With the JSR-226 support included in the Netbeans Mobility Pack for CLDC/MIDP 5.5, you can now use Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) files to add vector-based graphics to your mobile applications. SVG files are compact and give you a way to provide high-quality graphics on resource-limited handheld devices. SVG also supports scripting and animation, so it is ideal for interactive, data-driven, personalized graphics.
This article shows you how the GUI-based Visual Mobile Designer within the Mobility Pack software enables you to create menus, splash screens, wait screens, and animations using drag-and-drop components from its palette menu.
What are SVG and JSR-266?
Java Specification Request (JSR)-226 specifies the API for rendering scalable, two-dimensional vector graphics. Instead of encoding the contents of each pixel, as raster-based image formats like GIF and JPG do, vector graphics contain only the drawing instructions for each pixel. This gives vector images several advantages:
They are scalable, so the image quality remains the same on displays of different sizes and resolutions. You can also stretch, flip, or reverse an image without losing quality.
They support scripting and animations, so they are ideal for interactive, data-driven graphics.
They are compact. Vector-based images can be as much as ten times smaller than an identical image in GIF or JPEG format. This important advantage makes it possible to create graphically rich applications for handheld devices with limited resources.
They allow users to interact with image content.
They are searchable, allowing users to search for text within the image. For example, users can search a map for specific street names, or search a list of restaurant menus for their favorite dish.
The Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) specification is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specification for describing two-dimensional graphics and graphical applications in XML. The SVG specification describes images with vector shapes, text, and embedded raster graphics. A full-featured subset, or profile, of SVG aimed toward mobile devices is called "SVG-Tiny." JSR-226 adopts version 1.1 of the SVG-Tiny profile as the official file format for J2ME vector graphics.
You can find more about JSR-226 by reading the article, Getting Started with Mobile 2D Graphics for J2ME.

Professional digital photography has been a reality for a while now but the big-name developers have been slow to catch up. With different software like iViewMedia Pro or Photo Mechanic filling in the missing pieces of file organizing and metadata editing workflow and different apps providing the ability to do quality RAW conversion, it's a relatively new thing to have one program that does it all and does it well
With Apple's Aperture and now Adobe's Lightroom, it seems the big boys are finally ready to fight over who is going to be at the center of the digital creative arena. But Adobe isn't playing copycat here—and I think their release of a public beta was an attempt to send that message. It was pretty clear when the beta was released that this is not just a slapped-together product—Adobe's had this in the works for a while.
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More vector drawing tutorials from TutVid, here.

Adobe Illustrator CS3 is the best vector drawing program on the market. This statement would be more impressive if Adobe hadn't purchased and read the last rites to Illustrator's only serious competition, Macromedia FreeHand. Luckily, however, Adobe's virtual monopoly hasn't led the company to grow complacent. In the CS3 version of Illustrator, it has focused on improving integration with another acquisition, Flash (70 percent of Flash users also use Illustrator, according to Adobe), and on providing a number of small improvements that add up to a big difference in the program's usability. Nothing here quite approaches the status of "killer feature" the way CS2's Live Trace capabilities did, but CS3 is still a worthy upgrade to Illustrator

Read the Adobe Illustrator CS3 full review here. by PC Magazine

 

Visual design elements can considerably improve the readability of the page.

Using them, you can make it easier for your users to scan the presented content and find the information they’re actually looking for.

Icons can draw reader’s attention to the key aspects of the article and visualize the topic of the post.

Buttons can be used to motivate users to some particular actions; and templates are supposed to help designers to create user-friendly interface elements right away. And whatever aim you’d like to achieve, free visual design elements are always useful - simply because they can give your text content a better visual appearance.Click here to continue

Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Supported SVG features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping. Inkscape also supports Creative Commons meta-data, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XML editing, and more. It imports formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and others and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats.
Inkscape's main goal is to create a powerful and convenient drawing tool fully compliant with XML, SVG, and CSS standards. We also aim to maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development

Download latest version. Screenshots:

Many designers I talk to love Photoshop. They're experienced with it and know how it works, so they use it for almost everything. But when it comes to using Illustrator or Freehand, they're a lot less comfortable. "I know I can do that Photoshop," they think. "Why bother with Illustrator?"
I'll answer that question in this, the first article from a series on vector images. In subsequent parts of the series, we'll take the fundamentals we'll learn here and see how they can be applied to a range of more complex design tasks.
If you think Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand are all about creating boring geometric shapes, think again. By the end of this article, you'll have seen some very cool applications of vector graphics in design practice.
Why Vectors?
Once upon a time, people had to use pen and paper to compose letters or write articles. College papers were drafted on stacks of notebook paper; lots of lines crossed out unwanted words or sentences, while little carets inserted additional words or phrases. It wasn't unusual to see garbage cans full of crumpled pieces of paper (this was also before recycling), or for writers to mark pages with arrows or footnotes that pointed to other places where they wanted to insert another paragraph or two... more

This little tutorial is based on how I created my Circles and Drips symbols for Illustrator. It covers creating the basic image and converting it to symbols. Not much else to say other than it's done in Flash and has no pre-loader, so you'll have to be paitent while it loads.Enjoy. To seethe tutotial click here

On Tuesday, Adobe announced the third version of its Creative Suite family of digital media production applications. In addition to the overhaul of the user interfaces one would expect in a release such as this, each individual program in the suite has been updated to capitalize on popular technologies like Ajax, Flex and Camera RAW. Also, this is the first version of the suite designed to run on Windows Vista and Intel Mac hardware. Here are a few highlights. A bevy of powerful programs come with CS3, but presenting that power on the desktop can create a mess of a user interface. Photoshop and Flash have undergone the most thorough face lifts: All those panels soaking up space can be reduced to small icons that expand when clicked on, and Macintosh users can now work with all the windows and tool palettes docked together, just like their Windows friends. Unfortunately, these UI features are not implemented consistently for the other CS3 programs, which can result in hand-to-mouse confusion when switching between apps.