LightScreen is a free screenshot tool that makes taking screenshots easier.
It can run at the background, can be called via hotkeys and enables you to take a screenshot of:
The image format, quality, how it will be named & where it will be saved can be pre-defined.
And, once the screenshot is saved, it can notify you with a "tray icon popup" or a sound.
P.S. It only works in Windows OSs.
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:
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 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:
A lightweight templating engine for PHP.
it uses PHP itself as its template language & no need to learn a new markup system.
AdesClrPicker is a free color picker application which runs at the background of your PC & offers you a great usage.
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.
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.
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.
Every designer & developer loves handy tools that simplify frequent tasks.
And, even if you've a complicated software that does the same thing, usually it is much more effective to run a tiny, fast-loading application that does the job.
This is a list of 27 functional Adobe AIR applications that can help a web designer to design & develop:
Info: If you don't have Adobe AIR installed, it can be downloaded from here.
Very nice application for taking snapshots of any webpage.
It enables you to configure the snapshot sizes & lets you choose whether the snapshot be a thumbnail, browser size or the full page.
Using WebKut, you can take snapshots of an entire webpage, parts of them or a selection.
The tool's interface helps a lot by showing the size of the area selected, letting the user to choose the image format & quality.
A pixel ruler that enables you to measure the size of any object..
With browser skins, overlay mode and screen size presets, you can also preview how your design will look in the real environment.
Web & interface designers will love it.
PixelPerfect has 1 job to do: measure things on your desktop.
While designing a website or looking for the size of an object in a website, you can run this ruler & that's it.
A little application that lets you generate a CS3 or Web 2.0 style icon, in only 3 steps. Pick color, type characters, and save it. Icon is generated in 4 different sizes.
Do you start creating a design by sketching it via hand? Or you’re working on a web project & describing your ideas to your team members by just drawing them? Then you’ll find these free PDF graph papers handy.
These graph papers simply help you create better sketches by helping you to keep the ratios & taking notes.
P.S. These PDF documents are formatted for 8.5" x 11" paper in landscape orientation.
Pixel Perfect is a Firebug plugin which enables you to overlay a web composition on any developed HTML.
By switching between on & off, you can see easily howmany pixels you’re off with the development.
You can play with the opacity of the overlay to better see or totally disable the design below.
Move controls enables you to fine tune the position of the overlay. To give an example, you can exactly position a new menu over an old one to see if it fits or not.
Pencil Project is a free sketching & GUI prototyping tool which can be installed as a Firefox add-on or a standalone application.
You can paste a screenshot of a webpage and play with it’s built-in stencils like form elements & objects to sketch a design idea.
Pencil Project is very functional when you want to see how designs would look like with small updates like a putting a search-box and deciding where it will fit.
You can also install your stencils to this free sketching tool and improve it.
A killer feature would be importing webpages into this application directly. Hope it is the next step.
Designing with grids is very common as it helps creating identical, measured layouts.
960 Grid System is an effort to streamline web development (for rapid prototyping and for production environments) workflow by providing commonly used dimensions , based on a width of 960 pixels. There are two variants: 12 and 16 columns, which can be used separately or in tandem.
All modern monitors support at least 1024 × 768 pixel resolution. 960 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 24, 30, 32, 40, 48, 60, 64, 80, 96, 120, 160, 192, 240, 320 and 480. This makes it a highly flexible base number to work with.
In the download package, you can find PDF grid paper, templates for Fireworks, OmniGraffle, Photoshop & Visio, and CSS framework with demo HTML .
Designers, who wonder the RGB of any color that is around their mouse can get the results instantly.
Small utility named Pixie, runs on your system tray, you can call it with a click and it will show you HEX, RGB, CMYK & HSV values of any pixel you’re pointing.
Many designers take a screen capture, run their favorite image editing software like Photoshop, Fireworks and paste the capture to the image editing software to get the image color values. With Pixie, no need for these steps.
An extra feature of Pixie is, it shows the x y position of the mouse pointer.
