Flavors.me is a great service for anyone who wants to build their own Website to share all of their profiles on the Web. It allows just about anyone to design a personal site, even those of us without design skills. You can test out Flavors.me for free but for $20.00 a year you can have access to even more design customization, use your own domain and get informative stats on who is visiting your site.
To learn more about Flavors.me, check out the screencast below:
Adobe Ideas (iTunes link) is an app for the iPhone and iPad that helps you quickly sketch out design ideas on a blank canvas or a photo. There’s also a handy color palette generator for use on a new photo or an existing one. It’s completely free so even if you’re not very creative (you’ll see my level of creativity in this screencast ) it’s still fun to use and can be useful for sharing simple design ideas with others.
To see the Adobe Ideas app in action, watch the screencast below:
If you’re one of the unlucky (or lucky, depending how you look at it) individuals that is required to put on a clean, crisp dress shirt every day – and often find yourself struggling to find a shirt that actually fits correctly – then Blank Label may be just what you’re looking for.
Blank Label is a web-based application that allows you to pick the fabric, style, and measurements to create your very own custom dress shirt. It took me about 10 minutes to create a shirt the first time I used it, and the price seems relatively fair – even though I’ve never actually bought a mens dress shirt before.
To learn more about Blank Label, watch the screencast below:
Repper is a fun tool that helps you create fancy patterns out of any old photo.
All you need to do is upload a photo and then use the Repper tool to create crazy patterns. The image above is what I created and then added to my Twitter profile page. You just need to be sure to use a “tile” background option to make the pattern look right.
To see how to use Repper to make your own patterns, watch the screencast below:
If you’d like to send holiday cards to your clients but don’t have the time or the money to buy, customize, and mail out plain old greeting cards, then eCards for Business may be just what you (and the happy little trees!) have been looking for.
Pingg.com, an online invitation and party planning service, is behind eCards for business and they were nice enough to set us up with our own account to try out the new service.
In short, eCards for business allow you to create eCards that are branded with your company logo, which you can provide to your employees to send out to their clients. The eCards can be viewed on a Webpage with a custom URL, via email, text message, and/or you can opt to have pingg print out and mail the cards to your chosen recipients.
A really great feature of eCards for business is a customized Splash Page that pingg will create for you. You can add a logo, choose specific card designs that you want your employees to use, and add notes. After your Splash Page has been created you’ll just need to point your employees to the URL and they can simply click on a link to create eCards for their clients with your companies branding and specific designs. You can also encourage your employees to use your company eCards to send their family members holiday greetings. Your eCard Website is also completely ad-free. (In my screencast I don’t make this point clear – note that if you sign up for eCards for business, there is no additional charge for removing ads). You can find pricing information and learn more about how pingg will create your customized Splash Page here.
To learn more about eCards for business and see it in action, check out the screencast below (best viewed in HD in full screen):
Card.ly gives you a really easy way to create an online business card containing links to all of your online profiles. Card.ly doesn’t stop there though – you can also add contact information, an ‘about me’ section, and RSS feeds.
When you sign up, you’ll select a custom URL. Mine is www.card.ly/molly. You can then add your usernames for the various social networking sites you belong to like Digg, Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook. The next step is to create your ‘about me’ section and then add as much, or as little, contact information as you want shown. You can add your personal Website, your address, phone numbers, and IM usernames. Lastly, select your design and your page will be set and ready to go.
There is a free account (which is what I used for this screencast) and a paid-for subscription option. Paid accounts get access to more themes, they’re ad-free, and you can use a custom domain.
To see Card.ly in action, watch the screencast below (best viewed in HD in full screen):
Pictaculous is a great little tool for creating color palettes out of images. Whether it’s your favorite family photo or your favorite Website logo, Pictaculous can generate a color palette out of it in seconds.
To use Pictaculous, just upload an image and click on “Get My Palette”. You’ll then be shown the color palette pulled from your image as well as suggested color palettes from Kuler and COLOURlovers. You can use this data to help create a design based on your Website logo or to simply create a design around your favorite photo.
You can download the Adobe Swatch File and email it to friends or co-workers. There’s no sign up involved and the whole process literally takes seconds.
To see Pictaculous in action, watch the screencast below (best viewed in HD in full screen):
Readability is a bookmarklet that allows you to quickly remove distracting ads from a Website. Just choose the text and margin size you prefer and drag the bookmarklet up to your bookmarks toolbar. Whenever you’re on a site that is cluttered with too many distractions, click on the Readability bookmarklet and you’ll be presented with an ad-free environment to read your article.
Before:
SFWeekly article before the Readability Bookmarklet is enabled
…and after:
SFWeekly article after enabling Readability bookmarklet
To see Readability in action, watch the screencast below (best viewed in HD in full screen):
Fences is a free software by Stardock that helps you quickly group your desktop icons onto different blocks (or Fences) on your desktop. You can choose to create Fences from scratch and add all of your icons manually or you can have Fences do all of the work and organize them for you.
Besides just helping you organize your mess of icons, Fences also gives you an option to auto-hide all of your icons by double clicking anywhere on your desktop. You can bring them back by clicking again. You can choose to have certain icons or entire fences remain open on your desktop when you auto-hide. You can re-size and move the Fences anywhere on your desktop and easily drag icons from one Fence to another.
I usually keep icons hidden on my desktop because the clutter makes me feel unorganized and I never really know where to begin if I were to clean it up. Fences cleaned my mess up for me – and for that I’m very thankful .
To see Fences in action, watch the screencast below (best viewed in HD in full screen):
BgPatterns is a neat tool which allows you to create different patterns that you can use for your wallpaper or on your blog or website. It’s free to use and you don’t even need to register in order to create and download your patterns.
You can start from scratch with one of their images which can be resized, rotated, and made more transparent. You can also select a texture for the background and customize the colors. If you’ve signed up for an account, you can save your patterns so you can find them later. You can also just download them if you don’t want to be bothered signing up for an account. There is also a BgPatterns gallery that displays recent and popular patterns. You can vote on them, view them, and even download them for yourself. To see BgPatterns in action, watch the screencast below:
) it’s still fun to use and can be useful for sharing simple design ideas with others.
