animals

At Pixar Animation Studios, which will release "Toy Story 3," its 11th feature film, on Friday, each new movie is an opportunity both to notch huge box office numbers and to break new ground in the technique of using computers in digital animation.

To veteran Pixar watchers, the latter dynamic should by now be very familiar. With "Finding Nemo," the studio had to figure out how to use its technology to craft believable underwater scenes. With "Monsters Inc.," the challenge was animating the characters' lush fur. In "Cars," it was determining how … Read more

VIP attendees of the annual Design Miami/Art Basel art and design showcase in Switzerland Monday are being treated to a new interactive light sculpture from London design studio Random International.

Comprised of hundreds of LEDs that are physically linked with polished brass and electronically linked by micro controllers, Swarm Light takes audio visualization into the real world using three 3D grids of lights.

Interactivity is based around embedded microphones that pick up nearby sounds. The audio is processed in real time by software and transformed into corresponding light animations that float above you like swarms of choreographed fireflies. The … Read more

A group of University of Michigan students has brought the old-school flip book into the 21st century with the Scribble, a handheld touch-screen toy that turns digital drawings into animations.

With a plastic-tip pen, users hand-draw and save a series of consecutive images, which the Scribble then plays back in sequence to create the illusion of movement (once saved, drawings can be edited). A functional prototype of the device recently netted first place in a toy design competition co-sponsored by the University of Michigan College of Engineering's Center for Entrepreneurship, and Giddy Up Toys.

To make their product, University … Read more

The bottom line: Photoshop CS5 greatly expands the toolset that Adobe offers in its flagship product, charting new ways to make image manipulation easier while making older tools work better than before. Don't worry about the lack of a new interface, the new ways to get your project done make this version a must.

Photoshop has been in the English lexicon as a term to edit images for a long time, but the latest version of Adobe's flagship program stretches the canvas of manipulation much farther than ever before. The look of the program has changed so little … Read more

The bottom line: Photoshop CS5 greatly expands the toolset that Adobe offers in its flagship product, charting new ways to make image manipulation easier while making older tools work better than before. Don't worry about the lack of a new interface; the new ways to get your project done make this version a must.

Photoshop has been in the English lexicon as a term to edit images for a long time, but the latest version of Adobe's flagship program stretches the canvas of manipulation much further than ever before. The look of the program has changed so little … Read more

The bottom line: Photoshop CS5 greatly expands the toolset that Adobe offers in its flagship product, charting new ways to make image manipulation easier while making older tools work better than before. Don't worry about the lack of a new interface; the new ways to get your project done make this version a must.

Photoshop has been in the English lexicon as a term to edit images for a long time, but the latest version of Adobe's flagship program stretches the canvas of manipulation much further than ever before. The look of the program has changed so little … Read more

Virtual meat hooks, flame throwers, and propane bombs are OK, but attack dogs are not: social-gaming behemoth Zynga has removed pit bulls from its roster of virtual weaponry in the Mafia Wars game after a complaint last month on behalf of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

PETA's reasoning is that promoting a domestic animal as a weapon will only encourage misunderstanding and abuse of pit bulls, which have been routinely used in illegal dog-fighting activities and are often subject to horrific conditions as their owners attempt to toughen them up. The breed of dog has gotten bad … Read more

RealWorld Graphics' Cursor Editor is a nifty free app that you can use to create and edit special Windows cursors, including both static and animated designs. Drag-and-drop functionality, built-in drawing tools and image filters, correction capabilities, and support for sophisticated image-handling features such as layers and arbitrary selections give it capabilities we've usually seen only in large graphics packages that typically have correspondingly large prices. It can create custom icons, too.

A full Windows installer includes an optional component to support translations via community-made language packs, which we appreciate as a feature but declined to install. The clean and … Read more

Keynote for iPad lets you create presentations using only a touch screen, your content, and a huge number of ways to present your ideas. Like the other iWork for iPad apps, Apple has made it easy to get started using Keynote with a Getting Started presentation that shows you how to use each of the program's features.

The touch screen interface is very intuitive, with slide navigation on the left side of the interface, and close-ups of the slides in your main working area. In the left navigation you can add, delete, duplicate or reorder slides all with a … Read more