Articles about Content Creation

The maker of the popular credit card-sized ARM GNU/Linux computer has launched an online store to enable developers to share their games, applications, and tutorials with other Raspberry Pi users. The device was originally conceived as a way of encouraging youngsters to get into programming, and the store will provide a place for them, and older developers, to share their creations and maybe make a little money at the same time.

At launch the store has 23 free titles, and a paid game (Storm in a Teacup which is priced at £1.99/$3.22). The free content includes utilities such as LibreOffice and Despotify (an open source Spotify client) and classic games including Freeciv and OpenTTD. There’s also an exclusive 3D multiplayer space combat game called Iridium Rising. Winners of the Raspberry Pi Summer Programming Contest are being encouraged to upload their entries to the store, too.

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It’s that time of the year where it’s a great time to pick up a software bargain. Through December and the Christmas holiday season, the Downloadcrew Software Store has various software deals that are worth some consideration. Best of all, the Downloadcrew “Giveaway” site returns this Christmas, with five superb exclusive full software giveaway offers, for everyone.

You may have picked up a brand new Windows 8 computer during the festive season. If so, the first thing you’ll want to do is pick up a security suite to keep your system secure. The Downloadcrew Software Store is packed full of security offers from Bitdefender, AVG, Kaspersky, Avira and other brands.

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Popular open-source blogging CMS system WordPress 3.5 has launched. The system, pre-installed with many hosting packages but also available for direct download, shows off a brand new media manager and simplified default theme as its most noticeable improvements.

The update also becomes Retina-friendly for the first time, debuts a number of accessibility and interface tweaks, and provides a number of under-the-hood tweaks aimed at blog developers.

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Whether you are looking at how to best capture and share a video of baby’s first Christmas or the excitement of a marriage proposal this holiday season, cell phone, digital camera or camcorder often isn't enough. Some editing is required to tell a compelling and concise story.

I've prepared a list of 10 tips based on frequently asked questions from the more than two million consumers on CyberLink's DirectorZone social media site. Please add your own in comments, or sharing story about successful video-editing project.

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A port of the incredibly popular indie sandbox survival game Minecraft will soon be available for the Raspberry Pi, and if that news isn’t enough to get you excited, the price might -- it will be entirely free.

Minecraft: Pi Edition (a port of Minecraft: Pocket Edition) was officially unveiled at Minecon in Paris, and offers a revised feature set and support for several programming languages, so users can code directly into the game. According to Minecraft publisher Mojang, users will be able to "start by building structures in the traditional Minecraft way, but once you’ve got to grips with the in-game features, there’s opportunity to break open the code and use programming language to manipulate things in the game world. You’ll be learning new skills through Minecraft".

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If you’re a software reviewer or a blogger, a gamer or just looking for an easy way to take screenshots, there are plenty of tools to choose from. For anyone keen on sticking with what Windows has to offer, there’s the Snipping Tool but there are numerous other tools available if you like the idea of something a little more advanced. One of the leading commercial tools is SnagIt, but for many people this is restrictively priced. SnapCrab is a free screen capture tool that offers much of SnagIt’s feature set in a well-rounded package.

As you would expect, this is an app that is hotkey driven, and you can create keyboard shortcuts to grab the active window, the entire desktop, or just a selection. You can opt to have the cursor included or ignored and there are extensive options that allow for the automatic naming of files based on the date, time, program being used and numerous other variables. By default your images are saved as PNGs but there are other formats to choose from.

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If your digital photo collection is something of a mess, leaving you rarely able to find the images you need, then you’re not alone. The standard Windows tools just aren’t up to the task of managing large numbers of photos, leaving many people looking for third-party tools to help them restore order.

There are at least plenty of free photo managers competing for your attention, though, and the latest contender is Lunarship Software’s Phototheca, an interesting tool with a range of useful features.

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Editing lots of digital photos in a single session is generally a tedious and time-consuming business, as most image editors still assume you’ll only ever want to carry out actions on one picture at a time.

Fortunately there are plenty of third-party batch processing tools around who are trying to fill this functionality gap, and COOLTWEAK is the latest, allowing you to resize, watermark or share multiple images (on Facebook, Picasa and Twitter) directly from the right-click Explorer menu.

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The best photo editors are generally quite complex tools, and learning how to use them properly can take considerable time and effort. Which is fine if you’re a professional photographer, say. But if you just want to play around with some photos you took last night, before you share them on Facebook, perhaps, you might prefer something simpler -- like the free Toolwiz Pretty Photo.

This really isn’t a serious photo editor, and the chances are you’ll realize this almost immediately. Open an image of any significant size (greater than around 2,000 pixels on an axis) Pretty Photo complains that it’s “too large” to be processed, and demands that you resize it.

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If you want to cut the size of your JPEG images then reducing their image quality setting (usually accessible in the Save dialog or your program settings) will usually deliver spectacular results, but it’s not the only option.

Just about every JPEG also contains additional information, beyond the core image data itself, which further increases its size. And so if you’re in a situation where every byte counts, as with JPEG web graphics, say, then it may be worth using jStrip to remove these unwanted extras for you.

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Computing, and I use the term in the widest sense, has always been tribal to an extent. People have loyalties, and there’s nothing wrong with that. This year, tribes are called "ecosystems", but whatever the current label, looking around the Interweb it seems to me that tribalism is becoming more prevalent and more aggressive. It’s as if everyone stood on soapboxes with their fingers in their ears, shouting "LALALALALALALA", while at the same time (a good trick, this) yelling through a megaphone that theirs is the only way and anyone who doesn’t agree is just too stupid to be considered human.

Famously, way back in 1994, the writer and thinker Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose) compared computing loyalties to religions: Apple followers were Catholics who believed that they would find salvation through following the One True Path. Conversely, PC users, like Protestants, were obliged to find their own way through the many paths open to them, and not all would be saved. And (I guess) Linux users are the hairy prophets who come out of the desert proclaiming, "It’s really easy. Honestly. And these days you only have to scourge yourself with thorns once a week …"

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September was crazy month for new software. Whether this was the rush to get new products on-sale before the Windows 8 launch or the traditional Q3 pre-Christmas release schedule, or a combination of both, you may have missed one of these important releases.

Creating PDF files used to be an incredibly expensive operation but this is no longer the case. Nitro Pro 8 is an advanced PDF creation and editing tool which is available at a 20-percent discount -- just $95.99. For a limited period of time, you can get the previous Nitro Pro 7 for only $59.99, saving 50 percent from MSRP. There are also multi-user versions of Nitro Pro 8, so you can buy for your business and save further.

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If the colors of your latest digital photos are less than accurate, then most photo editors will allow you to try and resolve this manually. Tweak RGB here, maybe HSV there, and with a little work there’s a good chance you can improve the situation. If that sounds too much like hard work, though, you might prefer a tool like CastCor, which aims to correct color problems almost entirely automatically.

There’s nothing too special about this, of course -- most photo editors include at least some automated correction tools -- but CastCor delivers more than most: “White Point Auto”, “Grey Point Auto”, “Contrast Auto”, “Auto Color Enhance”, “Highlight-Shadow Enhance”, “Adaptive Equalisation”, “Luminance Correction”, and more.

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QR Codes are pretty much everywhere these days, but few companies really make the most of the possibilities they offer. TagMyDoc is a great example of what can be done with them, and lets you add a QR Code to your own physical documents, directly from within Word, Excel or PowerPoint. When someone scans that code, they’ll get a full copy of the document on their device.

It saves on printing costs, and means you don’t have to worry about how many copies of a document or presentation to output for a meeting, for example, because anyone with a QR reader can get a copy of their own. It’s a great service, but TagMyDoc has just been made even more useful, as it now lets you connect to popular cloud storage services Box and Dropbox, and tag and securely share documents you store there.

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You might have a great video camera, and be very skilled at using it, but it won’t make any difference: your raw footage will generally still be rubbish. That’s just the way it is.

Having a good video editor to hand, though, can give you the power to solve most problems. And CyberLink’s PowerDirector 11 Ultimate is the latest candidate for your attention, being packed with high-end features -- a 100-track timeline, fine keyframe control, advanced video effects, disc authoring and online video sharing -- yet also simple enough for beginners to use.

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