graphical

The U.S. International Trade Commission today said that Apple is not violating patents held by S3 Graphics in its products and is terminating its investigation on the matter.

The decision follows a mixed ruling in July, where an ITC judge found Apple to be infringing on two of S3 Graphics' patents, while not infringing on two others. A final decision on the matter was due last week, with the ITC electing to postpone it (PDF) until today for reasons unknown.

"Having examined the record of this investigation, including the administrative law judge's final ID and the submissions … Read more

The Khronos Group announced version 1.2 of OpenCL today, an update that gives programmers tighter control over how they run software on graphics chips.

OpenCL is a standard interface that makes it easier for programmers to tap into the "GPGPU" idea--general-purpose graphical processing unit, which runs software such as game physics engines on a computing device's graphics hardware rather than on its central processing unit (CPU). With OpenCL, or with another technology such as Microsoft's rival DirectCompute, a programmer can use a GPGPU approach without having to worry about the particulars of individual graphics chips. … Read more

Last month, Adobe announced its Creative Cloud intelligent dropbox service and six pro-targeted tablet apps; now Creative Cloud (CC) has entered public beta and the apps are available to the select few with Android tablets running Honeycomb 3.1.

I've had a few days to work with the apps, which consist of Photoshop Touch, a tablet-size version of Photoshop from the days when it was just a photo retouching and compositing program; Proto, a Web wire frame-creation tool; Ideas, a vector drawing tool that has been available for a while on iOS; Collage, a tool for assembling random elements … Read more

Food labels can be confusing, but graphic designer Renee Walker aims to change to that.

Walker says most food labels now are complicated and give people too much information. So she set out to create a design that is more visual and graphic, and one that focuses on ingredients. That could in turn lead to healthier eating habits, says Walker.

In this video, she shows SmartPlanet her designs that she's based on blocks of color, with bigger blocks indicating the major ingredients in the food and brighter colors signifying the ingredients that more natural.

This video first appeared at … Read more

The iPhone 4S is a bit of a tough sell for phone showoffs: there are literally no external distinctions to set it apart from an iPhone 4, not even a "4S" logo. Therefore, if you really want to demonstrate what your iPhone 4S can do, you're best off either taking a picture, demoing Siri, or playing a game.

The iPhone 4S has a bumped-up GPU and A5 processor, but few games have taken advantage of the iPhone from the ground up. Those that do offer better textures and lighting, but on a 3.5-inch screen it's hard to tell the difference. Frame rates and game load and launch times generally show improvement as well, but you'd need to be looking for the differences to appreciate them.

Here are five games I've found so far that are iPhone 4S-worthy.… Read more

With the release of OS X Lion, a number of owners of the 15-inch MacBook Pro from mid-2010 found that their systems began showing regular black screens when performing some tasks like manipulating graphics and waking from sleep. We reported on this when it first became an issue and also when OS X 10.7.2 was released.

A short while ago Apple issued a knowledge base article mentioning that it was aware of the black-screen issue with the affected machines, and was working on a fix.

I suspected that this was a hardware-based problem since people affected by it … Read more

With the iPhone picking up steam as a gaming platform, one of the biggest announcements for gamers was that the iPhone 4S' graphics would be seven times faster than its predecessor's. Even though no developers have released a game optimized for the device so far (Infinity Blade II is set to launch December 1), I decided to put some of the more high-quality current games side by side on the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 4S to see if we could spot any difference.

The reason for all the extra speed is the iPhone 4S' dual-core A5 processor, which supposedly has enough horsepower to render complex 3D graphics with significantly high frame rates. This bump in processor power should become particularly apparent once we see some of the new games being developed for the device, but I simply didn't want to wait that long.… Read more

Holy e-comic clash, Batman!

Amazon, apparently in an effort to add muscle to its recently unmasked Kindle Fire tablet, sparked a real-world fight over superhero comic books when it inked a deal with DC Comics for the exclusive digital rights to a hundred popular graphic novels, including Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, the Sandman, and Watchmen.

That arrangement apparently did not sit too well with rival bookseller Barnes & Noble, which has an e-book reader it would like to see flourish. In response to DC's deal, Barnes & Noble removed the physical copies of the titles from its store shelves, … Read more

Now that the Web-standards bug has bitten Adobe Systems, the company is starting to produce some very interesting new technology.

The newest example, revealed at the Adobe Max show this week, are CSS shaders.

This newly proposed standard, developed in cooperation with CSS pioneers Opera and Apple, brings a common 3D graphics ability to the Cascading Style Sheets technology for controlling Web page formatting.

Shaders are small programs run by computers' graphics chips for games and other graphics-intensive applications. Shaders come in two varieties: vertex shaders, which control the geometry of the vertices used to construct the 3D surface meshes, … Read more