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PaintSupreme Inexpensive Painting and Image Enhancement App for Macintosh, Windows, and Linux
Wider Availability Of Intel Thunderbolt On PCs Come April
Why Do PC Trackpads Suck?
Apple's Product History: 2001-2011
Apple Fined By Italy Over Misleading Product Guarantees
Voice Recognition Software: Report-Writing Without The Writing
How to Install Windows 8 Using VMware Fusion
An All Apple Family
PaintSupreme Inexpensive Painting and Image Enhancement App for Macintosh, Windows, and Linux
BrainDistrict GmbH, developer of world-class image manipulation and enhancement technologies offers PaintSupreme, a powerful yet easy-to-use application for drawing, painting, and image enhancement. Originally created for BrainDistrict's highly anticipated RaySupreme rendering and animation application, PaintSupreme is a fun and easy-to-use application that can deliver professional results at a price point that won't break the bank.
PaintSupreme is a full featured, easy-to-use painting application & image editor that allows users to use paint tools to create, edit and polish cool images.
PaintSupreme also provides a wide range of powerful selection tools like, freehand, ellipse and lasso as well as sophisticated but easy to use paint tools with a lot of options, like the Brush, Pen, Magic Wand, Gradient, Erasure, Clone and Paint Bucket tools. This allows you to combine tools for painting, drawing, retouching as well as being able to add type.
With PaintSupreme you can design your own, logos, sketches, graphic designs and image editing, who knows with a little creativity PaintSupreme will help you on the road to becoming the modern day Picasso or Van Gogh (in your own world of course).
With PaintSupremes image editor you are able to edit images non-destructively with layer styles & adjustment layers.
PaintSupreme's super-powers include sophisticated brush & gradient capabilities with many options tools, and BrainDistrict claims it's the only product in this price range that offers full vector support capable of creating paths that all tools can be applied on (the path itself as well as path contents). PaintSupreme offers full layer-based image editing, offering users a simple way to edit layered images, and has an intuitive user interface (that looks like a sort of cross between Photoshop Elements and Pixelmator - Ed.). And the best part ... PaintSupreme costs less than $20.00.
"PaintSupreme really is a fun and easy way to draw, paint, and edit images without the complexity of applications like Photoshop," says BrainDistrict GmbH Managing Director Markus Moenig. "More advanced users will appreciate the advanced vector capabilities, which are not currently found in either Photoshop or Pixelmator. PaintSupreme has something for everyone who needs a capable drawing and painting application yet doesn't want to spend a small fortune in the process."
Features:
• Create, edit and polish images with an easy-to-use and fun user interface.
• Layer-based editing with an unlimited amount of layers. Lots of powerful layer-based editing options (merge, group, lock etc.)
• Powerful selection tools: Freehand, ellipse and lasso. Selections can be joined, subtracted and intersected and can also be loaded and saved.
• Sophisticated but easy to use tools with a lot of powerful options, like the Brush, Pen, Magic Wand, Gradient, Erasure, Clone and Paint Bucket tools.
• Various transform, color adjustment and text tools.
• Support of vector shapes which can be used as a shape source for the pixel tools and which can be converted to selections.
• Guides and rulers make it easy to orientate and paint within sub-parts of the image.
• Various filters to polish your images and photos.
• Import and export of many external image formats.
System requirements:
Mac OS X 10.6.6 or later,
64-bit processor
BrainDistrict PaintSupreme is currently available for $19.99 for the Macintosh, Windows, and Linux platforms. The Windows & Linux version can be purchased from the BrainDistrict online shop. The Macintosh version is available in the Apple Mac App Store:
http://bit.ly/uLe51o
Visit the BrainDistrict Web site, http://www.braindistrict.com, for further details or to download a demo version of PaintSupreme, or learn more about other BrainDistrict products & technologies available for individual purchase or technology license in SDK form.
Product page:
http://www.braindistrict.com/en/paintsupreme
Mac App Store:
http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/paintsupreme/id450496217?mt=12
Wider Availability Of Intel Thunderbolt On PCs Come April
Digitimes' Monica Chen and Joseph Tsai report that
Intel recently notified its partners that the company will fully release its Thunderbolt technology in April, 2012, and that several top-tier PC players are preparing to launch Thunderbolt-supported motherboards, notebooks and desktop PCs, according to insider sources.
To speed up standardization of Thunderbolt, Intel is cooperating with Apple, which is currently the sole vendor offering PC products equipped with Thunderbolt technology, but as demand for ThunderBolt is growing, Intel is ready to release it for wider use.
Chen and Tsai note that adding Thunderbolt support costs more than $20, and is in competitoin with USB 3.0 to become the next-generation data transmission dominant technology. They note that while Thunderbolt didn't receive a lot of attention from the IT industry when first announced, Apple's adoption of the technology into products including its desktop and laptop auxiliary monitors, MacBook Pro, iMac, MacBook Air and MacBook Mini, has boosted demand, and with the cost including Thunderbolt support in PCs expected to drop in the second half of 2012, the industry insider sources predict the technology being standardized gradually in the future.
Sony and Asustek Computer are expected to be first up adopting Thunderbolt in their their high-end notebook products, and Chen and Tsai report that Gigabyte Technology has been aggressively adopting new transmission technology into its product line, is also expected to launch Thunderbolt-featured motherboard in April.
For the full report visit here:
http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20111226PD214.html
Why Do PC Trackpads Suck?
So asks ZNet's James Kendrick, contending that Apple set the bar for laptop trackpads with the outstanding ones on the MacBook line, and observing that there's yet been a trackpad on the PC side that comes close matching Apple's products.
Kendrick says he's been using PC laptops since they weighed 30 pounds, and that one common feature found on almost all of them over the years is a trackpad that sucks, and noting that until the unibody MacBook came along, the first thing he did with a new laptop is plug in a wireless mouse (some of us still do even post-unibody - Ed.), and he doesn't understand why, out of all the companies making laptops, Apple is the only one that makes a decent trackpad. They are either too sensitive, not sensitive enough, or even worse - interfere with typing by sending the cursor all over the screen when his palms hit the trackpad, while Apple has nailed multi-touch trackpad technology down cold, making it work exactly as it should - the sensitivity just right, integrated mouse buttons working just right, and palm rejection is just right.
Kendrick says he's beginning to think making a trackpad that works properly must be incredibly difficult. [However, from personal experience, Apple had it nailed back in 1996 with the PowerBook 1400c, and it got even better with the PowerBook G3 series of the late '90s and early '00s. Ed.]
For the full commentary visit here:
http://zd.net/sj5c24
Apple's Product History: 2001-2011
The Street's Chris Ciaccia notes that Apple has had a product timeline unlike almost any other company. Every year since 2001, Apple has released a product that the masses end up wanting and clamoring for.
However Ciaccia predicts that 2012 will be a little different, with Apple having to find a way to cope without leadership of its visionary founder, although he notes that rumors of an Apple TV set launch have given some tech enthusiasts hope, with analysts, including Ticonderoga Securities, haivng speculated that T.V.s could be a huge revenue driver for Apple.
In the meantime Ciaccia presents a nine-page retrospective of Apple's product timeline since the launch of the first iPod in 2001 to the present day.
You can check it out at:
http://bit.ly/vrOqcu
Apple Fined By Italy Over Misleading Product Guarantees
The BBC reports that Italy's watchdog Antitrust Authority has fined Apple 900,000 euros ($1.2m, 750,000) for allegedly failing to inform shoppers of their legal right to two years' technical support, recognising instead only a one-year standard warranty, leading customers to pay extra for Apple's own support service, which overlapped in part with the free guarantee.
For the full report visit here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16339651
Voice Recognition Software: Report-Writing Without The Writing
PoliceOne's Lindsey J. Bertomen reviews two Nuance voice recognition applications: Dragon NaturallySpeaking Version 11.5 Premium Edition and MacSpeech Scribe for Mac OS X, noting that the software transcribes voice into text three times faster than typing.
Bertomen notes that most people think that speech recognition software is designed to recognize individual words and translate them into text, but the software actually recognizes speech patterns, choosing the most likely pattern based on the history of the speaker, and says that after about 15 minutes of training, Dragon NaturallySpeaking could recognize speeds of more than 130 words per minute, and that using the latest version, he spent a single day dictating a little more than 10,000 words, making just one correction, noting that the software trains constantly, improving accuracy as it goes.
He also notes that Nuance produces several really good products aimed at reducing distracted driving - the ones that work on iOS devices being free. Bertomen's favorite is Dragon Dictation for IPhone, a dictation app that converts text to speech that can be copied and pasted into anything. He notes that he can dictate onto his iPhone at least twice as fast as a normal person can type.
MacSpeech Scribe is an advanced personal transcription software package for the Mac OS X products, and Bertomen uses a MacBook Pro, but says experience with earlier dictation software for Mac OS X has never been as good as with Dragon NaturallySpeaking and a PC. However, MacSpeech Scribe convinced him that Nuance rules the Mac world also, noting that the application seems to work best when one uses the iPhone as a dictation device, acheiving approximately the same accuracy as Dragon NaturallySpeaking Premium Version 11.5, and observing that the ability to use the iPhone for dictation is a great advantage because one doesn't have to worry about clarity when there's background noise and it means one less thing to carry.
For the full review visit here:
http://bit.ly/ruXM17
How to Install Windows 8 Using VMware Fusion
MacInstruct's Matthew Cone says if you're feeling adventurous, you can install Windows 8 for free in a virtual machine on your Mac, and that using a product called VMware Fusion (free trial, $49.99) is a great way to test Windows 8 in a sandboxed environment.
You can check it out at:
http://www.macinstruct.com/node/419
An All Apple Family
Blogger Ed Brill says:
Back in April, I proudly declared my second anniversary of living completely Microsoft-free. Not much has changed in the last six months, though their acquisition of Skype has momentarily returned a piece of "Microsoft" software to my kit-bag. There are alternatives to Skype, though, so I'm getting back to that mantra. Beyond Microsoft-free, though, the point of that blog entry was how much Apple technology had entered my life in the last few years.
Earlier this month, IBM started a conversion of our corporate mobile device program, in line with what had been disclosed externally a few months ago. For the first time, I had the opportunity to have an iPhone and have IBM manage the billing. It meant buying my own phone, but the opportunity to move not just in a Microsoft-free direction, but an all-Apple direction, was too good to pass up.
For the full commentary visit here:
http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/an-all-apple-family
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