creator

Spore spawns free creature-builder

One of the coolest features for Spore gamers is the ability to create their own creatures. Now, anyone can assemble aliens through a new site set up by Electronic Arts.

Spore Creature Creator 2-D, released Wednesday, lets you conjure up and animate your own creatures using an assortment of eyes, arms, feet, horns, and various unidentifiable body parts.

Produced by EA's Maxis studio, the Flash-based game starts with a large egg cracking open to reveal a simple alien body that you mold online like a lump of clay. Thin, fat, long, or short--you devise your creature's basic shape. Then it's time to build your baby with the right parts.

Choosing from such categories as mouths, limbs, and graspers, just drag your favorite body parts onto your creature to evolve it from a formless blob into a fully-functioning whatever. The game helps you along, directing you to drop the parts in all the right places. You can bend and resize many of the parts, giving your creature big eyes and a small mouth or long legs and stubby feet. You can also add a splash of paint by choosing from a wide palette of colors.

As you develop your creation, it takes on life by showing off its animated parts, such as a mouth that opens and closes, eyes that blink, and graspers that try to grasp. If you're in a hostile mood, you can even add weapons, like the Problem-Solvent that sprays solvent, the Hockitlauncher that spits out water, or the Phlegmthrower that shoots, uh, well, you get the idea.

If you need a helping hand, you don't have to build your creature from scratch. Spore Creature Creator 2-D lets you tap into the Sporepedia, an online gallery of creatures designed by Maxis developers and other Spore gamers. Simply load one of the pre-existing creatures and then tweak it to assemble a totally new organism.

Once you're done, it's time to name and describe your creature. You can then take it for a workout in the Creature Trainer arena, where you move it around the screen to catch bouncing balls with its mouth, hands, or other parts.

If you're proud of your new creation, you can e-mail a postcard image of it to a friend or save it as a PNG file for your own picture gallery or Web site.

A variety of Spore masterpieces are viewable at the Sporepedia Web site. And for all you budding Spore artists, Maxis is offering a Creature Creator challenge. Recreate one of your favorite Spore creatures using Creature Creator 2-D for a chance to be featured on Spore.com.

Caryl Shaw, a senior producer at Maxis who helped bring Spore Creature Creator 2-D to life, told me the game came about because Maxis wanted to make Spore more accessible and let anyone with a Web browser experience the same creativity that Spore gamers enjoy. As one of the most popular features of Spore, the Creature Creator seemed a natural.… Read more

Nitro's a better bet than before

PDF conversion is an essential part of business. A program that quickly and easily does the job is always in demand. Unfortunately, Nitro PDF Professional still doesn't live up to these high expectations, but it has improved.

Nitro looks like the real deal. It has a start-up wizard that offers to answer any questions and walk users through the process of converting files to PDF, or vice versa. The program's interface has been refurbished to make it look more like Office 2007, offering a layout that mimics Microsoft's button design and layout. Create and Convert, Insert and … Read more

ISO creation in a snap

Creating ISO images has never been so easy, thanks to Free ISO Creator's basic, functional user interface. We just wish it had included a Help file for novice users.

The user interface is pretty plain, but extremely easy to figure out because it walks you through the ISO creation process. You'll see a tree-style menu file list, and commands for adding files and folders to that list. There are also commands for renaming files and deleting them. Each time you add a file or folder to the list, a size-limit bar at the bottom updates to let you … Read more

Create TinyURLs as you surf

This Firefox add-on brings the capability to TinyURLize any Web page to your toolbar and menubar. Accessible from the Tools menu or as an added toolbar icon, it'll save you time from having to go to TinyURL.com to create a shortened URL. TinyURL Creator also offers several additional features that work expand on the utility of the TinyURL concept.

Click on the toolbar button to create a TinyURL for the Web site you're looking at, which then gets automatically copied to your clipboard. From the drop-down menu that's available, though, you can save TinyURLs so your … Read more

Amazon.com has the Roxio Easy Media Creator Deluxe Suite 10 [OLD VERSION] for $99.99, after $19.96 savings and $30 mail-in rebate.

Amazon.com has Roxio Easy Media Creator Deluxe Suite 10 [OLD VERSION] for $99.99, after $19.96 savings and $30 mail-in rebate. >> Regular price is $149.95 >> Sale price is $99.99 >> Savings $49.96 (33.32%) >> Offer ends 1/31/2009 >> Click here for deal

Zoho launches its own app store

Productivity application start-up Zoho is in a tough position: it has to compete with Google Apps. That hasn't stopped the company from pushing forward and trying new stuff.

Case in point: Zoho's Marketplace, which launched Tuesday. Through the Marketplace, Zoho users can make a buck or two off of applications that they built with Zoho Creator, the company's drag-and-drop application development tool.

If you've made an application in Creator, you can list it for sale in the Marketplace and charge a fee, if you want. Zoho doesn't take a commission from the sale of applications, … Read more

The 404 156: Where we animate Scaley McGrabAss

Our guest today is Stone Newman from Go!Animate, enter The 404 animation contest, Spore porn, pay per sick note, GTA copycat killings, geeks as better lovers, and TV shows on the big screen.

Stone Newman drops by the studio today to tell us about an awesome Web site that allows you to create your own custom Flash animation without all the tech nonsense! Go!Animate is all about simplicity. You can choose from a variety of locations and a ton of different characters, or even upload a picture of your own! Very cool, I can't imagine how many … Read more

Synthasite gets even easier to use with new UI

This morning simple site builder Synthasite has a new and improved user interface that's different from any other site creation tool I've used. There are still themes to choose from, and widgets to drop in, but the site building tool has received a far more polished feel that I think new users will be a little more comfortable with.

The biggest change users will notice is that the tool now scales to the entire width of your monitor. Everything is still drag and drop, but now each element also includes right click contextual menus to tweak various bits … Read more

Stunning site maker Wix now open to all

Web site maker Wix opened up to everyone earlier today. What the site offers over some traditional tools is SEO optimization that somehow works despite the very flashy pages you end up with. All of these pages are created with an editor that gives you some really gorgeous results as long as you're willing to work within the constraints of the templates, or dig into the tools provided. One of them being a MySpace editor that will let you create very dynamic page elements with no coding knowledge required.

Wix's core product goes far beyond MySpace though, and is a surprisingly advanced site creator. There are templates for artists and musicians or simple start pages for people to put up their resumes---the kind of things you find on competing sites like Jimdo, SynthaSite, and Weebly. The idea is that anyone can build a page and push it live with just a click if they're proficient with something like Microsoft PowerPoint.

However, one thing I found to be missing is an undo button, meaning if you accidentally delete a page element (or an entire page) you have to go re-create it from scratch. This can be a total show stopper if you're working on something important, and should really be in every workflow-based Web application these days.

Like Blogger in its old days Wix has an explore section that's worth checking out. Here you can see what others have created with the tool then copy over the code to place it wherever you want. Missing however is the edit option, so hopefully you like what you see.

You can see a demo of the site creator after the break.

'Spore' set to mold the future of Web 2.0-enabled gaming

Next week game publisher Electronic Arts will unleash a cleverly packaged marketing device upon masses of hungry gamers awaiting the release of one of this holiday's biggest titles--Spore. The software is a "creature creator" letting players put together 3D characters with an interface nearly as simple to use as Nintendo's Mii maker seen on the Wii. The 300MB download will be available next Tuesday, though some diehard fans and "influencers" got their hands on it last night.

The upcoming game focuses on creating a species and taking it from the microbial stage of … Read more