noisylime

Peter Alguacil and his team have created Pingdom, a free tool that tests the load time of websites and all included objects such as images, CSS files, scripts, etc, and shows this information graphically with an Ajax interface.

[via Ajaxian]

New York based Simple Spark aims to make finding web applications easy through an extensive catalog of online application sites.

Over 3000 web applications are tracked and categorized with screenshots, icons, feeds, reviews and concise summaries. Applications are indexed in over 70 categories including Spreadsheets, Workspace & Wikis, Education, Fashion, Green Living and Family & Kids

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Today I tested a new desktop application, called Skitch, that works far better than Photoshop for basic grabbing and editing of images. And it also has an associated online account for storage and sharing with others. For now, it only works with Mac (and is still in private beta), but a Windows version is in development. All of the images included in this post were grabbed and edited using Skitch, and it saved me a ton of time v. Photoshop.

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Glossy.js 1.2 allows you to add corners and shading and shadow to images on your webpages (alternatively: corner.js). It uses unobtrusive javascript to keep your code clean.

It works in all the major browsers – Mozilla Firefox 1.5+, Opera 9+, IE6+ and Safari. On older browsers, it’ll degrade and your visitors won’t notice a thing.

LINK

If you are a web designer, these 7 design movements haunt you. It‘s a love/hate relationship. You think to yourself, “I want to create something that‘s never been done before,” but you feel spellbound because you know “what works.” Unfortunately, you also know that “what works” has been done a million times before. No matter how hard you and other creative-types strive to do something new, history has created a set of "classic" styles that basically remain the same, save some minor updating.

Take the world of fashion for example. Fashion is in one minute and out the next because we get bored of looking at the same things day after day. The same pattern will occur in web design. However, just as there are mainstays of good fashion, such as the little back dress, there are also mainstays of good web design. Every site may not fit into each of the categories exactly and some may be combinations of styles, but you‘ll get the idea.

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I would like to collect the top resource sites for designers in this post. Please post your top 5 sites that you visit most often and are important for your work.

To start it off let me post my top 5 list:
1. http://logolounge.com – Logo collection for inspiration categorized by keywords and industry. Pay site.
2. http://sxc.hu – Free stock photo exchange site.
3. http://dafont.com – Free fonts.
4. http://brandsoftheworld.com – Logo collection for download.
5. http://tuaw.com – Apple blog with news about Mac software.

What is your top five?

[via creativebits - Apple oriented design community]

I’ve always preferred sketching UIs with an as-thick-as-I-can-find Sharpie over a thin ballpoint pen or finely sharpened pencil.

Ballpoints and fine tips just don’t fill the page like a Sharpie does. Fine tips invite you to draw while Sharpies invite you to just to get your concepts out into big bold shapes and lines. When you sketch with a thin tip you tend to draw at a higher resolution and worry a bit too much about making things look good. Sharpies encourage you to ignore details early on.

If you sketch, try a thick Sharpie next time. You may find you’re better able to focus on the concept and less on the drawing. That’s a good thing.

Veoh’s been busy. In addition to running its popular video sharing site, which is known for higher-quality streams (in terms of bitrate), they’ve announced VeohTV, which is best described as a distributed Joost.

The service, which involves, like Joost and Babelgum, downloading new software which becomes a sort of “video browser.” But instead of doing deals with content providers and piping content directly to users, VeohTV is letting users pull content from around the web – a “single interface to search, browse and view all video on the Internet.” Accepting that IPTV will be decentralized is the same theme driving Truveo’s success, AOL’s video search tool.

Basically, if its out there on the Internet, and Veoh can pull it in, you can watch it. Veoh says this is great for video sites, since they can continue to embed advertising, etc with the content.

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Optimizing your website can be tough business since you can’t “see” your customers online. Analytics packages like Google analytics do a good job letting you see how many visitors are coming and going on your site by tracking every page request. However, another breed of analytics focuses on optimizing how they’re using it, by tracking where visitors click. Crazy Egg, one of these optimization services, now has a new feature “Confetti” that lets you easily see where every visitor clicked on your site and what brought them there. We’ve covered their previous overlay and heatmap features here.

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Apple and Microsoft have always disagreed in how to display fonts on computer displays. Today, both companies are using sub-pixel rendering to coax sharper-looking fonts out of typical low resolution screens. Where they differ is in philosophy.

• Apple generally believes that the goal of the algorithm should be to preserve the design of the typeface as much as possible, even at the cost of a little bit of blurriness.
• Microsoft generally believes that the shape of each letter should be hammered into pixel boundaries to prevent blur and improve readability, even at the cost of not being true to the typeface.

[via del.icio.us/popular]