Roy of Superior Art Creations

Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and 8 and also Mozilla Fire Fox come with a feature called “Custom Search Providers” or Search Scopes. It allows you to add web sites and search engines to your search box to search them directly, if you need to. For example could you add Amazon.com search to your search providers and search the Amazon.com site directly from your search box, if you are looking for a book, CD or DVD and use Amazon.com as primary online shop for this kind of purchases. You can get a selection of custom search providers at this Microsoft web site. There you can find a number of options for popular web sites and other search engines. Also available there is the option to create your own custom search provider for your favorite web site. This is possible, as long as the site provides a site search option and passes the search parameters, such as the search term in the URL. If you have a web site yourself and want to offer your visitors the option to add your site search to their web browser, then you can do that as well. I did this for my small project SQLHunt.com, a MS SQL Server resources meta-search engine based on Google Custom Search Engine. See the link at the bottom of the homepage that reads “Widgets and Gadgets”. One of the options there is to add the SQLHunt.com search to your web browser. The search providers page for Internet Explorer on[…]

In the case that you forgot Adobe Photoshop at home and need to make some last minute tweaks of some nice and cool graphics for your blog or MySpace page, while at a friends house, who only has MS Paint installed on his Computer, then you don???t have to decide between no image or crappy MS Paint tweaked image anymore. There is now a nice third option available. All that your friend needs is a web browser and an Internet connection??? and who doesn???t have this nowadays. Finding a home with black and white television is probably easier than one with a computer without Internet, right? Anyhow. There have been in the past already multiple attempts to provide a practical photo and image editor on the World Wide Web. Yeah, you could tweak photographs a little bit, remove some red eyes, flip the image, crop it and adjust the colors and contrast or brightness, but that was about it. Pixlr has something for that as well, called Photo Express, where you can do some last minute tweaks to a photo before you put it up on Flickr or Photobucket. But if you had to do a little bit more tweaking to an image, you still required a desktop application installed on your computer. Pixlr provides a neat alternative to that. Their image editor is more than just a nice toy where you can draw squares and lines like in MS Paint. The Pixlr image editor supports Layers and has some[…]