PHP template engines are used widely to seperate the code & the layout.

This makes a website easier to maintain/update & creates a better development environment by enabling developers & designers to work together easier.

It sure has some drawbacks which is generally the performance (most libraries offer great solutions there) & need to learn a new syntax (not always).

To mention, using a template engine may not be suitable for every project. A website with few pages will probably won’t need it. But it can improve the development process of a portal, an e-commerce site or another web application easily.

Here are 19 PHP template engines with very nice features & have a continious development:

Smarty

The most popular PHP templating engine which prefers to call itself a "template/presentation framework" as it equips both the designer & programmers with powerful tools at the presentation layer.

It has a robust caching mechanism as well as a strong plug-in & add-on support.

With the template functions, debugging capabilities, security it provides & continious development, Smarty is a great engine.

Dwoo

Dwoo aims to be a serious alternative to Smarty with a cleaner codebase.

It has almost a totally compatible template & plugin system with Smarty.

Some main features are:

• Template Inheritance, a fresh look at complex template structures, now built without includes.
• Flexible plugin creation.
• Scope aware engine, allowing for  shorter templates.
• Unicode / UTF-8 support for string manipulation functions & more..

Savant

A lightweight templating engine for PHP.

it uses PHP itself as its template language & no need to learn a new markup system.

Read the rest of this entry »

Pretty Loaded is a website, created by Big Spaceship (a creative agency with amazing Flash works),  which is a new source of inspiration to Flash developers.

It simply presents beautiful Flash preloaders as a slideshow.

It displays the company who created it, the client & the year it is done.

You can filter the preloaders by years & nothing much to do rather than just watching .

P.S. Thanks to Dave for the suggestion.

AdesClrPicker is a free color picker application which runs at the background of your PC & offers you a great usage.

It can be reached via 3 ways:

• A hotkey
• Optional floating menu (good for frequent users)
• System tray menu

Once the color picker is run, it floats over every application. So, you can easily get colors from webpages, desktop or anywhere on your PC.

Just left-click your mouse & the color choosen is on your clipboard, simply paste it (possibly to your fav. image editor). And, you can reach the last 10 colors picked from the system tray.

There is also a color library within the application where you can manage your favorite colors.

All these features come with a lightweight application. Just great!

P.S. Thanks to Abdylas for the suggestion.

TartanMaker.com is a free online service which lets you create tartan patterns with ease.

Color & width of the bands can be modified as well as the orientation & yarn sizes to create a custom tartan image.

It is created by the team which also made the similar famous apps:

• Stripe Generator
• Tabs Generator
• Reflection Maker

Click here to create your tartan patterns or here to see the gallery of shared images.

Photoshop plug-ins are the add-ons that power a Photoshop user.

They make a complicated task much easier & help creating amazing effects, designing faster & better.

There are lots of free Photoshop plug-ins which can fire your skills. This post aims to present  most of them (150+) in a comprehensive way.
 

How to install Photoshop plug-ins?

Photoshop plug-ins are .8bf files. After downloading a plug-in, simply place it in the presets>plug-ins folder of the Photoshop's installation folder (creating a folder with a name defining the plug-in & placing the plug-in files inside the folder will make it more organized).

Here they are:

AlphaWorks – Transparency Effects

A free Photoshop plugin for easily removing black or white values and making the region transparent.

It provides 6 different filters to match any photo type.

ColourWorks – Colour Modification

It has 20 effects to modify image colour values in several ways.

The plug-in can be used for digital-photo color correction or any other transformations.

EdgeWorks – Cool Artistic Styles

It has 20 effects to create dramatic edge and colour modifications.

This Photoshop plugin is handy for photo transformations for a highly stylized look & creating interesting texture effects

ScreenWorks

Easily create screen/mesh patterns with 30 options.

In one step, you can add small detailed and repetitive texture overlay effects to areas of your image.

Read the rest of this entry »

Liquidicity is presenting these quality & free vector arrow icons.

There are 16 types of arrow icons (+ the rotations which equal to 64 icons).

Considering there are several types of arrows included, the set is very handy to be used in any type of design/application.

They can be downloaded as an Adobe Illustrator CS2 file or in SVG format.

PXtoEM.com is a website that makes converting PX values to EM values easier.

Conversions are based on 16px browser default size & you simply:

• Select your body font size
• And get the conversion
• Or, manually enter PX or EM values to get custom conversions.

The CSS file of the values you’ve choosen can be get based on the typography.css portion of Blueprint CSS to setup a default typography.

Blender is an open source 3D content creation suite.

It is an all-in-one package for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, and gaming.

User interface of Blender is formed of boxes, where all of them can be moved for the max. flexibility for not being blocked by the UI.

Advanced animations & the integrated game engine can be controlled with Python scripting which also makes developers a part of the game rather than only the designers.

A very detailed feature list can be found here.

The software has a large community & is very well-documented which makes it easier to improve your skills.

An open source game built with Blender:

Yo Frankie! is an open source game built with Blender & its integrated game engine.

The game is also like a source of information (as you can download the source files) for anyone planning to develop games with the application.

P.S. Anyone into 3D design is probably aware of Blender but this post is published considering it may be helpful to fresh 3D designers.

SenCSs is a CSS framework that doesn’t provide a layout system but aims to take care of the rest, like:

• fonts & font-sizes
• paddings
• margins
• colors,
• tables & lists
• headers, blockquotes and what more..

SenCSs has support for forms which helps presenting them nicely (better form support is on the way).

There are also styles for elements like errors, warnings or success messages which are parts of a standard web application.

SenCSs, although being fresh & currently in development, is a nice base to start with & improve depending on your needs.

An example HTML file can be found here.

Favicons are one of the must-haves of websites.

They help making:

• a website unique
• easier to differenciate between tabs
• easier to find in bookmarks..

favikon is an easy to use online favicon creator.

You upload an image, if the image uploaded is bigger than a standard favikon size, you can crop it & that’s it.