Web design tools

I've heard of death by a thousand cuts, but never cursors--that was until Firefly, a less-than-practical approach to letting your site visitors communicate with one another in real time. The service lets everyone see each other's cursors live as they zip around the page and lets them chat with one another via text. To strike up conversation, just start typing and a chat bubble will form above your cursor. Everyone's public chats are stored in a little queue, and frequent users can register to have their information and chat history saved to view at a later date.… Read more

Pixel art has held a special place in the the world of Web 2.0. Most recently it reared its head at Adobe Systems' Engage event earlier this year, where attendees received a poster with pixel art characters using various Adobe products. The poster was professionally designed, but that doesn't mean you've got to go out and buy some special software or take digital art classes to have some fun making your own.

Enter Cubescape, a simple app that gives you some easy-to-use tools to create 3D pixel art on a large canvas. You can drop blocks down … Read more

Video and text don't always go together, but that's not stopping video and audio microblogging service Seesmic from partnering with the distributed comment tool Disqus. Starting Wednesday, users of Disqus will get the added benefit of video commenting alongside the text entry field.

The option is turned off by default in Disqus, and must be enabled by whoever is administrating the account. We've gone ahead and turned it on in the Webware 100 winner pages, where we've been using Disqus since unveiling the 100 winners late last month. I've also added it to the end of this post, where you can add your own video comment after the break.

One small hiccup I've found is that Seesmic won't pull in your Disqus account information. You've got to be registered with the currently private alpha service to have it linked up with any sort of account. Otherwise you're limited to leaving an anonymous comment that can later be reclaimed when you get Seesmic access. Disqus founder Daniel Ha tells me the two companies are working on deeper integration for user authentication, but in the meantime anonymous recording is the easiest option for people who don't yet have Seesmic accounts.

I'm still not sold on the trend of video commenting. It's a bit gimmicky, and as others have said, it makes conversations difficult to parse. Ideally I'd like to see services like Seesmic partner with Jott to add a small transcript under the comment that would save me some time, and improve the experience for search engine bots, the deaf, and others who don't feel like watching and listening to what could be a simple sentence or two of thought.

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Earlier today I had a great demo with Webjam, a do-it-all publishing service that launched at the Le Web conference in late 2006. In many ways it was ahead of its time with a platform that lets you create your own social network, blog, online shop, or iGoogle alternative.

Like Ning (which picked up $60 million in funding last month), it lets users build pages out of various components without needing to know any coding. The twist is that if you come across someone else's design of modules that you dig, you can copy the entire thing to your own page and make it your own. The same goes for individual modules, which can be ported over to any of your Webjam pages, complete with whatever feeds or standalone content they contain.

Co-founder and CEO Yann Motte, formerly of Yahoo Europe thinks his platform's got what it takes to rise above the noise of other platform services, social networks, and blogging tools because it can do nearly all of those things nonexclusively. "[Users] don't have to split their activities between several Web sites," he says. "It works for you and me, and other people in this industry, but it does not scale for the average user." Does that mean he wants people to give up their Facebook profiles? No, but Motte believes that Webjam offers the average user more possible combinations to post and discover quality content than the competition.

The service has already seen accelerating growth in the U.S. over the past few months. Motte says the site has been growing 10 percent a week and is seeing users spend more than 12 minutes on the site (according to Compete), something I think is due to the page creation tool, which is really well done. If you've ever used Netvibes or Pageflakes it uses the same system; you simply have a bunch of different boxes you can drop down onto a blank editing canvas, which can be skinned and re-arranged to your liking. Motte says that in many ways his system is like Facebook's except more open because you get more control over the privacy controls of each box, as well as the data that goes with it.

These extensive privacy settings might be one of the most complex bits of the service. Each module has its own settings for viewership and editing. Users who visit your creation can become members, and in some cases co-contributors to the content that gets pushed out for others to read. Motte's example was to show me a page where a Webjam user had two different versions of a blog--one for everyone in the world to see, and a member's-only version.

One thing I'm not sold on is that people would pick Webjam as a blogging platform over a more established service like WordPress or Blogger. Motte acknowledges that Webjam's blog editor does not offer as many tools or the same level of community interaction, but comes back to say that if you decide to change the focus of your site later on it's not limited to being just a blog, and that's not a freedom most users are used to having. One service that took that idea and ran with it was Tumblr, which lets people change course if they get tired of writing things, and simply lets them republish photos, videos, audio, and IM conversations.

When it comes down to it, I found Webjam's creation tools and skinning to be far easier to use than the ones that come with Ning. I think the results looked a little better too, at least with some of the themes you can apply which are on par with some of the really simple and beautiful ones on iGoogle. What's not as established as Ning is the business model, which for now is simple text ads. The good news for power users looking to potentially get a little cash off of the hosted sites is that the service is rolling out a premium plan in July, which is currently being offered for free until then. Premium members get all the usual perks of services like this, with domain mapping and the option to remove or place banner ads.

To see some examples of popular Webjam pages you can go here. You can also check out a quick demo of the site maker in action after the break. … Read more

At last week's Web 2.0 Expo, one of the companies showing its wares was Profy, a blogging service I covered back in January. Back then, I was impressed with its vision, although not with its customization options, which fell short of what was offered on hosted blogging tools such as MovableType and WordPress. However, after meeting with Profy co-founder Svetlana Gladkova this morning, I'm beginning to see the bigger picture: an ambitious plan to serve as a huge platform for other popular blogging services and make them better with tools that have designed with the novice to … Read more

The Web 2.0 Expo is really a show for developers. Most of the exhibits are developer tools and platforms, and the pitches I'm hearing in the hallways are for tools, not applications. Case in point: Rambla, by Piria, a Flash-based Web site builder that president Bob Lang is building to sell to hosting sites, so they can rebrand it and sell it to their customers.

In this very early stage, it looks like a very usable tool for building flat sites. The templates are attractive and flexible, and it's easy to select and move text and art … Read more

The last panel sessions for day two of the Web 2.0 Expo just wrapped up. One of my favorites was global design trends, a panel discussing the Web design around the world. In my less than two years of tracking Web apps, I've seen a huge shift in the look and feel of mainstream sites, as well as seeing a slew of services that have pushed what I thought was possible on the browser.

There can, however, be huge differences between two versions of the same site in different countries. A good deal of what's important is … Read more

One of Apple's biggest blunders in creating its own directory of iPhone Web apps was to make the site suited for desktop users instead of people on the portable handset.

While the company has since made it easy for people to bookmark Web apps onto their home screens by adding a quick link from inside of Safari Mobile, the "official" directory of Web apps continues to be unapproachable for iPhone users unless they're on a speedy Wi-Fi connection. Widget directory Widgetbox has come up with its own solution and launched a directory of iPhone-friendly widgets that … Read more

Google on Monday invited programmers into a new sandbox that will let them test out significantly expanded possibilities for Web gadgets, small applications that can be hosted on the company's iGoogle personalized home page.

The sandbox, available at Google's iGoogle developer page, lets developers get started with a number of new features that eventually will make their way to the regular iGoogle home page, said lead product manager Jessica Ewing.

Among those new features are a left-hand region of the Web browser that lets users navigate quickly through a list of gadgets, a "canvas view" that … Read more