Mac Games Arcade is giving away a game for free each day until Tuesday! Yesterday they gave away “Pangea Arcade”, today they are giving away “Bullet Candy”, and over the next 3 days they will be giving away “Rocket Bowl”, “Platypus”, and “Nanny Mania”. Read this post for instructions, and enjoy your free games! 
| 3.5 |
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
The Mac Giving Tree is giving away several commercial apps for free this Christmas! Right now only 2 apps are available for download - Synergy and Enigmo 2 - but 2 more will be unlocked on Christmas, and another 2 can be unlocked by referring your friends.
I’m really excited about getting Enigmo 2, and I can’t wait to start playing! I think Synergy will also be very useful - the addition of global hot keys to iTunes means I will probably be using it much more often. I’m also looking forward to finding out what the other apps are going to be! Hop on over to the Mac Giving Tree to get your free gifts too! 
| 3.5 |
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
In a previous post I linked to sites where you can buy and sell vector images. Those sites have big collections of vector images made by many different artists, but this means that the quality of the illustrations are not always the best. But there are also sites dedicated exclusively to vector images made by one person, team, or company. Designious is one such site, and they have a huge selection of beautiful vectors to choose from.
Designious sells dozens of $15 themed packs with many vector images in each one. The categories include Floral, People, Nature, Buildings, Skulls, Scrolls, Halftones & Grunges, Wings, and more. These packs are also available in Mega Packs and Giga Packs, which are great if you want to buy multiple normal packs, because you can get them for half price! They also have dozens of striking T-shirt designs for $10 each.
If you want to try before you buy, you can go to their free downloads page, where you can find free vector packs, T-shirt designs, icons, and some stunning illustrations.
My favorite floral design is “Floral vector pack 19“, which is filled with beautiful vines and flowers! Most of them are meant to be used as abstract silhouettes, but you can still color the vines and flowers separately with a little more work. Just copy and paste your image, and remove the part of the drawing you don’t need (for example everything except a flower). Repeat until you have separate images for each part you want to give a separate color to.
I have also tried the “Cartoon girls vector pack“, which contains 17 vector images of women in different poses, with different hair and clothes, and of different nationalities. My first thought when I saw them was that they would be perfect to use in personal websites and blog designs! I really love using vectors instead of bitmap images, because it’s so much easier to change the colors to my liking. I had great fun changing the colors of their hair, skin, clothes, and even their make-up! Try doing that so easily in Photoshop 
Users who don’t have Illustrator might have some problems with the parts of the images that are colored with gradients - I use VectorDesigner, and some of the girls from this pack were missing clothing or hair! Luckily I also have ZeusDraw, and was able to get around this problem by importing the EPS file as a PDF, and then converting the PDF to objects. But if you’re lucky enough to have Illustrator, you shouldn’t have any problems
Browsing through the Designious vector packs has given me a lot of ideas and inspiration for new designs, and I can’t wait to get started!
| 3.5 |
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Some of you may have noticed that the Bits and Pixels RSS feed is not working right now. I just wanted to let you know that I’m trying to find the problem, and will get it fixed as soon as possible. I think it might be a problem with the desktop blogging client that I bought recently, and which I used to post the last two posts (which coincidentally are the ones that have not been distributed via feed and email subscriptions). I am writing this post from the WordPress dashboard, so if it shows up in my feed I’ll know for sure it’s the desktop blogging client’s fault
If it doesn’t show up in the feed, then I really don’t know what’s wrong, as I’ve had the feed validated with no problems. In this case I will have to contact Feedburner to see if they know what’s wrong, but hopefully I can get it fixed soon. Thanks for your patience!
Update: Okay, I don’t think it’s a problem with Ecto anymore. I’m pretty sure now that the problem lies with Feedburner. I have posted in their Google group, since I couldn’t find a contact form or email address, but hopefully they will respond soon. Does anyone know how to contact them directly?
| 3.5 |
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Cooliris, formerly known as PicLens, is finally available again for Safari users! Cooliris is a browser plugin (currently available for Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer) that enables you to browse or search for images and video via a beautiful interface. The results are shown on a 3D wall that you can scroll around on and zoom-in on.
Supported sites include Amazon, YouTube, Flickr, SmugMug, Google, Yahoo, deviantART, Photobucket, Picasa, Facebook, and MySpace. For the full list click here. It is also possible to enable Cooliris on your own website or blog.
I have been waiting a long time for Cooliris to be compatible with the new version of Safari, and now that it has been released I am suitably impressed. The images don’t completely load until you click on them, so when you select an image to enlarge it’s a bit blurry at first, but the loading time is quite fast - and I have a terrible connection! It also considerably speeds up image browsing and searching, as there’s no need to load a new page after every few images, and it only fully loads the images that you are interested in.
To see everything Cooliris can do, just hop over to Cooliris.com, and watch the introductory video. You need to see it in action to fully understand how great it is!
| 3.5 |
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Receive feed updates via your feed reader
Email Subscription
Receive feed updates via email
