Free Stuff!
We're constantly scouring the 'Net for cool tools and tricks to make our production time more efficient and more fun (we're avid supporters of the "work smarter, not harder" mentality). We also take time to develop our own utilities when we have the need.
In this area, we post our favorite and most useful apps, scripts, tutorials and other tricks of the trade. While some of our findings may not be entirely "free" they certainly have qualities that have earned them special attention here. (Keep in mind, we are a Mac-based business so most of our products will be Mac oriented. Sorry PC guys, but we'll try to find some goodies for you too!)
If you have any questions regarding the downloads, tips or tricks posted here, don't hesitate to contact us!
Graphic Design:
Photoshop:
Illustrator:
InDesign:
Flash:
Dreamweaver:
Acrobat:
Web:
Firefox is our browser of choice at the studio, and each of us has our own list of favorite websites we like to visit. So how do we share our latest find with one another? Foxmarks...
The Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer automatically synchronizes your bookmarks between two or more computers running Firefox. It also lets you access your bookmarks from any computer anytime via my.foxmarks.com. An easy-to-use wizard guides you through the quick startup process. Then Foxmarks works silently in the background to keep your bookmarks up-to-date on all your computers.
Simple. Solid. Free. And ready to use.
Web Development:
www.xml-sitemaps.com: This free web gem crawls your site and automatically generates XML (compressed and uncompressed), HTML, and TXT versions of your sitemap for download. All you have to do is upload the maps to your server and let Google and the other engines know they're there! We've tried other sitemap creators with various success (or not so much...) and this one seems to generate the cleanest code and do the most accurate crawling.
Free Search Engine Submission: Of course, after your site is built, getting your name out there is important. There are many pay services out there that promise instant results, but truth be known... There are very few ways to instantly get your site indexed (though, yes, with a lot of hard work and money, it can be done), however, the best way to be seen is to let the engines know where you're at and wait for their crawl robots to index you. This is a great little tool to do just that for free to more than 100 search engines:
FaviconGenerator: What is a Favicon? A favicon (short for "favorites icon" and also known as a page icon), is an icon associated with a particular website or webpage that is displayed in the browser address bar next to a site's URL. This site keeps it simple enough... Upload your graphic, generate the favicon, upload to your server and put the necessary code on your pages! Sweet.
Photography:
iPhoto Batch Enhancer is designed to make your life with iPhoto even more comfortable. It helps you apply the built in iPhoto effects (enhance, black-white, sepia and more) with a few mouse clicks to a batch of photos. Additionally you can perform changes to the Adjust palette as well as scale or rotate your photos.
Applications:
MacTidy: In a world where standards rule, MacTidy helps make sure you don't make any errors. When editing HTML it's easy to make mistakes. MacTidy is a Macintosh application designed to make sure you don't do just that. MacTidy checks and corrects HTML and XML to make it compliant with the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) HTML standards. This is also a great tool for converting a file from one markup language to another (HTML to XML, XHTML, etc.)
Scalp: We keep a busy schedule at the Studio. One of the ways we keep track of what's going on is through iCal. However, when you've got a team of people using multiple machines all running the calendar app, it can be difficult to keep track of who's doing what when. Apple's iCal can help you share your schedule by publishing calendars to .Mac and WebDAV servers. Because .Mac is expensive and WebDAV can be hard to come by, Scalp is a tiny hack for iCal that allows calendars to be published and subscribed to from the Web via FTP and SFTP.
Fun Stuff:
Point of View: POV is a mind-bending puzzle game for Mac OS X. It is a game of perspectives: given three views of a figure you must construct that figure using as few blocks as possible. POV is also a puzzler in the truest sense. It relies on planning and strategy rather than lightning quick reflexes.
Electric Sheep is a free, open source screen saver run by thousands of people all over the world. It can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac. When these computers "sleep," the screen saver comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as "sheep". The result is a collective "android dream," an homage to Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
Without a doubt, this has got to be the coolest screensaver ever! This screensaver app is constantly updating itself with new modules that are user created so you don't have to see the same thing over and over each time your computer goes into screensaver mode.
