Archive for the ‘Tools’ Category

Top 10 Insanely Addictive Online Games

July 20th, 2009

No matter how much the desktop gaming industry progresses in terms of graphics, game play and overal user experience. The highest level of addiction still lies in the light-weight online flash games. For some people, online games are just a passtime to fill in hours at office or at lunch time. For others, online games are a hobby that keeps them addicted to the computer for hours and hours.

These games vary from simple one-click mouse games to the ones with advanced gameplay using a keyboard. I have put together a list of the MOST ADDICTING, REALLY ADDICTING, INSANELY ADDICTING online games ever made since 2000.

All these games have been actually played for atleast a month, tested for addiction and then posted here. Have fun and put your high scores in the comment box at the bottom :)

  

1. Desktop Tower Defense

desktoptower

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Posted in Entertainment, Flash, Games

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Facebook Style Photo Tagging

July 16th, 2009

Facebook popularized a great and convenient way of identifying people or objects within a photo. The technique is called photo-tagging and is used for annotating images. There are some pretty neat javascript classes to apply facebook style photo tagging to the image galleries on your website or blog.

Taggify

Taggify is a web widget which allows bloggers and publishers enhance their sites by adding image tooltips linked to certain image’s reqions. Image regions become clickable and tagged with some title, description and link. When visitor moves mouse over the image, Taggify widget shows a nice tooltip with related content provided by the publisher.

taggify2

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Posted in Facebook, Images, Javascript, Tooltips

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Customizable Polls & Surveys For Your Website

July 15th, 2009

PollDaddy is a great service to create customizable polls or surveys for your website or blog. The polls are quick and easy to create, fun to use, and best of all, cost nothing! No technological knowledge is required – the code is created for you in seconds. You merely cut and paste into your website or blog! 

PollDaddy comes with an extensive API which can be used for authentication, fetching polls and data, moderation and loads of other stuff.

PollDaddy Survey

polldaddy3

  1. A selection of skins to choose from or create your own in CSS.
  2. Advanced online reporting in real time of your data as it is collected.
  3. Insert HTML directly allowing you to add pictures, video and more.
  4. Full foreign language support.
  5. 11 question types to choose from with multiple options for each.
  6. Export your data as XML, CSV and receive your results via Email or RSS.

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Posted in Polls & Surveys

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Check Your Website In All Browsers And Platforms

July 12th, 2009

If you are a professional website designer, you will know the importance of achieving cross browser compatibility for your website designs. Even for people with years of experience in CSS and designing, 100% cross browser compatibility is a pain to achieve. Gone are the days when putting a label “Best viewed with Netscape” or “Best viewed with Internet Explorer” guaranteed you compatibility.

Now a days, there are dozens of browsers on hundreds of devices that need to render your website without damaging your design. It’s not possible for you to own all these devices and test your design on them one by one.  There are so many issues to test like:

  1. Screen Resolution
  2. Colour Limitations
  3. CSS rendering & hacks
  4. Frames support
  5. PNG transparency
  6. Javascript performance

So for this problem, there are 2 great tools that will help you test your site designs in dozens of browsers and platforms.

BrowserShots

BrowserShots is a great free tool which captures screenshots of your website. A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to the central server.

Step 1 - Select all the browsers you want a screenshot of.

browsershots

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Posted in Browser Testing, Compatibility, Design, Testing, Tools

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Microsoft releases the “flash-killer”: Silverlight 3

July 11th, 2009

silverlightMicrosoft has released the latest version of their “flash-killer”: Silverlight 3. This release brings along a couple of VERY useful features that a lot of developers will be pleased with.

1. If you’re a video publisher, you can take advantage of the new MPEG-4 based H.264 codec along with the high end AAC sound. Technically it means you can stream videos beyond 720p (which is 1080p at the moment) as Microsoft writes “720p+”. Along side, Microsoft is touting about its new streaming feature named “Smooth streaming” which according to Washington Post means that if your bandwidth is above 3 Mbps, HD streaming, as it normally should, will take place whereas, if it goes below 3 MBPS, smooth streaming’s dynamic capabilities will be triggered and the video will be divide into multiple chunks so that the user experience remains consistent on all sorts of networks.

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Posted in Microsoft, Multimedia, Video

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Top 7 Modal Dialog Boxes Using Javascript (Comparison)

July 10th, 2009

Modal boxes are dialogs that float overtop of a web page without having to open a new browser tab or window. Modal boxes are usually a combination of javascript and css. These boxes are especially useful for displaying a full size image preview, multimedia content, contact forms or alert boxes.

There are some great modal box libraries are available for you to choose from. Below is a list of the best ones.

1. LightBox

lightbox

LightBox is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page.

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Posted in Dialogs, Images, Javascript, Multimedia

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Online Chart Maker Using Google’s URL Based API

July 5th, 2009

What do you do when you want to show a visual representation of data on your website? Now you don’t need any heavy libraries to do that.

The Google Chart API is an extremely simple tool that lets you easily create a chart from some data and embed it in a webpage. Charts are created dynamically. You embed the data and formatting parameters in the URL, and Google returns a PNG image of the chart. Many types of chart are supported, and by making the request into an image tag you can simply include the chart in a webpage.

The chart below has been generated on the fly using the following URL:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=t:60,40&chs=550×200&chl=This is|a sample chart

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Posted in Charts, Google

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