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.
Keynote is slide based presentation software designed by Apple
, Inc for MacOS computers and iOS devices. Keynote offers a similar feature set as Microsoft PowerPoint, but it differs stylistically by using a different set of transitions, themes, fonts, animations, and backgrounds.
Keynote is available for free with any computer running MacOS 10.9 Mavericks. Keynote can also be purchased for older Macs through the Apple App Store for $19.99.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is a photo editing and management computer program developed by Adobe Systems for Windows and OS X. Via a single user interface, it allows the viewing, management, and editing of a large number of digital images. Lightroom and Photoshop share many of the same photo editing capabilities but with very different strengths, namely Lightroom’s non-destructive behavior and Photoshop’s ability to layer and manipulate specific elements of an image.
Lightroom is not a file browser like Adobe Bridge, but rather an image management application database which helps in viewing, editing, and managing digital photos.
Magic is a very large scale integration layout tool. The main difference between Magic and other VLSI design tools is its use of “corner-stitched” geometry, in which all layout is represented as a stack of planes, and each plane consists entirely of “tiles” (rectangles). The tiles must cover the entire plane. Each tile consists of an (X, Y) coordinate of its lower left-hand corner, and links to four tiles: the right-most neighbor on the top, the top-most neighbor on the right, the bottom-most neighbor on the left, and the left-most neighbor on the bottom. With the addition of the type of material represented by the tile, the layout geometry in the plane is exactly specified. The corner-stitched geometry representation leads to the concept of layout as “paint” to be applied to, or erased from, a canvas. This is considerably different from other tools that use the concept of layout as “objects” to be placed and manipulated separately from one another. Each concept has its own strengths and weaknesses in terms of both practical use and speed of computation. The corner-stitched representation is particularly well suited to searches within a single plane, for which it excels in speed. It is not particularly well suited to extremely large databases: The need to maintain four pointers for each tile, as well as the need to store tiles representing the space between areas of material on a layout, makes it more memory-intensive than object-based representations.
Magic currently runs under Linux, although versions exist for DOS, OS/2, and other operating systems. Magic is frequently used in conjunction with IRSIM and other simulation programs.
