One of my friends informed me of very cool freeware application that allows you to view Photoshop brushes without ever opening Photoshop. The ABRViewer was written by Luigi Bellanca of Italy. This tool allows you to preview, test, manage and cache thumbnails of your favorite brushes.
The following text straight from the site explains the program nicely.
There are lots of wonderful brush sets for photoshop in the web… too many to install them all just to see what they look like! now you can have the preview of a set without having to install it… without having to run photoshop! You can even adjust thumbnails size and you can have the preview of the actual size of the brush… you can also try it out!people who publish brush sets on their personal websites need to provide users with previews. This software is able to generate images for every single brush and can also generate the general image from the panel of the thumbnails you have visualised. I think it’s great, don’t you? 
Here is a screengrab that showcases the brush panel and brush preview.
The program does require the .NET framework but that can quickly be downloaded from Microsoft.
Recently Adobe released Lightroom Beta 4 for both Mac and PC. If you had used Lightroom in the past you will quickly notice the developers overhauled the interface and added a ton of new features. New to the Windows version is the “Web” tab where you can quickly and painlessly turn your library into a web page with only a few clicks. The library tab now offers advanced searching and filtering tools. I have now cut my searching time in half with this new tool and as you can see that “ON” switch is the quick way to disable all filters while still giving the ability to re-enable it by flipping the switch again.
Lightroom filtering options now offer quicker searches.
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You may have noticed that Microsoft recently released a public beta of Internet Explorer 7 (RC 1 at the time of this posting) and there have been mixed thoughts and a ton of false facts. At the top of the false facts list is thinking that IE still has poor/limited PNG support but that simply isn’t true. IE 7 now supports transparent PNG’s and doing so really allows designers to take advantage their amazing quality. Continue Reading »
This book is essential for anyone starting out in PHP, but not only for them. It offers tips for almost any skill level, maybe you know some of the ways to keep your site secure but Chris really goes in depth on some of them.
The code snippets are short, simple, but convey the point exactly as intended… and I also like Chris’s method for validating tainted data, similar to a fisherman. If the fish is bad throw it back and the same goes for user input.
I still have this book for reference and have lent it to a few people which resulted in them picking their own copies… all around a great resource.
Purchase the book from Amazon
Overview
I recently started using the NuLOOQ on my Mac Mini and was pleasantly surprised with its performance. Right out of the box I have been using the NuLOOQ for brush adjustments in Photoshop and controlling my iTunes for easy listening. Then I started to customize the settings and now have some of my other programs configured to use the NuLOOQ as well.One extremely small but super useful feature is the ability to quickly drag around a massive image which allows me to quickly examine an image in Photoshop and make finer corrections. I tend to do a fair amount of photo retouching in my studio and now I am able to adjust my brush sizes but that’s not all, I can also change the hardness, flow or opacity all with the same tool and a simple button press.
Software
The Tooldial software allowed me to quickly change tools in Photoshop, paint with the Wacom tablet and all without ever touching the keyboard. Simply put this is an amazing productivity increase and I have only scratched the surface of the power behind the NuLOOQ’s customizable settings. Continue Reading »
