SOFTWARE OF THE DAY - COMPOSITOR & VIRTUALBOX

Hi All, Key Combination of the Day Command-Shift-Delete in the Finder Pressing -Shift-Delete (Command-Shift-Delete) in the Finder empties the Trash with a confirmation warning . Shareware of the Day: Compositor - Image editing and image to art application. Compositor is a full featured image editing and image to art application. Take the tour and check it out. Better yet, download the demo and try it for 35 days. Have a problem? We didn't bribe anyone for this compliment : "You offer the best support of anyone in the business (and a person doesn't have to talk to a computerized telephone menu or be put on hold)." Compositor features (briefly): Over 165 Filters and channel effects Levels and Curves for great image enhancing and color correction. Full Painting and Editing Tool Set Save and Replay of your Filter actions Slide Show Quick Palette for commonly used operations Crop, Scale and Rotate Anti-Aliasing Zoom Window Keystone Correction Online Help Priced at $35 USD It's Fun too, and worth 2 times the price. (quoting customers) Compositor is programmed by an artist for artists. Or those who simply want to create and edit images. Easy enough for the newbie, advanced enough for the power user. Works great alongside Photoshop (imagine Adobe Trademark here) too. Compositor can turn an image into art with just one filter application. Try out "Dark Painting" or "Spunky Painting" (in the Combo menu in FilterVille). Here's a longer feature list of Compositor. *** means OS X only right now. If you have any questions about what you see here, or other, please write. Tool Mode Select Tools: Rectangle, Oval, Magic Wand, Lasso Brush,Motion Brush, Wet Media Brush, Airbrush, Pencil, Line Tool, Gradients Crop Tool, Rotate Tool Dodge, Burn Tools Smear, Blur, Sharpen Tools Stamp Tool Deskew/Keystone Correction/Distort Tool Clone Tool (aligned or non-aligned)*** Fix-It Tool Type Tool (render or use as mask for filters) Magnify Tool, Zoom In, Zoom Out Eraser, as block or brush Dropper Color Picker Hand (Move) Tool for quick scrolling Popup Color Quick Picker on Toolbar (quite handy) RAMometer shows app free memory (Classic version) Palettes and Windows Tool Palette Actions Palette Selections Palette Quick Palette for Paste and Filters Brush Control Palette (Save and Load sets, see the Tour) Color Picker Palette, remembers your last 20 colors too Zoom Window, auto anti-aliasing on pause (2X and 3X) Info Palette Filters , Channel Effects, and General Info Multi Document capable (24 max, number depends on RAM) Fade Undo with preview History for 64 steps of Undo Snapshots for saving 32 interim work pieces Median + Oily feature CMYK separation Posterize can separate by level Create Contact Sheets, and HTML image galleries. (v2.9 for OS X on up) Explicit Alpha Channel support (v2.9 for OS X on up) Levels,Autolevels*** Curves*** Full Screen mode as composition aid (Shift + G)*** Slide Show with Rename option (try the"N" key) Anti-Aliased Image Rotation Scale Image Stretch Canvas 20 Paste Variations 8 Paste Into (Color) Variations Luminous Edges filter Plasticize Combo filter Inkage Combo filter Posterica Combo filter Aldo Fresco Combo filter Soften Image filter High Pass filter Unsharp Mask filter Drop Shadow filter (works all 3 modes) Split and Recombine Channels Create Stars and Add Planets Luminosity Mapping - can be animated to make a Quicktime movie! DuoWave image distortion filter. TV Scan Filter, better than RetroScan Replace Color with "fuzzy factor", and preview Paste Into Color with preset fuzzy factor Fast Cropping in Frame and Mat mode Crop/Save to preset proportion Hue Saturation and Lightness, applicable via channel. Desaturate Brightness and Contrast (Apply by Channel) Gamma Adjust Threshold, Color and B/W, Applicable by RGB Channels, with preview Emboss, 8 Angles, with preview, Applicable by Channel. Add Noise, with preview. Color-Monochrome, Applicable by Channel. 52 Channel Colorations: Apply randomly,step through, or numbered entry. Channel Zap: remap any channel to another or black and white. Over 5 Types of Blur, including true Gaussian. Zoom Blur Motion Blur Blur Lites or Darks Only Spherize, Ripple Waves , and Twirl distort filters*** 4 Types of Average Sharpen, Sharpen More, Sharpen Edges Sharpen Lites or Darks Only Unsharp Mask of Zorro Median, Median Smooth, Minimum, Maximum Invert Self Compare Equalize, Equollide, ReQuollide, Channel Average Enhance, more Immersion ( + Invert = Solarize) Solarize Flare Spazoid and Son of Spazoid Filters Boid Lines AI Brush 3x3 Kernel Filter, User Defined Several Types of Find Edges Fill Edges/Fill Not Edges Contour Filter Big G Filters for painterly coolness, and color effects Preset Combo Filters for bigtime painterly coolness PixelWhack Filters for more painterly coolness and disruption Replay Actions, Save Actions. Replay Actions upon a movie. Movie To Image Sequence Image Sequence To Movie Blend Image Sequence Blend Movie To Image Mirror Horizontal and Vertical, great for tile effects, textures "Multi" tiles your image 3D Red-Blue 3D Red-Green Online Help under the Help Menu Online URL launch under the Help Menu All operations are in 24-32 bit RGB image space. The program seeks to maintain any alpha channel (unchanged) during the process, if the preference is checked. Alpha channel support may be increased in the future. More info and download link here: <http://www.artlythere.com/compositor.shtml> Freeware of the Day: VirtualBox - Professional, flexible, open virtualizer for x86 hardware. (Runs Windows on your Intel-based Mac.) innotek VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is now the only professional-quality virtualization solution that is also Open Source Software. Some of the features of VirtualBox are: Modularity. VirtualBox has an extremely modular design with well-defined internal programming interfaces and a client/server design. This makes it easy to control it from several interfaces at once: for example, you can start a virtual machine in a typical virtual machine GUI and then control that machine from the command line, or possibly remotely. VirtualBox also comes with a full Software Development Kit: even though it is Open Source Software, you don't have to hack the source to write a new interface for VirtualBox. Virtual machine descriptions in XML. The configuration settings of virtual machines are stored entirely in XML and are independent of the local machines. Virtual machine definitions can therefore easily be ported to other computers. Guest Additions for Windows and Linux. VirtualBox has special software that can be installed inside Windows and Linux virtual machines to improve performance and make integration much more seamless. Among the features provided by these Guest Additions are mouse pointer integration and arbitrary screen solutions (e.g. by resizing the guest window). A number of extra features are available with the full VirtualBox release only (see the "Editions" page for details): Virtual USB Controllers. VirtualBox implements a virtual USB controller and allows you to connect arbitrary USB devices to your virtual machines without having to install device specific drivers on the host. Remote Desktop Protocol. Unlike any other virtualization software, VirtualBox fully supports the standard Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). A virtual machine can act as an RDP server, allowing you to "run" the virtual machine remotely on some thin client that merely displays the RDP data. USB over RDP. With this unique feature, a virtual machine that acts as an RDP server can still access arbitrary USB devices that are connected on the RDP client. This way, a powerful server machine can virtualize a lot of thin clients that merely need to display RDP data and have USB devices plugged in. Shared folders. Like many other virtualization solutions, for easy data exchange between hosts and guests, VirtualBox allows for declaring certain host directories as "shared folders", which can then be accessed from within virtual machines. More info and download link here: <http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/VirtualBox> Regards... Gordon