Free Website Tools
Free Website Tools

If you’ve been toying with the idea of creating iPhone apps and you’d like to get started with designing graphical user interface (GUI), or you’d like to get an overview of what kind of design elements it takes to design an iPhone app, check out MobileLove’s collection of iPhone design templates. The collection of iPhone stencils for wireframes, speech bubbles and high resolution vector elements makes it easy to get started and are a great inspiration to come up with your own designs.

Track increase in social media followers for your and your competitors’ Facebook and Twitter accounts with Wildfire’s Social Media Monitor. The company actually sells brand marketing services, but this free app can be useful if you want to track and compare your own versus your competitors’ social media efforts. You can also sign up to receive weekly updates with the most recent fan counts and growth over the past 7 days for several companies at a time.

If you have a large repetitive task at hand, or you find yourself doing the same type of editing over and over again, Photoshop Actions can be an amazing time saver. You can string together a series of tasks, like tool actions, menu commands and other editing features and record and save them as an action (Like Automator scripts on a Mac).

Photoshop comes with some actions already installed, or you can create your own actions to change the size of an image, apply filters and effects and then save your files in a specific format. Or click over to Visual Blast Magazine for a great collection of customized Photoshop Actions from around the web, like puzzle action, crystal ball, 3d cube and skin softening actions, postage stamp and vintage and curled edge actions.

For any search we’re used to simply typing a few keywords into a search engine, but what if you want to search better? What if you you’re searching for help from experts instead of just info from a news or other authoritative website? What if you’re searching for investigative reports on a topic or ancient history? How do you search better? Noodletools offers a very useful questionnaire you can use to refine your search and get better search results quicker. Simply answer a few questions and it’ll suggest the best sources to start your search.

You’ve been using free or premium WordPress templates for a while and have learned how to modify them, change their design and add functionality to them, and now you’re ready to build your own theme. With Themeshaper’s WordPress theme tutorial you’ll be able to create a theme for yourself with all the bells and whistles just how you like it. Your finished theme will be search engine optimized, include google-supported Microformat markup, have valid and logical semantic markup structure than can be used to create any layout, smart default CSS layouts, 2 widget areas coded to disappear when they’re empty and a lots of the typical WordPress stuff you expect from a theme.

“Chronicling the most curious, creative, and notable projects, stories, and events of the graphic design industry on a daily basis” is how Underconsideration’s Quipsologies is describing what they’re doing. Recent entries sure to inspire more great designs include products like a crumplable and waterproof maps, magazine title and logo designs, designs that sprung from the former Soviet Union, Susan Kare’s signed prints classic Apple icons, CMYK soft drinks, profiles of the Google Doodlers, different ways to think of six-pack abs, defunct airline designs, Drawing Exercises in Excel, and so on. Great way to wake up and inspire your designer brain!

Flash and ActionScript 3.0 user interface components can take lots of time to create, so why not use some ready-made, open source starter components, like the ones on MinimalComps.com ? The components on this site are lightweight, but extremely small and easy to use. In fact, the site is created purely with Minimal Components and comes in at about 60kb for the whole site! Choose from sliders, calendars, bar charts, numeric steppers, draggable windows, VSliders, HSliders, text areas, knobs and more. You can find more info on MinimalComps on Keith Peters’ blog at Bit-101.com.

Have a most vexing design problem and are running out of ideas and time? Put your brain into learning mode and run through a myriad of creativity and innovation techniques described at myoted.com. Look at dozens of techniques like reverse brainstorming (love this one!), using crazy ideas without censoring yourself, analogies and the cherry split.

If you’re already in the ‘tearing your hair out’ phase of your project – and we’ve all been there – try this all time favorite: “If you need to ‘see,’ look at something else” meaning you take a break from your current project and literally walk away and put your brain into a completely different environment. For example, if you’ve been stuck working at a desk, get out and ride a roller coaster, walk through a museum (modern art or classic) or strike up a conversation with a complete stranger. The idea is to get unstuck and open up your brain for new impressions, the food of creativity!

If you need a simple yet versatile FTP program, give Cyberducka try. This Open Source FTP program also handles FTP/TLS (FTP secured over SSL/TLS), SFTP (SSH Secure File Transfer), WebDAV (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning), Amazon S3, Google Storage, Google Docs, Windows Azure and Rackspace Cloud Files. Works with open cloud software from Eucalyptus and OpenStack. You can basically upload, download and synchronize anything from any server.

You can edit any text or binary file on the server in your preferred application, configure CloudFront and Rackspace to distribute your files, browse your Amazon S3 account like your hard disk, convert uploads to Google Docs format and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for image uploads. It also has bookmarking capabilities, advanced SSH features and supports Growl and Mac’s Keychain.

If you need to find which keywords are dominant within a body of text before you publish it, or that isn’t available online, copy and paste your text into PrioritySubmit’s keyword count tool. It’s a simple tool that can be very useful when checking an article for dominant keywords before posting it to your own website, or before publishing a press release for example. This tool also lets you exclude short words like it, he, etc.