Archive for October, 2009

Monochrome photographs are timeless, especially black and white photographs. They enhance emotional substance and have a disposition of making photos look more artistic.

Credit: Jana by LudovicMazet

They can be used on many different scenes as it’s not required to think about all the colors that should look good together and match the amount of light available. And for those who love to play with color, black and white photography doesn’t necessarily need to be boring as there are so many different shades to choose from.

Gray scale is a spectrum of black and white which evolves into shades and different depths of gray. So when we speak of gray scale we speak of how we measure tones of gray. Here are five tips you might need to know when it comes to Black & White Photography.

1. Use RAW

If you have the opportunity to use RAW, do it! It will open up many new possibilities and give you more control of the image’s appearance.

The negative aspect of RAW files is that it needs to be processed later. If you use RAW files, your computer, rather than your camera will process the records and generate a picture file from it. You can for instance use Adobe Photoshop to process the images.

If you don’t have that function on your camera, then don’t worry, carry on reading and you’ll see that there are plenty of other ways to get great black and white photographs.

2. Pattern and Texture

Rich textures and detailed sceneries will help your photograph become comprehensible and exciting.

Patterns are lucky in black and white photographs as colors aren’t taking the attention from them. So if you want to take a shoot where you’d like to emphasize on the patterns, then choose black and white tones instead of color.

3. Contrast

With the help of light you can get great contrast. Contrast will bring the tonal differences in your photography as you can’t use color. With side lighting, for instance, you’ll get longer shadows.

Contrast is important because when there is a distinct contrast, with dark shades and bright light, you’ll be able to see things you didn’t see before.

4. ISO

In photography, an ISO number is an indication of the sensitivity of the image sensor, where a higher number indicates higher sensitivity. The higher the ISO is the more are the possibilities to take pictures in low light, without the usage of flash.

For black and white photography, use the lowest ISO. When you use high ISO the noise will become more obvious. Noise in photography is like the “grain” in film, where the film doesn’t become as smooth as you’d wish. The higher your ISO is, the more unpleasant dots will show in your photo. Therefore shady and dim days are actually great for black and white photographs.

5. Subjects

Black and white photography can basically look good in most occasions and circumstances.

• Monochrome photographs are good at bringing a sensitive experience and story into a shoot, they tend to bring depth and give us the chance to explore an object or person more strictly due to the graphic elements that it conveys (especially thanks to a good contrast). Therefore it’s also well-matched for abstract photos.
• When taking pictures of large spaces, like landscapes or foliages; make sure that the same tone isn’t flowing through all the elements in your photography as this will give it a rather boring and dead look. Most black and white images are supposed to be dramatic and leave a striking impact on the viewer.
  One way of doing this is by finding a movement, like an unsteady wave in a sea or a moving sky. Something that isn’t really all that dramatic in real life can become much more intense when a glimpse of it is caught on camera.
• One single subject is the most popular choice for black and white photography. This goes mostly for portraits, here you can really emphasize on the affect that the gray scale will bring to the person’s expression.

Portable applications in general are software and programs you can run independently from a removable drives (like flash/pen drive) without going through the hassle of installing them. They are widely used and have been a favorite approach for professionals of different various industries.

With portable applications, you can leave your laptop behind; plug in the thumb drive in any client machine, run the application without worrying about leaving anything behind. In this post, we attempt to show a collection of useful and free applications you can run independently from thumb drives, sorting by profession by general. You’ll be surprise how many applications you can actually run without installation. Full list after jump.

Portable Apps For Bloggers

1. Mozilla Firefox

   Mozilla Firefox, portable version allows you leave no personal information behind on the machine you run it on, so you can take your favorite browser along with all your favorite bookmarks and extensions with you wherever you go.

   

2. Opera

   Full featured web browser, rapidly gaining popularity. Fully portable, keeping all data in its local folder.

   

3. Google Chrome

   

4. Portable Safari

   Portable Safari is packaged so you can carry around on any portable device, USB thumb drive, iPod, portable hard drive, memory card, other portable device (or also on your internal hard disk), taking your preferences with you.

   

5. Windows Live Writer Portable

   Windows Live Writer Portable has all your blog settings, ping server settings and FTP settings to redo.

   

6. Zoundry Raven

   Zoundry Raven™ is the next generation WYSIWYG blog editor that makes posting to your blogs easier and faster.

   

7. FileZilla

   FileZilla is a fast and reliable FTP and SFTP client. It includes a site manager and supports uploads/downloads queue, keepalive, timeout detection, SOCKS 4/5 and HTTP 1.1 proxy etc.

   

8. FeedReader

   Feedreader is a FREE RSS news aggregation solution that provides robust, state-of-the-art features in an intuitive, user-friendly environment.

   

9. GreatNews

   GreatNews displays full pages of news articles across rss feeds, optimized for fast reading.

   

10. Foxit Reader

    Foxit Reader is a small and fast PDF viewer.

    

11. StickyTweets

    A lightweight Twitter client built in C/C++ with Win32. No additional frameworks required.

    

12. Fruitfultime Bookmark Manager

    Bookmark websites from any web browser with a global hotkey and bookmark documents, pictures, and other files with drag and drop ease.

    

13. Web Design Toy

    Web Design Toy provides a deceptively simple split-window layout. Whatever HTML is typed in the editor window is instantly shown in web-page form in the display window.

    

14. Lingoes Portable 2.6.2

    Lingoes Portable is green portable version of Lingoes released by Lingoes Project.

    

Portable Apps For Designers

1. GIMP Portable

   The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

   

2. Artweaver

   Artweaver is a Windows Freeware program to simulate natural brush tools.

   

3. MobaPhoto

   MobaPhoto is a nice freeware for managing your digital photos. MobaPhoto allows you to resize, crop, correct red-eyes of all your pictures very easily in "batch-mode".

   

4. Active Pixels

   Activepixels is a neat full-featured photo editor. Interesting auto enhance options (including shadow/hilight recovery), many filters, correction and denoise settings.

   

5. Photoscape

   Photoscape is the fun and easy photo editing software that enables you to fix and enhance photos.

   

6. PhotoFiltre

   PhotoFiltre is a complete image retouching program. It allows you to do simple or advanced adjustments to an image and apply a vast range of filters on it.

   

7. Fotografix

   An image editor that can be used for image enhancement and graphic design.

   

8. Anim8or

   Anim8or is a 3D modeling and character animation program.

   

9. XBlender

   Blender is an integrated 3D creation software suite.
   It lets users create high quality 3D graphics, movies and replay real-time, interactive 3D content.

   

10. X-Inkscape

    Inkscape is a vector editor that supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface.

    

11. Inkscape

    Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor.

    

12. Diagram Designer

    Simple vector graphics editor for creating flowcharts, UML class diagrams, illustrations and slide shows.

    

13. FastStone Photo Resizer

    FastStone Photo Resizer enables users to convert, rename, resize, crop, rotate, change color depth, add text and watermarks to images in a quick and easy batch mode.

    

14. JPEGCrops

    JPEGCrops is a Windows program, created for preparation of a batch of images for printing. It provides lossless cropping with fixed aspects using jpegtran.

    

15. Riot

    Riot allows you to save images for web/email/other media with the best compression ratio and quality.

    

16. SmillaEnlarger

    SmillaEnlarger is a small graphical tool ( based on Qt ) to resize, especially magnify bitmaps in high quality.

    

17. PNG Optimizer

    Png Optimizer creates PNG screenshots and make them easily available.

    

18. IcoFX

    IcoFX is an all-in-one solution for icon creation, extraction and editing.

    

19. Greenfish Icon Editor Pro

    Greenfish Icon Editor Pro is a professional, yet easy to use tool for designing and retouching icons, cursors, animations and static images, and assembling icon libraries.

    

20. WinSnap

    WinSnap includes easy capture of non-rectangular windows with customized and transparent backgrounds, simple and automatic canvas transformations, coloring effects, and the addition of eye-candy drop shadows.

    

21. PicPick Tools

    PicPick features a powerful capture tool, image editor, color picker, color palette, pixel ruler, protractor, crosshair, whiteboard and etc.

    

22. SiteShoter

    SiteShoter is a free tool that can be used to take a screenshot of any webpage.

    

23. Greenshot

    Greenshot is a revolutionary screenshot tool optimized for productivity.

    

24. FastStone Image Viewer

    FastStone Image Viewer has a nice array of features that include image viewing, management, comparison, red-eye removal, emailing, resizing, cropping and color adjustments.

    

25. IrfanView

    IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative graphic viewer for beginners and powerful for professionals.

    

26. Cornice Portable

    Cornice Portable is an image viewer that has thumbnail previews, full screen modes, rotation, slideshow modes and more.

    

27. Osiva

    Osiva is a free image viewing program that opens and scale images fast — get images into view and out of the way

    

28. RealWorld Paint.COM

    RealWorld Paint.COM can display images using any zoom factor and always shows 100% accurate preview of the drawn shape. Tooltips are displayed throughout the user interface to explain meaning of controls.

    

29. AMP Font Viewer

    AMP Font Viewer is an easy to use but powerful font manager, which allows getting a quick overview of both installed and non installed fonts.

    

30. FotoSketcher

    FotoSketcher is a 100% free program which can help you convert your digital photos into art, automatically.

    

31. Dia Portable

    Dia can be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams and has special objects to help draw entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and many other diagrams.

    

32. Oiko CSS-Editor

    Oiko is a visual CSS editor. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) allows to separate the representation definitions of such structured documents as HTML, XHTML, XML from their content, which is an effective principle in the design of web sites.

    

Portable Apps for Business Purposes

1. OpenOffice.org

   OpenOffice.org Portable is a complete office suite — including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, drawing package and database

   

2. Notepad++

   Notepad++ is a free (as in “free speech” and also as in “free beer”) source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages.

   

3. SoftMaker Office 2006

   An Office Suite which contains components that compatible with Windows Office applications like Word, Excel, etc.

   

4. PNotes

   PNotes is fast and light-weight. It has flexible settings – both for the program in whole and for individual note.

   

5. AbiWord

   AbiWord is a free word processing program similar to Microsoft® Word. It is suitable for a wide variety of word processing tasks.

   

6. Jarte

   Jarte is a WordPad based, FREE word processor whose unique interface will make you feel like you are piloting a swift, nimble yacht by comparison.

   

7. Portable Office Exec

   

8. ToDoList

   A simple and effective way to keep track of your current programming tasks.

   

9. Task Coach

   Task Coach Portable lets you bring your to-do list and task manager with you so you always stay on top of things.

   

10. Date Reminder

    Date Reminder reminds you of recurring or nonrecurring events, like birthdays, bills to pay, appointments etc.

    

11. Sunbird

    Sunbird Portable is a standalone calendaring and task management application built on the same technology as the Firefox web browser.

    

12. Koma-Mail

    Koma-Mail is an email client which is comfortable and has very handy functions. It does not need an installation, so that you can run Koma-Mail from your flash drive but, of course, also on your desktop.

    

13. Thunderbird

    Mozilla Thunderbird is the safe, fast email client that’s easy to use. It has lots of great features including quick message search, customizable views, support for IMAP/POP, RSS support and more.

    

14. Qm – The Quick Mailer

    Qm – The Quick Mailer is a tiny program for sending quick e-mail messages without having to load your main email client program.

    

15. WinMerge

    WinMerge can compare both folders and files, presenting differences in a visual text format that is easy to understand and handle.

    

16. KeyDb

    Keydb is a password manager. With it you create and store strong random passwords required by many websites.

    

17. 7-Zip

    For ZIP and GZIP formats, 7-Zip provides a compression ratio that is 2-10 % better than the ratio provided by PKZip and WinZip

    

18. Express Burn

    Express Burn lets you create and record audio or data CDs with any CDRW drive.

    

19. Recover Files

    Recover Files is an award winning program that can undelete / recover deleted files after they have been deleted.

    

20. Team Talk

    TeamTalk allows you to talk to friends and colleagues using the internet as audio carrier. With TeamTalk any number of people can participate in a conversation and is only limited by the bandwidth you have available.

    

21. Blowfish Advanced CS

    One powerful file encryption and security tool for the Windows platform.

    

22. TrueCrypt

    TrueCrypt is a software application used for real-time on-the-fly encryption.

    

23. Tomahawk PDF+

    Tomahawk PDF+ is one of the most advanced word processing/pdf creation software packages available for the Windows platform.

    

24. GnuCash Portable

    GnuCash Portable is the open source financial management software packaged as a portable app, so you can take your financial data with you.

    

The moment you decide to run an online store selling your favorite stuff, you are immediately thrown with dozens of questions and obstacles. For starters, you’ll need to decide between clean inventory/excess stock, then comes the resource for products. Ultimately, when it comes to open an e-commerce site, the biggest decision is – Which platform should I use?

The software you’ve decided upon will be the foundation of your entire e-commerce site and will not likely be changed in the future, therefore it’s utmost important that you know all of the best one before you choose and regret later. In this post, we want to bring to your attention some of the best (free) open-source shopping carts available on the Internet. Do check them out, test of the demo, play around with it to know if the functionality suits your business before deciding on one.

Full list after jump.

OsCommerce (PHP/MySQL)

OsCommerce Online Merchant is an open source online shop e-commerce solution that is available for free under the GNU General Public License. It features a rich set of out-of-the-box online shopping cart functionality that allows store owners to setup, run, and maintain online stores with minimum effort and with no costs, fees, or limitations involved.

Zen Cart (PHP/MySQL)

Zen Cart truly is the art of e-commerce; free, user-friendly, open source shopping cart software. The ecommerce web site design program is being developed by a group of like-minded shop owners, programmers, designers, and consultants that think ecommerce web design could be and should be done differently.

PrestaShop (PHP/MySQL)

PrestaShop is a professional e-Commerce shopping cart software that you can download and use for free. Having a very powerful back-end, store admins can manage the inventory, orders, customers & payments easily. System never limits you as it supports unlimited categories, sub-categories & image pictures.

CubeCart (PHP/MySQL)

CubeCart is written to run on servers that have PHP & MySQL support. With CubeCart you can quickly setup a powerful online store which can be used to sell digital or tangible products to new and existing customers all over the world.

Magento Commerce (PHP/MySQL)

Magento is a feature-rich eCommerce platform built on open-source technology that provides online merchants with unprecedented flexibility and control over the look, content and functionality of their eCommerce store. Magento’s intuitive administration interface features powerful marketing, search engine optimization and catalog-management tools to give merchants the power to create sites that are tailored to their unique business needs. Magento also comes with a much more powerful Enterprise version.

Digistore (PHP/MySQL)

Digistore Ecommerce 4.0 is a fully featured open source ecommerce solution based on the popular osCommerce engine. Boasting improvements both to the administration and the end user experience – Digistore has quickly become a popular choice for people wishing to market products online.

Opencart (PHP/MySQL)

A robust e-commerce solution for Internet merchants with the ability to create their own online business and participate in e-commerce at a minimal cost. OpenCart is designed feature rich, easy to use, search engine friendly and with a visually appealing interface.

Spree Commerce (Ruby on Rails/MySQL)

Spree capitalizes on the dynamic nature of the Ruby progamming language to provide the most flexible commerce platform available. Spree has been designed from the ground up to be as open and extensible as possible. You no longer have to be frustrated with the limited set of choices provided by most platforms.

CREloaded (PHP/MySQL)

CRE Loaded is much more than your average shopping cart. It’s the industry’s first downloadable e-commerce system that makes your store fully compliant with all Payment Card Industry (PCI) security rules. Organize, manage and ship your products from your online store. Accept credit card transactions safely.

Zeuscart (PHP/MySQL)

The Zeuscart shopping cart is based on PHP application and it is used as scripting language which facilitates developer in making dynamically driven websites. It is very facile to learn and understand. To be precise, application of PHP is most popular because of its functionality which can be changed as per ones requirements.

Agoracart (Perl/MySQL)

Offers a very wide range of features that allow you to setup an online storefront or shop ranging from a simple template based store for novices to the integration of complex web design concepts created by your web designer.

Afcommerce (PHP/MySQL)

AFCommerce is a full and complete online store with both a store front and administration area directly Out-Of-The-Box, which can be easily installed, configured, and maintained over a web-based interface. AFCommerce now includes our Ecommerce Website Building Software, AFBuilder, included completely Free.

RapidShop (PHP/without MySQL)

Very fast and easy to use, without MySQL (and can without PHP), direct from MS Excel. For 1000-2000 item of products. RapidShop is integrated with PayPal, EGold and any payment system. You can link your shopping cart to any credit card merchant account or payment gateway. Search Engine Optimized.

For Designers and Photographers

These following shopping carts are light, simple and utmost useful for those who wish to sell stock photos, video and print graphics online.

• Cmsaccount Photo Store Script (PHP/MySQL)
  Photo store software for selling your photos, images, artwork, audio, videos, vector illustrations and prints online.

  

• Ktools Photostore (PHP/MySQL)
  PhotoStore allows you to setup a complete photo selling website on your server or hosting space in just minutes. Perfect for professional photographers looking to sell their images or prints to their customers online.

  

• Xpoze (PHP/MySQL)
  Complete and easy to use solution for selling images and other media files such as videos, vectors or 3D graphics. As everyone tends for something unique Xpoze have worked had to provide you with the best flexibility to customize the look and the features you want to use without much fuss and programming knowledge.

  

Shopping Carts That Integrates With Others

Joomla

• VirtueMart (PHP/MySQL)
  The complete e-Commerce shopping cart solution for Joomla! – used by thousands of store owners. It can be run in Store- and Catalog-Mode. With its powerful Administration Tool you can handle an unlimited Number of Categories, Products, Orders, Discounts, Shopper Groups and Customers. VirtueMart works for both Joomla and Mambo.

  

• RokQuickCart (PHP/MySQL)
  RokQuickCart is a simple shopping cart for Joomla. It takes a simple, yet elegant, shopping cart script and integrates directly into Joomla. It allows you to showcase products, inclusive of images, descriptions and additional options, and purchase these items, with support for shipping and tax calculation.

  

• Seber Cart (PHP/MySQL)
  Small, fast and easy to use shopping cart for Joomla.

  

• SimpleCaddy (PHP/MySQL)
  Integrate a simple shopping cart into your content. No need to set up a complete system like VirtueMart if you are only selling a few items or you don’t want to setup a complete shop.

  

WordPress

• ShopperPress (PHP/MySQL)
  ShopperPress is a fully featured shopping cart plugin for wordpress, suitable for selling any types of products, services, and digital downloads online. ShopperPress has built in support for multiple payment gateways allowing you to accept product payments online.

  

• Fat Free Cart (PHP/MySQL)
  With FatFreeCart Plugin you do not have to generate or paste any code in CSS or HTML of WordPress theme. The plugin is designed to work within your WordPress post editor.

  

• WordPress e-Commerce (PHP/MySQL)
  WordPress e-Commerce is a WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin that is truly an industrial strength elegant easy to use and fully featured shopping cart solution suitable for selling your products, services, and or fees online.

  

Premium Carts Worth Knowing

Last but not least, we throw in some shooping cart that comes with a price tag. For those who have budgets for their online business, these following shopping carts are worth knowing too.

• CS-Cart (PHP/MySQL)
  CS-Cart is an “out of the box” ecommerce software solution with easy-to-use functionality that allows to start selling online immediately. Its feature set fits into businesses of any size, from a small single-product shop to a fully-featured online storefront. Designed for ease of use along with flexibility, CS-Cart is equipped with the latest ecommerce innovations (like one-page checkout, AJAX-based web interface, block manager and others) built into a highly configurable and modifiable sales and promotion engine.

  

• Bosscart (PHP/MySQL)
  Boss Cart is an eCommerce shopping basket application, specifically developed to meet the needs of small to medium sized retailers. Boss Cart has been created using the latest technology and runs on Windows, Linux and all other Web platforms. Boss Cart has been tested with over 20,000 items to ensure maximum speed and efficiency.

  

• Avactis (PHP/MySQL)
  Avactis shopping cart is a software package that allows you to open an online store on the Internet. It comprises two parts – a client side and an administrator side. The client side is your website as seen by visitors. The Avactis’s client side allows the visitors to your site to browse products in the online store, select products and put them into the shopping cart, as in a conventional supermarket, and then pay for the selected products using a credit card or other payment options.

  

• Lite Commerce (PHP/MySQL)
  LiteCommerce is a lightweight high-tech ecommerce solution devoted to make an internet store launching process as easy as surfing the Web. LiteCommerce is more than just a shopping cart. It is a multipurpose ecommerce store platform. Numerous built-in features will make your online store and your business successful: inventory management, credit card processing, SEO tools, special offers, discount coupons and others.

  

• X-cart (PHP/MySQL)
  X-Cart shopping cart software is based on PHP Smarty templates, this makes it very flexible and easy to modify. The data is stored in MySQL database. X-Cart is a turnkey package. Installation is handled by web-based step-by-step wizard to make the system running immediately after receiving it. X-Cart is search engine friendly. A merchant can specify meta tags and define custom URLs for product and category pages that results in higher search engine rankings.

  

• Instantestore (Hosting not required)
  InstanteStore provides a variety of SEO, marketing, and promotional tools that you can make use of to bring in traffic and customers. These features will help you reach your potential customer market and get them buying at your store.

  

• Interspire (PHP/MySQL)
  From complete SEO optimization to single page checkout, track-able coupon codes and business intelligence reports – no other shopping cart software increases your online sales like Interspire Shopping Cart. Guaranteed, or your money back. We offer both a PHP-based shopping cart and also a hosted, fully-managed ecommerce solution called BigCommerce.

  

• Sunshop (PHP/MySQL)
  SunShop shopping cart is search engine friendly shopping cart system. A complete ecommerce solution packed with and extensive feature list. SunShop offers all of the standard features you would find in any off the shelf shopping cart software plus much more. What makes SunShop shopping cart stand above the rest is the ease of use.

  

• Squirrel Cart (PHP/MySQL)
  Squirrelcart PHP Shopping Cart software is a fully customizable, robust php shopping cart, designed with the advanced developer and web novice in mind. If you are a web novice, you will appreciate its ease of use, and the fact that Squirrelcart will generate the HTML for all of your store’s pages based on the built in templates provided. If you have a strong knowledge of HTML, you will appreciate the ability to make Squirrelcart look and work the way YOU want it to.

  

• Shopfactory (PHP/MySQL)
  ShopFactory 8 all-in-one shopping cart software allows anyone to quickly create and manage their own professional Internet shop — despite being one of the most powerful and feature rich eCommerce solutions on the market. Now you can update your own website and products to sell securely online without professional help.

  

• 3dcart (Hosting not required)
  Shopping Carts from 3dCart are complete e-commerce storefront solutions for your new or existing web site. Easily build, edit, and maintain your online shop, and collect orders without any programming or HTML knowledge!

  

• Viart (PHP/MySQL)
  The Viart range of software provides the tools you need to make full use of the Internet in your business. Now anyone can set up a secure online store without the need for any programming knowledge. The Viart suite of products is designed by Viart in-house team of e-commerce software developers. Together team has over thirty years of experience in this arena.

  

• Pinnacle Cart (PHP/MySQL)
  Pinnacle Cart is an extremely powerful php shopping cart and website builder application. Designed from marketing perspective, this eCommerce application is feature-packed, robust, scalable and easy to use. Pinnacle Cart is the clear choice for serious merchants focused on rapidly and cost effectively deploying, managing and growing a successful web-based business.

  

About author:Dainis is blogger from Latvia. He is webmaster of Psdeluxe.com (Photoshop deluxe) – Design community where you find photoshop tutorials and useful resources for web and graphic designers.

It all began in Plaza Hotel, New York City on the 10th of November 1983. Two Microsoft founders Paul Allen and Bill Gates officially announced their corporation’s first and next-generation graphical user interface operating system – Microsoft Windows.

Despite the criticism on stability and constantly being compared to their rivals Apple Macintosh, Microsoft Windows is still the most widely used operating systems in the world. In this article, we’ll bring you back to 1985 where the very first official Microsoft Windows 1.0 was announced, and then we take a trip down memory lane to see all boot screens and desktop interface of all Windows operating system possible.

Here are more related entries we’ve previously published:

• Evolution of Photoshop: 1988 – 2009
• Websites We Visit: How They Look Like 10 Years Ago

Full content after jump.

Windows 1.01 (1985)

Officially released on November 20, 1985, this 16-bit OS that cost less than 1MB in overall is Microsoft’s very first operating system that allows multi tasking with graphical user interface on PC platform that runs on MS-DOS 5.0.

Windows 1.03 (1986)

Introduced in 1986, Windows 1.03 is an upgrade to its previous predecessor Windows 1.01. Entire operating system cost about 2.2Mb hard disk space.

Windows 2.03 (1987)

Taking advantage of the speed of Intel 286/386 processor at that time, Windows 2.03 is a replacement for Windows 1.x. It also starts the era where users are able to overlap windows, customize screens, etc. Still the entire operating system cost no more than 2.5Mb.

Windows 2.86 (1989)

Windows 3.0 (1990)

This is the third major released of Microsoft Windows with a improved set of Windows icons and applications like File Manager, Program Manager that is still being used in today’s Windows. This 22 May 1990 released operating system is then replaced by Windows 3.1 two years later.

Windows 3.1 (1992)

Windows 3.1 is probably the earliest Windows most of us are familiar with. Windows 3.1 and later Windows 3.1x is an upgrade to Windows 3.0 with bug fixes and multimedia support.

Windows NT 3.1 (1993)

The first Windows New Technology (NT) introduced. It maintains consistency with the Windows 3.1, a well-established home and business operating system at the time, the new Windows NT operating system began with version 3.1. Unlike Windows 3.1, however, Windows NT 3.1 was a 32-bit operating system.

Windows 3.11 (1993)

A superset of Windows 3.1, Windows for Workgroups 3.11 added peer-to-peer workgroup and domain networking support. For the first time, Windows–based PCs were network-aware and became an integral part of the emerging client/server computing evolution – Microsoft

Windows NT 3.51 Workstation (1995)

The Windows NT Workstation 3.5 release provided the highest degree of protection yet for critical business applications and data. With support for the OpenGL graphics standard, this operating system helped power high-end applications for software development, engineering, financial analysis, scientific, and business-critical tasks – Microsoft

Windows 95 (1995)

Previously code-named Chicago, Windows 95 is a successor to all the existing Windows operating system so far. It gives full graphical user interface support, integrated a 32-bit TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) stack for built-in Internet support, dial-up networking, and new Plug and Play capabilities that made it easy for users to install hardware and software.

Windows NT 4.0 (1996)

Windows NT Workstation 4.0 included the popular Windows 95 user interface yet provided improved networking support for easier and more secure access to the Internet and corporate intranets – Microsoft.

Windows NT Server 4.0 (1996)

Windows 98 (1998)

Windows 98 was the upgrade from Windows 95. Described as an operating system that “Works Better, Plays Better,” Windows 98 was the first version of Windows designed specifically for consumers – Microsoft.

Windows 2000 (2000)

More than just the upgrade to Windows NT Workstation 4.0, Windows 2000 Professional was also designed to replace Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT Workstation 4.0 on all business desktops and laptops. Built on top of the proven Windows NT Workstation 4.0 code base, Windows 2000 added major improvements in reliability, ease of use, Internet compatibility, and support for mobile computing – Microsoft.

Windows 2000 Server (2000)

Windows ME (2000)

Designed for home computer users, Windows Me offered consumers numerous music, video, and home networking enhancements and reliability improvements – Microsoft.

Windows XP (2001)

Windows XP Professional brings the solid foundation of Windows 2000 to the PC desktop, enhancing reliability, security, and performance. With a fresh visual design, Windows XP Professional includes features for business and advanced home computing, including remote desktop support, an encrypting file system, and system restore and advanced networking features – Microsoft.

Windows Server 2003 (2003)

Released on April 2003, and also known as Win2k3, this operating system is a sucessor to it’s predecessor Windows Server 2000 (Win2k).

Windows Vista (2006)

Came more than 5 years after it’s predecessor Windows XP, Vista is the longest timeline break for Microsoft between two operating system. Read more.

Windows 7 (2009)

Codenamed Blackcomb, Windows 7 is one of the most anticipated operating system which should be available somewhere in Oct 2009. Read more.

References

In order to gather all boot screens and interfaces of various Windows Operating System, we crawled the Internet up and down. Here are some sites we’ve cross-referenced:

• A Visual Tour of Windows 1.01 – Vista
• Microsoft Evolution in Technology
• Desktop Evolution: Windows and Mac OS Visual Comparison Through the Years
• Windows History
• History of MS Windows

We’ve seen how Photoshop has been extensively used in areas like web designing and beauty photo retouching. In today’s post, we bring you into another stretch where Photoshop also rules and dominates – the modding and sketching of rides.

This following article is dedicated to car lovers, forumites who use car photos as signatures, web designers or anyone who fascinates nice rides. We search the Internet and here we put forward some of the best Photoshop tutorials with techniques on how to mod a car. Full list after jump.

Colors Manipulation

Chrome your car
Gives your car body that chrome effect. Works better with black default.

Color Tweak The Ferrari
This tutorial make use of an additional mask and give your car a color change on the fly by applying different color blending options.

How to make Car Advertisement Mock-ups
Get your car air brushed with any color, or design. But before that, Thomas Baekdal suggest you give it the right base color.

Add Flaming Decals to a Modern Car Design
This tutorial will explain the steps needed to turn this boring Prius into an awesome street racer.

Body and Parts Enhancements

Porsche digital rendering photoshop tutorial
How to render a low quality digital car photo into a high quality output.

Give your car a little wood
Here is one way to take a simple texture and apply it to a shaped object like a car and have it appear to follow the body contours.

Create a stempunk golden car

Create a real life “Cars”
How to create a real CARS of your own cars.

Change rims on a car

Vanity License Plate
How to create a custom vanity license plate using a few basic Photoshop tools a piece of reference material and some creative layer stylings.

Car Enhancement with Digimods

Folks at Digimods have a comprehensive list of Photoshop tutorials covers almost everything you will want to mod on a ride. From adding a bad boy bonnet, carbon fibre bonet to lowering the car, changing the wheels and much more!

Freehand and Sketching

Concept car sketch Photoshop Tutorial
This tutorial describes how to render this car with paths, and finishes the paints with later masks and filters.

Drawing a Car Lineart in Photoshop
Draw the lineart of this Mclaren F1 using paths. You are required to have some experience in using Photoshop’s Pen tool to be able to draw this car in detail.

Photoshop Rendering
Photoshop rendering in Photoshop by Emre Husmen, a 20 year old Turkish design student, also the 2004 Peugeot Design Contest finalist.

Rapid Development Sketching
“In this tutorial it is assumed that you already have a design theme worked out and know roughly what your car will look like. Ideally you would be working over a photo of a clay or screenshot of an alias model. I have chosen a supercar to show the methods used here because the forms are exaggerated and it is easier to see how they are being rendered.” Miles Waterhouse

Vector Car Tutorial
This tutorial guides you through creating a vector toon based Veilside’s Fortune RX7 from scratch.

Dramatic Effects

Create a truck coming from a flame
Create a Acura commercials simmilar effect where a truck came out from the flame.

Super Slick Lighting Effects
Learn how to combine photos and brush strokes to give a car photo slick dusky lighting effects.

How To Create An Amazing Car Illustration
How to create a fierce car illustraton making use of different type of brushes.

Create a Smoky Car Crashing Shot
“We have another tutorial this week in which we will learn some menus of blur filter, which will help us create smoke effect. We will also cover up some brush technique too to make this smoke effect.“

Video Tutorials

Photoshop Car Tuning – 65 videos and 3 how-to articles to learn all about Photoshop car tuning, by wonderhowto.com

YouTube – Tons of great video tutorials are hidden within YouTube. We attempt to pull out some of the best for you, sorted by view count.

Let’s face it, most of us don’t create every single image and icon when we do web design. It is not because we can’t but merely because we’ve got better options. Kudos to many designers and their generosity, there are in fact a lot of really nice creative common images and icons on the Internet we can take advantage. All we need to know is – where to find them.

In this post, we want to bring to your attention some of the really great search engines that will come in handy when it comes to image and icon search. Full list after jump!

Image Search Engines

• EveryStockPhoto

  A search engine for free photos come from many sources and are license-specific. You can view a photo’s license by clicking on the license icon, below and left of photos.

  

• Xcavator

  Xcavator.net is a stock photo search portal for the creative community. You can quickly browse the way you think – visually – through millions of stock images.

  

• Ginipic

  Ginipic takes image search to a whole new level. Now you can search image search engines, photo sharing websites or your own local picture collections simultaneously.

  

• GazoPa

  GazoPa is a next generation similar image search engine in private beta. Users can search images from the web based on user’s own photo, drawings, images found on the web and keywords.

  

• FreeFoto

  FreeFoto.com is the largest collection of free photographs on the Internet. FreeFoto.com features exclusive images found nowhere else on the web with new pictures being added every week.

  

• TurboPhoto – Free Stock Images

  Browse and download 2,000 (3.4 GB) free stock images from 10 categories (view all thumbnails below). Stock images are in the public domain.

  

• Feelimage

  Feelimage is not only key words search. It is also equipped phrase search, that is images search engine ‘FeelPhrase®‘.
  It’s corresponding 127 colors, and has a technology that quantifies colors like ‘red’ ‘ blue’ in images.

  

• oSkope

  oSkope is a visual search assistant that lets you browse and organize items from Amazon, Ebay, Flickr, Fotolia, Yahoo!Image Search and YouTube in an intuitive way.

  

• Incogna

  Incogna process the shape in every image and use this to build a large scale searchable visual index.

  

• Imagery

  Imagery search executes an keyword search and rollover results to get photo dimensions and options to open the source page or the image itself.

  

• ImageBase

  The ImageBase is a searchable image and text database of objects from the collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

  

• Pixolu

  An image search engine which lets you go deeper into the mechanism of image search and lets you find more relevant images using the image results it displays the first time you search.

  

• Picsearch

  Search the web for images. An image search service with more than 3,000,000,000 pictures.

  

• Picitup

  Picitup is a leading web 3.0 developer and provider of content based image search services.

  

• PicFog

  PicFog provides a real time image search.

  

• PicFindr

  PicFindr is a rich internet application (RIA) that helps you search several stock image and photo community sites simultaneously.

  

• Pixsy

  Pixsy powers video and image search experiences for some of the Internet’s leading brands including Pearson, Lycos, National Lampoon, Cooliris, BuddyTV, Infospace, and many others.

  

• Biomed-Search

  Search for images from biomedical articles. Currently over 1 Million images have been indexed. BioMed Seach indexes image captions along with the citations to these images.

  

• Bing Image Search

  An image search engine on Bing.

  

• Compfight

  A Flickr image search tool.

  

• Tiltomo

  Tiltomo, where you can play with our Visual Search code using two sample databases from flickr.

  

• Altavista Image Search

  Altavista image search tool.

  

• Photogen

  The source for quality, high-res FREE stock photos and images.

  

• Yahoo! Image Search

  Image search engine on Yahoo!

  

• Google Image Search

  A very powerful image search engine provided by Google.

  

• facesaerch

  Enter a name and search for faces!

  

• Multicolr

  With the Multicolr Search Lab, you can browse through 10 million of Flickr’s most ‘interesting’ Creative Commons images, and find ones that share the same colours.

  

• PicBrk

  A real time image search.

  

• PD Photo

  PDPhoto.org is a repository for public domain photos.

  

• Stock.XCHNG

  Stock.XCHNG lets you browse through the categories of our huge gallery containing over 350.000 quality stock photos by more than 30.000 photographers!

  

Icon Search Engines

• Challenger IconDB

  Challenger IconDB (Icon Database) is a database that contains icons of various sizes and keywords attached to them.

  

• ICONLOOK

  ICONlook.com is a place where to find your icons and offers a pretty handy interface for searching and downloading icon files.

  

• Icons-Search

  The Icons-Search is an Icon Search Engine that helps you to find quality icons available on the Internet. You can find icons for Windows Vista and XP, Macintosh, Linux, icons for Desktop, Software, Website, Mobile, Presentation, in sizes from 16×16 to 256×256 in PNG format and sizes from 16×16 to 128×128 in ICO format.

  

• Iconlet

  Iconlet is simple search engine for free icons, images. For every image user get information about author, image resolution, graphics format and license type.

  

• IconFinder

  Iconfinder provides high quality icons for webdesigners and developers in an easy and efficient way.

  

• IconSeeker

  The IconSeeker.com is an icon search engine on web, it contents about 50,000+ high quaility icons and each icon has PNG, ICO and ICNS formats for Windows, Macintosh and Linux Systems.

  

• Icon Library

  

• EasyIconFinder

  EasyIconFinder is a new Icon Search Engine that helps you find quality icons now available simple by filling in a keyword !

  

• Free Icons Web

  Free Icons Web is where you can browse and download Over 15,000 high quality Free Icons for Windows, Macintosh and Linux Systems.

  

• Very Icon

  The VeryIcom.com is a icon search engine, it contents over 20000 high quaility web icons in more than 1000 icon packs. Each Icon has serval file formats such as PNG, ICO, you can free browse and download for Windows, Macintosh and Linux Systems.

  

• IconsPedia

  Search and download free icons in PNG format. Arranged by categories, that include animals, food and phones.