“We get lots of emails asking us what tools we use to build our products and run our business, so I figured we’d just post it to the blog.”

“Since we are moving towards 2006 I thought of compiling a list with the best tutorials (imho) of 2005. Of course I haven’t read all of the tutorials written this year, but believe me I have read a large percentage of them. So here we go in no particular order.”

“As the line between software and hardware blurs, coding errors are increasingly playing tricks on our daily lives. Bugs don’t just inhabit our operating systems and applications — today they lurk within our cell phones and our pacemakers, our power plants and medical equipment. And now, in our cars. But which are the worst?”

“A visit with the Photoshop engineers at 345 Park Avenue, San Jose, CA. June 16 & 17, 2005.”

From Display .07, Photoshop’s precursor, to the Photoshop CS2 (9.0) alt screen. (Thanks kottke.org!)

“Now available for download is Nvu 1.0 — a ‘complete web authoring system’ for Linux, Windows, and OS X. It’s free, and packs quite a punch in the features department — integrated FTP, site management, tabbed documents, spell checker, in-line preview, css editor, and numerous wizards for building tables, forms, and other elements.”

“There’s not much that really gets me excited about technology. To me, technology is a tool that allows me to express a concept or organize information. But I recently saw something that has me fired up and imagining the possibilities. Rich media PDF files created with Adobe InDesign. This may be old news to some of you. But this is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time.”

“Now you can instantly draw the golden sections, or other divine proportions, as an aid to composition. This plugin can draw fibonacci sequences such as the golden sections, golden spiral and the golden triangles. In addition it also can draw the harmonious triangles and the rule of thirds - based on composition through identity. The best way to use the plugin is to output the drawing to a transparent top layer you can move around for cropping.”

“As you might expect from a story with design, media, and technology angles, Adobe’s impending acquisition of Macromedia has resulted in much reaction from a big chunk of the blogosphere. Here are what some technologists, designers, and pundits have had to say about the deal so far…”

“Once again we experience a long awaited new update of Photoshop. This is a brief overview on some of the features that are new in Photoshop CS2 (aka PS9). All observations are based on a current beta version of PS CS2.”

“Quark continues to fight back in its battle for software survival in the newspaper business. The Denver Post scores a rare interview with new Quark CEO Kamar Aulakh. ‘We have been very successful,’ Aulakh says in the linked article. ‘Sometimes when you are successful, you lose touch with the customer.’”

“Adobe’s open source web site is the home for the Adobe Source Libraries (ASL) and information about other Adobe open source projects. ASL provides peer-reviewed and portable C++ source libraries. The libraries are intended to be widely useful, leveraging and extending both the C++ Standard Library and the Boost Libraries… The goal of ASL is to develop the technology necessary to construct commercial applications by assembling generic algorithms through declarative descriptions.”

“When called upon, FlySketch will show its main drawing window above all other windows in the system. Change the transparency of the canvas, and you can trace, draw over, highlight, and capture just about anything that shows up behind FlySketch.”

“Inkscape is an open source drawing tool with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, and CorelDraw that uses the W3C standard scalable vector graphics format (SVG).”

“Standard photo mosaic applications are based on similar (don’t read the same) process. Applications are different in implemented recognition/selection algorithms (most are unique and not patented :o) and built-in functions for control/enhance mosaic rendering process. This comparison shows main features for selected mosaic software.”