Software
Corel Painter 12 was released earlier today, and is a massive overhaul of the Painter we all know and love. The Painter team addressed quite a few long-standing requests and issues in this version, all exciting and all pulling together to create the best version of Painter yet!
colorbranch Touch is a color picker, color matcher and color conversion application created for artists, designers and developers. The first release allows colors to be chosen from photos and other images with more choices coming.
All colors are represented in many different common formats for ultimate flexibility. Easily see HEX color codes for CSS, then convert to HSL with one button for some CSS3 color animation magic!
Swatches can be exported as XML, Adobe® Swatch Exhange (.ase) for use with Adobe Creative Suite and Corel® Painter™ Color Set (.colors) files for truly portable color palettes. In addition to designers and artists, code-ready strings are also readily available for CSS2.1, CSS3, Adobe® Flash® and other programming languages.
January – the month of updates! BlackBerry released a new version of the PlayBook SDK and simulator yesterday (0.9.2). With the update, your password is required to interact with the simulator via the command line tools. This update changes the command line interaction slightly to accommodate for that.
Update 02/2011: This version is also compatible Tablet OS SDK version 0.9.3 which was released by RIM on 02/08/2011.
If the command line errors out, check to make sure the clock in the simulator has the correct time, matched to your computer’s clock.
FruitBat 1.1.1453 fixes the package command to ensure the application descriptor file always comes first in the file list, no matter what it is named. This bug would stop some applications from compiling into BAR files.The icon has also been switched for a much simpler, blue version with icon sizes trimmed to only those that Windows will use, shaving around 400K from the download package size.
The update may be downloaded from the FruitBat page or through the in-application updater (Help > Check for Updates).
The first update to FruitBat is ready. This update includes several enhancements as well as compatibility with the newest version of the Tablet OS SDK (0.9.1). Thanks to those of you that reported bugs and errors.
This update should address all of the reported issues that cause FruitBat to not do its job. More info and download link after the jump. This is the last version you should have to download and install manually. Updates are included in this version.
Despite the misinformation floating around out there, the openness of the Flash Platform and the open source Flex SDK make it possible to create Flash and AIR applications without touching a single authoring tool created by Adobe. It also makes it possible for other tools and projects to be used in conjunction with the Adobe-produced tools. You’re in control of your preferred toolset, and it’s a beautiful thing.
One application that is part of my toolset is FlashDevelop. It is an open source development environment for Flash Platform content. It includes features for both ActionScript (2 & 3) development as well as Flex (3 & 4) development for both Flash Player and AIR and is on par with Flash Builder in several areas and surpasses it (in my opinion) in other areas. For final output, it uses the open source Flex and AIR SDKs to compile SWF and AIR files that are identical to those produced in Adobe authoring.
Of course, the very day that BlackBerry announced that Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.5 would be fully supported on the BlackBerry PlayBook in the browser and as apps, I downloaded all of the required SDKs and set out to build my first PlayBook application. After downloading, installing and donating *wink* to the FlashDevelop project, the following will get you started with building your own PlayBook app.
Over the past two decades, TechSmith has built their entire business around making screen sharing easy and convenient – they are THE experts. Snagit is Techsmith’s first and oldest product with version 1 being released 19 years ago. This past May, Snagit 10 was released and TechSmith proved once again that taking and editing screenshots like a pro can be easy and fast, even for those items that used to be difficult to capture.
A couple of weeks ago at Adobe MAX, Research In Motion announced that Flash and its cousin Adobe AIR would be first class citizens on its upcoming tablet, BlackBerry PlayBook. In fact, several of the default media applications to ship on the tablet are written using AIR.
Of course, this is exciting because we can use familiar technologies to create applications. Even though AIR is a runtime on top of the operating system, I’ve seen quotes to the effect of “AIR and Flash are embedded through and through, all the way to the silicon.” This should bring a performance boost between the hardware and AIR apps.
With being able to create AIR apps for PlayBook, we need tools. Of course Adobe offers a nice selection with Flash Professional, Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder, but one of the great things about Flash content creation is that you’re not limited to only the Adobe applications. The Flex SDK, which includes much of the same functionality as the Adobe applications, is available at no charge from Adobe Open Source. Everything you need to create Flash applications is in the package. Add your favorite editor and you’re ready to write ActionScript or MXML applications for both AIR and the Flash Player plugin.
Following my article on loading OpenX ads in Adobe AIR applications, I’ve written a very simple class to make it a little easier. This should be able to load in both image and HTML/text based banners with no problem.
Corel has released a service pack to users of Painter 11 on both Windows and Mac. The service pack addresses issues that some experienced with the initial release of Painter 11. To install the update automatically, open Painter and choose “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu (manual download link at the end of this post).
The areas of focus in the release include:
- Copying & Pasting
- Transformations
- Color Management
- The Eraser Tool
- General Performance
For full details of what the update includes, check out the Release Notes from Corel.