Software posts

Yesterday, Adobe used the keynote slot of their ‘Create the Web’ event in San Francisco to preview what they hope, will be the next generation of tools that you and I use to build the web.

For those of us not lucky enough to be in the hall with them, the event was streamed online — ironically displayed using Flash Player. That was however, the only dated aspect of the presentation.

Much of the community has been querying Adobe’s commitment to innovation in the last couple of years, especially with the apparent cash cow of...

If you’re anything like me, you’ve always viewed Adobe Illustrator as an incredibly intimidating program. I think Illustrator might have the reputation of being the most complex program designers use.

And because of that, a lot of new designers are afraid to even start using it. They take one look at it and go back to Photoshop.

Sure, I’ve used Illustrator for various projects, but I always felt a little bit like I wasn’t “worthy” of Illustrator. Like I didn’t have the necessary skills to do the program justice.

After attending...

I recently had the opportunity to attend Adobe’s Reviewer’s Workshop in New York, where they covered the new CS6 product suite, including major overhauls to Illustrator, aspects of Photoshop, and the official launch of Adobe Muse.

More interestingly, to me at least, was the new Creative Cloud subscription service. Creatives, especially small agencies and freelancers, have long struggled to pay for Adobe’s products. After all, shelling out hundreds or thousands of dollars for their software can be a struggle for small businesses, really cutting into profits.

Even hiring new employees can be an issue, when you figure that the Design & Web Premium...

As computers, phones and tablets have improved their designs, and as people have become used to apps being as beautiful and intuitive as they are functional, it’s become more and more important to fit in with the aesthetic.

An app may be well built, and can do a job well, but if it’s icon looks anything less than stellar then it can let the user experience down.

Beautiful, well designed app icons can help the app to stand out, and can ensure the app get’s a spot...

[Editor's note: This is a sponsored review for Parallels 7]

One of the long-standing complaints about Macs is that there are more limited software options than for Windows-based PCs.

While the gap has closed in recent years as Macs become more popular (and let’s face it: there are some awesome Mac-only programs that PC owners are rightfully jealous of), there are still programs you can only run on a PC.

And even if the programs you want are available for the Mac, what if you already have Windows licenses for them? Do you really want to spend hundreds of dollars on buying the exact same version of your software, just for a different platform? Can you even afford to do that? Probably not.

Sure,...

Disclaimer: This is a sponsored review for Approval Manager

Any time you’re working in a team environment, it’s likely you’ll need a series of permissions and approvals for various stages of your project.

Managing all these approvals, making sure that they’re done on time, and making sure that the right versions of everything are getting passed along to the right people can be a headache for even the most organized of project managers.

Add into the team mix approvals from clients and it becomes an even bigger hassle.

The truth is, a dedicated proofing and review system...

The folks at BundleHunt have done it again and are back with another great bundle full of all the hottest apps for Mac OS X along with a nice selection of design goodies.

This time around, there are 13 items inside the bundle which are worth a whopping $780.

But fear not, the bundle sells for a mere $49.99 which translates to a whopping 93% discount!

This is a truly great bundle and probably one of their best so far with...

After creating two successful bundles for creatives, our friends at Bundle Hunt are back with their latest installment of popular design resources and applications packaged into one neat and powerful bundle.

This time, the bundle includes 20 great design items valued at over $1,200 and is now on sale for only $49.

The new bundle includes fantastic products such as the Pictos Icon Set, GoMedia Arsenal Ultimate Vector & Font Collections, WordPress themes from...

Ever wondered which are the most popular design tools and their number of users? We did too!

So we partnered with Mostash to create an exclusive infographic depicting the 20 most popular design tools, calculated using a ‘magic’ formula based on the results taken from three different popularity ranking websites.

We used the stats from Software Informer, Wakoopa and iUseThis. For the number of tweets per minute, that you’ll see below, we used the wonderful Twitter Tussle.

The artwork was done by Ricardo Cavolo (all credits appear at the bottom).

Surprised...

A few weeks ago we gave away some copies of Bundle Hunt to some of our readers. As you probably know by now, Bundle Hunt compiles awesome applications, products and services and slash the price really low to make it as affordable as possible.

Today, the Bundle Team has announce a brand new Bundle, called simply Bundle Hunt 2. I’m personally excited to see some great Mac apps, attractive icons and some professional fonts bundled all together in a really high quality package.

The new bundle is packed with even more applications...

Unless you’re a one person web shop with no team to collaborate with, you’ve experienced the frustration that goes along with file sharing. No matter how hard you try, when multiple people are working on a single project without a version control system in place things get chaotic.

If you work with developers on the buildout and implementation of websites, the merge between front-end templates and back-end functionality can be a scary black hole.

Issues like overwrites, lost files, and the all-too-common “working off a previous version” phenomenon crop up constantly. And once back-end functionality has been put into your templates, you become terrified to touch them for fear of breaking something a developer spent a great deal of time getting...