As reported on Mashable, the Google Earth techies have coded quite a cool little easter egg into the new version of Google Earth - a flight simulator.
To enter flight sim mode, hit Ctrl+Alt+A on windows, or Command+Option+A on a Mac. This should pop up a window like the one above and allow you to start your flight. The help button is pretty comprehensive and gives you a fulll list of controls.
Occasionally when I’m not being a programmer I find myself playing with various other creative tools, mostly Photoshop, After Effects, and Maya - each application is superbly suited to it’s task.
Recently I’ve been playing with After Effects and trying to pick up tips for post-production video editing when I stumbled across this site. Andrew Kramer has put together some great video tutorials on how to do various things inside After Effects, including the increasingly popular light-saber effect.
The tutorial I was particularly intested in was “Light Streaks“, thanks to the new iPod Nano advert I saw a while ago….
Pretty cool, huh? I wondered at the time if I could recreate something similar so I created a new After Effects project, but got distracted 30 seconds later - until now!
Andrew Kramer’s Light Streaks video tutorial takes you step by step through recreating this effect - just the streaks themselves mind you. I’m pretty sure that with some other skills (colour keying - aka. ‘green screening’) you could convincingly recreate some pretty neat stuff.
If you’re into video editing/post production give his site a look - be warned though, it’s easy to get sucked in for a few hours! Nice one Andy.
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If you’ve ever been sat at a computer and thought “!*@%, I only need to resize (or crop) this picture”, but haven’t had anything to hand except MS paint, Picnik is the solution for you. If you want to quickly import and edit your photos from Flickr, Picnik is the solution for you. If you want to then export your saved photos to Flickr, Photobucket, or Imageshack - Picnik is for you.
Oh yeah - it can take pictures straight from your webcam too.
Picnik is written entirely in Flash so there’s no danger of worrying about Javascript/CSS incompatibilities with your browser. It’s just a slick, quick, and simple way to edit your photos. The main tools it sports are Auto-Fix (available for most filters), Rotate, Crop, Exposure, Colours, Sharpen and Red-Eye removal. Navigating through the list of tools brings up simple easy to use menus for each item.
Having played with Picnik for a little while it’s easy to see that there will certainly be an audience gagging to get their hands on it’s smooth rounded controls and cuddly interface, just because it’s Web 2.0. There is however a much bigger question potential audience available. Obviously Picnik isn’t a replacement for programs like Paint Shop Pro and Adobe Photoshop, but it certainly removes the need to have another image editor installed on your desktop for when you just want to resize something quickly, or change image saturation, colour balance etc. That is Picnik’s biggest selling point.
At the end of the day, if you’re someone who lives in Photoshop for it’s creative abilities - this isn’t going to help you much. Picnik doesn’t allow you to paint with the brush or fill areas etc, but if you only open it to resize your photos before you save them to your blog, visiting the Picnik site will save you about 30 seconds on the loading time and if you make use of their automatic publishing systems it’ll save you a whole lot more too.
Check it out at http://www.picnik.com
