Google’s Free Photo Editing Software, the Nik Collection, Has Been Acquired by DxO & Will Live Another Day

In March of 2016, read­ers thrilled when Google announced that it made the Nik Col­lec­tion, its pro­fes­sion­al pho­to edit­ing soft­ware, free to down­load and use. Pre­vi­ous­ly priced at $149, the now-free soft­ware gives users access to “sev­en desk­top plug-ins that pro­vide a pow­er­ful range of pho­to edit­ing capa­bil­i­ties — from fil­ter appli­ca­tions that improve col­or cor­rec­tion, to retouch­ing and cre­ative effects.”

If there was cause for cel­e­bra­tion, it did­n’t last that long. Ear­li­er this year, Google fol­lowed up with anoth­er announce­ment–that it planned to dis­con­tin­ue devel­op­ment of the Nik Col­lec­tion, and essen­tial­ly let it with­er on the vine.

Now here’s the lat­est chap­ter in the sto­ry. A seem­ing­ly good one. The image pro­cess­ing com­pa­ny DxO has acquired the Nik Col­lec­tion from Google. Jérôme Ménière, DxO’s founder and CEO, declared in a press release, “DxO rev­o­lu­tion­ized the image pro­cess­ing mar­ket many times over the years with its inno­v­a­tive solu­tions, and we will con­tin­ue to do so with Nik’s tools, which offer new cre­ative oppor­tu­ni­ties to mil­lions of pho­tog­ra­phers.” Appar­ent­ly the Nik Col­lec­tion gets to live anoth­er day.

If you head over to DxO’s web­site, you can still down­load the cur­rent Nik Col­lec­tion for free. You sim­ply need to pro­vide your email address, and they’ll send a down­load link to your inbox.

Also on the DxO web­site they’ve announced plans for a future iter­a­tion of the Nik Col­lec­tion, say­ing “The new ‘Nik Col­lec­tion 2018 Edi­tion’ will be released mid-2018, please leave your email below to be informed when it’s avail­able.” Whether that 2018 edi­tion will stay free remains to be seen.

via Petapix­el

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Google Makes Its $149 Pho­to Edit­ing Soft­ware Now Com­plete­ly Free to Down­load

Down­load New Sto­ry­board­ing Soft­ware That’s Free & Open Source

NASA Puts Its Soft­ware Online & Makes It Free to Down­load

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Download New Storyboarding Software That’s Free & Open Source

Quick tip: The new soft­ware pack­age, Sto­ry­board­er, makes it “easy to visu­al­ize a sto­ry as fast you can draw stick fig­ures.” You can cre­ate a sto­ry idea with­out actu­al­ly mak­ing a full-blown movie and see how it looks. Sto­ry­board­er is free. It’s open source. It’s avail­able for Mac, Win­dows, and Lin­ux. And you can down­load it here.

As the web­site Car­toon Brew notes, the sto­ries cre­at­ed in Sto­ry­board­er “can be export­ed to Pre­miere, Final Cut, Avid, PDF, and ani­mat­ed GIF for­mats.” Or you can “refine the art­work in Pho­to­shop.”

Get Sto­ry­board­er here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via Car­toon Brew

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Google Makes Its $149 Pho­to Edit­ing Soft­ware Now Com­plete­ly Free to Down­load

NASA Puts Its Soft­ware Online & Makes It Free to Down­load

Down­load 243 Free eBooks on Design, Data, Soft­ware, Web Devel­op­ment & Busi­ness from O’Reilly Media

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Margaret Hamilton, Lead Software Engineer of the Apollo Project, Stands Next to Her Code That Took Us to the Moon (1969)

Pho­to cour­tesy of MIT Muse­um

When I first read news of the now-infa­mous Google memo writer who claimed with a straight face that women are bio­log­i­cal­ly unsuit­ed to work in sci­ence and tech, I near­ly choked on my cere­al. A dozen exam­ples instant­ly crowd­ed to mind of women who have pio­neered the very basis of our cur­rent tech­nol­o­gy while oper­at­ing at an extreme dis­ad­van­tage in a cul­ture that explic­it­ly believed they shouldn’t be there, this shouldn’t be hap­pen­ing, women shouldn’t be able to do a “man’s job!”

The memo, as Megan Molteni and Adam Rogers write at Wired, “is a species of dis­course pecu­liar to polit­i­cal­ly polar­ized times: cher­ry-pick­ing sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence to sup­port a pre-exist­ing point of view.” Its spe­cious evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­o­gy pre­tends to objec­tiv­i­ty even as it ignores real­i­ty. As Mul­der would say, the truth is out there, if you care to look, and you don’t need to dig through clas­si­fied FBI files. Just, well, Google it. No, not the pseu­do­science, but the careers of women in STEM with­out whom we might not have such a thing as Google.

Women like Mar­garet Hamil­ton, who, begin­ning in 1961, helped NASA “devel­op the Apol­lo program’s guid­ance sys­tem” that took U.S. astro­nauts to the moon, as Maia Wein­stock reports at MIT News. “For her work dur­ing this peri­od, Hamil­ton has been cred­it­ed with pop­u­lar­iz­ing the con­cept of soft­ware engi­neer­ing.” Robert McMil­lan put it best in a 2015 pro­file of Hamil­ton:

It might sur­prise today’s soft­ware mak­ers that one of the found­ing fathers of their boys’ club was, in fact, a mother—and that should give them pause as they con­sid­er why the gen­der inequal­i­ty of the Mad Men era per­sists to this day.

Hamil­ton was indeed a moth­er in her twen­ties with a degree in math­e­mat­ics, work­ing as a pro­gram­mer at MIT and sup­port­ing her hus­band through Har­vard Law, after which she planned to go to grad­u­ate school. “But the Apol­lo space pro­gram came along” and con­tract­ed with NASA to ful­fill John F. Kennedy’s famous promise made that same year to land on the moon before the decade’s end—and before the Sovi­ets did. NASA accom­plished that goal thanks to Hamil­ton and her team.

Pho­to cour­tesy of MIT Muse­um

Like many women cru­cial to the U.S. space pro­gram (many dou­bly mar­gin­al­ized by race and gen­der), Hamil­ton might have been lost to pub­lic con­scious­ness were it not for a pop­u­lar redis­cov­ery. “In recent years,” notes Wein­stock, “a strik­ing pho­to of Hamil­ton and her team’s Apol­lo code has made the rounds on social media.” You can see that pho­to at the top of the post, tak­en in 1969 by a pho­tog­ra­ph­er for the MIT Instru­men­ta­tion Lab­o­ra­to­ry. Used to pro­mote the lab’s work on Apol­lo, the orig­i­nal cap­tion read, in part, “Here, Mar­garet is shown stand­ing beside list­ings of the soft­ware devel­oped by her and the team she was in charge of, the LM [lunar mod­ule] and CM [com­mand mod­ule] on-board flight soft­ware team.”

As Hank Green tells it in his con­densed his­to­ry above, Hamil­ton “rose through the ranks to become head of the Apol­lo Soft­ware devel­op­ment team.” Her focus on errors—how to pre­vent them and course cor­rect when they arise—“saved Apol­lo 11 from hav­ing to abort the mis­sion” of land­ing Neil Arm­strong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon’s sur­face. McMil­lan explains that “as Hamil­ton and her col­leagues were pro­gram­ming the Apol­lo space­craft, they were also hatch­ing what would become a $400 bil­lion indus­try.” At Futur­ism, you can read a fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view with Hamil­ton, in which she describes how she first learned to code, what her work for NASA was like, and what exact­ly was in those books stacked as high as she was tall. As a woman, she may have been an out­lier in her field, but that fact is much bet­ter explained by the Occam’s razor of prej­u­dice than by any­thing hav­ing to do with evo­lu­tion­ary deter­min­ism.

Note: You can now find Hamil­ton’s code on Github.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How 1940s Film Star Hedy Lamarr Helped Invent the Tech­nol­o­gy Behind Wi-Fi & Blue­tooth Dur­ing WWII

Meet Grace Hop­per, the Pio­neer­ing Com­put­er Sci­en­tist Who Helped Invent COBOL and Build the His­toric Mark I Com­put­er (1906–1992)

How Ada Lovelace, Daugh­ter of Lord Byron, Wrote the First Com­put­er Pro­gram in 1842–a Cen­tu­ry Before the First Com­put­er

NASA Puts Its Soft­ware Online & Makes It Free to Down­load

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Apple’s Hypercard Software, the Innovative 1980s Precursor to Hypertext, Now Made Available by Archive.org

Archive.org is on a bit of a roll late­ly. After recent­ly mak­ing avail­able 25,000+ dig­i­tized 78rpm records from the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, they’ve turned around and put online Apple Hyper­card soft­ware. When Hyper­card was released in 1987, The New York Times pub­lished an arti­cle enti­tled “Apple to Intro­duce Unusu­al Soft­ware,” which began:

Apple Com­put­er Inc. will intro­duce an unusu­al data­base and man­age­ment infor­ma­tion pro­gram Tues­day that the com­pa­ny hopes will help it main­tain its lead in tech­nol­o­gy for mak­ing com­put­ers easy to use.

The new soft­ware, known as Hyper­card, will enable users of Apple’s Mac­in­tosh com­put­ers to orga­nize infor­ma­tion on com­put­er­ized file cards that can be linked to oth­er file cards in intri­cate ways. The pro­gram will be includ­ed for no charge with each Mac­in­tosh sold, start­ing this month.

Hyper­card made its appear­ance pre­cise­ly when Apple also released “a com­mu­ni­ca­tions device, known as a modem, that will enable the Mac­in­tosh to send doc­u­ments to and from fac­sim­i­le machines.” Some of us still use modems today. Hyper­card, not so much. At least not direct­ly.

As Hyper­card’s cre­ator Bill Atkin­son indi­cates above, Hyper­card start­ed work­ing with the hyper­text con­cept that’s now preva­lent on the web today. Think those links you find in HTML. On Archive.org, you can find and play with Hyper­card soft­ware, or what they call emu­lat­ed Hyper­card stacks. (They also host a library of emu­lat­ed soft­ware for the ear­ly Mac­in­tosh com­put­er). Read more about Archive.org’s Hyper­card project on their blog here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es

Free: You Can Now Read Clas­sic Books by MIT Press on Archive.org

How Brew­ster Kahle and the Inter­net Archive Will Pre­serve the Infi­nite Infor­ma­tion on the Web

Run Vin­tage Video Games (From Pac-Man to E.T.) and Soft­ware in Your Web Brows­er, Thanks to Archive.org

The Inter­net Arcade Lets You Play 900 Vin­tage Video Games in Your Web Brows­er (Free)

Learn Python with a Free Online Course from MIT

The pro­gram­ming lan­guage Python takes its name from Mon­ty Python (true sto­ry!), and now cours­es that teach Python are in very high demand. Last Decem­ber, we fea­tured a free Python course cre­at­ed by Google. Today, it’s a free Python course from MIT.

Designed for stu­dents with lit­tle or no pro­gram­ming expe­ri­ence, the course “aims to pro­vide stu­dents with an under­stand­ing of the role com­pu­ta­tion can play in solv­ing prob­lems. It also aims to help stu­dents, regard­less of their major, to feel jus­ti­fi­ably con­fi­dent of their abil­i­ty to write small pro­grams that allow them to accom­plish use­ful goals.” Beyond offer­ing a primer on Python, the course offers an intro­duc­tion to com­put­er sci­ence itself.

The 38 lec­tures above were pre­sent­ed by MIT’s John Gut­tag. On this MIT web­site, you can find relat­ed course mate­ri­als, includ­ing a syl­labus and soft­ware. And if you’re inter­est­ed in tak­ing this course as a MOOC (Mas­sive Open Online Course), you can sign up for the ver­sion that begins on May 27th over at edx.

The course will be added to our list of Free Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Learn Python: A Free Online Course from Google

Learn How to Code for Free: A DIY Guide for Learn­ing HTML, Python, Javascript & More

Down­load 243 Free eBooks on Design, Data, Soft­ware, Web Devel­op­ment & Busi­ness from O’Reilly Media

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Hayao Miyazaki Tells Video Game Makers What He Thinks of Their Characters Made with Artificial Intelligence: “I’m Utterly Disgusted. This Is an Insult to Life Itself”

For a young per­son in an ani­ma­tion-based field, the oppor­tu­ni­ty to share new work with direc­tor Hayao Miyaza­ki must feel like a gold­en oppor­tu­ni­ty.

This may still hold true for Nobuo Kawaka­mi, the chair­man of Dwan­go, a Japan­ese telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions and media com­pa­ny, but not for the rea­sons he like­ly antic­i­pat­ed at the start of the above video.

The sub­ject of their dis­cus­sion is a com­put­er gen­er­at­ed ani­mat­ed mod­el whose arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence caus­es it to move by squirm­ing on its head. Its cre­ators haven’t invest­ed it with any par­tic­u­lar per­son­al­i­ty traits or sto­ry­line, but its flayed appear­ance and tor­tu­ous move­ments sug­gest it’s unlike­ly to be board­ing Miyazaki’s mag­i­cal cat bus any time soon.

Even with­out an explic­it nar­ra­tive, the model’s poten­tial should be evi­dent to any­one who’s ever sat through the final-reel res­ur­rec­tion of a hor­ri­bly maimed, pre­sumed-dead ter­ror­iz­er of scant­i­ly clad young ladies.

The model’s grotesque squirm­ings could also be an asset to zom­bie video games, as Kawaka­mi excit­ed­ly points out.

Let us remem­ber that Miyazaki’s films are root­ed not in gross-out effects, but redemp­tion, a rev­er­ence for nature, and respect for chil­dren and all liv­ing things.

The mas­ter watch­es the demon­stra­tion with­out com­ment, then dis­pens­es with tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese eti­quette in favor of some strong­ly word­ed med­i­cine that leaves no doubt as to what he real­ly thought of Dwan­go’s arti­fi­cial­ly intel­li­gent wretch:

“I am utter­ly dis­gust­ed… I strong­ly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”  

(At this point, you real­ly should watch the video, to hear Miyaza­k­i’s open­ing state­ment, about a dis­abled friend for whom even a sim­ple high-five is a painful phys­i­cal exer­tion.)

Poor Kawaka­mi-san! Uncer­e­mo­ni­ous­ly shamed in front of his col­leagues by a nation­al trea­sure, he doesn’t push back. All he can offer is some­thing along the lines of “We didn’t mean any­thing by it”—a state­ment that seems cred­i­ble.

The Amer­i­can pres­i­dent may be into dehu­man­iz­ing those with dis­abil­i­ties, but the Dwan­go crew’s heads were like­ly occu­pied with boy­ish visions of a thrilling­ly grue­some zom­bie apoc­a­lypse.

It’s a harsh, but impor­tant mes­sage for Miyaza­ki to have got­ten across. Dwan­go is respon­si­ble for cre­at­ing a lot of online games. In oth­er words, they hold con­sid­er­able sway over impres­sion­able youth.

Stu­dio Ghi­b­li co-founder Toshio Suzu­ki grants Kawaka­mi and his col­leagues an oppor­tu­ni­ty to save face, ask­ing what the team’s goals are.

“We’d like to build a machine that can draw pic­tures like humans do,” one shell­shocked-look­ing young man responds.

What, like, Hen­ri Mail­larde­t’s automa­ton from 1810? While I can imag­ine such a con­trap­tion show­ing up in one of Miyazaki’s steam-punk-fla­vored adven­tures, the hush that greets this state­ment all but screams “wrong answer!”

What will this encounter lead to?

The release of an online game in which one scores points by hideous­ly dis­mem­ber­ing the ani­mat­ed form of direc­tor Hayao Miyaza­ki?

Or a new­found sen­si­tiv­i­ty, in which cool tech­no­log­i­cal advances are viewed through a lens of actu­al human expe­ri­ence?

Only time will tell.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Essence of Hayao Miyaza­ki Films: A Short Doc­u­men­tary About the Human­i­ty at the Heart of His Ani­ma­tion

Soft­ware Used by Hayao Miyazaki’s Ani­ma­tion Stu­dio Becomes Open Source & Free to Down­load

Hayao Miyaza­ki Meets Aki­ra Kuro­sawa: Watch the Titans of Japan­ese Film in Con­ver­sa­tion (1993)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

NASA Puts Its Software Online & Makes It Free to Download

A quick heads up: NASA has just announced that it has released its “2017–2018 soft­ware cat­a­log, which offers an exten­sive port­fo­lio of soft­ware prod­ucts for a wide vari­ety of tech­ni­cal appli­ca­tions, all free of charge to the pub­lic, with­out any roy­al­ty or copy­right fees.”

More than 30% of NASA inno­va­tions are soft­ware-based, and by mak­ing its soft­ware avail­able to the pub­lic, it helps give a boost to entre­pre­neurs, small busi­ness­es, cor­po­ra­tions and aca­d­e­mics. Ah, the ben­e­fits of Tech­nol­o­gy Trans­fer.

Avail­able in both hard copy and online, the soft­ware archive is divid­ed into numer­ous cat­e­gories, includ­ing Busi­ness Sys­tems and Project Man­age­ment, Vehi­cle Man­age­ment, Data Servers and Process Han­dling, Data and Image Pro­cess­ingDesign and Inte­gra­tion Tools, and more. See all avail­able soft­ware here.

h/t goes to OC read­er, Kunal

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free NASA eBook The­o­rizes How We Will Com­mu­ni­cate with Aliens

NASA Puts Online a Big Col­lec­tion of Space Sounds, and They’re Free to Down­load and Use

Down­load 14 Free Posters from NASA That Depict the Future of Space Trav­el in a Cap­ti­vat­ing­ly Retro Style

Down­load Free NASA Soft­ware and Help Pro­tect the Earth from Aster­oids!

Down­load 243 Free eBooks on Design, Data, Soft­ware, Web Devel­op­ment & Busi­ness from O’Reilly Media

Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty Launch­es Free Course on Devel­op­ing Apps with iOS 10

Stanford University Launches Free Course on Developing Apps with iOS 10

When­ev­er Apple releas­es a new ver­sion of iOS, Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty even­tu­al­ly releas­es a course telling you how to devel­op apps in that envi­ron­ment. iOS 10 came out last fall, and now the iOS 10 app devel­op­ment course is get­ting rolled out this quar­ter. It’s free online, of course, on iTunes.

You can now find “Devel­op­ing iOS Apps with Swift” housed in our col­lec­tion of Free Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es, which cur­rent­ly fea­tures 117 cours­es in total, includ­ing some basic Har­vard cours­es that will teach you how to code in 12 weeks.

As always, cours­es from oth­er dis­ci­plines can be found on our larg­er list, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Fol­low us on Face­book, Twit­ter and Google Plus and share intel­li­gent media with your friends. Or bet­ter yet, sign up for our dai­ly email and get a dai­ly dose of Open Cul­ture in your inbox.

 

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.