• Adobe Flash Pro CS5

Where all is talking about the end of flash after the debut of HTML 5 in web standards, flash has make us sure that flash is a never ending platform and it will make the web platform more vibrant by shaking hands with HTML5. With the pre-release video demo of flash cs5, we have come to know that now flash content can be play without a flash player. Flash will export a FXG format of file which is a playback element of canvas tag introduces in HTML5.

Adobe has progressed towards a better integration between products in the Flash Platform. Flash Builder and Adobe Flash® CS5 will have a better work-flow, with greater integration starting Flash Builder 4 (which just recently released). We are also expecting, that the newest member of the Flash family - Adobe Flash Catalyst will also be unveiled as part of the CS5.

Now Flash Pro CS5 can create iPhone app with targeting the iPhone system. Basically iPhone does not have the support of flash. So you cannot play flash games and animation cannot be played in iPhone. Now Flash CS5 has an ability to compile flash content into a native iPhone app. These apps can be distributed through the Apple App Store.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpEUNqfk4rw

• Flash Catalyst

Flash Catalyst is Adobe’s attempt to bridge the gap between Flash developers and designers. This is something like Fireworks® terminology. This software is both for designers and developers. You can shuffle between the designers view and code view as you might do in Dreamweaver®. You can add some gradient with the code and have some button with hover and click state. In Catalyst, a designer can use the UI created in Illustrator, Photoshop, or any other tool which can generate FXG, and turn it into a live interactive application in a short amount of time.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEEN9CrPDes

• Dreamweaver CS5

Now Dreamweaver® CS5 comes with some new eye catching feature, one of them is SmartPaste. With this you can directly copy one image and paste into your web design. Dreamweaver will create a FXG file and create a canvas tag for it with the new JavaScript rendering. Now as I say the canvas tag, you might guess that the new Dreamweaver will have HTML5 and CSS3 support and yes it is. FXG file will keep the original information from your illustrator file. That means your artwork will be crispier on the web. You can also create a chart with external information with the SmartPaste function. You have to select the dataset and the artwork to represent your data.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhjLlPegA8I

As we all know that Photoshop® is a very promising photo editing software. And it’s most popular among us for its eye catching features that make photo retouching in a minute. Recently Adobe has announced their hot new version of creative suite which they named as CS5. New version, Adobe Photoshop CS5 will be released on Monday, April 12, 2010 at 8am PDT / 11am EDT / 4pm GMT. CS5 has promised for lot of new features and improvements. For more news on its lunch, please log on to http://cs5launch.adobe.com/?PID=3387991 and reserve your seat now. Now we have taken a sneak peak on its most crowded product Photoshop®CS5 before its launch.

• Content aware fill

It’s a very handy tool that help a lot in photo retouching that introduces in Phtoshop®CS5. You can say it’s an upgraded version of ‘Spot Healing Tool’. Spot Healing Tool was used to remove a unwanted particle from the image or fill a blank space with surrounding patterns. Now this tool was good but very time consuming as you have to select the surrounding patterns by pressing Alt key so the blank spaces can be filled with same patterns. Now Photoshop® CS5 has introduced a fully automated patching tool. What you have to do is to select the unwanted part of the image or the blank space that you want to fill with the same pattern and Voila! You are done. This tool will automatically fill the space with surrounding patterns and make the image realistic. In the demo video by a product manager of Photoshop® team, he used to remove some trash from the field, remove lance flair and a big tree just with some of click. He vanish a road situated in the desert and feel them with tree with easy. Last but not the least he fix a problem of misshaped edge in panorama photos. If you are wondering how could he done all this, Please check out the video below.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyxDBRnuL3s

www.youtube.com/watch?v=X58evj9A8lg

• Wet paint

Photoshop® is claiming that this new tool will enhance your performance and I think it so. Now you can mix two or more colors with brush as you might do in real world. Another enhancement with brush behavior is brush prototypes. You can change the tip of the brush from the available flat brush, pointed brush, angle brush and fan brush. A small window will show you how the brush pretzels  changes when you are dragging your brush pointer over and image.

• Brush Stroke effect

You will get a life like brush strokes when you are converting your image to a hand drawn painting as you might do with the artistic filter.

• Patchmatch

This is mostly like a bone tool used in Maya, 3Ds Max and other 3D image editing software. Just place some control point in the image and move a particular part of the image without disturbing the rest. You can say this is an upgraded version warp tool in transformation.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BShE_jS8jLE

• Better edge detection & masking results

Newer version has better and more precise edge detection. It can detect and identify complex borders in any image. In the demo below the manager has mask a photo of a hairy cat. This was a very complex edge but the enhanced Photoshop® masking to done that precisely.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNR0n_IK7MM

• 3D enhancements

Now it’s time to forget use 3ds max, maya, xara 3D and any other 3D modeling tool to create a 3D object and import that design into your photoshop design. Because photoshop has integrated the 3D rendering tool . Now you can create any 3D object within photoshop. You can change width, height, depth and texture of a 3D modeling

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhzs8O1b-HA

www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY9aRB_HOzU

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hr0l35KGG0

• Dueling Paint

Adobe Photoshop CS5 provides an alternative to either use a special tool to interpret a photograph into a painting or to use a “from scratch” tool and create absolutely new objects. You can convert your photo into a hand drawn painting with much more realistic results. And Wet paint is a new Photoshop CS5 feature that lets you mix up colors with brush in the same way you do it in a real world, ‘wet’ paints can be smudged, smeared and blended. The new brush tools aim to match that found within Corel’s Painter application.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oHogFHZdxQ

• Small but effective enhancement

Now you can choose your default layer option. Just click on ‘make default’ button after creating a custom layer style and this will be your default layer style. Whenever you are changing a layer option in future, layer style will start from your default value. Another option is default closing dialogue box action. You can choose whether to save the file or not and you can make the same action to all the opened files by checking a box in dialogue box.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGlSIbhaGKM

Another great improvement is on screen color picker. No more dialogue boxes to choose Hue, Saturation or color. With the new eye dropper tool, you can compare between the foreground colors with the color you are picking with a rounded color selecting pointer. Now you can change the size of your brush with the horizontal movements and the softness with vertical movements of your mouse. In the same way you can change your page size with the magnifying tool.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8sEGVoTW9Q

Think you have a photo taken angularly and you want to straighten the image. Just go to skew and draw a horizon line, press Straighten button and your photo will be straight according to your line. Now you can select more than one layer and change the layer opacity and fill for the all selected layers simultaneously with the one click.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUF3cJjcHdY

Opera 10.51: The fastest phantom on the earth

Opera is all time favorite browser for the ubber geek for is cutting edge user-interface, thumbnail tab preview, mouse gesture, opera turbo, Unite, Opera links and many other unique feature that other cannot deliver. But unfortunately 2-3% of user use opera while browsing. You may think why least number of people use Opera though it has so many promising feature. It’s little bit confusing for m also, I think this is for slow page loading but this is my all time favorite browser.. Opera runs out its newest phantom 10.51 in this month with reducing its cluttering option.

• No more irritating pop-ups asking for saving password. This has integrated under the address bar.

Password Manager in Opera 10.51

• Title bars are no more in 10.51 as it replaced by the tabs, a Chrome rip-off.

Tabs in Opera 10.51

• Well-organized address bar and search bar to give people a comfort while browsing.

Well Organized Address Bar

• Shading the page and well highlighted search terms.

Search in Opera 10.51

• Visual Tabs: Just place your pointer under the tab and drag it down to have a thumbnail like screenshot of opened webpages instead of tabs.

Visual Tabs in Opera 10.51

• HTML5 and CSS3 support.
• Carakan JavaScript engine which is 7x faster than Opera 10.1.
• Vega is the new software based graphic engine which feature hardware-acceleration.
• Aero effect and Jump List to easily integrate it with new Windows™ 7.

Windows Aero and Jump Lists

Statistics shows:

Browsers:

• Opera 10.51
• Firefox 3.7 alpha 3
• Safari 4.0.5
• Google Chrome 5.0.356.2

System:

• AMD 64×2 2.4 GHz
• 2 GB DDR2 RAM
• NVDIA 8400 GS Graphics card
• Windows 7 64-bit

SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark Results (smaller is better)

SunSpiser JavaScript Test

• Opera Wins

Acid 3 Test Result (higher is better)

Acid3 Test

• Opera, Safari, Chrome wins

V8 Benchmark Test Result (higher is better)

V8 Benchmark Test

• Chrome Wins

DOM Test Result (higher is better)

DOM Test Result

• Chrome wins

Peacekeeper Browser Benchmark Test Result (higher is better)

Peacekeeper Test Result

• Opera wins

Sputnik JavaScript Conformance Test Result (number of failed script, lower is better)

Sputnik Test Result

• Opera wins

CSS3 Selectors Test Result (number of pass, higher is better)

CSS3 Selectors Test

• All passed except IE 8

*Results may differ in other computer as this depends on system configuration and internet speed.

So we can see Opera has wins in most of the test with making a great difference with others. Opera has joined the race with main browsers. We will not shock if we see opera as the leading browsers after a few month, if they keep up the good work.

create your own free blog in jiffy with vox.com

Trends for creating blogs are growing rapidly. Mostly user prefers Word press and other Content Management System (CMS) for their blog hosting. Installing any CMS in a server needs a minimum knowledge on hosting, server and scripting. Some people who doesn’t want to invest any buck for blog or doesn’t know anything about hosting, vox.com is for them. This week we have reviewed vox.com. You can create blog easily, free of cost and with no coding experience with this site. Your blog will be created as the sub-domain of vox.com (e.g. your-blog-name.vox.com). So let’s go through how to create a blog with vox.com in jiffy!

Step 1: Setup Your Blog

1. Open up your browser. Go to http://vox.com .
2. Click on ‘Join Vox’ on top and you will be redirected to the registration page.

Tip: You can also click on ‘Take a Tour’ for a small tutorial on using the site and at the same time you will be aware of all the features of the site.

Joining Vox

1. Fill up your original details and a valid email address.
2. Enter the text ‘captcha’ and click ‘Sign Up’.

Info: It is free to create your account. Unfortunately there have no option to host your vox blog with top level domain.

Registering at vox

1. You will get a validation mail containing a confirmation link.
2. Either go through the link or copy the confirmation number and paste in vox account verification page and click ‘Confirm Account’.
3. Fill your profile details (optional) if you like.

Confirm account in vox

Step 2: Creating Your Post

1. click on the ‘create’ on the top from the control panel.

Start Blogging

1. You will get a text editor on the screen.
2. Give a relevant title that would attract your post viewer.
3. Enter some relevant keyword. Your blog will appear in the search result when anybody searches those keywords.

Editing a Blog

1. Click on ‘Photos’ if you like to insert image in your post.
2. This site supports photo uploading from your computer, Flickr, iStockphoto, photobucket and your Vox library.
3. Click on ‘Choose’ and target your image path.
4. Add some relevant keyword for your photo.
5. You can change the permission of viewing your photo from bottom line.
6. Click on ‘ok’ if you’re done.

Uploading photo in vox

1. You can change the size and position of your image which you have uploaded.

Resizing an image

1. You can add music in the same way you have insert the image.
2. Vox support MP3, MP4, M4A, AMR, Ogg, Vorbis and WAV music format.
3. You can upload your music from your computer, Vox library, Amazon.

Uploading Media

1. Click on ‘save’ when you think your page is done.
2. Once you have saved your post, you can send notification about it to your friends or bookmark it to social bookmarking sites.

Sharing your blog

Step 3: Styling Your Blog with Themes

1. Click on ‘you’ from the top menu and select design from the sub menu.
2. Select your layout at first.
3. Point your mouse over the theme and click ‘apply to blog’.
4. You can change the theme category from the sidebar to fit your blog.

Here is what you get at last

Final Image

Hope you have enjoyed this tutorial. So create your first Vox blog as soon as possible.

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