After playing a little with Photoshop CS2, I’ve now spent a couple minutes checking out Illustrator CS2 to see what is new. A pretty cool new feature, is “Live Trace”. It converts images into vector objects and does a pretty good job of it. I seem to recall a really old Adobe product that use to do this many years ago. I remember trying it out and ending up with pathetic results. I went to flickr and found a random image to use as a test. (original here. I used the largest original version.) I cropped out the drawing thingy out of the photo, imported into Illustrator and simply clicked the “Live Trace” button. Here is the result. The image on the left is just a bitmap image, the one on the right is vector based. You can do all sort of tweaks and adjust the number of colors that are used to generate the vector version. Click the image for the larger version.

Via Technocrat.net, The SHIFT bike is a bicycle designed for toddlers that effectively changes from a tricycle to a bicycle as the speed increases. Who knows if it actually works, but it looks cool.