inkscape

Inkscape Portable offers graphics editing on the fly

Inkscape is a popular open-source vector graphics editor that has earned high praise for its powerful features. Inkscape Portable takes these powerful features on the go, letting users store the program on a USB drive or other portable device for access anywhere.

Like its installable cousin, Inkscape Portable is not for beginners, unless you're a beginner who's ready to put some effort into learning about vector graphics. An array of toolbars line three sides of the interface, and they can be overwhelming if you don't already have some idea of what you're looking at. Experienced artists, … Read more

Download customizable NCAA tournament brackets

It's the big dilemma for the fantasy NCAA basketball tournament pool manager: paper brackets or digital? Whichever option you choose, I've got you covered.

When I was a kid, the announcement of the teams and seedings in the NCAA men's basketball tournament was always accompanied by furious scribbling as I tried to manually create an instant tournament bracket. I just couldn't wait until the newspaper arrived the next morning to start making my picks.

The advent of the VCR reduced the furious scribbling, and the Web eliminated the need to write down teams at all. Now … Read more

Adobe bashes open-source alternatives

Adobe Systems has embraced open-source software for some products, but its core Creative Suite line looks like it'll remain proprietary.

In a blog posting Sunday, Adobe's top creative products executive, John Loiacono, made unflattering remarks about open-source alternatives whose free cost is offset by the time that creative pros have to spend fiddling. "Time is money," he opines, not without merit, and links to a blog posting by Eric Vreeland, who observed, "Debugging recent installs of certain open-source software has wasted immense amounts of my spare time; charged at my hourly rate these hours represent … Read more

Roll your own Adobe CS3 for free

So, you need to finish up a design project that requires the image-editing capabilities of Photoshop along with the vectorized lines of Illustrator, and it needs to be animated in Flash with documentation in a PDF. However, you blew your budget on bling and a sweet alpaca-skin bongo set.

Take your head out of the microwave. There is indeed a way to save your project and your wallet from the $2,500 price tag of Adobe Creative Suite 3. You just have to be a bit...creative.

Photoshop is arguably the most powerful and certainly the most well-known of the Adobe set. Heck, the term "photoshop" is now a slang verb that describes altering an image. The program's popularity is well-deserved, with an array of features that is mind-boggling. Unfortunately, that incredible feature set comes with associated bloat, and Photoshop is quickly becoming the military tank of image editors: yes, it gets the job done, but no, the job description should not include cruising down Highway 101.… Read more