Some of you may have noticed that Leopard’s finder doesn’t really like EPS files. Its a huge inconvenience to have to open a file just to see what’s in it, and if you’re at all like me, you have a hard drive full of downloads that need to be browsed once in a while. Never fear, EPSQuickLookPlugin is here to help. It’s a (freeware) plugin for QuickLook, that allows you to view the contents of an EPS file (in Finder and QuickLook) without opening an application. Now that’s gonna save me about 500 hours per year, I’d guestimate.

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Liquid Resize is a content aware image resizer that allows yo to resize images without the typical restrictions of the aspect ratio. You can download Liquid Resize as a standalone application for product review purposes from onOne Software, but in it’s final form, Liquid Resize is slated to be a Photoshop Plugin. (pricing not yet released) Even if you hate demo versions, the trail period is 3 months, and it’s fully functional, meaning you can save your images without watermarks and such.

[via: PhotoshopNews] [image by: bryce_edwards]

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I’m rather sad to be reporting this one, but Vector Magic, the awesome free online vectorizing service is no longer free. It looks like the creators behind the service have left Stanford to make a desktop version of the popular software, which will be selling for a price that has yet-to-be-decided. Personally, I prefer Vector Magic over Live Trace in Illustrator, but that may change if the price isn’t right. Vector Magic is a single-function software. It’s nice, but It only does one thing. I can’t see myself paying more than $50 for a software that only does one thing, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens.

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I’ve recently received quite a few emails about VectorMagic, a new online bitmap vectorizing service from a couple generous and ingenious minds at Stanford University. If you read the about page, VectorMagic seems to be the brain-child of two individuals, James Diebel and Jacob Norda. [Thanks Guys!]

My initial reaction. . . . WOW. If this is truly the work of 2 individuals, I couldn’t be any more impressed. Not only is VectorMagic (in my opinion) up-to-par/comparable to “Live Trace” in Illustrator and “Trace Bitmap” in Inkscape, but it’s 100% free, online, and to tell you the truth, seems to be as fast, if not faster than our desktop counterparts. Impressive.

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If you haven’t been informed from your updater application yet, Adobe has made available a new version of Adobe Reader (8.1.1). Personally, being on a Mac, I prefer Preview because it seems a ton faster, but Adobe Reader is great for viewing, saving copies, and even adding security (passwords) to PDF documents. [Lots of] Designers use PDF documents regularly, and Reader is a good way to view these documents, (before delivering them to press for example), without having to run the bulkier Acrobat. (it launches noticeably faster than Acrobat too, from my experience).

Filed under: Software | 6 Comments »