Archive for May, 2011
34 Fresh And Stunning Fonts That Can Enhance Your Designs
Effectively usage of fonts in a web design not only makes it visually alluring but also conveys the message to the right targeted audience in a right tone. Basically typography is the art of arranging or modifying type glyphs. The filed of typography is continually evolving and now typography has become a key component of any web design. The proper selection of typography can make or break the complete design.
This round up covers fresh and stunning fonts which are available for free and can significantly enhance your web design. Have a look!
20 GRUNGE FONTS by lexiibabii01
TYPORM01 Round ans Square by RGSONE
Cappuccino Serif Font 0.563 by keisans-bold
Tipografía Gratis: Spatha Serif
Web Hosting Accounts With Unlimited Resources Giveaway From Zyma
Zyma.com is running a contest, where 15 winners will get the web hosting accounts with unlimited web space. Well, you guys know what they are offering? Lets say it once again for n00bs.
Zyma.com is one of the fastest growing web hosting companies in the UK. Their industry leading web hosting package offers the most attractive and comprehensive features for one the best prices on the internet. With their low cost web hosting package, You can host your website on superfast hi-speed servers, supporting over 70+ scripts and technologies.
Hosting Account Features
Unlimited Web space
Unlimited Traffic
Unlimited Email Accounts
Unlimited SQL Databases
Unlimited Addon-domains
99.9% Uptime Guarantee
Free Google Vouchers
Free Transfer & Setup
Free Tech Support
cPanel Web Hosting
Fantastico De Luxe
Softaculous Premium
Attracta seo tools via cPanel
This contest will run from May 30, 2011 to June 3, 2011 and we will select the winners randomly by running MySQL query. Result can be announced any day before June 8, 2011 so keep visiting here or subscribe to our rss feed to get the latest updates. To participate in the contest and win Web Hosting from Zyma, All you have to do is :
1. Just leave a comment.
2. Use valid email ID in the email box.
3. Make sure that you are following @SmashingApps and @Zyma_Hosting on twitter and subscribe our rss feed to track this contest and for future updates.
4. And that’s it!
So, what are you waiting for now? Let’s participate in the contest and good luck!
7 Excellent Windows-Based Tools To Help You Manage Your Routine Activities
There are many Windows-based tools out there for us, but getting by good ones and free is not that easy. That is why I am sharing Seven Excellent Windows-Based Tools To Help You Manage Your Routine Activities. Read each entry in the list and see which one suits your needs best.
You are welcome if you want to share more Windows-based tools that 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 and follow us on Digg as well to get updated.
Kestrel GX
Kestrel GX is a free photo organizer and photo editor that makes it a breeze to manage and edit digital photos! The software supports more than 20 different photo formats including several digital cameras RAW. Kestrel GX is a complete workflow tool packed with lots of useful tools for both amateur and professional photographers.
JPEG to PDF
This is a program for converting image files into PDF files. The program supports converting multiple image files to single or multiple PDFs files. The program also supports image scaling and positioning.
SyncBreeze
SyncBreeze provides multiple one-way and two-way file synchronization modes, periodic file synchronization, compressed file synchronization, background file synchronization, real-time file synchronization, an option to synchronize specific types of files, user-selectable GUI layouts and allows one to define multiple customizable file synchronization commands making it very simple to synchronize numerous directories, disks or NAS storage devices.
Duplicate Photo Finder
Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder is a free powerful tool, that helps you to find and remove duplicate photos on your PC. With this program you can easily clean
up your photo collection from duplicates or even similar images.
VirtuaWin
VirtuaWin is a virtual desktop manager for the Windows operating system (Win9x/ME/NT/Win2K/XP/Win2003/Vista/Win7). A virtual desktop manager lets you organize applications over several virtual desktops (also called ‘workspaces’). Virtual desktops are very common in Unix/Linux, and once you get accustomed to using them, they become an essential part of a productive workflow.
Spesoft Image Converter
Spesoft image converter is a free, easy to use, yet substantial utility for batch image, PDF, text and OCR conversion. You can convert between over 75 different
image formats. Including vector formats such as EPS and PDF.
DuckCapture
DuckCapture allows you to capture a window or region on your screen, or the contents of a tall web page that scrolls. You can change your captured area
or add more areas to one image, add annotations. When finished, you can save to file, copy to clipboard or print out directly.
Congratulations To The Winners Of Ultimate Designer Toolkit
Thanks to all of the participants of contest in which Ultimate Designer Toolkit (Over 60,000 Premium Design Items) were givingaway. We ran the MySQL random query and selected these 3 comments to give them free subscription of Ultimate Designer Toolkit with over 60,000 premium design items (worth $99 each subscription).
- Leezozo
- Benny
- Stephen
Ultimate Designer Toolkit is one of the most acknowledged website among graphic designing and printing personnel. Ranging from Seamless Vectors to Pixel Icons, the website is meant to help a designer with visually aesthetic design material. The website holds more than 60,000 design items which are carefully chosen.
Following is a quick look at the design item ultimatedesignertoolkit.com is offering:
- Seamless Vectors
- Photoshop Gradients
- Photoshop Layer Styles
- Vector Illustrations
- Photoshop Patterns
- Ultimate CSS Framework (Easy PSD-2-HTML Conversion)
- Photoshop Brushes
- Adobe Add-ons
- Vector Elements
- High Resolution Textures
- Vector Icons
- Stock Photos
- Web Graphics
- 3D Software Box Creator
The website also features a blog which contains photoshop tutorials, photoshop textures, design elements and vectors. Navigating the site is extremely easy and due to exhaustive collection of web development and printing items, a designer never finds himself deserted. The website was developed with a fair idea in mind – one platform, all designers. Visiting the website and surfing it thoroughly reveals the very fact that ultimatedesignertoolkit is a gentle collection of diverse design and printing items.
Congratulations to all the winners from SmashingApps.Com. They will be contacted in few days. If you are not winner at this time so please be patient and keep visiting here or subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well because we are coming up with another new great contest very soon.
Thanks to Ultimate Designer Toolkit for sponsoring this wonderful contest at Smashing Apps.
If you want to conduct any contest at Smashing Apps just contact us and send us all the details.
Showcase Of Unbelievably Realistic 3D Artworks
Human eye always get enthralled by 3D artworks because 3D artworks are created with a creative and artistic approach and look extremely eye-catching and attention-grabbing. This is the reason why 3D artworks have become so much popular all over the world.
In this post, we have gathered amazing examples of 3D artworks that are unbelievably realistic showing the skill level of the designers. We hope you enjoy this post. Share your comments below.
Dreamer Corn by Marcos Nicacio
Cup of Ditto by ShengDaFlashPRo
RayBan glasses by Cédric Steiger
The orphan dog Gabriela Besser
Blind Batman Real Time Character by Jocelyn Zeller
Devil in iron by Nikita Veprikov
Hunter by Maximilian Gordon Vogt
My Favorite Pastry by yinxuan Li
Sewer Dwelling Monster by loden
370Z pit by Rhangga adian putra
Fantasy Cartoon Snail by karim kashefy
Rebuild by Andrew Hickinbottom
The Last Battle of Thor by Sasin
A Nation On Its Knees by Isikol
Little Bunny by Rafael Z Chiesve
Harley Davidson CVO softail springer custom by Eric LICATESE
Wanna hop with me? by brijesh pandey
Girl In China Old Book by ZhiHeng Tang
Batman Arkham Asylum 2 by Koray Kocaturk
Troll – Got Fresh Milk by Andreas Chrysovitsanos
TurtleTank (second attempt) by Jeroen Backx
White Night Fantasy by Mariana Gorbea
Knife by Bruno Macedo da Silva
Hummingbird by Radoslav Zilinsky
Apprentice – Raxus by Manny Llamas
Customized by Ibrahim Bouchrika
Dream of flying by Artur Szygulski
70 Free PSD Web UI Elements For Designers
Nothing can beat the freebies as they not only save your time but also give quality results. These free to download PSD files are priceless and worth mentioning. Every designer and web developer is always looking for free downloadable PSD files that can make their design process easier.
Check this free to download collection of PSD Web UI Elements and share it with others. Do not forget to share your opinion with us via comment section below.
You are welcome if you want to share more PSD Web UI Elements For Designers that 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 and follow us on Digg as well to get updated.
4 Designs for Search Input Field
36 Free Web Buttons Collection
Free PSD Rating Elements and Icons
Grunge / Gothic Navigation Menu
Dark and Glossy web-buttons II
Ten Best Collaborative Sites For Quick Code Sharing
There are many apps that can make developer and designer lives easier, but getting by good ones is not that easy. That is why I am sharing Ten Best Collaborative Sites For Quick Code Sharing. Read each entry in the list and see which one suits your needs best.
You are welcome if you want to share more online code sharing and management tool that 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 and follow us on Digg as well to get updated.
Pastebin
Pastebin is a website were you can store a piece of text for a certain amount of time. The site is mainly used by IT professionals to store pieces of programming code and configuration information. You can however store any type of text that you like. Many twitter users use Pastebin to store tweets which are over 160 characters and normally wouldn’t fit in a Twitter message.
Chop
Chop is a quick and easy way to let the offending engineer know the error of their ways. Just copy and paste the lines in question, add your notes and share
them with a unique URL.
Gist
Gist is a simple way to share snippets and pastes with others. All gists are git repositories, so they are automatically versioned, forkable and usable as
a git repository.
ideone
It’s an online compiler and debugging tool which allows to compile and run code online in more than 40 programming languages.
Copy Paste Code
Copy Paste Code allows you to publish your code with colored syntax for most popular programming languages out there. After publishing you can share your
code to colleagues and friends, and they can debug and use your code snippets. You and others can also download the snippets, password-protect and publish
revisions to snippets.
Slexy
Slexy.org is a powerful, slick, and sexy pastebin designed with the user in mind. You can use Slexy.org to paste errors for debugging, show off your code
or your tech specs, or share anything else with other Internet users worldwide.
Smipple
Smipple is a social service for saving, storing, organizing, and sharing snippets of code with your friends and coworkers. With Smipple, you can make friends
and Improve your coding skills too.
Snipt
Snipt.org is a free tool for the community so developer or alike can save and share their code snippets with their web family.
Pastie
This is one of the simple code management tool for developers. It has a clean user interface with sensible defaults and strong syntax highlighter.
Friendpaste
A fast service where you can copy/paste your code, recipe, anything else and give the link to your friend. You can select your preferred languages and possibility
to edit pastes. This service support for a large number of syntax that you would need.
45 Color Tools And Resources For Choosing The Best Color Palette For Your Designs
Every designer knows how important and crucial color palette is in the success of any design. Knowing how to use color palette effectively is an essential part of a designer’s workflow. Color management and experience of using right color in the right place give a website a unique shape and identity that helps it stand out among the rest.
Here, we are sharing some useful tools that help you choosing the most appropriate color palette for your design. Take a look at this collection. Your comments are always more than welcomed.
ColourMod allows the user to input a starting value and get an automatic conversion. Whether you start with RGB, CMYK, HSV or a Hex value you will get its equivalent in RGB, CMYK, HSV and Hex.
The color Wheel is an online application that lets you generate random color schemes.
Matching your web site colors isn’t always as easy as it should be. Colors that look good to one person may look terrible to someone else. Color Match is a web site tool that helps you to easily find a perfect color scheme generated from a base color then displays the matching HTML color codes.
The application allows users to experiment with color combinations, examine them under the aspect of accessibility guidelines and to create custom color palettes.
This is a tool that will help you convert colors between RGB, CMYK and HSV color spaces.
The Color Wizard is a color matching application for anyone who wants to create designs with great looking colors.
With ColoRotate, you can work with colors in 3D, in real time, and in a way that matches how our minds process color.
Kuler™ — the web-hosted application for generating color themes that can inspire any project. No matter what you’re creating, with Kuler you can experiment quickly with color variations and browse thousands of themes from the Kuler community.
Color Scheme Designer is very useful online tool to generate your own color scheme.
COPASO is an advanced color palette tool that helps you create the perfect color palette. If you’re finding COPASO a bit too rich for your color creating tastes, you can always use our basic color palette tool.
Used alone or in conjunction with our other creation tools, Toucan gives you the features you need to inject color into your creative process.
ColorMunki is the industry’s hottest all-in-one color solution that delivers unparalleled color control and color creation tools for photo and design digital workflows.
ColorExplorer is a free online toolbox for designing and working with color palettes.
Enter the URL of an image to get a color palette that matches the image. This is useful for coming up with a website color palette that matches a key image a client wants to work with.
It is a tool for checking foreground and background color combinations of all DOM elements and determining if they provide sufficient contrast when viewed by someone having color deficits.
GrayBit is an online accessibility testing tool designed to visually convert a full-color web page into a grayscale rendition for the purpose of visually testing the page’s perceived contrast.
ColorPix is a neat little app that will let you grab the color values and screen coordinates at any pixel on your screen. ColorPix automatically translates any screen color into RGB, HEX, HSB and CMYK color values, and comes with a zoom-able magnifier built in!
ColorJack is an online Color Scheme Generator used by Graphic Designers, Interior Decorators, and many other people from around the world.
The ColorBurn widget features a new color palette every day, along with its hexadecimal values for all you web geeks out there. If you’re looking for some daily inspiration, some colors to steal, or simply another cool-looking widget to fill up your dashboard and impress your friends, here you go.
Advanced Eyedropper, Color Picker, Palette Viewer and other colorful goodies for your Firefox.
Krazydad is a Experimental Colr Pickr.
Generate a color palette from PNG, JPG or GIF image/photo. Receive color suggestions, download Photoshop swatches (.ACO)
A very useful online Color Scheme Generator
Type a URL of any online image below and our system will tell you the most used colours from that image, and as a result give you some inspirtation!
This is a great tool to use if you want to develop a matching color scheme for your site. Say you want your nav color to be #000066 (navy blue) and you want to know what colors would go best with it, this tool will help you.
Color Combinations and Color Schemes
A tool for web developers to test website color combinations, along with a library of pre-selected combinations.
Kolur is a simple and enjoyable way to browse color palettes.
Create and find color palettes made from images.
This color schemer is a simple tool to help you experiment with various color schemes for your next web or print project.
Upload an image to generate a color palette based on the image’s primary colors. Useful for quickly grabbing a particular color within an image for inspiration.
Upload an image to generate a color palette based on the image’s primary colors. Useful for quickly grabbing a particular color within an image for inspiration.
Takes two user-defined valid colors and creates a palette using a set number of points between the colors.
A very useful online color scheme generator.
Generate matching color schemes like never before.
Find matching colors for your web page.
A useful web color combinations testing tool for web developers.
Useful HTML Color Coordinator for your websites.
This application is a simple tool for generating 10 shades of a given color.
A very useful Free Color Matching Tool.
The ultimate tool for web 2.1 designers
Free online tool for color palette design and color matching.
The Colour Contrast Check Tool allows to specify a foreground and a background colour and determine if they provide enough of a contrast “when viewed by someone having color deficits or when viewed on a black and white screen”
This colour schemer tool helps you choose colour schemes for monochromatic, analogic, complimentary, split complementary, triadic, and double contrast. It’s especially great for exploring color combinations easily and quickly.
Free tools for working with digital colors. Import, convert, match, analyze, and explore colors!
Peter Piper’s Palette Picker is a very useulf online tool to get your color combination.
50 Fresh and Free WordPress 3 Series Compatible Themes
Being the most preferred Content Management System (CMS), WordPress is used by millions of users all over the world. It empowers bloggers and webmasters to effectively build blogs, websites and powerful online applications.
Since many people are using WordPress because of its ease of use and extensibility but sometime one or more WordPress websites look similar. This is the point where WordPress themes come in. Selecting a distinctive WordPress theme sets your website apart from others.
Recently WordPress has released WordPress 3 Series with loads of added features. So, next time when you update your WordPress theme, choose a WordPress 3.0 compatible theme. Here in this post we have gathered 50 outstanding WordPress 3 series compatible themes. All these themes are available for Free downloading.
Six Useful Tools To Create Distraction Free Writing Environment
Facebook, Twitter, Skype, and various other things on your computer distract you from important tasks that you turned on your computer for. When it comes to writing these distractions can be very problematic since writing requires your full attention. Normally writers distance themselves from all distractions just to be able to focus completely on their writing. Thankfully there are computer tools that let you do the same on your computer.
Check out our list of 6 very useful tools that let you write on your computer in a distraction-free environment. The list is a collection of web tools and desktop apps. Pick the one that suits you best.
Darkcopy
Darkcopy is a free to use web service that lets you type green text on a black background. You can setup the canvas to full screen and then your browser to full screen. This way the only thing your monitor will display is the black background with your typed green text on it. You can save your text by downloading it as a simple text (TXT) file.
FocusWriter
FocusWriter is a desktop application that comes in different versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This desktop app lets you setup a black background and green text combination much like Darkcopy. Additionally it can set a transparent writing screen with a custom background. You can start using whichever writing canvas you prefer.
QuiteWrite
QuiteWrite is a distraction-free online tool that offers options to actually use your writing in addition to saving it. While writing new pieces you are able to title them, revise them, and even publish them on your WordPress blog. This service is very helpful for people who blog their writings.
Write Space
Write Space is a free to use browser extension for Google Chrome that provides you with a distraction-free writing environment. The extension lets you write in white on a black background. By setting the browser tab to full screen you can eliminate the distractions from other windows. A complete count for words, lines, and characters is shown below your text. The text is automatically saved and present on the canvas on your subsequent visits to the writing canvas.
Koi-Writer
Koi-Writer is another distraction-free online tool. Unlike other online tools in this list, Koi offers numerous formatting options along with different heading fonts, font styles, and bullets. It also offers different backgrounds for your text. You can save separate versions of your text and find them available on your subsequent visits to the site.
PenZen
PenZen is a web application that can be used as a distraction-free writer and an online note-taking application. You can start writing on a white background that can be set to full screen to eliminate distractions. The text can be downloaded in a PDF file. Alternatively you can save the text online and obtain viewing URL and an editing URL along with a password.
