Web design tools

Today PollDaddy is launching a new line of pro services for users looking to get a little more from their polls than the average Joe. There are two new tiers, which run at $20 and $99 a month respectively. Pro users get to remove the PollDaddy branding, effectively turning the service into a white-labeled solution. They can also get support over the phone, as well as a sizable increase on response caps up to 1,000 and 10,000 responses, which for free account holders is limited to just 100.

The real hook, however, is the new set of reporting … Read more

It's a good time for talented developers. Architects of Web and client-side apps have their choice of dazzling users on not one, but three cutting-edge mobile platforms. There's no shortage of opportunities to create custom Safari apps for the iPhone, and add them to our growing collection of iPhone apps, of course. Developers can also now download the Android SDK (for Mac or Windows) to start measuring and mixing an app for Google's new mobile platform. Inspired developers have a chance to earn a share of the $10 million in prizes offered in the Android Developer Challenge.… Read more

In September I reviewed Zinadoo, a free service for creating mobile Web sites with a ".mobi" domain. Zinadoo, and now MoFuse, which joined the mobile Web site creation space last week, give individuals and companies a chance to put their wares in a format that will render well from the mobile phone each and every time, from any browser.

So the question is: which service serves you better? The bird's-eye answer is that they both purpose WYSIWYG editors to make site creation painless. They've both worked well, every time. Zinadoo is much more bubbly, graphics-rich, and … Read more

Those of us who are artistically challenged need all the help we can get when it comes to design software. A new tool called Vector Magic--the result of Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory research project by James Diebel and Jacob Norda--seems to be a valuable addition to the arsenal of free apps available for creating and editing images online.

Basically, Vector Magic takes rasterized images (composed of pixels) and converts them to vector (or scalable) images. The result is an image that can be easily resized with no blur or pixelation--an ideal format for logos or other images that need to appear both large and small. Vector Magic supports the uploading of JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, and TIFF formats, and can export its final products as EPS, SVG, or PNG files. A warning on the Vector Magic blog today warns users to be patient because of a recent upswing in the load on its servers, but I had no problem at all converting JPEG images of various sizes into vector images in no time at all.… Read more

Fawnt is a new font link directory that's got a variety of interesting and neat-looking fonts for your computer. I've been to a lot of sites like these in years past, and many are nauseatingly ugly and difficult to navigate. Fawnt, on the other hand, goes the slick and clean route, showing you a dozen fonts at a time in little white bubbles that can be navigated (12 at a time) with simple and large arrow buttons.

Clicking on any of the font links will take you to its site or origin, where you can go download and … Read more

Despite a few hiccups on the big launch day, DC Comics' webcomics initiative Zuda Comics went live before the end of business Tuesday on the Left Coast. The first webcomics push by a corporate comic book publisher, Zuda is attracting a lot of attention as the webcomic-o-sphere tries to figure out what it all means.

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Even the Mozilla Foundation, makers of the popular Firefox Web browser, thinks it's time to break out of the browser.

On Thursday, developers from Mozilla announced a project called Prism that will, along with other "experiments," make Web applications better resemble desktop programs.

The idea with Prism is that people can integrate their favorite Web applications with their desktop operating systems.

For example, a person could access Web-based programs Gmail or Facebook from the applications menu of Mac OS or Windows. Or they could create an icon for Facebook on their desktop that launches in its own … Read more

Microsoft started an open beta program for its consumer-oriented mashup builder Popfly on Thursday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

Popfly is a hosted application that enables people to assemble mashups by dragging and dropping components, rather than writing code. It's built with Microsoft's Silverlight Web browser plug-in.

When Microsoft released the alpha in May, it had prebuilt "blocks," or connections, to popular Web sites Flickr and MySpace.

Now it integrates with Facebook and people can create gadgets (also called widgets) that run on Windows Vista or Windows Live.

There are a growing … Read more

I've played around with a variety of online image editors, but "played" should be the operative word. For any serious image-editing work, I've always used traditional software methods. I hadn't found a Web service that could replace my usual standby apps (Photoshop at work, and Paint.NET at home) ... until I tried the new Web-based rsizr this weekend. I was blown away by its speed and ease of use in resizing and cropping digital images.

Even cooler than those basic-yet-essential functionalities are the app's flexible image-sizing features. Rsizr uses an algorithm called "seam carving" to expand or contract images in any direction while maintaining focus on the areas rich in detail. In essence, it lets you stretch or condense pictures without making them look blurry or smooshed. With a bit of practice, you can also perform the trick of removing people or objects from photos.… Read more