337 Media Studios » Technology

Bryansays Podcast Ep7 (Guest spot)

Damien Benoit — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 15:48:53 +0000

Got in on another episode of the Bryansays Podcast and had a great time talking alot about the location aware social networks that are similar to the popular Foursquare. I learned alot and even ended up signing up for an account on Whrrl, a new one I have never heard much of. There are really just too many of them out there and need to step up with more amazing features before it gains a huge mass like twitter or facebook but listen in on the episode because we might have a few big name players to talk about that are possibly getting in on the location game and changing it. Enjoy listening to this episode just as much as I enjoyed being in on it!

BryanSays:

Links:

BryanSays Site
Subscribe to Podcast
Our Episode (Ep 7)
Download Podcast

My iPhone 4 FaceTime Commercial

Damien Benoit — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 07:01:56 +0000

Been having a really good time getting a better grasp at 3d modeling, rendering and animating. There is a lot that goes into all of it but once you start to see final products coming out, it really feels good. I can say that it has taken me longer to get good pieces out of 3d work than anything else I tried to create. Thankfully, I have been making post worthy stuff lately so thats pretty much the reason for this post. Please feel free to leave some comments in the post to let me know what you think. Rate the posts on my site as well, dont be too shy to join the blog community by giving feedback!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here is something uploaded just to facebook:

First iPhone 4 Wedding Video

Damien Benoit — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 14:58:29 +0000

Ever since I got my iPhone 4 I have been itching to try it out in some of my real world freelance projects. I have been doing a lot of editing with any kind of camera you can think of to put together great product for a client of mine named David Axe that takes from iPod’s with video cameras to HD Sony cameras all over Afghanistan and other places. We put that stuff together to make great pieces, so why cant I take this new iPhone 4 with an amazing high definition camera that takes great? shots under the right circumstances? Well I could, I already lined up and talked a client into letting me shot part of his upcoming music video with it, another one wants me to do every part of the project using it and now I already got a wedding video done!

The wedding video was not planned at all but came out decent enough for them to at least have their greatest moments captured in high quality for them. I was at a friends wedding when I realized I didn’t see anyone with a professional camera capturing this great day so I dug into my pocket and said I got this!

It wasn’t the most pleasant thing in the world trying to keep my phone straight the whole time for a Catholic wedding but I did fairly well for an impromptu videography session. The best part about the whole thing was the quick turnaround. I shot it at around 2pm, edited a good bit on the way back home and put the final touches a few hours later after hanging around the house. Now its a DVD for them, the day after! I will work on my equipment to get more smooth shots and be more steady with the camera and turn this into one of my production tools. Here is a quick clip of the highlights, Watch it in HD!!!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Google Tv, are you ready?

Damien Benoit — Thu, 20 May 2010 23:03:36 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

Still dont know what iPad is?

Damien Benoit — Thu, 13 May 2010 14:54:12 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

Adobe Photoshop CS5 Tips

Damien Benoit — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 16:46:56 +0000

Superior HDR Imaging

Although HDR images always received a mixed response from photographers, there’s no denying that they provide a unique and interesting take. CS5 will – for better or worse – make creating HDR images easier, with greater control and accuracy.

Automatic ghost removal compensates for any camera movement, and the HDR tool gains tone mapping and better adjustments. The tool also allows for the creation of a HDR using only one image.

Content-Aware Fill

Another feature that has “wowed” users in the run-up to the launch is Content-Aware Fill. This is one of the app’s flagship pieces of functionality. The idea is to let you remove any part of an image, with content-aware fill automatically filling in the space left by that particular object. It aims to accurately match lighting, tone, and noise so it looks as if the removed content never existed.

Abobe’s demonstrations of this look impressive to date, and I’m looking forward to giving it a try with a few of my own images.

Easier Complex Selections

Accurately selecting delicate areas of an image – such as a person’s hair – can be a very difficult task. We actually posted a tutorial on this very subject a few months ago.

CS5 brings new functionality to let you easily select these intricate image elements. You can eliminate background color around your selection edges, and use a set of refinement tools to ensure an accurate selection.

State of the Art RAW Processing

To co-incide with the launch of CS5, we’ll be seeing a new version (v6) of Camera Raw. This new version of the plugin gives far greater control over your RAW conversions. A few notable features let you nondestructively remove image noise while preserving color and detail, add grain to make digital photos look more realistic, and give you greater flexibility for post-crop vignetting.

Better Performance

Finally, a few changes in CS5 promise to bring much improved performance. The main addition in this area is the introduction of 64 bit support. Providing you have a 64 bit computer, this could mean that processing very large images is “up to 10 times faster”. Whether you’ll experience that type of speed boost remains to be seen, but it’s a welcome addition for those of us with newer hardware.

Watch the Launch Event

If you’d like to see all these new features and functionality demonstrated, it’s worth signing up for the launch event later today. Julieanne Kost will be demonstrating several new features for photographers.

I’d love to know what you thoughts are at this stage – will you be rushing to upgrade, or are you happy to wait and see how the upgrade is received by everyone else first?

Announcing Adobe CS5! Join us for the exclusive Global Online Launch Event, Monday, April 12, 2010.

-source: tuts network

The First iPad Review

Damien Benoit — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 02:53:31 +0000

It strikes you when you first touch an iPad. The form just feels good, not too lightweight or heavy, nor too thin or thick. It’s sensual. It’s tactile. And it’s a good way to spot a first-timer, too, as I observed with a few test subjects. The dead giveaway for an iPad n00b is pausing a few breaths before hitting the “on” switch, and just let the thing rest there against skin. Flick the switch and the novelty hits. Just as the iPhone, Palm Pré and Android phones scratched an itch we didn’t know we had, somewhere between cellphone and notebook, the iPad hits a completely new pleasure spot. The display is large enough to make the experience of apps and games on smaller screens stale. Typography is crisp, images gem-like, and the speed brisk thanks to Apple’s A4 chip and solid state storage. As I browse early release iPad apps, web pages, and flip through the iBook store and books, the thought hits that this is a greater leap into a new user experience than the sum of its parts suggests.

Remember The Periodic Table of Elements series of books we featured here at Boing Boing? There’s an iPad version ($13.99 in the app store, screenshots here), and it’s dazzling — it makes science feel like magic in your hands. I called the guy behind The Elements, Theo Gray, and asked him to put into words the UI magic that iPad makes possible for creators of books, games, news, and productivity tools.

“The Elements on iPad is not a game, not an app, not a TV show. It’s a book. But it’s Harry Potter’s book. This is the version you check out from the Hogwarts library. Everything in it is alive in some way.”

Indeed, the elements in this periodic table seem very much alive. The obvious way to examine static objects — say, a lump of gold (number 79) or an ingot of cast antimony (number 51) is to rotate them, to spin the specimen with your fingertips. And that’s exactly what you do here. You can view them in 3D if you wish, with 3D glasses you buy separately online. Tap here, and live data from Wolfram Alpha pops up (the thermodynamic properties of molybednum, perhaps, or the current price of platinum). Some elements are presented with little video clips you can play, too.

When you get a chance, compare it to the tiny screen of an iPhone or Droid, or the less responsive touchscreens of an all-in-one desktop PC such as HP’s TouchSmart: it’s a completely different experience.

“A stereo 3D video of a static object that you can rotate in real time,” Theo says over the phone. “Honestly, I’m not sure where you go from there. Smellovision? Not a whole lot more you can do.”

The Elements presentation for iPad (those spinning samples of elements you twirl with your fingertip) makes use of openGL textures, compressing visual data in a way that can be compressed in the graphics chip, so the data can be read without hogging CPU resources. By making use of hardware native to iPad, you can can “play” a spin forwards and backwards with no hiccups or performance lags — even spin 3, 4, 5, 10 views of an element at a time. This ain’t Flash video over WiFi, folks. You’ll feel sad going back to chokey http embeds.

Each app for iPad can’t be more than 2 gigs in compressed archive form (a limitation imposed by the zip compression standard at work here, not something of Apple’s own design). Data-dense applications like The Elements buck right up against that limit, but future iterations (this and others that go live Saturday were developed with great haste) will likely take advantage of the ability to do background downloading to supplement data.

Tapping and swirling my way through iBooks (the store includes free, public domain titles in addition to the $9.99-$12.99 bestsellers), and iPad native apps provided at launch such as the spectacular, game-changing Marvel Comics app (crisp, lucid art, the ability to navigate frame-by-frame, rendering spoilers down the page obsolete), the Epicurious recipe browser, and the news browsing app by Reuters (free app in which video is, again, a seamless delight), the idea hits. This is what we wanted e-books to be all along. Rich, nimble, and dense with image and sound and navigability, right there inside the flow of the story. And this is what we wanted the web to feel like all along. We just want it to work, and we don’t want to be aware of the delivery method while we’re enjoying what’s delivered.

Theo’s been thinking about all of this, too. “The Kindle is a great device, and I own several,” Theo says. “But the concept of an e-book has always been that it’s like PDF. Imagine if the web standard was PDF instead of html, if everyone’s web pages consisted of what you can do in PDF? That would be a really boring world. I hate to see ebooks as being pigeonholed as these static, PDFlike things, in which the biggest ‘a-ha’ you can have is an exciting pageturning animation, or search. What could an ebook be? Let’s draw a line in the sand out in the future and say, this is the greatest aspiration, if the limitations of code and hardware were no object.”

Draw that imaginary line in the sand, and you’ve sketched out iPad.

Manic, nonstop use revealed a number of things: battery life is better than I anticipated. I got a full day of constant internet-connected use (it did not leave my hands) on one charge. More than 12 hours, with heavy video and gaming, and screen cranked up to full brightness.

Orientation lock is great for when I’m sharing YouTube clips on the couch with family, or web browsing in bed. It fits well in my lap for tweeting when eating during lunch break, and it’s easy to wipe off a stray mayo glop and get right back to updating the world on the details of my sandwich (using Twitterific for iPad, a free app which does what it promises on the tin). When we began developing the Boing Boing iPad presentation, we used a simulator and tapped into a lot of JQUERY, thinking that snazzy transitional animations would delight. They didn’t: it worked great on the Mac simulator, but were sluggish on iPad, so we aborted and went simple. When you’re redesigning a site for iPad, you start to think in terms of a visually rich ‘zine, not a website. Given Boing Boing’s ‘zine roots (25 years and counting since the first Xeroxed copy), the close of that evolutionary circle is something that makes me smile.

Familiar Mac fundamentals like Calendar, Keynote, Pages, and Numbers are presented thoughtfully with the kinetic and tactile specifics of iPad in mind. Pinch-zoom the preview image for a photo album you’ve saved, and watch the contents scatter out accross the screen, so you can be reminded of the shots you’ve stored inside.

Gaming possibilities are profound. Accelerometer-driven games like the Real Racing HD iPad app ($9.99) available at first release thrill in a new way, like when I first held a Wii. There’s something about tilting and steering and braking with a device you hold in your hands, just like a steering wheel, that’s so much more viscerally pleasing than a big old shelf-bound console.

The on-screen QWERTY keyboard is more finger-sized than iPhone (obviously, the screen’s larger when either in portrait or landscape) but I didn’t find myself using the device for lots of text input (email, blog post composing) without the aid of the keyboard dock— pretty much exactly like the standard Mac keyboard. No, there’s no camera, but it doesn’t seem like as much of a big deal as when I heard that news back at the January unveiling. iPad is more about experiencing media, and light sharing, than heavy-duty media production.

That said, I can imagine traveling with iPad instead of a netbook, with that keyboard dock in tow if I really need to do heavy text input.

Maybe the most exciting thing about iPad is the apps that aren’t here yet. The book-film-game hybrid someone will bust out in a year, redefining the experience of each, and suggesting some new nouns and verbs in the process. Or an augmented reality lens from NASA that lets you hold the thing up to the sky and pinpoint where the ISS is, next to what constellation, read the names and see the faces of the crew members, check how those fuel cells are holding up.

I like it a lot. But it’s the things I never knew it made possible — to be revealed or not in the coming months — that will determine whether I love it.

via Boing Boing

Apple iPad, no thanks!

Damien Benoit — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 21:47:23 +0000

From looking on Gizmodo, Engadget and other sites, mostly Twit Live, I came to the final conclusion. You let me down Apple. You have fun with that device. Thats just gonna be another thing I will never own unless you can impress me with the developed apps that are coming, but honestly. I don’t want this at all, let me count the ways!

Big, Ugly Bezel
Have you seen the bezel on this thing?! It’s huge! I know you don’t want to accidentally input a command when your thumb is holding it, but come on.
No Multitasking
This is a backbreaker. If this is supposed to be a replacement for netbooks, how can it possibly not have multitasking? Are you saying I can’t listen to Pandora while writing a document? I can’t have my Twitter app open at the same time as my browser? I can’t have AIM open at the same time as my email? Are you kidding me? This alone guarantees that I will not buy this product.
No Cameras
No front facing camera is one thing. But no back facing camera either? Why the hell not? I can’t imagine what the downside was for including at least one camera. Could this thing not handle video iChat?
Touch Keyboard
So much for Apple revolutionizing tablet inputs; this is the same big, ugly touchscreen keyboard we’ve seen on other tablets, and unless you’re lying on the couch with your knees propping it up, it’ll be awkward to use.
No HDMI/HD Video Out
Want to watch those nice HD videos you downloaded from iTunes on your TV? Too damned bad! If you were truly loyal, you’d just buy an AppleTV already.
The Name iPad
Get ready for Maxi pad jokes, and lots of ‘em!
No Flash
No Flash is annoying but not a dealbreaker on the iPhone and iPod Touch. On something that’s supposed to be closer to a netbook or laptop? It will leave huge, gaping holes in websites. I hope you don’t care about streaming video! God knows not many casual internet users do. Oh wait, nevermind, they all do.
Adapters, Adapters, Adapters
So much for those smooth lines. If you want to plug anything into this, such as a digital camera, you need all sorts of ugly adapters. You need an adapter for USB for god’s sake.

Google’s Nexus One, who’s da mastah?

Damien Benoit — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 00:54:46 +0000

SHO NUFF!!!

What I like:
- UI is much better, OS seems fairly fast and responsive.
- Google Maps Navigation.
- Solid HTC hardware. About the size of an iPhone, feels good in the hand/pocket.
- The bundled apps are excellent with (obviously) deep Google integration.
- 5MP camera w/flash, options to set white balance, effects, location, and focus.

What I didn’t like:
- Some UI inconsistencies between Google apps.
- GPS sucks the battery down pretty fast.
- There are only a handful of good Android apps, most of them are written by Google.

Final thoughts:
Android based phones have always seemed ..how to put this.. Linux-like. That is, solid and utilitarian but lacking the eye candy and attention to detail. This phone/OS release closes the gap on the iPhone, but doesn’t overtake it. That said, if my favorite iPhone apps make the jump to android I’d seriously consider making this my full-time phone when the Verizon model is released. Nice job Google, you’ve come a long way in a short amount of time.

-Source

So with that, I want to know what phone is your baby?

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Sneak Peek: Photoshop CS5

Damien Benoit — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 00:17:00 +0000

There’s a chance you might already have seen this ‘sneak peek’ video, in which case forgive me. For those of you that haven’t seen it, read on and take the jump to view it.

This is actually old news, but I only just stumbled across it a couple of days ago. You see, news of Adobe’s next Creative Suite is so hard to come by that this is still the latest Photoshop development! In fact, since October, the only news they’ve released was to announce the cancellation of their Flash CS5 public beta. But can I say, having just watched the the ‘sneak peek’, I am now very, very excited about the possible applications for Adobe’s CS5. Give us more news, Adobe!

Do you see the 3D elements that have been thrown in? The wire frame, the joints (the kinematics!), the simulation of a paint brush’s tip… it’s really quite crazy. I know Adobe gets a lot of flak for the continuous milking of their cash cow, but after that video I could almost forgive them.

With no news since October, and their usual 18- to 24-month development cycle, we might actually see Photoshop CS5 and Flash within a couple of months. I’m positively eager to review both of them.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Building your own Computer!

Damien Benoit — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 18:45:18 +0000

If you’ve never done it before, the idea of building a computer from the ground up can seem very intimidating but it’s one of the most satisfying projects a tech enthusiast can take on.

Being more of a software guy than a hardware geek myself, I was the only Lifehacker editor who had never built a PC from scratch. So when I needed a new PC late last year, I took the plunge and built my custom system. I’m so glad I didthe project turned out to be one of my proudest accomplishments of 2008. If you’ve cracked open your PC before to install a new hard drive or TV capture card, but you’ve never built a whole new system from the ground up, it’s not as difficult as you might think. Here are my notes for first-timers who want to build instead of buy their next computer.

Why Build Instead of Buy

“But computers are so cheap these days,” you say. “Why waste the time and energy building your own system when you can get a great machine fully assembled and shipped to your door?” That’s a great question. Building your own PC will not save you time. ItÂ might save you money, but that’s not even the best reason to do it. For me, it was a fantastic hands-on educational experience. It gives me a deep sense of satisfaction every single day when I press the power button on my tower, watch it light up, and know that I plugged in the wire that goes from that light to the motherboard. Building your PC takes the mystery out of what’s going on inside that black box you spend hours on per day.

There are other good reasons to build instead of buy, too. With your own build you can customize your system just how you like and make your perfect media center or gaming machine. You can save money if you already have some parts (though see my warnings on the dangers of a “Frankenbuild” below). Upgrading your PC in the future becomes easier and cheaper since your parts aren’t tied to a particular manufacturer. With a custom build you can do fun stuff like overclock your CPU and get more bang for your buck, orÂ install OS Xwhere it was never intended to run.

In short, building your own PC makes you feel like a badass.

What You’re Getting Into

Don’t get me wrong, though: building a PC (for the first time especially) takes research, time, gumption, patience, and a willingness to deal with several WTF moments. If you’ve never cracked a PC’s case and installed parts, like a new hard drive or a video card, start there first. If you’ve got that experience under your belt, you might think that building a new PC is just a matter of snapping together a few parts. It is, but building from the ground up takes much more than an hour or two. My build took two full days, one online order, one returned motherboard, two trips to Fry’s, one condescending sneer from a sales associate when I asked a newb question, and one trip to Radio Shack. If that sounds like a lot, well, it was, and there were moments in the process when I wished I’d just bought a Dell. But when it finally all came together, all the sweat makes the results even sweeter.

Where to Start: Researching and Buying Your Parts

You scared off yet? No? Good. Let’s get down to it. There are a gadzillion articles on the internet about building your own PC, but many are way out of date, or just don’t get specific about what exactly you should buy. When I had to start researching what parts to purchase, of course IÂ turned to savvy Lifehacker readers to help me out. Several readers mentionedÂ Ars Technica’s excellent system buyer’s guide, which breaks down exactly what parts you’d want for one of three levels of computer: a “budget box,” a “hot rod,” or a “God box.”Â The 2008 guide published last fall; make sure you use the most recent one when you start your research. I started by plugging parts from Ars’ “hot rod” system list intoÂ Newegg to get a sense of price and see if there were any deals, coupons or upgrades. In the end I didn’t use Ars’ exact recommendations, but it was an awesome, up-to-date, jumping-off point.

Your research into parts is the most important stage of the process. For first-timers it can be bewildering, and you will have questions. Just keep reading, take notes, consult with forums or sales associates, and remember that if you make the wrong purchase you can always return it for the right one. In the photo to the left you’ll see my build’s case, motherboard, power supply, CPU, and RAM. (I had a video card, DVD drive, and a hard drive from an old machine I planned to use in my new build.)

SeeÂ this entire comment thread for more resources on deciding what parts to buy for your budget.

Get Down and Dirty

Once you’ve got your hot little hands on all the parts you need, the real fun begins. There are two stages to your build: the hardware stage, and the software stage. Adam’s already covered how to install each individual hardware component. Here’s the list:

Once you’ve got everything plugged in and mounted inside your case, leave the case sides off and plug in your keyboard, mouse, monitor, and power, and press the On button. This is the moment of truth. The first time you see the lights come on and the system setup appear on-screen, you’ll feel like you’ve just arrived at the top of Mount Everest.

If the machine doesn’t power on, or there’s no video signal, or the keyboard doesn’t workjust unplug everything and check your connections. It took me a few hair-pulling, teeth-gnashing attempts to get my new build to boot properly. If it doesn’t work the first time, take a breath, unplug it all, and try again. Don’t cry; that won’t help.

Once you’re into the machine’s BIOS setup, key around and make sure the motherboard recognizes your DVD or CD drive and your hard drive. You’ll need those working in order to install your operating system. Everything there? Now set your boot sequence to check your optical drive first. Insert your operating system’s disc into your CD or DVD drive, and restart the machine. Now your operating system’s setup will launch on boot, and you can install away.

In the meantime, blast very loud rock music, strut about the vicinity, arms upraised, and revel in your greatness.

Mistakes I Made That You Can Avoid

When you build your first PC, keep a few things in mind I wished I’d realized before I started.

Beware of the “Frankenbuild.” A great way to save money on your new PC is using parts that you’ve already got around. But I was overly optimistic about what items from my very old Dell tower would work in my new system. I assumed my hard drive would work (it did, but it was an IDE drive, which I wound up replacing with a faster SATA model), I hoped my video card would work (it didn’t), and I thought my DVD drive would work (it did). In the end I wound up buying parts I thought I’d be able to reuse, so my total price wasn’t as low as my initial estimate.
Expect mishaps. I bought the wrong motherboard. Well, not the wrong one, but one that didn’t have a FireWire port, which I wanted. Well, I had a FireWire card, but it didn’t fit into the motherboard. Anyway, I figured all this outÂ after I installed the CPU, which meant I had to remove it from the board, break the thermal compound seal, and ship the motherboard back. When I got the new motherboard and reinstalled the CPU, because the thermal compound left there didn’t work anymore, the machine would start and within 10 seconds overheat and shut itself off. Next thing you know I’mÂ scraping hardened thermal compound off the CPU with Goof Off and a credit card, and reapplying fresh from a tube I had to pick up from Radio Shack. Lesson: there will be mishaps. Expect crap to go wrong. Be confident in your ability to fix it after you Google the solution to the problem hundreds of people have had before you did.
Read the frakkin’ manual. With years of tinkering in my PC’s case under my belt, I went into my build eager to start working and only skimmed the user guides and online howto’s before I started. Don’t do that. Open and read the full-on manual that comes in the box with every single one of your parts. If you’re not sure about something said manual includes, do your research before you plug anything in.
Buy locally if you can. My initial parts order was fromÂ Newegg, which was great price-wise, but really sucked when I had to return my motherboard, because I had to pay shipping fees and a restocking fee. With a Fry’s down the road, I regretted not just buying everything at the store itself from the get-go to to make returns easier.
Give yourself lots of time. I wrongly assumed I’d be able to finish my build in a day, but it took two whole days and stressed me out because they were work days. Don’t build a new PC when you’re on deadline or otherwise pinched for time. Give yourself a whole weekend and a clean and spacious work area that you can leave filled with packing debris and electronic parts strewn about for a few days.

Have you built your own PC? Are you considering taking the leap? Let us know how it went or what you’re thinking in the comments.

Google Chrome OS (w/ video)

Damien Benoit — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:29:41 +0000

So Google finally let loose withÂ a real glimpse at Chrome OS today, unveiling it at an event in Mountain View today. It’s pretty much what we’ve thought all along: a bootable browser with an affinity for web apps – especially Google’s.As you’d expect from a “browser OS,” Google pretty much admits that Chrome OS isn’t really intended for offline use. They see devices running Chrome as a compliment to the existing systems in your home or office. Local storage? That’s not really part of the big picture either. Everything you save heads straight for the cloud.

It has a few good features from MAC a few from PC and obviously Google’s spin on things with features like the notification panel and such. Check out Google’s first produced video telling you exactly why they made this thing.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And Google’s staunch “no third party apps” stance means that no, you won’t be running Firefox on Chrome OS. Google doesn’t want other apps playing in their sandbox, it would seem.

Personally, it looks like I’ll enjoy playing with Chrome OS but I can’t see myself relying on it for day-to-day computing. I’d prefer to at least run a lightweight but fuller-featured linux distribution likeÂ xPudorÂ Crunchbang where I have more flexibility.

I own a Dell Mini 9 and would like to see it running Google Chrome OS. But I will always need my Adobe & Digidesign products to run my business. So until it runs everything then its just a netbook OS to me. Lastly, enjoy their actual demo part of the day video where they boot this baby up supa fast! Oh yeah!

Click here to view the embedded video.

New Website: Paper Your Screen .com

Damien Benoit — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 07:11:06 +0000

I just released a new website with a few other graphic designers called PaperYourScreen.com. This website is in its very beginning stages but overall I want a place to put all the designs I make for my iPhone as well as a place for other designers that I know. I hope this website will build alot more and mostly I just programmed the back end so its easy to organize and setup the wallpapers per each designer so far and there is alot left to add to this site, but please dont let that steer you away from checking out, rating and commenting on the various wallpaper designs that are made. If you have an iPhone, then this is a great add to your favorites when you want to go look for some new wallpapers.

Though at the time of this post we only have iPhone wallpapers, I am working on adding wallpapers for any screen size and type, hence the name paper your screen! So please go check out the webpage and start rating and commenting the images in there so far. The design of the site will be changing alot so please come back if not to see the wonderfully designed new wallpapers from various artists but also for the new layout changes we will be adding as we go.

View site

’09 iPhone Ringtone Collection

Damien Benoit — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 22:02:52 +0000

Since a long time ago making alot of calm sounding ringtones for people I decided I should just go ahead and give you guys my complete list of this months ringtone collection. People seem to like to come to the site for my ringtones so what the hell right? If you are interested in getting your own ringtones made even songs completely made like with your own saying being chanted or what not, do not be affraid to ask for something in the comments or however you guys want to contact me.

This is just a zip file that’s about 26 MB full of m4r files that you just place anywhere and drag into your iTunes and then drag or sync to your iPhone. Others that are smarter and need mp3′s for whatever phone, just open these files and convert to mp3 using your favorite audio editor tool like Audition or Sound Forge or maybe Audacity if that opens that format. Pretty simple right? Good!

Here is a quick list of just some of the songs you’ll get

Kanye West – Heartbreak Collection
311 – Random
Basket Case
Beatles Songs
Big Booty Hoes (Hump wit it!!!)
Brad Sucks
C’mon ride that Train!
System of a Down – Chop Suet
Do the Stinky Leg
Eazy E
Some Gangsta shit!
House of Pain – Jump Around
I CAN BREAK THESE CUFFS (anyone remember this?)
Kris Kros – Jump
Ice Ice Baby
Mary Jane
Me So Horny
My Dick
STP – Plush
Flobots
& MORE!!!

Got some surprise ones in there too, so if you appreciate this list, please digg it and rate it and comment on it. Let me know when you guys want more. Bringin it to ya!

Download Zip File

Garageband tools in your web browser

Damien Benoit — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 17:56:39 +0000

Iâ€™ve always been opposed to using online audio editing tools, because I havenâ€™t found them to be robust or fast enough to be compelling to use. Myna just might change that, because think about how convenient it could be to start a project on one computer and pick it up some place else.Aviary is already well-established as an online image editing suite, but today the company is expanding its creative reach and bringing multi-track audio editing to the cloud.

The service, called Myna, is sort of like Garage Band in your web browser. You can import audio directly into it, record a track into the application, or use clips from one of Aviaryâ€™s provided clip libraries.

All audio effects are non-destructive and you can automate fades and pans, modify gain over time, loop, stretch and reverse audio clips and more. Once youâ€™ve got your track just the way you want it, you can mixdown to your desktop or publish directly to your Aviary account.

The entire process takes place inside your web browser (Adobe Flash is required) and the interface is both robust and easy to use. Anyone familiar with multi-track audio apps will be familiar with Mynaâ€™s layout, and I was impressed with the speed of the app. You can playback clips before dragging them to the time line, which is really nice.

Check out this video demonstration:

Click here to view the embedded video.

How do you edit your audio? What do you think about using online editing tools?

337 Media Studios » Technology

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