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Context Free is an application that creates geometric shapes using a programming language.

All the images created are vector images that can be exported as SVG. You can open the files in Illustrator or Photoshop and further modify them to include in your designs.

Typical uses would be patterns for backgrounds and geometric shapes for logos.

Here are few examples created with this application:

Adapted from Photoshop CS4 for Nature Photographers: A Workshop in a Book (Sybex)
By Ellen Anon and Josh Anon
Dateline: September 24, 2009
Version: Adobe Photoshop CS4

The Shadow/Highlight adjustment is an excellent way to reveal subtle detail in the shadow and/or highlight areas of your images. Although you could theoretically produce similar results with sophisticated use of Curves, the Shadow/Highlight adjustment is far easier to use when you need to recover detail that has been lost in shadow or highlight areas because of excessive contrast. It’s similar to the Fill Light and Recovery sliders in ACR, but it has additional controls so you can fine-tune the results.

Read the full article on Graphics.com

There are several reasons to put your display to sleep whenever possible:

• Saves your display
• Saves electricity
• Saves power in a laptop battery
• Saves private info on screen from preying eyes
• Saves the whales

To put the display to sleep at an instant just press:
CTRL-Shift-Eject

If you want to help a friend to fix a Mac or want to buy a used Apple machine you will need detailed and extensive information about the computer. The easiest and fastest way to create a document that can be emailed is to export a text document with all the details from System Profiler. Here are detailed instructions:

1. Open Applications/Utilities/System Profiler application
2. Select the level of detail of information from View menu: Mini / Basic / Full
3. Select File/Save as menupoint
4. Select Plain Text format from the drop down

This document can be emailed and opened with TextEdit.

Let's say you want to delete a backup from an external drive you don't need anymore. This backup will be millions of files if it includes all the system files. If you want to delete such large amount of files using the Finder's Empty Trash command it may take you hours.

A simple trick in Terminal will reduce the time by 40% to empty your trash significantly. Carefully enter this command:
sudo rm -r

Now click and drag the folder you want to delete to the end of the line. This operation will insert the correct path. It will look something like this:
sudo rm -r /Volumes/Backup_Disk/Backups

Press enter and you will be asked for your admin password. Now just wait for the command to complete.

This method is not just faster, but it also runs in the background so you can use Finder normally.

If for whatever reason you need a list of files within a certain directory in text format you can do so using the ls Terminal command.

Just open Terminal, navigate to the required directory and then enter one of these commands to save the information to the directory.txt file:

Only the files within the directory: ls > directory.txt
Lists all subdirectories recursively: ls -R > directory.txt
Sorts by time of last modification: ls -t > directory.txt

For more options check this page.

With the iPhone software 3.0 and a mobile me account you don't have to panic if you lose your device:

1. You can locate it remotely through your mobile.me account. Just enable Find My iPhone in MobileMe settings on your phone in advance. Then you can log in to me.com from any computer to access Find My iPhone and display your phone’s approximate location on a map.
2. Display a message on the lost iPhone. This service allows you to make contact with the person "finding" your phone, so you can negotiate terms of return.
3. You can remotely erase data on your iPhone. Addresses, phone numbers, email, photos will all be gone in a second. If you happen to find your phone you will be able to restore all this data from your computer.

‘Google Doodle’ is the buzz word these days. Whether it’s Christmas, Halloween, St. Patrick’s Day or any other important date, Google doesn’t miss out doodling for them. For readers who don’t know what Google Doodle is all about, here is a little piece of information on what it is, how Google started it, what kind of response are they getting from the people all across the world and how you, as a business owner can embellish your logo on different occasions?

We all know the literal meaning of the word ‘Doodle’, which means aimless drawing. Google, the most successful internet giant started doodling in the year 1999. Their first doodle was designed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin on ‘Burning Man Festival’, which bagged a lot of popularity. So later on, in 2000, they assigned an intern, Dennis Hwang in their own company to take charge of this department named ‘Google Doodle’. His first doodle was created in 2000 for ‘Bastille Day’ and he’s been designing doodles for Google ever since.

We've discussed techniques for enlarging images before using Photoshop commands. Re-sizer is an action pack that uses a series of such commands as an action pre-packed for you to achieve the best possible result.

For decades designers were told to avoid the use of more than 3 colors in a logo. This trend was broken in the mid eighties by Apple launching their famous rainbow apple logo. Then we were told to avoid gradients. 20 years later Apple was among the first to break the rule again by launching their shiny trendsetting aqua Apple logo.

The reasoning against gradients was strong, but it is not valid anymore. The printing costs for 4 color process was more expensive than just two direct colors. The widespread digital printing which is primarily based on cmyk printing eliminated this problem. High quality full color printing is not expensive anymore even at small quantities (like 50 pieces of business cards).

Online branding has become more important for companies than printed materials. Most company logos on websites are seen by many more people than all their printed material altogether. And full color logos with gradients look great on screen.

We can officially claim that a new era in logo design has arrived. Feel free to design logos with gradients. Naturally a good logo design should translate to a single color for special uses, ex. etching on a marble floor. But we should not limit our designs to logos that fail in black & white. The b&w test remains valid to evaluate the concept of the logo, but should not be a deciding factor.

For inspiration let's see 30 great logos with gradients from large and small companies. Finally, let's make some projections about coming trends in logo design.