Thursday 30 May 2013

Free FontFont Fonts


25 in total, Motter Festival and Fancy Writing being my personal favourites, available from their Pinterest site.
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Wednesday 22 May 2013

Sony Xperia SP


The Register has published a very positive review of Sony's mid-range Android smartphone.

Snippets follow:

"You can pick one up unlocked for £300 and on PAYG for £50 less. For that you get a 4.6-inch, 1280 x 720 Gorilla Glass-covered screen; a 2370mAh battery; 8GB of storage with a microSD slot for more; an 8MP camera; a dual-core 1.7GHz Qualcomm Krait-class Snapdragon processor; and an Adreno 320 GPU. That’s all the smartphone many people - including me - will ever want or need."

"Thanks to Sony’s Mobile Bravia Engine 2 processing, which makes good on its boasts of enhancing contrast and sharpness, reducing noise and improving colour saturation, videos look good."

"The Qualcomm S4 Pro MSM8960T SoC turned in a respectable AnTuTu score of 15,500, while a test of JavaScript performance in the Chrome browser with SunSpider threw up an equally decent 1200ms. In the real world you needn’t worry about any performance giveaways to the current crop of quad-core superphones because frankly there aren’t any."

"The UI is consistently fluid and even demanding games run cleanly. That’s mainly down to the Adreno 320 GPU, which is the same graphics chip used in the Xperia Z, UK-spec Samsung Galaxy S4 and the HTC One. I ran the Epic Citadel demo which uses the Unreal Engine 3 and got very similar average frames-per-second numbers to the S4."

"With a dual- rather than quad-core processor, the battery takes less of a shafting. With it being unusually capacious by the standards of this, or any other price, category, I was able to get the thick end of two days of general use from one charge."

"The 8MP main shooter produced results that were rather noisy and showed less than perfect colour balance, while the webcam’s 0.3MP (640 x 480) resolution is low by modern standards."
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Tuesday 21 May 2013

Pixelmator 2.2


9to5Mac has published a review of one of the best budget (£10.50) Mac image editors.

Snippets follow:

"Pixelmator 2.2 focuses heavily on shapes and vector drawing options. The new Shape Style palette lets you set and tweak a variety of different settings on your shape. From the Shape Styles palette, you can edit properties such as fill and stroke colors, stroke size, drop shadow, inner shadow, and more."

"Any text, from full sentences to individual letters, can be turned into a shape, making it much easier than before to work with fonts and type. Once you’ve turned text into a shape, all of the same shape style properties that are applicable to normal shapes are available to your text shape as well, meaning it’s now really simple to create great looking, stylized type, right in Pixelmator."

"Pixelmator 2.2 gains a new retro Light Leak Effect, which contains 8 customizable Light Leaks, each offering a unique look and sliders for adjusting the intensity.These new effects are great for pictures that you want to a retro feel."

"Pixelmator 2.2 includes many other small tweaks, including an improved Type Tool, new gradient presets, improved Drawing Toools, the ability to copy a shape’s style to another shape, as well as some much welcomed performance improvements."
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Thursday 16 May 2013

Adobe Project Mighty


core77 reports: [edited]

The Adobe Mighty Pen is designed for sketching on tablets. The screen can distinguish between the pen's nib and your mitts, so you can draw with the pen, then erase with your finger. No more having to click a submenu to change the tool. And when you do need a submenu, you click a button on the pen itself to make it appear on-screen.

The second device is the pen's Napoleon Ruler. Adobe's VP of Product Experience Michael Gough was trained as an architect, and wanted to bring the efficacy of sketching with a secondary guiding tool to the tablet experience.

The pen and ruler are not available yet, and no release date has been given.

For a video demonstration, see below.


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Tuesday 14 May 2013

Free Font - Clutchee

A decorative block face, designed by Sinisa Komlenic.

Available from Font Squirrel.
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Thursday 9 May 2013

Adobe Ideas


Creative Bloq reports: [edited]

Adobe's vector-based drawing app for iOS, Adobe Ideas, would have cost you $10 until recently. Now the tablet companion to Illustrator has had a big update - and to celebrate, Adobe has made it free to download.

The features in version 2.6 include the ability to customize your toolbar with your favourite brushes, draw more accurately, share your designs on Facebook and Twitter, and sync your color themes with the Kuler website. If you have Creative Cloud membership you can also sync the app between your iPad, your iPhone and your desktop.

Already bought it? If you did so in the last three months, there's no need to kick yourself. US residents can get a refund, while purchasers outside the States can get an Amazon voucher.
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Type Fluid Experiment


See the full alphabet, along with videos of how it was made here.
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