Plugin Newsletter - October 2000

This issue is sponsored by ISS Inc. Please support our sponsor:

Browse, locate and manage digital photos with imagENGine
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imagENGine is an integrated software suite of imaging utilities. You can use it to create html image galleries for the WEB, batch edit images, generate thumbnails, rename images and convert them to other image formats. Additionally imagENGine lets you produce contact sheets, image databases, catalogues for print and photo albums.
For more information and for downloading a free trial version go to:
http://www.insyse.com/imoverview.htm

CONTENTS
========

INTRODUCTION

PLUGIN GALAXY 1.01 FOR MACINTOSH HAS BEEN RELEASED

OLD POLL: YOUR FAVOURITE FREE PLUGIN

NEW POLL: YOUR FAVOURITE WEB AUTHORING TOOL

GALAXY CONTEST GALLERIES & BET CONTEST

REVIEWS: SUPERBLADE PRO & IMAGENGINE

FREE PLUGINS AND TOOLS

GIVE-AWAYS: INTERNET EYE & ULTIMATEPAINT.de

Dear Subscribers,

ThePluginSite.com is getting bigger and bigger as more pages are transferred from the old pico.i-us.com web site. There has been a problem with some downloads in mid October because there was a hacker attack on the download server. As a consequence I placed other download links available for most of the downloads at ThePluginSite.com. So this problem should be solved.

See below for further news...

Wishing you great inspiration and creativity,
Harald Heim

PLUGIN GALAXY 1.01 FOR MACINTOSH HAS BEEN RELEASED

Finally Plugin Galaxy 1.01 for Macintosh is available. Plugin Galaxy is a collection of 20 Photoshop-compatible plugins with 129 image effects. The Mac Version was produced by Panopticum LLC according to my instructions.

This free update fixes some problems which appeared if you applied the plugins to hires images and didn't allocate enough memory for Photoshop. Plugin Galaxy 1.01 works and doesn't crash anymore even if you didn't allocate enough memory. Furthermore it is now compatible with a lot of other applications. It has been tested successfully with Photoshop 4, 5 and 6, Illustrator, ImageReady, PageMaker, Photoline 32, Canvas and Color It!. It should work with other image applications, too. There are two problems when running Plugin Galaxy 1.01 in Fireworks 3, but generally it can be used with Fireworks.

Best of all, if you previously installed Plugin Galaxy 1.0 and the trial period ended, you can test Version 1.01 again for another 5 days.

http://thepluginsite.com/products/plugingalaxy/

GALAXY CONTEST GALLERIES & BET CONTEST

The Galaxy Contest 2000 was finished at the end of September after two months' duration. Over 380 images and animations from 128 artists of 18 countries were submitted. You can view them now in the contest gallery. Don't miss this great artwork!

http://thepluginsite.com/gallery/galaxy2000/

I thought of giving people who didn't participate the chance of winning a prize, too. So here's what you need to do to win one of my three products:

Send an email to us with 'Contest Bet' in the subject line and include the names of the six images you think will be Nr. 1 in each of the six contest categories. Also add whether you would like to win Edge & Frame Galaxy, Plugin Galaxy or Plugin Commander and mention your system (Win or Mac).

If your email doesn't match the mentioned criteria, your bet will be disqualified. Sorry, would be too much work otherwise. Of course the jury members and contest participants are not allowed to take part.

Good Luck!

OLD POLL: YOUR FAVOURITE FREE PLUGIN

Finally the old poll which had been active for two months was closed.
A total of 416 people voted for their favorite freeware plugin. Here are the results:

1. Plugin Galaxy Free Plugins (95) 23 %

2. Flaming Pear Freebies (47) 11 %
3. AIM Photoshop Plugins (34) 8 %
4. Fantastic Machines Paint Engine (33) 8 %

5. Extensis PhotoBevel (21) 5 %
Ulead ArtTexture (21) 5 %
6. NRV Bordermania (18) 4 %
Axion Lens Flare32/Glow32 (18) 4 %
Mark's Page Curl (18) 4 %
7. Jama 3D/Mesh 3D (17) 4 %
8. Panorama Tools (16) 4 %
9. Procyn Filters (15) 3 %

I was surprised to see my two Plugin Galaxy freebies at number 1. Reasons for this might be that they are available on the same web site as the poll was conducted and that many of you know and like Plugin Galaxy very well. I had also expected to see Paint Engine at place one or two as it is a very interesting plugin. Nevertheless, that's how you voted...

To download the above listed free plugins go to:
http://thepluginsite.com/resources/freeps.htm

For more interesting poll results visit:
http://thepluginsite.com/knowhow/polls2000.htm

NEW POLL: YOUR FAVOURITE WEB AUTHORING TOOL

This month's new poll asks you to vote for your favorite web authoring tool. More than 20 html editing applications are listed you can choose from. There was already a visible trend short after the polls started last week.

Pick your favorite html tool at the bottom of
http://thepluginsite.com/

REVIEWS: SUPERBLADE PRO & IMAGENGINE

With this weeks two new reviews the number of available reviews at ThePluginSite.com has increased to 20. If you like to see a review about a certain product, feel free to contact me.

SuperBladePro and imagENGine were inspected this time. Both have some small handicaps concerning dialog design, but are very useful for doing the task they were intended to. Read the reviews at

http://thepluginsite.com/reviews/

FREE PLUGINS AND TOOLS

TV Effects is a plugin from Kevin Anetsberger (Windows only) for creating TV lines similar to Xenofex's Television effect. Controls for line width and contrast are included as well as two sliders for producing TV artifacts. The plugin has no time limit, but the author requests a $5 registration fee if you decide to use it longer than 30 days.

http://idt.net/~kevant19/tvfilter.html

A new freeware plugin created with Filter Meister (Windows only) is available from MuRa. It's called Pole Transform and transforms an image to polar coordinates or rectangular coordinates. You might know this effect from Photoshop. Pole Transform is part of a collection of three other plugins which were mentioned in issue #13 of this newsletter. The other three plugins called Cloud, Copies and Seamless have been updated in the meantime.

http://www.geocities.com/murakuma/mmplugins.html

PiXELS3D | studio | 3.6 for Macintosh is an animation, modeling and rendering tool which can be downloaded for free now. It lets you build 3D models and animation, create 3D characters, environments and presentations with realistic movements.

http://www.pixels.net/downloads/

GIVE-AWAYS: INTERNET EYE & ULTIMATEPAINT.de

The Internet Eye, an online magazine about computer graphics, will conduct their fantastic Christmas Give-away again this year. To participate and win dozens of software and hardware prizes you need to sign up now.

Prizes include Vue d'Esprit, Ozone 3D for Lightwave, Virtual Mirror Vector Studio for Illustrator, Plugin Galaxy, Plugin Commander Pro 1.5, Edge & Frame Galaxy CD-ROM (yes, I've donated some prizes, too!),
Corel Painter 6, CorelDraw 10, MacDrive 2000, Thumbs +, Photowebber, Cinema 4D XL 6, IIRD CDEverywhere, Deep Paint 3D, Xenofex, Eye Candy 4000, Life Forms Studio, MegaMoCap, Poser 4, Photo/Graphic Edges 10,000+, Media Emotion 1.5, ZBrush, XENO-1, Accents Texture CD, Xara 3D,
Xara X, Agfa digital cameras and scanners, 3Dlabs Video Card, Lexmark Z52 Inkjet Printer ... just to name a few.

http://www.the-internet-eye.com/

UltimatePaint.de has a small give-away running. You can win prizes from Panopticum, Flaming Pear, AV Bros, ThePluginSite.com (again some donations from me) and others. Currently the page is only available in German language, but the webmaster promised to set up a english page soon.

http://www.ultimatepaint.de/gewinnspiel/

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