Monthly Archive for October, 2009

10 Useful Desktop Applications for Freelancers

When your application has to be accessible outside of web browsers, a desktop application is the way to go. There are multiple Desktop applications available that you can make use of depending on your requirements and preferences.

The desktop applications have gained a lot of popularity, and there’s been a lot of great applications created, including some that really stand tall in terms of functionality and utility.  Here are some of the applications that we thought can be useful for our readers.

ReadAir

read_air

This is a desktop client for Google reader that allows you to get information on your desktop. This application supports Windows/Mac/Linux desktop and synchronizes with your Google Reader account. It enables you to add, remove, manage tags, subscribe, unsubscribe from feeds, search feeds and set preferences.

Agile Agenda

agile_agenda

It is a project management application that lets you enter data about tasks and projects. You can easily move, extend or split tasks as per your requirement. Its light table feature enables you to view tasks, reassign them, change their priority, or durations.

Flickr desktop search

flickr_desktop

This desktop application helps you in searching images easily and instantly. It allows you to get any information you need from the Flickr website including photos, groups and people.

TechHit

techhit

This twitter client seamlessly integrates Twitter into Outlook. It allows you to update your Twitter status directly from Outlook.  You can easily receive your friend updates,  archive, manage, group and search your tweets the same way you manage your email.  It automatically download all tweets matching the keywords you specify, even if you are not following the tweet sender.

Color lovers

colorlovers

Another desktop application for designers and artists to create colors, palettes and patterns for their requirements. It lets you search its entire database of nearly 1 million named colors and more than 300,00 user created color palettes.

Blogdesk

blogdesk

As an offline weblog client, BlogDesk lets you comfortably write and effortlessly publish new posts to your blog. It also allows you to upload images directly and even publish them to multiple blogs instantly. Your links can be easily inserted and edited. It also provides dictionaries in 14 languages for the integrated spell checker.

Facedesk

facedesk

This desktop application for Facebook lets you do all your Facebook surfing with ease.  You can easily receive messages, post on the walls, check updates and use applications just like Facebook. It is easy to install and run from your desktop.

iplotz

iplotz

This desktop application allows you to quickly  create clickable, navigable mock-ups and wire-frames for prototyping websites and software applications. You can easily create a project, add wire-frame pages with design components and discuss your creations with clients.  You can add, delete, rename multiple pages for your sitemap. Also, upload, drag and drop your own images onto a page.

De MonsterDebugger

demonster_debugger

This is a free, open-source debugger for Flash, Flex and AIR. It includes live editing, method testing and a tree structure, among many other features. It also  traces strings, numbers, objects, arrays, xml and even custom classes. It also enables you to edit properties at runtime and works well with Windows, Mac and Linux.

WebKut

webkut

It is an AIR application that allows you to capture web pages, or parts of them in a  simple way.It  allows you to  capture web pages in three different ways such as the entire page, the current view, or only a selection.

Hope these desktop applications would help you in completing your project requirements instantly and successfully. Please provide us with  your feedback as always.

10 Popular Content Management Systems

The varied range of Content management systems that are easily available online helps in collaboratively creating and editing content stuff such as news articles, manuals, guides, images, videos, and marketing brochures etc. These online systems are easy to install and use. Moreover, they offer readymade templates and customization features as per your requirement. We have listed here some Free and popular content management systems in no particular order:

ExpressionEngine

expression_engine

It is one of the fastest, flexible and feature rich content management systems that allows thousands of individuals, organizations, and companies around the world to easily manage their websites. It enables its users to have multiple sites running on one single installation. It empowers users to run blogs, community forums, knowledge-base, wiki, contact forms, search engine and more. It has a templating engine that has custom global variables, custom SQL queries and a built in versioning system which is useful for web designers.

Pricing- Core  plan Free

Radiant CMS

radiant

This open source content management system is specially designed for small businesses. With an elegant user interface, this system offers flexible templating with layouts, snippets, page parts, and a custom tagging language. Radiant has a special macro language (similar to HTML) called Radius which makes it easy to include content from other pages, iterate over page children, and display content conditionally. Radius tags are available in pages, snippets, and layouts.

Pricing- Freeware

WordPress

wordpress

It is the most popular CMS for bloggers as it allows them to start blogging in minutes. It has an excellent documentation and super-quick installation wizard, which takes only five minutes in starting a blog.  It also offers a WYSIWYG editor for those who are not familiar with HTML or other markup language. It also comes with built-in image and multimedia uploading support.

Pricing- Freeware

Drupal

drupal

It is an open source content management platform that allows you to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. It offers a variety of optional modules that can add lots of interesting features like forums, picture galleries, file uploads and downloads, user blogs, OpenID, profiles and more.  Drupal supports a variety of websites ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven websites.

Pricing- Freeware

Joomla

joomla

This is an award-winning content management system, which enables you to build websites and powerful online applications. Creating content is simple with the WYSIWYG editor as it allows you to combine text, images in an attractive way. Once you’ve created your articles, there are a number of pre-installed modules to show the most popular articles, latest new items, newsflashes, related articles, and more. The CMS also has great support for access control protocols like LDAP, OpenID and even Gmail.com.

Pricing- Freeware

TextPattern

textpattern

This web application designed to simplify the production of well-structured, standards-compliant web pages. Unlike other CMS it offers textile markup in the text areas to create HTML elements within the pages. The pages that are generated are extremely lightweight and fast-loading.  Its features include quick search for old articles by keyword, up-to-the-minute visitor/referrer logs, browser-based template and CSS editing, unlimited site sections etc.

Pricing- Freeware

TYPO3 CMS

typo3

Another user-friendly, intuitive tool Content Management system that allows content editors to produce and maintain web pages. It offers an extensive list of features including rich text editor, spell checker, configurable UI levels, multiple page editing, internal shortcuts, “live” search & replace, task center, internal search engine etc. You can also create templates in designer-friendly applications such as Adobe Photoshop or Macromedia Dreamweaver before being ported to TYPO3.

Pricing- Freeware

MODx

modx

This fast Ajax and SEO content management system allows any individual to manage content on their websites simply, quickly and intuitively. It helps you take control of your online content. It offers fast and super-simple templates in HTML/CSS/JS. It reduces your SEO efforts by making it easier to adjust meta-content of your site on a per-page basis.

Pricing- Freeware

CushyCMS

cushycms

This content management system is specially designed for content editors and designers. It allows you to safely edit content of your web pages. Using its excellent features you can create standards compliant and search engine friendly content. It also enables you to check editable areas of your pages with a few CSS classes and it also provide FTP details to successfully complete your webs pages.

Pricing - Freeware

Alfresco

alfresco

It is an open source content management system designed to deliver your content to websites and web users. It offers some really nice features such as shared drive interface, sandboxing, staging and virtualization, multilingual management, xml authoring and multi-channel publishing, web site templating and branching, integrated code and content management and more.

Pricing- Contact Sales for pricing information.

We hope these content management systems will help you in creating, or re-creating  your web presence instantly. We welcome your feedback and suggestions on the same.

10 Essential Tools for Web Developers

A web developer plays a crucial role in designing a user-friendly and visually enticing website. Developing an effective website with controlled navigation and workflow can be challenging for even experienced web developers. It is important to understand the latest web development trends and tools that can help you speed up your efforts and work in a more efficient manner.

We are listing here some important resources and tools, which can help you in enhancing productivity as well as accuracy in terms of developing a website.

HTML Encoder

html_encoder

It is an online tool that converts HTML code into a JavaScript Unicode string. You can simply enter your text or html code you wish to encode in the box, press the process button and you get the results instantly. To finish, simply cut and paste the new code into the place where the original code was and then save.

CSS Sprite Generator

css_sprite_generator

This is another great tool as it reduces the number of HTTP requests and increases the speed of your website. It allows you to upload your images in a zip file, combined into a sprite, and paste the CSS code in your main css file. This technique can be very effective for improving site performance, particularly in situations where many small images, such as menu icons are used.

Test Everything

test_everything

This website allows you to test everything included in a website. It aggregates over 100 different tools to test almost everything on a webpage. The major categories include CSS and HTML validators, SEO tools, Social services, Web proxies, Network tools, Text tool and Image tools (works only with Image URLs).

CSS Tidy

css_tidy

It is a free, online application that fixes errors and optimize your CSS code. Optimizing CSS code helps in faster loading of web pages and lower the traffic costs as well. Before trying out CSS tidy you can also check out some examples to understand the functionality of CSS tidy more clearly.

layouts

layout

This simple CSS framework allows you to create web pages layout. Similar to Yahoo!’s Grids CSS, it offers 5 preset widths that supports fluid-width or fixed-width layouts. Its features include option to make layout flexible, font-size adjustments, self-clearing sections and also over-write CSS classes for people who require “pixel perfect” layouts.

pForm

pform

It is an online tool that helps in generating great looking HTML form instantly. It offers various color schemes to get started and allows you to design your form with an Ajax interface. It also enables its user to add any type of form objects text fields, checkboxes, dropdowns, file upload fields, and also customize field label, type size etc.

Typetester

typetester

It is an online application for comparing how different fonts and font attributes will look on your designs. It helps in testing and editing any text with different font, font size, color, background, alignment, and more. You can also have a quick preview of the text and font appearance.

Load impact

load_impact

This online load testing service lets you load- and stress test your website over the Internet. You can have several different test configurations and run the tests whenever you want. The test results are stored on the system for easy access at any time.

Cuzillion

cuzillion

It is a tool for quickly constructing web pages to see how components interact. It lets you observe these activity and share sample pages with others. It is a simple three step process in which you have to add components (external script, inline script, external stylesheet, etc.),  arrange and modify and submit your changes. The server returns the page as per your specification. It also allows you to make further changes by clicking on.

ErrorKey

errorkey

This online tool provides you with an answer for errors you encounter on the web page. It allows you to check the error message you are getting and give you a detailed explanation with its meaning. This will help you avoid these problems or troubleshoot through them quicker the next time they pop up.

Hope these tools will help a web developer in creating a successful website with excellent usability features and functionality. Please provide us with your feedback and suggestions on the same.

10 Useful Applications for Bloggers

Blogging is an ongoing trend that has caught up with the professionals worldwide — be it a businessman, a professional or a freelancer, everyone is on to blogging. Since hundreds of blogs are posted everyday, your blog should have some components, which would make it stand out from others. There are a variety of blog applications available on the internet that increase your productivity and save a lot of time as well. These application includes text editors, image editor, file uploaders, online dictionary etc.

Here is a list of some essential applications that you can utilize to boost your efficiency and creativity.application1

Windows Live Writer

This blogging application from windows allows you to write and edit posts from your desktop.

Special features

•  An impressive  editor that makes it easy to share  photos and videos.
•  Share your videos and photos on WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad etc.
•  You can add plugins to the editor as there are plugins to integrate with Flickr and Facebook photos; word counting etc.

Review- The software is chock full of great features and capabilities that make it the best choice in free offline blog editors.About.com

IrfanView

Another great application that allows screen capturing and editing.

Special features

• Supports Windows 9x, ME, NT, 2000, XP, 2003 , 2008, Vista and Windows 7
• Multiple file formats and  multi language support
• Provides paint option, multipage TIF editing and modify color depth
• A variety of plugins also included

Review- Displays dozens of image formats and feels like the fastest program ever written. PC MAG

Memokeys

It is an interesting application that allows them to create shortcut key combinations and associates them with any text information or e-mail and link action of their choice.

Special features

• Store passwords, code snippets, addresses, favorites,  email signatures, documents and more
• Can be used  with word processors, email programs, web forms and any other window

Review- Instead of typing ‘Best regards’ every time you email your friends, you could just press F10 +B and the text is instantly typed for you. CNET

Babylon

This application is an online dictionary and translation software.

Special features

• Translate text in 50 different languages for Free
• Works with all applications such as PDF, Microsoft, Internet explorer, firefox etc.
• offers 1400 trusted dictionaries, encyclopedias and information sources

Review- Babylon 8, understanding, reading and writing in all languages is easier, faster, and more efficient than ever before. ZDNet UK

Notepad++ Portable

It another useful full-featured text editor for bloggers.

Special features

• Supports multiple languages and an extensive plugin system
• Syntax highlighting and syntax folding (C, C++, HTML, ASP, Java, Pascal, CSS and more) user defined syntax highlighting
• Auto-completion, multi-document, full drag ‘n’ drop supported, zoom in/out, macro recording , playback etc.

Review-Excellent replacement for the basic Notepad editor. itnews

Typing Assistant

This application makes typing faster by auto completing your frequently used words and phrases anywhere.

Special features

• Word/phrase auto completion and word auto corrector
• Text expander , clipboard manager and application launcher

Review-With a minimum of frills and an impressively large dictionary, this program will shave minutes off writing. CNET

Photoscape

Another useful application that allows you to fix and enhance photos for you blogs.

Special features

• Edit images by resizing, brightness and color adjustment
• Includes print portrait shot, passport photo, splitter
• Allows screen capture, color picker, raw converter and face search

Review- It will take photos that are in the RAW format used by many digital cameras, and convert them to JPG, so that they’re more useful. PC World

SmartFTP

It is an FTP client which allows you to transfer files between your local computer and a server on the Internet.

Special features

• Web site publishing and maintenance
• Upload and download of images, documents, movie and music files
• Share your files with your friends and coworkers
• Backups of local or remote files

Review- Highly customizable and simple–to–use program. It is also affordably priced for commercial use or free for non–commercial use, free is perfectly priced.TopTenReviews

KompoZer

It is a great application for non-technical computer users who want to create an attractive, professional-looking web site instantly.

Special features

• Transfer content to Ms word, after checking grammatical errors
• Combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing

Review- KompoZer a capable professional web authoring system worth of four stars in this.practicalecommerce

Jott

It transfers your voicemail messages into text and delivers them as text messages, posts and emails that helps in connecting with readers instantly.

Special features

•  Post on Blogger, Typepad, LiveJournal, Tumblr, and WordPress
•  Receive via email, SMS or online
•  Reply, forward, and share
•  Set call-back reminders
•  Search your messages
•  Works with all of your phone numbers

Review- Meet Jott, your personal transcription assistant.TheNewYorkTImes

Hope these applications would help you in setting up and making your blog a great success. We welcome your feedback and suggestions as always.