Cool flower, right. The animator (or possibly just uploader) Ben Reubold credits Freesound.org with the audio, and I just hopped on over to that site which looks like a great resource for free audio.
Design Utilities/Helpers
Yes, I too can’t resist something called Cyber Monday. So this code… 796201V6 … will get you 25% off any download-able items (so anything except our hard drive deal) and it can be used in the next 24 hours!
Also our master template author, Tibi has brought forth from the fiery lavas of pure Flash, a master work we’re called The Deep Linking Multimedia Template. This one has sections for Audio, Video, Photos and tons more! Plus a very hypnotic animated background. Check it out below…
And if you don’t know what Alernativa is (like me a few minutes ago) its a3d technology for creating multiplayer Flash games and projects. Wait, instead of that entire video just check out this cool picture…
Check out these next 3 ray guns that Brian Z is prepping for a soon-to-be-for-sale 10 pack. Like his last royalty free vector art set, these will be nice and affordable. Click to embiggen them for more detail…
Okay I have a tendency to announce things as “the greatest thing, since the last thing”, but I am really impressed with Tibi’s latest work (his website btw, is here). If God made Flash templates (directly) this latest piece of his would come close to matching that. And this template actually has two variations included for the same price. One with and one without a Paypal cart. So if you’re selling prints of your photos or artwork, viewers can add whatever image they are seeing to the cart, and checkout. All you need to do to set things up is give the template your Paypal email address. That simple. And prints are just one idea, you can sell anything. Jump below to check out more details or view the actual template in action here.
Continuing our week of new stuff, here’s another first for CartoonSmart: A HUGE collection of royalty free vector art. We’re calling this the Props, Parts and Gadgets Collection and it has 500 pieces of art you can use anywhere, commercial or personal projects. And for a brief moment in time, all this will be priced at just $10. If you’re familiar with other vector clip art sites, $10 usually buys you one or two pieces of art and the licensing isn’t always as kind.
This collection has every piece in .ai (Adobe Illustrator) format, as well as Flash files of the artwork.
These were all made by Brian Zaikowski which you all might recognize from past blog articles featuring his work at DementedDenizens.com
WebDesignShock.com is giving away this darn cool freebie. Its a Photoshop file with lots of interface elements (buttons of all types, menus, keyboard designs, sliders, etc) and it also contains a couple fonts. You’ve still got to do a bit of work to get each element out of the file and into your project, be that an Android app or otherwise, but the price is right: free.
Alright, here’s my kind of non-video-based learning: cheat sheets. And this site QuicklyCode.com has plenty. They take user submitted cheat sheets and users rate the best. Which really is a fantastic idea for a site. Its like Am I Hot or Not for homework. So there’s a whole variety of approaches to remembering that one thing you never can. And if you have a printer, you can print a ton out, paste them on the walls and start making abstract connections among them to uncover elitist conspiracies… (seriously do that, you’ll find something)
Also I’ve mentioned this before here, but I’m still using a fantastic app called Snippet for remembering code. Worth checking out if you’re on a mac.
Now of course nothing beats high definition video training . Ughghh (Krusty groan). Its shameless I know, but hey, I gotta work on my SEO some of the time here.
Well here’s a really cool idea for a site which specializes in cool ideas for other sites. Check it out… Area 51, Stack Exchange . So someone proposes an idea for a site, and then other people commit to using it. When a proposed site reaches 100% Commitment (I’m not sure how many people that is) it goes into the Beta stage, where the site actually gets a temp domain and people start contributing real topics.
Also there’s no shortage of cool graphics throughout the site.
Well freaky in the sense that Chrome has Flash “enabled by default”. Awwwwww yeeah. So if you’ve downloaded Chrome, you’ve already got Flash ready, no more separate plug in updates. They have mated. Which brings me to Chrome, and I should have mentioned this weeks ago….
Get it. I like it way more than Safari and Firefox on the Mac. Aesthetically and otherwise. Well, who cares what I like aesthetically. It does seem much faster than Firefox, and much much faster than Safari which at one time seemed like a quick browser to me, and now feels like the slowest. And by “feels” I mean, I see a lot of spinning color wheels waiting for Safari to figure out what to do with Flash or a YouTube video or whatever.
Here’s the best part though. Tucked inside Chrome are really handy developer tools. Hit up View > Developer Tools, then Enable Resource Tracking ( I only for the current session ) and then you get a plethora of tools for seeing what’s really going on behind the scenes (see the screengrab below). And I do realize not everyone will start drooling over seeing how many milliseconds it took for a graphic to load or unmatched DIV tags, but you can do some pretty cool stuff too. Its worth exploring if you deem yourself a web developer.
Plus Chrome has a ton of themes. So if you look like a hippy, your web browser probably can too. My theme is none other than Late Night. It is black.
