Have you used kuler? It's a color selection tool that helps you create harmonizing (or clashing, if you prefer) color schemes for your video projects, print work, web sites, bathroom, etc. You browse themes that others have created or you can share your colors with others on the site, in your work group, or keep them to yourself.

Now, you can save them directly to Illustrator, Photoshop or InDesign, so no more screenshots!

Download kuler desktop

Just an observation, but are capital letters moving out of the English language? kuler desktop is lower case although it's a name. I've been seeing this a lot lately. The capital letter in the middle of two words smashed together is still going strong (iTunes, MySpace, LeapFrog. Note: Toolfarm has NEVER had a captial F in the middle).

You probably don't know this, but I have a fascination with languages. I studied Spanish for 6 years and I know a bit of Japanese (my husband is from Japan) and I have dabbled in German and some French and Italian during travel, which were surprisingly easy to pick up due to the shared Latin roots with Spanish. I find the roots of languages very interesting, as well as how they have diverged over the centuries. Thanks to globalization, the pace of language evolution is going to be even more pronounced.

I was reading a very interesting article this week in Wired Magazine, How English Is Evolving Into a Language We May Not Even Understand. It's an English as a Second Language world, not Esperanto. "By 2020, native speakers will make up only 15 percent of the estimated 2 billion people who will be using or learning the language." The article focuses mainly on China and how many Chinese are learning English but have no one to speak it with. They pronounce things differently than a native speaker would and add words from their own dialect. It's known as Chinglish.

Computer jargon and the English language is having a similar effect. It already is to a huge extent - Google is now a verb, blog is in common usage and even the term globalization is fairly new. The mouse as we know it is not the mouse of 100 years ago. Other terms that are in constant use: browser, laser, internet, cyberspace, terabytes... you get the idea.

Could this happen to English grammar due to our highly technological lifestyle? Will we stop using capital letters like e.e. cummings? It has become common place for IMs and emails to be sent without capitalization or proper punctuation. cummings may have intended it as a gesture of humility, but most computer users are most likely doing it out of laziness, indiscretion or we've just become accustomed to being so casual with the language. Now products are named in lower case!

Your thoughts?

Labels: internet, Opinion

Robert Sharp of Digieffects sent me this article, Editing on Big Films Is Now Being Done On Small Computers by Lee Gomes, published today in the Wall Street Journal. Note, the article is posted to a forum because you need a subscription to the WSJ to read the article.

For most of us, this is a Ric Romero sort of headline. I thought it was worth mentioning though because Phillip Hodgetts and Red Giant's "plug-ins" are mentioned in the article.

Avid software does just about anything you could ask -- for a price. The company's flagship Media Creator package runs $5,000. Philip Hodgetts, who follows the industry for Creative Planet, says Avid has an epic fight on its hands from newer, lower-cost alternatives. Apple sells Final Cut Studio for $1,300, while Adobe's Premiere Pro is just $800.

Thanks to cheap computers, a similar sort of creative destruction is happening everywhere in the industry. Color adjustment used to require expensive oscilloscope-like monitors. It first moved to specialized -- and expensive -- software, but lately it's done with relatively low-cost (say, $200) "plug-ins" by companies like Red Giant Software.

Plus, hell, it's the Wall Street Journal! Doesn't that make you feel warm and fuzzy all over.

Labels: internet

Those videos of a cute kitten falling asleep in it's food bowl on YouTube is causing the net to crash! Videos have Net bursting at the seams by John Van (Chicago Tribune) discusses how the web is near it's limit. Traffic volumes are high and computing power can't keep up. Yeah, I'd say that's a problem. I think Second Life is really the problem, but I digress...

So, how can you fix this problem? Toolfarm links to videos on the web in our Inspirations page and we have a big video project in the works (sorry, no spoilers). We're uploading tutorial videos and files, demo downloads, all which can get pretty bandwidth hefty. I also use Vonage and Skype, which are internet phone services. And yeah, I do download a mess of mp3s.

I guess I'm part of the problem, eh.

If the internet does blow up, this could be a good thing. It would probably not happen at once, but blackouts here and there. This would force technology to catch up in a hurry, drastically increasing bandwidth, quality and the substance that currently exists, spreading knowledge and freedom to all corners of the world.

By downloading videos on the web, I'm actually helping someone in the Third World, in my own twisted logic.

Or, it's all just a conspiracy to keep the public in fear and off the internet so "they" can have the bandwidth all to themselves. Yes, I'm sure that's it.

Labels: internet

I'm always looking for ways to monitor the site, track visitors, popular links and different ways of viewing statistics. Tonight I stumbled up on one of the weirdest site graphs I've ever seen - Websites as graphs - an HTML DOM Visualizer Applet. The image to the left is basically a dendridic diagram of Toolfarm's home page. At first I thought it was a map of the whole site, but that is not the case.

I wish it were clickable, more like the visual thesaurus, so that I could see what each dot represents, but It's pretty cool anyway. It doesn't seem that useful, but does everything need to be utilitarian? It's fascinating none the less.

Labels: internet