Radical Image Optimization Tool (RIOT for short) is a free image optimizer that will let you to visually adjust compression parameters while keeping minimum filesize. It uses with a side by side (dual view) or single view interface to compare the original with the optimized image in real time and instantly see the resulting file size.

It is lightweight, fast and simple to use, yet powerful for advanced users. You will be able to control compression, number of colors, metadata settings and much more, and select image format (JPG, GIF or PNG) for your output file.

Main features:

• Open many image types including rare/scientific types.
• Save and optimize JPEG, GIF and PNG with a simple, clean user interface.
• Works in dual view: (original – optimized image) or single view (optimized image).
• Automatic preview of resulting image.
• In-place compare function (alternativelly display the original image over the optimized image to notice small pixel changes).
• Compress files to desired filesize threshold.
• Fast processing (all is done in memory).
• See instant results including resulting filesize.
• Batch support (process multiple files at once).
• Transparency handling options.
• Decide if you want to keep metadata (comments, IPTC, Adobe XMP, EXIF profiles, ICC profiles).
• Unsupported metadata is removed.
• Transfer metadata between image formats (destination format must support them).
• Common tools: pan and zoom, rotate, flip.
• Basic image adjustments: brightness, contrast, gamma, invert.
• Visually reduce number of unique colors for PNG and GIF images in order to reduce filesize.
• Two quantization methods are available: Xiaolin Wu and NeuQuant neural net.
• Resize image by using well known resample filters (ex: Lanczos3, Catmull Rom, Bicubic, and others).
• Out-of-the-box support for external PNG optimizers (optipng, pngout, etc).
• The compression and the results are comparable to those of commercial products, even higher.
• Adaptive logarithmic tone mapping algorithm (Drago) used for HDR images.

]]> http://helpwebdesigners.com/radical-image-optimization-tool-riot-a-free-image-optimizer.html/feed 0 http://helpwebdesigners.com/formee-fresh-baked-forms-for-your-websites.html http://helpwebdesigners.com/formee-fresh-baked-forms-for-your-websites.html#comments Tue, 06 Jul 2010 03:50:36 +0000 herbertaqp http://helpwebdesigners.com/?p=403

Formee is nothing but a framework to help you develop and customize web based forms. Formee works with the technique provided by Fluid 960 Grid System to compose the form’s layout, allowing total flexibility to put it in any website or web system.

Customizable and Flexible – The form has a structure built around percentage widths, thus allowing its inclusion in any project, adapting to the space available. Formee has its structural code independent of the style codes, facilitating the complete customization and manteinance of the form.

Semantics and Performance – The form was built with care to preserve web standards and their semantic values, working with the smallest possible amount of tags and according to the W3C rules.

Accessibility and Usability – Some elements have been inserted to add more value to your project , such as message boxes that can be shown indicating errors, warnings and success alerts. We also use the fieldset element to cluster form fields that have the same context through the legend tag.

BTemplates collects together templates for bloggers that range far and wide – from templates that deal with the most popular cartoon heroes like Kung Fu Panda and Garfield to streamlined templates for those who want to keep things simple, and garish designs for those who like things as psychedelic as they come.

The website is subdivided in consequence, and a tag cloud is also prominently featured for you to click about and see what comes up. Moreover, you can see these designs that have attracted the most attention alongside the ones that have garnered the best ratings. Likewise, you can visualize together the ones that have been downloaded the most.

ValidForm Builder is an impressive open source form creation library that relies on PHP and JavaScript (jQuery). The library outputs standards-based web forms (XHTML 1.0 valid) that are validated both on the client-side and the server-side.

It supports every input type (textbox, checkbox, radio, etc.) and comes with ready-to-use validation rules (integer, required, e-mail, etc.). ValidForm Builder also has a captcha class which is very easy to integrate and can display a new captcha on every click.

SeekWP is a search portal that is focused solely on the popular blogging platform. If you think that such a topic does not merit such a treatment, you obviously haven’t been doing your homework. As a platform, WordPress is phenomenal in its depth. Any person who is new to it all will obviously feel a bit confused. This site will be perfect for them, as they can look up everything from themes to general usage tips.

And a resource such as this one is not only suitable to newcomers. I can tell you from experience that even some of the more seasoned bloggers around are oblivious to many tricks and functionalities. Just like everybody, when they get what they need from what they are using they sort of stop there. Well, SeekWP will enable them to discover the platform that they use on a daily basis anew. And those who are just starting out couldn’t ask for a better companion to guide them through the long and winding road.

Grid System Generator. This tool generates grid systems in valid css / xhtml for rapid prototyping, development and production environments. The grid system generators offer the ability to customize the width, no. of columns and margin(s) to allow more flexibility for various designs.

Besides the CSS framework, a .PNG background file is created as well to help in prototyping and design. The generator is based on 960.gs & displays already created grids.

Rendera helps you learn HTML5 and CSS3. Type in your HTML code and see it rendered in realtime. Then style it with CSS. You can use any of the HTML 5 or CSS3 tags your browser supports. Want to learn HAML and SASS? It support those too. You can also learn from the many examples provided within, or create your own example and send it to a friend.

You can try out some Javascript too. we’ve even loaded jQuery, jQuery Tools and jQuery UI so you can experiment with those libraries too!. You can use HAML and SASS instead of HTML and CSS if you’d like. Have fun learning, and go build something awesome.

FindBrushes provides high quality photoshop brushes for designers and developers in an easy and efficient way. This search engine for Photoshop brushes currently contains over 13,000 quality photoshop brushes in over 650 sets.

To start, just enter your search terms in the homepage. You can also browse the website by going through the categories of the designs of brushes such as abstract, symbols, water color, swirls, shapes, and many more. If you are just looking around for something interesting, you can easily go through the designs by other users. Then just unzip the downloaded file to the brush folder where your Photoshop is installed to add them to your workspace.

FindBrushes is a useful tool for anyone who needs to find the Photoshop brush they need quickly, especially for designers who need to blaze through a project but cannot quite get the right brush to use.

Border-radius property offers a clean and easy way of adding rounded corners to elements on the page. The rounded corner look can be applied to any or all four corners of an element, and even works with elements with a background image. Practically speaking border-radius is supported in FF3, Safari3, and Google Chrome, by way of vendor specific equivalent properties as they race to eventually just support border-radius. IE users (as of IE8) are out of luck at the moment unfortunately.

While the details of the official border-radius property are being worked out, the vendor equivalent properties for FF3.x, Safari 3.x, and Chrome that you can use right now are:

* -moz-border-radius: value
* -webkit-border-radius: value

Safari and Chrome both use the “-webkit-” version btw. For the time being, you should define both properties to cover your bases while browsers move to support the official version. “value” in this case can be a singular value (ie: 10px) that defines the radius of the border for all 4 corners, for example:

-moz-border-radius: 10px;
-webkit-border-radius: 10px;

ColorZilla is an extension for Mozilla Firefox and the Mozilla Suite. It assists web developers and graphic designers with color related tasks – both basic and advanced.

With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. You can Zoom the page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page. The built-in palette browser allows choosing colors from pre-defined color sets and saving the most used colors in custom palettes. DOM spying features allow getting various information about DOM elements quickly and easily. And there’s more…