Indeed, commercial software is being offered for download for FREE at giveawayoftheday.com. Software that would otherwise cost you some hard earned cash could be available for free. Granted, you have a 24 hour window to download the software but did I mention that it would be free? It’s worth checking out, even if some of the software are obscure.
Try ResizR, a web application that will resize your image. Especially useful for those one-off resizes and you don’t have an image editor handy. There’s also Microsoft’s PowerToy Image Resizer which, after installation, will add a right click context menu that will allow you to resize one or multiple images at once.
I thought I would mention this for a friend of mine who wanted to resize an image to meet the requirements of an ad. I asked him what it was for and tried to explain resolution versus size which ended up confusing him even more. Anyway, I hope these help out anybody else that just want to straight up resize an image.
Oh god, I’m so cheese with that title. Anyhow, on with the article.
I usually start a design out by opening a new document and adding all the required text and elements I need, such headlines, details, legal and logos. Depending on the images, I need a font that will work well with the overall theme or vice versa. More often than not, people can work with a limited pool of fonts on unlimited projects. Such is the case with people I work with, and I wonder how they get on with it. Their prevailing argument is that too much time can be wasted going through the font list, which is true. Taking into account that I have 1200+ fonts at the moment, I do spend a fair amount of time trying to find that perfect font.
At this point, I have so many fonts that I haven’t had the need or inclination to find more. Whenever I’m looking for something different I pop on over to 2 great sites that offer free downloads of fonts. Granted the majority will be free but the fonts available can be freeware, shareware, demos or public domain depending on the use. The downloads often include readme files with details on what you can do with the font. SearchFreeFonts.com has a huge library of 13,000+ free fonts and 23,000+ commercial fonts. And DaFont.com offers over 7,000+ fonts which are sometimes available in both Windows and MAC. Each site has their own features with articles and tips sections, so check them out. Either way, that’s a whole lot of free fonts.
I prefer to have a variety when it comes to fonts and a great way to manage them all is to use a font manager. The Font Thing is a fantastic app that allows you to browse, install, uninstall, view, print, copy, and delete multiple TrueType fonts at once. You can also write notes for each font, categorize them by serif, sans serif, script and whatnot, preview and save sample text, and even place them collections. The best part is that it’s FREE.
Update: I have come across another site where you can download even more free fonts at UrbanFonts.com
Then, use this to manage them: The Font Thing
There are an incredible selection of tools, software, add-ins and utilities that make the internet easier to manage and my life easy. The following are a few that I use for this site and at home/work use.
Internet:
Desktop Security: At this point it is always wise to set up your security in layers where one programs fails to detect a threat, another one will surely catch it. In the past I’ve only been aware of Norton and McAfee but I have come to understand that there so many programs out there that are available and free that offer equal to and sometimes substantially better protection.
WordPress Plugins:
Firefox Extensions:
Thunderbird Extensions:
The great thing about this is that these are all free. Some have options to upgrade to paid professional versions and most appreciate donations to continue to update and develop further improvements. Enjoy.
I’ve done my spring cleaning today and managed to finally set up my external hard drive. My big brother put together an awesome combination of Maxtor’s 200 GB hard drive with an inexpensive case. So now I have this great space to finally backup my great collection of music, photos, videos, work files and whatever else is mulling around in this machine. Besides manually copying files from my desktop to the external drive, I still want a great backup utility.
My first application to test is Window XP’s SyncToy v1.2 which is a free download from Microsoft. I’m already familiar with their TweakUI, Alt+Tab Replacement and ClearType Tuner.
SyncToy’s features that interested me:
Very simple UI
Easy to set up folder pairs
Ability to copy, move and syncronize files
I wasn’t looking for much really, just something to backup what I needed. Installation was a breeze, it didn’t even need to reboot so I can get right into backing up. SyncToy works by creating folder pairs and syncronizing them from the “Left” location to the “Right” location. Clear enough. After I’ve got all my pairs set up and I ran them all once to get it all started. Once completed, I had a brief moment of satisfaction. It didn’t last long because I was already thinking of the next time and I certainly didn’t want to have to run this all again manually.
Though SyncToy didn’t have a built-in autosync, there was a way to schedule the SyncToy to run all pairs or individual pairs. That little bit is actually available within the program’s help menu. However, after following the tutorial I couldn’t make it work for me. I was running the scheduled task and it just opened SyncToy without actually running the backup pairs.
Another con is that I can not change the location of the folder pairs. I will have to create new pairs which seems time consuming if I wanted to back up files to a new location.
Altogether, SyncToy ran smoothly and easy to use but it didn’t have the automatic feature I wanted. It’d be great if I could set it and forget it.