Tag archive for ‘tools’
Simulate Color Blindness with Color Oracle
I just noticed an interesting article on color blindness over at Pixelgraphix. Color Oracle helps webdesigners to view in real time, what a website would look like for people suffering from one of the various color blindnesses. The filter is applied to the whole screen so it's completely independent from the browser and even works with images in Photoshop.
Color Oracle is free and available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.
Tagged as accessibility, color, colorblindness, colororacle, design, review, software, tools, usability, webdesign+ Categorized as Uncategorized
CSS Edit
Web 2.0 in style? Now it's Web 2.5 in style! Macrabbit has released version 2.5 of their great CSS editor. And best of all, it's a free upgrade for owners of the previous version.
Tagged as css, cssedit, design, free, macrabbit, software, tools, update, web2.0, webdesign+ Categorized as Uncategorized
Tingelets - Bookmarklets for Designers
Tingelets is a new, free and practical service for designers and developers. Basically it's a set of bookmarklets that you can place in your browsers bookmark bar for immediate use. When you click on them, they highlight various elements in the current page. You can highlight tags, elements by id, elements by class and even tag sets (for example <ul> and <li> as a combination). Since they work in almost every web browser, they give you the possibility to compare web layouts on the fly.
The Tingelets are the newest project from Maurice Kühlborn and they are extremely well done. When you click on a tingelet, the corresponding element or elements are highlighted with transparent PNGs which display the name of the highlighted element.
It's a perfect and quick solution for troubleshooting and diagnostics without having to resort to external tools like Xyle Scope.
Tagged as bookmarklet, browser, css, design, free, html, online, service, tingelets, tools, troubleshooting, webdesign, xhtml+ Categorized as Uncategorized
Freshly Minted
Shaun Inman has once again outdone himself by launching two new websites and an updated version of Mint on one day, and a Monday at that! I'm quite fond of the new shauninman.com design with a duotone palette and a date-based background color.
Screenshot of the shauninman.com pre-launch intro page
More important however is the new version of Shaun's website analytics tool Mint. For those who don't know Mint, its simple yet powerful interface features an overview of visits, referrers, popular pages and searches which can all be taken in at a glance on Mint's flexible dashboard. And with the help of third party Pepper — little extensions for the dashboard — Mint is even more powerful.
Speaking of Pepper (yes, that's both the singular and plural form), the second website launched by Shaun today is the Peppermill, the new place to download the Mint software, official Pepper, widgets and third party Pepper. This ensures, that Pepper developed by others can all be found in one single place, somewhat reminiscent of the Mozilla Extension room. As Shaun puts it:
Until today tracking down third-party Pepper involved checking the Pepper Development forum religiously or subscribing to Sam Brown’s Peppermint Tea. And there was always the chance that a developer’s site and Pepper would disappear.
In case you aren't convinced yet, there are some nice screencasts, screenshots and even a live demo on Shauns website. And what's best, Shaun somehow tricked inflation. The price for Mint 2 is still at the same US $30 (€ 23,-) it was before. And existing Mint licenses can be upgraded for only US $19 (€ 15,-). That's less than the price for two drinks around here, and believe me, it's worth those two drinks.
If you don't have your site Minted yet, you should definitely do so now — just take a look at the feature highlights. And if you already use Mint, did I tell you that Mint 2 is out? Because Mint 2 is out, you dinosaurs, you!
Tagged as addon, ajax, analytics, extension, mint, pepper, relaunch, shauninman, software, statistics, tools, travel+ Categorized as Uncategorized
ColorZilla now working on Intel Macs!
I've just received word from Alex Sirota, that his great Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Suite extension, ColorZilla, is now working on Intel Macs.
Its task is to assist professional web developers and designers with color related tasks. The feature most of us have used though, was the color picker, which unfortunately stopped working on Intel Macs.
ColorZilla allows you to get a color reading from any pixel in your web browser. You can do all sorts of things, like adjusting the sampled colors and copying them to the clipboard, but those are just two of the color related tasks ColorZilla performs.
Tagged as addon, browser, color, colorzilla, design, extension, firefox, free, mozilla, software, tools, webdesign+ Categorized as Uncategorized