- Opera 10 Web Browser now available in alpha
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Posted by oVan on Monday, December 08, 2008 | PermaLink | 0 comments
Opera Software lets us have a sneak peek at Opera 10! You can now download an alpha version of Opera 10 at http://www.opera.com/browser/next/. Here’s a quick rundown on what’s new:
- Presto 2.2 Engine
- Performance boost
- 100/100 and pixel-perfect on the Acid3 test
- Auto-update
- Inline spelling checker
- Opera Mail improvements, including rich text composition and delete after X days
Here’s some more detail on the improvements and new features:
Opera 10 contains Opera's new rendering engine, Opera Presto 2.2, which will be integrated with all future Opera 10 products. This rendering engine gives us up to 30 percent faster browsing experience (compared to Opera Presto 2.1 from Opera 9.5).
For web developers: support for standards has improved also, resulting in a 100/100 score on the famous Acid3 test. There are also improved tools for web developers: you can use Web Fonts, including SVG font files, making great typography possible for designing web sites. Now it is also easier to make page elements transparent, by using a transparency channel added to RGB and HSL (so: RGBA and HSLA). Finally, Opera Dragonfly has improved website debugging, editing the DOM and inspecting the HTTP Headers.
There are some more improvements for the users too: spellchecker while you’re typing, auto update to the latest versions as they become available, and Opera Mail now supports HTML formatted e-mails.
“My favorite development in this release is the support for new Web technologies, which allows people to explore new ways of using the Internet," says Johan Borg, Vice President of Consumer Engineering, Opera Software. "Our 100/100 Acid3 Test score is only a first indication of the impact these new Web technologies will have. We look forward to your feedback on Opera 10.”
Find out more and download Opera 10 free: http://www.opera.com/browser/next/.
Labels: alpha, browser, download, free, Opera, semantic, standards, SVG
- Making your bitmaps scaleable and stylized (part 1)
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Posted by oVan on Tuesday, April 24, 2007 | PermaLink | 0 comments
This is the first post in a two part article on how to make your bitmaps scaleable and stylized. In this first part, we'll have a look at a free utility by Peter Selinger called Potrace.
There are various reasons why you would want to make your bitmaps or icons scaleable: In older times, the main reason was to be able to print the images with high resolution. Nowadays, with the advent of high-resolution LCD screens and very large icons in Windows Vista and Mac OS X, it's becoming more and more obvious that just scaling your bitmaps leads to blocky, ugly edges. Other reasons might be to convert scanned company logos, handwritten text, etc.
Potrace is a utility that converts the original bitmap into a series of vectors. It is to some extent similar to CorelTrace and other tracing tools that are bundled with scanners and graphic programs. The advantages of Potrace are of course its price (free) and the fact that it's very lightweight (you don't need bloated installation files of hundreds of megabytes).
Original scanned image:
Potrace converter output:
You can find more examples of the excellent results you can achieve with Potrace on the Potrace examples page.
Once you've converted your bitmaps with Potrace, you can save the result in various formats: EPS, PostScript, PDF, SVG (scalable vector graphics), Xfig, Gimppath, and PGM. All of these formats allow you to print or display your image at any resolution without losing edge quality.
Bundled with Potrace is a tool called Mkbitmap. This is a little program to pre-process the input bitmap to achieve better results on grayscale and color images. You can see examples and an explanation of Mkbitmap on the Mkbitmap examples page.
In the second part of this article, we'll have a look at scanning a drawing, converting it with Potrace to the SVG format, and then stylizing it with the excellent Inkscape SVG editor.
Download: Potrace and Mkbitmap (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux)
Part two will be published soon. Meanwhile, comments and recommendations welcome!
Update: Corrected the link to the Potrace Samples!Labels: bitmap, convert, download, EPS, free, Inkscape, output, PDF, Potrace, scaleable, SourceForge, SVG