Raiting: 4.5/5

The Pixelmator team, brothers Saulius and Aidas Dailide, have released the 1.0 of their revolutionary image editing software. It is a Delicious Generation image editor that works beautifully, is amazingly easy to use, and is filled with features. It allows you to edit everything from a png to a icns file, plus has support for psd (Photoshop Documents) with layers, with over 100 formats total. It uses the Core Image and ImageMagick foundations, and provides a top quality image editor. There is also a Photo Browser that allows you to access your iPhoto Libray, albums, Picture Folders and more. For those wanting to create and edit images, Pixelmator is a great choice over an application like Adobe Photoshop, at just under 6% of the price, it is a great choice for those needing to do image editing, but either don’t have the money to spend or don’t need to advanced features of Photoshop. I have enjoyed Pixelmator so much, even since the first beta, as I had a chance to participate in the beta, I have made it the app I open to do my image tasks rather than Photoshop.

?¢‚Ǩ?ìAfter two months of bug squashing we are very excited to finally release Pixelmator,?¢‚Ǩ¬ù said Saulius Dailide of the Pixelmator Team. ?¢‚Ǩ?ìWith its use of latest Mac OS X technologies, breakthrough ease-of-use, innovation and low $59 price tag we think all Mac users will find Pixelmator very useful and fun.?¢‚Ǩ¬ù

I hope everyone enjoys Pixelmator 1.0 as much as I have, and make sure to purchase it if you like it to help support future developments of this amazing product!

Price: $59

Site: http://pixelmator.com

Rating: 4.5/5

CSSEdit is my favorite app to edit and preview CSS. It’s got really good WYSIWYG CSS editing, and a live preview of what your editing. On the preview window you can inspect every element of the page. It’s got an editor and preview window. Now the editor is really what makes CSSEdit shine. It formats your CSS automatically and with a click of a button you can validate it. It’s got nearly every CSS attribute in the WYSIWYG editor, and puts out perfect working code. You can chose to use full WYSIWYG, WYSIWYG with code editing, or just code editing. It’s the perfect companion for TextMate.

Version Reviewed: 2.5

Price: $29.95

Site: http://macrabbit.com/cssedit/

iAppblog has won the ASiteADay Award for June 21, 2007. We are very honored, and would like to thank our amazing designer, Leo Mancini for all his great work on the blog. We would not have been able to win this award without the support of all of our advertisers, so I would like to thank all of them. And, to everyone who have donated, big or small, we thank you for you contributions to help make this blog what it is.

Leo Mancini also won ASiteADay for his great personal site, and he allowed us to use his banner.

I have also setup a redirect on iAppblog that goes to the award. http://iappblog.com/awards/asiteaday/

We’re giving away five copies of ButtonDesign. Whoever can make the best logo for iAppblog will win a copy and four runner-ups will be drawn. This is your opportunity to help make iAppblog better, and we appreciate it. We will also link back to the winner’s website or email. Who knows? Maybe we’ll secure more apps for the winner, by the time this contest is over.

Rules
-Send your entry in a common picture format, preferably PNG, at a resolution of or greater than 512 pixels by 512 pixels.
-The logo must be square shaped and you must include a 16×16, 64×64, 256×256 and the full version. We would also love it if you could include the PSD (the raw photoshop file), or any other raw, uncompressed version you have.
-Your entries must be sent by Saturday June 23 at 11:59:59 PM EST.
-Send your entries to contest@iappblog.com.
-The winners will be announced during the week of Sunday, the 24th of June.
-Once submitted, iAppblog will have full legal rights on the logo. You must use original images, or images otherwise licensed for this use.
-Up to 3 different submissions per person.
-Both EDIT-XTREEM and Phoenix42 will vote on their favourite.

So.. Start designing and thinking about the iAppblog logo. This is a great way to show your support for iAppblog and win a great app.

Rating: 3.5/5

General Info: ButtonDesign can save you time from, well, designing buttons for a webpage. A sidebar on the left provides button style choices. The problem with many of them is that they just don’t look good. The flag-looking one is a mess, reminding me of web-pages from the late 90’s. Some of them are pretty good though. There is a mix of buttons with around half of them being acceptable. For each button is a set of options for normal, hover, and pressed states. There are the usual text options like fonts, bold, italic, and underline as well as colors. More adjustable items include size, alignment, opening in a new window, and more. When you’re finished, you can export to CSS or HTML with either JPEG or PNG. Despite the number of ugly buttons I would recommend ButtonDesign for beginners and/or those with less graphic design skills.

Retail Price: $19.95

Site: http://www.ragesw.com/products/buttondesign.html

London, UK - May 30, 2007: Founded by brothers Saulius and Aidas Dailide in 2007, the Pixelmator Team today introduced Pixelmator, the world’s first GPU-powered image editing tool that provides everything needed to create, edit, and enhance still images.

“Finally, an innovative, fast, and easy-to-use image editor for Mac OS X that brings the power of todays expensive image production tools to every Mac user at a very affordable price,” said Saulius Dailide, Pixelmator Team. “We think all Mac people-home users as well as professionals-will find Pixelmator very usefull and fun”.

It will be available in June on http://pixelmator.com. It will sell for $59 USD.

This Press Release was brought to us by A Media Partner of ours, PRMac, which we told you earlier this month, and that we have become a Media Partner of theirs, and we have a link under Media Partners on their site.

I have signed up for their Mailing List, and when they release anything, I will be sure to let you all know.

Rating: 4.5/5

General Info: I already have a ton of software. Okay, not quite a ton (maybe 1/2 a ton ;-). This includes apps for graphics editing, a variety of things I can use for HTML editing, and so on. For the longest time I’ve worked in Dreamweaver then I ended up with a license to RapidWeaver. Then I found themes. I’m hooked. But, I like to tweak things and make them my own, especially colors and graphics since that’s what my background is in.

On a search for things that work with RapidWeaver I came across RWThemeMiner. Yes, I probably have other tools that I could pull together to get inside the RapidWeaver theme components but RWThemeMiner is direct, intuitive and makes quick work of tweaking themes to make them your own. Sometimes the larger apps get all the attention but there are some really nice little hidden gems that crop up because of the “main” app. The modular aspect of RapidWeaver is a nice feature that’s allowed other developers to come up with useful add-ons like themes, RWThemeMiner and a few other related apps.

If you are interested in making themes or customizing aspects of your websites to suit your own tastes by tweaking the colors or images you may find RWThemeMiner as useful as I have in just a short time.

Price: $15.00

Site: http://www.ttpsoftware.com/Products/rwthememiner.html

Screenshot

Rating: 3.5/5

General Info: One app that’s always fascinated me is Apple’s iMovie. PulpMotion is very nice companion to iMovie. PulpMotion is a lot like iMovie in the sense that it’s for making a movie from videos and/or photos. PulpMotion even feels like a x.0 iLife app. Sadly, that also applies to PulpMotion’s stability. PulpMotion suffers from some odd bugs that placed the window half out of the screen and one crash. Like any iLife app PulpMotion has amazing output. To get an idea of PulpMotion’s output, let me describe some of it’s themes. One is a spinning, globular maelstrom of pictures and/or video of your choice. Another is a horizontally sliding pattern or color with pictures and/or video falling on top of it. The themes number many more, so there’s bound to be something you like. What you can add to these themes includes not just music, video, and photos, but also live or recorded video from iSight. A feature iLife should steal borrow is the ability to export, or “Share” as Apple calls it, application files. Exported applications feature some neat interactive abilities like using the iSight video feed on the viewer’s Mac (much to your friend’s paranoid surprise).

What PulpMotion needs to learn from iLife are more interface guidelines. One, the media browsing bar is labeled “Medias”. Two, there’re are too many side and top-bars at a time. This is very confusing on the first launch, even with the sticky-note instructions. The area labeled “Outputs” doesn’t seem necessary until at least something is actually output. “Compositions” seems to be the equivalent of timeline in iMovie; it seems logical that “Compositions” would be located at the bottom. The theme browser at the top of the window is shown by default and adds to the clutter. To hide these crowding interface areas PulpMotion relies on the menubar. Like GarageBand, it would be wise to keep most areas of the interface features hidden until they’re needed. PulpMotion features something iLife apps should really use: an easy way for third parties to make their own themes. With an interface refresh and speed improvements PulpMotion would be an iLife app of it’s own. As it stands now, PulpMotion is still a useful tool any iMovie enthusiast should try out.

Retail Price: $29.95

Site: http://www.pulpmotion.com/

Screenshot

Rating: 4.5/5

General Info: Thinking of waiting a minute or so to start up Photoshop should make you cringe. Specifically, it should after using Picturesque. Now before I go on, realize that Photoshop is still the image editing app for complex edits that the small tools can’t handle. For one the of the newest “small tools”, Picturesque fares very well. Nearly every Mac guru needs to “beautify” images for avatars, print stuff, blogging, and general website production. Picturesque bills itself as the app to do the basic editing you do 90 percent of the time. Unsurprisingly, Picturesque knows how to do these tasks very well. It’s capable of applying shadows, glow, rounded corners, reflections, and much more. Another time saving aspect of Picturesque is automation that can handle large batches of images. Some more operations Picturesque can perform are: resizing with or without proper aspect ratio, convert common image formats, add borders, and fade borders. Whew, that’s a lot. Few trips to the slow and increasingly bloated Photoshop are welcome.
What isn’t great about Picturesque is the fact that it doesn’t show where the borders of the image are. This may not seem important until you add shadow, glow, or reflections. This is the only thing that I really disliked , which is really good for a 1.0 product. My advice on Picturesque is to see if it will save you enough time compared to Photoshop, and if it does, definitely check out it out.

Retail Price: $19.50

Site: http://www.acqualia.com/picturesque/index.html

?Ǭ†With this little plugin any standard Mac app with a color picker (not Photoshop) has another tab for inputing hex codes as a color. Waiting for Coda to add a way to use hex numbers in the GUI CSS mode? This is one great, free way to add it. Get it at: http://wafflesoftware.net/hexpicker/