*** From the Archives ***

This article is from June 29, 2009, and is no longer current.

Free For All: The Best Things In Life

Photoshop ABR Brush Viewer
Photoshop brushes are favorites on Free for All. I love finding and giving them, you love receiving them. But what do you do with them once you have them? You probably install them, sure, but with brush set names like “014ruthenia_alba-time_planning” and “Vector Brushes 1.0,” how do you know what images, shapes, textures, and brush tips they contain? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could explore your library of Photoshop brushes visually? Now you can.
ABR Viewer is a simple, portable, open source application for Windows and Mac that lets you visually explore Photoshop brush .abr files. After pointing the application to one or more .abr brush sets (installed or just sitting on your disk), ABR Viewer presents thumbnails of each for easy exploration. You can even export the brush thumbnails to PNG graphics, something I wish brush set creators would do.
Click the image to see a larger version.

Illustrator Brushes
I know, I know. I tip you off to the ABR Viewer, and then I follow it up with free Illustrator brushes instead of free Photoshop brushes. You can find plenty of free Photoshop brushes in past (and future) installments of Free for All. For now, let’s give some love to our creative pro sisters and brothers using Photoshop’s older brother, Adobe Illustrator. Get yourself some scatter brushes, more scatter brushes, and yet more scatter brushes, some high-tech brushes, and finally, classically useful watercolor, and standard paint brush brushes.

Send Faxes Free
Wait! Don’t skip over this section! “Why not,” you might ask. “Fax is dead.” If that’s your belief, you’d be (regrettably) wrong. Don’t get me wrong. I agree: PDF is the way to go and facsimile transmission should die. It’s an antiquated, tree-killing, technology that is just so 1990s — and I hate every fax machine I’ve ever encountered. In fact, if I hadn’t already thrown my fax machine out a third-floor window (true story), you’d probably see me in this YouTube video. (Caution: adult language.)
Unfortunately, not everyone is so enlightened. Some clients and vendors still want to send you faxes and get faxes back from you. For those occasions, hop over to FaxZero.
FaxZero lets you send faxes to and from anywhere in the U.S. and Canada for free. Just enter the sender and recipient data, upload a document, and click Send. You’re allowed to send up to two free faxes per day, with a maximum of three pages each. FaxZero inserts an ad on the cover page, which doesn’t look all that professional, but, hey, it’s free. To get ad-free service you’ll have to pay $1.99 for up to 15 pages.
Click the image to see a larger version.

Leaf Textures
Get back to nature with ten high-quality leaf textures ready for use in personal or commercial projects (note their Creative Commons license).

An Everywhere Note and Image Organizer
Not only does Evernote boast a superb example of logo design, but it’s a wicked cool free text and multimedia note application and service.
Chief among Evernote’s impressive set of features is its portability. With desktop clients for Mac OSX and Windows, mobile clients for the Palm Pre, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and a brand new iPhone 3.0 app, a version that runs from SanDisk U3-powered USB thumb drives, and a full-featured Web interface, Evernote lets you create and access your text, audio, image, and other bits of data from virtually anywhere. Snap a picture of a business card on your mobile and you can then call up the actual text of the business card on your work computer or laptop at a later date.
Click the image to see a larger version.

Evernote’s built-in Optical Character Recognition is pretty darn good. You can run any image scanned, pasted, or clipped into Evernote through the OCR. You’ll still see the image, but you’ll also be able to search on, and extract, any readable text contained within the image. This feature is nothing less than jaw-dropping the first time you use it on a design sketch scribbled on a cocktail napkin.
Notes are grouped into user-defined “notebooks” and may include titles and keyword tags for easy categorization. Notes can hold images, text, addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, audio recordings, URLs, and “snippets”: content grabbed from the Web using the Evernote add-in for Firefox, Internet Explorer, and other browsers. Once a note is created, the Evernote client uploads it to your private area of Evernote.com and automatically synchronizes to all your Evernote clients. For instance, you can clip the address of a location in Firefox and, five minutes later, that location is pinned on a map on your iPhone.
Evernote is free with a monthly upload (synchronization) limit of 40 MB, which is approximately 20,000 text notes, 400 mobile snapshots, 270 Web clips, 40 audio notes, or 11 high-resolution photos. If that’s not enough for you, you can upgrade to Evernote Premium for the dirt-cheap rate of $5.00 per month or $45.00 per year. It increases your synchronization limit more than ten times.
Evernote’s note organization is limited compared to applications like Microsoft Word for Mac’s Notebook view and the Windows-only My Note Keeper, which include tree-like logical information organization. However, they’re not free, nor can they synch data across all your computers and devices.
What can I find free for you? Want more free fonts? More Photoshop brushes? How about more online applications that do this or that for free? Tell me in the comments what you’d like to see in future installments of Free for All, and I’ll do my best bloodhound impression to track it down for you.
Please note: Free for All will often link to resources hosted on external Web sites outside of the control of CreativePro.com. At any time those Web sites may close down, change their site or permalink structures, remove content, or take other actions that may render one or more of the above links invalid. As such neither Pariah S. Burke nor CreativePro.com can guarantee the availability of the third-party resources linked to in Free for All.

Pariah S. Burke is the author of many books and articles that empower, inform, and connect creative professionals.
  • Anonymous says:

    Pariah,

    Thanks for the link to ABR viewer, but now that I’ve downloaded the abrViewer.net file, I have no idea how to install or use this thing. There are no instructions, nor is there any apparent way to start it up. There are nothing but a collection of random .exe files and other strange formats in the folder. I’m on a Mac. Can you tell me how I can use this?

    Jon

  • Anonymous says:

    I followed the links for ABR viewer and it seems to be windows only (it requires .Net)

    https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=143912

  • Anonymous says:

    I’m on a mac – and have no idea why or where to find out about this needed file.
    Maybe you could explain a little or redirect the viewers?
    RE

  • Anonymous says:

    Have Vista. File download is a .php file. Not right. Doesn’t work. Know what the problem is?

  • kgps says:

    Excellent series. Can you confirm whether or not the ABRViewer is in fact cross-platform? The SourceForge download page has an RAR file that expands into an EXE. Closer scrutiny of the ABR page indicates it requires the NET framework to run. Thanks!

  • Pariah Burke says:

    Darn it! There WAS a Mac version download link when I wrote this. I’ll see if I can find it elsewhere. In the meantime there’s a non-free, Mac-only Photoshop brush viewer called Brush Pilot. I haven’t tried it personally, but you might want to check it out here: https://www.brushpilotapp.com/

  • Anonymous says:

    Any luck with this yet?

    PS> Love your articles!

    Tina

  • Anonymous says:

    The download files for the ABR Viewer do not contain MAC Installation Files.

  • James Song says:

    Thank you for sharing this useful information. Another website that lets you send free fax online is https://www.GotFreeFax.com . It is a great alternative to faxzero because it does not include a logo on your fax cover page.

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