Does advertising actually create demand? - http://ping.fm/2cUIV -- what's your take?

Read More...

Summary only...

Five Best Online Image Editors [Hive Five]

Editing your images on a desktop image editor might be ideal, but sometimes you're away from your home workstation and need to do some impromptu editing. Check out these five options favored by Lifehacker readers.

Photo by karlfrankowski.

Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite tools for editing images online, independent of any downloaded or portable software.

You responded and we rounded up the top five nominees for best online image editor. All of the editors are free so don't hesitate to jump into any editor that catches your eye and give it a test drive.

Sumo Paint

If you're expecting online image editors to be anemic, you'll be surprised by the extensive features of many of the nominees like Sumo Paint. Sporting a toolbar, image navigator, swatches, and layers, Sumo Paint does more than just crop and rotate images. In addition to having layers, as some other editors do, Sumo Paint has support for blending modes and other advanced layering magic like drop shadow and outer glow. The brushes and ink tools offer a wide variety of shapes and textures. If you like some of the paint-centric features of Sumo Paint, you'll definitely want to check out the Gravity tool, which creates some pretty interesting abstract paint effects. Sumo Paint also supports drag and drop image opening for pictu! res you have stored in your Sumo Paint account. Sumo Paint doesn't require a login for use, but if you sign up for a free account you can store images online and participate in the Sumo Paint community by submitting your work and ranking the work of others. Photo by Randy Son of Robert.

Adobe Photoshop Express

Photoshop Express is Adobe's offering in the online editing arena. One of the first things you'll notice, and if you're an avid Photoshop user it's sure to elicit at least a chuckle, is that out of all the online image editors in the world, the one that looks the least like Photoshop is the actual legitimate Photoshop offering from Adobe. Nonetheless, the interface is easy to use and covers the basics nicely. One of the best features of Photoshop Express is the film strip view provided along the bottom of the editor when using a variety of the adjustment tools. Instead of just giving you a slider to adjust the saturation, white balance, and other subjective photo tweaks, Photoshop Express displays the changes incrementally, letting you pick your favorite from the gradient of choices. It's much faster for quick tweaks than fiddling with sliders. If you want to use a slider, however they haven't removed the feature; the more granular slider is underneath the pictures, allowing you to fine tune to your heart's content. Under the advanced feature set, you'll find tools like tinting, sketching, and distortion. Adobe Photoshop Express is free but, unlike all the other nominees in the Hive Five, it requires an account for you to use your own photos. If you just want to play ! around w ith it, the demo account contains sets of pictures for you to play with. Photo by pasotraspaso.

Pixlr

Pixlr takes a two-prong approach to image editing. When you visit Pixlr, you can opt to use Pixlr Express or Pixlr Editor—seen here—depending on your needs. Pixlr Express is a simple image editor with a right hand toolbar which covers basic tasks like cropping, rotating, applying basic correction filters, and so on. Pixlr Editor looks like a more traditional photo-editing application, complete with a toolbar, menu bar, and even navigator, layers, and history panels. If you're familiar with desktop applications like Photoshop and GIMP, it won't take you very long to find the location of tools like the clone stamp, selection wand, and gradient map. The Pixlr Firefox extension allows you to grab images and screenshots from your browser and send them to Pixlr.

Picnik

Picnik doesn't seek to emulate desktop editors with its simple toolbar design, instead opting to make the most popular tools as high profile and easily accessible as possible. Picnik has no Photoshop-esque sidebars, palettes, or other advanced features in the main editing window. The features it provides, however, are extremely intuitive and easy to use with tool tips that pop up to help you use the various tools. If you want to tweak you! r photo beyond basic cropping and color correction, you can find over 30 image filters and a variety of tools (like a blemish touch-up wand) under the Create tab. A premium version of Picnik is available for $25 a year and gives you access to more advanced tools, special effects, and other perks like bulk uploading. Photo by jurvetson.

Aviary Phoenix

Aviary Phoenix is an image editor that is part of the Aviary Suite of online editing tools, which—on top of image editing—boasts a vector and filter editor, among other tools. Aviary Phoenix has an advanced interface and plenty of options to help you edit your images, like layers, blending, and magic wand selection. You can use Aviary without signing up for an account, but with an account you can save your creations, collaborate with other users, and otherwise participate in the Aviary community. The Aviary Phoenix Firefox extension, called Talon, adds in an assortment of functionality like screen capture, quick editing of images you find online, and—unique among the Hive Five candidates this week—it adds support for pressure sensitive input devices. The premium version of Aviary Phoenix is available for $25 a year and unlocks advanced features and the ability to save your work to your Aviary account without adding it to the public area of the Aviary community. Photo by tinyfroglet.

---

Now that you've had a chance to check out—and hopefully play with!—the nominees for best online image editor, it's time to cast your vo! te in th e poll below:

Which Online Image Editor is Best?(opinion)

See your favorite in the Hive? Can't believe your favorite didn't make it? Still chuckling that one of the least Photoshop-like offering is from Adobe? Let's hear about it in the comments below.

Read More...

Summary only...

Install Chrome and Chromium for Easy Extension Testing [Tricks]

Google Chrome is the officially sanctioned browser from Google, but the open-source, alpha-level Chromium project has the cool stuff, like basic Greasemonkey support and extension support. Luckily, it's not hard to install and use both browsers on one system.

As the ReadWriteWeb blog explains, the hard part isn't the actual installation, at least on a Windows system. What might be confusing for a newcomer is actually finding pre-built Chromium installers for your system. They're found at build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots, along with the "official" Mac and Linux Chrome alpha tests. Grab a copy of the chromium-rel-xp release for Windows, install it, and then enable extensions in Chromium, explained both at the link below and in our look at early extensions.

Chromium's list of usable extensions is growing at am impressive rate, with social, bookmarking, and even IE8-style accelerators showing up in the latest test builds. If you're all about Chrome and want to get ready for the next big developments in that browser, keeping a self-upda! ting cop y of Chromium handy is a good way to go about it.

How to Install Chrome and Chromium Side-by-Side (So You Can Play with Extensions!) [ReadWriteWeb]

Read More...

Summary only...

McDonalds to offer ChargePoint electric vehicle charging stations

Mind you, we're talking just one of the 30,000 or so McDonalds around the world. Nevertheless, the first "green" version of the ubiquitous US "restaurant" will offer NovaCharge ChargePoint electric vehicle charging stations when it opens in Cary, North Carolina on July 14th. The idea is to recharge your plug-in Electric Vehicle while "enjoying your meal." Unfortunately, the current generation of EV batteries won't likely benefit from the 10 minutes or so it takes to gulp down a value meal. However, Mickey D's might be on to something should drivers choose to stay for the additional 2-hours of regret that follows.

[Via RedFerret]

Filed under: Transportation

McDonalds to offer ChargePoint electric vehicle charging stations originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Jul 2009 07:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Read More...

Summary only...

CrunchPad Web Tablet Landing "As Soon As Possible" for Less Than $300 [Crunchpad]

Mike Arrington's CrunchPad web tablet, already several prototypes in, is quickly bubbling to reality reports Bits: There's going to be an announcement in July or August, and it'll be available "as soon as possible."

Arrington's incorporated a separate company, called CrunchPad, and has apparently spent two-thirds of the last six months working on it with his 15-man team from Fusion Garage.

It's been iterated a bunch before, but worth saying again, that the Atom-powered touchscreen CrunchPad is strictly for internet consumption—it boots directly into the WebKit browser and there's no hard drive or keyboard, though you can plug in a keyboard if you want. It does support for Flash, so Arrington's claim that compared to netbooks, "most people will find it works as good as a netbook or better" for getting their internet on sounds pretty reasonable, given its 12-inch screen. Pointedly, it's not meant to compete with Apple's mythical tablet, whenever it graces the world.

I'd take the under $300 CrunchPad over a netbook any day, since it seems like it'll surpass them at the one thing they were supposedly designed to do—eat the internet. And it still blows my mind it took a tech blogger to actually make it happen. [! Bits]

Read More...

Summary only...