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AMD has recently announced the launch of their factory overclocked graphics processor that

is the first in the world to cross the 1 GHz barrier. ATI Radeon™ HD 4890 utilizes advanced GDDR5 memory and a 1 GHz clock speed to deliver 1.6 TeraFLOPs of computing power. The 1 GHz ATI Radeon HD 4890 is all set to deliver new levels of performance in ATI Stream applications such as video transcoding and post processing. The new graphics processor is air-cooled and that’s another first for AMD.

“Throughout the 40-year history of AMD, we have continually focused on technology firsts that deliver superior value to the customer,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president, Products Group, AMD. “The 1 GHz ATI Radeon HD 4890 continues that tradition by increasing the performance and compute power of our flagship single-GPU solution, ensuring a great experience whether our customers are playing the latest DirectX 10.1 game or running GPU accelerate

admin Designing 1GHz Graphics Processor, ATI Radeon

ColoRotate is a free web-based service that helps to work with colors in 3D, in real time & offers an unique experience.

Using the application, you can quickly see the multidimensional nature of colors and the relationships between colors.

With ColoRotate, you can create color palettes & save them. Its quick drag-and-drop interface to adjust hue, brightness & saturation helps you customize the colors with ease.

And, palettes created can be imported & exported in Adobe Swatch Exchange (ASE).

ColoRotate is also a color community where it is possible to browse & search themes created by other users.

P.S. You may also want to check  Learn About Color menu of ColoRotate where it is possible to find valuable information on color like:

where it is possible to find valuable information on color like:

    * How do we perceive color?
    * Color models
    * & more

admin Designing 3d, colorotate, colours

There has been a bit of a code war going on or at least a some what heated debate on code quality and programming principles.

I’m not going to rehash everything but I will sum up the two sides and throw my opinion into the ring. Why does my opinion matter? I’m not so sure that it does but you can be the judge of that. What I do think is different about my opinion than the opinions that I have heard/read so far is that I can’t place myself in either camp. I am not a coding cowboy that just cares that “it works” and I am not a bureaucratic standards Nazi either. I’ll talk a bit more about why I am ducking for cover in no man’s land in this battle of opinions.
The Coding Cowboys Say

Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky sure hit a sore spot when they suggested that learning programming principles just wasn’t worth it and just getting it done was more important.

Jeff likened principles and guidelines to the Ferengi and their 285 Rules of Acquisition saying that every situation in programming cannot be governed by a set of rules and there isn’t a one size fits all pattern to solve everything.

Joel refers to the SOLID principles as “extremely bureaucratic programming that came from the mind of somebody that has not written a lot of code.”
The Craftsmen Say

Jeff and Joel’s comments sparked a lot of rebuttals from the ALT.Net community. It is understandable since those comments attack the very foundation of TDD and DDD. I am not going to bore you with a list of everyone that chimed in but I want to highlight a post that I think sums up this position in a clear and nice way.

Justin Etheredge made a great post is response to the criticisms. I have been reading Justin’s blog for a while and I like the way he views software. He likens software development to carpentry and woodworking, both are a learned craft. You don’t get good a carpentry by throwing things together and ignoring building codes. Patterns and principles are like building codes.
My View On The Whole Thing

I was a bit surprised at first to hear Jeff and Joel’s comments because they are some smart guys that have produced some successful software. I highly doubt, regardless of how it came across, they intended to imply that you should ignore all guidelines and just string together your code. Unfortunately, the comments of their posts make it all too clear that this is exactly the way a lot of programmers took it. What’s worse is bad programmers will use this as a defense for their resistance to improving their skills.

Like I said, currently I am somewhere in no man’s land. For too long I had the mindset that would take Jeff and Joel’s comments and use them as an excuse to ignore patterns and principles. From the beginning of my education in software development, no importance was placed on “good design.” My college training only focuses on teaching the syntax and considering that “knowing” the language.

After a few years of living in denial, I had to accept that their was far more for me to learn and I began my journey out of the cowboy coding camp and started striving to develop software in a TDD manner. I still have a lot to learn but facts cannot be ignored. Since making an effort to improve my craft I have seen a significant drop in the amount of bugs found in new software I am producing and the bugs that are found are smaller and much similar to solve. So that is my take on the whole thing and I hope that this at least peaks someone’s interest to dig a little deeper in regard to becoming a craftsmen and taking pride in the code they produce.

admin Designing cowboy, craftsman

Need a color scheme, but suck at that whole hexadecimal - where - the - hell - is - the - next - shade - of - blue thing? No biggie, I’ve got you covered. From eyedroppers, to scheme generators, to color blindness tools, below you’ll find my latest list of color tools that make my “Web Developer Must Have” list. While you’re playing with these, please do me a favor and keep in mind that the level of contrast you come up with is directly proportional to how much I’ll probably hate your site. No excuses, really now, if you want me to go into an epileptic shock (which you very well may), you’ll ignore my warning.

Here we go:

1. ColorBlender.com
   Slider based, relatively easy to use. Has a great selection of pre-made “blends” if you take a look at their “browse blends” section, though the type of blend you get doesn’t seem to be editable. This does let you get related .ACT (Photoshop) and .EPS (Illustrator) palettes from the site though. Pretty handy if you need a quick scheme in a hurry.
2. Big Huge Labs’s Palette Generator
   This one’s pretty sweet - upload an image and the generator will create a color palette for you with hexadecimal web colors from the colors in the image. It’s pretty handy if you have a nice photo that you want to build a design around.
3. ColorZilla
   An awesome eyedropper and color chooser tool extension for Firefox. Open it up and instantly know the color code of whatever it is you’re looking at. Also includes a color chooser. Highly recommended.
4. Color Fields Colr Pickr
   Way cool Flickr app that finds pictures with the color you need. Granted - many of these images are probably not okay to use without permission, but if you see something you just have to use, it’s easy to take a look and try to get ahold of the photographer.
5. ColorJack: Sphere
   The ColorJack Sphere is amazing - it lets you generate color schemes based on a formula (triads, complementary etc), and even lets you simulate color blindness. This is great as a scheme builder alone, but add in the accessibility factor and you get one of my favorite color tools. Evar.
6. The Colorblind Web Page Filter
   Have an accessibility need, but aren’t quite sure what the results are going to look like? Use the colorblind web page filter, and take a look at your site through the eyes of the colorblind. It’s quite the revealing tool, and incredibly helpful if you have a need for it.
7. J.Y. Design’s Pantone to Web HEX Color Chart
   Have a Pantone specification to go off of, but don’t know the web color to match it to? Easy. Though it’s just a big list, it’s saved my ass more than once. Easily match your web colors to Pantone colors with this chart.
8. Color Inspirator
   Haven’t the slightest idea what color scheme to start with? Try out Color Inspirator. It generates color schemes in variable sized columns, and just might jump-start your creativity with colors.
9. Metasphere’s Simple Color Chooser
   Quick and dirty color chooser. Doesn’t really get any more straightforward than this.
10. Color Schemer Online v2
    Generates a 16 color palette for you quickly based on the color of your choice. Handy, and quick to use in a bind, but what I find really useful is the ability to quickly lighten and darken entire schemes.

admin Designing, Others

TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions. TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks.

When you submit an image to be searched, TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or ‘fingerprint’ for it, then compares this fingerprint to every other image in their index to retrieve matches. TinEye can even find a partial fingerprint match.

TinEye does not typically find similar images; it finds exact matches including those that have been cropped, edited or resized. I have found TinEye very useful, you can easily find out who has stolen your images from your website or portfolio. You can see how powerful TinEye is by checking out their search examples.

admin Designing image search, stolen

I run down 8 top points that make the design community a great place

Ahh yes, the Design Community. I love it! This is the topic of a recent guest post I wrote over at MyInkBlog. Below is an extract from the article, but you can read the full the article here. Please leave your feedback and comments on the actual post rather than here.

Why I love the Design Community & Industry

Choosing what career path you wish to take is one of the biggest decisions you will ever make in your life. And people take a lot of things into consideration when choosing their job, but did you ever stop and think about what the community around your job choice might be like, and how that could effect your choice.

Without doubt the Design community is one of the most unique industries to be a part of, what other profession would you see professionals going out of their way to make a tutorial of how to do something and make it public for all of their “competitors” to read and learn from. It’s a strange logic, but one that makes sense and ultimately creates a community and industry that is always moving forward and evolving together.

I’ve put together a list of my top 10 reasons why the design community is such an amazing and diverse place, and why I love being a part of it.  *The links & examples I give are only there to support my points, and are not the main focus of the article.

01. Freebies

A word which a lot of people love to hear, it is something which you find a lot of in the design community. Giving something away for free to other designers to help them improve their own work and profession is rare in many other jobs. But in the design community designers love creating things for other designers and giving top quality products away for free.

Here are some of my top Freebie Picks:

Silk Icons

Function Icon Set (128 Free Icons)

Agregado: A Free Wordpress Theme

30 Sites to Download Free Stock and Royalty Free Images

Tutorial9: Dirty Spray Brushes

02. Sharing Information & Knowledge

The design community is very geared towards making the industry and community better, this explains why it’s very easy to find yourself getting involved in the design community, and start learning some tricks of the trade in all aspects of the industry. There’s tutorials on all sorts, everything from finding clients & managing your work to creating big elaborate graphic design pieces and tutorials going into great detail on all aspects of web design & development. Being part of a community that is so willing to share tips tricks and information is quite a privilege, and while the information is out there it would be silly not to take advantage of it, there is always something you can pick up from any tutorial (even if the end result isn’t always mind-blowing)

Great examples to show what I mean:

Tutorial9

PSDTuts

PSDFan

VECTORTuts

Photoshop Star

All of these not only have a great focus on tutorial and education, but there is also a great community around them, providing feedback and allowing other people to share further tips and techniques. So for me, tutorial sites are quite an important part of the design community.

admin Designing, Others

Our new icon set is now available and we are giving away 10 sets free

We’ve been working hard to create these beautiful icons exclusively for Graphic River. They are a great addition if you already have our free icon set, they are done in a similar style and could be used together. The new icons are a lot more refined and clean, with a lot more new icons that may have been missing from the first set. Check them out and let us know what you think.

We’re also quite excited to announce that the latest marketplace from the wonderful Envato team is now up and running. It’s called Graphic River, and it is where we have put out latest icon set up for sale. Also, if you have a read through this post you will see that they will be giving away 10 free copies of our icon set… scroll down for details.

View The Complete Set

Icon Set Details

There are 148 icons in total, and they are ideal for use in your website, blog or application. We’ve seen or last set used in everything from top 25 iPhone applications, to web blogs and some really neat websites. We hope that this new set will be just as successful and useful to all of you out there.

Download Function Premium Icon Set | .zip Format | 2.5mb | 48×48px Icons

Win 1 of 10 Free Copies of the Icon Set

As part of their launch Graphic River have agreed to allow us to give away 10 free copies of the icon set. They launched their new marketplace today, and I really suggest you check it out. The Graphic River website allows you to buy & sell all sorts of graphic resourecs. Everything from icons and Vector illustrations, to Brushes and Shapes for various softwares.

How to Win a copy?

1. Sign up to Graphic River, if you haven’t already.
2. Leave a Comment Here telling us what you would use the icons for.
3. With your comment include your Graphic River username.
4. Make sure you fill out your email address on the comment form, so we can contact you if you win.

Winners will be chosen & announced on March 2nd. The winners are the people we judge to have some good solutions for how to use their icon set.

Good luck to everyone, we hope you all enjoy the new icon set. Leave us some feedback and let us know what you think, and possibly give us some ideas for a few set. I think the next set will be free so it would be great for us to see what icons everyone would like to see.

Written by liam on February 24, 2009

admin Designing, Webmasters Resources Icons

WE ANNOUNCE THE LUCKY WINNERS & SHARE SOME OF OUR TOP Graphic River PICKS

Thanks to everyone who gave us feedback on the icons, and ideas for future sets. We’re very happy with how things went. Right now we have the Highest Rated, and the Most Downloaded icon set on Graphic River, and the 3rd most popular file overall.

We chose the 10 winners based upon their uses for the icons, and I hope that the icons can make an impact on the designs that all of the winners use them in.

The Winners

We’re really happy that so many people took the time to give us some feedback, and here are the list of the lucky 10 winners:

01. DVQ / cosmokramer
02. Nick C
03. John / johnyboy
04. Cody / cosm44
05. Jordan / Cupcakes
06. BrandRob
07. Dan Cameron / sproutventure
08. boxcarracer
09. iPad
10. Design Studio 51 /  ToddyBoy

Some other Amazing Files to Check Out!

While I’m really happy with how well my icon set is doing on Graphic River, I’ve been really impressed with a lot of the items for sale on the site. So here’s a round up of a few of my favorite items currently available for download on Graphic River.

Commerce Theme Vector Icon Set

Very useful icons with a great style to them too.

Circularity - Circular Icons

A really nice icon set which I think has a really nice finish to it.

Colorful Abstract Circles

Very well made and beautiful looking abstract.

Graffiti Grunge Painting

Lovely work here, this pack could have a lot of uses for your grunge work.

So there we have it. Congratulations once again to the winners, and I hope you all enjoy exploring Graphic River. If there’s any items on the website which you think deserve a mention, do so in the comments section.

admin Designing, Webmasters Resources Icons

One of the major drawbacks of the Blender game engine is that it doesn’t support video textures. There is something under development but it is still in its early stages.

Panda3D on the other hand has solid support for video textures. Getting it to work is really easy:

import direct.directbase.DirectStart

#load movie texture from disk
tex = loader.loadTexture("trailer.avi")
#load 3D cube model (.egg file) from disk
cube = loader.loadModel("videotexttest")
#put the cube in the scenegraph
cube.reparentTo(render)
#set the cube's position
cube.setPos(0,42,0)
#apply the texture
cube.setTexture(tex)
#rotate the cube
cube.setHpr(45,0,0)
#scale the cube
cube.setScale(2)

#run the program
run()

The cube was created with Blender and then exporter with Chicken, a blender to .egg exporter.

admin Designing D, example, viideo

Cufón is similar to Typeface.js which aims to become a worthy alternative to sIFR, and despite its merits still remains painfully tricky to set up and use. Cufón consists of two individual parts as well – a font generator, which converts fonts to a proprietary format and a rendering engine written in JavaScript.

It works on every major browser on the market. There is near-zero configuration needed for standard use cases. And it is fast, even for sufficiently large amounts of text.

admin Designing alternative, Cufon, Font Embedding, Fronts