Y’all may have noticed that basement.org’s elsewhere links have dried up a bit these days. They actually haven’t. They’re just not happening on this blog. If you’d like to follow the links I’ve been sharing, the easiest way is to just visit (or follow me) on Twitter (@richziade). There’s also an RSS feed fed by that account.
It’s just so much easier to publish quick tidbits this way. I primarily use TBUZZ to share links out. Eventually, I’d like to let that stream show up here on basement.org as elsewhere links. As soon as some time frees up, I’ll make that update.
Posted by richz at 2:42 PM“Polypage was designed to ease the process of showing multiple page states in html mock-ups. By adding simply adding class names to a document you can imply state and conditional view logic.” Translation: Niiiice.
Posted by richz at 10:50 AMGoogle Gravity is one of those Google Chrome experiments that shows off the Javascript powerhouse that is Google Chrome. Still, it works in most browsers. Pretty fun…and I love that the links still work. (via Swiss Miss).
Posted by richz at 10:50 AMWith minimalistic flair (is there such a thing?) Skimmer blends together your various social streams (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) into a single, elegant interface. Powered by Adobe Air so both Macs and PC’s can play along.
Posted by richz at 9:57 AMVery sweet JQuery plugin that supports simple gestures. As the world goes more tablet, this stuff will become more relevant.
The NY Times app for the iPhone has sucked since it came out. It was slow, buggy and crashed a lot. The new version 2.0 is a big improvement. It’s faster and more reliable. It even has some new features. Nice job!
Posted by richz at 6:06 PMThe mad scientists at the Arc90 lab have just updated Readability to make it even more diabolically effective. Details on the update are available here. No re-install is required if you’re already using it. It just gets automatically better (like wine).
I was about to sit down and put together a nice Photoshop template for creating iPhone wallpapers. Then I realized that everything has already been done on the Internet. No complaints here. Nice work.
I’ve pointed to color scheme makers before but this is completely badass (well, as badass as a color scheme tool is going to be). Color Scheme Designer let’s you mess around with color schemes, try them on a mockup Web page and then export the CSS. Many options. Really impressive.
Posted by richz at 10:13 AMThe inherently evil Readability bookmarklet is now on Google Code. Mangle it. Rewrite it. Add to it. Host it yourself. Licensed under Apache License 2.0.
Posted by richz at 2:43 PMLivesurface is an image library that allows you to drop your brand or logo into realistic looking photos. With a little help from Photoshop’s fancy perspective tools, you can do some pretty fancy things.
Posted by richz at 6:27 PM“Ever seen a great font in a magazine ad, poster, or on the web and wondered what font it is? Whip out your iPhone and snap a photo, and WhatTheFont for iPhone will identify that font in seconds!” Pretty damn cool!
Posted by richz at 10:14 AMDealnews has a nice summary of price comparisons pitting Circuit City against other stores. The results? Just about everything is still more expensive at Circuit City. I wonder if they’ll still liquidate everything anyway. Ah, the uninformed consumer.
Posted by richz at 10:42 AMI have to say, I’m hating cruft on Web pages these days. Compfight cuts all the nonsense out of a Flickr search and boils it down to what makes Flickr so great: the damn pictures.
Posted by richz at 10:24 AMThere are plenty of CSS galleries out there, but how many just focus on menus? That’s right, menus. Well 13 Styles does exactly that. Really nice collection for outright copying or inspiration.
Posted by richz at 10:00 AMEveryone can appreciate a good Tartan pattern right? (Right?). Well then, check out Tartan Maker, a handy tool for creating authentic looking Tartan patterns that stitch nicely when tiled.
Posted by richz at 9:29 AMHere’s an excellent little single purpose site: flippingtypical.com shows all of your installed fonts via editable sample text. Nice. Mac users should check out Fontcase, a nicely designed font manager for OSX. Anyone know of a good font manager for Windows?
Posted by richz at 10:49 AMWorld of Goo, one of the best (if not the best) indie games of 2008, is now available for the low, low price of $14.99 on Steam. For the unfamiliar, Goo is a really fun physics-based puzzle game. Worth every penny.
Posted by richz at 9:49 AMI like arrows. They tell you where to go. Go Squared’s Liquidicity blog has consistently shared free, quality vectors. Their latest is 64 Vector Arrow Icons. Usefully wonderful and wonderfully useful.
Posted by richz at 12:42 PMsIFR Lite is a nice rethinking of sIFR the Flash-based font replacement library that lets you embed virtually any font on your website without images. It’s a hell of a lot smaller and actually pulls off some new features. Very nice.
Posted by richz at 12:14 PMMy latest obsession these days is Web typography. We still can’t compete with the fidelity of a book yet we’re increasingly spending our days reading online. Web Design Wall has an excellent summary called Fonts and the Web.
Posted by richz at 4:46 PMJust visited Google Reader (which I do 500 times a day) and notices that it’s gotten some nice interface tweaks. The Google Reader blog has more. I like it.
Posted by richz at 11:35 AMI’m a big Instapaper fan. The iPhone app is sweet as all hell and I love marking things to be read later. Now there’s Give Me Something To Read, a site (and feed) that bubbles up popular Instapaper articles pegged for reading later. Very, very (very) cool. Now my cousin in Dubai can stop asking me to recommend articles. (via Waxy).
Posted by richz at 9:16 AMFor all you power searchers out there that just can’t frickin’ wait to hit the ENTER key, there’s Keyboardr, a neat show-results-as-you-type and keyboard-friendly version of Google search. It gives a nice summary of your search across web, blogs and Wikipedia. Handy.
Posted by richz at 10:48 AMIf you hit Sitepoint, you can get The Art& Science of CSS for free if you either follow their Twitter or sign up via email.
Posted by richz at 9:14 AMThere are few things more daunting for a graphic designer than coming up with a logo from scratch. Designwalker has a nice roundup of 17 Designer’s Logo Making Processes.
Posted by richz at 9:46 AMYa gotta love melodramatic headlines: at Arc90, our customers threaten to fire us every day.
Posted by richz at 4:57 PMIntersquash (bizarre name, heh) takes your RSS feed and turns it into an alternative destination for iPhone users. When you visit your URL on an iPhone, the site shows up replete with the neat sliding-navigation effect we’ve all come to love. Pretty handy.
Posted by richz at 1:40 PMHere’s a nice series of side-by-side comparisons of old and new designs of a variety of things from logos to cars to websites. Nice. (via Authentic Boredom).
So how did the press around the United States and around the world cover Obama’s historic election victory? Man, it would be great if there were a site that took snapshots of all the front pages…oh wait.
Posted by richz at 9:42 AMRegular expressions make up that dark and mysterious alleyway that every programmer occasionally has to walk through. Ryan Swanson has put out a very nicely designed Regular Expression Explorer. It’s built in Flex but is universally useful.
Posted by richz at 9:38 AMDirector/Animator Kristofer Ström has taken Minologue’s quirky electronic sounds and visualized them into a beautifully animated music video. The result is all kinds of happy. Vimeo’s HD feature finally show’s its worth!
Posted by richz at 10:18 AMYou can’t have enough JQuery plugin lists. Ever: 20 JQuery Plugins For An Unforgettable User Experience. Many new ones in this list (for me at least).
Posted by richz at 9:47 AMNicely design and infinitely useful, Trackthepack let’s you stalk your shipped packages on Google Maps. Nicely done.
Posted by richz at 3:45 PMI’m a sucker for creative ad compilations. Cerium’s Blog (in French) has just put its third compilation. Great source of inspiration (or just a nice diversion).
Posted by richz at 10:47 AMUsability Post has a handy article giving a quick primer on choosing colors for your brand. Nicely illustrated and informative.
Posted by richz at 8:43 AMNice content and nice design. 3rings is an architecture and design blog.
Posted by richz at 11:32 AMThe Onion peeked into Obama's Inbox. Hilarious. Be sure to also check out his Trash and his draft to MoveOn.org.
Posted by richz at 9:05 AM"The Awesomer is a daily blog filled with awesome stuff for guys." Beautifully designed and very pic-centric. It's rare that you'll find me leafing through more than pages like I did here. Very nice (via The Presurfer).
Posted by richz at 5:16 PMMofuse does a nice job of skinning of your blog or website for mobile viewing. It takes only a few minutes and an RSS feed.
Posted by richz at 1:35 PMjParallax "turns a selected element into a 'window', or viewport, and all its children into absolutely positioned layers that can be seen through the viewport. These layers move in response to the mouse." Very nice, though I'm not sure of its utility. Built atop the consistently awesome jQuery.
I may well be late to the party on this one, but the Darden Studio site/blog is a real treat. It's a shrine to typography. I love the white glove treatment on magazines.
Posted by richz at 9:29 AMMichael Eastman's online gallery of photographs makes me want to quit taking pictures. Really stunning. Don't miss the Vanishing America series.
Posted by richz at 1:45 PMMmmm....wallpaper. BgPatterns is a nicely designed and easy-to-use background pattern generator (via Authentic Boredom).
I'm not even sure what category to put this. Yugo Nakamura's Fontpark 2.0. You pick out some Japanese fonts and then, um, move them around and bend them like pieces of rubber. You can record and share your manipulations. It's hard to explain...but fun. Just go play with it.
Posted by richz at 5:19 PMYeh, we're only halfway through 2008, but so what? We're already trending - at least as far as logos are concerned. Logolounge does a nice roundup of logo trends for 2008.
Posted by richz at 3:49 PMFinally, del.icio.us has made public the new redesign. I'm liking it.
Posted by richz at 9:08 AMPhillip Toledano has published a beautiful photo essay and tribute to his dad. At times haunting but very beautiful (via Boing Boing).
Posted by richz at 8:57 AM"At Snagfilms.com, you can watch full-length documentary films for free." And we're not just talking about second-rate homemade films. Supersize Me and Dig are available for example. You can even embed and share them Youtube-style. Very cool.
Posted by richz at 2:44 PMBlow Up is a sweet Flash-based Flickr viewer that shows your photos in a neat full screen display. Just drop your Flickr name and go. Also downloadable.
Icon design is one of the most deceptively difficult tasks to do well. You'd think a handful of pixels would make life easier, but they don't. Designer Felix Sockwell shares the NY Times iPhone app icon-building experience. He nicely captures the struggle and triumph of building attractive and useful art inside a 32x32 pixel box.
Posted by richz at 8:31 AMI've been a big fan of SF Gate's Mark Morford for awhile now. For the unfamiliar, he's the Op-Ed equivalent of a raging tornado. Recently, he wrote about how the Internet is turning our brains into steamy piles of mush. It's Nick Carr with an edge. Entertaining and insightful.
Posted by richz at 10:12 AMI'm always on the lookout for decent wireframing tools. The Pencil Project is a Firefox add-on "for making diagrams and GUI prototyping that everyone can use." (via GUUUI).
Posted by richz at 3:03 PMCheck out Alexey Titarenko's beautiful (mostly) black and white photography. Don't miss the City Of Shadows series - long exposure shots of crowds. Pretty eerie.
Posted by richz at 8:28 AMAs if your awesome brain isn't already turbo-charged, here are 14 simple ways to super charge your brain.
Posted by richz at 4:00 PMNick Carr (great blogger) has the feature article in the upcoming Atlantic (great magazine) : Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Posted by richz at 7:57 PMWe're officially in the land of ridiculous. Prince covers Radiohead at a live show. Fans record the performance and put it on Youtube. Prince (who's notorious for aggresively enforcing copyrights) demands that the videos be taken down. Radiohead's Thom Yorke requests they be unblocked. So who's right? Who cares. The notion of "copyright" is officially useless.
Supercook is a neat little search engine that hits up numerous recipe sites. The interface works well, allowing you to add and remove ingredients to your search easily.
Posted by richz at 10:52 AMThe kids at Adobe have released a beta of the upcoming Dreamweaver on their Labs site. Key highlights: code-hinting for web frameworks (JQuery, etc.); Subversion integration; and a real-time editing mode built atop Webkit. Sounds sweet. Have at it.
DimP is a video player prototype that allows to browse video clips by directly manipulating their content. It's an interesting interaction approach, though I'm still wondering about its usefulness.
Posted by richz at 2:47 PMRelated to the last post, here's an interesting summary of the meaning of colors that factors in national customs. Pretty fascinating (though I wonder where they get their information).
Posted by richz at 9:23 AMA List Apart shares a nice recipe for baking your very own open source Ajax-style mapping destination (a la Google Maps). The tutorial nicely walks you through the components and steps to get your own map up and running.
Posted by richz at 9:16 AMIf icons were crack, I'd be...umm...on crack. And what's better than crack? Free crack. Free Icons Download has some nice, shiny icons as well as some other treats (wallpapers, buttons and the like). Check it out.
Posted by richz at 3:10 PMWeb Distortion has taken to the time to review and summarize 9 of the Best Web-Based Rich Text Editors. Well worth marking if you're interested in that sort of thing.
Posted by richz at 9:58 AMHere's a nice succinct article on designing logotypes. Great logotypes probably don't come out of tutorials but great designers. Still, the post gives some nice guidance.
Posted by richz at 9:16 AMActions are Photoshop's pre-recorded macros that can do all kinds of snazzy things to your images. Visual Blast Media put out 124 Photoshop actions to help give your stuff that extra umph (or is it "humph"?).
Posted by richz at 9:32 AMAs an Outlook user that uses Google Apps to handle the back end, I'm sure others share my pain of syncing/coordinating/making sense of Outlook Calendar and Google Calendar. Google apparently had pity on us. They've just released Google Calendar Sync. Haven't tried it yet, but it looks promising.
Posted by richz at 5:32 PMFor all the lazy bastards among us, Markup Generator takes in some simple shorthand and generates all that fancy XHTML code - id's, classes and styles in all - in a spiffy. Looks useful.
Posted by richz at 3:57 PMOver at the Arc90 Blog, I've laid out ten reasons (yeh I know, yet another list) we're digging Adobe AIR. Check it out.
Piclens has actually been out for awhile. It's a plugin available for most browsers that allows you to more intuitively browse images. I'm posting it here again because Piclens has really evolved into an amazing image browser. Try a Google images and drag your mouse left or right. Very, very impressive.
Posted by richz at 4:43 PMDezignus just keeps sharing the vector love. Here's a nice set of glassy looking icons. What's great about these is that you can come up with your own icons to overlay. Sweet.
Man, Javascript is looking snazzy these days. FancyZoom is a great looking image viewing library built in Javascript. Clicking on a thumbnail creates a neat zoom effect as the image enlarges. Nicely documented as well.
Posted by richz at 9:36 AMAh, the legend of latin filler text, every designer's dubious ally. For forever I've used the popular lorem ipsum generator on the Web (you know, the one that shows up as the top result on Google). Well, there's a better tool out there that pulls it off in the Queen's English. Blind Text Generator does a great job of generating paragraphs against a set number of words. So long pretentious latin filler text!
Posted by richz at 1:13 PM"Who Knew is an information design network devoted to 'difficult content' - ideas and issues that are commonly misunderstood and censored." Through the use of visual design and succinct, to-the-point explanations, Joshua Trees and his team have put together a compelling series of visual essays. Well worth checking out.
Posted by richz at 8:50 AMgDocsBar is a handsome-looking extension for Firefox that puts Google Docs in a nice, lean interface within Firefox's sidebar. The sweet feature here: drag & drop for uploading files to Google Docs. Nice.
Posted by richz at 9:26 AMThis is slightly insane. Make3D any photo into a 3D model. It's obviously not perfect but hey what do you expect? Still very impressive. (via Waxy).
Posted by richz at 11:13 AMiPodia is a finger-friendly, slimmed down version of Wikipedia that fits more snugly into all those fancy iPhone contraptions people are waving around.
Posted by richz at 9:30 AMHohli Charts (I'm not even gonna try to pronounce that) steps you through building the query string around generating a Google Chart. The interface is a bit clumsy, but it sure beats wading through API documentation and building them yourself.
Posted by richz at 5:04 PMAnyone that's used the creamy-smooth OSX-based OmniOuliner can appreciate the value of a good outlining application. If you're a Windows user, that appreciated gives way to envy. Listas is a cool, dead simple web-based outliner that does the job pretty admirably.
Posted by richz at 9:41 AMFor all the Windows users out there envious of Apple's new Web Clip feature in Leopard, check out Snippage. Both tools allow you to cut out any portion of a web page and have it live on your desktop. Snippage still feels pretty experimental and lacks some features, but it's a nice start.
Posted by richz at 4:14 PMEasylistener is a very slick, Flash-based music player that will play just about anything linked to at a URL destination. Imagine pointing this player to your favorite music blog (or music RSS feeds) and...you're done! A playlist of all the songs is automatically created. Damn cool...and a slick interface to boot.
Posted by richz at 6:55 PMI'm a bit of an icon addict. Get your fix with some quality mini icons.
Posted by richz at 4:21 PMHilarious. I'm totally guilty of skipping weekends on basement.org.
Posted by richz at 10:30 AMSclipo is an online repository of tutorials, howto's and all sorts of knowledge. Learn Taichi...or guitar (not Guitar Hero, but actual guitar) from Mark Knopfler.
Give your art and illustrations that offline, real paper look & feel with Bittbox's free vector paper illustrations.
Posted by richz at 2:04 PMThe Chicago Athenaeum (Museum of Architecture and Design) has put up its winners for best architectures of 2007. There is some interesting, occasionally inspiring work in the list.
Posted by richz at 9:19 AMBen Fry dumps out the source code from old Atari 2600 games to create cool, oddly recognizable art. Ben slyly draws the data portions of the code as colored boxes, thus revealing the crude graphics embedded within.
Posted by richz at 9:56 AMThis is pretty frickin' huge if you do any sort of emailing in your web apps. Campaign Monitor has a great little testing tool that shows you previews in all the major email clients. Very handy.
Scott Berkun has an excellent little blog post entitled Creative Thinking Hacks. He gives some handy little tips for getting those creative juices flowing.
Posted by richz at 3:00 PMLogotemplater is bringing some logo template love to the masses. They're nice starting points for logos. There's not much there just yet but what's there looks polished. They'll hopefully keep adding.
Elliot Jay Stocks has a great slide presentation up that talks about destroying the Web 2.0 look. It's a quick flip thru and sums things up very nicely. Well worth your 3 (or 5) minutes.
Posted by richz at 9:50 AMI like this. Dead simple. Just search for music and you're one click away from listening (or sharing with others). I'm also digging the tangerine red theme. Check it: Songza.
Posted by richz at 9:36 AMAnimoto is a cool free services that can pull in your pics (from various services, including Flickr), add some music and whip up a nice, stylish little video montage thiny. Nice.
Posted by richz at 10:08 AMWhat level of education is required to understand your blog? Take the blog readability test. Basement.org? Junior High School. That awkward time in your life where hormones and XBox rule everything.
Posted by richz at 9:48 AM"Green Thing is a community that makes it easy and enjoyable to be a bit greener. Every month you’ll get a different Green Thing to do. All you have to do is do it."
Posted by richz at 9:04 AM
Paste Magazine, a cool magazine focused on alternative culture (film, music, etc.) is available via one year subscription for US$1.00 (which is like $1.50 $.50 Canadian these days). Just go here and put in the amount you want to pay (a la Radiohead). (via the cheap bastards at Slickdeals).
Anil Dash calls Apple out for their obnoxious little jab at non-Mac operating systems. I agree with his points. It's odd to see negativity in such otherwise elegant design. I'd be interested in hearing the real story behind it.
Posted by richz at 9:24 AMYes, they're as useless as real bumper stickers. That's the point. Polish your chrome and slap on some Blog Bumper Stickers.
Posted by richz at 2:29 PMI like this: a JQuery plugin that increases line height as you adjust width and font size. Very thoughtful.
Posted by richz at 9:29 AMNogray's Calendar Component is a nicely documented, elegant and simple Javascript calendar component. I like it.
Posted by richz at 10:04 AMArc90 Lab : Taking RSS Beyond Headlines With RSS Traits. Sketchcast included for your convenience along with a draft spec.
Newsweek has joined other big media brands and redesigned its web presence. It's a definite improvement. Heavy use of CSS and a sprinkle of JQuery. And...rounded corners everywhere!
Posted by richz at 9:46 AMFor the less enlightened among us, Digital Web has a JQuery crash course queued for mass consumption.
Posted by richz at 2:00 PMpForm is a really elegant web-based three step wizard that generates nice XHTML/CSS form code. Very lean and very nicely done (via etc.).
Posted by richz at 2:12 PMAndy Lewisohn, resident Arc90 Flex guru, just released Modular to the Arc90 Lab. It allows Cairngorm to play nice with Flex's built-in Modules framework. Slick.
Posted by richz at 9:51 AMWe'll forgive them for boycotting the letter 'e' (it's Flickr's fault anyway I suppose) but Flickr Foldr Monitr watches your pictures folder in the background and when there's new stuff in there - it automatically sends it up to your Flickr account.
Posted by richz at 9:46 AMGrab the music streaming from a slew of hosted music services. Free Music Zilla (terrible name, cool app) sits in the background and allows you to snatch up songs from the likes of Myspace, Pandora and Last.fm.
Posted by richz at 9:31 AMFreebies are good. Always. Go Mediazine has some free hi-res watercolor textures as well as a slew of other art (vector and such) for the small price of free. Have at it. (via Bittbox).
Posted by richz at 10:00 AMRobert Fabricant of Frog Design talks about how the iPhone, that wonder of modern technology, just isn't modern enough. Ouch. A good read.
Posted by richz at 9:10 PMThis is pretty frickin' handy. CSS Menu Maker asks you some questions and spits out a nice lookin' CSS menu.
Posted by richz at 10:06 PMThe NY Times, effective midnight tonight, will eliminate the paid portion of their online presence (aka TimesSelect). In short, online advertising growth is outpacing subscription paid growth. (via Anil Dash).
JQuery just got a whole lot sexier : "JQuery UI is a set of themable widgets and interactions, built on top of the jQuery JavaScript Library, that you can use to build highly interactive web applications."
Posted by richz at 2:20 PMThis is ridiculously cool: Peter Feigenbaum has allowed crime and lawlessness to creep into his train set. The result is a stunning model ghetto train set reminiscent of New York City in the 70's.
I remember first messing with Winamp many years ago. It was so slick and lightweight. The bad boys at Nullsoft are at it again with a new version 5.5 that is aimed right at iTunes. Nothin' like a nice dose of healthy competition to get things going. The Wired Blog has more.
I'm a sucker for slick looking CSS. Here's a nice series of menu styles from CSS Play: the Professional Horizontal Series.
Posted by richz at 4:17 PMCourtesy Brian Reindel with some help from the mighty JQuery, an accessible news slider is available for all to download, deploy and joyfully consume. Nice implementation.
Posted by richz at 3:10 PMNot sure how I missed this one. Netvibes, the badass personal portal, has gone mobile at http://m.netvibes.com.
File this guy under 'inspiration.' The wild and unhinged illustrations of Brazilian artist Guilherme Marconi. Groovy.
Posted by richz at 8:54 AMYou know you're advanced...in Photoshop that is. Clear out your afternoon and dig into 60 advanced Photoshop tutorials (via the consistently good etc.).
Posted by richz at 11:06 AMArc90'er Avi Flax has a well laid-out post on why he thinks Flash is coming to the iPhone. It definitely needs to get there, but the conspiracy theorist in me thinks otherwise (see the first comment by me).
Posted by richz at 2:44 AMYou know you love those soothing swooshing graphics. PSDTuts.com gives a neat step-by-step tutorial of how to create some tasty looking Mac-like backgrounds yourself.
Posted by richz at 9:24 AMThis is seriously cool. Enrico Lamperti, an Argentinian blogger, is hosting a Spanish-language sketchcasting blog at http://sketchcasting.com.ar. His first sketchcast explains how hard drives work (or something, I don't speak Spanish).
Posted by richz at 11:13 AMI always dug the top-of-the-search experience. Ask.com does a good job with it, but they ain't got what Yahoo's got, baseball player stats if you type a player's name in. Here's Jorge's. The Yahoo Search Blog has more.
Boxes & Arrows teaches how to create Interactive Prototypes With Powerpoint.
Posted by richz at 10:36 AMI'm a freak when it comes to icons. They make me happy. Iconfinder is a sort of search engine for icons. Nice. Via the perpetually groovy Swissmiss.
Posted by richz at 9:25 AMLovin' those shiny, Chiclets-like iPhone buttons? Of course you do. Bittbox generously donates templates for creating your own tasty buttons (Photoshop & PNG format).
Posted by richz at 2:09 PMI haven't looked into this but it looks interesting/promising: Blueprint is a CSS framewrok.
Posted by richz at 11:09 AMThe Web Design Wall is a "wall of ideas" for designers. It's got tutorials as well as links to other sites. Not a ton of stuff just yet, but it looks promising - and beautifully designed.
Posted by richz at 3:45 PMThe CIA looks like a great source of inspiration (or procrastination). No, not that CIA. The Central Illustration Agency.
10 Tips For A Great Photowalk. What's a photowalk you ask? Well, duh! I gotta dust off the Rebel XT and do this more often.
Posted by richz at 9:36 AM26 Reasons What You Think is Right is Wrong is a nice, succinct list of cognitive biases. Nothing wrong with a little self-auditing now and again.
Posted by richz at 10:20 AMA How To Sketchcast movie has been posted sketch.basement.org. Check it out if you're interestted in sketchcasting.
Posted by richz at 9:20 AMYou really can't go wrong with free. For all the cheap bastards out there: The Open Source Web Design Toolbox: 100 Tools, Resources, and Template Sources.
Posted by richz at 9:41 AMThree well-regarded design forms, IDEO, thehappycorp and Ziba Design, took a crack at redesigning the formidable (and famously overwhelming) Bloomberg terminal interface. The results are pretty diverse and interesting. From the looks of them though, none match the sheer volume of data that a single Bloomberg screen can muster.
Excellent NY Times Infographic : The Wealthiest Americans Ever.
Posted by richz at 9:35 AMGood practical advice (more pragmatic than inspirational, but still).
Posted by richz at 2:37 PMPerfectly timed with today's earlier post, someone has been kind (and kooky) enough to put together famous scenes in Lego. Odd and cool.
Posted by richz at 10:11 AMI've always enjoyed pulling color schemes out of real-world scenes. Colourlovers has a lovely collection of color schemes extracted from famous paintings. Well done.
As if the Web 2.0 world isn't glossy enough, glossy.js is a little javascript package that gives just about any image a wonderfully glossy, just-Windexed shine. I'm still digging the gloss effect. Shoot me.
Posted by richz at 12:37 PMThis is nice (and kinda...weird), Test Everything is a single destination that lets you hit tons of different testing tools that test all sorts of stuff.
Posted by richz at 10:20 AMThe Style Archive is a nicely browsable collection of templates for Movable Type, Livejournal and Typepad.
Posted by richz at 9:10 AMAdobe just keeps on truckin'. A beta of Flex Builder 3 is now out on Adobe Labs. Adobe's Matt Chotin has all the luscious details. Did I somehow miss Apollo being renamed to Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime)?
Posted by richz at 2:24 PMA new beta version of cnn.com is up. It looks cleaner (and less filling). A lot nicer integration with their video content too.
Posted by richz at 3:15 PMI used to really dig Amazon/A9's old "street view" on their A9 maps. They since got rid of it. Google has brought it back (in some major cities). It's even better - you can actually turn your little virtual head and look around the street. Fun...and sometimes useful.
Particls, a desktop application that lets you track news topics via a ticker or popups, went beta today. I'm not sure what to make of it just yet. It looks polished, but I'm still seeking its usefulness (not a good sign, heh).
Posted by richz at 9:04 AMPicFindr is a nice little search tool that hits up numerous free stock photo sites. Built on Flex technology. Not too shabby.
Posted by richz at 2:58 PMI don’t know why I love vectors oh so very much, but I do. “Vecteezy is an index of Free Vectors available for download by some of the best designers around the world.” Have at it.
Posted by richz at 9:15 AMYeh, I know there are about 500 Ajax autosuggest implementations out there, but this one over at Brand Spanking New is nicely packaged, documented and it looks darn cool.
Posted by richz at 9:16 AMThe kids at Netvibes can't rest up for a minute. They've extended Netvibes to allow you to customize it in all sorts of ways. A bunch of pre-packaged themes are also available.
Posted by richz at 8:55 AMThis is kinda, sorta, kinda neat: Ajaxtrans is a real-time translator that will port your text to a bunch of languages as you type.
Posted by richz at 9:12 AM2020ok.com is a directory of free online books and eBooks. Groovy.
Posted by richz at 9:39 AMIf you've locked into the CS3 madness, you'll probably enjoy the pretty large collection of videos that walk through the new features across the products. Pretty nice interface too.
Posted by richz at 3:37 AMGoogle Desktop is now available for Mac. I'm not sure about its value with Spotlight already in place, but nonetheless, it's here. TUAW has a nice review.
Posted by richz at 2:21 AMI don't usually point to stuff like this on basement.org but...wow. (Via the relentlessly great Waxy's Links.)
Posted by richz at 9:30 AMFlash Magazine has a nice preview (with some racy screenshots) of Flash CS3. It's looking like a pretty significant, highly-integrated (think Photoshop and Illustrator integrated) release.
Posted by richz at 7:43 PMHere's a wacky little feature I never knew existed on NYTimes.com. If you're in any article (like this one), and double-click on any term, it'll bring up a dictionary or encylopedia view of that word. Pretty cool. It works in both web view and printer-friendly view.
Original Signal, that neat little pre-canned portal that aggregates a bunch of sites like Digg, Techcrunch, and such, has put out Frontpage - a summary of the hottest articles out there on any given day. It feels a lot like Techmeme.
Posted by richz at 9:38 AMThe Yahoo! Widget Blog reports that Yahoo! Widgets Goes To Version 4. A major new feature is the Widget Dock. Widges everywhere!
Posted by richz at 10:44 AMSomebody send whoevers behind Bittbox a cheese basket. There's a great set of vector assets that are pretty high quality that he's sharing. I'm liking the Free Vector Web Page Elements parts one, two and three.
Posted by richz at 9:58 AMIn the spirit of sIFR, swfIR is a flash/javascript concoction that replaces images with Flash-driven equivalents. This allows you to do some fancy tricks like dynamic resizing and image effects. Pretty cool...though the initial flipping to the Flash version of the image is a bit annoying.
Posted by richz at 11:47 AMYour favorite portal and mine, Netvibes, has churned out a handful of features and enhancements. Netvibes continues to impress.
Posted by richz at 9:33 AMOk, this guy is damn cool. Opensearchfox is a Firefox extension that allows you to easily add new search engines to that handy little search box in Firefox. Simply right-click on any search box in any website and you're done.
Posted by richz at 12:54 PMI'm convinced the guy behind Smashing Magazine has no job. Yet another massive list: 83 quality Wordpress themes.
Add Opensearch (that in-line search box in Firefox and Explorer that lets you easily search Google, Amazon, etc.) for your site in five minutes.
Posted by richz at 9:42 AMImified is a new service that allows you to manage various web accounts like Backpack, and Google Calendar through your instant messaging client (MSN, Yahoo, Google Chat & AOL are supported).
Posted by richz at 2:24 PMAll kinds of cool Photoshop, Illustrator and 3D tutorials at Tutorials 2.0. Go ahead - make some shiny, glossy icons. You know you want to.
Posted by richz at 2:25 PMI know what I ain't good at: creating Photoshop brushes. That don't mean I don't love'em though. Brusheezy is a repository of free brushes that real artists contribute to (mostly).
Posted by richz at 2:46 PMI may be late to the party on this one, but iConcertCal is damn sweet. It probes your iTunes library, pulls out the artists and sends them off to Pollstar to see who's on tour. Then it plots them on a calendar. You heard me right.
Posted by richz at 10:08 AMGroovy/cool illustration art from Baz Pringle (an equally groovy/cool name!).
Posted by richz at 2:40 PMNo, I'm not plugging Design-feed.net because basement.org is one of the contributing sites. I'm plugging it because it's a nice collection of design sites all rolled into one. I swear.
Posted by richz at 5:48 PMPutting aside an oddly confusing name, Yahoo!'s new mobile service nicely unifies your typical mobile web services into a nice streamlined interface. Looks neat if your phone supports it (my Treo 650 doesn't).
Posted by richz at 3:12 PMPhotographer Daniel Edburg breathes new life (or, um...death) into famous scenes with this series of photos. It's hard to really explain. Just click thru.
Posted by richz at 10:52 AMIf you're any sort of web developer - CSS, Ajax, Javascript, XHTML - you need Firebug. The new version renders itself indisposable.
Posted by richz at 1:36 PMWant to send a nose hair-plucking e-Card? It's hard to really explain. Just click on the link.
Posted by richz at 9:40 AMWant another example of why Ajax doesn't creatively scale? Check out Youki. It's a service that allows you to display your galleries of photos in a booklet-style interface. It's Flash-based and it's pretty darn awesome.
Posted by richz at 9:47 AMThis is kinda weird and sorta cool. ArtPod has little video shorts for the iPod. They're these neat little ambient movies for your iPod.
Posted by richz at 4:49 PMYeh. You read it right. "Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture." Yeh. I'd watch it. So what?
Posted by richz at 9:04 AMThe latest version of Google Desktop is now see-thru. Kinky.
Posted by richz at 9:25 AMLab Pixies : cute little gadgets that can be added to your personal Google or Windows Live page (some work with Netvibes as ewll).
Posted by richz at 1:30 PMWondering why Web 2.0 startups keep dropping vowels from their names? Forbes says it's because all properly spelled URL's are sold out or really expensive. Interesting.
Posted by richz at 10:24 AMA nice bit of Photoshop love. A groovy series of Photoshop-manipulated images of dissections. Very realistic looking stuff. Also, a tutorial to make your photos look like Roy Lichtenstein's pop art with Photoshop. Both links are swiped off the mighty BoingBoing.net.
Posted by richz at 10:24 AMWe'll put aside that Icebrrg continues Web 2.0's all out assault on proper spelling and boycott of vowels and simply enjoy it for what it's worth: a form builder, simple data storage thingy (a la Wufoo).
Posted by richz at 9:56 AMPaint.net is a free, semi-worthy Photoshop-like graphics editing tool for Windows. Looks pretty ok.
Posted by richz at 12:34 PMI'm digging dzone. Fresh links for developers with Digg-style voting.
Posted by richz at 9:21 AMIndex : Design To Improve Life. Awesome.
Posted by richz at 9:20 AMI've thought about this and wanted to build this (no really) but couldn't find the frickin' time. Anway, somebody else did it nice. Upload a picture and it spits out a color palette. This is good. Real good.
Jack Slocum (yes, his coding skills are as badass as his name) has put out a really impressive commenting system for Wordpress. Built atop the Yahoo UI library, it's a different take on comments. Rather than just dumping them all on the bottom of a blog post, he meshes them into the reading experience. Nice.
Posted by richz at 9:54 AMDesigncharts is sort of like a Billboard Top 10 of (mostly Flash-driven) web sites. I'm not sure how the rankings are gathered, but the top 10 seems credible.
Posted by richz at 8:41 AMSay it with me..."Sizeasy" (yeh, I have no idea how to pronounce it either). Sizeasy is a neat little tool that compares the size of...umm...anything to common objects like a deck of cards or a piece of paper. Kind of cool (kind of).
Posted by richz at 8:51 AMWanna avoid those gosh-darned laser-guided missiles? The friendly folks at the EFF provide six excellent tips for searching privacy.
Posted by richz at 11:10 AMPaul Neave, a Flash wizard by any measure, has completely outdone himself with Neave.tv. A truly immersive video viewing experience. It's amazing what you can pull off with Flash if you're willing to look beyond the paradigm of web pages and hyperlinks. The transitions are just awesome. (Found via Waxy's Links).
Posted by richz at 11:10 AMMan, I love free stuff so very much. And in this case, "stuff" means software - a lesser known list of some useful freeware apps. Have at it.
Posted by richz at 8:25 AMAdobe (yes - Adobe - the entire company) has a delicious acocunt and they've decided to share it with us all. All sorts of great links on PDF, Flex, Photoshop (tons of Photoshop) and others. Very nice. Other corporate behemoths should take notice. This is smart.
Posted by richz at 11:49 AMHow To Create Groovy Vector Art. 'Nuff said.
Posted by richz at 5:32 PMI must've somehow missed this one. Google's put out an AJAX search widget for their search. Pretty cool. Not sure I like the different category listing though.
Posted by richz at 2:09 PMTake a geeky trip down memory lane with this cool collection of splash screens from various popular software packages. Kind of fun.
Posted by richz at 8:29 AMVia Meebo integration, now you can hit all the major instant messaging clients in one of your Netvibes tabs. Very sweet.
Posted by richz at 8:59 AMFile this bad boy under "inspiration" (or something). Logopond displays...logos (submitted ones that is). Neat-o.
Posted by richz at 10:02 AMThe Yahoo Interface Blog struts its stuff by showing the many ways Yahoo! is taking advantage of its freely available user interface libraries. As they say on Sportscenter: "useful."
Posted by richz at 9:04 AMThe constantly thoughtful and inspiring Creating Passionate Users considers whether the U.S. sucks at design.
Posted by richz at 9:50 AMCSS Mania : CSS World 2006 Winners
Posted by richz at 1:40 PMA nice, simple (really simple) implementation of tabs via Javascript and CSS.
Posted by richz at 1:52 PMI just wrote up some reasons we're loving Adobe's Flex technology here at Arc90. A worthwhile read for anyone interested in AJAX or rich internet apps.
Posted by richz at 11:55 AMThe excellent UI/UX blog, Functioning Form has a great entry on the behind-the-scenes thinking and motivations behind the development of OSX and Longhorn (Vista). Well worth reading.
Posted by richz at 9:05 AMSweetie is a free and very nice icon set. Go get it.
Posted by richz at 9:31 AMDigg For Designers : PixelGroovy.
Based on the 25 comments, I guess I'm a bit late to this. Nevertheless, Design Observer talks about The Power of Context.
Posted by richz at 9:16 AMLevitated.net has an oh-so-sweet collection of Flash physics demos (via Passionate Users).
Posted by richz at 9:59 AMI'm not sure if this old news or not, but it's new to me. Free, nicely designed CSS/XHTML layouts under Creative Commons.
Posted by richz at 12:28 PMA good summary of the major Javascript frameworks : The JavaScript Library World Cup.
Posted by richz at 2:26 PMI've always considered myself a "designer." But what kind? At blog.arc90, I give some thoughts on what we mean by "design."
Posted by richz at 9:49 PMHere's a nice implementation of a CSS/XHTML renderer. Ideal for trying out an idea before applying it to your own code.
Posted by richz at 1:36 PMGoogle has released a Firefox extension that maintains your Firefox settings across computers. Pretty useful. Just keep in mind it requires a Google account and syncs your saved passwords as well.
Posted by richz at 9:13 AMPlugins. Filters. Brushes. Actions. You name it. Here's a massive list of Photoshop add-ons.
Posted by richz at 10:19 AMArc90's Chris LoSacco discusses on the real, tangible returns of investing in interface design. Few things frustrate me more than key decision-makers not getting the value of good, thoughtful interface design. The post highlights some excellent points on the often-overlooked value of interaction design.
Posted by richz at 10:17 AMA nicely designed, social Web 2.0 thingamajig: The Best Stuff In The World let's you find and vote on...umm...stuff. It's sort of like a Digg for everything else.
Posted by richz at 4:29 PMYour favorite portal page and mine, Netvibes, has added Digg and eBay support. The Netvibes blog has all the details here and here.
Posted by richz at 3:18 PMSlashdot just announced their winner for the CSS redesign contest. It looks nice. Mmmm...gradients.
16 Bugs is a dead simple, web-based, AJAXified bug tracking tool. You can have one project for free, then tiered pricing after that.
Posted by richz at 9:52 AMIBM DeveloperWorks : Devise Web 2.0 Apps With PHP & DHTML. Looks like the first of a series. IBM's articles are usually pretty thorough.
Posted by richz at 1:53 PMGetty Images has put out a seriously impressive collection of interactive Flash and Shockwave applications called 10 Ways. The demos are designed to provoke us to think about the different aspects of photography: light, information, memory, space, response, emotion, color, truth, time, and transformation. Pretty inspiring. It really shows how powerful Flash is in the right hands.
Posted by richz at 2:13 PMDealmyday.com is a sort of Digg for online deals. I'm liking it. It looks fairly new based on the activity.
Not sure if this has already made the rounds, but the Dynamic Drive CSS Library is a nicely put together set of CSS tweaks.
Cool Text is a web-based image generator. Many text styles and each with many options. Just ignore all the annoying ads.
Posted by richz at 10:36 AMA nicely categorized, fairly comprehensive listing of Ajax and Javascript resources can be found at Solutoire.com. In other news, Google has released an Ajax framework based on Java (Slashdot has more).
Posted by richz at 10:05 AMHere's a neat little mashup. Sync up Yahoo! Local directions with your ipod so you can take your directions to go. I don't own an iPod (but by God I may cave in soon) but it looks pretty neat.
The lunatics at Adobe have put out a nice little Ajax framework called Spry. Yeh I know, there are many frameworks out there (just ask Max Kiesler), but this one's leveraging pure XML and Xpath. It looks pretty elegant.
Posted by richz at 2:28 PMGoogle's showing the world that "yeh we can go mash ourselves into...ourselves" (or something). There's a flavor of Google News available that has that tasty Google Suggest autocomplete flavor. Pretty neat.
The Yahoo! UI team is obviously taking no prisoners. They've put out a slew of components that bring the desktop feel to web applications. There are some really useful, well-documented things here.
Posted by richz at 8:56 AMTag a Flickr image page in del.icio.us and you'll get a thumbnail of that image. Yes. Groovy.
Posted by richz at 2:18 PMI have no clue if this is any good but I figured I'd point to it anyway. Litefeeds is a mobile RSS feed reader for Nokia, Palm, PocketOS and other devices.
Posted by richz at 9:47 AMBokardo : 7 Reasons Why Web Apps Fail.
Posted by richz at 6:03 PMWebsiteicons.com has a nice collection of free pixel-based icons. There are other icons as wel for a fee ($48/year).
Drunk Men Work Here (heh) has an impressive analysis of how the bots of the big three search engines troll around the Internet. Some really nice data visualization here (in both images and Flash animation). Found via the relentlessly cool Information Aesthetics blog.
Semplice Pixelfonts is a nice collection of ultra-stealthy pixelated fonts. The site is not in English but the fonts seem of high quality and free.
Posted by richz at 10:10 AMProtolize : Essential Web Tools In One Place. Man, can't get enough of those gosh-darn lists.
More Live tastiness. Windows Live Shopping debuts. Interestingly, no Firefox support yet.
Posted by richz at 10:34 AMAnyone who follows basement.org knows I'm a giddy cheerleader for Netvibes. Perusing their blog today, I notice they've made a bunch of upgrades and enhancements.
Posted by richz at 9:59 AM"GrayBit is an online accessibility testing tool designed to visually convert a full-color web page into a grayscale rendition for the purpose of visually testing the page’s perceived contrast."
Mmmm...vectors. I'm a big fan of Illustrator. N-Design has a nice collection of Illustrator tutorials.
Posted by richz at 3:06 PM"PlotKit is a Chart and Graph Plotting Library for Javascript. It has support for HTML Canvas and also SVG via Adobe SVG Viewer and native browser support."
LockNote is a nice and simple (and free) Wiindows Notepad replacement that adds strong password protection support. The twist: it doesn't require itself to view files. They get saved as exe's that aren't much larger than regular text files.
One of the oldest translation services around - Babel Fish - has found a new home at Yahoo! The Yahoo! Search Blog has all the details.
Posted by richz at 12:33 PMMicrosoft has released Beta 2 of Internet Explorer 7.
Posted by richz at 10:17 AMAJAX is obviously no longer fringe. The white-collar freaks at IBM have put out an exhaustively detailed (and fairly technical) tutorial for building an AJAX/XML-powered slideshow replete with the Ken Burns effect.
Posted by richz at 10:12 AMWhy do all the grunt work when you can generate? The Movable Type Style Generator is a nice wizard-style template builder.
Yahoo! MapMaker for Excel. 'Nuff said.
Posted by richz at 1:58 PMSolution Watch (solid blog by the way) has a good summary of apps that aid note-taking.
Posted by richz at 9:49 AMWe'll let the goofy name slide...for now. Zixxo delivers local coupons via RSS. Another great use for RSS. Death to weekly sales flyers.
Posted by richz at 9:32 AMWe all owe Max Kiesler a drink. He rounds up 50 (yes 50) Ajax frameworks.
Posted by richz at 9:56 AMThe View Source Chart Firefox extension displays source code in a nice color-coded layout for better readability.
Posted by richz at 12:07 PMMcSweeney's : Nihilist Job Résumé. Hilarious.
Posted by richz at 8:52 AMI'm not sure how I stumbled on this (a link somewhere I think). Preview.netvibes.com is publicly viewable. It's a version of Netvibes that has tabbed pages so you can really go nuts. Hopefully the Netvibes team won't hate me for pointing this out.
Posted by richz at 9:45 AMI think I blogged about htis before, but this got a whole lot sweeter. Ajaxamp 3.0 is a Ajax web interface to Winamp with audio streaming. Dang that's cool.
Posted by richz at 8:55 AMLightbox, very nice AJAX/Javascript slide show generator, just went 2.0. It's now got "fancy pants transitions."
Posted by richz at 8:24 AMConversationstarter.com : A Complete Guide To Web Analytics Solutions.
Posted by richz at 8:09 AMThe Yahoo! Toolbar has been refreshed for both IE & Firefox. The IE version has it's own flavor of tabbed browsing.
Posted by richz at 7:12 PMCNN.com finally gets a redesign. A bit more interactive. A lot more CSS. And from the looks of it, designed against 1024x768 and up.
Posted by richz at 3:34 PMYeh, yeh. We all know we love rounded corners, but creating them is still painful these days. Nifty Corners Cube is a solid, scripted implementation that has all sorts of capabilities. Very handy.
As tasty as combining chocolate and peanut butter. Deliver out your ftp server's contents via RSS. Be warned, somewhat technical.
Posted by richz at 8:54 AMFactor CSS takes in a CSS and spits out a new CSS with "rulesets split, combined, and reordered to "factor out" common declarations." Mmmm...refactoring.
Netvibes, through an integration of Box.net, now let's you access 1GB of storage on your desktop. If you throw MP3's up there, it'll just play'em. Sweet.
Posted by richz at 2:08 PMMicrosoft released a new version of IE7 today. The IE7 blog has the details.
CSS Tweak is a web-based CSS tweaker. Haven't tried it yet. Looks promising.
We'll let the missing 'e' slide on this one. Grazr is a mini web-based widget that browses OPML & RSS feeds.
Posted by richz at 8:44 AMAdd a chat box to any URL with Gabbly. Here it is for basement.org's home page. Pretty nice implementation.
DHTMLGoodies has both PHP & Javascript code for building those neat, draggable RSS boxes you see on sites like live.com an Netvibes (demo).
Posted by richz at 8:49 AM25 Best Freeware Fonts (via the mighty Kottke).
Posted by richz at 9:25 AMNetvibes Adds iCal Support. Groovy.
Posted by richz at 8:56 AMIt ain't all about work and such. Gnome's Lair has a nice list of free games.
Posted by richz at 8:59 AMHarvest is a simple web-based timesheet program. Trial available but it's not free (though reasonably priced).
Posted by richz at 9:47 AMGood article on how RSS is helping retailers reach customers.
Because we need to visually see where our consumable goods are on a map. Package tracking with Google Maps.
Seth Godin :The Problem With "Global Warming."
Max Kiesler (cool site by the way) put up an exhaustive list of AJAX slideshows.
Posted by richz at 9:55 AMLayout Gala : 40 Canned CSS Layouts. Mmmm. So del.icio.us-able.
Posted by richz at 10:08 AMOswd.org has nearly 1500 (yes, 1500) CSS/xHTML designs that are shared for free. Have at it.
Posted by richz at 8:20 AMFeedBlendr allows you to enter the URLs to any RDF, RSS or Atom (XML) feeds you'd like and blend them into a single feed. We won't hold the missing "e" against them. (Thanks for nothing Flickr).
Posted by richz at 5:02 PMPretty cool. Type in the name of a movie or a theater and it gives the movies playing and showtimes. MSN Search WebLog has the details. Groovy.
Posted by richz at 3:18 PMNo, not waffles. Wufoo lets you build on line forms. A very slick interface that nicely marries Flash and DHTML.
Posted by richz at 5:00 PMWeb-Based Spreadsheet : iRows.
A couple of really useful cheat sheets for Actionscript and the Javascript Prototype framework.
Posted by richz at 9:41 AMJotform is a neat little form builder with drag & drop support. Nice.
Posted by richz at 4:58 PMTimes Online : Are You Experienced?
Posted by richz at 9:19 AM"Scriptio is an open source framework for presenting animations and educational content in a rich online experience." The framework is written in Javascript/AJAX.
Posted by richz at 8:57 AMTasty. 25 Free Grunge Fonts.
Create your own design portfolio online with Carbonmade.
Posted by richz at 3:36 PM"ZenGarage is a showcase tool that may help you to develop and present different visual styles for a single set of templates. All by the power of CSS."
Posted by richz at 8:57 AMIn the spirit of Eric Meyer's S5, AJAX-S is an AJAX-powered slideshow renderer that pulls in an XML and presents it in slideshow form. A demo is available.
Posted by richz at 1:25 PMBusiness Week published an insightful article on the Adobe / Macromedia merger and the rationale behind it.
Posted by richz at 8:54 AMIE Blog reports that the IE Developer Toolbar goes to Beta 2.
Yahoo!’s My Web 2.0 get’s an update. The Yahoo! Search Blog has the details.
Posted by richz at 9:25 AMbgMaker is a nice, interactive tool to create your own tiled backgrounds for your web pages (a typically annoying task). Very nice implementation.
Opera joins the browser party with a preview of their own browser's next release : Opera 9. It features widgets, Bittorrent integration and more. Opera Labs a good summary.
Posted by richz at 10:13 AMI'm always looking for sources of design inspiration. So why not weird, old, foreign cigraette packaging? Desginboom has a post up thank links to hundreds of cigarette packs.
Posted by richz at 10:12 AMJSMin is a filter which removes comments and unnecessary whitespace from JavaScript files.
Posted by richz at 8:28 AMParticle Tree : Lightbox Gone Wild. Tackling modality. Nice.
Posted by richz at 8:44 AMA Digg-style link voting site that suggests headlines from contributing feeds. Pretty nice design too. FeedButler.
I can't kick the icon addiction. Here's a nice list of icon library links. It's in French, but still useful.
Posted by richz at 10:15 AMReally nice, simple trick. John Oxton throws down a logo via a static Flash image. If you zoom in/out (CTRL +/CTRL - in Firefox), the logo keeps it's sharpness and scales nicely.
Posted by richz at 9:04 AMA List Apart seeks out the Holy Grail (in CSS design that is - the three column layout, revisited).
Posted by richz at 11:01 AMAn index of all TechCrunch profiles. Also available in OPML.
Posted by richz at 9:23 AMFor all you designers out there, free blank PDF graph/grid/lined paper downloads.
Posted by richz at 10:07 AMAsk Jeeves boosted the capabilities of their image search. I play around a bit and it's pretty cool. Details here.
Posted by richz at 8:08 AMScienceBlogs is a nice little network of science blogs covering topics from anthropology to politics. My favorite is the cognitive science category. Check it out.
Posted by richz at 7:29 PMWizlite : Collaborative Highlighting. Pretty neat.
Posted by richz at 8:02 AMAs announced at CES, Google Video now allows the purchase of videos. Some details here.
Slickr is an OpenGL-based screensaver that does that cool zoom and pan thing to give your Flickr photos an oddly sentimental/dramatic vibe. I've seen something similar on Macs. Now all we need is a Windows version of that cool RSS screensaver for Mac...
I can get into typography now and again (though I admit I don't know much about it). Typographica dishes out the favorite fonts of 2005.
AIGA has a set of pedestrian symbol icons freely available in both EPS & GIF formats.
Posted by richz at 11:51 AMFACE is a framework for animating elements through CSS and Javascript. Really wild stuff.
Posted by richz at 11:51 AMMicrosoft ClearType Tuner. Requires Internet Explorer & Windows XP.
Posted by richz at 9:45 AMHere's an excellent breakdown of Web 2.0 apps released the past year. I agree with all his "winner" selections.
Posted by richz at 11:19 AMSitepoint.com : The Anatomy of Web Fonts.
Here's a trippy way to look at search resutls. Kwmap.com presents a visualized map of keywords you search against. It displays an intersection for words you searched for. Try it out.
Posted by richz at 10:51 AMLooklater looks intriguing - essentially del.icio.us with the ability to make bookmarks private. Their blog has more.
Posted by richz at 5:35 PMApples To Oranges : CSS For Bar Graphs
i have no idea who is behind www.FamFamFam.com (actually it's Mark James, a designer from the UK), but he's decided to share some high-quality free icon love. Check them out. Good stuff.
Posted by richz at 4:01 PMVisualComplexity.com : Data Visualization Gallery
I'm all about vector these days. Here's a nice gallery of free vector icons and GUI interface elements.
Posted by richz at 1:53 PMSo what can XUL (Mozilla's XML User Interface Language) do? Check out the XUL Periodic Table to find out. A great example/source code browser for the unfamiliar.
Posted by richz at 2:36 PMHere's a happy accident: a bunch of Photoshop tutorials ready for consumption on Google Video. Searching for terms like "training" and "tutorial" will bring up all kinds of video training materials for other apps as well. Yahoo has a ton as well (but lacks the in-line player of Google Video).
Posted by richz at 10:42 AMBartelme Design has a neat two part tutorial on creating badges (you know, those glossy looking stickers) in Photoshop. Great looking blog too.
Posted by richz at 12:02 PMI have nothing but deep hatred for the term "mashup." With that said, the ProgrammableWeb blog has a nice summary of the most popular mashups based on votes and visits (or something).