“DrawIt is not your typical image-editor. It does not fill up your window with lots of pallets you don’t use but instead presents with just one simple and clean window. Nevertheless, DrawIt packs an impressive feature-list into this single window. DrawIt is layer-based, has a powerful vector-drawing tool, incredible support for masks and much, much more. Check the feature-list below to discover why DrawIt might be the tool you need.”

“The below image looks like a simple gradient with my website’s name on it. But it’s more than that. There’s a picture hidden in that gradient. Can you find it?”

“This video by Dr. Ariel Shamir shows off presentation on content-aware image sizing. It demonstrates a software application that resizes images in such a way that the content of the image is preserved intelligently.”

“The InfoVis Toolkit is a Interactive Graphics Toolkit written in Java to ease the development of Information Visualization applications and components… The InfoVis Toolkit, as of version 0.9, implements nine (9) types of visualization: Scatter Plots, Time Series, Parallel Coordinates and Matrices for tables; Node-Link diagrams, Icicle trees and Treemaps for trees; Adjacency Matrices and Node-Link diagrams for graphs.”

“There are literally over 8,500 programming languages in existence, yet despite all these options, the vast majority of us all use the same dozen or so. Whether it’s infighting among language creators, bad marketing, new technologies or just being a crummy language, there are almost as many reasons why coding languages didn’t become popular as there are programming languages. In this article we examine 12 coding languages that never took off, and the reasons they didn’t.”

“With the Office Open XML Converter, you can convert Office Open XML files to a format that is compatible with Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac and Microsoft Office v. X for Mac. You can choose to convert and open one file, or convert a large number of files… This version [currently 0.2 Beta] of the converter can convert the following Office Open XML file formats:

• Word Document (*.docx)
• Word Macro-Enabled Document (*.docm)
• PowerPoint Presentation (*.pptx)
• PowerPoint Show (*.ppsx)
• PowerPoint Template (*.potx)”

Into Campfire, that is. I just noticed that the screenshot over at 37 Signals’ Campfire site has one of our XPLANATiONS pasted into the sample chat. How cool!

“Sketching User Experiences is Bill Buxton’s new book arguing that the process of sketching is distinct from prototyping, and an integral part of design. Buxton opens with the canonical example of great design, Apple’s iPod, to show that its “overnight” success actually came after 3+ years of development and updates, and moves on to talk about the lack of design in typical software organizations… About 1/3rd through the book, Buxton cuts to the chase with an 11-point definition of sketching as distinct from prototyping. Most importantly to Buxton, sketches are fast, cheap, and divergent. They develop quickly with only minimal detail to make a point, and are intended to communicate the essential ideas of a maximally-wide variety of design possibilities.” (Thanks Magnetbox!)

Reagarding software programming, it boils down to: Partitioning, Hierarchy and Independence.

“I am constantly writing notes. Whether it be for my blog, work, meeting, new ideas, or just basic notes, I am always jotting something down. So I started thinking about all the services I’ve used for taking notes and thought it would be a good idea to share them with you and while I’m at it, to make a list of any others that I find. Now, when it comes to note taking, I personally look for quick and simple. If I have something on my mind, I don’t want to go through some advanced system and climb a mountain just to save a note for myself. There won’t be all the note taking tools out there on my list, but ones that I feel get the job done well.” (Thanks Rebecca’s Pocket!)

“Running a business for yourself means you have to be inventive and always on the lookout for a new and better way to get things done. Innovation junkies, take note: the Internet has a lot to offer. From invoicing to marketing, these are tools that freelancers need to know about.”

“Microsoft Powerpoint transitions, running in sequence, switching from black to white by Daniel Eatock & Timothy Evans: After viewing Transition I remembered a quicktime I had seen on an avant-garde art website. The film was Rhythms 21 by Hans Richter from 1921. The similarities between the two films are quite exact at times, both feature wipes from white to black and black to white. It was quite interesting to me that there could be these parallels between works made 85 years apart.”

“The ubiquity of frustrating, unhelpful software interfaces has motivated decades of research into ‘Human-Computer Interaction.’ In this paper, I suggest that the long-standing focus on ‘interaction’ may be misguided. For a majority subset of software, called “information software,” I argue that interactivity is actually a curse for users and a crutch for designers, and users’ goals can be better satisfied through other means.” (Thanks Magnetbox!)

“Full icon set replacement for Creative Studio 3 based on CS3 retail product box design. What’s missing is document icon for Contribute CS3 and few more small CS3 apps. I’ll do second part as soon as Adobe releases more CS3 apps to public.”

“It’s been just over 12 months since I posted our original Guide to CSS Support in Email and quite a bit has changed since. Sadly, the most significant of these changes was in the wrong direction, with Microsoft’s recent decision to use the Word rendering engine instead of Internet Explorer in Outlook 2007. We’ve written plenty about it already including an explanation of the reasoning behind it. More on its impact on CSS support later. It hasn’t all been doom and gloom though, a number of vendors have maintained or improved their support for CSS, especially in the web-based email environment.”