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MyPunchBowl, an
eVite competitor that opened its doors early last year, has
launched a ‘2.0′ version of its site that features a revamped interface and a very
impressive custom E-card creator.
MyPunchBowl CEO Matt Douglas says that his team has integrated improvements throughout the site
for the new release, including an enhanced address book, the ability to send test invites (to
make sure they appear correctly in mail clients), and various UI changes. And while these
features are welcome additions to the site, the site’s most significant release is easily
its E-card Design Studio.
Douglas, who worked at Adobe for years, says that his team has created a card designer that is
similar in many ways to Adobe’s Photoshop. While the designer has a very intuitive and
simple interface, it allows users to manipulate layer opacity, color, and texture with very
little effort. Users are offered a library of pre-made cards as well as some basic templates, all
of which can be customized to include user-defined text, fonts, and colors. While many users will
simply choose one of the pre-fabricated cards, the flexibility afforded by the designer will
definitely appeal to a large portion of MyPunchBowl’s userbase.
Of course, these cards will only appear in Email form for now, but Douglas says that the company
is in talks with major printers. While there a many other places to get custom cards printed, the
ability to send both electronic and traditional invites (especially ones that look so nice) could
give MyPunchBowl a leg up on its many competitors.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear
drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Deerhoof - Offend
Maggie
With equal time devoted to Deerhoof’s sweet, challenging and reflective sides, Offend
Maggie is one of the band’s most balanced albums. Shades of The Runners
Four’s sprawling experimentalism, Friend Opportunity’s economic pop and
Apple O’s galloping riffs can be heard throughout these songs, but they never feel
scattered — they just feel like natural additions to Deerhoof’s consistently
interesting, and continually changing, body of work.
Bob Dylan - The
Bootleg Series, Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs - Rare and Unreleased 1989-2006
The eighth volume in Bob Dylan’s official bootleg series focuses on the songwriter from
1989’s Oh Mercy straight through 2006’s Modern Times. There are
many stops –and surprises–along the way. It offers a better picture of Dylan through
the 1990s and into the new millennium than his released studio records suggest, and is, if
anything, a new Bob Dylan record rather than an odds and sods collection.
Lambchop - OH
(Ohio) OH (Ohio), Lambchop’s tenth proper album, finds the band in masterful form; Kurt
Wagner and his seven accompanists (with two additional musicians helping out with horns and
woodwinds) bring a dazzling sense of grace, balance, and drama to the melodies, and while one
senses the size of the ensemble while listening to these songs, there’s no clutter or waste
in the arrangements, and Lambchop is able to generate a compelling emotional immediacy no matter
how broad their musical canvas.
Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s -
Not Animal
Following a spat with Epic Records, Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s were forced to
issue two concurrent albums: Animal, the band’s preferred sophomore record, and
Not Animal, which featured enough marketable material to appease their label. Not
Animal is anything but a commercially-minded album, however. While the band’s debut
effort drew parallels to Sufjan Stevens and Arcade Fire, this record is more introverted and
melancholy, with the 8 bandmates rarely piling their instruments into lush musical heaps. Not
Animal is a challenging listen, perhaps, but it grows all the more rewarding as the album
progresses.
Oasis - Dig Out
Your Soul
Colorful and dense where Don’t Believe the Truth was straightforward, Dig Out
Your Soul finds Oasis reconnecting to the churning psychedelic undercurrents in their music.
This is heavy, murky music, as dense, brutal and loud as Oasis has ever been, building upon the
swagger of Don’t Believe and containing not a hint of the hazy drift of their late
’90s records: it’s what Be Here Now would have sounded like without the
blizzard of cocaine and electronica paranoia.
Jay Reatard - Matador
Singles ‘08
Jay Reatard spent much of 2008 releasing singles for his new label Matador, six in all.
Matador Singles ‘08 collects all the tracks and adds one song as a bonus. The
songs find Reatard moving away from the frantic wildness of earlier records and into a more
mature and tuneful direction. That said, there are still plenty of racous rockers mixed in among
the acoustic guitar-driven and melodic mid-tempo songs.
Rainmaker Research has announced Spell Catcher
X 10.3, a new release of thecollection of writing productivity tools. Among other things, it
provides spell checking services for more than a dozen languages, and combines its multilingual
spell checking with a suite of writing productivity tools. Among its features are:
My apologies if this has been answered or if it is obvious, but I can't find anything on it. I
would like to find a simple list of movies new to the iTunes store each Tuesday, both for sale and
for rent. I know that the store has a new release section, but my experience is that the new
release section is not comprehensive. For example, if an "old" movie (something from the 90s) goes
online for rental, it may not be in the new release section.
I know there is a web site devoted to nothing more than the .99 cent movie of the week. ( http://www.99rental.com/ ) That's
the kind of thing I have in mind; just a simple one-stop-shop for knowing what is new to the iTunes
movie store.
Windows/Linux: Picasa, Google's photo management tool, has quietly
announced a new beta that adds basic movie editing, fuller syncing to Web Albums, and many
other features and changes. Actually, the biggest change in the new Picasa isn't in the software
itself—it's a new "quick view" utility, which replaces the basic double-click viewing
tool in Windows with a Picasa-friendly, drop-cloth-style window. Five new collage styles have also
been added to the offerings, and Picasa's new "Move Maker" tool lets you create slideshow-style
clips out of stills or trim and paste video clips together. Check out Picasa's help section for
more details on what's new and what's
changed, or read on for a peek at some screenshots from the new release. Note: These screenshots come from Picasa 3's Windows release. The Linux
version—which, like previous editions, is basically an enhanced port run through
WINE—lacks the movie editing function and has a few other differences (which you can read
about at the Linux edition's what's new
and what's changed pages).
During the installation process, Picasa 3 will ask whether you want to enable the "Picasa Photo
Viewer," the aforementioned quick-view tool that opens when you double-click an image file. I like
the way it puts a dimming "drop cloth" on the screen, as well as the scroll-button scaling and
Picasa tools—including Gmail-friendly "Email"—available under the "More"
button.
The "movie editor" is a bit under-powered, in my opinion. I like how, with still pictures, Picasa
gives you an uncluttered selection of basic editing and viewing tools, but makes the geeky stuff
available in the corner menus. With the movie editor, there's just basic trimming and ordering of
clips. More annoyingly, there's no editing functionality with QuickTime/.MOV files—the
kind that many consumer-grade digicams shoot. Still, if you're just putting together shots from a
family gathering and you're already a Picasa fan, it's not a bad place to get it done. There's also
easy YouTube integration and screencap tools.
Picasa added a whole bunch of collage types to its offerings, as well as jumped the level of
control you have over spacing, file selection, and other options.
The text feature is slyly genius. For whatever reason, many photo editors make you outline a "box"
to put your text in, and going back to make edits is often a real pain. With Picasa, you can just
click anywhere, start typing, then grab and manipulate the box to edit it later. Importing photos directly from a memory card seems to move a bit quicker, and, in a welcome
move, the photos you're importing are now grouped together by the blocks of time they were taken
together. In other words, you won't have to click and check through tiny thumbnails to figure out
exactly where Aunt Lily's birthday ends and your ragin' BBQ party began.
The Picasa team pulled a major re-design on the bottom toolbar, hiding away some of the more
simplistic tools and going big on the social ones. Depending on how and why you used Picasa in the
past, this might be a welcome time saver. If not, you can always edit which options get the
big-button treatment. One thing you'll definitely notice is the continuing emphasis on uploading to, and using, Picasa
Web Albums to share and back up your photos. There's a new button in the upper-right of every album
folder that allows you to "sync" your photos to a web album, which would push your local changes to
the web and pull down data to your desktop. If you're more of a Flickr user, the Picasa2Flickr button plug-in has been
updated for this beta.
You can grab a copy of the free Picasa 3 beta for Windows and Linux at the link below. Already
on-board the beta and got some grievances or glad-hands? Tell us about them in the comments. Picasa 3 beta [Google]
Windows/Linux: Picasa, Google's
photo management tool, has quietly announced a new
beta that adds basic movie editing, fuller syncing to Web Albums, and many other features and
changes. Actually, the biggest change in the new Picasa isn't in the software itself—it's a
new "quick view" utility, which replaces the basic double-click viewing tool in Windows with a
Picasa-friendly, drop-cloth-style window. Five new collage styles have also been added to the
offerings, and Picasa's new "Move Maker" tool lets you create slideshow-style clips out of stills
or trim and paste video clips together. Check out Picasa's help section for more details on
what's new and
what's changed, or
read on for a peek at some screenshots from the new release.
Note: These screenshots come from Picasa 3's Windows release. The Linux
version—which, like previous editions, is basically an enhanced port run through
WINE—lacks the movie editing function and has a few other differences (which you can read
about at the Linux edition's what's new and what's changed
pages).
During the installation process, Picasa 3 will ask whether you want to enable the "Picasa Photo
Viewer," the aforementioned quick-view tool that opens when you double-click an image file. I
like the way it puts a dimming "drop cloth" on the screen, as well as the scroll-button scaling
and Picasa tools—including Gmail-friendly "Email"—available under the "More" button.
The "movie editor" is a bit under-powered, in my opinion. I like how, with still pictures, Picasa
gives you an uncluttered selection of basic editing and viewing tools, but makes the geeky stuff
available in the corner menus. With the movie editor, there's just basic trimming and ordering of
clips. More annoyingly, there's no editing functionality with QuickTime/.MOV files—the kind
that many consumer-grade digicams shoot. Still, if you're just putting together shots from a
family gathering and you're already a Picasa fan, it's not a bad place to get it done. There's
also easy YouTube integration and screencap tools.
Picasa added a whole bunch of collage types to its offerings, as well as jumped the level of
control you have over spacing, file selection, and other options.
The text feature is slyly genius. For whatever reason, many photo editors make you outline a
"box" to put your text in, and going back to make edits is often a real pain. With Picasa, you
can just click anywhere, start typing, then grab and manipulate the box to edit it later.
Importing photos directly from a memory card seems to
move a bit quicker, and, in a welcome move, the photos you're importing are now grouped together
by the blocks of time they were taken together. In other words, you won't have to click and check
through tiny thumbnails to figure out exactly where Aunt Lily's birthday ends and your ragin' BBQ
party began.
The Picasa team pulled a major re-design on the bottom toolbar, hiding away some of the more
simplistic tools and going big on the social ones. Depending on how and why you used Picasa in
the past, this might be a welcome time saver. If not, you can always edit which options get the
big-button treatment.
One thing you'll definitely notice is the continuing
emphasis on uploading to, and using, Picasa Web Albums to share and back up your photos. There's
a new button in the upper-right of every album folder that allows you to "sync" your photos to a
web album, which would push your local changes to the web and pull down data to your desktop. If
you're more of a Flickr user, the Picasa2Flickr
button plug-in has been updated for this beta.
You can grab a copy of the free Picasa 3 beta for Windows and Linux at the link below. Already
on-board the beta and got some grievances or glad-hands? Tell us about them in the comments.
EJB 3.1 specification lead Ken Saks, presents the main points behind the new release of this often
controversial enterprise Java technique, which is slated to form part of Java EE 6.
Berbie Software announces an update for TrailRunner 1.8, the outdoor oriented route-planning and journaling software for Mac
OS X. Among other improvements, the latest update has a full integration with GPSies – a
community web site to store, view and share outdoor activities and routes. With this new release,
TrailRunner...
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Deerhoof - 
Bob Dylan - 
Lambchop - 
Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s -
Oasis - 
Jay Reatard - 
Windows/Linux: Picasa, Google's photo management tool, has 
Importing photos directly from a memory card seems to move a bit quicker, and, in a welcome
move, the photos you're importing are now grouped together by the blocks of time they were taken
together. In other words, you won't have to click and check through tiny thumbnails to figure out
exactly where Aunt Lily's birthday ends and your ragin' BBQ party began.
One thing you'll definitely notice is the continuing emphasis on uploading to, and using, Picasa
Web Albums to share and back up your photos. There's a new button in the upper-right of every album
folder that allows you to "sync" your photos to a web album, which would push your local changes to
the web and pull down data to your desktop. If you're more of a Flickr user, the 
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