Friday 20 April 2012

Active GIF Creator 3.5 (AGIF)

0 comments
Active GIF Creator 3.5 (AGIF) is a powerful, intelligible, compact and affordable gif maker for creating and optimization animated GIF- images, buttons, banners and other Web graphic that attract attention of your site visitors.


With Active GIF Creator you can:
  • make GIF and AVI- animations for the Web and presentation materials;
  • make banners;
  • make 2D and 3D buttons;
  • make various graphic using effects and other program tools;
  • add hidden signatures to GIFs to protect them from unauthorized use;
  • develop creative imagination.
 Program features:
- makes animated GIF- files from set of BMP, JPEG, ICO, PCX, PNG, TGA, PSD- files, and Windows Metafiles;
- imports frames from other GIF- files;
- imports and exports AVI- files, ANI- files (animated cursors) and bitmap strips;
- supports clipboard operations for images (BMP);
- manages list of images;
- edits images using internal image editor or script editor;
- duplicates, merges, crops, resizes, rotates and flips frames;
- defines GIF- files global parameters: GIF size, logical screen size, background color index, number of loops in animation;
- defines offset, transparency, interlacement, delay, title and value "how to remove" for each separate image;
- applies effects to whole image or to its rectangle part;
- puts particles on image;
- uses image collections;
- edits color palettes;
- creates 2D and 3D button images;
- creates animation scripts;
- adds and removes text commentaries;
- optimizes size of GIF- files;
- shows GIF size and download time for different speeds of modems;
- allows to preview your GIF- file on Web pages with different backgrounds;
- adds hidden signatures to GIFs to protect them from unauthorized use;
- creates GIF- files from command line in batch mode;
- saves images of GIF- file as a set of BMP, JPEG, PNG, TIFF or TGA- files;
- saves created animation as a project in a file with extension .agif;
- creates maps for tag <MAP> in HTML;
- generates HTML links;
- supports localization tools for different languages.
Reasons to buy Active GIF Creator.
Virtually every popular image editing software title comes with an option to create animated professional looking GIF images. Yet, most people find these built-in tools very counter- intuitive, complicated and almost impossible to use.
  • Active GIF Creator has many useful features, like support of most popular image formats; internal image editor; rich image editing options; image effects; color palette support; import / export to other graphical formats; advanced open picture dialog (thumbnailer); GIF- file size powerful optimization; HTML image map editor; button creator; batch mode; image collections; animation scripts and others.
  • The program's functionality in combination with the low cost has made it the first choice for many users and software evaluation websites. Plus, Active GIF Creator has a user- friendly, international interface and consumes very little system resources.
  • All registered users are entitled to free technical support and minor upgrades.
If looking for a well-rounded, efficient and affordable tool for creating great-looking animated GIF’s, stop by Active GIF Creator! Editors of 3d2f.com named the program "most perspective among competitors".

Download Active GIF Creator 3.5 (AGIF) sofware here

Thursday 12 April 2012

Mount Everest, How Tall Is It? - A Mathematics Mystery

0 comments



Last night I started to read Mount Everest, The Reconnaissance 1921 which I downloaded for free from Google Books. In the introduction there is a three page explanation of the methods used to measure the height of Mount Everest. An explanation of the differences in measurements is also provided in the introduction. Part of that explanation includes differences in snow fall, cyclical deviations of gravity, and differences atmospheric refraction when observations were made. I'm not a mathematics teacher and will never pretend to be one, but reading that introduction did get me thinking about a possible mathematics lesson.

Applications for Education
Turn to pages 10 through 13 of Mount Everest, The Reconnaissance 1921 and read about the difficulties of accurately measuring Mount Everest in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. It's interesting to note that most accepted measurements were more than 100 feet higher than today's accepted measurement. Tell your students that Mount Everest has shrunk over the last 100 years and ask them to solve the mystery of the shrinking mountain. 

On a mildly related note and on a promotion of a Mainer note, Snow in the Kingdom: My Storm Years on Everest by Ed Webster is one of the best books ever written about Mount Everest. If you enjoy good adventure stories and or stories about overcoming personal struggles, I think you will enjoy Webster's book. For my money, and I own two copies of it, it is far better than Krakauer's Into Thin Air.

Sunday 8 April 2012

OpenRocket 12.03-an Open Source model rocket simulator

0 comments

OpenRocket is a free, fully featured model rocket simulator that allows you to design and simulate your rockets before actually building and flying them.
OpenRocket features a full six-degree of-freedom simulation, realistic wind modeling, a multitude of different components including free-form fins and canted fins, clustering and staging. Read more about its features and see screenshots.

OpenRocket is an Open Source project licensed under the GNU GPL. This means that the software is free to use for whatever purposes, and the source code is also available for studying and extending.

Features
General:
  • Fully cross-platform, written in Java
  • Fully documented simulation methods
  • Open Source, source code available under the GNU GPL
User interface:
  • Easy-to-use user interface for rocket design
  • Real-time view of CG and CP position
  • Real-time flight altitude, velocity and acceleration information from a continuous simulation performed in the background
  • Zoomable schematic view of rocket from the side or rear, with rotation around the center axis
Design:
  • A multitude of available components to choose from
  • Trapezoidal, elliptical and free-form fins supported
  • Support for canted fins (roll stabilization)
  • Staging and clustering support
  • Automatic calculation of component mass and CG based on shape and density
  • Ability to override mass and CG of components or stages separately
Simulation and analysis:
  • Full six degree of freedom simulation
  • Rocket stability computed using extended Barrowman method
  • Realistic wind modeling
  • Analysis of the effect of separate components on the stability, drag and roll characteristics of the rocket
  • Fully configurable plotting, with various preset configurations
  • Simulation data can be exported to CSV files for further analysis
  • Simulation listeners allowing custom-made code to interact with the rocket during flight simulation
Download openRocket 12.03

Monday 2 April 2012

Learning Essentials for Microsoft Office

1 comments

 
Learning Essentials for Microsoft Office is a great application. It focuses mainly on Students and Teachers to help in their school work.

It contains the following programs

(1) Learning Essentials for Students
(2) Learning Essentials for Teachers
They both include a lot of templates you could imagine to be useful in school work. Templates for book report, class debate, essays, etc are for students. All of them have different subcategories like different types of essays, and their formats with a short description on how/what-to-dos

For example,
"Subject:
In a short paragraph, describe the subject of the book.

Setting:
Explain where and when the story takes place.
Tip: it might be helpful to include maps, pictures or historical information about the setting. "
...................
is what I found for a book report.

Even while you are working on the matter in MS Office, a small window still remains on the right side, to help you remind what all things you need to add, the format/style you should follow, etc.

This is really cool

For Teachers, we see lesson plans and assignments, classroom organization, organization of field trips, charts and diagrams, math worksheets and even handwriting practice.
It includes provision for creating content for "Learning Essentials" to help students.

(3) "Learning Essentials Content Development Kit" is a program with a "wizard" interface to help us use the programs easily. It has step by step procedure for selecting the type of document, whether you are a student or teacher, what you want to do, etc.

Download Learning Essentials for Microsoft Office here