If you use Macintosh and have trouble finding a good Photoshop, free or cheap, replacement never fear. I am actually amazed at the limited amount of paint applications there are for OS X. Windows has millions, like Paint.Net which is free, Gimp, Paint Shop Pro, Corel Photopaint, you name it.

The closest I could find to Photoshop is Gimpshop . Gimpshop is great and it is GPL, free as in beer, but it runs in x11 which some dislike. Another that runs kind of native? is Pixel Image Editor , but it is really buggy, does not have plug-in support, and I couldn't get the license to work in OS X Tiger 10.3 or 10.4! I also had tons of problems with it in Linux. It looks really promising, but the lack of support and paying to beta test is kind of annoying. I also tried Seashore . Seashore is a great application and it's free, but it lacks the high end features you find in professional graphics programs. If you need limited image editing for photo cropping and touch up it's perfect.

What OS X really needs is a Paint.Net! Seems most Mac developers are in it for the money, which is a shame, but whatever... I am sure there are some commercial products I have missed, but one application that I looked at really looked interesting! It's the Paint.Net for OS X and has a lot of features found in Photoshop, plus some, and it's pretty.

I couldn't find much on Licensing, but from a post I read it appears to be much nicer than Adobe's strict licensing. Also not sure if it has been released, I couldn't find a download link. Either way Pixelmator looks damned cool. At the very least visit the site and give it a look over.

Just a short post on this, too cool to not share for those who haven't seen it. Make music with tangible items. This is pretty cool stuff. Although it is not currently available commercially it is being used and I am sure will take of in a year or two. They provide the software to interface (GPL), but not all the pieces you will need.  They also provide instructions to build your own table. Looks to be a pretty involved process, but could be fun and well worth it when you're finished. 

Visit the Reactable web-site , they do live shows so take a look at their schedule while you're there.

Yesterday I decided to try out canvas since I had seen some cool stuff, especially the 3-D. I am currently working on a dashboard so I decided to try and make a live gauge to replace the Flash gauges I was working on. I found a couple of nice graphing scripts, which I will be looking at next, but gauges and meters are non-existent.

 Here is a screen shot of this gauge if you're not sure what I am talking about:

5/8/2008: So I decided to play with Mootools, ajax, JSON, and the pure Canvas\JS gauge and now have a pure javascript gauge that is updated live getting data in JSON format. If you want to check it out it is here . 

5/10/20008: Made a Flash gauge updated using Mootools 1.2  Request.json() for live updating, which can be found here . If you want to learn how to add a Flash object using Mootools and send a variable to Flash automatically without manual data input this will be good for you to take a look at. It's super easy too...

If you're looking for an open source dynamic Flash graphing system for your web-site you can find a really nice one called Open Flash Chart . The server side is PHP and text for the data with the graphs being displayed in Flash. I see no reason why the back end couldn't be written to support ASP, Python, Java script, or whatever. These charts are similar to Fusioncharts, very nice. I was thinking about making these, but I don't have the time so this just rocks!  

Fusioncharts is commercial, but they do have a free version for non-commercial use here .

Bumptop is a really cool 3-D desktop that totally changes the way you handle files. I also like the way SkyOS handles file management, execution, and searching but Bumptop is just cool and it doesn't require typing or guessing alphabetically to find things. It would be very cool if SkyOS offered Bumptop as an alternative to their already amazing OS! 

Considering I haven't used Bumptop I can't really say much more about it, but it is something I find really interesting, because I am a very visual person, and I would love a more visual desktop for handling files and such. There is a You Tube video I watched awhile back that shows it in action, which is here .