BittBox » Freeware

Freeware Find: Repeating Motif Generator

Jay Hilgert — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 18:52:13 +0000

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.

Faster Freeware Searching on Apple Downloads Site (Video)

Jay Hilgert — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 20:20:22 +0000

I’d like to show you a very quick time-saving search tip that I use to find freeware on the Apple site. We all love freeware, so let get our grubby hands on it even quicker, shall we? Have a watch.

Super Fast Freeware Searching on Apple Downloads Site from Jay Hilgert on Vimeo.

Alternatively, you can search by keyword (type in “freeware”) using a Custom Google Search Engine. I created one below for the Imaging and 3D category on the Apple downloads site. Here is the homepage for the search engine if you’d like to bookmark it. You can create a search engine for any category, or the entire downloads section if your heart so desires.

I hope these two quick tips saves you some time. Happy searching :)

Freeware Find: Hugin Photo Stitcher

Jay Hilgert — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 20:45:53 +0000

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:

[qt:http://www.bittbox.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/office_pano.mov 485 364]

Freeware Find: DrawBerry – A Free Vector Editor for OS X

Jay Hilgert — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 20:20:50 +0000

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: