I released Brush Pilot 1.0.4 yesterday, and I recommend everyone upgrade if you haven’t already. In 1.0.4 we’ve added the Sparkle framework for automatic updates. From now on when a new version is released Brush Pilot will automatically give you the option to download an install the new version. This way you don’t have to keep track of new versions, it does it for you. Also in 1.0.4 is a bug fix that prevents BP from crashing in Snow Leopard with no Photoshop installed. This is a free upgrade for all licensed users.

The new version can be downloaded from the Brush Pilot homepage ».

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Wether you’re a programmer, designer, or just a web surfer, I’m sure you’ve accidentally hit the Caps Lock key before. Especially if you’re a terrible typer, like myself, this can get really annoying. I like anything that keeps annoying things out of my life. That’s why as soon as I found CapSee, I immediatley downloaded and installed it. CapSee is an exptremely simple app for OS X that will display a bezel on screen when you accidentally hit the Caps Lock key. Simply Awesome. (in my opinion)

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How about we start off the week with some free software! I’ve got another 3 copies of Brush Pilot to give away this week. Brush Pilot is a fast, easy to use Photoshop Brush previewer for Mac OS X. Read the rules after the jump and good luck!

Visit BrushPilotApp.com to download a demo and read more details.

Contest Rules:

• All you have to do to enter is leave a comment. (tweeting is appreciated)
• Only comment once.
• 3 winners will be randomly chosen from the comments.
• You must leave an email address in order to win.
• Please only comment if you have a Mac.
• Comments will remain open until Thursday, September 24th.

Here’s a quick overview of what Brush Pilot can do.

Instantly finds all your brushes, fast.

Seperates uninstalled from installed brushes

Single click installation into all installed Photoshop Versions on your machine.

Reveal file locations in Finder.

View names and pixel dimensions of each brush.

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In case you’ve been wondering what I’ve been up to lately, well, here it is. After lots of hard work and testing, I’m proud to release my latest pet project, Brush Pilot 1.02. It’s a lightweight, fast Photoshop Brush Previewer for OS X. In the spirit of BittBox, I’m giving away 3 free copies to some lucky commenters. Make sure and read the rules, and good luck!

Visit BrushPilotApp.com to download a demo and read more details.

Contest Rules:

• All you have to do to enter is leave a comment. (tweeting is appreciated)
• Only comment once.
• 3 winners will be randomly chosen from the comments.
• You must leave an email address in order to win.
• Please only comment if you have a Mac.
• Comments will remain open until Friday, June 26th.

Here’s a quick overview of what Brush Pilot can do.

Instantly finds all your brushes, fast.

Seperates uninstalled from installed brushes

Single click installation into all installed Photoshop Versions on your machine.

Reveal file locations in Finder.

View names and pixel dimensions of each brush.

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I’ve got a great giveaway for you all this week. Billings 3. Its a robust and feature-rich invoicing, time tracking, and project management software for Mac. (just name a few features) If you’re a business owner or freelancer, it doesn’t matter. This software does it all. I’ve had the liberty of playing around with Billings 3 for a couple days now, and I’m extremely impressed by it’s usefulness, and attention to detail when it comes to features that just “make sense.” It’s very affordable, but today, I have 2 licenses to give away to 2 lucky BittBox readers. I encourage you to download the trial and see exactly what’s at stake. You won’t be disappointed! Rules after the jump.

A couple more screenshots:

Not just an invoicing software, Billings gets the job done with style, as well as functionality :)

It even has Google Maps integration for your contacts! (I really like this feature)

Contest Rules:

• All you have to do to enter is leave a comment.
• Only comment once.
• 2 winners will be randomly chosen from the comments.
• You must leave an email address in order to win.
• Please only comment if you have a Mac machine.
• Comments will remain open until Monday, May 11th.

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I’ve stumbled upon a little gem on the Apple downloads site, and I’d like to share a new freeeware app with everyone. It’s called Repeating Motif Generator, and it’s a handy little app for creating seamless repeating patterns. There is a variety of uses for this application, but it may just come in handy for you some day. :)

There’s also a quicklook plugin for easy viewing.

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Lost Minds has recently released Vectoraster 3, the third iteration of a handy application for OS X that takes images and instantly converts them into vector halftones that can be exported and opened in almost any vector editor. I wrote about Vectoraster a while ago, and version 3 is quicker and has a couple cool new features, one of which I want to show you right now.

One of the things in Vectoraster 3 that stands out is the new option to make a “Line” halftone. I can see this being very useful in certain situations.

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Congratulations to the 3 randomly selected winners of a shiny new copy of Swift3D v5 from Electric Rain. We had 2 Robs in this group of winners, so congrats to Rob, Rob, and Kimberly. I hope you all enjoy the software. I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank Electric Rain for their generous contribution to the design community, and and a big thanks to everyone who participated.

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Its time for some more free stuff everyone, and I have a nice little giveaway for you! The kind folks over at Electric Rain have offered up 3 more copies of Swift3D V5 ($249 value each) to 3 lucky BittBox commenters. If you’re not familiar with Swift3D, it’s a very powerful 3D modeling/animation software that makes it super easy and fast to create stunning 3D animations and import them directly into Flash without writing a single line of code.

Contest Rules:

• All you have to do to enter is leave a comment.
• Only comment once.
• 3 winners will be randomly chosen and will receive a downloadable version of Swift3D V5.
• You must leave an email address in order to win.
• Comments will remain open until Friday, January 30th.

About Swift3D V5:

If you haven’t ever used Swift3D, or you’ve never heard of it before, here’s the low-down. Swift3D is a 3D modeling and animation environment that makes professional animations that can be exported and integrated very easily into Flash. Not only does it make 3D animations a snap, but the interface is easy to use and even a beginner can start animating in minutes. The thing I like the most about Swift is the fact that you can create things in a 3D environment, and export them in vector format, yes vector. I like to design intricate 3D scenes and export them as an AI file to use in Illustrator, but you might be more interested in the Flash side of the program, I don’t know. In fact, I wrote a tutorial a long time ago about using Swift3D as a powerful 3D Illustration tool, if you’re interested in reading that.

Key Features:

• Import 3DS and DXF files.
• Export Vector OR Raster animations
• The only 3D animation software that directly integrates with Flash.
• Drag and Drop preset animations (rotate left, right, up, down, etc.)
• New to V5, Export to Papervision
• Save as AI, EPS, or SVG vector formats
• Export to Silverlight (If you’re into that)

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I’ve been experimenting with panoramas lately and as a result, I found a very nice free program for stitching multiple images together. It’s called Hugin, and its available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. You don’t need a fisheye lens to make panoramas, all you need to do is take a bunch of overlapping images and let Hugin do the rest.

If you browse around the sorceforge page for Hugin, there are plenty of tutorials to get you started.

I did a panorama of my workspace as I learned more about stitching, so here it is:

In my experiments, I used Hugin to stitch my images into a single image, then I used a program called Cubic Converter ($49 US) to make a 360 degree QuickTime VR. Cubic Converter tutorials here. Here is the result:

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I recently found a little gem in the ever-growing list of software of the Apple site. DrawBerry is a free vector graphics editor for OS X. It has a slick, Pixelmator-like interface and is pretty easy to use. It’s not as powerful as Inkscape, but it’s much more lightweight and it’s very easy to use. Some features to note are, layers, opacity, blending modes, history, fill shapes with images, SVG support, shape alignment tool, and much more. Check out the video below, and screenshots to get a closer look.

DrawBerry from Jay Hilgert on Vimeo.

I really liked the simplicity of the Gradient Palette:

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Its time for some more free stuff everyone, and I have a good little giveaway for you! The kind folks over at Electric Rain have offered up 3 copies of Swift3D V5 ($249 value each) to 3 lucky BittBox commenters. If you’re not familiar with Swift3D, it’s a very powerful 3D modeling/animation software that makes it super easy and fast to create stunning 3D animations and import them directly into Flash without writing a single line of code. Even if you don’t win, enter the promotional code “BITTBOX” to save 15% off the regular price. Details and more on the software after the jump.

Contest Rules:

• All you have to do to enter is leave a comment.
• Only comment once.
• 3 winners will be randomly chosen and will receive a downloadable version of Swift3D V5.
• You must leave an email address in order to win.
• Comments will remain open until Tuesday, June 17th.

About Swift3D V5:

If you haven’t ever used Swift3D, or you’ve never heard of it before, here’s the low-down. Swift3D is a 3D modeling and animation environment that makes professional animations that can be exported and integrated very easily into Flash. Not only does it make 3D animations a snap, but the interface is easy to use and even a beginner can start animating in minutes. The thing I like the most about Swift is the fact that you can create things in a 3D environment, and export them in vector format, yes vector. I like to design intricate 3D scenes and export them as an AI file to use in Illustrator, but you might be more interested in the Flash side of the program, I don’t know. In fact, I wrote a tutorial a long time ago about using Swift3D as a powerful 3D Illustration tool, if you’re interested in reading that.

Key Features:

• Import 3DS and DXF files.
• Export Vector OR Raster animations
• The only 3D animation software that directly integrates with Flash.
• Drag and Drop preset animations (rotate left, right, up, down, etc.)
• New to V5, Export to Papervision
• Save as AI, EPS, or SVG vector formats
• Export to Silverlight (If you’re into that)

Like I said, I use Swift3D mostly for exporting single frames an vector format to use in Illustrator, but that’s what’s great about this software. It can do so many different things, I’m sure many of you could find plenty of good uses for it. Good luck to everyone! Let the contest begin :)

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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.

Not only is EPSQuickLookPlugin a godsend, it’s also a breeze to install. It comes with it’s own installer. Just drag the plugin icon and drop it on the ‘QuickLook” folder and you’re done. Note: You may have to Logout of your Mac and Log back in in order for it to start working.

Not only can you use Quicklook to view EPS files, but you can get an “Icon Preview” with some EPS files. The older versions of Illustrator, like 8, will sometimes only have an icon, but you can still use Quickloook to peek inside. You can force the older versions to display a thumbnail if you check “Include Document Thumbnails” when saving to EPS format.

If you would like to preview files other than EPS, you might check out QLPlugins.com, a site with a growing collection of QuickLook Plugins. Not everything on the site is free, but you may find something worth a few bucks if it saves yu enough time.

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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]

Liquid Resize is not unlike the online service Rsizr, but after playing around with it for a while, I can manage to get better results with Liquid Resize. I can also see how this would come in handy for web designers. For example, you already have your client-approved web design built and coded, then the client requests an an image to be replaced and it just won’t work without cropping. Liquid Resize could (but not always) come in handy.

Just like Rsizr, with Liquid Resize, you can ‘protect’ parts of the image from distortion in order to get your desired results.

Here’s a quick before and after that I played around with:

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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.

If you visit the Vector Magic website (again, no longer at Stanford: http://www.vectormagic.com) you’ll notice that they are selling “tokens” for the service. I’m not sure about the reasoning behind tokens, and I haven’t bought any yet, but if you look at the offer details, they are trying to motivate early adopters by letting you put your first $50 worth of token purchases towards the price of the desktop software when it’s released.

There are some pretty slick apps out there for less than $50 that do much more than a single task. Take Pixelmator for example. It’s only $49, it has one of the slickest UI’s around, and is packed with features. Another example: Vectoraster. It’s only $15, and it’s pretty much a single-function app. Textmate is another one worth mentioning.

The good news is the Vector Magic desktop app will support both Windows XP and Vista, as well as OS X 10.3 or later. (No Linux Support announced at this time) We’ll just have to wait and see if the price is right!

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There are tons of undocumented Photoshop shortcuts out there, lots of which can make our lives a lot easier if we only take advantage of them. I want to show you one that I use often. I would only assume that as designers, we would typically have our rulers turned on most of the time. (I’ve tested this as far back as CS1) To access your Photoshop preferences quickly, just double-click on a ruler! That’s it!

The preference pane will open in the “Units & Rulers” section, which makes sense:

For whatever reason, this does not work in Illustrator. Man, a little consistency would be nice . . .

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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).

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