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When it comes to graphing equations, the picture that's normally worth a thousand words is probably worth a thousand numbers as well. Once you start graphing anything interesting, your graph paper and pencil start to fail you. You could go buy an expensive graphing calculator, but why spend all that dough?

EdenGraph is a graphing calculator for Macs. Along with all the arithmetic, algebraic, and trig functions you'd expect, it also has built-in constant values for pi and e. Enter your equation–algebraic, trig, or whatever–and it plots it for you. Tweak your values and it updates automatically. You can zoom in to get up close and personal, or zoom out to get the big picture. Tweak colors for your plot as well as the background, axes, and grid. When you're all done, print your handiwork out, or save your graph as a TIFF, EPS, or PDF, or even copy it to the clipboard to paste into another application.

A free download, EdenGraph is a Mac application. It's a Universal Binary, so you should be able to use it on both your PowerPC and your Intel machines.

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If you're a blogger worth your salt, you're uploading pictures to support your posts. If you create web pages, you're adding visual interest by sticking some photos, drawings, and other stuff up there as well. Dealing with all those images can be a bit of a pain.

Take image sizes, for example. For your visitors to have the best online experience, their web browsers appreciate it when your web page tells them what size your images are. Unfortunately it's not always easy to know what those width and height numbers are. Finder won't tell you, so often it means that you have to fire up your favorite high-powered image editor and look at image properties to find out what size they are. That's a bit like using a canon to swat at mosquitos. That's where Dimensionizer comes in.

This little tool puts image size information into the context (right click) menu for you. Just right-click on an image file in Finder and you'll get the filename along with the height and width of the image and the image resolution to boot. Now you can add that important information to your web pages and know that you've given your visitors a hand. Their browsers will love you for it.

Dimensionizer is a free Mac application. It requires OS X version 10.2 or later.

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How many times do we hear that a picture is worth a thousand words? Too many, no doubt. While a photo or drawing can help to point something out or demonstrate a problem, often the picture by itself isn't enough. After all, books and newspapers add captions to photos for a reason: the picture doesn't necessarily always tell the whole story.

If you're using pictures to tell a story, you might want to take a look at Skitch. This tool lets your take a screenshot of a web page or desktop application, and then add your own annotations to it. A picture's good, but when you add an arrow and a note—look at this widget, right here—and everybody will know what the excitement is all about. Or grab an image from your machine and have at it. Your annotations—circles, arrows, text—are all held in a layer separate from the image itself, so you can drag them around the canvas without messing-up the underlying picture. And it's easy to save your new-and-improved image to the desktop or upload it to any server.

Skitch is a Mac application. It runs under OS X version 10.4.6 and later. It's a Universal Binary, so it should be equally at home on PowerPC and Intel-powered Macs. The current release is a public beta, so it may behave in unexpected ways.

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It's always amazing to me how the human brain works, trying to organize and extract meaning from seemingly meaningless stimuli. We all know that the pictures on the TV screen and images thrown against the wall by a movie projector don't really move; rather our brains take a series of still images and supply the "tweening" such that we see motion even when there is none. Or take a look at the pictures in a newspaper. There's not really a line or shape in most of them; instead it's a bunch of larger- and smaller-sized dots against a white background. You see shapes and a zillion different levels of gray because your brain fills-in-the-blanks to make us "see" pictures.

HyperDither is an interesting app that deals with this "see dots as images" thing. Built using the same same dithering filter used to convert grayscale images to black and white for early Macintosh computers, it takes your image and converts into a bunch of dots, to rather interesting effect. It's easy to use, as you can either browse to the file you're interested in, or just drag and drop your picture into the app's main window. You can even grab a whole folder's worth of files if you want to go nuts with it.

A free download, HyperDither is a Mac application. It runs under OS X (10.3 and greater) and is a Universal Binary, so you can use it on your PowerPC or Intel system.

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Tweaking pictures one at a time is a pain in the neck. A camera full of digital images takes up a ton of space, and would take forever to load if you were to put them on a website or blog. Shrinking them down into something more manageable will save space, and makes it easier for everybody who views your handiwork online to see it quicker and get on with their day.

Resizing images is easy with Shrink O'Matic. Just drag and drop your picture files onto the application, or browse for them on your hard drive. It works equally well with JPEG, GIF, and PNG images. Choose a maximum height or width for your tweaked pictures, and then save them in their original format, or convert them into one of the other supported image types.

Shrink O'Matic runs on the Adobe Air platform. That means that it's available for Windows, Mac, and Linux machines—any system that supports Air. That's handy, since you can use the same tool on all of your machines.

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Everything can look better. Grab a handful of digital images and no matter how good they are, there's always room for improvement. Even if they are perfect photos, they may not be the exact right size for the website or blog you're posting them to. You can manipulate your image files with expensive proprietary tools, although that can be pretty expensive. Or you can use free apps to do your work, but even things like GIMP are fairly complicated, and require that you have X11 up and running on your system. Or you can go with a more "bare bones" solution: just enough tool to get the job done, but without all the bells and whistles—and dollar signs.

ToyViewer is a tool that lets you examine and tweak image files. It handles the standard Mac repertoire, including GIF, TIFF, JPEG and all; in addition it can work with many PSD and SVG files, as well as others. Use it to look at images, and also modify them for you. Functionality lets you flip, clip, and resize images, as well as adjusting color, brightness, and contrast. Save your handiwork off into one of several different image formats, allowing you to convert JPEGs to PNGs and more.

ToyViewer is a free download for your Mac. It runs under OS X 10.4 and later. If you're still using an earlier version (Panther, Jaguar, Puma), they've still got older down-rev versions that include much of the same functionality.

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Lots of systems now ship with a webcam as standard equipment. It's pretty handy to be able to video conference from the convenience of your desktop. For that matter, there are lots of uses for that technology. Unfortunately, if you're using more than one of them at a time, you may be out of luck as far as your camera is concerned.

ManyCam lets you use your webcam with multiple applications at the same time. Whether you're chatting or streaming live, your single camera handles it all. In addition, ManyCam includes several fun features you can use, including adding text, including local date and time, to your video feed, and background effects. It's almost like having your own green screen backgrounds, but without all that tedious painting.

ManyCam is a free download. It's available for Windows (requires Win2k or later) and Mac (OS X 10.5+, Intel machines only).

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Did you ever wish that something on your monitor were bigger? I don't mean the monitor itself—displays are getting HUGE and displaying massive amounts of information. But what about that little section over there? Whether it's because your eyes aren't quite as sharp as they used to be, or because you're looking at some video clip that doesn't have a "full screen" button on it, you'd like to make that thing you're focused on big enough to really see. Check out HotBox.

With this application, you can select a region on your display and blow it up to full-screen size. With a simple click-and-drag movement, you choose the area you're interested in and enlarge it to big (or huge). Now you can read that teeny-tiny print, or see that little thumbnail-sized image in all its glory.

HotBox is a Mac application. It runs under recent versions of OS X.

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Origami has always been intriguing to me. I could never make anything more complicated than the tried-and-true "cootie catcher" from the Third Grade, but that didn't stop me from admiring the work of others. I've never quite figured out what the problem is, since I've always enjoyed the "what will this shape look like when it is folded together?" tests. Maybe it's a lack of clear instructions on how to get from start to finish. Well now, here's a site with clear instructions.

HowPack features patterns for making various containers. Using their patterns, some heavy paper- or card stock, scissors, and maybe a bit of glue or tape, you can create all sorts of different containers. They run the gamut from a simple open-ended sleeve—think of a box with four sides but no top or bottom—up through milk cartons (pointed top), pyramids, little boxes, and more. Interestingly enough, the instructions are basically all nonverbal. The patterns and outlines for the various containers all show where to cut and where to fold to execute these containers.

HowPack patterns are all JPEG images, so all you'll need to grab them and start building your own containers is a web browser and a pair of scissors.

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It's a big, wide, wonderful world out there. How big? Big enough to fill a big expensive atlas with maps and maps. But you don't need to spend all that cash—not if you visit Printable Maps.

This site has a huge collection of maps—something like 150—for you to download. They've got maps of continents, and countries; regions and states. There are maps that are all labeled for you, and others that are left blank for you to label yourself. Get out the vacation brochures and plan your next trip. Teachers can use them in their classrooms. Students can use them for study and reports. And best of all, they're all free. Grab a map, grab two, or maybe download them all. Now you're giving Rand McNally a run for their money.

Printable Maps are free to download and use. They're all available in PDF format, so you'll need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open the files and print them out.

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