Tag: TOOLS

Looking for a way to expand GIMP's default toolset? Have a look at Gimp Paint Studio, a Creative Commons-licensed set of brushes and tool presets that add a wide range of new artistic options to your painter's toolbox. While GPS itself is a fantastic and functional add-on for GIMP, its creators hope that it also provides a spark to encourage others to experiment with the open source photo app's ...

If you have a friend that's a graphic designer or photographer, and you're really strapped for gifts this Christmas, how about giving them a TidyPSD? For the meager (well, fairly meager) price of $9, TinyPSD will take any unorganized, jumbled-up PSD and turn it into a thing of Zen-like beauty. Sequentially numbered layers will be replaced with names! Unordered chaos will be replaced with layer ...

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 ...

Despite being posted by someone with a thoroughly unbelievable name ('Joy Victory'? Really?), I can confirm that WordPress.com users now have access to Zemanta's rather sexy functionality. Zemanta, if you've not heard of it before, is best explained as a blogging buddy. It doesn't write your blogs for you, but it can help your posts along. As you write your posts (and update your title), ...

You know those neat thumbnails that you get when you hover over an icon in the Windows 7 taskbar? Did you ever notice how they're "live" and keep moving when a video is playing in a window that is minimized or otherwise obscured? OnTopReplica is a neat little tool that takes this functionality and lets you put one of those thumbnails anywhere on your screen, and it can be any size. Once you run ...

This is not a "tool" in the normal DLS sense of the word; rather, it's a "romance tool." Think of it as a little love life tip from DLS, helping you to be a more desirable geek. Chocri is a website that lets you create your own custom chocolate bar. Once you select a "base" chocolate, the site's AJAX-y interface lets you tab through dozens of different toppings and select up to six to put on your ...

Quick! What's an eight-letter word that starts with R, ends with M, and has B somewhere in it?* I know that these are often life-or-death questions, especially if Scrabble is involved (or poetry, for that matter). It's a good thing we're in the 21st century and there are now handy tools like Word Finder. This handy little form, hidden away in, of all places, the Toolbox section of a photography ...

Ahhh, color...you can't live with it, can't live without it. At least, that often seems to be the case for me; my color vision isn't exactly perfect, and sometimes I do need to pick colors for a design. I've been known to make some very odd "matches" (well, I thought they matched very well, while others begged to differ). I then found Adobe's Kuler, which is a great tool for browsing ready-made ...

Lifeyo is an incredible content management system for someone just trying to put together their first website. The whole system is very web2.0, but they manage to pull off this design cliché in a way which is actually useful -- all the dialogs are sensibly laid out, and the large fonts and bright colors actually make the system less intimidating to use. Their business model is also ...

I was recently playing around with Windows Gadgets, trying to find a decent clock gadget for multiple timezones. Selection was pretty grim, and I ended up settling for an okay-looking gadget, just because I was sick and tired of searching. Then, I was reminded of TimeLeft; it's a true classic. It's one of those modest utilities that has been around pretty much forever (check out the Windows XP ...

Never, in the entirety of history, has there been so much gaming to be done. You can hardly finish a game without the Next Great Game appearing in your mailbox or on your hard disk -- because you pre-ordered it on Amazon or Steam, of course. Believe it or not, we actually have too many good games at the moment. Until recently, gamers could dedicate themselves to a single stand-out game -- ...

Crocodoc is a free service that lets you mark up and annotate documents collaboratively. You upload a file (DOC, PDF, PPT...) and Crocodoc converts it into a PDF-looking document that you (and anyone else who knows the URL) can mark up. Note that it's mark up only. You cannot edit the text. Even worse (for me), you cannot export the text in any way. Maybe that's why they call it Crocdoc -- ...

Replacing the color scheme for a site using CSS can be an annoying task. The same color may be used for several elements across the file, and you need to search and replace for it. Color is represented by hex codes, which is not very visual. This is not a problem heavyweight web developers have -- they're usually set up with advanced text editors which feature built-in color pickers. Users ...

Glary Utilities is an extremely popular free program, offering a whole slew of useful system maintenance and cleanup apps in a single package. The recent update to version 2.2 introduces a small -- but very welcome -- addition to the suite. Glary's shortcuts fixer and empty folder finder now offer a restore function. That's good news if you've ever accidentally removed an empty folder ...

Today is Safer Internet Day, an annual event coordinated by the folks at InSafe -- who are all about promoting responsible Internet use. We've covered a number of great tools in the past that have the same aim, so what better day to take another look at them? Web Of Trust (WOT, Pictured) WOT is a community-powered trust and ratings system. With nearly 26 million sites rated to date, it's one ...