They have just about anything you could ever need, from an RSS feed reader, to apps for writers, and fabulous business apps. Even better, a whole bunch of free apps! http://myownapp.com/site/free/free.html

Some of them are even portable, so you can stick em on a thumb drive and take em with you!

I’m a Mac app addict. I’m gonna have a bunch of reviews coming up soon about my favorite apps, I just gotta decide where to start!

Today I learned that it’s ok to be a bigot racist anti American crazy person, as long as you’ve served in the military. The comments on the actual Digg page just put me over the top.

Theres crap like that filling the top ten everyday. I would stop reading it, but I have an uncontrollable urge to spy on the enemy. Which invariably givs me an even stronger urge to kill small animals. I almost have enough for a patchwork blankie

Me-> <-Digg

Fortunately for my little tan friend, I have found Netrenderer… god dammit I love words with double er endings. Netrenderer provides INSTANT screenshots of your site in Internet Explorer 7, 6 or 5.5 on Windows. Lets look at an example, so you all can see what a difference a browser makes;

First, my pretty test site on my MacBook in Firefox:

Next, the same site looking all jagged and stoopid in IE 6 on a PC:

They even have options for mixed and difference overlays, so you can really get a good look at positional differences in IE6 and 7. They take screen shots of the site in both browsers, then lay them on top of each other:

Netrenderer is limited in browser options compared to browsershots.org, but all I really need is access to Internet Explorer on Windows. Thats the only browser I ever have problems with.
I hate you IE

They have made the kick ass even more kick assier! The new version has lots of new features, my favorite is the palette browser.

You can extract all the colors from any web page and save it as your very own color palette in the palette browser, or send it to an online palette saver and share it with the world! You have all your color values handy in one place for all the sites you take care of, or just some great color inspiration from sites you find along your sick porno browsing adventures.

Perv!

See the version history for the newest features and screen shots.

Here is a picture of it in action-

I can’t remember what I was typing in that picture. I was on a high. Amazed at all the awesomeness packed into such a tiny delicate package. Reminded me of myself. *tear*

This device has obviously made me much cooler than I was before, and no one ever thought that was possible. My mom thought I was as cool as any human could possibly be, and my friends thought I was incapable of ever being cool. Both proven wrong by the IPod Touch. Take that society!!

…I probably should have mentioned how useless this review was going to be at the beginning of this post. Sorry about that.

No I’m not.

I love capitalism and capitalism loves me. I love capitalism and capitalism loves me. I love capitalism and capitalism loves me. I love capitalism and capitalism loves me. I love capitalism and capitalism loves me. I love capitalism and capitalism loves me. I love capitalism and capitalism loves me.

vs.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure.

See what I mean?

ANYWAYS, there are lots of ways to get the lorem ipsum text, but MY favorite is a handy dashboard widget I found called Dolor sit amet. You really can’t get any simpler than this;

All you do is select characters, words or paragraph, then type how many you want (e.g. 4 paragraphs, 50 characters, 10 words) click the ‘to clipboard’ button and presto! It’s on your clipboard ready to be pasted into whatever you’re working on.

I love it, and you should too. Because I said so.

Fortunately, I found Paparazzi! This awesome little utility couldn’t be easier to use…

Just put a URL in, decide your sizes, and presto! I use it a lot when I’m developing behind closed doors, so to speak. When I don’t want a client watching me fuck their site up during the creative process, I just send them screen shots to approve along the way.

It’s also nice to take before and after screen shots when redesigning a site…

Awww pretty!!!

Did I mention, it’s free? Try it, if you get a lot of use out of it, donate to the people who made it.

I neat tools

It’s pretty sexy looking too.

The easiest way to install dashboard widgets is to use Safari to browse to the widget page. When you download widgets while using Safari, it automatically installs them for you!

As a web developer/designer/whatever, I’m always looking for tools to make my work life easier. One super handy firefox extension I found was Colorzilla. It’s essentially an eyedropper tool that lets you find out the HEX and RGB values of colors on any website you’re on. Very snazzy for when you spot a color you like and might wanna use in a design.

HOWEVER…..I soon discovered an even better use for this tool. When you hover the cross hair over any area on any site, it outlines that hovered element and shows what css class it belongs to!

This is extremely useful when working on a site to find out what part belongs to what class so you can edit the site’s style sheet. You can also easily copy color values to the clipboard and just do a find in the style sheet. But when you have a bunch of big areas all the same color, but consist of many different elements, this tool helps sort through them so you can make any alignment or sizing or any kind of adjustments or trouble shooting you want.

Free but priceless!!

Here’s the deal. Since IE and Windows are the devil, they dont have full transparency support. So what do we do? Ignore the glorious world of the .PNG? Hell no!! We find a way around the failings of IE, as we so often have to do with css anyway. I searched high and low and found many different fixes, tried them all, and now I’m sharing the simpliest, most effective one with you here. The author is Erik Arvidsson, and the nitty gritty details of this hack can be found HERE as well as all the files you will need for it. I will explain how to use it in laymen’s terms here.

First, take the file named pngbehavior.htc and put it in the root directory of your site.
pngbehavior

  * PNG Behavior
*
* This script was created by Erik Arvidsson (http://webfx.eae.net/contact.html#erik)
* for WebFX (http://webfx.eae.net)
* Copyright 2002-2004
*
* For usage see license at http://webfx.eae.net/license.html
*
* Version: 1.02
* Created: 2001-??-??    First working version
* Updated: 2002-03-28    Fixed issue when starting with a non png image and
*                      switching between non png images
*          2003-01-06    Fixed RegExp to correctly work with IE 5.0x
*          2004-05-09  When printing revert to original
*
*/
 
var supported = /MSIE ((5\.5)|[6789])/.test(navigator.userAgent) &&
navigator.platform == "Win32";
 
var realSrc;
var blanksrc="blank.gif" ;
var isPrinting = false;
 
if (supported) fixImage();
 
function propertyChanged() {
if (!supported || isPrinting) return;
 
var pName = event.propertyName;
if (pName != "src" return;
// if not set to blank
if (!new RegExp(blankSrc).test(src))
fixImage();
};
 
function fixImage() {
// get src
var src = element.src;
 
// check for real change
if (src == realSrc && /\.png$/i.test(src)) {
element.src = blankSrc;
return;
}
 
if ( ! new RegExp(blankSrc).test(src)) {
// backup old src
realSrc = src;
}
 
// test for png
if (/\.png$/i.test(realSrc)) {
// set blank image
element.src = blankSrc;
// set filter
element.runtimeStyle.filter = "progidXImageTransform.Microsoft." +
"AlphaImageLoader(src='" + src + "',sizingMethod='scale'";
}
else {
// remove filter
element.runtimeStyle.filter = "";
}
}
 
function beforePrint() {
isPrinting = true;
element.src = realSrc;
element.runtimeStyle.filter = "";
realSrc = null;
}
 
function afterPrint() {
isPrinting = false;
fixImage();
}


Next, upload the blank.gif image to the same place, then all you have to do is add this small snippet of code to each page the .PNG image will appear on (if you have a header include you can put it there)…


 
<style type="text/css">img { behavior: url("pngbehavior.htc"; }
 
</style>

Easy as pie!!!

Now you can do all sorts of cool varying transparency anti-aliased images on any color backgrounds, on any patterned backgrounds, etc. The possibilities are endless. Check out just one example HERE …drag your browser window, resizing it, to see how the background image flows smooth behind all those curves and the handsome drop shadow. You can’t get that effect with a gif, suckas!

Without the hack, that image would appear as if its been highlighted in IE on Windows:

SO not cool.