Design software focuses on the digital creation or re-creation of a thing or idea. Types of design range from print media, web site, computational, 3-dimensional, structural, simulation, and more. Simulation and modeling software is closely related and sometimes integrated with design software.
Visualization software includes applications that help visualize concepts, ideas, or scenarios. This includes diagramming, geographical visualization, molecular and structure visualization, graphical data representations, and some animation.
Also included in this category are applications used in presentations. This includes not only Powerpoint and powerpoint style presentations, but live polling software, presentation capture software, and web presentations as well. As well, applications used to create, edit, convert, or touch up digital images. Software ranges from photo editing, photo cataloging, graphic design, and diagramming. Finally there are applications used to edit web pages including code editors, What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) editors, and Content Management (CMS) systems that organize and manage web pages on a server.
The Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) is a Java-based software framework for analyzing and visualizing geoscience data. IDV is developed at the Unidata Program Center (UPC), part of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), Boulder, Colorado, which is funded by the National Science Foundation. The IDV “reference application” is a geoscience display and analysis software system with many of the standard data displays that other Unidata software (e.g. GEMPAK and McIDAS) provide. It brings together the ability to display and work with satellite imagery, gridded data (for example, numerical weather prediction model output), surface observations, balloon soundings, NWS WSR-88D Level II and Level III RADAR data, and NOAA National Profiler Network data, all within a unified interface. It also provides 3-D views of the earth system and allows users to interactively slice, dice, and probe the data, creating cross-sections, profiles, animations and value read-outs of multi-dimensional data sets. The IDV can display any Earth-located data if it is provided in a known format.
A training guide is available here.
Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor developed and marketed by Adobe Systems. Vector graphics is a technology that allows objects to be infinitely scalable to either very large or very tiny sizes without degradation in quality. Often when an image is expanded to a large size the image distorts with rough squares and sharp edges, known as pixels. This is a raster image which is based with a particular size in mind. Vector images are based on geometry and relative location and angles, so its proportions can be scaled in any direction without pixelation or distortion. Illustrator also includes 3-dimensional capabilities allowing users to extrude or revolve shapes to create simple 3D objects.
Adobe Illustrator CS6 is being replaced with Adobe Illustrator CC.
