• Pressgram

    Pressgram is an Instagram like image sharing app built for WordPress. Best of all, you retain full ownership of your images. Support it on Kickstarter!

  • TJ and Dave

    This week one of my favorite improv groups, TJ & Dave, are on my favorite podcast, Radiolab. It is fascinating.

    When TJ Jagodowski and Dave Pasquesi get on stage they introduce themselves, work the crowd a bit … and then, the lights go off. And when the lights come back on, they’re just standing there, staring at each other. The audience is waiting, wondering what’s going to happen. And so are TJ and Dave.

  • ImageOptim

    I guarantee my jpgs, gifs and pngs are smaller than yours. That’s because of ImageOptim. This utility is a mandatory step when I create websites. It runs, at the time of this writing, 9 separate image optimization tools on your images to reduce their sizes. Best of all it is totally lossless, only removes pieces of information you don’t use, and is Free!

  • When I design, the annoying part of getting my designs in Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop on the web, is the export process. It can take a long time to get all the elements in my design exported out as web usable images. Today I ran across 2 useful utilities that can greatly speed the process.

    CSS Hat

    CSS Hat takes Photoshop layer effects and translates them into valid CSS3 markup. As long as you are styling with layer styles, you can get the applicable code in CSS.

    Slicy

    Slicy, likewise, takes Photoshop layers and exports each one as a transparent PNG, JPG, or GIF based on your layers export settings. Especially useful if you are layering image elements.

    While you can achieve both effects by spending a little time, these utilities can speed up your workflow if you are doing this kind of work a lot.

  • the levelator

    Do you have a podcast? Then you should really be using the free audio utility The Levelator. I spent many years trying to get my podcast audio to sound uniform and this utility does automatically.