visual media

This is a list of the top 15 web apps I use every day, or nearly every day in my business. I was going to do a top 10 list but couldn’t narrow it down to just 10. It’s amazing how many web apps I have come to rely on over the years and I would not be as productive or happy without all of them. What web apps do you depend on? Post your answers in the comments.

Here’s the current list, in alphabetical order, of products I use every day and couldn’t live without:

1. Blogger
2. Box.net
3. Delicious
4. Flickr
5. Google Calendar
6. Google Docs
7. Google Notebook
8. Google Reader
9. iGoogle
10. Netvibes
11. UReach.com
12. WordPress
13. WorkArea.com
14. Yahoo Addressbook
15. Yahoo Mail

The best thing Microsoft has decided to do in a long time. Glad to see that they’re listening to the cries of web designers all over the world.  The following article came from Download Squad:

Back in January, Microsoft caused quite a stir when they announced that the default behavior of Internet Explorer 8 would be to render web pages the same way as they are rendered in IE 7. The problem with this? One of IE 8’s most touted features is its web standards compliance and its passing of the Acid2 test. However, web developers and standards advocates were miffed at the idea that rendering the “correct” way would require an additional line of code.

Well, it looks like Microsoft is listening. Yesterday they announced that the default browser behavior will be to render according to standards. If sites want to render in the “quirks” mode (thus, look the same as it would look in IE 7), the site maintainers will need to add in a line of code to reflect that.

The rationale from the original decision stems from the problems Microsoft had when migrating from IE 6 to IE 7. IE 7 had to sacrifice standards compliance in order to deal with rendering problems held over from IE 6. Thus, a web page that was built around IE 6’s weirdness would look horrendous in IE 7, despite actually being displayed “properly.” Thus, Microsoft made the decision to work out a way to render older sites without the appearance of breakage.

By changing course, Microsoft joins other browser makers like Safari, Firefox and Opera is operating with standards compliance out of the box. We have to give Microsoft credit for at least listening to the response from the community.

I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything useful here. Work and family have been keeping me plenty busy. I do have some articles on my to do list that I hope to post here soon.

In the mean time, I just added in the links section, a link to my Google Reader shared posts. These are interesting articles that I’ve come across from various  blogs and websites that have to do with Web 2.0, web based applications, cool web services, and Internet Marketing. If you like the type of info I post here, you will like what you see so check it out.

Jaded New Yorkers and wide-eyed out-of-town tourists alike will visit the festively decorated, gigantic Norway spruce at Rockefeller Center. This year, according to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, those making the Yule time pilgrimage truly “can dream of a ‘green’ Christmas.”

In the past, the thousands of sparkling lights required 3,500-kilowatt hours daily. (A family in a 2,000-square-foot house might take a month to burn through half that much voltage.) Using the latest in energy-efficient LED (light emitting diode) technology, energy use this year has been reduced by two hundred percent.

Newly installed solar panels on Rockefeller Center’s roof will also contribute to holiday greening.

Were all this not enough, according to the Mayor’s office, “for the first time this year, the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree was cut with a handheld saw,” and “upon completion of the holiday season, the tree will be milled and treated and made into lumber to be used by Habitat for Humanity.”

On Sunday, I’m taking my family to see the tree and walk around  NYC. New York is a great city to visit during Christmas time.

Virtual Hosting has an excellent article up detailing 23 actionable web design lessons that we can learn from eye-tracking studies. Most of the items are common sense: people scan web pages rather than read them, people look at the top left corner of the page first, people ignore banner ads, people ignore fancy formating that looks like ads, etc. Read the entire article and keeps these tips in mind when designing your next website.

rsizr is a Flash application that lets you resize JPG, PNG, and GIF images on your computer. With rsizr, in addition to normal image rescaling and cropping, you can also resize images using a new image resizing algorithm called seam carving (a method of image retargeting) that tries to keep intact areas in your image that are richer in detail.

Seam carving is a brilliant image resizing technique pioneered by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir. For their rockstar YouTube video and paper, click here.

Send a memorable message to your clients. GoldMail is a new super simple service for creating presentations narrated by you. You can add your voices to slides, photos, or anything you create and then email it to your audience or post it onto your website or blog. They have lots of examples on their website or you can read a review on Webware.com.

The folks at Stanford have created a free website, VectorMagic, that takes your bit-mapped raster images and converts them into smooth vector drawings. You can download the converted images in .eps, .sfg, or .png format. This is an easy web based tool to rasterize logos or to give your photos a new illustration look.

A visual and entertaining example of web2.0 within the corporation.

OpenOffice.org community celebrates its 7th anniversary. 104 million downloads of the open source productivity suite.

Today, the open source project OpenOffice.org celebrates its 7th birthday. Founded by Sun Microsystems on October 13th, 2000, continues to experience tremendous growth. The project recently counted 104 million downloads from its website, and downloads have been increasing since the release of OpenOffice.org 2.3 last month. It is widely considered the most important open source productivity suite and one of the largest open source projects.

OpenOffice.org is available in more than 80 languages and runs natively on every major platform; it uses the ISO standard, the OpenDocument Format, for its files. Thousands from around the world contribute to its ongoing success, helping with the development, localisation, documentation, user support and marketing of the program. “OpenOffice.org is being developed around the world, and it is being used around the world by governments, businesses and individuals”, said Florian Effenberger, Marketing Project Co-Lead of OpenOffice.org. “The community has achieved what few predicted seven years ago, and we have just begun!”
In addition to its founder and main contributor Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice.org is also recognizes the contributions of RedFlag Software, IBM, Red Hat, and Novell, among others. OpenOffice.org welcomes the contributions of all organizations and individuals.

OpenOffice.org 2.3 can be found at http://download.openoffice.org/2.3.0/

Links to community and professional support, templates, books, etc., can be obtained from http://support.openoffice.org