It is end of the year and it is time to have a quick look back. Some of the major things that marked past year, professionally of course are :

• Work at Gladiators Software in the past year was very dynamic, we released Aston2 Panels, improved Aston2 Menu a lot and we are very near in closing the A2 product line with great matching desktop. We have achieved something but there is  still have huge work ahead.
• WordPress do I need to say more. I mean state-of-the-art publishing platform but really
• Adobe Illustrator – I started to use it more frequently and have learned a lot but what I am looking forward is to learn more complex techniques and to really master this wonderful tool in the future.
• If I look at my skinning work in the past year I can easy say  that so called web 2.0 style was dominant. I pretty much fed up on 2.0 and it is time to explore and implement new styles like grunge or something like that.
• Windows Vista, yes I switched to 64-bit Vista and yes its design is great but maybe too bling-bling. It works great for me but games (never been a serious gamer though) seems to work better on XP. But I can say it is a pleasent environment for work once you overcome some annoyances

I could add few more things but this will do, have a nice life in the next year

Happy New Year!

While waiting for WYSIWYG skin editor to be developed I know many skinners are eager to try their luck in skinning Aston2 (Aston2 Menu or Aston2 Panels) . So while waiting why not give it a try. Some other time I’ll get into skinning itself but for now let’s see what we need.

1. Solid knowledge of file operations such as copying, working with archives etc. Also help of some file manager can be useful too. There are several really good shareware file managers such as Total Commander or Directory Opus , also there is quite a number of pretty  solid free managers such as FreeCommander or SE-Explorer. File managers can save lot of time and effort so I suggest you should use one.
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Great news. Gladiators Software give  discount on any purchased  product during the holidays starting today.

All 25% OFF!

This is awesome opportunity to treat yourself (or someone else ) more…

Wow cannot believe it Opera 10 alpha is available and you can get it here.
I do not plan to write a lot about other software releases but the one that come from Gladiators Software but Opera has been my favorite browser since 2003. although I hate to admit Firefox has been developing much faster and statistics are devastating for Opera. I started to use Firefox more because of some very elemental Opera shortcomings like in-line spell checker or some add-ons that Firefox has due to ever growing and huge community. more…

This year I am really in the great mood for the upcoming holidays so I decided to treat  myself with nice Christmas theme. It is not much, just made new header and few other minor elements but I think it’s quite alright. I’ll maybe add few more things here and there but really happy with what I have now. It will be on for entire month. I really love Christmas.

And of course feedback is welcome

In this very simple tutorial I am using Adobe Illustrator (CS3) to show you how easy it is to get a nice gloss using the opacity mask. Start by creating a new 400 x 400px rgb document. I will use popular star (badge) shape that you can see a lot around telling you that something is new or so.

Step 1

Select the star tool and click on the blank canvas, for start use the following settings from the dialog.

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