As anyone does I scour the internet for useful and interesting things, information relating to my interests and hobbies one of the biggies. For the people that read magazines (me included) I guess one of the negative points is always going to be the price - it's amazing how much magazine pricing has shot up over the years.

Hope there free PDF magazine resources I've hunted out may be of interest to you folks out there in the net. I'll keep an eye out and update my findings every so often, but for now here's some interest to keep you going.

Creative/Art and Design Magazines

Root









Destructed



Photography





Apple Mac

Smoking Apples Magazine

Mac Companion Magazine

InCDius is a searchable and scriptable Audio CD cataloguing application. InCDius works with freedb so once you insert a CD it will retrieve all the information for you automatically.

First of all to set things up is choose a freedb server near you, this is done via the preferences of the application like the screenshot below.



screenshot of lookup tab

When you have set that up and insert your first CD, the import pane will pop up and you will see the connection to server and retrieval of CD information displayed as below.



screenshot of imported CD information

On this pane you have the two other tabs to input extra information, like your rating of the album an your specific genre for the album.

Once you have imported your collection, you can view all the imported data via the CD Browser window and scroll through your entire library.



screenshot of CD Browser

There is also a CD Controller window which lets you play the Cd's without having to open iTunes so you can review the tunes and refresh your memory.

I'm always trying to find new functionality of Firefox's extensibility - admittedly uninstalling most of the add-ons through lack of need. However I really like the useful ones that just integrate.

Here's three new ones I'm using at the minute - might come in handy for you too.

Minimap Sidebar is a handy tool that can be used as a sidebar or in a tab, drag location or address into the Multimap page to make the map load or enter locations by typing it in. Also adds contextual menu item.

UrlbarExt adds commands to your location bar giving you the options to copy url, use tinyurl to shorten the url, tag pages, browse anonymously and search the site you're on.

Juice can act as a search sidebar for rich content and your google searches.

In the current climate what better way to save money to make money than to employ open source free software as your creative tools.

Your alternative are as follows

For web design > NVU, a simple straightforward WYSIWYG editor for you web needs.

For animation > Synfig, 2D time-line animation creation tool.

For vector graphics creation > Inkscape, a vector graphics application similar to Illustrator and CorelDraw.

For page layout > Scribus, open source professional page layout design application.

For multimedia design > Libavg, create media rich interactive presentations akin to Director.

For video editing > Avidmux, video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding supporting many file types.

For adding video effects > Jahshaka, edit and add visual effects like After Effects.