Edit your photos online

If you need a quick fix on one of your photos or images, and you don't want to install any additional software on your computer, you can use the online PhotoShop Express. Check Jose's review and links to the solution. It's free and it's very good.

But there is another online service for modifying your pictures that I believe is also very good: It's called Picnik. You can find it on www.picnik.com.

There are some really nice features:

1. You don't have to signup or register to upload and edit picture
2. Lots of basic tools like Auto fix, Rotate, Straighten, Crop, Resize, Fix exposure, Sharpen, Red-eye removal, ...
3. Lots of effects for your photos

4. You can put texts, shapes, frames on the images
5. You can edit curves and color levels (for premium version only)
6. lots and lots of other stuff
7. If you want to experiment with the tool, it has some sample images for you to try the tools
8. It can connect to Flickr, Picasa, FaceBook and other online photo services, or you just upload your photo

Below is a sample that I made in just a couple of minutes using auto fix, exposure fix, rotate-straighten, added shape, text, some radial effect and drop shadow border and resized image:

I recommend you to visit the site and try it yourself.

Oznake ponudnika Technorati: free tools,online,photo editing,pictures,photos

Great site with a lot of free tools

It's useless to talk and search out all the good free software, when this guy is making an amazing job. Almost daily you can find here new and useful freeware tools. I found it by coincidence, but it's absolutely worth linking to it.

Visit Freeware Genius

Don't miss also the site's featured article: Reinstall Windows and outfit your system with all Freeware programs.

Oznake ponudnika Technorati: FreeWare,Free Tools

Free Undelete utilities

Not long ago I've had a bit of mishap by deleting some of my very important pictures (birth of my kid). With the first shock I couldn't find quickly any free software for undeleting.

After calming down I've found the following two:

Office Recovery FreeUndelete 2.0

Free Undelete +

They did a very good job and I have my photos back :) I hope by posting these here they'll help someone else too. I'd be glad to hear about similar situations or software in the comments of this post.

New Free Download Manager - Download videos from YouTube, Google Video, ...

I've already posted about the Free Download Manager. Recently I've checked and they have a new version, which enables you to download videos from YouTube, Google Video, Blennus, DailyMotion, LiveDigital and MySpaces. Probably the list of supported sites will keep expanding.

It enables you to automatically convert the downloaded Flash video (.flv) to some of the popular video formats - .avi, .mpg, .mp4, .wmv, etc.

It comes also with a built-in (as an option) torrent downloader.

Technorati Tags: free tools, download, download video, flv

Great tools for web developers pt. 3

The third in the series of tools for web developers is for the ones that don't want or don't have the option to install any software or addons and just need a quick access to a tool for inspecting DOM

1. Mouseover DOM inspector v. 2 - MODIv2

This thing is pure JavaScript, DHTML and CSS so you really don't need anything else for inspecting a DOM of a certain page. All you need is to bookmark a link on the help homepage:

And then go to the page you want to inspect the DOM, and next just call the script from your favourites.

And you're already exploring the DOM.

It doesn't contain as many tools as the previously described toolbars, but it's a very good solution for quick start and instant DOM inspection.

Technorati tags: web development, web design, DOM, html, css, javascript

Great tools for web developers pt. 2

In my previous post I've presented a tool that I find very useful when debugging display, creating javascript related to HTML DOM, etc. The tool is intended for Internet Explorer. The FireFox users aren't deprived of such tools either. There are two tools available:

 

1. Web developer toolbar for Mozilla Firefox

 

It offers quite a wide array of tools for web developers, such as ruler, css validation, DOM explorer, etc.

It has a nice feature when exploring DOM - it displays all the parrent elements - so you can see how any element is nested.

A neat add-on to that feature would be to be able to pause the selection and view the nested DOM, since there are a lot of times too many nested elements and the text goes out of the screen.

2. Firebug

A good combination of both - ie and firefox dev toolbar, it has very good tools for debugging HTML, CSS and JavaScript. What I like about it is that you can select the elements and it automatically also selects the HTML. And to manipulate the HTML, JavaScript and CSS in real time is very easy.

What I like about it is that it is easy to use, it has ability to monitor, debug and execute JavaScript, it helps with visualising some of CSS properties, and its toolset is nicely organized and easy to use. On the image below you can see how easy is to manipulate HTML in real time.

The problem of displaying too many nested elements is solvet neatly with a simple solution: the elements are ordered in opposite sense - it displays nested elements from right to left - instead of html > body > ... div it displays div < ... < body < html.

These are some neat tools that may make your life easier. I recomend using them all together because you know what headaches the IE/FireFox display compatibility can cause :)

Technorati tags: web development, web design, css, firefox, javascript, html

Great tools for web developers pt.1

Many times to refference or change the the element's properties in a DOM of a web page, I was just going crazy. Especially in SharePoint this can be difficult, because some elements are nested DEEP within other elements (table > div > div > div > ... > input).

You can help yourself a bit with javascript:alert() or by viewing code, but there are tools to make your life as a web developer much easier:

1. Internet Explorer developer toolbar

This tool is a super add-on to Internet Explorer, with which you can easily explore the dom elements and their properties simply by mouse over and click.

Some screen shots

It has lots of other neat features like visual display of class and id info, outlining certain elements, disabling styles, images, clearing temporary files, etc. I especially like the color picker and the ruler, enabling you to select colors or to measure width or height of anything directly on the screen!

Color picker

Ruler

Windows Live Writer Beta 2 available

I'm already using it to write all my posts for this blog. It has many improvements and features, so I recommend it. Amongst many others, one of them is also the support for blogger tags. You can download it from Windows Live writer website, but the link is misleading. Don't click on the big Download button, because it will lead you to the Live Betas web page.

 To download Windows Live writer, click on the links in the left bar. Click here to go to Windows Live Writer

Click here to go to the page and download Windows Live Writer beta 2

More options for creating a favicon

In my past post about creating favicon online nicolas sent me a comment with a link to another good tool for creating favicons. It's a favicon generator from images. All you need to do is to upload 16x16 or 32x32 .gif or .png file and it will generate the favicon for you. You can find this tool on Web Script lab.

.

If you have Paint.net, you can also download a plugin that will save your image like a favicon - so you can make your favicon also offline.

There are many options also online if you don't want to make your favicon. One is to search for them. I've also found one favicon gallery.

 

All this talk about favicon. And how to insert the favicon? If you have a favicon file named favicon.ico in the same folder that the web page you're trying to add it to, in the head if the page add the following line of code:

<link REL="SHORTCUT ICON" href="favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon">

Create comics online

Lately I'm noticing lots of sites passing information in a new way - with the aid of comic books! I like the Idea! Below you have some samples:

The Meatrix

The Enchanted Office

Genuine Fact Files

Creating (static) comics is no problem for mac users, While there also exists some programs for Windows I've found a very nice online service that lets you create simple comics - online. You can even create comics anonymous. But registration brings benefits, like strip blogging, Here is a simple example that I've created in minutes.

New Paint.NET available

Today I've received an auto-update of Paint.NET to version 3.0. Super. Just at a first glance, here are some features:

• Multi-document interface
• Gradients integrated into the Tools pane
• User defined color paletes
• New effects

And the thing I love the most (being also a PhotoShop user) - now you can switch primary and secondary color with just pressing key X. Small but I missed that a lot :) Thumbs up!

So if you don't have auto-update turned on, or you don't have this program yet, click here to download the latest version of paint.net

Technorati tags: free tools, web design, graphics, paint, drawing, picture, photo

New Screen Hunter

Remember my post about screen capturing software? Well There is a new version of screen hunter available. Now with even nicer interface, better options for capturing, etc. And still free for personal or business use. Great work, guys!

Click here to review and download it.

Free Tools Galore pt. 9 - For those who believe in writing code

The cleanest way to build a website is to write clean code. Like that you control the components that usually graphical editors take over. Even though I like the graphicak WYSWYG editing, sometimes I simply have to dig into code and make manual corrections.

If notepad is just a bit not enough for you (like for me), here is an improved version:

Notepad++

Just check the list of features... Tabs, Color coding, auto completion, Code grouping, Macro recording and playback, bookmarks, zoom, multiple views, etc, etc, etc. The guys really made a great product.

When you install the program, it can even replace the default program for viewing source code on the Internet. So super. Next time Internet Explorer will tell me in which line of code I made an error, I'll be able to find it!

Just check the list of languages it has color coding for... The menu doesn't fit in a screen! :)



(in the screenshot above I'm checking a website template from OSWD (I know they write good code)).

Free Tools Galore pt. 8 - More photos for your website

I've already posted about where to get free graphics for your website.

Another place that quickly became one of my favourites is stock.xchng. Liked it from the first moment. I've already registered and posted 2 photos to share with the community (click here to see my profile and photos on sxc).

The site is nice, has a community, some real nice tutorials for working with images and when I posted 2 photos it took some time for them to get published. They have administrators checking the quality of the photos and if the photos are appropriate for publishing.

Here are my 2 photos, only after a day of being published they're already rated and commented:

 

Free Tools Galore pt. 7 - Vector drawing

There are quite some good vector graphics editors available on the market. But again keeping the stle of free I have to recommend you Inkscape - an open source scalable vector graphics editor.

It has all the features for drawing with vectors that you need. I had to prepare t-shirts and I used this program. The print shop was surprised with the quality of result and also they were happy because I didn't forget to convert text into curves (which Inkscape automatically offered.)

Free Tools Galore pt. 6 - Compressed files manager

Windows already has an integrated .zip compressed file support. But I've experienced problem in bigger zip files. And also sometimes I'm receiving lots of compressed files in other formats, such as .rar.

A solution to this problem is:

7-zip file archiver.

It has its own high compression format and also supports

• packing/unpacking to/from 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR
• unpacking from: RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS

From what I've seen from news it also supports .ISO. What I especially like is the nice Windows Explorer integration.

Free Tools Galore pt. 5 - Graphics for your web site

My friend, Jose has a good post about where to find free graphics. When in need of graphics for your website, the problem can be the authorship rights. That's why you have to search for royality free pictures.

Or you can check office online.

Check Jose's tip about free clipart.

Through Office online you can find lots of quality photos that you can freely use.

Free Tools Galore pt. 4 - for build your website

If this blog is also for webmasters and those wanting to become one, I should start addressing this topic.


In the office I'm using FrontPage 2003 and lately the super new SharePoint Designer. But these are the tools we use in the office and are really proffessional.


If you want to create a website at home or with minimum costs, you can use NVU - free web authoring tool.


It has enough if you want to build the website for free, nice features and support for plugins also.

Below is a screenshot of user interface (click on the thumbnail to see bigger screenshot):

It has nice views (HTML Tags is a nice view)

Tag selector: a feature I can't live without when working with web pages. You can find it at the bottom of user interface:

One nice feature is also that you can see the width and height of the element (table, etc.) in the rulers. Below is the sample of the table. You can see the width in the top ruler (click thumbnail for bigger preview)

It is XHTML compliant as you can see in the source code view. (click for bigger image)

Absolutely nice if you want to create web sites for free. Nice also the site manager and possibility to publish the site via FTP.

What I was missing is

• support for working with layers
• opening non-html files (for example CSS)