Web design tools

Adobe's Kuler (coverage) is neat for finding color schemes that are aesthetically pleasing, but what about when you want to figure out what colored text will look like on a colored background? You can either spend time trying each combination in something like Dreamweaver, or by using this handy tool, which lets you select a background then the secondary color (for something like text) by just hovering over each color hash with your mouse.

Even if you're not a cutting edge Web designer it's pretty fun. Plus, once you've found your colors you can match them … Read more

You've got to love Web kitsch. The YouTube tube socks probably still take the cake in my mind, but slide show creation tool Animoto's latest offering isn't too shabby either.

Twenty dollars gets your rave-worthy slide shows burned onto DVDs and sent to friends and family members. To go hand in hand with that, the service has also bolstered resolutions two-fold, bumping up the respectable 432x240 videos to 864x480 while simultaneously increasing the frame rate from 15 to 24 fps--the same as a movie projector.

The larger sizes come at a price though. The extra resolutions cost … Read more

Back in days of yore I took a two-week course in HyperCard, the long lost Mac-only application creator that is now looked back on as one of the precursors to the modern Web. While our use of the application was mainly to create small animations with sounds and interactive buttons, it was fun, and if I really knew what I was doing, it likely would have led me down a different path.

So when I heard about a project called TileStack my ears perked up. The idea behind it is to bring old HyperCard stacks back to life by putting them on the Web, meaning you can take some of those long lost creations from the late '80s and early '90s and make them working Web apps. You simply upload them to TileStack's servers and they'll be converted and hosted for just you or the entire world to use once again--sans the software that is.

What makes the app especially cool is that you can make edits to public stacks, or just the ones you've uploaded from the past. You can also make entirely new ones with a Web-based editor that's a step up from the one in the old days.

So far, the mix of stacks goes from rehashes of modernday Widget files to honest-to-goodness early 1990s HyperCard test programs. There are also some newer creations that blend in special effects like fades, wipes, and transitions--some of the polishes that come with a decade of technological advancement. Co-founder and CEO Joshua Gertzen tells me future plans entail an iPhone-centric interface and more focus on widgetized content. Since the service runs without Flash, Gertzen says, TileStack is perfect for the iPhone and other devices that run on the Web without all of the latest technologies that are found on the desktop.

TileStack is in private beta with plans to launch at the end of summer. It originally demoed at the MacWorld Expo back in January. You can sign up on this page in the meantime. I've also embedded a demo of it in action after the break.

Kind of related: AniBOOM's ShapeShifter: easy user-generated animation creation

… Read more

Bomomo is a wonderful Flash-based art application that runs in your Firefox or Safari browser. Instead of giving you some simple MS Paint-like tools like a paintbrush, bucket, and eraser, everything in Bomomo is dynamic and moving, leading to some kaleidoscopic creations that you can either e-mail to friends or squirrel away to your hard drive. I spent about 15 minutes layering effects on top of one another, and while the results aren't nearly as professional looking as SXSW Interactive winner Viscosity (review), if you know what you're doing you can create some really gorgeous abstract creations.

What … Read more

Ever wanted to post a screenshot or thumbnail of a Web site on your blog? Probably not. But if you're like us then this situation comes up all the time. Enter SnapCasa, a service that lets you drop in a preview of any site in one of three thumbnail sizes that will regularly update as time goes on. We debated using a service like this for this year's Webware 100 winner pages, but opted instead to use static images since seeing what Web services looked like years later can be kind of interesting (see Archive.org).

The tool … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, founders of Ajaxian, took the stage at the Google IO conference here Wednesday morning to talk about one of the technologies that has helped define Web 2.0, and is of course their area of expertise: Ajax.

The technology is one of the things that made Gmail stand out among its other Web mail brethren, with messages and an entire in-box that would load and open without turning the entire page blank--a large leap ahead of preexisting Web technologies.

While the two mainly discussed design and the nitty gritty of coding, they stressed the … Read more

Adobe Systems is offering two-day trials of three beta applications from its next Creative Suite package.

The previews of Dreamweaver for Web design, Fireworks for image editing, and Soundbooth for audio editing became available Monday.

Trials expire after 48 hours for most people, but registered CS3 users get to keep using the CS4 betas until the final applications replace them.

Adobe hasn't publicly confirmed its planned shipping date or the name for the next Creative Suite, which we're nicknaming CS4. Adobe Creative Suite 3 was released in March 2007.

We took a quick test drive of the Dreamweaver … Read more

This post was updated at 9 a.m. PDT with clarifying details on GasBuddy.com's data source and the correct spelling on Milt Krantz' name.

Perhaps you heard Wednesday's news about the price of crude oil once again reaching all-time highs, and, like me, you're wondering how that's going to affect gas prices at the pump as you fill up for your Memorial Day weekend trip.

Rest assured, you've got the likes of Milt Krantz on your side.

Krantz, 71, a retired social worker from San Jose, Calif., is also a designated gas price spotter … Read more

Users of the next Adobe Creative Suite may be able to mix and mash up the applications with online content and third-party tools.

In a bid to make workspaces more nimble, Adobe Systems is considering making parts of Photoshop and other Creative Suite applications available for users to manipulate within Flash widgets, according to a blog post Monday by John Nack, product manager of Photoshop.

The capability to bring tools from the Creative Suite to the desktop or the Web with Flash or Flex could lead to novel ways of exploring Adobe's expensive, hulking software. Users have mashed up … Read more