Thursday, September 6, 2007
The new version allows you to customize your desktop and folder icons even in your PDA
Today we announce the release of Icon Craft 4.11, a new step made by the programmers from Icon Empire. This graphic editor now supports the TGA format, which allows you to create icons and toolbars for your Personal Digital Assistants. Icon Craft is armed with a variety of flexible tools, which are able to turn the faint glimmer of your interface into a festival of colors. Icons processing tools, which are standard for Icon Craft, include color picker, eraser, color replacer, pencil, paintbrush, flood fill, airbrush, line, curved line, arc, text insertion, rectangle, ellipse, etc. Functionality of a good modern icon editor implies that it is certain to support such essential components as layers, channels, image transparency control and the like.
A multitude of special effects are at your disposal. You can rotate, flip, roll, drop shadow, smoothsharpen, apply huesaturation, and use brightness. Thus, step-by-step and stroke-by-stroke new graphic images can arise on your screen: new icons, animated icons, cursors and the like. Having launched the program, you come across a navigation menu, where you can select an action you need to perform: create a new icon, create an icon from an image file, open an existing file, find icons in folders, extract icons from your computer and even more. Another important feature in Icon Craft is its ability to download icons right from the Internet.
The benefits of the program go far beyond the bounds of what is mentioned above. Icon Craft supports a multitude of graphic formats, including ICO, CUR, ANI, BMP, JPEG, JPG, PNG, GIF, PSD, PDD, TGA, TIF, TIFF, WMF, EMF, WBMP, XMP, etc. The program ensures that icon management is pure pleasure, which requires no special skills. This is the reason, why working with icon libraries is so easy here. The merits of this icon editor can be comprehensively assessed by everybody, who wants to find, extract, create and edit icons, cursors, manage icon libraries and image lists.
Icon Craft Features at a Glance:
- Edits icons, static and animated cursors, icon libraries, image lists;
- Creates new icons for Personal Digital Assistants;
- Creates and edits smooth semi-transparent icons, static and animated cursors for XP;
- Features standard and custom icon sizes, with color depth up to 32-bit True Color;
- Paints images with gradient and chess fill;
- Creates multi-layer images;
- Modifies images with a variety of special effects;
- Imports and exports a multitude of graphic formats;
- Manages icon libraries for better and more efficient image storage;
- Extracts icons from files;
- Downloads icons from the Internet;
- Searches for icons in folders;
- Modifies icons contained inside executables;
- Converts or applies effects to multiple icons at once;
- Customizes your desktop and folder icons
Pricing and Availability
Icon Craft runs under Windows 9x-NT-2000-XP and costs $39.95 (USD) or 30 (EUR). Volume discounts are available. We offer a 30-day money-back guarantee. A trial version of Icon Craft that contains a nag screen and allows you to save 7 files only is available as a free download at http://www.iconempire.com/downloads/iconcraft.exe (2.16 Mb)
About Icon Empire
Founded in 2005, Icon Empire is a software company focused on the development of graphics processing programs for the Windows platforms. Our catalogue contains such highly praised software tools as ICL-Icon Extractor, IconoMaker, Icon Processor and Pixel Editor. For more information, please visit http://www.iconempire.com
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AN EVALUATION COPY IS AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST
Product page link: http://www.iconempire.com/iconcraft/index.htm
Download link: http://www.iconempire.com/downloads/iconcraft.exe
E-mail: support@iconempire.com
Web: http://www.iconempire.com
Postal address: Pacific Business Centre, Att: Icon Empire, #101 - 1001 W. Broadway, Suite 381, Vancouver, BC V6H 4E4, Canada
Phone: 206-309-0821
Video Game Testing for Profits
Video game testing can be fun and profitable. Do to the massive growth in the video game industry; they need video game testers. Companies will pay up to $80 an hour for your help in testing video games.
The requirements of video game testing are you have to have a video game system or PC to test the video games and you have to be 15 years or older.
Here is how it works:
1. You have to find a video game testing job. Finding a video game testing job can be difficult, unless you have a friend that tests video games. Once you get in to video game testing, if you fail to complete an assignment you will lose your job.
2. Get the assignment and video game to test. The company that wants you to test the video game will send you the game and a form that you fill out after you are done testing the video game. The form normally wants to tell them of any glitches or mistakes in the game. When you are done with the form, send it back to the company.
3. Go to your mailbox and get your check. Normally it will take two weeks after you send in you are assignment to get your check. In addition, some of the companies let you keep the video game you tested.
I hope this article was insightful on the video game testing industry. The pay as a video game tester is rather good. If you like to play video games all day long, why not get paid for it?
Working as a video game tester, you can earn up to $80 an hour to test new video games on your PC or Video game console. Visit Video Game Tester to start video game testing today.
New technical developments are revolutionizing LIMS
By Stefano Marocco, Account Manager and Elian Winstanley, Managing Director at STARLIMS, UK
New technical developments are revolutionizing LIMS. The advent of web-enabled systems has provided a paradigm shift in technology, enabling LIMS access from almost anywhere. Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a simple, very flexible text format that was originally designed to meet the challenges of large-scale electronic publishing. It is rapidly becoming the common data language, playing an increasingly important role in the exchange of a wide variety of data on the web and elsewhere.
When coupled with web services (web based enterprise applications that use open, XML-based standards and transport protocols to exchange data with calling clients), the power of XML becomes fully evident. No longer is it necessary to create expensive custom interfaces to enable communication between disparate business systems. Using web services, one system can use the exposed functionality of another as if it were its own. For instance, when a new batch of raw material arrives, the details are entered into a manufacturing resource planning (MRP) system and the lot placed in quarantine awaiting laboratory analysis.
The MRP system can call a 'sample login' service published by the LIMS and provide a data transfer object (DTO) that includes the relevant information about the sample that should be logged. The web service performs the relevant sample registration transactions on the LIMS, hiding their complexity from the calling application. Once the sample has been processed in the laboratory and shown to meet specification, the LIMS can invoke a web service published by the MRP system that will update the lot status, releasing the raw material for use.
Web services can also be used to create an efficient and secure relationship with remote customers, suppliers or data clients, allowing them to request sample analysis, view testing status and print certificates of analysis, invoices or other reports via a browser based interface. This means that clients can access an organization's LIMS securely without having to download and install special software.
A collaborative LIMS can provide vital information throughout the manufacturing cycle. Providing quality data determined by inspection of raw materials can provide the needed information to tune the production process to yield acceptable final products. An integrated production and laboratory solution can alert purchasing to procure additional raw material if a lot fails incoming inspection. Shipments can be quickly released after final quality control checks. Should a non-compliant lot be inadvertently shipped, fast, efficient flow of information will ensure a recall can be quickly implemented.
Without traceability records, it would be nearly impossible to accomplish product recalls in a timely manner. Additionally, implementation of a LIMS-informed logistics and scheduling system at various stages of production can better manage the delivery of products by taking appropriate action to accommodate unplanned production issues.
Traditionally, laboratories have operated autonomously and are among the last domains to be fully integrated into the overall organization. LIMS applications typically focused on organizing laboratory data, tracking samples and providing results, often only in the form of a pass or fail for the lot. Increasingly sophisticated manufacturing processes in industries such as chemical, food and beverage, and pharmaceutical are dramatically increasing the number of laboratory analyses required.
Increased product quality and increasing regulatory compliance issues means that laboratory data must be readily accessible to both people and systems across the enterprise. Manufacturers are now discovering that quick access to laboratory data is just as valuable to operations as it is to achieving regulatory compliance. They are also beginning to realize that LIMS data is as important as other sources of real-time data in the manufacturing process, and that the data must be integrated with other business and process control systems to enable real-time performance management (RPM) initiatives. The recent developments within LIMS have meant that collaborative LIMS solutions have 'come of age', and result in productivity gains and reduced costs across the organization, leveraging operation excellence.
For more information visit www.starlims.com
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Stefano Marocco is an Account Manager at the UK STARLIMS office. Primarily an expert in LIMS implementation, he offers advice on how to develop time- and cost-effective solutions that optimise automation of laboratories' operations, and ways to manage samples in an environment that complies with regulatory requirements. Stefano holds an honours degree in Business Studies from South Bank University, London. He has over five years' experience in the LIMS industry, particularly in the pharmaceutical sector, gained with various solution providers.
Elian Winstanley has been involved with LIMS since the early 1990s. He has led teams who have successfullyimplemented LIMS for clients in a wide variety of market sectors including pharmaceutical, environmental monitoring, chemical manufacturing, food and beverage and contract laboratories. After graduating from Manchester University with a joint honours degree in Pharmacology and Physiology, followed by a masters in Physiology, he worked as a Liquid Chromatography and Data Systems specialist for a major laboratory instrument supplier before moving to laboratory information management. He currently manages the UK STARLIMS office.
The authors can be contacted at stefano@starlims.com
and elian@starlims.com
