visual

In case you weren't paying attention, 2009 was a banner year for big, big visual effects movies.

And the teams that crafted the most impressive work were honored Tuesday morning, along with all the best and brightest in filmmaking, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the nominations for the 2010 Oscars.

Here at CNET News we have a special place in our heart, as you might expect, for visual-effects-heavy movies because of the fantastic amounts of technology and computing power that goes into them.

As usual, the Academy chose just three films as visual-effects nominees. … Read more

Update at 8:25 a.m. PST Feb. 2: "Avatar" has snagged nine Oscar nominations: visual effects, best picture, art direction, cinematography, directing, film editing, sound editing, sound mixing, and music (original score).

When the trumpets sound Tuesday morning and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announces its annual Oscar nominations, could there be any more of a sure thing than that James Cameron's mega-hit "Avatar" will grace the list of visual effects honorees?

After all, while many people have enjoyed the film's sprawling anti-colonialism storyline, there's little doubt that what … Read more

We have to preface this by saying that we are engaged to a big graphic design nerd, and we know without asking what he would think of Visual Business Cards. There's a lot of bad design out there, and unfortunately, Visual Business Cards seems to be in the business of propagating it. Although the program is quite easy to use, we're afraid that more often than not it will result in tacky, amateurish business cards.

The program loses any design credibility it may have had by setting Comic Sans as the default font. We do give Visual Business … Read more

Multi Project Planner offers a vast array of tools to manage complex projects. It has all that you need to oversee any project, but its overwhelming options may hold some back.

The program's interface is clean and useful but a bit disorienting from the start because of an embarrassment of riches: Multi Project Planner offers so many details that its commands are difficult to memorize. Even the tutorials are confusingly dense with instructions and examples. In the end, Multi Project Planner produces readable, multicolored charts showcasing every aspect of a project, from daily responsibilities of individuals to total man … Read more

Update (11:49 a.m.): Weta Digital has been contacted for comment, and this story will be updated when and if the company responds.

SAN FRANCISCO--About a year ago, with James Cameron's science-fiction epic "Avatar" well under way, it became clear that Weta Digital, the visual effects studio doing much of the computer generated imagery, or CGI, on the project, was a bit in over its head.

At that point, the movie, which opened Friday, was about 40 minutes longer than it ended up being, and what was needed to finish the project was another company that … Read more

Microsoft said on Thursday that it would delay by "a few weeks" the launch of its Visual Studio 2010 developer tool suite and version 4.0 of the .Net Framework.

In a blog posting, developer division head S. Somasegar said the company needs more time as it continues to work on some performance issues.

Microsoft had planned to launch the product in March. The company now plans an added test version--a release candidate--to launch in February, with the final version coming a few weeks after the planned March launch.

"Since the goal of the release candidate is … Read more

Electric Sheep is a free screensaver that lets your computer join a global network of computers processing "electric sheep"--striking, ever-changing, abstract fractal animations generated with a genetic algorithm (taking their name from the novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" by Philip K. Dick).

Your computer downloads and displays sheep from the current "flock" as your screensaver, while running in the background, your CPU contributes to the parallel computation and mutation of new sheep, joining thousands of other computers around the world. You can also vote on sheep with your up and down … Read more

Microsoft made two enterprise moves on Monday, one expected and the other a bit of a surprise.

As promised, the company used its TechEd event in Berlin to release Exchange 2010, the latest version of its e-mail and calendar server software. Microsoft finalized the code for the product last month and had said it would launch at TechEd.

Meanwhile, the company also announced it is buying the Teamprise technology from SourceGear. Teamprise allows developers using Eclipse and those working on non-Windows operating systems to build applications using Microsoft's Visual Studio product.

"We know our customers face daily challenges … Read more

One of the best Mac OS X tools in my arsenal of iPhone utilities is Ecamm Network's PhoneView, which lets you retrieve your call history, export contacts, play and save voice memos, search and save SMS messages, play and export music, download photos, and create, edit, and save notes. It even lets you use your iPhone as a disk drive.

Now an update to Phoneview has added three new key features that make the app even more useful.

The first new features let you retrieve MMS messages and view them later on your computer. (The previous versions only handled … Read more