Trouble of finding free stock photos for your projects?

Freerange is actually giving away stock photos for free. Note that, I said free, not royalty free. You don't have to spend a penny to use the photos in both your personal and commercial projects. What could be better than this?? This is the best resource that I discovered for last week.......

Earning money by uploading photos
If you are photographers, Freerange encourages you to upload and share your photos. You are allowed to put Google Adsense ads aside your photos to generate revenue. However, there is a catch, 20% of your revenue will got to Freerange, this is how Freerange survives by giving away stock photos.

More links on web developments and design

Rather than create another new post with 10 links, I have added the new links to the original post which can be located here.

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

Adobe AIR vs Microsoft Silverlight: A developer's perspective

Adobe AIR is competing with Microsoft Silverlight in RIA domain. Adobe AIR is released a few days ago, so it is one step ahead than Silverlight 2.0.

Basically, from developer perspective, both technologies offer different paradigms. AIR is helping web developers to make desktop applications using ActionScript etc. While Silverlight is better for desktop app developers to move towards RIAs using XAML + code behind approach - the .Net 3.0 way. Web designers and developers will probably prefer AIR because of familiar development environment.

In addition, Adobe AIR SDK is available for Windows and Mac platforms. Silverlight has poor support for development on Mac - I am not aware of any decent Silverlight IDE tool is available for Mac OS yet. Putting aside the lack of OS support issue, I found that Expression Blend is quite easy to use - so designers shouldn't be worry when designing for Silverlight apps.

As for dekstop-application support, Silverlight is lacking this capability. Since Silverlight is a subset of WPF, it shouldn't be too hard to build a full blown desktop application using WPF built upon the same codebase with Silverlight (provided WPF and Silverlight 2.0 use the same XAML syntax). The only disadvantage is the .Net 3.0 deployment issue for Windows XP. Also, WPF is not a cross platform technology.

As for AIR, besides drag-and -drop, and minimize to system tray, there is not much native OS support. I have tried the AOL Music desktop application, when putting the window into dock mode, it is not docked like Windows Sidebar but placed at the desktop edge as collapsed window. I think the current OS support is enough for most of the situations.

In term of UI design, desktop applications usually are designed based on some standards, e.g. the Office 2007 ribbon UI. For web designers to design desktop applications, it is likely that they will get too creative until we have to change our behaviour in order to use the oddly designed and seriously compromised UI. Desktop AIR application, built using AJAX+HTML, may just be a web-application without web-browser window border.

For LOB applications, Silverlight gives better advantages. It is already confirmed that Silverlight 2.0 has built in data grid control. Third party component vendors are developing more Silverlight controls as well. ADO .Net team is also coming up with ADO.net Data Services (a.k.a Astoria) technology. As a subset of .Net framework, it is easier to inter-operate with WCF and WF services. So, I believe Silverlight will have more tools and resources for us to build web-based LOB applications.

Deployment isn't a big issue since both technologies are easy to deploy (approx 10mb download + a couple of seconds to install). If Siverlight 2.0 is built into Windows 7 by default, then it is even easier for Silverlight developers in the future. Another concern is the application update. .Net Framework has ClickOnce deployment technology to simplify application updating for desktop applications. I am not sure how easy it is to let the installed AIR applications auto-update themselves.

When putting Silverlight and AIR side-by-side, it is obvious Silverlight has something to catch up. Depending on the purpose of the applications, I tend to believe Silverlight will surpass Adobe AIR as the best RIA development platform in long term.

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...

Google Chart API for ASP.net

It is nice to see how fast the community responds to new stuffs. Someone has build on top of Google Chart API to make it easier to use for ASP.net developers. The ASP.net control can be found at here.

Web concurrent users tracking

amung.us has attracted my attention since long time ago. Instead of just providing traditional user-count widget, it offers widgets to track real time how many users hit on a web page at once. The widgets are available in counter, graph and map styles. Moreover, it is so easy to embed the widgets to a web page. Nice technology indeed - although sometimes I noticed there are some disagreements in the figures across different widgets on the same web page, not sure what is causing that. According to the amung.us, it is serving more than 7 billion widgets worldwide now.

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.

Google Chart

Google Code recently released a very useful product called Google Chart API. As described by Google, it allows you to dynamically embed charts in your web page. Chart API is pretty straightforward, simply add

IMG SRC = "http://chart.apis.google.com/chart? + parameters"

tag to a web page then the chart will be generated. You can use Javascript to encode dynamic data from back-end databases too. very very nice product - simple, easy and free. I will certainly revisit this API in the near future.