Archive for August, 2009
Thank You Our Valued Sponsors For Being With Us In The Month Of August
This is a post in which we want to say a big Thank You to the SmashingApps’ fastest growing community for regularly visiting our blog. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and be the one of 600k+ subscribers. But how can we forget to say a Great Thank You to our valued sponsors who helped us to make this blog possible in reach of everyone in the month of August, 2009 as well.
Do you want to get noticed? Advertise with us and feel the difference!
Smashing Apps always welcome new sponsors for our large and diversified visitor base from more than 188 countries. They are designers, developers, internet marketers, bloggers, IT entrepreneurs, etc. You will get noticed by the thousands of visitors every day. Moreover, a monthly recognition post to thank you as our valued sponsors. Are you really interested? Click here to contact us or see advertisement section for more information on advertising details.
Our valued sponsors were:
AN Hosting hosts more blogs than anyone else, hosting tens of thousands of independent blogs. With plenty of disk space, huge data transfer and the ability to host 20 sites on one account. You will get relax with them. We are thankful to them for hosting our website and to make us free of tension.
Wix.com is a Flash website builder, built to create a simple way for everybody to build and design Flash website. Create a free website like whether it’s business or personal, music or art. Wix’s Flash website builder is simple to use with a “drag and drop” builder and is the complete solution to publish & promote your Flash website like a pro.
DreamTemplate offers exclusive premium web content solutions for web developers and webmasters. Our service lets you access a large collection of professionally designed website template files. Designing for the web has never been easier, with DreamTemplate you can rapidly create and deploy professional looking website’s quickly.
HotCards offers services of Highest Quality, Lowest Cost Full Color Printing in the Nation. Business Cards, Postcards, Flyers and Club Cards, Posters and More.
RapidxHTML is a small team of designers and developers, with a wide range of skills and experience. They know their strengths and weaknesses and how these fit into the big picture.
 
5pm can be your central location for project and task management, team collaboration, time tracking, reporting and more…
FireHost provides secure hosting without sacrificing the redundancy and speed you would expect from an enterprise hosting provider. When you’re ready to protect your website and web application vulnerabilities from malicious hackers, look no further than FireHost Advanced Secure Hosting.
ThemeForest is a website from where you can buy and sell site templates and themes to skin popular CMS products like WordPress Drupal and Joomla. Files are priced from just five dollars, based on the complexity, quality and use of the file. Anyone is free to signup for an account and begin trading or purchasing files.
FreshBooks is an online invoicing and time tracking service that saves you time and makes you look professional.
Premier Survey is the users’ choice for free online survey management. This system, a powerful self-service application developed on the concept of Software As A Service (SAAS) is designed to minimize cost and maximize ease of use.
We are also thankful to those advertisers who purchased favicon ads.
Do you want us to say Thank You in this special way? So help us to help you!
You will just need to take a look at our advertisement section on how you can start advertising at SmashingApps to grow and spread more or contact us for more information and details related to
- direct marketing
- sponsored giveaways and contest for Smashing Apps readers
- releasing a free font, a WordPress-theme, some wallpapers, an icon-set or anything else
70+ Ultimate Collection Of Inspirations And Tutorial Resources For Designers To Discover The Best Of The Web In August
We are always in search of great free resources, tips, tricks, etc. for our readers. Every day we work hard to find new resources and inspiration for designers like you. Today, we have another great post, “Discover the Best of the Web†on SmashingApps. In this, we made a list of 70+ Ultimate Collection Of Inspirations And Tutorial Resources For Designers For Designers. We obviously cannot cover all the best from the web, but we have tried to cover as much as possible.
You are welcome to share if you know more best of the web in the month of August which our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well.
Design Tips, Tricks and Tutorial
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11 Mindblowing Digital Painting Tutorials
25+ 3D Text Tutorials to Enhance your Photoshop Skills
30 Creative Illustrator Logo Design Tecniques and Tutorials
40 Incredibly Inspirational Retro & Vintage Photoshop TutorialsÂ
33 Newly Fresh Web Design Layout Tutorials
27 Useful Logo Design Tutorials and Tips
25 Magazine-Style Layouts for Your Design Inspiration
Creating Colorful Disco Lines EffectÂ
Design a creative cosmetics layout with Photoshop
17 Noteworthy Typographic Tutorials
How to Design the Web in a High-Def World
40 (NEW) High Quality Adobe Photoshop Tutorials
How to Create a Fantasy Landscape Photo Manipulation
How to Draw Anime Complete Guide
Create a Trendy Galactic Poster Design in Photoshop
25 Cool Digital Photography Tutorials, Techniques and Effects
Mastering Photoshop With Paths
Design a 3D Box Icon in Photoshop
Artwork, Digital Photography and Inspiration
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50 Gorgeous Flash Websites You Definitely Should See
45 Inspirational Corporate Website Designs
27 Colorful And Futuristic Innovations In Product Design
20 Beautiful Digital Portraits of Women
25 Beautiful Examples Of Typography Portraits
50 Incredible Examples of Battle Art
30 Creative Examples of Javascript Slider & Scrollers
10 Outstanding 3D Character Designs and Illustrations
40 + simple and elegant business card designs
30 Stunning, Absolutely Magical Photo Manipulations Focusing on Human Eye
A Showcase of Beautiful Packaging Designs
20 Stunning & Surreal Illustrations of Male Characters
25 Amazing Flash Portfolio Sites
100 Artworks From the Top Digital Artists in the USA & Canada
Beautiful Single Page Website Designs: 65 New Examples
45 Amazing Examples of Code Generated and 3D CG Artworks
Amazing Retro Futurism Design Showcase & Tutorials
50 Beautiful And Creative Logos With Heart
30 Impressive Photo Manipulation Images
35 Hugely Expressive Works of Digital Art
26 Really Amazing Realistic 3D Computer Graphics
Javascript and Ajax
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30 Tutorials Combining Both WordPress and jQuery
22 Beautiful jQuery Plugins for Web Designers
14 Easy to Implement Drop Down Menu Solutions
50 Really High Quality Photoshop Navigation Menu Tutorials
5 Ways to Make Ajax Calls with jQuery
50 Useful New jQuery Techniques and Tutorials
xHTML and CSS
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25+ Great HTML 5 Resources to Get You Started
50+ Stunning CSS3 Articles, Cheat Sheets and Tutorials Collections
Mastering CSS, Part 2: Advanced Techniques and Tools
35 Websites To Teach You How To Use CSS Effectively
250+ Resources to Help You Become a CSS Expert
Resources
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75 Free Useful Icon Sets for Web Designers and Developers
70+ Awesome Free Textures and Texture Sets
25 Classic Fonts That Will Last a Whole Design Career
60 Useful Photoshop Actions to Enhance your Photos for Free
Free High Resolution Textures for Designers and 3D Artists
35 (NEW) Modern and High Quality Icon Sets
25 Excellent Handwritten Fonts
30 PSDs of Outstanding Digital PaintingsÂ
65 Popular And Professional Free Fonts For Creative Typography
200+ Excellent Free High Quality Tree Bark Textures
35 Original and Creative Free Twitter Icon Sets
Miscellaneous Articles
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30+New Useful WordPress Tricks & HacksÂ
15 (More) Free Web Tools To Simplify Your Work Life
20 Free Keyword Research Tools – Comprehensive Insight
21 Great Plugins to Manage Multi-Author Blogs Efficiently
10 Tools For Finding, Registering And Managing Domain Names
6 Ways To Improve Your Web Typography
10 WordPress ‘HOW-TO’ to Give Your Blog the Quality it Deserves
15 (More) Free Web Tools To Simplify Your Work Life
Today, we have a new post in which we are covering few more simplest free web apps that can really simplify your work life. Whether you are office worker, manager, supervisor, designer, developer, student, home user, etc. But we make sure to add something useful for everyone. Most of them are not very well-known, but they are really amazing in respect to their features. Just take a look at them and share your thought here.
You are welcome to share more free web apps that are really simple and useful and our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well.
MyFontbook is an unique online font viewer that can save your time by providing a number of tools to view installed fonts quickly and easily. Unlike a classic font management tool, MyFontbook is platform independent and can be used freely through any web browser. MyFontbook tries to fill the gap between the limited font tools provided by your operating system and the expensive font management applications aimed at power users.
Box.net’s online file storage makes it easy to securely share content as a link or a shared folder with anyone inside or outside your company. This will help you create an online workspace where you can share project files, add comments, assign tasks, start discussions or create new content.
Ronin is a flexible application designed for creative professionals looking for an easy, affordable, web-based way of managing clients and invoices. You can send invoices and estimates in multiple currencies. The dashboard provides an at-a-glance summary of account activity for all of your staff users. Quickly access existing invoices and create new clients. Manage your account with simplicity.
Go2Convert is a set of free web based tools that allow you to convert, resize a picture without having to install any software on your computer. It is not meant to be a complete Image editing software package. It is meant to be an easy to use solution to convert, resize your pictures and digital photos without the need to learn a complex software package. Once you convert, resize an image, you can choose to copy image’s URL or download it directly to your computer – It doesn’t get easier than that.
Managing projects and work via email is just so old-school. How do you keep track of tasks, issues, files, timesheets & feedback via email? How much work is still yet to be completed? Who is working on what? Where is all the communication related to this project? Is it done yet? What’s holding the project back? DeskAway is simple to use, feature-rich online service. This is a web-based project collaboration service that provides teams a central location to easily organize, manage and track their projects.
Atmail allows users to access IMAP Mailboxes on any server of your choice. You and your users can experience webmail via a fluid, intuitive interface that excels aesthetically and functionally; a benchmark that very few webmail clients have achieved. Staying in touch with business or personal contacts is made easy by the groupware features of Atmail. The easy-to-use calendar events, tasks, and free-busy scheduler provide collaboration and communication around the clock, with the simplicity of a browser-based interface.
Having a good uptime is essential for the success of your website. 247webmonitoring will monitor it 24X7 from their servers and notify you whenever it goes down. This will check your website every 15 minutes to know it is up. They will send you notification by email or SMS when it goes down. So you can quickly fix the issue and you can stay happy. This way you can relax and focus on your core business. In future, you will also find out how fast your site is from different location.
This is a brand new site that allows you to check out how your website looks in the most popular resolution formats. It’s all powered by Ajax & PHP so no need to download anything. Using ViewLike.Us is perfectly free.
You can use PDF to Excel to quickly and easily create highly, editable XLS files, making it a cinch to re-use tables and spreadsheets from PDF files in Microsoft Excel, OpenOffice, Google Docs, and WordPerfect Office. Best of all, you can do it entirely free.
With Shareflow you can share your team conversations so everyone involved can clearly see what’s being said, and you can all get more done. The more you use email, the more work you create for your team. Important information gets lost in the shuffle. The Shareflow bookmarklet gives you one-click access to post content from the web to any of your flows. You can use the bookmarklet with Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live Mail, and Gmail to share your email on a flow. Create multiple flows to organize different projects or teams. You can add or remove someone at any time and invited members can create their own flows, so different teams can work amongst themselves.
Vyew is a new and powerful platform for real-time and always-on interaction between people and connent. Vyew’s clear-view workspaces enable a transparent collaboration flow with content. Review the past, work together in the present and prepare for the future.
Windows Live SkyDrive works well on any Windows or Macintosh computer with Firefox 1.5 or higher, or Internet Explorer 6 or higher. 5 GB of free online storage, available from any computer with Internet access. You can create personal, shared, and public folders and you can decide who has access to each folder.
ShowDocument is a free service for online meetings with fully synchronized co-browsing of any document. It is a quick and simple way to share a document with other people at the same time. It is a web collaboration platform that lets individuals have a free online meeting. It is an alternative to various commercial desktop sharing applications. One can easily upload any file and during the session mark it up with a pen or a highlighter tool in addition to a text box tool and eraser.
AlertFox is a revolutionary new self-service website transaction monitoring service that is capable of keeping tabs on the functioning and performance of all websites. You can monitor even complicated steps, (e.g., complete check out process, not just store uptime) , only AlertFox can monitor the function and performance of sites that are based on any of the major rich internet applications (RIA), including ActiveX, AJAX, Flash, Flex, complex HTML and Silverlight technology. AlertFox also helps SaaS users monitor their provider’s reliability.
tgethr is for Project teams who need a no-frills, secure email-based collaboration solution and useful for families, friends, and clubs who don’t need the overhead of more complicated solutions. This is also best for remotely located people who still use email as a primary collaboration mechanism. With tgethr all correspondence over the web and email can be safely encrypted.
Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin For WordPress
Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress is a plugin that allows you to mobilize your blog in minutes. Every single mobile device is detected and all aspects of your blog are tailored to the visiting handset. Sites aren’t dumbed down to the lowest common denominator but instead use the features and functionality that advanced phones offer.
Devices are detected by using Wapple’s advanced web services instead of relying on inferior 3rd party tools. If you view your blog with a brand new, never before seen handset, it’ll still work perfectly!
Any theme you’ve installed and have styled for web will be carried across to mobile giving you a consistent look and feel for each and every one of your visitors.
Features
- Dynamic resizing of images
- Retain SEO, preserve your URL structure and promote one single domain
- Support for multi-lingual characters – even funny characters that make their way onto your blog (from a copy and paste from Word for example) are handled.
- Comment from mobile! Turn on the feature and your visitors can leave comments from their handset.
- Upload mobile specific header/footer images – resized on the fly to fit a visitors handset perfectly
- Place mobile friendly navigation links around your site to help users browse around your blog
- Advanced pagination – split up long posts into manageable chunks that make reading a post on mobile easier
- Any theme that you’ve installed will have its styles carried across to mobile giving you a consistent look and feel for all your visitors.
- Complete freedom over how you want to style your mobile site. We’ve done our best to make the mobile stylesheet as comprehensive as possible but no doubt there will be a few things you want to change – you can by editing a few settings.
- Control over almost every element on your mobile page:- change the size and quality of images on posts and pages, show tags and categories in different sections, you can even change the wording of certain elements on your site!
- Plus much much more…
Now Deeply Monitor Your Web 2.0 Websites And SaaS Web Applications With AlertFox
AlertFox is a revolutionary new self-service website transaction monitoring service that is capable of keeping tabs on the functioning and performance of all websites, even sites that use AJAX, Flash and Silverlight.
You can monitor even complicated steps, (e.g., complete check out process, not just store uptime) , only AlertFox can monitor the function and performance of sites that are based on any of the major rich internet applications (RIA), including ActiveX, AJAX, Flash, Flex, complex HTML and Silverlight technology. AlertFox also helps SaaS users monitor their provider’s reliability.
AlertFox is able to monitor sites like YouTube or Google Docs that previously were not candidates for these types of services. Furthermore, this monitoring runs directly in the web browser, thereby monitoring the true user experience. AlertFox constantly monitors web applications, alerting owners to problems that earlier generations of monitoring services would have overlooked.
Salient Features
- Best service for web application monitoring
- Worldwide Monitoring
- Real Browser based transaction monitoring
- Only service to support Internet Explorer and Firefox (PRO)
- Unique: Flash performance & transaction monitoring
- Unique: Silverlight performance and transaction monitoring
- Unique: 100% AJAX Support
- Based on iMacros, the leading web browser automation tool – free license for our users.
Atmail 6, A Linux Based Webmail Client And Email Solution
Atmail 6 provides an enhanced Webmail platform for your existing mail-server via IMAP. Offer the Atmail interface to your existing users and provide more then just standard Webmail. CalDAV client included.
Atmail allows users to access IMAP Mailboxes on any server of your choice. You and your users can experience webmail via a fluid, intuitive interface that excels aesthetically and functionally; a benchmark that very few webmail clients have achieved.
Staying in touch with business or personal contacts is made easy by the groupware features of Atmail. The easy-to-use calendar events, tasks, and free-busy scheduler provide collaboration and communication around the clock, with the simplicity of a browser-based interface.
As a WebMail Client, Atmail is accessible to users via any web browser or wireless device. Requests are handled by the web-server, Apache, which runs the Atmail WebMail Client application written in PHP.
User Settings, Address Book, Calendar/Task, profiles and account information are stored in a MySQL database. In Client Mode, email delivery and storage control are retained by the SMTP and IMAP server, which is accessed by the WebMail Client of Atmail.
Webmail Client Feature List
Atmail Webmail Software boasts an innovative user interface, pushing the boundaries of the traditional WebMail feature-set:
- Intuitive Webmail GUI
- Groupware support
- Enhanced Address Book
- Calendar supports iCal/CalDAV
- New Atmail 6 Framework
- Tabbed Email Browsing
- Full MIME Support
- HTML templates for easy customization
- Folder Management Utility
- Mailbox Sorting & Searching
- Multiple Languages Available
MyFontbook, A Browser-Based Free Font Viewer
MyFontbook is an unique online font viewer that helps save designers time by providing a number of tools to view installed fonts quickly and easily. Unlike a classic font management tool, MyFontbook is platform independent and can be used freely through any web browser. MyFontbook tries to fill the gap between the limited font tools provided by your operating system and the expensive font management applications aimed at power users.
Salient Features
- The font viewer window provides an overview of all your installed fonts, rendered and sorted for you convenience.
- Print a selected font with several style samples with the click of a button.
- Save tons of time by tagging fonts you are considering for an upcoming project, or rating fonts that you use frequently.
- Typeface characters are easy to preview and listed with each ascii character code to make adding to web pages easy.
- View your font collection in the condensed swatch view, or switch to list view to see each typeface with expanded example text.
- Easily change the sample text to view all your fonts rendered by example.
- The font viewer displays a sample of the selected typeface in a paragraph format so you can decide if the font fits your copy.
DeeperWeb, An Innovative Google Search Plugin For Firefox And Internet Explorer
DeeperWeb.com is an innovative search engine tool and an essential addon for Google users. DeeperWeb is integrated into Google web search results and is available for Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox browsers. DeeperWeb boosts searching by employing Tag-Cloud techniques to help users navigate through search results more efficiently and uses Topic-Mapping-Technologies for fast results identification. Visit us online for more information on our search plugin and Firefox extension.
A number of key features in this addon release make this the best time yet for Google users to reload their searching experience and boost Google web search results with DeeperWeb. All features are available for Internet Explorer and Firefox:
Improving search results with TAG-CLOUD techniques
•    See the full picture hidden beneath the pile of search results
•    Find related tags and phrases extracted from your search results
•    Modify search with one click tweak, rephrase and focus your search
In addition to these, there are several clever business and internet marketing applications to the DeeperWeb’s Tag-Cloud extension: identifying main competitors, pinpointing targeted sites for most effective advertisement and isolating the authoritative websites of a particular topic.
Finding the desired information hidden beneath the pile of web search results has never been easier. DeeperWeb’s Topic-Mapping search engine technologies reduce the clutter and help users to more effectively identify search results upon topic and type (e.g. articles, videos, podcasts, slides…).
Quick Zoom-In by Area of Interest with TOPIC-MAPPING technologies
•    See Mapped Information for fast results identification
•    Quickly Zoom-In (& Out) to categories such as answers, news, Wikipedia, video, podcast, slides,    research, expert’ advices and more…
•    Get Access to high-quality targeted news and information from leading publications.
Discover The Best World Heritage Sites In 3D With Vizerra
Vizerra is a free software which allows you to visit famous historical and architectural monuments from your home. You will have an opportunity to go for a virtual walk through incredibly precise 3D models of the best landmarks in the world.
This is first of its kind 3D educational software application. It combines high quality 3D locations, full editorial description for every location, a fully functional map service all in one software application.
Vizerra client application has three main functions. First, it’s an interactive world map where the places available for visiting are marked. Second, it’s a virtual encyclopedia which contains information on locations and regions available for download. And, there are 3D models which enable you to explore the landmarks by yourself or with the help of a virtual guide.
Why is Vizerra.com useful for end users?
The project Vizerra.com is absolutely irreplaceable if you want to:
- Distract your mind from the daily routine, take a break and relax, walk through precise virtual copies of the best sights of the world;
- Know something new about the world, and obtain the information in a relaxed, easygoing manner;
- Get your child interested in history, geography, architecture and art.
Who will benefit from Vizerra?
- School children who will learn history and geography while wandering through the virtual world.
- Parents whose children will study with pleasure.
- Educational institutions which will be able to plan the course of lessons on the grounds of interactive models of world landmarks.
- Travelers who will be able to see the places of future destinations beforehand, and to choose new interesting destinations.
- Publishers of tourist guides which will help tourists to choose their destinations.
- City halls and tourist councils which will be able to use our product to draw attention to local tourist attractions.
- All people who are interested in 3D development and world-famous landmarks.
What does Vizerra allow?
- Browsing 3D models of landmarks from all sides.
- Access to interesting information about objects, provided by leading museums and art history specialists.
- Visiting the most interesting locations with the aid of a video guide.
- Plunging into the atmosphere of the place of your choice with the help of photo-realistic graphics and rich sound effects.
Box.Net Simplifies Online File Storage, Replaces FTP And Connects Teams In Online Workspaces
Box.net’s online file storage makes it easy to securely share content as a link or a shared folder with anyone inside or outside your company. This will help you create an online workspace where you can share project files, add comments, assign tasks, start discussions or create new content.
You can easily share large files both within your company and with external partners replacing FTP software and email attachments. To send a file or a folder simply paste a link in an email or instant message and it will be there. You can even see when your files are downloaded. There is an option to leave comments attached to a specific document, start a group discussion, or create and share a simple document. Now you do not need to worry about version archive because it will allow you to view previous versions of your files even after changes are made and new versions are uploaded. You can also start group discussions within the workspace instead of through email so everyone stays in the loop.
This is perfect for multi-platform environments and you can use any operating system including Windows, Mac OS and Linux. As per the increase in demand of mobile accessibility, you can view your files on any browser-enabled mobile device and use Box’s apps on the iPhone and Blackberry.
Using Box.Net, you can minimize user training and support costs, eliminate software or hardware maintenance, and get started in just minutes.
