Tag: DESIGN

Despite its accelerated demise on personal computers, Internet Explorer 6 remains a force to be reckoned with in the enterprise. There are simply too many mammoth companies running applications that depend upon the grizzled, old browser for it to disappear from the market share charts any time soon. A company called Browsium thinks they might have a magic pill, however. It's called UniBrows, ...

One of the first things you learn about writing for the Web is that you have an incredibly short amount of time to make a first impression; it's usually said to be around three seconds. So, if you've grabbed your visitor's interest or managed to get your message across within those three seconds, you did a good job. But how do you know if you did? Clue is a new Web app from the fine folks at Zurb ...

When I marveled at Daily Todo, reader ViaTorci recommended TaskForce, a similarly minimalistic application for managing a single day's workload. This is one of the coolest recommendations that I've received via a comment. You don't need an account; you just enter your name, and then enter a task along with an estimated duration. A timer starts counting down, and then you go and do the task. Your ...

Slick, sexy and suave are just some of the adjectives that came to mind when I was testing Fillerati. This beautiful little toy is a testament to what one developer can do with modern Web technologies in just 48 hours. Functionally, it's very simple. Instead of generating Lorem Ipsum text for testing your new website or software, it lets you use excerpts from the works of famous (and long-dead) ...

What Color, here demonstrated with the beautiful Lemon Bee color theme, is a very simple Web utility. You punch in the URL (whatcolor.heroku.com), add a slash, and then put in the HEX codes of whatever colors you'd like to see. The tool accepts short notation, such as "cdc," or extended notation, such as "ccddcc." You can also just append the word "random" to the URL, and get a colorful ...

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 ...

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 ...

If you're an artist or designer on a Mac, and you want to draw vectors without all the other cruft in the Adobe Creative Suite, you're in luck. Meet Sketch, a new OS X app that's designed purely for drawing vectors. It's got a lot of power tools, but it falls squarely into the "do one thing and do it well" school of software development.Sketch comes from Bohemian Coding, and it's compatible with ...

I recently went on a search to find a good color picker for Windows that was both portable and fast so that I could stop making the trip to Photoshop whenever I needed to find a color value. After trying a number of different applications, I was delighted to find ColorPix (an app from ColorSchemer, who is the developer behind the previously mentioned ColorSchemer Studio 2). ColorPix has an ...

If you've been testing out Facebook Places, you may have noticed that the Places icon looks like the number four ... in a square. Is this a blatant glove-slap at Places rival/partner Foursquare? Is Foursquare so synonymous with location-based check-in services that Facebook decided it would best represent the Places services? It's a lot more innocent than that, according to the artist behind ...

Drips is a fun Flash application that was inspired by the art of legendary American artist Jackson Pollock. Its functionality is very basic -- you splash random colors on the canvas and that's about it. You can select a specific color or allow Drips to randomly rotate colors every time you let go of the mouse. You can also change the background color (again, either randomly or by ...

Like spam filters, Captcha is one of the necessary evils of the Internet. Google's Captcha is consistently irritating for me. I routinely fail it at least once, sometimes twice in a row, and I'm not a robot (to the best of my knowledge). Google bought reCAPTCHA a while back, and it's nicer (and helps a good cause), but they still seem to be using their older, super-irritating Captcha in many ...