Archive for October, 2011
Colorful Websites With Attractive Panoramic Backgrounds To Embrace You
Website templates with attractive photos and creative background images tend to attract audience attention much faster. This is a small designing secret that almost every designer and web developer knows very well and therefore, successfully apply it in his website creation task. When it comes to choosing the most appealing and eye-catching images, which one would you prefer? Without doubt, it is panoramic photos that exhibit incredible nature and urban landscapes. Generally speaking, parallel scrolling panoramic backgrounds are extensively spread all over the web. However, there are vertically-oriented panoramas and websites as well with a capacity to explore them in a fly-through mode. This is the time to embrace yourself with the beauty of panoramic backgrounds.
You are welcome if you want to share more unique websites with attractive panoramic backgrounds 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 Diggas well to get updated.
Polarbearplunge.sandiegozoo.org
10 Free Android Apps To Boost Your Productivity With
Having a smartphone in your pocket has somewhat become a style statement, but apart from its appearance and style appeal, it allows you to perform all tasks that you would perform with your laptop or computer. This is the main reason of smartphone popularity.
For the designing fraternity, there are plentiful Android apps accessible on the internet. So, rather than wasting time in looking for the one you require, have a look at this collection of apps that we have composed here to permit web designers and developers discover the few useful apps they can magnify their productivity with.
View Web Source
With this app you can view the source code of any web page, copy and paste the HTML, select the text and search for it.
HTMLeditor
A simple HTML,ASP,JS and CSS editor for your coding on the road, use menu to >”save and view file” to preview.
Eval your Javascript Code
A simple tool which might be useful in checking with javascript while you commute, or doing some simple maths.
Design Snack Mobile
Design Snack is a featured-rich, interactive and socially-powered web design gallery. It’s web design inspiration, evolved.
AndFTP
AndFTP is a FTP, SFTP, SCP, FTPS client for Android devices. It allows managing several FTP servers. It comes with both a device file browser and a FTP file browser.
HTML Test
Test your skills of HTML with application developed by INTERSOG. Fast and easy. It is a must-have app for web developers, tech enthusiasts and those with a general interest in HTML.
Magic Color Picker
Magic Color Picker is an powerful color selection tool suitable for designers, artists and programmers for selecting colors using different color models.
Devcheats
Developer’s cheat sheets in your android tablet: php, python, ruby on rails, jquery, css, seo, apache, regular expressions, svn, bash, c++, drupal, gcc, gdb, html5, javascript, microformats, mysql, postgreesql, unix, wordpress
W3C Cheatsheet
The W3C Cheatsheet provides quick access to useful information from specifications (incl HTML5, CSS, SVG, XPath) published by W3C, the leading international Web standards community.
Firefox 4 Beta Mobile
Beta version available only for Android 2.0+ devices.
Extremely Helpful Free Starter Kits For Web Designers
Every designer needs a starter kit containing useful tools and resources. Designer’s starter kits are extremely helpful in creating mock-ups for the future projects and are a great time-saver. The elements of these starter kits can vary from buttons to check-boxes and from tabs to dropdown menu.
Here, we have collected some cool starter kits that every web designer must have. These kits are free to download and customize. We hope you like this collection and find it useful for you. Enjoy!
Showcase Gallery is the perfect starting place for a sleek gallery website or to display your portfolio work. This download includes a well organized PSD file.
Clean ready to use Web navigation menu. The used font is Lucida Sans. Menu comes in three flavors!
iUnits is a PSD containing icon designs for the Apple iPhone, iPad, and Nano. Each icon is fully layered and customizable.
Simple, clean calendar mockup. The download contains a layered PSD resource file. The used font is Lucida Sans.
Big Block UI is a fresh take on common user interface elements. The PSD is well organized and colors can easily be changed.
Free PSD Progress Tracker Bars
This set contains 5 Progress Tracker Bars.
Simple UI Elements is a clean, well organized PSD file containing common user interface elements for web and app designs.
A small ui kit, made in blue color. Here you have a limit selector, toggle, buttons, loading bar.
Whether you’re creating a website or mobile app, well designed UI elements are key to a good user experience. This PSD contains a number of useful elements in a modern, sleek style.
Beautifully designed Dark Clean Forms Collection.
Up for grabs is a free PSD UI kit designed by Alex Patrascu. The file is fully layered and very well organized to make it easy to work with. Alex did a fantastic job of including a lot of the common elements needed when designing a website or app.
Here is a simple to-do list with a nice clean design and is easily editable.
PSD Layout for Flash / JavaScript Gallery
Ready to use design for Flash or Javascript Gallery. Replace the text, place your own graphics and enjoy.
The psd file contains media player elements in 3 different flavors.
Provides a set of shapes (stereotypes) and connectors to enable architecture description views to be produced using the open source TRAK enterprise architecture framework.
3 Different Styles of Notification Boxes
This set contains 3 Different Styles of Notification Boxes.
Ready to use free set of functional buttons. Colors are easy to adjust using Adobe Photoshop.
This set contains three web 2.0 styled slider boxes.
Leopardy interface stencil kit. This one makes extensive use of tables, for maximum flexibility while maintaining pixel precision.
6 Free Preview Slider Templates
This set contains 6 Free Preview Slider Templates
This set conttains 3 beautifully designed Shadow Pockets.
It’s modern, clean and aesthetically pleasing. I wanted to put my spin on it. Something quick, easy yet elegant and fun. Hopefully you can use for a possible business project or client.
This DIY magnet template is based on the Konigi wireframe stencils and includes 3 sheets of elements that might be useful in whiteboard prototyping.
This is “Tell yoru Friends” Bar for your webpage. 3 different style. Dark and light background, dark and light Bar, Fully editable PSD layers with Shapes-Text-Mask. Fully Scalable.
Lion UI Kit is a handy PSD mockup tool with fully layered and editable elements from the latest OS X operating system.
Interactive Sketching Notation 1.1
The latest Interactive Sketching Notation (version 1.1) stencil for OmniGraffle.
Blaubarry UI Kit is a PSD full of useful buttons, sliders, scrollbars, and form elements. The file makes use of shape layers for easy editing and resizing.
Solid UI Kit is a fresh design created by Alvin Thong from Sixbase. The download includes a well organized, easily editable PSD file.
Widgets for Eclipse and Mac OS X
This is another Visio stencil converted to .gstencil. This includes several Watchguard security appliance/firewall objects.
CSS3 Compliant cursors in a “sketch” style, for mocking up web UX designs. Includes: default, crosshair, pointer, move, text, wait, help, progress, not allowed, vertical text, and several resize arrows.
Minimalistic UI kit the color Google
Do you like google plus? Maybe for his services? Maybe for its interface? And maybe even for something?
“Slix UI” controls is a set made to make Web & App designers’ lives much easier. It was mainly designed to be used in Apps, but it can just as easily be used in the web . It gives you ready to use solutions for huge part of the most stuff you need to build an interface.
Simple UI element pack, free for use! enjoy!
This DIY magnet template is based on the Konigi wireframe stencils and includes 3 sheets of elements that might be useful in whiteboard prototyping. Simply download and print the PDFs onto magnet sheets, optionally laminate them if you intend to use with dry-erase markers, and finally cut them out.
A pretty sizable collection of Facebook related elements to use in creating wireframes for Facebook applications.
SolidShops Hosted E-Commerce Software Subscriptions Giveaway
SolidShops is running a contest, where 5 winners will get the 1 year subscription of SolidShops hosted e-commerce software. Well, you guys know what is SolidShops? Let’s say it once again for n00bs.
SolidShops is an extremely user friendly hosted e-commerce platform for web designers and their clients. Way too often, open source software like Magento or OScommerce disappoints when it comes to user friendliness, not to mention creating themes. On top of that you’re stuck for hours uploading and patching files to finally realize you still have to take care of backups and encrypted payments.
With SolidShops you can have a secure store up and running in just minutes, even on Facebook. That’s right: SolidShops also supports building out unique Facebook stores which can be customized to your liking by using custom HTML and CSS.
Popular payment methods like PayPal, Google Checkout, Authorize.net, Ogone and others can be set up in no time.
This contest will run from October 3, 2011 to October 8, 2011 and we will select the winners randomly by running MySQL query. Result can be announced any day before October 15, 2011 so keep visiting here or subscribe to our rss feed to get the latest updates. To participate in the contest and win SolidShops hosted e-commerce subscription, 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 @Solidshops and @SmashingApps 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!
Digg App For iOS: 5 Reasons You Should (Really) Use It
Bloggers today honestly appreciates the power of social networking and how it delivers not only traffic to blogs, important backlinks and of course more recognition. When we talk about social networking the first website that clicks my mind is Digg, followed by Stumbleupon and Reddit. Digg has been around for quiet some time and it actually had gained insane amount of popularity among publishers. It had been known for crushing web servers by sending its loyal visitors to websites.
Digg did change after they launched V4 and it may not be the same anymore but to make it up to its lost users they are putting maximum effort to make things right. Their recent attempt is the new Digg iOS app that is now available on iTunes for absolutely free.
I’ve downloaded it, used it and here are the top 5 reasons you should try it too.
Clean Interface
The new Digg iOS app for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch comes with a better user interface. You may relate it to the Digg’s mobile version but the iOS version is nothing short of awesome. As soon as you launch the app you will see the front page with the ability to browse via topics or check out the most recent stories. Once you click the “Most recent” tab you can browse topics with just a tap of your finger. This includes
- Newswire
- Most Recent
- Trending
- Top in 24 hours
- 7 Days
- 30 Days
Similarly you can browse the Top News topics by tapping the “Topics” tab. 
Easy Navigation
You can preview any story in a list by clicking the item in the list, which will reveal the story description, source, thumbnail, date, and submitter. To read more about a story a new page is displayed with further details. You can either Digg or Bury the story by tapping the links at the bottom. A well organized page makes it easy for you to read the comments and dugg stories faster.
Mobile friendly pages
You can now view websites in an integrated browser. After visiting a page, all the mobile friendly websites will open the page in a readable manner making sure that users don’t get interfered by ads and unwanted content.
Sharing
You can easily share stories with your friends via Facebook or email. If you like to save the pages in Safari you can also open them directly through the App.
Compatibility
The new Digg iOS app is compatible with all the Apple devices including the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. All it requires is the iOS 4.2 or later. That being said there are surely some cons that needs to mentioned
- Can’t check profile for submissions, comments etc.
- The comments don’t show up sometimes, if there are too many the page refuses to load, and the possible comment tree is not deep enough.
All in all Digg app is awesome as long as you require it for reading pleasure only.
Congratulations To The Winners Of Photo Collage Maker For Mac OS X & Windows
Thanks to all of the participants of contest in which Photo Collage Maker For Mac OS X & Windows were givingaway. We ran the MySQL random query and selected these comments to give them CollageIt.
Winners of Photo Collage Maker For Mac OS X & Windows
- Wiwa
- Yovan
- Duarte Nunes
- Sumon @ Sumon Seleem’s Blog
- Windy Phillips
- Floyd Johnson
- Nathaniel
- Cean
- Ann
- Asigurari Locuinte
CollageIt is an easy-to-use and automatic photo collage maker for Mac OS X & Windows, which makes photo collage automatically. There are only three steps to make your stunning collage: add photo, set parameters and generate collage preview, save collage as image format.
CollageIt will create photo collage automatically according to the added photos and parameters without any manual adjustment. It support creating collage with few photos to 100 photos. The “Auto rotation mode” and “Sparse mode” make the collage more varied. Ulitmately, you can save the collage in common image formats such as bmp, jpeg, png, tga, tif etc to share with your friends and family.
Thanks to CollageIt 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.
