For a while now I’ve been hearing that to make a dotted, dashed or any kind of non standard line in Photoshop you need to go back to illustrator (which I simply can’t stand). The solution as always turned out to be VERY simple. You can make dotted, dashed or any other kind of grungy lines in Photoshop and you can even make them curved to your liking.
That can apply to both making a nice looking separator, or creating a whole character outline that way. So here’s how to do it:
Recently headspark got a couple of older iPhones for app testing purposes and among them was the famous 3G model,with 4.2.1 firmware. What struck us was that the system was running so slow, it was barely useable at times. Getting into the messages app would take a lot of time, dialing was sluggish, and the overall performance far from perfect. So what’s the plan to fix that? Many people think that the best way is to downgrade it to 3.1.3 or 3.0 firmware and then it’ll work. Sure it had less features, but at least it worked well, right?
Well sure, you can do that, but if you jailbreak or unlock it might not be the best idea. And even if you don’t, why skipping on all the new features that came with 4.0 ?
Luckily there IS a way of simply turning off the two main reasons your iPhone 3G runs so slow: Multitasking and Wallpaper under the icons. Multitasking is obvious – for a device with less RAM it’s probably not the best idea, right? But why the wallpaper? Surely the device can handle displaying a small image without a huge memory loss? Yeah, it probably would, but when you have a wallpaper enabled (the one behind the icons), the icons generate a real-time shadow effect on that wallpaper and the app names so they’re readable on any kind of wallpaper. And that shadow is taking our processing power that could be used elsewhere. So here’s how to fix those two things:
Here’s what to do
1. First go and download iPhone Explorer app. It’s a simple tool that you can use to get to your iPhone’s filesystem.
2. Open the app and connect your iPhone. It should recognize it and display two (or more) folders.
3. Go to root\System\Library\CoreServices\SpringBoard.app\ and look for N82AP.plist file
4. Copy the file N82AP.plist to your desktop and edit it with a text editor. You’re looking for two lines to alter:
<key>homescreen-wallpaper</key> <true/>
and
<key>multitasking</key> <true/>
Change “true” to “false” in both cases, save the file and copy it back to the folder. Click on replace, restart your iphone and feel the difference!
Usually when we make wordpress websites we don’t really want people to see the website in the making – so we create an index.html splash page with “under construction” or something of that sort and then we go back to tweaking index.php
Well for a while now (since wordpress 2.7) that’s not really possible because if you access www.mydomain.com it’ll in fact show the splash page, but when you go to www.mydomain.com/index.php it’ll also redirect itself to that splash index.html file.
All the other wordpress pages and permalinks work, but without the main page it’s kinda hard to edit now isn’t it?
I was searching for an answer for a LONG time and it turns out there is one.
http://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/9203 – here it is. If it’s all black magic to you or you’re just lazy (who isn’t?) I’ll simply tell you what to do :
Go to wp-includes folder on your server, find the canonical.php file and then find a line that goes something like that:
$redirect['path'] = preg_replace('|/index.php/*?$|', '/', $redirect['path']);
and replace it with
$redirect['path'] = preg_replace('|/index.php/$|', '/', $redirect['path']);
It’s just removing two characters but the result is a working splash page and a working index.php
Ain’t it just great?
To achieve a HDR-kinda look you can either play with RAW images, various software, filters or do a similar effect MUCH much easier. See how.
Many of us might actually miss that because it’s not an option often used in tutorials online and the “snap to objects” function is used quite a lot in photoshop as well. But let’s imagine we have a couple of text fields and we want to align them vertically or horizontally together. Well we can do that with a set of these tools, the icons should be pretty much self-explanatory as it allows you to either align the baselines or centers of objects and it shows which kind of alignment each icon represents. Go and try those out!
This was one of the big drawbacks. Paying another 99c for making a ringtone from already purchased music? This is a very mean practice by apple, and they should stop doing that because people don’t like to be charged for EVERYTHING, and for some things twice.
Ok, let’s say we want to make a ringtone. What we need here is iTunes (but I guess you already have it) and your iPhone doesn’t have to be jailbroken. It can be fresh out of the box. The idea is to make a little cheat so the iPhone / iTunes will THINK a file you provide is a ringtone. And since most technology is at it’s root stupid here’s how we do it :
1. Find a song you like in iTunes. Right click on it and go to “Get Info”.
2. Go to options tab and find a place where it says “start time” and “stop time”. Remember that your ringtone has to be 30 seconds or less. Play the song a couple of times looking at the seconds to find a perfect spot, here let’s say 0:08 to 0:28 which will make a 20 second ringtone out of it. Click ok.
3. Now make sure you’ve got your encoder set to AAC. If you don’t know what I’m talking about just follow these simple steps to do so:
– Go to iTunes preferences. Then to “Import Settings” and choose AAC as the encoder. Click Ok everywhere.
After you’re done with that select your song and either right click and select convert to MP3, or in new iTunes click the advanced tab on top of the screen and click “create AAC version” there.
Now take that newly created 20 second long song and drag it onto your desktop. Then delete the 20 second file from iTunes completely (important!). You might also want to go to the original file and reset those start and stop times. After the 20 second AAC file is delted from iTunes and exists only on your desktop you see it has a m4a extension. In MAC OS simply select it, press Command + I and change the extension from M4A to M4R. It will ask you if you’re sure to change to m4r. Say you are. In windows you can probably change the extension by either selecting Rename from the right click menu or some preferences of the file.
After this step you have a M4R file on your desktop and it should be associated with iTunes. Click on it twice to open it and it should simply open in iTunes and start playing. But you’ll notice that in the ringtones tab you now have that file. So sync your iPhone and you’re done.
Today I’ll show you how to create those ubiquitous light trails or as I think of them “curved beams of light” that can either go around a character or be just in the front looking like “light painting”. We will create the image above and it will take about 10 minutes to do so because it’s all about the PEN tool in photoshop. If you don’t really know how to use the pen tool then find a tutorial that shows you the basics of the tool before you proceed.
Here’s a quick little tutorial showing how to make a combination of gradient and grunge that can look stylish in any color (blue is just an example, feel free to experiment). What you need to know is only the basic tools of photoshop that are available from the left toolbar. And some basic layer skills (blending modes, opacities). This tutorial ALSO works in Pixelmator and works exactly the same so you can duplicate all the steps. Enjoy!
Ok, you’ve probably always wondered, why photoshop and other apps (like pixelmator for example) allow you to use gradient masks and Flash doesn’t? You probably blamed it on some vector mambo-jumbo and decided to live with it somehow. Well that’s not needed anymore, because with some clever techniques we can achieve this effect in Flash from version 8 and up. It works in actionscript 2.0, but it should be easy to achieve in 3.0 as well. This is a simple, quick effect that we can make having a basketball and it’s reflection underneath. What’s cool is that you can also animate the mask so the ball will bounce for example.
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A quick little tutorial for photoshop this time (sorry, doesn’t work in pixelmator yet, but let’s hope they add this function in some time as well).
Here’s what we’re gonna do with just one shape, without manually rotating and positioning them.
Read more to find out how we do it!
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Here’s a quick little tutorial on how to make some fake-3d objects like cubes, book-shapes, dvd covers, cd cases and more. Those simple shapes can be recreated in Pixelmator (and photoshop since all the functions are exactly the same) easily. Then we can texture them and make them look a little bit more real. Sure with a lot of work they can be real, but the purpose of this tutorial is to create a more cartoonish-style fake 3d + we’re low on time ;)
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Here’s a quick little tutorial on how to create an emboss + brushed metal + some fire effect in pixelmator. This will actually work in photoshop as well since the tools used are the same (even the same keyboard shortcuts). So if you’re a photoshop user feel free to also try it.
So here we go :
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Here’s a little tutorial for pixelmator, since I’m working on some new visuals for the upcoming second promo EP from Krop. So let’s start shall we ? All you need for this tutorial are basic pixelmator or photoshop skills, a copy of pixelmator, about 20 minutes and a photo of a person. I used one of the promo pics from Krop. Read more for the tutorial itself. If any of the images is too small for you, you can right click on it, and choose view image opening it in it’s full. This release is an upcoming one, but if you like electronic dance music with an alternative twist check out the last cd at kropband.com . It’s a free download.
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