First of all, sorry that WRD had a downtime (around 8 hours) yesterday.

The post: 27 Adobe AIR Applications – Handy For Web Designers got pretty popular in most of the social-bookmarking / voting websites. I realized that the website was getting slower & about to take action on it. Then the post moved to frontpage at digg.com & I was not able to reach to server anymore.

As the server was not responding, rebooted from the power-strip several times, got ping results but after sometime, reboots weren’t pinging.

Thanks to the hosting company that they reached the server & told that the server was not able to boot because of corrupt system file errors (confirmed via KVM).

A fresh OS is installed & they added the previous harddisk as a secondary one so I could get the data.

After setting up the server, here it is, WRD is back online.

Lessons learned:

• Don’t underestimate the digg effect, it is really strong.
• Don’t reboot a server via power-strip (several times).
• Backup frequently (I’m good at this from past experiences).
• Apply all of your own tips.
• And maybe it is because the server is Windows, think about that.. : )

Hope that this post may help you to stay online.

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:

• Better
• Faster
• More organized

Info: If you don't have Adobe AIR installed, it can be downloaded from here.

Web Snapshot

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.

WebKut

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.

Pixus

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

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.

Icon Generator

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Form Tools is a form processor, storage and data access script written in PHP and MySQL, designed to work with any existing web form.

By making small changes to a form, you can:

• store form submissions in a database
• provide an admin area to your clients for managing the forms
• mass data export via excel
• have printer-friendly pages
• sort data & edit submissions
• have e-mail notifications & more.

With one install of Form Tools, unlimited number of forms can be managed. The script is multi-lingual, it can be branded & easily customized.

The Web Platform Installer Beta (Web PI), makes it easier to create a web development environment on your PC.

It provides a single, free package for installing and configuring Microsoft’s entire Web Platform, including:

• IIS7
• Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition
• SQL Server 2008 Express Edition
• .NET Framework.

You can mention whether you’re an ASP.Net developer or even choose support for specific features like ASP, SQL Server driver for PHP, etc. besides installing the complete Microsoft Web Platform

Considering the IIS version to be installed is IIS7, the installer is compatible with Vista & Microsoft Server 2008.

This is a set of RSS icon Photoshop shapes.

Download package has 20+ shapes including a RSS sticker, speech bubble, arrow, star & more.

The set is handy for creating different icons. And, the standard icon is also in the set which enables you to create something totally new.

NiftyPlayer is a tiny open source Flash MP3 player with a very simple interface.

It is lightweight (4kb) and usage does not require any Flash knowledge as the URL is mentioned in HTML.

The player can be easily controlled with JavaScript besides the Flash interface, like changing the file to be played, stop & start. With this feature, you can even bypass the whole Flash look.

Some other features are:

• Autostart capability
• Draggable/Clickable seek bar
• Simple operation with Play/Pause and Stop buttons
• Buffering with progress bar
• Buffering is stoppable! (through Stop button)
• Volume control

DevBoi is a Firefox add-on that adds a sidebar with web-development references and documentations for HTML, JavaScript, CSS, PHP, Ruby on Rails & Prototype.

The sidebar is very handy for any developer as you can reach it with a simple "CTRL+F9", find any function or property, see the browsers it supports & more.

Standard installation supports:

• HTML 4.01/XHTML 1.0,
• CSS 2.1,
• DOM 2,
• JavaScript 1.3

Support for other languages can be downloaded from here.

You can also go the original website for the add-on for downloading it without registering.

BigTarget.js is a jQuery plugin that increases the size of click targets and get more call-to-action conversions.

It has 2 options that can be customized:

• clickZone: By default the first <li> element is turned into a link but this can be changed with this option.
• targetClass: For mentioning the class for hover effect.

How to use it?

Adding BigTarget.js functionality to your site is straight forward. First include the plugin code in the head of your document, and then when the page is ready, attach the bigTarget function to the target anchor — bigTarget.js will do the rest.

$(document).ready(function(){
$("ol.bigTarget h4 a").bigTarget();
});

Cymbolism is a website which aims to quantify the association between colors and words with the help of the visitors.

It simply shows a word & asks the visitor to click a color, the visitor thinks the color defines.

There are currently 200 words & visitors voted more than 280,000 times for them.

Words can be browsed to see the color-palette generated from the previous votes. And, this may help on deciding which colors to use in our designs considering the theme of the website.

Superfish is an advanced suckerfish menu plugin for jQuery.

It turns a standard CSS dropdown menu and tranforms it to a more powerful one (it gracefully degrades).

It supports both horizontal & vertical menus and unlimited sub-menus can be defined.

Considering the menu is generated from a CSS-dropdown menu, every sub can be easily styled too.

Other features of Superfish:

• Suckerfish-style hover support for IE6.
• Timed delay on mouseout.
• Animation of sub-menu reveal.
• Keyboard accessibility.
  
• Indicates the presence of sub-menus by automatically adding arrow images to relevant anchors.
• Drop shadows for capable browsers – degrades gracefully for Internet Explorer 6. Can disable shadows completely via options object.
• Can show the path to your current page while the menu is idle.
• Optional callback functions. The ‘this’ keyword within the handlers you attach will refer to the animated ul sub-menu.