domingo, 25 de janeiro de 2009

12 Useful Web Tools for Designers

When it comes to design, there’s a plethora of free web-based tools to help you accomplish tasks such as color palette selection, creating unique fonts, editing images, and testing typography.

In this article, you’ll find a bunch of handy online utilities for designers.

kuler Create

kuler is a web-based application by Adobe that helps you create and share color themes. You can peruse the user-submitted color themes or create your own color themes with the kuler Create web tool.

pixlr


pixlr is a web-based image editor with a Photoshop-like user interface; pixlr has similar features like layers, filters, and even a Clone Stamp tool. For more image-editing web tools, check out this list of web-based image editors.

Wellstyled Color Scheme Generator



Wellstyled’s Color Scheme Generator is a simple web tool that helps designers produce color themes. It has an intuitive interface and the ability to bookmark generated color themes.

FontStruct

FontStruct is a web-based tool created by font retailer FontShop for creating, editing, and sharing fonts. The FontStructor tool is a simple and innovative font editor for designers who want to create beautiful type. You’ll need to sign up for a free user account to access the tool.

Typetester

Typetester allows you to test, tweak, and compare screen typography. It has a variety of typefaces that include web-safe fonts like Arial and Verdana - but it can also use your personal fonts.

TypeNavigator



TypeNavigator is a very clever web tool that can help designers identify typefaces. It’s great for hunting down a font you saw that you’d like to use on your own designs.

Dummy Text Generator

The Dummy Text Generator is a versatile and useful web application for generating dummy text. Though branded as a "Lorem ipsum generator for web designers", it will also come in handy for designers working on print layouts.

BGPatterns


BGPatterns is a web tool for generating tiled patterns. Its intuitive (yet robust) user interface will allow you to tweak, edit, and resize a wide range of patterns.

Dabbleboard

Dabbleboard is a convenient web-based collaborative drawing tool that’s designer-friendly. Create web layouts, design user interfaces, or draw freehand with other fellow designers. For more web-based collaboration tools, check out this list.

PicMarkr

PicMarkr is a web-based custom watermarking tool that you can use to protect and prevent design theft. It’s great for mockups or copyrighted designs that you publish online.

favicon.cc

favicon.cc is a favicon design tool. With the favicon.cc, you can either create favicons from scratch or upload and edit images from your computer. For more favicon tools, check out this list of web-based favicon >generators and resources.

templatr

templatr is a handy web application for creating web page templates. It has a very simple user interface, making itself an excellent tool for quick-and-dirty mockups of web layouts.

terça-feira, 13 de janeiro de 2009

La nueva especificación SDXC promete tarjetas de hasta 2 TB de capacidad

sdxcImage by tuexperto_com5 via FlickrLa nueva especificación SDXC promete tarjetas de hasta 2 TB de capacidad:
Aunque habrá que esperar un año para ver los primeros dispositivos compatibles con la nueva especificación de tarjetas SDXC, la SD Association ha aprovechado la inminente inauguración de CES 2009 para hacerse eco de ella. Futuro relevo de las tarjetas SHCD, el nuevo formato promete mejorar su velocidad y sobre todo su capacidad, situándose su límite en nada menos que 2 TB, es decir, unas 60 horas de vídeo en alta definición.
Tres años después de que viera la luz la especificación SDHC, destinada a ampliar la capacidad de las tarjetas SD Card, la SD Association ha desvelado los primeros detalles del formato SDXC, llamado a tomar el relevo en lo que a capacidad y velocidad de lectura y escritura se refiere.
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sábado, 10 de janeiro de 2009

5 Awesome And FREE Video Capturing Softwares

5 Awesome And FREE Video Capturing Softwares

1-Cam Studio

cam studio logo

CamStudio is a good video capturing tool to create video screencasts of lossless quality. The video output will be of AVI format, however, you can shrink its size by converting it to SWF without compromise in quality. And further more, you can: choose whether to record a section or the whole screen, increase or decrease quality of the recorded video etc.

Download Link


2-Jing Project

jing-logo

Another excellent program from TechSmith which quickly became famous like their previous products {Snagit and Camtasia}. What makes Jing Project stand out from the crowd is the sharing facilities it got. See the video rather than reading my explanation.

File Size: 8MB

Download Link


3-Debut

bs

Another one in the line, is the Debut Video Recording Software. It does more or less the same things as above tools, but its specialty lies in a range of formats it can provide the output in, including 3GP, AVI, ASF, FLV, MOV, MP4, MPG, WMV etc. A detailed review of this awesome tool can be found here.

Download Link




4-TipCam

tipcam-ui

In addition to record what is going on the screen, TipCam has also some unique features. It can trim the unwanted and no-no slides from the video and adjust the narration to get in sync with the video. Meaning, if you want to record a video separately, then want to attach audio file separately, TipCam does it for you.

Download Link



5-Free Video Capture Factory

freezvideocapture The last one is the software from Small Video Soft named Freez Screen Video Capture. You can start, pause and stop recording with shortcut keys. It also supports different output codecs (like Microsoft Video 1, MPEG-4, DivX etc.). Some other video related freeware are also available at the websites’ home page.

Download Link

domingo, 4 de janeiro de 2009

10 Free Websites to download any video off the internet | iTechMax

10 Free Websites to download any video off the internet | iTechMax:

I wrote earlier about how you can convert your youtube videos easily online. Recently I came across at least 10 more websites where you can download ANY video off the internet.

img143/2162/keepvidyu1.jpg

Keepvid is definitely one of my personal favorite websites where I download all my videos from. KeepVid supports just about any video sharing site out there. Another great thing about Keepvid is that it displays the most famous videos on the web so you can quickly download the most watched videos.

http://img354.imageshack.us/img354/6317/vixylo8.jpg

Vixy allows you to convert your youtube video into MPEG4,AVI/MOV/MP4/MP3 and 3GP file online. That means you don’t need no converter to conver these files. Everything is done online. It is using a compressed domain transcoder technology that converts FLV to MPEG4 faster and less lossy than a typical transcoder.

If you’re looking to covert your videos specifically into mp3 then you can use Flv2Mp3 for best results. FLV to MP3 Converter is 100% free and you don’t need to install additional software. This converter is great to convert videos to songs in a high quality

http://img45.imageshack.us/img45/5758/heywatchni9.jpg

It’s is an amazing online video encoding web service that allows you to encode videos into different formats that includes High Quality [HD] very quickly. It has the ability to transfer any video form the web directly to an ftp server. Is that cool or what?

img232/8496/downloadersj9.jpg

VideoDownloader is the best Firefox extention for video lovers. VideoDownloader Extension add a small icon on the status bar at the bottom of your firefox window, and a toolbar button. Just click that and download the video you are watching !

http://img221.imageshack.us/img221/2562/downlovideosel8.jpg

One of the most easiest website to use that supports most of the major sites. You can also download a free FLV player off their site to play videos from YouTube.

http://img222.imageshack.us/img222/4466/zamzatrir5.jpg

Online free web application that not only convert videos off the Internet to AVI, MPEG, 3GP, MP4, MOV, etc, but also converts between audio, image, and document formats. Paste the URL into Step 1 and then convert the file to your favorite format.

http://img339.imageshack.us/img339/6199/kcoolsa4.jpg

Kcoolonline supports more than 200 streaming video sites, and more are being added every week. Supported sites include many popular stream sites. Just paste your url press enter and you’re good to go.

http://img411.imageshack.us/img411/4994/nabberdn3.jpg

Simply copy and paste the URL.Once done you’ll then get a link whereby you can download the file to your computer, iPod, iPhone, or any other media player.

http://img222.imageshack.us/img222/86/downthisoo8.jpg

Last but not the least Downthisvideo is just like any other website out there that easily allows you to download your favorite videos from Youtube and Google Video. It has a cool tag cloud that helps you find the videos quickly

sábado, 3 de janeiro de 2009

Royal Pingdom » 10 amazingly alternative operating systems and what they could mean for the future

10 amazingly alternative operating systems and what they could mean for the future

This post is about the desktop operating systems that fly under the radar of most people. We are definitely not talking about Windows, Mac OS X or Linux, or even BSD or Solaris. There are much less mainstream options out there for the OS-curious.

These alternative operating systems are usually developed either by enthusiasts or small companies (or both), and there are more of them than you might expect. There are even more than we have included in this article, though we think this is a good selection of the more interesting ones and we have focused specifically on desktop operating systems.

As you will see, many of them are very different from what you may be used to. We will discuss the potential of this in the conclusion of this article.

Enough introduction, let’s get started! Here is a look at 10 alternative operating systems, starting with a familiar old name…

AmigaOS 4.1

This month (September 2008) AmigaOS 4.1 was released. Although AmigaOS is a veteran in the field (many have fond memories of the original Amiga computer), its current version is a fully modern OS.

AmigaOS only runs on specific PowerPC-based hardware platforms. The company ACube is currently marketing and distributing AmigaOS and is going to bundle the OS with their motherboards.

Source model: Closed source

License: Proprietary

Platform: PowerPC

State: Final

Read a review of AmigaOS 4.1 at Arstechnica.

Haiku

Haiku is an open source project aimed at recreating and continuing the development of the BeOS operating system (which Palm Inc. bought and then discontinued). Haiku was initially known as OpenBeOS but changed its name in 2004.

Haiku is compatible with software written for BeOS.

Source model: Free and open source

License: MIT License

Platform: x86 and PowerPC

State: Pre-Alpha

Read more at the Haiku website.

ReactOS

ReactOS is an operating system designed to be compatible with Microsoft Windows software. The project started in 1998 and today it can run many Windows programs well. The ReactOS kernel has been written from scratch but the OS makes use of Wine to be able to run Windows applications.

Source model: Free and open source

License: Various free software licenses

Platform: x86 (more under development)

State: Alpha

Read more at the ReactOS website.

Syllable Desktop

Syllable is a free and open source operating system that was forked in 2002 from AtheOS, an AmigaOS clone. It’s intended as a lightweight and fast OS suitable for home and small office users.

Source model: Free and open source

License: GNU General Public License

Platform: x86

State: Alpha

Read more at the Syllable website.

SkyOS

SkyOS is a closed source project written by Robert Szeleney and volunteers. It originally started as an experiment in OS design. It’s intended to be an easy-to-use desktop OS for average computer users. Well-known applications such as Firefox have been ported to run on SkyOS.

Source model: Closed source

License: Proprietary

Platform: x86

State: Beta

Read more at the SkyOS website.

MorphOS

MorphOS is a lightweight, media-centric OS build to run on PowerPC processors. It is inspired by AmigaOS and also includes emulation to be able to run Amiga applications.

Source model: Closed source

License: Mixed proprietary and open source

Platform: Pegasos, some Amiga models, EFIKA

Read more at the MorphOS website.

AROS Research Operating System

AROS is a lightweight open source OS designed to be compatible with AmigaOS 3.1 but also improve on it. The project was started in 1995 and can today be run on both PowerPC and IBM PC compatible hardware. It also includes an emulator that makes it possible to run old Amiga applications.

Source model: Open source

License: AROS Public License

Platform: x86 and PowerPC

Read more at the AROS website.

MenuetOS

MenuetOS, also known as MeOS, is an operating system written entirely in assembly language which makes it very small and fast. Even though it includes a graphical desktop, networking and many other features it still fits on a single 1.44 MB floppy disk (for our younger readers, that was the USB stick of the 80s and early 90s ;) ).

Source model: Open source (32-bit version), freeware (64-bit version)

License: Menuet License

Platform: x86

State: Beta

Read more at the MenuetOS website.

DexOS

DexOS is an open source operating system designed to work like the minimalistic ones on gaming consoles, but for PCs. Its user interface is inspired by video game consoles and the system itself is very small (supposedly this one also fits on a floppy disk, like MenuetOS) and the OS can be booted from several different devices. Its creators have tried to make it as fast as possible.

Source model: Free and open source

Platform: x86

Read more at the DexOS website.

Visopsys

Visopsys is a one-man hobby project by programmer Andy McLaughlin. The development began in 1997 and the OS is both open source and free. Visopsys stands for VISual Operating SYStem.

Source model: Open source

License: GPL

Platform: x86

State: Final

Read more at the Visopsys website.

The OS future

Even if none of these operating systems ever were to “make it” and become mainstream (and admittedly, some of them simply are not intended to be mainstream), the passion behind them is real, and many have the potential to introduce new and fresh ideas.

All this independent development can act as a kind of think tank, if you choose to look at it that way. It’s quite possible that concepts introduced by a niche OS will later be adopted by a larger player on the OS market.

There are lots of interesting things happening today with the rise of virtualization and the “always online” nature of today’s computers that opens up incredibly interesting possibilities. For example, what we have read about Microsoft’s internal research OS Midori (the one that will retire Windows) sounds highly interesting.

Wherever the future operating systems may come from, be it from the already established players or some kind of newcomer, we are looking forward to seeing what the future has in store for us. We suspect that there is a significant “jump” in the evolution coming up just around the corner.

Who knows, a couple of years from now maybe all the computers here in the Pingdom office will be running the UltraMagicalSuperVirtualOS version 1.2?

What are your predictions for the future of operating systems?

sexta-feira, 2 de janeiro de 2009

keybr.com | Typing at the speed of thought!

keybr.com | Typing at the speed of thought!: "Have you ever wished for a way to practice typing so that you may become a more efficient and capable keyboard jockey? Typing at the 'speed of thought,' perhaps? Enter Keybr, the flash based type instructor you've been waiting for.

Keybr is very straight-forward. You can choose from three basic lessons that start with a certain number of keys on the keyboard, and then, as you progress through the lessons, more keys are added to the mix to make things a little tougher. As a nice touch, it keeps live track of all your mistakes and your words-per-minute (wpm), and even creates graphs of your performance."