Thursday, June 19, 2008

Firefox 3

It's finally here, and it's AWESOME.

Yes, Firefox 3 has now been officially released, and you can download it here.

Let's just face it, Firefox pWns IE. And now, Firefox 3 pWns it even harder. Right after installing I could tell it was faster. I've never bought into that whole faster thing. With FF2 and IE7, I couldn't tell the difference. But with FF3... it's discernibly faster, and that is awesome :D

But yeah, aside from that, there are some cosmetic changes, and it's now rendering the "dotted" border attribute as rounded dots, rather than square dots, and that's about all I really notice at the moment.

So go download it!

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

CDex Icon

So, remember how I was talking about that CDex icon? This one:

I mentioned I was going to make a new one, and well, I've done just that. Take a look:

So yeah, it pretty much looks nothing like the old one. I originally had the idea to do just do a CD with "ex" in small letters in the bottom corner or something. Then I saw this icon:

designed by Simon Cook, and I thought the X in the middle was great. So I made my own CD with the X in the middle, then put the "e" on the left. It didn't quite feel finished, so I put an upside down "e" on the other side. I thought about doing "e"s all the way around, but it wouldn't have been right.

Like the K-Meleon icon, it took quite a long time. Lots of masks. Lots of different colour choices, but that orange just got into my head.

Anyway, if you want to use it, click here to download it.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Karma K-Meleon

Geez, it's been about a month since I've posted in here. I haven't had much to post about, and I hate just regurgitating other information, so blah.

But anyway, I've found a new hobby (sure to last only a few days). That hobby is creating icons.

It started when I began trying to make my own PS3 theme. I scoured the net for icons to use on the XMB, and came across some really great icons. IconArchive.com, iconBase.com, and IconsPedia.com have some great selections (though you'll find plenty of overlap).

So I d/led some icons to replace various ones on my computer, and started noticing all the ugly icons I had left that I hadn't been able to find replacements for. Well, there was only about 4 or 5 that I thought needed changing, and now there are only 2.

The first icon I made was for Google Talk. The original icon: isn't necessarily ugly, I just wanted something a little more polished. Having searched for that icon up there, it came to my attention that there are quite a few custom icons for Google Talk, but never mind. Anyway, so this is what I came up with:



Note: The pink/green background isn't there on the actual icon.

My second icon was made for K-Meleon. A little known browser running off the same gecko engine as Mozilla, Firefox, etc. I've become a bit of a browser collector lately, using Firefox, Opera, K-Meleon and (only when necessary) IE. But anyway, this was the original icon for K-Meleon: Kind of cutesy, but very pixelated, and not transparent. I went searching for custom icons on Google, but there was nothing. Anyway, it was a VERY long process, but in the end I came up with this:



Much better if I do say so myself. And again, the pink/green background isn't a part of the actual icon.

The next couple I want to replace are the icons for Audacity and CDex. There are a few custom Audacity icons around, but only one of them is any good (to me, at least), and that is this one here. If you want to use the icon, just ask him (I did) and he'll send you the png which is awesome. So here's a plug to JohnLepinski.com. He is one heck of a graphic designer.

The current CDex icon is just plain horrible: I mean it's pixelated, it's not keeping in with the current trends. It's a very Win95 icon :D There's a couple out there for it, but they're not that great either, so I'll have to see what I can come up with.

Btw, if you want that Google Talk icon, it's available here (Creative Commons License).