Best resources for Web developers and designers

* denotes new links added on 28th March

CSS

• TabCreator - A CSS Menu generator*
• Write a well structured CSS file without becoming crazy*
• Most used CSS tricks*

Data Management

• 50 Content Management Systems - some are free...

Design > Guidelines

• 20+ Free Web Design Ebooks And Guides
• 20 Free Ebooks and Whitepapers for Better Web Design*
• 20 Websites That Made Me A Better Web Developer*
  

Design > Icons

• 35 (Really) Incredible Free Icon Sets
• Best Small Web Design Icon Download Sites
• PI Diagona Pack

Design > Photoshop

• 45 Photoshop Tutorials for Better Navigation - I finally know how to make a nice looking button...
• Photoshop actions: 124+ Free Photoshop Actions to Boost Your Designs - some are really cool..
• 100 Photoshop Tutorials for Creating Beautiful Art
• 23 Most Incredible Photoshop Tutorials*
• 33 awesome body enhancement photoshop tutorials*

Javascript

• FancyZoom 1.1 Smooth Javascript Image Zooming For Your Web Pages - something different from the widely used Lightbox
• iCarousel - creating image / text carousel like widgets
• dfFlexiGrid - Liquid Javascript Grid Layout*
• 10 JavaScript Effects to Boost Your Website’s Fanciness Factor*
• Mootools - Allow you to write flexible, and cross-browser code with its API*

Security

• How Hackers Hack Your Website - informative...

Testing

• Browsershots - Free online service to test your web design in different browsers with just a few mouse clicks

Other great lists..

• 99 Sites ALL Designers Must Know About
• 100+ Resources for Web Developers

Cloudo: Technology that will change your digital life

Cloudo is taking a step further than gOS by putting an entire operating system in your web browser!! In other words, Cloudo is an Internet Operating System - bringing the whole desktop experience to web browser.

Imagine that you have signed up on Cloudo, all your applications or files are actually hosted on the web. Hence, you can access your data from anywhere as long as you are connected, eliminate the need to bring your laptop along. You can access you same files using your home PC, from your school / office PC, and your mobile phone too! Maybe even Xbox 360. So, no more copying files using USB drives (more importantly, no more 'Oops..I forgot to copy the files'), no more complains on this PC does not have the program I need or I can't open the file in this PC etc....In addition, you can even sign up a joint accounts to facilitate information sharing / collaboration within a group.

I think the implication for general consumers is that, since the system is actually web-hosted, majority of the processing should be done at server side, i.e done by Cloudo servers, we as users, only running small Javascripts. Hence, the hardware requirements to run Cloudo should be very low - you can easy invest in cheap machine to run it - good for students and non-profit organisations.

For enterprises or IT staffs, managing the systems are simplified hence the maintenance is centralized now - data backups, updates and security are managed at one place and easily rolled out to user accounts. As for me, I am eager to know what kind of opportunities Cloudo will make available to developers. I think this technology is great and will have positive and important impacts to all of us.

Cloudo is still under development, and should be launched publicly later this year. For more information, you can visit Cloudo website. Unfortunately, the streaming of the Guided Tour video at the website is very poor, but, luckily, someone has uploaded the videos to YouTube a few days ago. So enjoy...

Part 1...

Windows Sidebar Styler: Customize your Windows Sidebar

Windows Sidebar Styler provides extensions to the existing functionality of Windows Sidebar. It allows you to customize the appearance of the sidebar and even resizing it. For software developers, we can now create WPF gadgets for the sidebar. In addition, Windows Sidebar Styler is available in a number of languages. Various styles by other designers are available at the gallery here.

LINQPad: A better way to practice using LINQ

Imagine that you can use C# to query against your database. Now there is a free tool available to let you do that. Best of all, LINQPad is preloaded with 200 examples. I have read some articles on LINQ, but haven't started to get serious on it. It seems LINQPad is a great tool to help me get myself started to learn more about LINQ.

Open source .Net operating system: Cosmos

Cosmos is an operating system that is done entirely in C#.

Microsoft has a similar research project called Singularity, Singularity is not made publicly available (I thought the project was dead but the project website states version 1 is completed and is available for a small number of universities).

Although an OS written in pure C# is cool, I am awaiting to see the real word examples to solve real world situations.

Free Icon Editor

My favourite icon editor is actually Axialis Icon Workshop (which is not free). The reason I use Axialis software is because I am not the designer myself and the imange object packs offered by Axialis become very handy when I need new icons.

IcoFX is a free icon editor and I like to use it to process existing PNG files or icons files. Not only that IcoFX can support Vista icons, it also allows batch processing on files, has many built in effects and it can extracts icons from EXEs and DLLs. Click here to check it out.

GC.Collect()

One thing I don't like about .Net application is that it takes up very large chunk, and the memory usage grows very quickly in a data intensive application. I regularly need to call GC.Collect() to force the application to free up memory otherwise it is just getting slower and slower. This observation here is very interesting. It seems GC is smarter in .Net SP1 and even more in .Net 3.5 runtime.

Software Development in the Future

Brad Abrams made his software development predictions for 2008. However, the content isn't sound too realistic according to my experience. Maybe, I should call it predictions for the future, some times beyond 2008. Here is a response to the Brad's predictions which I believe is more practical in many ways.

LINQ Cheat Sheet

A great way to learn a programming language is to look at the code snippets. Keith Rull has published a LINQ Cheat Sheet which is quite nice. Most of the LINQ coding are one-line and lengthy statement which make it very hard to code in VB. I think it is hard to read with so many underscores in a code file. In other word, if I want to use LINQ extensively in my projects, it is better to convert my existing data validation coding, etc to C# first, and that would be lots of work. Also,I rather stick to my current ORM vendor as LINQ is not much more superior as an ORM tool. However, LINQ will be an excellent query language if it is well integrated into my favourite ORM tool.