modifoo

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or get my latest posts directly in your mailbox. Thanks for coming to the Foo!

These past weeks I have worked on a couple of web pages. In the course of it I came across some helpful sites that I want to share with you.

Flash files (from good to awesomely mindblowing)

Flash Den is a relatively new site, offering mainly Flash files. They have all from small pre-loaders to full webpages. And most of them of an exceptional quality.

In addition they also have royalty free music loops, some video files and graphics on offer. Plus a few fonts. But their main business is Flash.

Stock Photos (affordable)

iStockPhotos offers royalty free photographs for all kinds of usages. You can chose the size of the picture you buy, and a photo can cost just above $1. They have gained both size and quality, but unfortunately have increased the prices, while lowering the pay-out for the original photographers.

Still, you can easily browse for hours in their exhaustive library, searching for subjects, themes, emotions, colors, even whitespaces. Additionally, iStockPhoto also offers graphics, good vectors, cheap videos and lower quality flash files. One nice feature is that you can save interesting photos in your own lightboxes, leaving them for purchase at a later point. Or you can share your lightbox with a client.

If you have some good photos rotating away on your harddisk, you can start selling those pictures at iStockPhoto. Hey, you even can get some of my photos there.

Ajaxising (without knowing Ajax)

For the portfolio section of our new webpage I used a donation-ware component by Kevin Miller, called LightWindow. Besides adding that Ajax feel to your website (opening links without having to re-load), it also enables you to play back pretty much any media format around. Lots of options.

And if you use it, send some PayPal love to Kevin, so that he can get his well deserved Power Book Pro.

Shopping Cart (open source)

If you need a cart system for your website and you want to avoid having to pay hundreds of dollars in royalty payments (and probably some monthly fees), Zen Cart is definitely worth a look. Though it has a somewhat messy admin interface, it leaves you space for many tweakings. There are numerous extensions available, such as plug-ins, language packs, buttons and a couple of free templates.

See it live on our company’s brand new (and Norwegian language) shopping site.

Content management (minus the pain)

Now 1 1/2 years old, this blog has always run on WordPress. Though I’ve had some Windows like experiences, by and large I am impressed by this powerfool — and free — tool. So impressed, that I have used it as the CMS for our new webpage.

With the new version of WordPress, I can even be lax with using links. A page that is really located at, say, www.abitofmagic.no/english/services/eng-crew can also be reached by www.abitofmagic.no/eng. The magic happens without me having to do anything.

Of the many good plug-ins around, the one I want to mention today is WordPress automated plug-in, which takes the pain out of upgrading your blog. Which is especially nice when the frequency of those updates increases, and exponentially higher when you have more than one copy of WP running. I’ve used it on most of the 5+ WordPress sites that I maintain, without a single glitch.

Graphic Freebies (quality, not quantity)

One of my favourite blogs on graphic design, BitBox, regularly offers high quality freebies, be it web 2.0 buttons, high res photoshop brushes or vector graphics.

Photoblogging (free)

Pixelpost is to photos what wordpress is to writing. One great software to easily, yet beautifully, churn your digital photos into an on-going on-line publication. Lots of followers, translating to many exciting add-ons. Recently they also took the important step of easing the process of upgrading to new versions.

For fun, I am occasionally posting pictures on my pblog over at visualnary.com

If you have a Mac and a video camera, there is a nifty tool called iDive (“the iPhoto of video”). Good program if you want to organize your shots, it integrates into Final Cut Pro or iMovie, lets you keep compressed versions of the footage. And it gets good to very good ratings across the range.

Sometimes you have to produce photographs from films, so-called frame grabs. In Final Cut Pro this entails several clicks for each frame, something that becomes tiresome after a while. Also, if your material is anamorphic, you have to resize it in a separate programme, adding yet more clicks.Enter Movie Frame Grabber, a simple programme for the Mac.You drag a QT into the blue window, then you chose the frame you want, hit “Save Frame” and you are done.Much easier than using QT or FCP.One thing I noticed - and I am torn between calling it a feature or a bug - is that each frame gets exported in the same size as your windows is sized. I.E. When you have a 600×400 QT file, but your window is, say 605×605, you get a square picture. The good thing is that Movie Frame Grabber does a decent job of uprezzing. So if you need some quick framegrabs, this is a big time saver.

Wishes

What I would love are the following future features:

• De-interlacing
• Automatic naming and numbering of exported frames.
• Option to export in native QT size (with option of having 16:9). Option of having 25%, 50%, 200%, 400% sizes. Throw in some advanced resizing calculations, and this could become a powerful tool that people would spend money on. This reviewer included.
• Display of current window size.
• A Text saying “Drop QT file here” instead of the blue screen — this threw me off at first; blue screen to me suggested that I would have to plug in a DV source.
• Support for keyboard control. Space = start/stop. Arrow left/right = one frame advance/back.

That said, great little – and free – program.(Review at Macupdate.)

When I was a kid, I loved making flipbooks. They could have between 2 and 100 pictures. Flipbook.info is a great site that has many videos of antique flipbooks.

I was delighted to find out that there is software to print out your films, and make a thumb-able movie. For the Mac there is the free DYI flipbooks, and if you are on Windows, you can start your search here.

A US sandwich chain is taking the concept further and made a human flipbook:

And a fun how-did-they-make-it film:

Gems from the Web:

• Checking the back focus - A brief explanation alongside a printable siemens star for easy back focus calibration.
• ISO 12233 Test Chart - Resolution test chart for HD
• Video Resolution Test Patterns - Nice collection of downloadable test patterns for video cameras
• bartek:bargiel : iGTD - Freeware organizer for the Mac
• MacUser: Want to download YouTube videos? Kiss them - Simple way of downloading YouTube videos that are worth keeping
• MacUser: 10.4.9 brings new phone sync compatability - …but my p990i - the so-called top-of-the-line phone from Sony Ericsson - still does not sync.

On the norwegian language site video1 I found a nicely compiled list of recources of OSX software. All levels of experience catered for. For those who are not fluent in Norwegian, here it comes:

Newbies

iMovie

• Apple iMovie Support
• Apple iMovie Tutorials
• The “Unofficial” iMovie FAQ
• Lynda.com - iMovie Video Tutorials

(more…)