This looks very cool:
Google Earth 5 gives you the ability to create a guided tour using KML Touring. KML Touring allows you to tell your story by creating a movie-like tour in Google Earth. You can add enhanced navigation, balloon pops, image overlays, voiceovers, music and sound, and many other types of special enhancements. Get creative and bring your cause to life.
via Tutorial: Create Narrated Tours with KML Touring (News).
Magic Number Machine is a free scientific calculator for Mac Os X.
Pencil is free and open source software that can be used for creating traditional (read: hand-drawn) animation. From what I’ve seen it works well at what it does, but don’t expect a lot of time-saving features. This software is for creating your animation frame-by-frame. Works on both Mac And Windows
I found a few ways to take an image, blow it up, and print it over several sheets of paper. You can find solutions here for the Mac, here for Windows, and here online.
On a recent episode of Geek-Ed we talked about a cool, free concept-mapping tool (think Inspiration) called Cmap. I found out today that you can incorporate pictures into your maps by putting them into Cmap as backgrounds for the various “concept boxes” you create. Simply drag an image from a folder and drop it on the concept box. One caveat: the images need to be resized before going in to Cmap because they are displayed full size. On the Mac the free Image Well does the job nicely.
ArtRage is a really cool natural-media painting program. The full version is only $20 and there’s a free version as well (with fewer features). Doesn’t look as expansive as Painter from Corel but you can’t beat the price. Check it out!
Fauxto.com is an online image editor: think stripped-down version of Photoshop, but online and free. Do basic image editting, use layers and save your work online or to your computer. Caveat no. 1: you must have the latest version of the Flash plugin (free from Adobe) installed. Caveat no. 2: when using the move tool on a layer make sure you click the “apply move” button after you move something (and before going to another tool); failure to do so caused the program to lock up (at least in Safari; I didn’t try any other web browser).
I’m a big fan of Google Earth and not just because it’s cool in itself but because of all the resources that extend it’s functionality. The Google Earth blog contains a wealth of resources for getting more out of Google Earth. For example I recently came across this entry that describes how to get an animation showing the progress of continental drift over the last 650 million years or so. Other recent posts include a map of glaciers showing which ones are advancing and which ones are melting and a map of the flood in Florence in 1966 (important for Art History students!).
My favorite application for working with digital photos on Windows is Google’s Picasa. It is far and away easier to use than any program I’ve seen that came with a digital camera. It allows you to organize, edit, and share your photos in many ways and, best of all, it’s free.
Mac users don’t need to feel left out, however, because iPhoto comes with every Mac and provides essentially the same features as Picasa.