Web design tools

There are a lot of widgets out there. So many, in fact, that sorting through them can be absolutely daunting. Joining the fray of sites that attempt to solve this problem is Widgipedia, a site that catalogs and hosts widgets, both Web-based and downloads. We've covered competitor Widgetbox several times, and the two sites are quite similar. Where Widgipedia differs is in mixing up widgets that run on different platforms: those that run right in your browser and ones you download for various engines such as Mac OS X's Dashboard and Yahoo Widgets. The result is a diverse … Read more

If you ever find yourself needing to throw a basic site up on the Web quickly, it would be worth a few minutes of your time to check out Weebly, the 2.0 version of which launched today. It is a free Web design and hosting system that takes nearly all the pain out of creating a site.

Weebly has big gaps in its feature set, but as a quick-and-dirty site host, it's not bad. I really like its simplicity. You can start by selecting a page layout from Weebly's templates (all of which look good), or just … Read more

Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen, in conversation with CNET News.com Senior Writer Martin LaMonica, dropped a bombshell this morning: Adobe will release a Web-based version of Photoshop within six months. See the News.com story, Adobe to take Photoshop online, for details.

There are other online photo editors already (see our coverage of Fauxto, Picnik, Pixoh, Pxn8 , and XMG), but an online version of Photoshop is sure to capture a lot of users due to name recognition alone. We hope the online product lives up to the standards that the traditional version has set. The service will likely be free, … Read more

Wetpaint on Tuesday is upgrading its wiki editing and hosting service with the ability to embed widgets, or mini-applications, into a Web page.

The "Easy Edit" button on Wetpaint wikis now lets people include a widget on a page, which can be anything from a YouTube video to a group Web calendar. The editing tool presents a variety of options, including adding RSS feeds and links to popular video-sharing sites services.

Rather make you write the HTML by hand, the Wetpaint editor generates it for you. The company developed the widget feature in response to customers, who are … Read more

Mashable, the blog about social networks, launched Mashcodes last week, a sister site devoted to HTML codes for MySpace, blogs, and other social networks that support custom code. The move complements Mashable's coverage of these sites, and Mashcodes is easier to navigate and has fewer annoying ads than competing MySpace code sites like MyProfilePimp and MySpace-Codes.com.

The first thing I wanted to do after joining MySpace was get custom code for my profile. To my surprise, nearly all of the sites I pulled up on a casual Google search had a ton of pop-ups, off-site links, annoying ads, … Read more

Kuler is a free tool from Adobe Labs that lets users design and share color schemes for use in Web sites or other projects. If you've ever designed a Web site or PowerPoint presentation before, you know that choosing a color scheme is often trial and error. Kuler lets you tune up to five different colors at once and makes the process surprisingly easy, allowing users to simply adjust selectors over a large color wheel. Users can then go deeper, adjusting the finer details of a color, and Kuler makes small adjustments to make sure the other colors will … Read more

Put a bunch of passionate geeks in a hotel meeting room and what do you get? An "unconference," of course! I headed over to MashupCamp at MIT in Cambridge, Mass., on Wednesday to see what the avant garde of the Web developer world is up to.

There were some interesting sessions discussing issues in commercializing mashups (see this CNET News.com report). But the Speed Geeking contest, where people have five minutes to demo their mashup applications, was the most entertaining.

First and second prize went to two music-related mashups: the Hype Machine and Tourfilter. The Hype Machine, … Read more

Some digital publishers are complaining that the new Microsoft Outlook rolls back design standards by half a decade. The 2007 edition of Outlook, the most popular e-mail client for big businesses, ditches Internet Explorer's technology for that of Word 2007 to display HTML messages.

The result? In your Outlook 2007 in-box, background images may not appear within dressed-up HTML messages. Forget about filling out certain forms. Animated GIF images won't play, and a red X will mark the spot where a Flash movie would be. ALT tags, which describe pictures and help blind people to "see" … Read more

Fine art and kitsch have a long history of being intertwined ever since Duchamp's urinal made a splash in the art scene. In the same spirit is Mr. Picasso Head, a drag-and-drop abstract art creation tool that lets you make your own Picasso-like masterpieces.

You control all the pieces of the face and can choose from a variety of eyes, ears, noses and hairstyles. There are some simple scale and rotation tools which let you adjust the size of facial features and which way they should be pointing. You can also change the coloring of each piece using a … Read more