Techie Buzz » Designing Tools http://techie-buzz.com Know your technology head on Sun, 22 Nov 2009 08:01:00 +0000 en hourly 1 How Can I Personalize My Cursors On My System http://techie-buzz.com/designing-tools/how-can-i-personalize-my-cursors-on-my-system.html?utm_source=subscriber&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss http://techie-buzz.com/designing-tools/how-can-i-personalize-my-cursors-on-my-system.html#comments Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:28:10 +0000 gautam http://techie-buzz.com/?p=11160 You might also like: ]]> Personalizing cursors can be fun ! And more fun when you make your favorite Disney characters as your cursors and the kids at home would love it ! If you thought customizing your cursor was a difficult task, then you were wrong as it is a no brainer job with the readily and freely available software AniTuner, which allows users to personalize their cursors.

This means that you can now animate your cursors and revamp their mundane look. You can do this by importing your favourite animated images in the format of GIF and then animate your cursor frame by frame. You can further, customize the appearance of your system’s Windows as per your desires. Next, you can also convert images to animations and display them on your website, emails, manuals, applications and documents.

The striking feature of AniTuner is that its inbuilt features can generate animated cursors from your regular animated GIF and AVI images. In addition, you can also import the existing static images in formats like BMP, PNG, GIF, PSD, ICO, CUR and turn them into animated cursors. Also, you can edit, remove and replace the frames of animated cursors with the help of this tool. You can further manipulate the duration of the animation by accessing the preview feature of this tool. The size of the cursors created by this tool can vary between different sizes. Also, the color depth of the cursor can vary from 1bpp to 32bpp.

This application offers special support to 32 bit cursors equipped with 8-bit alpha channel. When you download the installation kit of AniTuner, you get a help file, an animated tutorial file in Flash format and some really good samples of animated cursors. All this is available for free download. You do not need the aid of any other software for accessing the features of this application.

Have fun customizing and be rest assured that your friends will be amazed once they see what you have and will soon want something similar for themselves !!

[ Download AniTuner ]



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How Can I Personalize My Cursors On My System originally appeared on Techie Buzz written by Gautam . on Wednesday 18th November 2009 10:28:10 PM. Please read the Terms of Use for fair usage guidance.

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]]> http://techie-buzz.com/designing-tools/how-can-i-personalize-my-cursors-on-my-system.html/feed 0 Clean CSS: Web Based CSS Formatter and Optimizer http://techie-buzz.com/designing-tools/clean-css-web-based-css-formatter-and-optimizer.html?utm_source=subscriber&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss http://techie-buzz.com/designing-tools/clean-css-web-based-css-formatter-and-optimizer.html#comments Sat, 19 Sep 2009 10:57:32 +0000 Srikanth AD http://techie-buzz.com/?p=7383 You might also like: ]]> Clean CSS is a web based tool for CSS formatting and optimization, a handy application for web designers. It basically takes your CSS code and makes it compact and clean. It helps you get comparatively small CSS file size, with shorthand coding.

CleanCSS doesn’t include a validator which points outs errors in your code. So, its advisable to make sure that your code is well formed via the W3C Validator.

To get started, just copy and paste your CSS code into the ‘CSS input’ field on the site. There is also an option to upload your CSS file from a URL. It enables you to choose the compression standards ranging between high readability and smallest size. Other options include,

  • Sorting selectors and properties
  • Optimize selectors and their properties
  • Discard invalid properties
  • Remove unnecessary backslashes etc.,

As in the above image, it provides you with the optimized CSS code, along with the input, output file sizes and the compression ratio. It’s a must bookmark tool for web designers to quickly format and optimize CSS code.



Clean CSS: Web Based CSS Formatter and Optimizer originally appeared on Techie Buzz written by Srikanth AD on Saturday 19th September 2009 06:57:32 AM. Please read the Terms of Use for fair usage guidance.

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]]> http://techie-buzz.com/designing-tools/clean-css-web-based-css-formatter-and-optimizer.html/feed 0 Create 3D Animations Easily With Blender http://techie-buzz.com/designing-tools/create-3d-animations-easily-with-blender.html?utm_source=subscriber&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss http://techie-buzz.com/designing-tools/create-3d-animations-easily-with-blender.html#comments Mon, 07 Sep 2009 17:00:12 +0000 Omkar Dutta http://techie-buzz.com/?p=6982 You might also like: ]]> Blender is an open source software for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback. Blender has proven to be an extremely fast and versatile design instrument.

Blender Animation

The software has a personal touch, offering a unique approach to the world of Three Dimensions. You can use it to create TV commercials, to make technical visualizations, business graphics, to do some morphing, or design user interfaces. You can easy build and manage complex environments. The renderer is versatile and extremely fast. All basic animation principles are well implemented.

Blender Animation

Features

  • Revolutionary non-overlapping and non-blocking UI delivers unsurpassed workflow
  • Flexible and fully configurable window layout with as many screen setups as you prefer
  • Built-in text editor for annotations and editing Python scripts
  • Custom themes
  • Consistent interface across all platforms
  • Fast skeleton creation mode
  • Interactive 3D paint for vertex weighting
  • Fast envelope based skinning
  • Audio playback, mixing and editing support for sound synchronization
  • Timeline offers fast acces to many playback functions, autokey, help markers
  • Graphical logic editor for defining interactive behavior without programming
  • Support all OpenGL lighting modes, including transparencies, Animated and reflection-mapped textures
  • Playback of games and interactive 3D content without compiling or preprocessing
  • Audio, using the SDL toolkit
  • Multi-layering of Scenes for overlay interfaces
  • A range of 3D object types including polygon meshes, NURBS surfaces, bezier and B-spline curves, metaballs, vector fonts.
  • Smooth soft selection editing tools for organic modeling
  • Python scripting access for custom tools
  • vSupports float images as well as regular 8 bits images
  • Read and write support for many other 2D and 3D formats
  • 2D – TGA, JPG, PNG, OpenEXR, DPX, Cineon, Radiance HDR, Iris, SGI Movie, IFF, AVI and Quicktime GIF, TIFF, PSD, MOV (Windows and Mac OS X)
  • 3D - 3D Studio, AC3D, COLLADA, FBX Export, DXF, Wavefront OBJ, DEC Object File Format, DirectX, Lightwave, MD2, Motion Capture, Nendo, OpenFlight, PLY, Pro Engineer, Radiosity, Raw Triangle, Softimage, STL, TrueSpace, VideoScape, VRML, VRML97, X3D Extensible 3D, xfig export

Blender is an excellent animation tool. It works on Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Mac OS X (PPC and Intel), Linux (i386), Linux (PPC), FreeBSD 5.4 (i386), SGI Irix 6.5 and Sun Solaris 2.8 (sparc).

[ Download Blender ]



Create 3D Animations Easily With Blender originally appeared on Techie Buzz written by Omkar Dutta on Monday 7th September 2009 01:00:12 PM. Please read the Terms of Use for fair usage guidance.

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]]> http://techie-buzz.com/designing-tools/create-3d-animations-easily-with-blender.html/feed 4 Free Visual CSS Editor http://techie-buzz.com/designing-tools/free-visual-css-editor.html?utm_source=subscriber&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss http://techie-buzz.com/designing-tools/free-visual-css-editor.html#comments Mon, 17 Aug 2009 20:30:26 +0000 Keith Dsouza http://techie-buzz.com/designing-tools/free-visual-css-editor.html You might also like: ]]> CSS definitely speeds up website design and coding, and also helps in reusing styles across your HTML page, however many designers are used to coding CSS and then applying it to the webpages to test them out.

visual_css_editor

Arduo CSS Editor is a handy that will allow you to visually create and edit CSS files, the tool is definitely useful it you want to preview your changes as you edit the CSS files, in addition to that Ardou CSS also provides users with property selectors making it more easier to create styles for you HTML pages.

optimize_css_content

Once you have created your CSS styles you can also optimize it for the web using the inbuilt CSS optimizer (CSS Tidy) and save it.

Arduo CSS Features

  • Edit CSS files through visual interface
  • Edit CSS through text editor with syntax highlighter.
  • Allow CSS compression to optimize site performance.
  • Allow preview in external CSS files.
  • Allows to edit CSS property through dialogs .
  • Show preview of the file being edited.

Download Arduo CSS Editor



Free Visual CSS Editor originally appeared on Techie Buzz written by Keith Dsouza on Monday 17th August 2009 04:30:26 PM. Please read the Terms of Use for fair usage guidance.

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]]> http://techie-buzz.com/designing-tools/free-visual-css-editor.html/feed 2 Create CSS Dropdown Menus Online http://techie-buzz.com/designing-tools/create-css-dropdown-menu-online.html?utm_source=subscriber&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss http://techie-buzz.com/designing-tools/create-css-dropdown-menu-online.html#comments Mon, 03 Aug 2009 06:04:00 +0000 Keith Dsouza http://techie-buzz.com/designing-tools/create-css-dropdown-menu-online.html You might also like: ]]> Back in the days when I worked for a popular Indian web portal, my work day included receiving designs from the design team and painfully converting them into HTML based pages.

And I did do it using tables and font tags and it took me several hours to convert a design into a workable HTML page, however coming back to the future, everything is so easy these days, you can build full blown websites online without even having to have any coding skills.

pure_css_menu_online

In a similar way creating drop down menus usually required lots of coding and CSS skills, but thanks to Pure CSS Menu you can now create CSS Dropdown menus online for free without even having to know a single bit of CSS or HTML.

The website is dead simple, you can add items, parameters configure links and choose from pre-defined templates.

Once you are satisfied with the menu you can download it to your local PC and then add it to your own website.

For more information watch a tutorial video on how you can create CSS dropdown menus online using Pure CSS Menu.

Tutorial Video to Create CSS Dropdown Menus Online

Couldn’t get simpler than this could it? Thanks Mayur.



Create CSS Dropdown Menus Online originally appeared on Techie Buzz written by Keith Dsouza on Monday 3rd August 2009 02:04:00 AM. Please read the Terms of Use for fair usage guidance.

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]]> http://techie-buzz.com/designing-tools/create-css-dropdown-menu-online.html/feed 1 Musicians, artists, and dancers platform for self promotion http://techie-buzz.com/internet-tools/musicians-artists-and-dancers-platform-for-self-promotion.html?utm_source=subscriber&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss http://techie-buzz.com/internet-tools/musicians-artists-and-dancers-platform-for-self-promotion.html#comments Sat, 23 May 2009 11:42:16 +0000 gautam http://techie-buzz.com/?p=4421 You might also like: ]]> If you are a musician, artist or a dancer and if you are looking for an easy and a quick way to promote yourself, you should take a look at iOpera.

Still in their beta, they have three products to choose from -

  • iOpera Showroom – platform to showcase musicflim productions
  • iOpera House – exclusively for singers
  • iOpera Manager – platform for artists to create, powerful, rich websites within minutes.

While iOpera Showroom and iOpera House are yet to be released, let us take a peek at all the functionalities iOpera Manager has to offer.

With iOpera Manager you can create your own website with just a few clicks. Use any computer connected to the internet and you can add video, music, text files, pictures and all other forms of media files. It also comes with an inbuilt Search Engine, that helps you market yourself and also find media content you might be interested in.

iOpera

Some of the other features are:

  • You can promote yourself, a festival, a concert tour,
  • You can share your schedule, performances, recordings and picture,
  • Now your friends, family and audience can be updated with latest updates about you.

iOpera is a paid monthly service, which costs $3.29 a month. Try the 7 days free trial and decide if iOpera is the solution you’ve been looking for.

[ Visit iOpera ]



Musicians, artists, and dancers platform for self promotion originally appeared on Techie Buzz written by Gautam . on Saturday 23rd May 2009 07:42:16 AM. Please read the Terms of Use for fair usage guidance.

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]]> http://techie-buzz.com/internet-tools/musicians-artists-and-dancers-platform-for-self-promotion.html/feed 1 How To Measure Pixels On A Webpage? http://techie-buzz.com/designing-tools/how-to-measure-pixels-on-a-webpage.html?utm_source=subscriber&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss http://techie-buzz.com/designing-tools/how-to-measure-pixels-on-a-webpage.html#comments Sat, 18 Apr 2009 14:27:00 +0000 Keith Dsouza http://techie-buzz.com/designing-tools/how-to-measure-pixels-on-a-webpage.html You might also like: ]]> Quite recently one of my friend on (follow me @keithdsouza) asked how one could measure pixels between any two points on a webpage?

There was something about this question, that made me realize that, I have been using a that helps users to measure pixels on a webpage, in a quick and easy way for ages now.

The Web Developer extension for is something I rely on quite often for several reasons, I feel will not fit this post, but to answer this certain question, you can easily measure pixels on any webpage using the Web Developer add-on.

If you do not already have this useful add-on installed in Firefox, download it first and then visit the toolbar or the Tools menu and click on Miscellaneous –> Display Ruler.

view_screen_ruler_firefox

Once you have enabled the ruler you can measure any object on the webpage to determine the exact pixels used for the HTML object. Take a look at the screenshot below to see how much pixels are used to display the Techie Buzz logo.

exact_pixel_measurements

This is one extension we would recommend to everyone, there are several other features which come in really handy and can make it a must have Firefox add-on.

We have a compiled list of cool for programmers and designers coming up soon, it’s been on a backburner, but this question has led me to work and publish that post faster, so stay tuned and visit back regularly.

Download Web Developer Firefox Add-on



How To Measure Pixels On A Webpage? originally appeared on Techie Buzz written by Keith Dsouza on Saturday 18th April 2009 10:27:00 AM. Please read the Terms of Use for fair usage guidance.

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