graphics

With Apple now on the record about an October 4 iPhone event, analysts are reaffirming their prognostications about the phone's hardware--and adding an item or two to a growing list of specifications.

Chris Whitmore, Deutsche Bank Equity Research, said in a research note Monday that he expects an iPhone 5 with aluminum unibody construction, better camera, and a slightly larger screen size. No big surprise there.

Ashok Kumar, an analyst at Rodman & Renshaw, said on Tuesday he expects better graphics silicon--not unlike the big performance increase that Apple boasted about for the iPad 2.

Piper Jaffray's Gene … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which we answer questions e-mailed in by our readers. This week readers had questions on security software recommendations for Macs, systems pausing while showing green pixels, garbled boot images when booting from the OS X DVD, and Office 2011's Solver utility crashing when launched. We continually answer e-mail questions, and though we present a few answers here, we welcome alternative approaches and views from readers and encourage you to post your suggestions in the comments.

Question: Security software for a new Mac MacFixIt reader "scfox" asks:

Meet MotionStudio 3D, Corel's inaugural entry into the animation and motion graphics software category. Geared more toward novices and prosumers than professionals, this capable newcomer lets you create 3D text and titles, lathe objects, and a variety of animations with relative ease.

MotionStudio's interface is intuitive, which should be comforting to motion graphics novices. The Edit Window displays your project as you work, and can reflect changes in near real-time--with virtually no waiting for rendering. Also, you can drag objects directly within the Edit Window for a more tactile way to customize basic aspects like position, rotation, and … Read more

Corel, maker of the popular VideoStudio Pro and PaintShop Pro franchises, has today released its newest title, MotionStudio 3D. As Corel's first entry into the animation and motion graphics software category, MotionStudio 3D targets multimedia enthusiasts looking to create stunning title sequences and basic 3D animations. While it's not quite a big-budget Hollywood workhorse, the program certainly appears to be good at what it does.

On top of its basic 3D titling and text animation capabilities, MotionStudio also includes a powerful, yet simple particle effects tool that recreates the appearance and movement of elements like bubbles, fire, smoke, … Read more

Intel has released a graphics driver update for its Sandy Bridge processors that boosts performance up to 37 percent for games on Windows 7 and Vista.

"This major graphics driver update for 2nd generation Intel Core processors with Intel HD graphics improves game performance by up to 37% on ULV platforms," Intel said in a statement.

ULV--or Ultra Low Voltage--processors are Intel's most power efficient and are typically used in thin and/or compact laptops such as Hewlett-Packard's updated Pavilion dm1 and Samsung Series 9.

ULV-based systems will see the biggest performance improvement, Intel said. "It is where some of the biggest gains are seen on the driver," Intel spokesman Dave Salvator said. But the driver update applies to all systems with Sandy Bridge processors sporting HD graphics. … Read more

Apple has released a couple of updates that are relevant to people running Boot Camp on their Macs, and for iMac systems. The Boot Camp update brings the version of the drivers to 3.0, and according to the Boot Camp updater Web page, it addresses some critical problems with the version 3.2 driver set. Therefore if you are running Boot Camp, then Apple recommends you install this latest update.

The firmware update for iMac systems will flash their Radeon graphics cards to a new version that will address a problem where the systems were hanging when performing some … Read more

Online note-taking specialist Evernote has acquired Skitch, a Mac app for annotating photos and otherwise editing images, and plans to dramatically expand the software's availability.

For starters, Evernote is making the $20 app free. In addition, "We are committed, not only to making the Skitch Mac app more awesome, but also to bringing Skitch to every desktop and mobile platform under the sun," Evernote's Andrew Sinkov said in a blog post today.

That expansion begins with Skitch's first mobile app, a free download for Android, Evernote said.

"Our goal is to make Skitch a … Read more

Yesterday Apple released the first update to OS X Lion, but people who expected the first update to bring about major changes or fixes to problems that developed with the initial release of the OS may have to wait for a future release. The update is a relatively small one, at around 17MB for some people when downloaded through Software Updaate, but around 80MB as a standalone updater. For now the updater is just a minor bugfix that addresses some of the issues people have had with Lion, and enhanced fixes will likely come with the more hyped 10.7.… Read more

Halftone turns your photographs into captioned comics with a distinctive worn-paper style. Start by snapping a new photo with your iPhone camera or by selecting an image from your photo library. From there, you can use the buttons on the bottom of the interface to select from 27 different paper styles to give your final product that heavily dogeared comic look. You also can add customizable speech balloons and choose from a few different layouts, but we think there should be more layout options--especially multipane formats. For a little more excitement, you can pick from 24 exclamation balloons (Arrrgh! BLAM!) … Read more