Creation

Probably my last 'find' of the month from Yaëlle Blog.



PictureFlow is an excellent AS2 implementation of iTunes7 Coverflow. It was developed to offer high 3D visual impact and compact interface to present on your web, a large collection of images. It is driven by an XML file in which you can tune your set of pictures and comments. Since 2.7 version, it is linked with the excellent Shadowbox from Michael J. I. Jackson which can overlay full size media when you click on it. Yaëlle also provides the previous version 2.6 with LightBox2. You can download the installation kits for free from Yaëlle Blog under Creative Common License

Don't you just love it when you find something a client wants - and it's free!

You can publish your brochures and newsletters as Page turning e-books at Yudu Freedom. All you need is a PDF and you can be publishing online in no time.

Whilst as designers we're all a bit fed up with 'web 2.0' website designs by now, clients still like them so I've been looking for some stripy repeating background tiles for a clients website. Of course I found loads and I also came across a very useful 'Stripe Generator' that's well worth checking out if you need stripes.

There are now so many 'Free Font' sites on the web it's becoming more and more difficult to find useful fonts for web or print design. Whilst there is no substitute for perfectly crafted fonts from established foundries such as Linotype and Bitstream - or some of the more avant garde font designers such as Typo5 - free alternatives can sometimes be a lifesaver when designs are just at concept stage.

The best laid out free font site I've come across is Better Fonts. Better fonts has more than 10,000 free fonts available to download and an interface that makes it easy to find the font you want from amongst them.

Well worth checking out.

As I'm forever looking up which fonts are installed by default in Windows XP and what the Mac variations are I thought I'd put this chart here for reference. For more information about all the various mac and XP fonts that are, or can be, installed check out X vs XP.

Lord Coffee has written a tutorial showing how to embed Flash Videos in your Serendipity blog with the most needed features like Timeline, Volume etc. Excellent work!

You can read the tutorial on Lord Coffee's site, where it's available with all the necessary files, in both English and German.

After a fortnight of frenzied polling - and I like to think that twenty two can be considered a frenzy, I'd like to say thanks to everyone who voted for 'A button for Dave's Serendipity themes'. You've not chosen one button, you've chosen two! These are the winners and I'll be putting them up on Dave's Serendipity themes sometime this week.

Matt Western over at 10 Gallon Radio has asked me for a button to put on his site linking to my Serendipity themes site. I haven't got one! So, I've put a few here to try them out.








Feel free to vote for your favourite in the sidebar poll. It runs left to right, top row then bottom row.

Well, I finally took the plunge and installed IE7 on my Macbookpro! Of course, before I did, I looked at all the alternatives for keeping IE6 running too.

Microsoft's 'Virtual PC' virtualisation runs IE6 in new window on the desktop and works perfectly for testing

Evolt.org have standalone installers for Internet Explorer 5, 5.5 & 6 available for download but I was concerned about some of the library files being overwritten when I installed IE7 so I ended up installing Microsoft's 'Virtual PC' virtualisation.

It's a fairly weighty download at around 500Mb but it's a handy solution. Basically, it runs IE6 in a separate install of windows inside a new window on the desktop and works perfectly for testing. I had some difficulties connecting to my Airport network and ended up connecting to my network over ethernet. Other than that the installation was straightforward.

Now I wish I'd allocated more space to the bootcamp partition on my Macbookpro!

You can get more info on IE6 and virtualisation and download everything you need over at Microsoft's IE blog.