Category: Design

Watch out, Inkscape! As Web browsers become increasingly powerful, it is only a matter of time until a free browser-based vector graphics editor pops up that is powerful enough to compete with a desktop application -- and SVG-edit may well become that editor. Currently in version 2.5, this open-source project was surprisingly responsive and powerful on my aging Firefox 3.6.8. The one thing I ...

Mind mapping is kind of like American coffee: you either love it or hate it. While I'm not an American coffee fan, I do like mind maps, and I just found a beautiful tool for creating them -- as well as other charts. It's called Blumind [Google translate link], and here's what you need to know about it: It's tiny: Blumind is a 244KB download. It's super-lightweight. It's portable: The whole ...

So it turns out that Marvel has a whole line of kid-friendly characters under the moniker Super Hero Squad. I like it already! And it gets even better, because I've just found that they also have a Create Your Own Comic feature on their site. It's a full-featured comic strip generator similar to previously featured ToonDoo and Toonlet, but the graphics really set it apart from the ...

Adobe let-fly its ROME free public preview over the weekend, for use on the desktop in AIR, or direct in the browser. Project ROME is an attempt to blend the kind of static content creation that InDesign allows, plus interactive media elements and a bit of PowerPoint thrown in for good measure, all wrapped in a cloud-based solution. It's difficult to describe exactly what ROME is, as it does so ...

Flickriver was briefly mentioned on Download Squad back in 2007, but it really deserves its own post. It's a very simple interface for browsing Flickr photos which displays a bunch of photos on the page, and you scroll down to view them. As you near the bottom, more photos are loaded so that you can just keep scrolling. This is by no means a new trick, but I find it very convenient and easy to ...

Here's one thing that I had no idea you could do with Delicious: bookmark color palettes! This hidden little gem was apparently introduced one April Fool's day, but it was useful enough to stay (if not enough to become famous). To bookmark a color template, just save a bookmark and, instead of a URL, specify a color: prefix and then a bunch of HEX color values, like ...

So, what does your site look like on a tiny mobile device? And what does it look like on a 1024x768 display? Sure, if you're a nerdy Web developer you probably already have a Firefox add-on that resizes your window to the pixel-perfect viewport in the exact dimensions that you require. That's great, but how do you show it to your boss? Simures is the answer. This link leads you to a 570px by ...

A while ago, we had a heated debate on our internal mailing list concerning the best way to note shortcut keys. Is it Ctrl+Enter? Maybe it should be a hyphen, so should it be Ctrl-Enter? And should there be a space? Should we capitalize, or not? This might seem fussy, but when you're authoring a large body of text (or a collaborative blog), some standards have to be established. It's not just a ...

Once upon a time, creating pixel art was a completely manual process. You drew your base shape, and then if you wanted to add highlights, shadows, or blur, you had to draw them in, pixel by pixel. Piq is a Flash-based pixel art editor that lets you enjoy fine-grained manual control, while making it a bit easier to add those extra touches to your image. You first draw the image pixel by pixel. ...

The Randomiser is a one-trick pony, but it's an extremely fetching one. You get a huge, chunky text box on a dark background, where you enter a list of items (comma separated). Then, you hit Enter, and Randomiser chooses one item and tells you what it is. It's as simple as that, really. The Randomiser beautifully designed, fast, and it works. If it only had a high-profile domain name, it's the ...

If there's one thing that I dislike about other people's CSS, it's how messy it can be. Seriously... Some people just do whatever they feel like! There's no order or convention. If you feel the same way, ProCSSor may come in handy the next time you have to tweak someone else's layout. It may be someone who doesn't take the same meticulous care that you do to align all the braces just so and sort ...

This one's for the Web developers in the audience. ColorPicker is a very powerful JavaScript ... color picker. Okay, so maybe the name isn't very original (or searchable, for that matter), but it is very descriptive. In the demo shown on the page, ColorPicker pops up as you click a text field that needs to be filled with a color value (think #ff00ff format). But what you get feels like a ...

Seasoned Download Squad readers are probably already aware that you don't really own some of the software on your computer. You have a license to install and use it, but that's not quite the same as that software actually belonging to you. It's a bit confusing to the average user, to be sure. Thankfully, we have the court system to help us sort out all kinds of confusing matters of legality, ...

DeviantArt has a fairly active community of people tweaking and customizing Windows 7. One of their favorite tricks is to replace a whole bunch of system and software icons with desaturated or monochrome variants. This "unifies" the system visually, and the whole thing feels like one "package" instead of a bunch of disparate applications. Usually, this is a manual process, and it's fairly ...

ColorExplorer is one of the most massive and exhaustive online color tools that I've ever seen. In fact, it's not really a tool, but more of a toolkit – it's a bunch of separate utilities that allow you to select a palette of colors and then refine it and test how usable it would be in real life. It's basically a bunch of tabs. You have a "My Palettes" tab, which lets you save/load and ...