This blog is from our content partner 1stwebdesigner.
It's been a while since I haven't done any tutorial for Photoshop, but my Christmas spirit is telling me, I must do something to change that. Yes, I am totally deep in heap of snow and I am throwing one snowball to You too! Actually this is just my first attempt to create something like that, so don't be harsh, but hey - maybe You can just smile and accompany me in this simple Christmas wallpaper tutorial?

We will learn how to use pen tool, use paths, smudge tool and yes - how to create 3D effect in Photoshop in joyful way!

This is what we are going to create this time, finished result:

Click on the wallpaper to view and download it full sized.

Step 1
Create a new document, I wanted this to use later as wallpaper, so I used 1920×1200 resolution, 72 dpi.

Activate radial gradient (G), use colors #3d51f7 and #1525a0 and fill background with it like in the picture below. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article about Best free (and open-source) FPS games is from our content partner Ghacks.
Whilst first person shooters are mainly confined to the console, several good FPS games are available for PC. I'm nothing more than a casual gamer but I enjoy shooters and I was surprised by the sheer number available. I use a Mac, so this article will primarily focus on cross-platform shooters.

AssaultCube
AssaultCube is a quite simple 3D FPS available for Linux, OS X and Windows, which just reached version 1.0 about a week ago. The graphics are not very advanced, but a benefit of this is that it’s easier to run a server and that it can run on nearly any machine.

The best aspect of AssaultCube is the online play; there's always a few busy servers available where one can play capture the flag, deathmatches or variations on those modes. AssaultCube is limited to seven weapons: sniper rifle, assault rifle, handgun, grenades, knives, shotgun and submachine guns.

Maps can be created for AssaultCube quite easily. Read the rest of this entry »

This blog is from our content partner AddictiveTips
Did you ever get tired of your hard disk that is always full? Do you want to increase space on your hard disk by removing any useless junk? There are many ways to speed up your computer without purchasing more memory or upgrading your CPU.The following easy steps are simple to follow and almost guaranteed to increase the hard disk space of your computer!

Disk Cleanup
After a lot of use, your Computer's hard disk should be cluttered up with unwanted files that you'll never need. Instead of having to manually go through and delete every unwanted file, your Computer has an easy-to-use built-in method of getting rid of these unwanted junk files.

Open My Computer, Right-click on one of your Disk Drives, and Select Properties Select Disk Cleanup.

When you click this, a small box should pop up that tells you that it's calculating the amount of disk space it can clean up. This can take several minutes depending on how much clutter you have on your computer.

Once it's finished, a small box should pop up, giving you a few options of what you would like to have cleaned up. Read the rest of this entry »

As I did with Image Viewers, I'm going to try to shed some light on a topic that deeply concerns not only professionals, but also amateurs and occasional users. After a year using Adobe Photoshop for retouching, clipping and adjusting digital photographs at work (I was part of the team which is in charge of developing the website for a well known artist in Buenos Aires, among other things) I came to know that there is a whole universe beyond the boundaries of this brand.

"You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one…" sang J. Lennon and I subscribe to that prerogative, I say yes! I want to be a dreamer! I dream of a world that freely shares, meaning they give and receive. You know what they say… good things happen to those who know to wait, and fortunately, I saw a little bit of my dreams come true the day I knew GIMP and GIMPshop.

GIMP and GIMPshop father and son
GIMPshop is a customized version of GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) which has been adjusted in its wording, appearance and menu structure to resemble Adobe’s application look and feel. As you can imagine, this image editing tool turned to be a very popular piece of freeware. The biggest advantage of being open source is that plugins and procedures run much faster than in similar commercial products, and they are also very expensive, on the contrary, GIMP and GIMPshop plugins and add-ons are developed within the user’s community that makes use of them. This fact brings a very important added value: there is always somebody who has already solved the problem that you are dealing with right now.

Thanks to the Deweirdifyer Plugin included in GIMPshop, which has been designed to put all the different windows into a single containing window, they do not behave as independent little programs any more, they act more like a single application. This software allows users to adjust a lot of parameters to fit their needs: transparency, colour, texture, thickness, anti aliasing, an a too-long-to-be-named etcetera list.

To what comes to menus and tools in GIMPshop, I may say that they are perfectly organized in two toolbars one for image editing tools: paintbrush, pencil, lasso tool, magic wand tool, zoom, move, rotate, scale, type tool, eraser tool, blur/sharpen, and much more; and the other for history, layers and channels as well as brush types, texture and gradients.

As said above, the users interface had suffered severe changes from the original GIMP, and this fact allows the use of many of Photoshop's instructive manuals just the same in GIMPshop, many others can be adapted by GIMPshop users through minimal effort as well. Read the rest of this entry »

MailStore Home 3.0.1
License - Freeware
Publisher - Deepinvent Software

MailStore Home enables you to backup all your email messages from multiple applications and accounts into one secure and persistent archive. Lightning-fast search, one-click backup, powerful export - all information from your email is at your fingertips anytime. Never lose important email again!

Key Features
1 - Microsoft Outlook 2000, XP, 2003 and 2007
2 - Microsoft Outlook Express and Windows Mail
3 - Microsoft Exchange Server Mailboxes
4 - Mozilla Thunderbird and SeaMonkey
5 - POP3 and IMAP (including webmail services such as Gmail and Yahoo)



Features-★★★★
Operation-★★★★
Security-★★★★
User Interface-★★★★★
CPU/Mem usage-★★★★★

Download MailStore Home NOW! Read the rest of this entry »

Back to the roots
In 1621, the survivor Mayflower immigrants, decided to celebrate their first harvest. Those who were to be named as "Pilgrims", had left England two years ago to settle in what is now the state of Massachusetts, it is said that they came in search of religious freedom. What they found was a merciless climate, disease and famine that took the lives of many of them. Those who succeeded did so thanks to the help and food that the natives of the area, the Wampanoag people, supplied them. Thus by the fall of 1621, as they were already established and the first crop was harvested, the survivors decided to share their fruits with the Indians who helped them when they did not have any resources.

Since 1863, the year in which Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving as a national holiday, the Americans have been celebrating it on the fourth Thursday of November with a family reunion where they prepare a special dinner which includes as main dishes a large stuffed roasted turkey, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes apple pie and many other. The desserts are also important at the dinner, pumpkin and apple pies are very popular.

Of course there is a lot of controversy about this topic and you can find a lot of websites that fit both supporters and detractors, and you may know I am not here to elucidate this kind of historical issues but to make my best to show you which are going to be the novelties regarding software and so on.

This kind of traditional celebration is also observed by techie people like me and as you know we do not miss any occasion to try some new piece of software.

Thanksgiving 3D Screensaver
License - Shareware
Publisher - Astro Gemini Software

Thanksgiving! It's a special time of caring and sharing, remembering the best and being grateful for all the wonderful things in your life. Visit Harvest Time Farms, a place that perfectly captures the essence of fall and the sentiments of the season. You can almost feel the autumn breeze as you watch the lively surroundings of a rural house on a sunlit hillside. Let thankfulness fill you heart on this day of love and plenty!


Key Features
Full 3D environment
High-quality animation
Colorful graphics
Joyful music with a touch of holiday spirit
FPS counter
Digital Clock
Beautiful rural autumn scenery
Create the perfect Thanksgiving atmosphere on your desktop!

Download Thanksgiving 3D Screensaver NOW! Read the rest of this entry »

As you may probably know, a role-playing game (aka RPG) is an interpretive-narrative game in which players assume "the role" of the characters along a story or plot, the players have to make some decisions about the character and act in consequence. This is a genre which has a lot of fans all over the world.

The below listed games, are for me, the most popular of these year, but of course, some of you may say that I forgot some of them, so, if you feel it, you can leave a comment about your preferences.

Fable 2
The moment of truth must come to the Fable saga. This awesome title arrives to the second part of the game, but with the same intention to leave a gorgeous mark in this genre. Four years of development have been required to get a Molyneux game which is more closely related to what they intended to do in the first.

In this game you will be a hero from the very beginning until his last days. A novelty is that you can choose to be a male or a female. Another new thing is that you will be able to deeply explore the different scenarios.

You will be able to have weapons, spells, which are going to be very helpful and different skills that will help you in this adventure.

The modelling of the characters, buildings and scenarios are fantastic, and of course the sound effects are very well done. Read the rest of this entry »

XF Rendering Server 2008 6.0.0
License - Shareware
Publisher - Ecrion Software Inc

XF Rendering Server family of products can automate the creation of electronic documents like technical manuals, brochures, catalogs and marketing materials, invoices, statements and business reports containing charts and graphs, by dynamically generating them from XML. Documents can be generated in both on-demand and in batch processes.

Key Features
1 - Can paginate XSL-FO, WordML (Word 2003) and DocX (Word 2007 aka OOXML) documents.
2 - Can produce PDF, AFP (MO:DCA), XPS and POSTSCRIPT output. Support the encryption and signature of PDF documents and generation of PDF documents compliant with PDF/X and PDF/A standards.
3 - Can use RGB, CMYK and PANTONE colors and ICC color profiles.
4 - Supports Type1, TrueType and OpenType fonts. Fonts are embedded in the generated output.
5 - Documents can contain GIF, PNG, TIFF, GIF and JPEG images, as well as PDF and PSD.



Features-★★★★
Operation-★★★★
Security-★★★★
User Interface-★★★★
CPU/Mem usage-★★★★★

Download XF Rendering Server NOW! Read the rest of this entry »

This blog is from our content partner Make Tech Easier
Have you ever wanted to remove Windows components like Media Player, Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, MSN Explorer, Messenger… How about not even to install them with Windows?

nLite and vLite are two useful tools that allows you to customize your Windows XP or Vista installation CD and add/remove extra components of your choice. You can use it to deploy additional software packages including drivers, service packs or to remove miscellaneous Windows components that you have no use for it.

Here's how you can integrate additional packages to Windows XP with nlite.

Customize Your Windows XP Bootable ISO Image
1) Create a folder on your hard disk and label it XP_Source
2) Copy the full content of the XP distribution CD into this folder.
3) Start nLite. The welcome screen shows you which version of nLite you are running and allows you to choose an alternate language. To continue click on 'Next'.

4) Click Browse and locate the XP_Source folder that you have created just now. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article about Blu-Ray Region Code Remover is from our content partner Ghacks.
Although Blu-Ray has won the battle of this generations HD formats against HD-DVD it is still far away from winning the battle against the DVD format. The majority of Blu-Ray players had made their way into the homes in the form of the Sony Playstation 3. PC users can purchase Blu-Ray players and the more expensive Blu-Ray writers for their computers for some time now as well.

There have not been many releases on Blu-Ray disks though except for movies. Blu-Ray disks can have a region protection which means that it can be that a movie won't play on a Blu-Ray player if the disk and the player have been purchased in different regions.

The world is divided into three regions: Region A spans across most of Asia, region B includes Europe, Africa and Australia while region C includes North- and South-America and Japan.

Not all Blu-Ray movies are region encoded though. The decision is made by the motion picture studio releasing the movie.

The Blu-Ray Region Code Remover removes the region code of Blu-Ray disk rips on a computer's hard drive so that these rips can be played regardless of the user's region. It furthermore supports removing of region code from Blu-ray titles and Java-enabled titles. It can also remove Prohibited User Operations for a better user experience.

The software program requires Windows XP or Windows Vista and the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0.