Sample the Icon Buffet

It’s one of those wonderful services I’ve been using for a while – it’s time I should mention it.

IconBuffet gives you access you loads (and I mean LOADS) of truly beautiful and professionally-designed icons. I haven’t had any spam from them – just notifications of new icon sets.
If you have friends who are IconBuffet members as well, you can exchange icons – IOW you can collect sets you may not have snagged before.

Oh, I know… it sounds kinda naff.
But honestly, give it a try. It works and it’s wonderful.

Filed under: Graphics

Picasa

I discovered Picasa only recently.
Until now (confession time), I’d never used any photo-managing software; I just couldn’t be bothered.
But Picasa is nice. It’s very intuitive, does a lot automatically (i.e. doesn’t bother me too much), and has a good feature set without overwhelming me. I might yet get my pics organised.

This is a good question: When will Picassa go online?
It would make life a lot easier.

Filed under: Google, Graphics, Web Apps

Photopress update: 0.83

It keeps getting better and better.
I’ve started using it over at FussyPoodle. I’m finding it intuitive – it fits nicely into the blogging workflow – and there’s nothing superfluous in it.

Filed under: Graphics, WordPress

Xara: new tutorials

From the Xaraxone November News:

The recent release of Adobe Illustrator CS2 introduced a new feature that has created waves of hype and interest. The feature in question is the Live Trace, which can be used to convert bitmaps and other raster images into vector shape compilations. Many Xara users may realize that this sounds remarkably similar to the Bitmap Tracer that Xara has offered for the last decade. Xhris provides a useful comparison between the different methods in this month’s Guest Tutorial.

The guest tutorial is well worth reading; and Gary Priester’s November Tutorial is particularly detailed, to help new users become familiar with Xara. It also shows off the new Xara Live Effects.

Filed under: Graphics, Xara

Xara Xtreme Introduction – overview of new features

Gary Priester has put together a wonderful tour of all the new features in XaraXtreme.
Go have a drool … If you have always believed that vector graphics and bitmap graphics software should be kept at arm’s length from each other, you might rethink that once you try out this new Xara version.

Filed under: Graphics, Xara

Free greyscale icons

Ian Main at e-lusion.com offers a set of 40 greyscale icons (34×34px) – very nice they are, and very generous of Ian!

Filed under: Graphics

Xara Heaven – Dreams Do Come True

Caught up with the big news in the Xara world: they’re going open-source! I can hardly contain my joy.

Here is the low-down: XaraXtreme and the announcement by Charles Moir on the TalkGraphics Xara forum: I’m a Windows user, so why do I care?

To think that the graphics programme I have loved and used more than any other for years will become available for the Linux platform, as well as for the Mac … it’s just too much. I’ll take the dogs for a walk now – all that excitement has to go somewhere!

Filed under: Graphics, Linux, Mac