Leslie M. Ficcaglia

Leslie M. Ficcaglia, a member of the American Society of Portrait Artists, has been an artist for as long as she can recall. As a child she carried a sketchbook with her and took every opportunity to draw the people and objects she encountered. Largely self-taught, she attended life classes at The Art Students’ League while a student at New York University and more recently studied landscape painting with Glenn Rudderow, of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, to learn oil techniques. This experience with landscapes is evident in the backgrounds she uses for her oil portraits. While she is proficient with more formal studies as well, her specialty is “Portraits in a Natural Setting” and she often depicts her subjects out-of-doors, in settings which are meaningful to them. Painting in her studio overlooking the Wild and Scenic Manumuskin River in rural Port Elizabeth, in southern New Jersey, Ficcaglia normally works from her own photographs. She finds that using photos as her reference material enables her to achieve fresher and more spontaneous facial expressions than would be possible if her subjects were asked to pose for long periods of time, and the warmth and sense of personality she is able to convey have become a trade- mark of her work.

    Ficcaglia’s choice of subject matter reflects both her background in psychology and her strong interest in the environment. Although she has only been doing figurative paintings since 1995 she has already developed a wide reputation for her work. Her portraits in oils have been featured in articles and photographs in local papers, the Press of Atlantic City, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, and have been the subject of a radio interview, and her commissioned works hang in public and private settings in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Florida, Nevada, California and the south of France. Several years ago she was honored to be commissioned by the New Jersey Conference of Mayors to paint a portrait of Governor James McGreevey and his wife, Dina Matos McGreevey, and she now completes the annual Mayor of the Year portrait for that organization. Recently Ficcaglia has begun traveling to France, where she spends time with friends who live there and also explores the countryside. This has provided her with material for a series of mostly figurative paintings based on the people and places she has seen in the Southwest and in Paris.

Leslie Ficcaglia has long been interested in ecotourism as a means of protecting her area's resources. Her ecotourism brochure was distributed by her township and became the core for this web site. She served as a member of the Maurice River Township Planning Board for almost twenty years and as its chair for the last seven years of her tenure, and continues as vice-chairman of the Cumberland County Planning Board. She was active in the effort to obtain federal Wild and Scenic status for the Maurice River and its tributaries, working on the task force established for that purpose. In addition she is the Pinelands Commissioner for Cumberland County and a past trustee for the Association of New Jersey Environmental Commissions. She also sits on the county Tourism Council; serves as vice-chair for the township Environmental Committee; acts as trustee for Citizens United, a local watershed organization; is a member of the Delaware Bayshores Advisory Council of The Nature Conservancy; and chairs the board of the Riverfront Renaissance Center for the Arts. Her biography is listed in Who's Who in America.

Professionally Mrs. Ficcaglia, a retired psychologist, is a portrait artist. She finds it especially satisfying to depict the people of the area against the background of the local landscape which she loves. Her commissioned oil paintings hang in public and private settings in a number of states.

JAVA 8 FEATURES

Java 8 launched today and it’s a groundbreaking release since Java 1.2. Although Java 5 brings big features but Java 8, as a whole, is really an enormous step for the Java language and platform.

Java 8 is the first truly revolutionary release we’ve done in a very long time

- Mark Reinhold (chief architect of the Java Platform)

Formal support of Lambda expressions, the Stream API and Functional Interfaces are spectacular improvements to java platform that allows developers to take advantage of multicore processors. Other than that new Date Time API, new JavaScript Engine, Compact Profiling, annotations and concurrency enhancements are impressive improvements.

Java 8 Features

Language and Platform Features

• 
  

  Lambda Expressions

  
  

  Aka closures, enable developers to encapsulate a single unit of behavior and pass it to other code. Its like syntactic sugar for an anonymous class (with one method whose type is inferred) and is an object-less method or anonymous method. Its the most dominant feature of Java 8 and will have great implications for simplifying development. Behind the seen it is not an anonymous class; it actually uses invokedynamic in the byte-code.

  
  


• 
  

  Stream & Bulk Data Operations

  
  

  Represents a sequence of objects, somewhat like the Iterator. However, unlike the Iterator, it supports parallel execution. Classes in the new java.util.stream package provide a Stream API to support functional-style operations on streams of elements. The Stream API is integrated into the Collections API, which enables bulk operations on collections, such as sequential or parallel map-reduce transformations.

  
  


• 
  

  Functional Interface

  
  

  Its defined as an interface with exactly one (non default) method. This concept also applicable to interfaces that were created with earlier Java version. Java 8 comes with several functional interfaces in package,java.util.function.

  
  


• 
  

  Method Reference

  
  

  As its title are reference to some method. Java 8 allow developers to refer any existing method  or anonymous method (Lambda) as well. Method references can point to static methods, instance methods, particular object/instance methods and constructors.

  
  


• 
  

  Default Method

  
  

  Aka Defender Methods or Virtual Extension methods, now adds support for multiple inheritance in java(multiple inheritance of implementation more precisely). It help API authors to add new methods to an interface without breaking the old code that already using the actual interface.

  
  


• 
  

  Type Annotations

  
  

  (Annotations on Types) extends the set of annotatable locations, now developers are allowed to use annotations along with the use of a type. This new ability is primarily aimed at supporting type-checking frameworks that refine Java’s built-in type system.

  
  


• 
  

  Repeating Annotations

  
  

  These  provide the ability to apply the same annotation type more than once to the same declaration or type use. Improve the readability of source code which logically applies multiple instances of the same annotation type to a given program element.

  
  


• 
  

  Generalized Target-Type Inference

  
  

  It expands the scope of method type-inference to support (1) inference in method context and (2) inference in chained calls. Now developers need not to manually specify type-parameters on chained callas, method call in some expressions.

  
  


• 
  

  Method parameter reflection

  
  

  provide a mechanism to easily and reliably retrieve the parameter names of methods and constructors at runtime via core reflection. It allow to improve IDE capabilities by making parameter names more widely available.

  
  


• 
  

  New Date/Time API

  
  

  is thread-safe, easier to read, and more comprehensive than the previous API. It will make developers more productive, whether they are using the global date and time standards or one of the regional calendars.

  
  


• 
  

  Base64

  
  

  encoding/decoding provides a standard built-in API for encoding/decoding resources. URL Base64 Encoder provides an encoding that is URL and Filename safe.

  
  


• 
  

  Compact Profiles & Small VM

  
  

  allow developers to use just a customized subset of the platform, and is a major step toward the merging of Java SE and Java ME. It opens horizons to work on the smallest embedded Internet of Things (IoT) devices to enterprise servers in the cloud. Small VM feature support the creation of a small VM that is no larger than 3MB.

  
  


• 
  

  Nashorn

  
  

  replaces Rhino as the default JavaScript engine and intend to provide a version of JavaScript that would run as part of JVM. The new script engine allow to import packages, use and even extend Java classes inside JavaScript,  and invoke JavaScript functions directly from Java as well.

  
  


• 
  

  PermGen

  
  

  removed from the Hotspot JVM. Class meta-data in native memory and move interned Strings and class statics to the Java heap. The code for the permanent generation in the Hotspot JVM will be removed.

  
  


• 
  

  JavaFX 8

  
  

  is now available for ARM platforms. JavaFX is now integrated in Java SE, developers can use the java command-line launches JavaFX applications. It also allow developers to embed Swing content into JavaFX applications.

  
  


• 
  

  Miscellaneous

  
  

  There are many other new concepts and improvements in the platform like Concurrency  API improvements, preparation for modularization (Jigsaw), Statically-Linked JNI Libraries, Parallel Array Sorting, Internationalization improvements,  JDBC-ODBC Bridge removal, addition of new tools, enhancements in some existing tools  and many more.

  
  


• 
  

  Backports

  
  

  for some of these exciting features are available in market. If due to some reason application can’t immediately be upgraded to Java 8, developers can still spice their code with these exciting features to previous versions of Java. For each of the following features, here is the backport or similar library:

  
  
  
  
  • Lambdas – Retrolambda
  
  
  • Lazily Evaluated Sequences – totallylazy
  
  
  • Optional – guava
  
  
  • Date/Time – ThreeTen
  
  
  • Nashorn – nashorn-backport
  
  
  
  

Source : http://zishanbilal.com/

Wallpaper of the Week - Confucius

The wallpaper of this week is the image created in our last tutorial/case study. It features a very inspiring positive quote by Confucius saying "Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it". The image our created for our series of positive thinking wallpapers and tutorials.

For more information visit http://abduzeedo.com/playing-type-and-images-photoshop

Desktop Version

iPad Version

iPhone Version

Resolutions:

• 2880x1800px


• 2560x1440px


• 1920x1200px


• 1680x1050px


• 1440x900px


• 1280x1024px


• 1280x800px


• iPhone


• iPad

wallpaper

wallpaper of the week

iphone

ipad

Android

Source : abduzeedo[dot]com

The best anti-smoking print ads Key trends in luxury retail design Featured designer: Jasper Jongeling Exclusive font deal: new Thirsty Soft font family GraphicStock – 7 days of complimentary download Freebies wednesday Typographic sphere Ads that show people stuck in the wrong job Graffiti art by Sainer and Bezt Featured illustrator: Hugo Horita Cute illustrations by David Olenick When luxury brands meet food packaging Yummy Pantone pairings Pop-culture characters painted in a 19th century style This week on Pinterest Get Amelia Basic Font for only $12 The original mixtype Typographic inspiration for the week-end

Source : designer-daily[dot]com

Exclusive font deal: new Thirsty Soft font family

If you remember the amazing energetic Thirsty Script font from Yellow Design Studio, you’ll certainly want to check this deal out! Not only is Mighty Deals bringing the savings… but we’re also bringing you the EXCLUSIVE first chance to own the new Thirsty Soft Font Family!

Source : designer-daily[dot]com

Featured designer: Jasper Jongeling

Jasper Jongeling is an independent graphic designer based in Utrecht (the Netherlands). He’s been awarded for his excellency in editorial design.

Source : designer-daily[dot]com

Freebies wednesday

Every wednesday, we share a few freebies that’ll make your designer toolbox a bit more useful.

Font to width

Font‑To‑Width (FTW!) is a script by Nick Sherman and Chris Lewis that takes advantage of large type families to fit pieces of text snugly within their containers.

Infinite slide

An awesome WordPress plugin that makes it very easy to add infinite scrolling to your website.

Leather textures

An extensive pack of seamless leather textures for your next work as PSD files.

Shine.js

A js library for pretty shadows. The coolest features: dynamic light positions, Customizable shadows, no library dependencies, AMD compatible.

GIF player

This is a small bit of Javascript that can be used to delay loading of an animated GIF until a control button is clicked, and showing a still image until then.

Source : designer-daily[dot]com