Hab.la – Add live chat to your website nice and easy…
This is nice!
Hab.la is a tiny piece of code that you can paste into your iweb website (or others) that will unlock the ability to include a live chat panel (that you can customise) on your page. The best part is that it is multi-protocol which means it works with ichat, googletalk, and loads more…….
So you can be logged in on adium and somebody visiting your website can see your online and send you a message (this is done anonymously so they will not know your chat details and username etc..) and when you respond in your favourite client (adium suggested but supported by ichat also) a live chat session is initiated…..
It sounds a lot trickier than it is but the Hab.la have included a little file to automatically install the account into your adium or ichat client.
I really like this one!
Opacity – Amazing Graphics Editor
Watching the video on the website of this application blew me away. For a couple of projects I needed to design an application icon, it wasn’t easy and the results weren’t particularly awe inspiring.
Opacity is so cool, it has built in effects and has many vector tools, best of all, however, is the built in ‘factories’ that allow you to export the graphic as icon presets and many other file types, even directly into your website via FTP.
I sincerely suggest watching the video on the homepage to guage the true value of Opacity.
Picturesque – Make stunning images for your website etc…
Picturesque is an image editor tailored to those who want some of those snazzy mac effects such as reflections, 3d perspective and rounded corners etc.
It is not free like most of my posts but because of its ease of use and general coolness I thought I would post it anyway…
iTweak – Add extras to iWeb such as favicon and google search…
I just stumbled across iTweak, a free application that gives you the chance to add favicons, hit counters, google site search fields and more to your lowly iWeb website.
It seems pretty simple to use and gives iWeb some pretty nifty functionality. Guess well have to wait to see if any of this will be included in the next iteration of iWeb but until then, check it out.
Xmind – Mind Mapping Software, now FREE!
XMind is a piece of software that helps those of us who need to visualise our thoughts in order to stay organised. Having recently gone open source, XMind is now completely FREE!.
Its not the prettiest mind map software going (think omnigraffle etc) but for free it certainly is amazing value!
No, this one is definitely worth a look and has many powerful features.
Wufoo – Create Glorious Forms for your site…
Wufoo is stunning.
It allows you to design and deploy detailed forms that can be used to gather inforamtion, as a contact me page, for research, maintaining a mailing list and much much more.
What is extra spiffy about wufoo is that it will generate reports on your responses for you that you can also export as excel etc. Also it will host and generate the code for you to link to or even embed the form on a website made with iWeb via HTML Snippets, as well as myspace etc.
On top of that there is a theme designer which means your forms can look great and appear branded (by uploading your own logo or image)
A free account will give you up to three forms and up to 100 responses with premium accounts starting at a very reasonable low sum….Most people, however, shall probably never need more than the free service (unless its for business etc).
I use this one alot……enjoy!
Cooliris – Reloaded on the iPhone
jeez, I just installed the iPhone App (hot of the press) thanks to the lovely Jenny Lum letting me know that its available……..crikey it works reaaaaaally well, I was expecting it to be a lot slower than the safari app but hell no…..if anything it may even be faster!
For me the killer is being able to email images direct from the application, great for doing little bits of research on the bus etc. (I know not all of you are dorky beans like me!)
Definitely get this one guys and best of all its free!
Cooliris – The Cinematic Web…
Transform your browser into a lightning fast, cinematic way to discover the Web. This is the promise of Cooliris and it kinda delivers.
Basically it is a plugin for Safari that adds a button to the Safari window that when pressed will invoke the cooliris view where you will see purely the media contained within certain (supported) websites. At the moment it is fairly restricted to flickr, google, amazon etc but you can also easily optimise your own website to work with cooliris by going to developer.cooliris.com (they have made it really easy to do!).
Even though its still a bit green its defintely worth downloading and adds an extra dash of Oooooo! to your browsing experience!
