20 Useful & Nicely Designed Web Applications
My Clippings November 2nd, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from Google Starred
We need to be inspired to be in style. All of us are looking to give the website the edge to make it one in a million. We look for the style that allows the website to speak for itself, because a picture is tantamount to a million words. Last but not the least, it is always the first impression that leaves a touch; sometimes it might even metamorph in to first love.
Here we have showing you the top 20 designs that have inspired us; we are sharing the web app designs that have made the difference; we have been eclectic with an esoteric collection.
1) Reinvigorate
A tool to track real time traffic to your web with many features including heat sensing
2) Moodstream
A powerful tool to find you the images, footage or audio you are looking for.
3) Mailchimp
A powerful tools to manage your subscribers list, design HTML email campaigns and track and analyze email campaigns.
4) Blinksale
A very useful and easy to use tool to build and track invoices
5) GoodBarry
A complete tool for ecommerce, email marketing, CRM and analatycs
6) Wufoo
A must have, HTML form builder tool
7) Campaign monitor
Everything a designer needs to manage the subscriber emails
8 ) Kontain
A social media platform to promote your brand
9) Active collab
A powerful project management and collaboration tool
10) Proworkflow
A tool to manage your projects online
11) Aviary
A tool to create logos, webtemplates, filters and more .
12) Basecamp
A webbased project collaboration tool
13) Kuler
Explore, create and share color themes here
14) Emberapp
Best way to share your design inspiration with the world using emberapp
15) Freshbooks
Fastest way to track time and invoice your clients
16) Carbonmade
Easy way to display and manage your portfolio online
17) Notable
Easiest way for teams to provide feedback on websites
18) Evernote
Save your ideas and things you like for free on your desktop
19) Hotelmap
Get connected to each London hotel’s own reservation system
Tags: Build, cli, css, email, Google, Guideline, IO, ma, man, Photo, way, XP
Learn to Compile Software from Source Code [Terminal Tips]
My Clippings October 28th, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from Google Starred
Normally, installing a new application is no more difficult than double-clicking an installer and hitting Next a few times. For those very rare occasions when an app’s source code is all that’s available, Wired details how to compile it yourself.
As the post acknowledges, it’s not a comprehensive guide, since some apps are build using very different tools, and they don’t all work the same (particularly on Windows). That said, it’s a good starting point, and worth a read even if you’re just interested in how some apps go from hand-written code to compiled binary executables. (I said interesting, not necessarily exciting.)
Do you ever compile from source? When and why do you do it? Share your experience in the comments.
NameChanger – batch renaming made easy on OS X
Uncategorized October 26th, 2009 by Shai Perednik
Filed under: Text, Utilities, Macintosh, Productivity
A lot of digital cameras are great for taking photos, but pretty shoddy for naming files. Sure, it’s alright to have them listed by date and time — at least that keeps them in order — but we think it’s a lot nicer to rename a batch of photos so you remember what they’re actually of. That’s where NameChanger comes in. It’s a lightweight renaming app for OS X, with a focus on images.
NameChanger can append, prepend, replace, or rename all kinds of files with whatever input you give it, but it really shines when it comes to pictures. Drag a batch into the image browser, switch to sequence mode, and “DCP_16739″ becomes “Hawaii01,” or whatever you want it to be. Let NameChanger keep the numbers straight for you. And, at a tiny 1.9mb, you probably have pictures that take up more disk space than this useful little app.
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NameChanger – batch renaming made easy on OS X
Uncategorized October 26th, 2009 by Shai Perednik
Filed under: Text, Utilities, Macintosh, Productivity
A lot of digital cameras are great for taking photos, but pretty shoddy for naming files. Sure, it’s alright to have them listed by date and time — at least that keeps them in order — but we think it’s a lot nicer to rename a batch of photos so you remember what they’re actually of. That’s where NameChanger comes in. It’s a lightweight renaming app for OS X, with a focus on images.
NameChanger can append, prepend, replace, or rename all kinds of files with whatever input you give it, but it really shines when it comes to pictures. Drag a batch into the image browser, switch to sequence mode, and “DCP_16739″ becomes “Hawaii01,” or whatever you want it to be. Let NameChanger keep the numbers straight for you. And, at a tiny 1.9mb, you probably have pictures that take up more disk space than this useful little app.
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CeeVee Makes Web-Based Resume Building Quick, Easy, and Free
My Clippings October 22nd, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from Google Starred
You don’t have to have a fancy Microsoft Word template or a gorgeously tweaked document layout to build a clean looking and complete resume. Sure, you can choose a pretty template for your favorite desktop publishing or word processing app, but if you’re like me, you wind up spending more time tweaking the look and feel of the document than editing the actual text.
Thankfully, there’s CeeVee: a free Web-based resume builder that not only helps you put your resume together and fill in the important details about your skills and your work history, but it also helps you share it on popular social networks that may help you get a job.
CeeVee is free to use. You’re immediately launched into the process of creating your own resume on the Web once you’ve signed up. You can upload a photo if you’d like to include one with your resume. You can also add or remove sections that are applicable to the types of jobs you’re applying for, and tweak all of them in-line. The service offers a number of clean-looking themes and typefaces to choose from, all of which read well on the Web and lend themselves to easy sharing and printing.
Once you’re logged in, the majority of the page is taken up by your resume. Controls for adding and removing sections are on the right side of the page. For example, there’s a huge debate over whether or not “summary” or “objective” sections in resumes are worthwhile, so depending on how you feel about them you can add or remove a summary section from your resume with a single click. You can edit the contents of each section in-line with the rest of your resume, so you don’t have to leave the resume view to see how your changes will affect the overall document.
CeeVee’s resume builder makes it easy to copy/paste information from a resume you may already have, or to add information about your work experience, studies, and special skills from scratch. The entire resume interface is interactive, but when someone else views it they only see the static page with all of your information on it that they can easily print. Also, since many of us work for companies that don’t take kindly to their employees updating their resumes, you have the option to make your resume private at any time so no one can see it.
Tags: Build, cli, Google, Information, IO, ma, man, Microsoft, Photo, php, Printing, quick, Remove, video, wind, XP
Adobe ships Lightroom 3 free public beta
My Clippings October 22nd, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from Google Starred
Adobe has introduced a free public beta of Lightroom 3, it software for digital photographers.
Adobe’s Julieanne Kost has created three videos which detail 25 new minor refinements in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 that could impact your workflow, these clips are available here.
Writing on the Lightroom blog, developer Tom Hogarty said, “We've come a long way since our very first public beta on January 9th 2006 at Macworld.(We didn't even have a crop tool in the first release!) For this latest release we went back to the drawing board and revisited what we believe are the fundamental priorities of our customers: Performance and Image Quality.
“Lightroom has been stripped down to the "engine block" in order to rebuild a performance architecture that meets the needs of photographers with growing image collections and increasing megapixels. The raw processing engine has also received an overhaul right down to the fundamental demosaic algorithms that now allows unprecedented sharpening and noise reduction results.”
Lightroom users can organize, enhance, and showcase their images all from within a fast application that’s available for Mac and Windows.
Some of the new features include:
- Brand new performance architecture, building for the future of growing image libraries
- State-of-the-art noise reduction to help you perfect your high ISO shots
- Watermarking tool that helps you customize and protect your images with ease
- Portable sharable slideshows with audio—designed to give you more flexibility and impact on how you choose to share your images, you can now save and export your slideshows as videos and include audio
- Flexible customizable print package creation so your print package layouts are all your own
- Film grain simulation tool for enhancing your images to look as gritty as you want
- New import handling designed to make importing streamlined and easy
- More flexible online publishing options so you can post your images online to certain online photo sharing sites directly from inside Lightroom 3 beta (may require third-party plug-ins)
Full release notes are located here.
Download the software here.
Tags: Build, cli, Google, IO, ISO, ma, Mac, man, Photo, video, way, wind, XP
Five Best Software Update Tools [Hive Five]
My Clippings October 18th, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from Google Starred
Rather than wait around for your software to notify you of updates (let’s face it, a lot of applications never will), these five handy tools keep an eye on your apps, alert you when an update’s available, and streamline the updating process.
Photo by Wesley Fryer.
Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite software update tools, and now we’re back with the five most popular nominees. Read on for an overview of each, then cast your vote for the one you like best in the poll below.
Note: Clicking on the screenshots below will enlarge the screenshots to their original size.
FileHippo Update Checker (Windows, Free)
FileHippo.com is a software download site that hosts tons of both freeware and shareware, so the FileHippo Update Checker is a natural extension of their web site—only better. The lightweight application (the download is 155kb) scans your computer for installed apps in seconds, compares your installed version with the FileHippo.com database to check for new releases, then lists all detected updates in a list in your browser along with links to download your updates. FileHippo Update Checker is a free download for Windows only. (Original post)
Synaptic/APT (Linux, Free)
The Advanced Packaging Tool, a.k.a. APT, is a free tool built into most Linux distributions and many variants that handles the installation, removal, and updating of software packages. APT is a tool that went a long way toward making Linux a bit friendlier to the masses who aren't comfortable installing or compiling software packages on Linux, but it runs from the command line, so it's still not all that friendly to folks joining Linux from the Windows or Mac worlds. That's where Synaptic comes in. Synaptic is a graphical front end to APT that makes the tool wildly more user-friendly, and—yes—it handles checking for and updating software with aplomb. (Folks using Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distribution among Lifehacker readers, take note: Synaptic will be replaced by the Ubuntu Software Center—another APT-powered update tool—in April of 2010.)
Tags: Apple, Build, cli, command line, email, Google, Information, IO, Linux, ma, Mac, man, OSX, Photo, quick, script, security, Ubuntu, way, wind
New Screencast: Editable CSS3 Image Gallery
My Clippings October 18th, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from Google Starred
We build a pretty typical image gallery design pattern, a grid of images that pop up larger when clicked. But this image gallery page makes use of hot semantic HTML5 markup, loads of visual treats with CSS3 and jQuery, and made editable through the CMS PageLime. Quick reminder, the demo is awesome-est in a WebKit browser (Safari or Chrome).
View Demo Download Files View Screencast
Tags: blockquote, Build, cli, css, Google, ma, man, Photo, quick, video
Setting Up Photoshop For Web, App and iPhone Development
My Clippings October 17th, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from Google Starred
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Most people who have designed websites or apps in Photoshop will, at one point or another, have had issues trying to match colors in images to colors generated by HTML, CSS or code. This article aims to solve those problems once and for all.
Color Management to Match Colors Across Multiple Devices
In the print world, color management typically involves calibrating your entire workflow, from scanner or digital camera to computer display to hard proofs to the final press output. This can be quite a tall order, especially when the devices use different color spaces — matching RGB and CMYK devices is notoriously hard.
When designing or editing for TV, calibrating the main editing display and using a broadcast monitor are common; these show real-time proof of how the image will look on a typical TV in a viewer’s home. In such a scenario, color management offers many benefits and is highly recommended.
When building Web and application interfaces, the situation is a little different. The final output is the same device that you’re using to create the artwork: a computer display (putting aside for now differences in gamma between Windows, Mac OS X prior to 10.6 and the iPhone, which we’ll cover later.)
There is a catch, though. Even though you’re creating the Web or app interface on the same device that the final product will be shown on, the colors will have various sources: images (typically PNG, GIF and JPEG), style markup (CSS) and code (JavaScript, HTML, Objective-C, etc). Getting them all to match can be tricky.
The Goal
When designing websites or app interfaces, we want to perfectly match the colors that are displayed on screen in Photoshop and that are saved in files with what’s displayed in other applications, including Firefox, Safari and the iPhone Simulator. Not only do we want the colors to look the same, but we want the actual values saved in the files to perfectly match the colors we have defined in Photoshop. Colors should not shift or appear to shift in any way, under any circumstance.
Why Is This So Difficult?
Photoshop applies its color management to images displayed within its windows and to the files it saves. This is a bad thing if you’re working exclusively with RGB images for Web or on-screen user interfaces. With the default Photoshop settings, #FF0000 will actually display as #FB0018, and #BB95FF will display as #BA98FD. The differences are subtle but definitely there.
Tags: Build, css, flash, Google, Information, IO, Javascript, Leopard, ma, Mac, man, Photo, php, script, Snow Leopard, video, Vista, way, wind, XP
TapLynx 1.0
My Clippings October 17th, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from Google Starred
TapLynx is a framework for building media-based iPhone apps without needing to do any programming.
It’s a tool for developers, though — you still use Xcode to build the app. You configure it via a property list file, add artwork and feeds, build it, upload it. (You build a fully-native Cocoa app: it’s not like compiled Flash or something like that.)
Though programming isn’t required, you still can do some programming: a tab can have a custom view controller. An example case: you’re building an app for a sports team. TapLynx provides the news display, photo galleries, and audio and video. But you want a tab that shows scores and stats — that’s the tab that you write. But since TapLynx provides the other features, you can save time, make more money, and concentrate more on the part that makes your app special.
Some technical details
TapLynx is a static library. It’s a whole app in a static library. Since the views are things like UITableViews and UIWebViews, there’s no need for xib files. (I’m not anti-xib, by the way. But when a view is just a table — and it needs to be configured in code — a xib doesn’t make sense.)
The SDK provides a sample skeleton app that links to the library. The skeleton app has no code other than its main method.
The features, colors, feeds, and so on are all configured in a single property list file. Artwork is added to the Xcode project just as you would with any other project. There’s no black magic going on, in other words.
It’s 1.0
The future of TapLynx will be driven by the needs of developers. We can’t know in advance everything you’ll want and need, but we’ve had some experience building iPhone apps and we know what the basics are.
For instance, I’m sure you’ll need more programming hooks, ways to customize and add features via your own code. But I don’t know in advance what those will be. (The custom tab was obvious: the next step isn’t obvious.)
So we’ve set up a Google Group for TapLynx as a place for feedback. I’d love to hear what would help you make apps faster, make your clients happy, and make you money.
Tags: Apple, Build, cli, flash, Google, IO, ma, Mac, Photo, Remove, video, way, XP
