Internet Explorer 8 is ready to download in beta version. You can read about some of the new features in the IE upgrade here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/features/overview.aspx
October 2008 Archives
Google's popular photo organizer software, Picasa, has been upgraded with new features like photo editing and video slideshow creation.
Read about the new features here:
http://www.google.com/support/photos/bin/answer.py?answer=93773
Easy script generator for adding random background images to your site:
http://www.thought-after.com/free-tools/random-background-image-script-generator/
Pixolu helps you find images by their similarity to each other. Enter a search term and Pixolu searches the image indexes of Google, Yahoo, and Flickr.
PDFUNdo.net is a free online PDF to Word converter. It's real simple. You just upload your PDF document and when the conversion is complete, download your Word document.
Wow. Idee Multicolor Search Lab is a great tool. You select up to ten colors and it returns Flickr photos with those colors Great for coming up with color palettes.
A new alternative to the sIFR method. It's called Facelift:
"Facelift Image Replacement (or FLIR, pronounced fleer) is an image replacement script that dynamically generates image representations of text on your web page in fonts that otherwise might not be visible to your visitors. The generated image will be automatically inserted into your web page via Javascript and visible to all modern browsers. Any element with text can be replaced: from headers to elements and everything in between!"
From Smashing Magazine:
"We’ve searched for the best downloadable Photoshop actions that can help you improve your workflow and perform complex techniques with the push of a button. In this collection, you’ll find more than 350 free hand-picked Photoshop actions that you can use to speed up your graphics creation."
Smushit.com is a service that goes beyond the limitations of Photoshop, Fireworks & Co. It uses image format specific non-lossy image optimization tools to squeeze the last bytes out of your images - without changing their look or visual quality. You'll get a report of how many bytes you can save by optimizing your images and all the changed images as a single zip for download.
TYPECHART lets you flip through, preview and compare web typography while retrieving the CSS.
Take a look:
From Digital-Web-Magazine:
"With 75%1 of the US population and 65%2 of the UK population having internet access at home, it is imperative that websites are designed to be both accessible and usable. The WCAG Guidelines, introduced in 1999, go some way to helping web developers create accessible websites—but …we must look further than the guidelines if we are to create websites which are accessible to users with disabilities and the assistive technologies they rely on."
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/understanding_disabilities_when_designing_a_website/
From Sohtanaka.com:
"As designers and developers we are all responsible for the product we produce, and cross browser testing is a must in our line of work. Although the W3C statistics show about 7 browsers that people tend to use most, in my opinion, two of them are the most important and should be given special attention to perfecting (Firefox and Internet Explorer)."
http://www.sohtanaka.com/web-design/css-fixes-tools-hacks-cross-browser-solutions/
Free graph paper templates for visual designers. Use for wireframing user interfaces, story boarding, etc. Handy!
