Mac OSX people, who still search for good drawing tools (apart from that obvious, but expensive Adobe range), should make this an instant download: Autodesk’s SketchBook teamed up with the marker and color-manufacturer Copic. The result is an free app, on the Mac App Store, that combines the goodness of both worlds: an easy to use software with nice to look at colors.

The app features 6 different Copic marker nibs and brushes, up to 6 basic layers and a collection of 72 Copic colors. Simply a fast way, to get stuff drawn.

Pause Music is back with a classic-sounding 8-bit release from Zan-zawa-zawa-veia. The tracks oscillate between music, you would expect at NES or gameboy classic games. The vibe is offworld and sometimes messes in technical, musical structures. It’s all a little sick, including the bands name “Zan-zawa-zawa-veia” itself. Music like 486-PCs. Classic game-music lovers just head over to the Pause-Music site and have a listen to Lune Rose or head over to the Bandcamp-site for doing the same.

August 2011 there will be the second edition of the Platine-Festival – parallel to the Gamescom 2011 and the GDC Europe. Is is a small scale, decentral organized, but really great festival upon contemporary game-art. The exhibition features a handful of cutting-edge artworks, that is somehow connected to games and art. It is taking place at various venues right in the heart of Cologne. I went there last year and really was not disappointed. The festival-program is available at the platine-cologne website. But to tease you, the friends of the Netlabelism-magazine, put together a small compilation of netmusic – featuring bits and bleeps, somewhere between game- and chipmusic. The compilation is also available to download (.zip).

Creative Code hackers and artful code tinkerers can cheer up. Because there is a new project coming at them: Zajal can briefly described by Ruby meets openFrameworks and OS-X in a graceful Processing-style. Currently the project is at version 0.3.3, the source-code is available at github. But people want to see examples to get an idea: here is the public sketchbook of Zajal.

One interesting aspect of this project is, that you can use Ruby and the full power of Ruby gems to develop your sketches. The design of the language is really Processing-like: to pick up and get started fast. Get results quickly. As you can see, that thing is also suitable for livecoding!

This music came just in: The EP Kemonogatari from artist Renzo. It sounds like F-Zero soundtrack meets music from Ken Ishii and endless blue nights. Maybe also with a little spice of Fila Brasilia. This EP was released on the Berlin / Barcelona based Netlabel Musica Vermella. And since this is a free Creative Commons download, you best choose the option to download now!
(via @rec72)

Kosmoraum is the name of a special compilation, that is is tribute to the first man-flight into space, done by Yuri Gagarin, almost exactly 50 years ago. Four netlabels and two netaudio-streamingradios joined together for this release. Half of them from Germany, half from Russia. (Netlabels: Zimmer Records, Tonatom, Aventuel, CirclesandLines, Radios: Ambione, Klangboot).

Although this is a trippy electronica release with full length playing time, I would have wished a little more striving for musical uniqueness with the aim of making all time classic netaudio release. My favourite track so far is “Treibstoffmasse” from “Sternenspringer”.

On the other hand I ask myself, why so many netlabels don’t take opportunities like that – to join together with special releases in order to reach a broader audience than doing just simple homework!

D3.js looks like a promising free JavaScript-framework, to visualize data-driven documents and infographics. The special thing about this framework it, that D3 is not another ordinary visualizing-framework, that you have to learn and adapt. It is much more lightweight in its nature:

“D3 is not a traditional visualization framework. Rather than provide a monolithic system with all the features anyone may ever need, D3 solves only the crux of the problem: efficient manipulation of documents based on data. This gives D3 extraordinary flexibility, exposing the full capabilities of underlying technologies such as CSS3, HTML5 and SVG. It avoids learning a new intermediate proprietary representation. With minimal overhead, D3 is extremely fast, supporting large datasets and dynamic behaviors for interaction and animation.”

There could be much more said here, but why not directly head over to the D3.js-page? There is everything explained in an elegant way.