Take a crack at making the Eclipse icon and loading splash image more interesting!

Create one PNG to be used as the application icon. It can use transparency and should be sized at either 512×512, 256×256 or 128×128. The png can be converted to icons for all systems at http://iconverticons.com/

Also, create one BMP to be used as the loading splash image. The existing Eclipse one is 455×295 but yours can be any size you like. Preferably not more than 500 pixels on either size.

Post your new creations as a comment to this post and the best ones will be picked by RJ and me! There’s no prize, just more geek cred! The deadline is 12:01am PST on January 1 after which I will annouce the winners and give instructions for how to swap the images out on your computer!

Go!

The jolly souls at Big Spaceship have launched a really interesting gallery of gorgeous Flash pre-loader animations. Check it out and submit your own!

Aviary, those masters of outrageous ambition, seeking to replace every piece of creative software in the world with a version free to everyone online, is out of private beta today! Now you can use their bitmap editor Phoenix (think Photoshop), their vector editor Raven (think Illustrator), their excellent color theory tool Toucan (think Kuler), and a sick node-based image generation tool Peacock, one user creation of which I’ve featured at right (think vvvv or Quartz Composer but for static images). Need I mention that these run in Flash Player?

Speaking of node-based editors, the always-busy-how-does-he-do-it Zeh Fernando is working on a visual node-based programming tool as well, called FNK, which you can already play with in alpha. Pretty sweet. Check it out!

Finally, we have a pretty neat idea sponsored by IBM’s Collaborative User Experience research group called Many Eyes. The site is a huge user-rated and user-submitted gallery of visualizations of different kinds of data. Right now it appears to only use your choice of the site’s pre-made visualizations, though they are quite nice. For me the more interesting thing is that it also acts as a clearinghouse for data sets. Though many of them seem fairly useless, it’s great to have a central place to look for data, and I wonder if you are licensed to just take those data sets to use on your own projects as well.

Happy Friday!

Colour Lovers API lets you pull color palette information with very Flash-friendly urls and XML results! I dare you to make something with this.

Also, I found this little blog post very interesting.

Word Clock for Mac, PC, iPhone from Simon Heys on Vimeo.

Click for full size

Dictionary

Garage Band

iTunes

TextEdit

Transmit

An Introduction to Using Patterns in Web Design [37 Signals]

Aviary is a platform ecosystem for people who create. It is organized around a suite of Flex-based rich internet applications geared for artists of all genres. From image editing to typography to music to 3D to video, we have a tool for everything.

Sign up on the site for an early preview invitation. These tools, if not truly competition for CS3, at least look very interesting on the surface. It’s hard to imagine developing so many tools at once.

The solution they’ve come up with is a Dreamweaveresque WYSIWYG editor that can convert Photoshop elements directly into functioning Flex code. They call it Thermo and here is a sneaky video preview of it.

Makibishi Comic is a beautiful, silly, and very strange Flash based puzzle game. The objective is to find the 5 ninjas who are hiding from you by clicking through riddles. The puzzles are just challenging enough and the illustration is amazing.

Warning – You may be tempted to spend an hour playing this game, as I was.

On Reflexion

I know what you’re thinking, “that’s so 6 hours ago.” But nevertheless, Adobe has just released a public beta of the new version of PhotoShop. It offers a load of improvements to non-destructive editing, a redesigned UI, and support for new Macs and Vista.

Go get PS!

Taking a back seat to PhotoShop is the somewhat less glamourous release of JSEclipse, a plug-in for the Eclipse tool (upon which Flex Builder is also built). Also, a new update to the Spry framework. Both could be very interesting. I’ll probably end up using the JSEclipse plug-in to write WPF/E code. LOL

Go get JSEclipse!

Go get Spry!

See the full review after the jump

I’ve only played with this app for a few minutes so far but I’ve already found some very exciting new features. I’ll list my favorite first impressions here. [I should note that the last version of PS I used regularly was CS1 so please forgive me if I accidentally get excited about something that's not new.]

Smart Objects & Smart Filters

The coolest thing by far is Smart Objects and Smart Filters. This is essentially your method for doing non-destructive edits. Converting a layer to a smart object recreates it as a dynamic photoshop file that you can edit as its own composition. It allows you to apply smart filters which are like adjustment layers but include the entire set of filters, yes, even gaussian blur.

Quick Selection Tool

This tool is filed with the magic wand tool. It allows you to draw over the shape of an object to magically select exactly what you want. It’s like a marriage of the magnetic lasso and the magic wand tools. It’s incredibly useful and intuitive.

Refine Edge

PS CS3 wraps up several of the selection refinement tools into a new dialog called Refine Edge. This let’s you play around with the selection’s edges with much more control than before. A preview window shows you what you’re doing and there are matting options so you can choose the best background to work from.

Surface Blur

One neat addition is the surface blur which blurs out the textures of an image selectively while keeping the general shape of the image intact. Depending on how you adjust it, it kinda makes the subject look like it was drawn in illustrator but in a much less tacky way than posterize.

Compatibility

It’s been about a 20 months since CS2 launched but it feels like it’s only been about a million years. Time flies when you’re running PPC apps on a macbook! The new version (supposedly) works great on PPC, Intel, Win XP and Vista. My experience on a MacBook Core Duo have been very smooth so far. There are no significant lags even when working with RAW files. Adding lots of SmartFilters and layering causes some slowdown but that’s nothing new.

Toolbars & Workspaces

CS3 has a brand new look that I’m not sure whether I like yet. The toolbar on the left is compacted into a single column. The panels on the right have been organized so that they group themselves together into little expandable icons. They’ve also added a workspace dropdown that lets you switch workspaces easily although this seemed to be broken or unimpressive. The menus are also enhanced with highlighted words based on what workspace you’re in. It’s a little jarring but it might be useful in the long run. Time will tell.

Image Processor

Finallly, a much needed feature the Image Processor script allows you to batch process images into another format and apply actions at the same time. The old way of doing this was to either write an AppleScript or JavaScript or use Actions to process the images. I’m sure I’ll use this quite a lot when preparing assets for the intarwebs.

These are just my initial reactions. I hope to write some more after I’ve had a chance to play with it some more. Prognosis: w00t!