You may not be familiar with the company Tronical but you will know their work because they are responsible for Gibson’s Robot Guitar tuning systems. Well judging by this video it appears that Tronical are about to launch some standalone systems that can be retrofit to pretty much any guitar be it a Les Paul [...]
Category: Graphics
Pinterest Becomes Top Traffic Driver for Women’s Magazines
Pinterest hasn’t just become a significant source of referral traffic for retailers; it’s also becoming a top traffic driver for women’s lifestyle, home decor and cooking magazines, some of which are seeing bigger referral numbers from the image-collecting service than from major portals like Facebook and Yahoo.
Beginning this summer, Pinterest became the top social referrer for marthastewartweddings.com and marthastewart.com, sending more traffic to both properties than Facebook and Twitter combined. Pinterest is on track to become the second highest traffic driver (after Google) to Cooking Light‘s website, up 6,000% from just six months ago. The social bookmarking site already drives 10 times the amount of traffic to Cooking Light compared to Facebook.
Elsewhere, Pinterest is the fourth largest source of traffic for Country Living, up 150% from August to the end of January, and accounts for 3% of all referrals. It was the ninth largest traffic source for both Elle Decor and House Beautiful last month, both of which have seen triple-digit percentage increases in referrals over the last six months, and was among the top 10 referral sites for Self magazine.
In most cases, the traffic began organically. Style, home decor, weddings and food are among the most popular pinning categories among the site’s more than 10 million registered users, the majority of whom are women. Pinterest users turned to the websites of lifestyle magazines early on for material, and many publishers moved quickly to harness Pinterest’s potential as a traffic driver by creating their own branded accounts.
Multiple editors contribute to Country Living’s Pinterest page.
Instead of assigning the account to a community or social media manager, Country Living has divvied up its boards among editors. The crafts editor, for instance, posts to the crafts board; the photo editor posts to a board of inspiring images; and three market editors manage the shopping, style, and Etsy boards. An editors’ faves board contains repins from staffers’ personal boards. Much of the content is derived from Country Living‘s own evergreen and season-specific material, but content is also pinned and repinned from favorite bloggers, designers, stylemakers and photographers, Allison Mezzafonte, director of Hearst Digital Media’s Shelter Network, tells us.
“Creating Pinterest pages [for our magazines] allows us to share what we see around the web, and not just our own content. [Our audience] wants to know what we see, what we like, and what’s inspiring us beyond the beautiful images seen in the pages of our magazines,” Mezzafonte explains.
To build awareness of Country Living‘s Pinterest presence, the magazine also cross-posts some of its pins to Facebook and Twitter. Mezzafonte also monitors Country Living’s source page to track, Like and comment on what is being pinned from the site. “I think it makes [users] happy to know that we’re paying attention to what they’re pinning and what they like,” Mezzafonte says. “It’s also a very visual way for me, as the web editor, to see what people are looking at on our site… [To see] the images, projects and recipes that resonate most with our readers.”
It’s not just legacy print publications that are reaping the Pinterest boom, however. Pinterest recently passed Yahoo to become the number-four referral source to MyRecipes.com, accounting for roughly 6% of traffic in January. Referrals are up 246% from October, and up a whopping 2500% from July. A spokesperson for the MyRecipes.com noted that the site has its own frequently updated brand pages, but that the majority of the traffic is coming from users who pin recipes directly from the sites, and from the viral activity that happens organically on Pinterest.
Martha Stewart Weddings has added pin buttons to its site.
In some cases, publishers are also adding pin buttons to their sites, reminding readers to save their content to Pinterest. Martha Stewart Weddings recently added a pin button to its social toolbar, in between the Facebook Like and Google +1 buttons.
While publishers and retailers are both reaping the rewards of traffic increases, it’s still not clear whether they’ll be able to monetize that traffic further. Can magazines turn Pinterest referrals into subscribers? Can retailers turn Pinterest users into customers? The platform certainly has the potential to do both, meaning that the network could become even more central to their marketing efforts than it is at present.
(Via Mashable!.)
How to Calibrate Any Display in Mac OS X
Regardless of what you use your computer for, there’s one thing that’s in common with all set ups: a display. There are tons of different display manufacturers to choose from with varying standards of quality, and because of this, each of your displays may not have the exact same color accuracy. There is a remedy however: your Mac’s built-in Display Calibrator Assistant. Read on and we’ll show you how to ensure you’ll always see the most vivid, true color on your display.
Photo Grabbr 1.44 – Download photos and photosets from a Flickr account
Photo Grabbr makes it easy to download photos and photosets from a Flickr account. Features include:
- downloading from a Flickr user OR a group.
- easily pick photosets to download from a user
- easily download all photos from a user or a group (including being able to specify certain criteria for which photos to download)
Version 1.44:
- Any videos in a set are now downloaded if you’re downloading from your own account and you have a Pro account (this is due to limitations set forth by Flickr — there’s not much I can do about it).
- Updated the XML export to include any notes and comments on a photo.
- The XML export now also contains the file path to the photo saved.
- Photos of a Flickr user (i.e., photos posted by other Flickr users that contain the user searched for) can now be downloaded.
- Mac OS X 10.4 or later.
- Flickr account (optional)
- Growl (optional).
(Via MacUpdate – Mac OS X.)
15 best places to download free desktop wallpaper
The average adult spends around eight hours a day staring at a screen, but if you take a second to think about what’s on display, all too often it’s framed by a bland background.
Windows and Linux make it easy to display something more aesthetically pleasing. Indeed, Windows 7 comes with a wider selection of gorgeous images than ever before. However, this means the art of original desktop decoration is being lost.
Customising your desktop with a picture of the family cat is all well and good, but few of our own digital photos are actually suitable for the desktop – they’re either too busy and distracting to have icons splattered on top, or not high enough resolution, so the result is grainy.
And forget dedicated websites too – many wallpaper sites simply offer tasteless images of sunsets and models, and some are even designed to spread malware.
That’s why we’ve found 15 of the best places to get wallpapers on the web, whatever your tastes may be. Some are a little left-field and some are plain unconventional, but we’re confident that whatever your taste in art, you’ll find something that will make working on your PC much more enjoyable.
1. Wikimedia Commons
Webiste
Wikimedia is a free online community made up of millions of photos, movies and sounds that are free to use. There’s a myriad of images, some of which aren’t suitable for life on the desktop, but some are beautiful shots that are crying out to be displayed.
One of the best ways of hunting down great desktop images on the site is to use the Photo of the Day feature, and going back through the site’s long history, where there are some great images on offer.
When you find one you like, download the full-resolution version rather than the preview, as these will be much higher quality and will look better on your desktop.
2. Hamad Darwish
Website
Windows Vista may have been disappointed in nearly every respect, but one aspect that did impress us was the great-looking desktop wallpapers that came included. Those masterpieces were the work of Hamad Darwish, who travelled the world for Microsoft, taking wonderful snaps for our enjoyment.
Upon his return, he put all of the wallpapers that Microsoft rejected on the internet for free, and there are some fantastic vistas that will really brighten your desktop. Just head onto his website, click the Windows Vista tab and download the 30MB folder.
While you’re there, check out Hamad’s other work, which is really rather good.
3. Dual-Monitor Backgrounds
Website
If you have a dual-monitor setup then Dual Monitor Backgrounds is an essential wallpaper resource. All the wallpapers on the site are 2,560×1,024 or 3,840×1,200 and look truly stunning when spread out.
One of the best features on the Dual Monitor Background site is the ability to set your monitor resolution by clicking the link at the top. All the results will then be filtered to your specific needs, so you’ll only see the wallpapers that suit your desktop. There are loads of categories to choose from, but just remember to click on the preview shot first to get the full-resolution image before you save it to your desktop.
4. Space
Website
The Windows desktop: the final frontier. Well, not quite. But those with a passion for space, stargazing and sci-fi are well served for quality wallpapers. Head onto the Space Views part of www.space.com and click the Wallpapers tab to get an array of out-of-this-world shots.
They come in a range of sizes specifically designed for life on your desktop. Admittedly, many are mock-ups by artists whose impression of space, it seems, has been altered by hallucinogens. However, we love the Earth shots – some of them are truly inspiring.
5. National Geographic
Website
When it comes to incredible images, you can rely on National Geographic. It has an array of the world’s most gorgeous vistas on offer, and what’s more, they’re specifically designed for the desktop, and free to download.
From the National Geographic homepage, just go to ‘Photography | Wallpapers’ and start browsing the best that nature has to offer. When you click on an image in the Wallpapers section, you’ll see a ‘Get wallpaper’ link. The image will resize and you can right-click to apply, or save the image using the link at the top.
6. Gigapixel
www.gigapxl.org
If your digital camera is measured in megapixels, just imagine what a gigapixel camera can do! Miracles, that’s what. The images are stunning, and they can be enlarged to such an extent that you can make out the smallest details in huge vistas, as if looking through a telescope.
The Gigapxl Project has a huge collection of shots that show off the impact of gigapixel images, and they offer wallpaper-sized versions of most of their photos.
7. NASA
Website
NASA may be hard at work discovering the secrets of the universe, but it’s nice to see that between deep space explorations, they’ve found the time to put a couple of wallpapers up as well. There are close-up images of the darkest and weirdest corners of the galaxy, taken by space telescopes and satellites.
Interplanetary wonders on offer include the Orion Nebula, Lulin Comet and the Martian surface, to name but a few. If there’s a set of images guaranteed to give you a self-worth complex, it’s NASA’s, and we salute them for it.
To find the images, go to ‘View Image Gallery’ and scroll through the sets. The download links are in the right-hand panel, with a variety of sizes to choose from.
8. Porsche
Website
There are few sights as pleasing as one of the most expensive cars on the planet, and for fans of Porsche, these wallpapers are an absolute must.
Porsche has gone to the trouble of taking scores of pictures of its cars bathed in sunlight, dripping with decals and racing mods, and they’re guaranteed to get fans of the supercar excited. The Boxster, 911, Panamera and every middle-class parent’s favourite, the Cayenne, are all available, and there are multiple sizes to suit every desktop.
9. Bing
www.bing.com
Bing may be struggling to gain ground in the battle of the search providers, but it beats Google hands down when it comes to amazing pictures. Photos are so important to Bing that every country has someone in charge of selecting the images, so it would be a shame to let that go to waste without making some fantastic desktops.
10. Microsoft Official Themes
Website
One of the best parts of Windows 7 is its desktop themes. These enable you to select sets of photos and colour schemes with which to decorate Windows and change them on demand. While previous editions of Windows were fairly static in terms of appearance, Microsoft has been updating wallpapers and themes for Windows 7 via its Personalisation Gallery.
These range from country-specific scenery to the best of Bing. To access the gallery, right-click the desktop and go to ‘Personalize | Get more themes online’. All of the wallpapers and themes plug straight into Windows 7, so there’s minimum fuss and maximum enjoyment.
11. Enigma desktop
http://rainmeter.net
One of the most dramatic ways of changing your desktop’s appearance is the Enigma Desktop, which is easier than ever to set up. The Enigma mod is now fully featured in Rainmeter, and turns your desktop into a blank canvas for everything from storing icons to implementing a fully integrated panel that can alert you to new emails, RSS feeds and much more.
Just head over to the website to download the program, which now comes with a fantastic set of wallpapers by Kaelri from Deviant Art. Enigma is a great mod for anyone looking for a unique and functional desktop, and the wallpapers make it well worth the time investment alone.
12. Deviant Art
www.deviantart.com
For fans of independent digital art, Deviant Art is a great place to look. It’s a huge melting pot of creativity, with a mixture of graphically altered images and amazing digital drawings.
While Deviant Art is by no means designed to cater specifically for wallpaper hunters, there are some stunning images on offer that make fabulous backgrounds. You can download the original versions of the images for use on your desktop, although there isn’t universal support for every screen resolution.
13. Windows 7 Themes
http://windows7themes.net
Windows 7 Themes is so popular, it has a higher Google rank than the official Windows Personalization Gallery that’s linked to from every copy of Windows 7. Don’t be misled: there’s nothing official about this site, which even lists Windows 8 wallpapers among its wares!
That’s to take nothing away from its vast selection of wallpapers, though. If you like the swirls and colours of the official Windows backgrounds, then you’ll love the selection of tribute images on the site.
14. Flickr Wallpaper Group
Website
Flickr is fast becoming the best online source of images in the world, so it’s no surprise that there’s a section dedicated to wallpapers. The pool is contributed to by members of the Flickr community, many of whom are professional and semi-pro photographers, and the quality of the photos reflects that.
Many are arty, most are striking, and they’re all designed with the desktop in mind, with every image clocking in at over 1,024×768 pixels. To download, simply click on an image and then click the ‘All sizes’ button located at the top left. The next screen will offer a list of all the available resolutions, so pick the one that suits your display, or just click ‘Download original size’.
15. Wallpaper Stock
http://wallpaperstock.net
Wallpaper Stock is an apt name for a site that offers such a huge range of desktop images. They’re all free to download, and while they might be slightly generic and unimaginative in places, there’s a massive range of resolutions available, and a genre of images to suit every taste.
In a bizarre twist, you need to tweet about the site in order to download an image. Once you’ve spammed your followers with a tweet about how great Wallpaper Stock can be, you’re free to download. The full-sized image is opened in a new window, so just right-click to save it.
(Via TechRadar: All latest feeds.)
20 Stunning Halloween Desktop Wallpapers
Seeing a lot of user-submitted artwork and animations via Blender, GIMP, and Inkscape enthusiasts (some of which you can see in 10+ Amazing Short Films Made With Free Software) has made me really appreciate images illustrated by hand, which includes wallpapers. Given the season, illustrated wallpapers shouldn’t be too difficult to find, and it might even get you excited for Halloween!
Here is a set of wallpapers that feature this exact illustrated-by-hand concept, though authors have not indicated that they used GIMP or other open-source image editing application. Also, some are from general wallpaper search sites, which I suspect don’t always link to the original author, but a number of these have a watermark (smart!) on them so they’re more traceable and attributable.
You can also find a few tutorials after the set of wallpapers, which may help guide you should you become inspired to create your own!
Wallpaper Collection
1. Halloween by Sandara
Download at: Deviant Art
2. Halloween
Download at: Zastavki
3. Halloween/Preparations For The Holiday
Download at: Zastavki
4. Halloween/All Saints Day
Download at: Zastavki
5. Untitled 2
Download at: Wallbase
6. Happy Halloween by Anthony Altamirano of ArtkasDesign
Download at: Slodive
7. Halloween
Download at: Wallbase
8. Halloween
Download at: Wallbase
9. Halloween/House Witches
Download at: Zastavki
10. Halloween by Hellen
Download at: Wallbase
11. Hallowmas
Download at: Zastavki
12. Untitled 3
Download at: Wallbase
13. Halloween Haunts
Download at: Wallcoo
14. Witchcraft Magic Night Cauldron
Download at: Halloween Web
15. Halloween Theme
Download at: Zastavki
16. Halloween/Holiday Decorations
Download at: Zastavki
17. Castle Witches
Download at: Zastavki
18. House At The Cemetery/Halloween
Download at: Zastavki
19. The Night In The Midst Of Halloween
Download at: Zastavki
20. Halloween Theme
Download at: Zastavki
(Via MakeUseOf.com.)
Seashore – A Free Lightweight Image Editor For Your Mac
Mac doesn’t count nearly as many free image editors as Windows. This is something you won’t notice if you’re using Adobe Photoshop, Pixelmator or Apple’s own Preview application. But you’ll need a second mortgage to afford Photoshop, and Preview doesn’t do much more than annotating and cropping.
Looking for freeware clears the stage of all but a few players, most famously GIMP and Acorn. We decided to take Seashore for a spin. It takes the middle ground between the advanced, but overly cluttered and complicated GIMP, and the beautiful simplicity of Preview.
Seashore
The Seahorse project has been out and about for quite a while, and aggregated a notable followership, but it was discontinued for the last three years. Only a couple of months ago, Seashore pushed out a working 0.5 preview, featuring drastic changes to the interface and functionality.
Seashore is based on GIMP and developed with the Cocoa framework, and proves once and for all that GIMP-based applications don’t have to be awkward. As an intermediate to advanced image editor, Seashore hasn’t ported all the available features, but enough for the average user.
All these can be found in the default application view, with a layer overview on the left and a feature-ridden ribbon on the top which, together with the pop-ups, allows immediate access to all features. These cover selection tools, brushes, filling, effects, nudge, stamp, color picker, crop tool, and more.
Now here’s where Seashore shows itself as an old-fashioned image-editor, but not in a particularly good way. The application misses tools for creating shapes, both free-form and basic squares and arrows. Typesetting is included, but rasterizes itself after creation – which, in human language, means that the text, font type and color can’t be changed later on.
This can be circumvented by using the selection tool to select part of an empty layer, and coloring it with the fill tool. It shouldn’t be necessary, but it allows you to create a quick square, rectangle, circle, ellipse and free-form shape. This can be made easier by ticking off the aspect ratio checkbox.
The effects menu, mentioned above, looks like a blurred dot and arrow. This feature makes up for the lack of freeform shapes, and is again focused around image manipulation. These effects cover a goodly number of things, both fun and practical. You can use the blur and distort tools, 11 total, and the generate and tile tools to create great backgrounds or warp your photographs. The transform tools are especially useful for manipulating multiple layers, including perspective, scale and rotation.
Summary
Compared to GIMP, using Seashore is an incredibly fluid and intuitive experience. It’s obvious, though, that Seashore isn’t intended for seasoned graphic editors, and it isn’t a match for the likes of Photoshop and Pixelmator. Seashore is also an old-school free image editor. Although the effects pane offers an incredible array of features, the absence of simple shapes makes this application mostly appropriate for working with ‘real’ photographs.
(Via MakeUseOf.com.)
Expedition Titanic gives you a virtual tour of the Titanic wreck site
Simon points out that the official Titanic Expedition website is pretty darn cool. It’s run by RMS Titanic Inc. and basically gives you a virtual tour of the entire Titanic wreck site along with important historical facts and figures about the boat and the sea bed that it currently lives on.
The media portions of the site are worthy of a look so head on over to the Expedition Titanic site to check it out.
(Via Doobybrain.com.)
How To Create Stunning Presentations Using Text Images
I guess it’s true that there’s a first time for everything. After years of watching people doing presentations, I finally got to create my own.
I wanted my first time to be special, so I tried to find ways to make sure that mine was not going to be ‘just another boring presentation’. I noticed that most people paid too much attention to data and sacrificed the appearance. On the other hand, there are others who create a presentation that is too ‘flashy’ which distracts the audience from the real content.
The perfect combination would be to use related beautiful images to complement the content of the presentation. Then your audience can digest your content without getting bored.
Creating The Perfect Images
There are many ways to acquire perfect images that go along with the content of your presentation. You can create your own, or find and use somebody else’s.
If you are a good photographer with lots of stock photos, then the first option would not be a problem. But for those whose image capturing skills are below par, the easiest method to create your own image is to make the text itself as the image.
This is a trick often used by one of the greatest presenters out there: Steve Jobs.
The key is minimal use of text and extra time on tinkering with font properties and background. For example, I would like to present the statistic of blogs from Technorati. Some copy and paste routines would give me something like this:
To modify the data into text images, I cut out the fat and deleted most of the text. I also changed the written numbers with real numbers to add some drama.
Then I did a quick change of the font type, size and color using ‘Formatting Palette‘. I assigned white for the title and dark grey for the content.
You can also use the ‘Format – Font’ menu for more comprehensive options.
I added some shadow and reflection to spice things up a little bit.
Centered text is so static and boring, so I moved them around.
And the last step was changing the background using right click and ‘Format Background’
I chose a simple 90 degrees linear gradient color fill from dark to light to further emphasize the text.
I clicked ‘Apply’ and here’s what I came up with.
Be sure to add real life context to the presentation. Using the blog statistic example, I’d show my audience the stunning slides while saying something like this: ‘In 2009, Technorati said that there were more than 130,000,000 blogs out there. That’s as much as all Japanese people in the world.’
Adding Real Images
To take things a little bit further, you can also use real stock photo images. My favorite way to get free to use and free to modify photos is downloading them from Flickr. Just be sure to use the Creative Commons licensed ones.
To find photos within that category, you can use Flickr Advanced Search while ticking on the CC boxes.
Or you can use Quix and ‘fc’ command for faster results.
Use the downloaded image(s) for the background of your slide(s), and you can get something like this:
Using text images (and real images) is just one of the simple and easy tricks that will boost your presentation several levels above boring.
(Via MakeUseOf.com.)
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