I have to admit, I am a sucker for the visual arts. I often tell my wife that I am the reason people still spend money on billboards. I am the kind of guy that will nearly run the car off the road looking at billboard signs. You can imagine my thrill when I found a great social networking site geared towards all things visual called “Pinterest“.

Pinterest is a virtual pinboard that “lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web.” The site seeks to connect people through common interests. People post things they like that they’ve seen on the web to their “boards” and, like Twitter, people can follow your boards and you can follow theirs.

How does it work, you ask? When you first go the Pinterest website, you will be greeted with a montage of stunning images shared from all over the web. Below, you will see a picture of the main page.

You will notice that there is a button to “Request an Invite” from Pinterest. If you click this button, you will see the screen pictured below.

Shortly after submitting an invitation request, you will receive a greeting in your email with a link to sign up. You will see a screen similar to the one pictured below when you click that link. Pinterest links with an existing Facebook or Twitter account. They claim it makes it easier to find friends and share your interests. I suspect they didn’t want to reinvent the social networking wheel.

Once you have connected to your Facebook account, you are taken to a page where you can indicate certain interests that you have. If you look in the picture below, there are several categories from which to choose. Pinterest will automatically sign you up to follow certain people based on the interests that you chose. You have the option to unfollow these people at any time.

You will now have the option create pinboards of your own. Below, you will see the default suggested categories for pinboards. These are merely suggestions and you can add or delete as many as you like. Once you have added all of the pinboard categories you like, click “Create”.

Lastly, you will be given the option to install the Pinterest button to your browser. This will allow you to easily pin something to one of your boards from any website. I think this is a good idea. You don’t have to install it if you don’t want to, but then the process of adding pins is a little more manual. When you hit the Pinterest button in your browser, it automatically picks the images off of the page and gives you the choice of which image you want to pin.  Below, you will see a group of images from a website about Ayers Rock.

When you click “Pin This” on an image, you will be taken to a dialog box like the one below. You will be given the option to pick which board you want to pin the image to. You also have the options of giving it a description, mentioning Facebook friends, and adding tags. When you are ready, click “Pin It” and you are done.

Pinterest is a unique way to network with people through the sharing of images. You can make wish lists, plan a wedding, plan an interior design, and much more. Frankly, it is only limited by your imagination and creativity. I hope you enjoy using Pinterest.

I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas. Please feel free to comment below.

The HTC Incredible 2, also known as the Verizon Droid Incredible 2, is supposed to be launched soon. It will be one of the few new high end Android smartphones which will be powered by a single core processor. Other than that, the HTC Incredible 2 seems to have some really good hardware specs.

Today, images and specifications of the HTC Droid Incredible 2 have leaked out.

It will come with a 4.0 inch Super LCD display with a WVGA resolution. It will run Android 2.3 Gingerbread with the HTC Sense UI (It is running Android 2.2 Froyo, but will get a upgrade to Gingerbread before launch).

It also has an 8 MP camera with flash as well as a 1.3 MP front facing camera. It is powered by a 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM 8655 processor and offers 768 MB RAM. It also has 4 GB internal storage and has a 1450 mAh battery.

Compared to the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S 2 or the Motorola Atrix 4G, it seems a bit underpowered in terms of clock speed and RAM, but it is an impressive device nevertheless. Pricing details and launch dates should be announced soon.

via AndroidSpin

When Windows Phone 7 was first announced by Microsoft, Sony Ericsson was named as a Windows Phone 7 partner by Microsoft, along with Samsung, HTC, LG and Dell. While each of the other manufacturers have launched their Windows Phone 7 devices, Sony Ericsson still hasn’t made any move in the WP7 market.

It has been quite loyal to Android so far, ditching even Symbian in the process. Today, images have leaked out which have captured a Sony Ericsson prototype slider phone running Windows Phone 7.

The prototype is labelled “Not for Sale” and has a nice sleek design with a sliding keyboard. It seems to be running a very old build of Windows Phone 7. This is rumored to be the Sony Ericsson Julie, a phone similar to the Xperia X10 with a QWERTY keyboard, a 4 inch display and a 1 GHz processor which was scrapped after Microsoft and Sony Ericsson failed to reach an agreement about Xbox Live.

We don’t know if Sony Ericsson plans to continue to work on the prototype and launch it though, considering that it would run Xbox Live and compete with the Playstation phone – the Xperia Play. Stay tuned for more updates.

Check out these leaked images of the Sony Ericsson Windows Phone 7 phone.

via WMPowerUser

Details of the Blackberry Dakota, a smartphone styled after the Blackberry Bold, first surfaced after RIM’s Blackberry Roadmap for 2011 was leaked. Soon after, the specifications of the Blackberry Dakota and a few rendered images of it also leaked out.

Today, we have the live images of the Blackberry Dakota / Montana, rumored to be the Blackberry Bold Touch. It will be the first Blackberry phone to sport both a touchscreen display and the famed Blackberry QWERTY keyboard.

The Blackberry Dakota / Montana will run Blackberry OS 6.1. It comes with a 2.8 inch capacitive touchscreen display with a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels. It has 6.5 GB internal storage and comes with 512 MB RAM.

The Bold Touch will be slightly bigger than the Blackberry Bold, but will offer much more than its predecessor. It will also have a 5 MP camera with HD video recording, flash and image stabilization. It will offer Bluetooth, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n and NFC support. It can also act as a 3G mobile hotspot. It will be one of the slimmest Blackberry devices at just 10.5 mm.

For more details on the specifications, check out our original Blackberry Dakota Specifications post.

Head over to n4bb for more images of the Blackberry Bold Touch (Dakota / Montana)

Sony Ericsson has been one of the most loyal Android adopters. It has refused to even work on any other smartphone platform, including Windows Phone 7. It hasn’t had many hits yet, but it looks like 2011 will be a great year for Sony Ericsson.

The Xperia Play is one of the most awaited Android smartphones of the year, and the Xperia Arc is an excellent phone too. Today, details of yet another Android device by Sony Ericsson were revealed. It is the successor to the Sony Ericsson Vivaz – the Xperia Neo. It has much better hardware specs and comes with Android.

Like the Arc, it will come with a 4 inch LED backlit LCD capacitive touchscreen display with a resolution of 854 x 480 pixels. It will be powered by a 1 GHz processor, 512 MB RAM and an Adreno 205 GPU, just like the Xperia Play. It has an 8 MP camera with an Exmor R sensor and LED flash and also supports 720p video recording. It also has a nice secondary camera, either a 1.3 MP or a 2 MP one, for video calls.

It will be powered by Android 2.3 Gingerbread, the latest version of the Android OS. It will have the Timescape UI too, and will also offer HDMI out.

The Sony Ericsson Xperia Neo will be officially launched with the Xperia Play at the Mobile World Congress in February. Keep checking for more MWC updates.

via Techradar

Have you ever wondered if you could have some control over GIF animations? Like, did you ever want to pause, rewind, or run the images in slow or fast motion. Well, you can now easily do it using a simple online tool, PlayGif.com.

PlayGif.com adds functionality to animated GIFs, that includes controls for pause, reverse and speed adjustment. The website splits the image into separate frames, which can be played and controlled by the user.  This is a brilliant tool, for it provides the user better control of how the animation is played and how fast. Also, in certain situations, like this population chart, having the ability to pause or slow down the image can help immensely with analyzing the data.

To use their functionality, you’ll need to enter in the url of the gif image (as of now, you can’t upload the image on PlayGif.com. Use an image hosting site like Imgur.com to first upload the image on the Internet). Or if you plan on using the service regularly, they also have a javascript bookmarklet that can make your task much easier.

If the previously leaked Blackberry devices weren’t enough, the folks over at BGR have gone ahead and posted up another image render aside some specifications of the Storm 3. Outfitted with a relatively large 3.7″ 480×800 resolution screen, one can only hope that RIM has decided to drop their “SurePress” technology and run with a regular “non buttoned” capacitive screen for ease of use to regular consumers. Along with the other “next generation” Blackberry devices, the Storm 3 packs new internals, supports “3G Mobile Hotspot” as well as the OpenGL standard and should also be shipping with OS 6.1.

Blackberry Storm 3 Specifications

1.2GHz processor
3.7-inch 800 x 480 capacitive display
Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE
Tri-band UMTS/HSPA
5-megapixel camera with 720p video recording
8GB eMMC (storage for apps and data), 512MB of RAM
microSD slot
Magnetometer
Proximity sensor
Accelerometer
Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
2.4GHz b/g/n and 5GHz a/n Wi-Fi + UMA
3G Mobile hotspot
Optical trackpad
1230 mAh battery

Via BGR

With the news of the impending launch of the Blackberry Tablet and leaked images of the Blackberry Storm 3, here’s another interesting piece of news for Blackberry lovers.

The Blackberry Bold 9780, the next phone in the Bold series, has been spotted a few times already. Yesterday, it was spotted once again, in Vietnam, of all places.

It looks very similar to the Blackberry Bold R020, details of which we uncovered last month.

The hardware will me more or less the same as the Bold 9700. It will have a 624 MHz processor, 512 MB RAM and a 2.44 inch display with a resolution of 480 x 360 pixels. It will also have a 5 MP camera and will run the new Blackberry OS 6.0. It will sport the standard connectivity options – 3G HSDPA, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS.

Do check out this hands-on video:

Source via BGR

Despite the name of the site, MorgueFile has hundreds of free photos and they don’t have anything to do with death. According to the site:

Free images for your inspiration, reference and use in your creative work, be it commercial or not!

You are free:

Remix — to adapt the work.
Commercial — to use this work for commercial purposes.
Without Attribution — to use without attributing the original author.

This collection of photos was started in 1996 by Michael Connors, a multi-media artist in NYC. Michael, his brother Kevin, and a friend named Johannes have continued to manage the site since then. They accept photos and images from anyone who wants to contribute them. So if you have some unique photos or images you want to show off, just sign up to upload them.

The photos and images are indexed and tagged so that you can find what you are looking for. When you type in a keyword to search for specific types of images, you’ll get a nice looking page of thumbnails as shown here.

You’ll be to open any image by clicking on it. In addition, there’s also a tab showing Dreamstime images, but keep in mind that those images may not be free. If you are only interested in free images, don’t bother opening up the Dreamstime tab.

If you can’t find what you are looking for at MorgueFile, be sure to check out PicFindr,    stock photo search engines or the open clipart library.

I often spend too much time looking for the right image to use in a blog post or web page. My biggest problem is finding an image that I can use without worrying about copyrights. Most of the images you find on the web are not labeled with a clear message that says who it belongs to.

Since I’ve found OpenClipart.org, I think I’ll be saving a lot of time. Everything there is completely free. There are no strings attached. You can use their images in anything you publish.

OpenClipart.org has been doing this since they were founded in 2004. This is what they say about their project:

The usage of the name is to convey connection to Open Source software and culture. Also, the word conveys the concept of the project lowering barriers for participation for submission of artwork, development on the project, use of the site and use of the clip art stored.

If you just want to use the freebie art, you only need to go to the site and type in a search term or use the categories to find what you need.

They also offer several packages loaded with all of the clipart from the entire website. These can be downloaded in a couple of different formats.

Download Clipart

If you are an artist, they’d love to get your help with this project. Here’s how to get involved.

If you’re just an average graphics-challenged person like myself, be sure to tell everyone you know about this cool website.