monitor actions by users and of course take action when a P2P style software operation is detected.

Currently, around six million of the UK population are estimated to be downloading software illegally, via a number of different means (which I won’t name here for obvious reasons). One of the reasons put forward by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport is that it is aimed to reduce piracy to bolster the UK’s creative industries.

Various Internet service providers such as Tiscali, Virgin and BT have already been in talks with the entertainment industry to voluntarily police online activity for acts of piracy but so far no agreement has been reached on the best way forward.

Of course, there are various difficulties in ensuring that someone is being prosecuted for the crime they have committed. In the case of piracy, if there is more than one computer in the household, or if someone has ‘piggybacked’ a connection, how can the authorities be sure that they have got the right person?

Of course, as ISP’s don’t actually host the content, one has to wonder how responsible they actually are for the activity that is taking place. That might seem like somewhat of a cop-out for the music industry et al, but that’s the way it is. Perhaps if download costs were lower (or more attractive in other ways) then less people would feel the need to download.

Filed Under: Software Features

Australia Censors The Net

January 9, 2008 by Mr Butterscotch

From January the 20th new laws will come into effect after the South Australian government voted to put new censorship laws on the net. This will mainly affect entertainment companies who sell content but may affect content already on the world wide web.

Essentially, content providers will have to check the age of a user where necessary, i.e. whether a person is above 15 or 18, depending on the material being viewed. The Australian Communications and Media Authority will be able to force providers to remove content as well as links being deleted.

The restrictions apply to chatrooms, websites and mobile phone content. It has been stated that there will be an ‘opt out’ option for the restrictions, how this will be implemented however remains to be seen.

As part of a wider discourse on the web and how it should be used, I’m all for protecting children. However, surely the best form of protection would be to have an adult viewing material with their child? Chatrooms in particular are demonised on the internet – due to the fear of ‘predators’ lurking behind pseudonyms and fake i.d’s.

I’m all for protecting children as I said, however there are smarter ways to do it than putting a blanket like this over the internet. It also makes me concerned that more and more countries around the world are putting in place some kind of restriction on what we should view and read, and how we should interact with this information.

Reporters Without Borders is a group that hilights the ways in which the freedom of the press can be limited. This certainly applies to the internet, one of, historically, the most free arenas on Earth to state your beliefs.

The web is a genuinely amazing place. It has changed the way we communicate with one another whether it is through blogs, social networks, chat forums or even online phone calls like Skype. Nonetheless, governments haven’t been slow to see the trend, and many have already decided to use it to their own ends.

One example from Iran is the case of Mojtaba Saminejad, imprisoned since February 2005 for making available online material that is offensive to Islam. Of course, Iran being a Muslim state, one could argue that extra care is needed when being a digital (or other) author. But it begs the question of how are the government can go?

China however is the nation that continues to come under fire for particularly harsh regulations and restrictions on the internet
. Originally, China was merely using a range of technologically high-tech means to monitor citizens (and in particular political dissidence) on the internet. However, this has recently changed.

More than 130 Chinese citizens have access to the internet, but rumour has it that more than 62 people (and some say this is an extremely conservative estimate) have been jailed for their views online. Unfortunately, Zimbabwe (not known for freedom of speech, press and human rights) is not in the due process required to purchase monitoring/censoring equipment from China.

A number of other nations are now at work to develop technology that bars pornography, political dissidence, web email systems, religious criticism and more. Ironically, the West even came in for criticism for shipping material that could be used to control citizens of other nations.

I truly believe in freedom of choice and expression and so I really do feel that this is a worrying trend – but it is one that is set to continue apace around the world.

Filed Under: Software Features, Tech Companies, The Web, Wireless

AOL News

January 5, 2008 by Mr Butterscotch

AOL has a massively long history on the Internet, being one of the firs tcompanies to really get people online (even if you don’t like the service they provide). Back in 1999 there was an acquisition of Netscape Communications Corporation, i.e. Netscape Navigator – one of the leaders in web browsing.

AOL played a massive role in assisting the launch of Netscape 6 – which happened to be Mozilla based (the company behind the Firefox browser) but still Netscape branded. AOL was a major source of support for the Mozilla Foundation and the company continued to develop versions of the Netscape browser based on the work of said Foundation.

Whilst Netscape Navigator was used reasonably widely prior to the overtaking of Internet Explorer (of course, along with many other products developed and pushed by Microsoft), suddenly it had been overtaken by a number of other browsers in terms of use and popularity – including Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera.

Therefore, it comes with great sadness to myself that no longer is Navigator being supporter, as of February 1st 2008. Why is that? Well the first time I had a chance to browse the net – as far as I can recall anyway – it was on a very old PC with Netscape Navigator running. The joy I had of realising that the information superhighway was available right there. It truly is the end of an era.

In other news concerning AOL and Time Warner, Jeffrey Bewkes (new chief executive officer of Time Warner Inc) may be looking at selling the AOL Web and Time Inc magazine units, stated Gamco Investors Inc. The remaining company would be more akin to Viacom – a media based conglomerate.

Back in 2001, America Online Inc’s $124 billion takeover of Time Warner Inc was of course huge news, and seen as one of the biggest media convergences to ever take place. However, plans to sell all sorts of product (including TV shows) via the AOL network saw record losses and the leaving of CEO Gerald Levin and Chairman Stephen Case.

It is possible that the sale of AOL could fetch as much as $18 billion, which by anyone’s calculations is rather a lot of money. What that will mean to subscribes and the services they receive of course will be completely dependent on the buyer of the company.

Bewkes has a history of success – he was after all the man responsible for bringing us all Tony Soprano via HBO. However, he may ultimately lead a Time Warner that is half the size but much more streamlined and geared toward final margins.

Filed Under: News, PC, Software Features, The Web

A Bright Future for Apple.. And Jonathan Ive

January 1, 2008 by DummyGeekGurl

I was just lurking around on PhilMug.ph today and I saw a thread on the speculations of who will succeed Steve Jobs.

I came across the name Jonathan Ive one time here on Gadzooki, I think, or was that on ZDNet, and when they said that he was the one who was behind all these sexy breakthroughs in computer and gadget designs, I did realize that the speculations of his succeeding the Apple Inc. throne are not too far off the mark. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Apple, Editorial, Software Features

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