Keyboard shortcuts are one of the important key to speed up productivity. A difficult task can be done easily and rapidly by using the right shortcut keys for an action.

As the biggest multimedia softwares company in the world, Adobe provides Adobe Shortcut App that lets you find and gather the shortcuts you need on your desktop for all creative suite.

If you can’t remember your shortcuts, try Adobe Shortcut App. They’re right where you need them, when you need them, allowing you to create your masterpieces with ease.

You’re allowed to browse through a long list of shortcuts that may be available for the program and easily find a shortcut from the app with its user friendly interface and add them to a favorites list.

Adobe Shortcut App supports Windows, Mac or Linux. Cheat sheets are provided too for printing purposes.

Previously I did introduce PhotoFunia to make your photos unique and funny. Here’s another free online editor which allows you to add funny effects on your photos on the fly – piZap.

In short, piZap lets people easily create wacky images with their digital pictures.

Before:

After:

piZap was created as a tool primarily for social networking users who want to post their images to their favorite social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, Orkut, Friendster, Bebo, miGente, Windows Live Spaces, Blogger, Tagged, and many more.

Effects provided includes:

1. Custom text
2. Speech bubbles
3. Colorful stickers
4. A full painting program
5. Accessories like Goggle, pendants

No registration is required to access all the features above. PiZap also has built in tools for sending e-cards, downloading your image, embedding your image in any website, or sharing the link directly to your image.

Here’s some most viewed funny photos in piZap:

Visit piZap!

GIF stands for graphics interchange format which used for images with sharp edges and relatively few gradations of color such as line art, cartoons and text. We normally use GIF to create background transparencies and animations for web purposes.

Making an animated GIF is no longer a fussy job after MakeAGif has provided an easier way for users to design a GIF online.

The user interface MakeAGif allows you to design a GIF easily by browsing and uploading pictures, and sorting them in a sequence.

How To Make A Gif

First of all you need to browse and upload images from your computer and make sure they’re in a correct order. This will determine how your animation plays.

Then click the “Create GIF” button and your images will be put together in a single animated Gif image. There you will be able to download and save your image for use on other webpages.

MakeAGif supports a max 1MB for each images. You can also create a loop animation with MakeAGif. Animation speed is customizable – fast, medium or slow. Last but not least, you can resize the output for AIM buddy icon or a customized size.

Folks on web like to provide free services to make fun with photos. Previously I have showcased PhotoFunia, Phototeez and dumpr. Today, I gonna introduce another a cool website which has lots of great montage effects for your photos – YourMagicPhoto.

In short, YourMagicPhoto is a web-based service that enables you to take a photo and apply a particular montage backdrop from the ones on offer.

Just upload a photograph to YourMagicPhoto, you can easily come up a photo with different type of montages with a few steps.

There’re total up to 181 montages for you to choose for.

Once an effect is applied, you can right click and save as image on your computer. No registration is required and it’s totally FREE.

Visit YourMagicPhoto.

If you’re bored with your Google Chrome plain layout, FreeChromeThemes has released 17 designs to makeover your Google Chrome user interface.

Available Google Chrome themes are:

• Dark Google Chrome Theme
• Orange Google Chrome Theme
• Green Google Chrome Theme
• Mac V1.0 Google Chrome Theme
• Internet Explorer Google Chrome Theme
• Firefox 3 Google Chrome Theme
• Aqua Marine Google Chrome Theme
• Army Style Google Chrome Theme
• Gold Google Chrome Theme
• Blurk Google Chrome Theme
• Carbon Fiber Google Chrome Theme
• Safari Google Chrome Theme
• Red Sox Google Chrome Theme
• Black Google Chrome Theme
• Opera Google Chrome Theme
• Galaxy Google Chrome Theme
• Purple Google Chrome Theme

How To Install

Beside being free, FreeChromeThemes is caring enough to guide you how to use and install a theme. Here’s the guideline:

For WIndows XP users:

Extract it to:
C:\Documents and Settings\User\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application.2.149.27\Themes\

For Windows Vista users:

Extract it to:
C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\0.2.149.27\Themes\

Visit FreeChromeThemes to grab a free theme now!

Today I gonna introduce an online image editor/resizer for light use beginners – DrPic.

In short, DrPic.com is a free to use online image editing tools which uses HTML, AJAX, and Java Script technology with absolutely no Flash.

Image Editing

Tools in DrPic are absolutely user friendly. The processing time for each editing step is faster than the other Flash based online image editors.

In order to start to edit an image, you can either load a picture from your local harddisk or Internet.

DrPic has featured some real cool editing options for uses to edit a photo in a simple mode. These options include:

After you’ve done with editing a photo, you can either save it to disk or save to web. An URL link will be given if you choose the later option.

Image Resizing

DrPic has a Batch Resize tool allows you to resize multiple pictures at the same time. All your resized pictures will be returned in one compressed zip file.

3 new sizes are available for all pictures: 75% smaller, 50% smaller and 25% smaller. Final output can be saved in JPG, GIF, PNG and BMP.

To use the above 2 main features of DrPic, NO registration or single penny are required.

Visit DrPic!

If you’re using iGoogle as your personalized homepage (like me), folks in iGoogle team have just released a fresh collection of iGoogle artist themes.

This new massive collection features 28 creative artist from the worlds of fashing and music. Within these great collection, I bet there’s one match your taste.

More Designs

To check out the latest collection of themes by leading fashion designers and musicians, simply click on “Get artist themes” on iGoogle or via this link.

Choose a nice theme and liven up your browser now!

In order to get through spam filters, spammers have started to use ASCII to represent words. Even though it’s not entirely effective, it still allows spammers to convey their message to us.

I have received such abominations in my Yahoo inbox today. Apparently Yahoo needs to adjust their security line for it. The below picture shows how an ASCII Spam appeared in my Yahoo inbox.

From: Ibarra Latham Guidry
Subject: Vvvoodhnblbm

I have no idea on how Yahoo allowed this kind of sender name and subject but I personally think this is very creative and I admire the efforts put by those spammers.

How do you think?

I believe fantastic wallpapers inspire us with creativity. Hereby I introduce you the Desktopography which has been continuously producing extremely fantastic wallpapers for free download.

In their words,

Designers and developers spend about 90% of their waking life in front of a computer so the most appealing genre for a wallpaper would be one that has beautiful design mixed with the all important aspect of being outdoors.

38 wallpapers with essence of nature and the outdoor existence have been released in 4th exhibition (2008).

Take a look at these wallpapers which bring tranquility and wilderness to your desktop.

Visit Desktopography for more wallpapers.

Design Snack demonstrates the award winning websites in thumbnail format. You can find either CSS websites or Flash websites by selecting specific categories. If you’re a fan of certain color theme, there’s an option for  you to browse the thumbnails by colors.

Simple features like rating and commenting are allowed in Design Snack. People wanting to find out current design trends as well as people who require feedback on their own project, Design Snack will be the best place for you to showcase your master piece.

Visit Design Snack!

Before this we had War of Computer Technology in Picture showing the current technology war. Today I gonna show you a mosaic world map which designed by 1001 Web 2.0 logos.

This Map of the World 2.0 is created in Appappeal.com. When you mouse over those logos, a bigger and clearer thumbnail will be shown. By clicking on it, you will be brought to the original website.

To me, it’s a creative master piece but I think it can be better if make the Asia part a little bit more contrast.

The above tutorial is showcased by Deke McClelland. If you feel it useful, you can even download it in low and high resolution.

Dumpr is a pretty interesting website for us to create over 16 photo effects online. These 16 photo effects include:

1. Your photos in art museums!
2. Celebrity Paparazzi
3. Peeling Paint
4. Sketch Artist
5. Rubiks’s cube
6. Jigsaw puzzles
7. Photo to Sketch
8. Weave
9. Alien vision
10. Amazing Circles
11. Lomo
12. Stone Mosaic
13. Photos insides a photo
14. Create breathtaking reflections!
15. Easter Egg Decoration
16. Lego-ize

Apply them!

Dumpr has minimized the tedious process into 3 simple steps.

1. At home page, select an effect to begin with.

2. Upload a photo either from your computer, a website or Flickr.

3. Download it without paying a single cent.

The result

Before,

After,

Rubik’s cube effect applied.

If you’re looking for free software to convert bitmap images to vector images, here’s a website that provides free bitmap-vector conversion service – Vector Magic.

With a few simple clicks and guides from Vector Magic, you’re able to perform a vectorization in a few simple steps.

1. Upload Bitmap Image

File format supported includes PEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, PSD. Maximum allowed file size is 10 MB.

2. Configure Original Image

Several settings are provided to determine the type of original image. After that, determine the quality level and color numbers of original image with given selections.

3. Vectorization and Preview

Preview will be shown after the process of image vectorization is completed. Here, users are allowed to perform final touch up on vectorized image before download it.

4. Download Vectorized Image

Users can download the vectorize image in PNG format without registration. But for downloading vector output (EPS, SVG, PDF), users are required to register as a member.

The Trick

As a member, you are only given 2 tokens for downloading vector format output. Each download will cost 1 token.

In order to enjoy unlimited download, you can subscribe to Vector Magic Unlimited plan or buy individual tokens, both cost you some money.

So, the best way to enjoy free vector format download is – register with a new email whenever 2 tokes have been spent. No clever enough?  Try these temporary & disposable email services:

• GuerrillaMail
• SpamBox
• 10 Minute Mail
• MintEmail
• ShortMail

Picreflect, as name suggest, is an online application that ables to create a reflection to your image within 1 minute. As usual, you can select a file from your computer or from a URL, then customize the way you want it reflected, click “Generate” button to get your new image with reflection.

Picreflect allows you to customize the setting as in

• height of reflection
• Transparency
• Resizing
• Flip Vertical or Mirror
• Rotation
• Set background color

Original picture (example)

Result picture