Web design tools

Fauxto is a little Flashy

A few weeks ago we played with CanvasPaint, a version of Microsoft Paint that runs in your Web browser. Along similar lines is Fauxto, a browser-based design program reminiscent of early versions of Adobe Photoshop. Fauxto has the usual drawing tools: a pencil, a pen, a paintbrush, and an eraser. Users can create their own drawings or perform rudimentary photo enhancements, but essentially it's a doodling tool that proves these kinds of programs can work in Flash.

What sets Fauxto apart from CanvasPaint is its use of layers and brushes. For those unfamiliar with working with layers, each layer … Read more

CanvasPaint is everything Web 2.0 should not be

What is Web 2.0? It's freeing computing from the shackles of individual computers. It's using the Internet to make both machines and people part of a community. We all benefit from that. One of the side effects of Web 2.0 is that a lot of the things people do with traditional software (write, edit, plan, calculate, and so on) gets put on to the Web. Usually there's a worthwhile trade-off: we lose the speed of a local app, but in return, we get access from anywhere and features that connect us to others.

Just putting … Read more

What's more than a blog and less than a Web site? A Squarespace site, of course.

Last night I was among the attendees at the New York City chapter of Social Media Club, and there was arguably one star of the evening: Squarespace, a home-grown Manhattan start-up that claims to offer a content management system for small Web sites that can do more than, say, WordPress or MovableType.

Here's the raison d'etre for Squarespace. There are plenty of small Web site owners out there, both businesses and individuals, that are yearning for more than a blog but don't have the technical know-how to do it themselves. Maybe they'd like a few extra … Read more

Get clear feedback on creative work with ConceptShare

ConceptShare is a new service, close to being released, that gives creative pros an intuitive way to share their work with clients and coworkers. Essentially, it's just a repository for images that people can add notes to, but it's focused and straightforward, it has a very clear interface, and it's unlikely to confuse clients.

The Flash-based interface makes it very easy to switch between different images (or "concepts") and see the notes that people have left on each. You can toggle quickly between different images and easily spot small tweaks between different concepts. Designers can … Read more