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 couldn't get it to do was curves. The feature list does say that it supports "curved paths," but I couldn't figure it out, despite previously having worked with Inkscape, CorelDRAW, and Illustrator. Other than that, SVG-Edit gracefully handled just about anything that I could come up with. You can change opacity, set the fill or the outline to any solid color or gradient, align items on the canvas, shift Z-order (bring items to the foreground or send them to the background), and lots of other functions. In case you're wondering, that screenshot isn't blurry -- it's showcasing SVG-edit's built-in Gaussian blur functionality.

SVG-edit also supports layers and imports SVG files that were created in other applications. The whole thing is powered by HTML5, JavaScript, CSS, and your compatible browser's SVG functionality. It all runs in the browser itself, too - there's no server-side component.

One neat thing that you can do with SVG-edit that you can't do with other apps is resize the UI. When you use your browser's zoom functionality, the whole thing grows, including the buttons. And it all stays crisp, because the buttons use SVG icons. It's beautiful work.

SVG-edit is a surprisingly powerful in-browser vector image editor originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 15 Nov 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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 thing is just one executable file; there's no installation needed.
• It supports color schemes: If you don't like the colors on the screenshot, don't blame Blumind. It's just one of several possible schemes that the application offers. You can change the scheme for your entire diagram in one fell swoop.
• It's keyboard driven: Creating new nodes couldn't be easier. Enter creates a new sibling, while Insert or Tab creates a sub-node.
• It's simple: There aren't very many options. Most notably, there are no "node styles" - meaning that you can't format one node and then save that formatting so that you can apply it to other nodes. It does have a Format Painter, though, so you can copy one node's formatting onto another.
• It doesn't play well with others: While there are nice export options for PNG, SVG, JPG, and other "final" formats, there is no way to export your work to FreeMind, or to any other mind-mapping format.
• It can be used for more than just mind maps: It's a snap to convert your drawing to an organizational chart, a tree chart, or a logic chart. In fact, Blumind is the fastest way I know of to create a beautiful organizational chart.

The bottom line? Blumind is a great little tool as long as its lack of interoperability isn't a deal breaker for you.

Blumind is a tiny, powerful tool for creating mind maps and other diagrams originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 04 Nov 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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 competition.

This is pure Marvel. It's beautiful stuff, really. You can either create a comic strip or an entire comic book. I selected a single strip, and I was then offered a number of possible layouts, ranging from the standard three-block strip to the funky layout that you see in the screenshot above.

You then get a palette of backgrounds, characters, objects, dialogue bubbles, and "sound effects" (those are the "ZZZATTP" and "Krunch" above). There are tons of options in each category, except for one. For some reason you only get five objects to choose from and they're all surprisingly mundane: a cellphone, desktop computer, laptop, office phone, and a chair. Yes, a chair. How exciting is that?

Objects aside, you do get many characters and some seriously beautiful backgrounds -- and it's just plain fun.

Create Your Own Comic lets you make Marvel-like strips and books originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 03 Nov 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading Adobe announces Project ROME public preview, brings all-in-one content creation to the cloud

Adobe announces Project ROME public preview, brings all-in-one content creation to the cloud originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 25 Oct 2010 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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 use. What's nice about it is that it pre-loads four images at a time, so I don't find myself waiting for the next image when I want to view it.

You can search by photo, group, user, tag, or location, and then you can sort the results according to relevance, recency, or "interestingness." The whole thing is very low-key; it has a dark background, an uncluttered interface, and the bare minimum of JavaScript required to make it work. You won't find anything sliding around, fading in and out, or being overly modern.

Flickriver just gives you the photos you want to look at, with no frills.

Flickriver is a fun way to browse through Flickr photos originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 22 Oct 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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:

color:FE9600,FFC501,FFEE4A,77477E,03001C

As you can see in the screenshot, the result is quite fetching. The only thing missing (in my opinion) is a way to display larger color swatches. The existing ones work well with Delicious' layout, but they leave something to be desired in terms of visual impact; I find huge, full-screen palette previews much more visceral.

Still, you can't beat Delicious' ubiquity and tagging ability. It's basically taking Adobe's Kuler, removing the Flash bit, and making it a lot more ubiquitous. Now, if there were just a way to search only palettes...

How to visually bookmark color palettes using Delicious originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 21 Oct 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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 320px version of Download Squad, and it's very human-readable - simures.com/570x320/downloadsquad.com. I just love it when things have human-readable URLs. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, like the Web is becoming a friendlier, simpler place every day.

Warm and fuzzy feelings aside, Simures is a very valuable tool. I just wish it had a little button for changing the user agent so that I could quickly test Download Squad's mobile website on the desktop. That's really the only missing feature.

Simures lets you see and share websites in specific resolutions originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 21 Oct 2010 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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 matter of consistency for consistency's sake - the question is what makes the most sense for users.

Key Command Generator offers an interesting take on this problem. You fill in a simple form for your shortcut key, and you get an embeddable code. When you embed said code within your document, it shows up as a stylized "keyboard diagram" (as you can see in the screenshot).

While we won't be using it ourselves (because the output is pretty ginormous), I can certainly see how this can come in handy for other projects. I only wish it was a bit easier to use. A simpler syntax would be great, because then I could just change a few parameters in my code and avoid having to fill the form in every time. Perhaps something like shortcutkey.com/ctrl+shift+enter. Oh well, I guess there's always the HTML5 kbd element.

Key Command Generator helps you generate beautiful shortcut key codes originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 23 Sep 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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. Then, once you have the base shape, you can use one of several tools to painlessly manipulate the colors.

In the screenshot above, I drew the letters "DLS" (hey, I never said I could do pixel art!), and then I used the "burn" tool to create some highlights. It may not be a very good example of what this tool is capable of, but that's just because I can't draw. As their gallery shows, piq can be used to create some very detailed and beautiful pixel art, such as this beautiful apple.

Once you're done drawing, you can upload your image to the piq gallery with a single click. You can also save the image to your hard drive as a BMP and then easily convert it to a site favicon.

Piq is a fun way to create pixel-art and favicons originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 20 Sep 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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 type of thing that could become a widely-recognized utility. "Drawing straws" is one of the few remaining things Google doesn't do with its search box (yet?), and it's something just about everyone needs from time to time.

Randomiser presents a couple of tabs at the bottom: one is a simple suggestions tab (to give you some ideas for things you can "Randomise"), and one is "Recently Randomised," which actually gives you a nice, large ... error message.

Still, if it ever gets fixed this option introduces an interesting twist. On the one hand, what you enter won't be private (somewhat of a downer). On the other hand, you can look at what other (random) people are entering, which could be interesting.

Next time you're deliberating over what you should get for lunch, give Randomiser a shot. The authoritative manner in which it presents the selected answer is very convincing. One might even call it commanding.

The Randomiser lets you draw straws, 21st century style originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 16 Sep 2010 12:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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 all of the attributes alphabetically.

As you can see in the screenshot, ProCSSor looks quite nice (it slides down and everything - we're living in the future now), and it provides you with a plethora of options on where to start new lines, what to do with the selectors, and even how you want the braces handled. In fact, you get to pick one of seven different brace styles. One possible choice is the exotic sounding Horstmann. I can hear it now - "Sorry, I don't touch a stylesheet unless it's Horstmann-formatted. Fix it first, come back to me when it's Horstmann."

One disappointing hiccup arose when I fed it with a URL; it wasn't smart enough to extract the CSS from the linked file, and it just choked and died with an uninformative error message. It was quite sad to watch, really. But as long as you're careful and feed it with just CSS, you should be fine.

Bottom line: ProCSSor looks like it could become a major tool in the discerning CSS connoisseur's toolbox.

ProCSSor is a slick, powerful CSS beautifier originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 15 Sep 2010 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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 full-fledged application; you can populate multiple swatches, specify your color using hue/saturation/brightness (HSB), RGB, CMYK or HEX number, drag the window around, select it using a swatch spot or a hue slider, and that's just one possible look for the control!

As the screenshots on top of the page show, the control is incredibly configurable. You can add and remove UI elements, change its size, skin it, etc. And it's compatible with pretty much everything from IE 5.5 all the way to the newest Chrome and Opera (Firefox included, of course).

One interesting note is that this thing is totally self-sufficient; it doesn't use MooTools or prototype or anything like that. It's all "native code," as they say on the page. I'm not sure that's a plus, but it certainly makes deploying it easier. It's definitely an impressive piece of code!

ColorPicker is a powerhouse JavaScript control for working with color originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 13 Sep 2010 19:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Autodesk wins court case, you officially don't own AutoCAD originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 13 Sep 2010 16:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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 laborious and error-prone. Not all icon sets supply icons for the same applications, and changing the files around can get old quite fast.

7CONIFIER is a slick application that makes this process as painless as possible. You feed it with an icon set, click Apply, and you're done. It's even responsible enough to propose creating a "default set" containing your current "vanilla" icons when you first fire it up.

To be honest, I'm not 100% sure it worked on my system. I mean, I see a different icon for Opera, but I don't see a different one for Notepad or for Explorer. So, I guess it's partially successful (at least on my rig). That's par for the course with this sort of thing - customization is tricky business!

7CONIFIER lets you quickly alter icon sets in Windows 7 originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 12 Sep 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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 export palettes. It also lets you apply filters to the current palette and tweak all the colors in certain ways (make them warmer, for example).

That's just one tab, and that isn't even all of the functions it offers. You can import colors from saved images or from CSS/HTML pages, for example. The site takes quite a bit of time to navigate through. I cannot hope to list everything it does, but here are some highlights:

• The Color Picker tab provides you with a color picker and preset variations on the color you've chosen. Once you find a hue you like, you can add it to the current template. This template then "carries through" to the other tabs.
• The Color Libraries tab lets you add precise hues to your template from a number of industry-standard libraries, such as TOYO and PANTONE. You can also choose from W3C Named Colors, Web safe colors, and others. You can sort the swatches by hue, lightness, saturation, and name. And, of course, add any swatch you like to your palette.
• The Color Matching tab lets you adjust RGB or HSB (hue, saturation, brightness) components for a specific swatch on your template. You can then append the result as a new swatch, or you can replace the existing one.

There's also an Analysis and Conversion tab that provides some really neat metrics on your palette, such as contrast analysis. And at the end of all this, you can export your palette to ASE, ACO, TXT or even PNG. It's very, very impressive stuff.

ColorExplorer is a full-fledged online color laboratory originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 11 Sep 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Just because we're all agog over the new Firefox 4.0, that doesn't mean there's a lack of action on the 3.6 front. In fact, SmallringFX DARKBlue is a dark, sexy theme that was updated just yesterday.

Personally, I like my Firefox as "chromeless" as possible (see what I did there?). But seriously, I hide the menu bar, the bookmarks toolbar, and any other toolbars that I happen to have lurking around. However, if you like your toolbars, SmallringFX DARKBlue is a very nice, comprehensive theme. I tested it with the Delicious and Diigo toolbars, and the icons looked just fine on the dark background.

One slight problem is that some of the status bar icons look pretty bad. For instance, Video DownloadHelper looks awful on a dark background, but that's not the theme's fault. (Video DownloadHelper guys, are you listening?) Another small glitch is that, on my system, the context menus appear to be gray on gray -- so all of the entries seem as though they're disabled. I'm not sure if it's just me or a general issue (I think it may be Windows-related).

Read It Later's sidebar, on the other hand, looks wonderful with this theme. Another thing I like is how tall the status bar is; it's really nice and roomy. If you like dark themes, don't miss out on this one!

SmallringFX DARKBlue is a slick, dark Firefox 3.6 theme originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 08 Sep 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Sketch is a brand-new lightweight vector-drawing app for OS X originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 07 Sep 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Designers think iTunes 10 logo "sucks", Steve Jobs responds originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 06 Sep 2010 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Another day, another CSS3 playground. Are you excited yet? Wait for it - this one has wood paneling for a background! (That's classy!) Even though it's not exactly the first tool of its kind (or the second, ... or the tenth), CSS 3.0 Maker is pretty handy and comprehensive, so I decided it was worth covering. Let me quickly sum it up:

I like:

• That it provides clear compatibility information for Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome (no IE, of course). You can see exactly which browser versions support your bleeding-edge CSS.
• That it's visual and real-time.
• That it provides code that works across as many browsers as possible, including browser-specific syntax (think -moz-border-radius for Firefox).
• The wood paneling! It makes me feel like I'm in a sauna.

I don't like:

• That it won't let you set all parameters at once. You can tweak the border parameters but upon clicking the gradient tab, your changes are undone. It's pretty irritating and almost relegates this to "toy" status.

CSS 3.0 Maker helps you visually create next-gen CSS originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 03 Sep 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Continue reading ColorPix is a fast, free Windows color picker

ColorPix is a fast, free Windows color picker originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 02 Sep 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.