John Wang

There are some wonderful and useful free tools available for Web Designers and Developers. Here’s a small taste of some.

The Google Suite: Google has created an entire set of tools for free.

Google Docs – A great replacement or addition to Microsoft Office or an alternative to OpenOffice.

GrandCentral – This is great for freelancers abound. The greatest feature for them is the ability to automatically send calls to voicemail during specific time periods. It helps a lot when you have clients in different timezones and you’re trying to sleep.

Google Analytics – A great way to see statistics on your websites.

Google Webmaster Central – Another way to see statistics and errors on your websites.

Google App Engine – Although you’re currently limited to 3 applications, it’s a free way to play or host your Python projects on Google’s servers.

Skype – Free internet calling, also available on the Sony PSP for those who actually own a PSP mic. Supposedly, they are considering an iPhone application.

Evernote – a wonderful tool for taking screenshots, pictures, notes and having them synchronize to all your computers and even the free iPhone application. Definitely handy for having your notes everywhere.

Remember the Milk – A wonderful to-do list application. Also has a mobile version with a 15-day trial. You need to sign up for their Pro services to continue use of it afterwards.

Tada List – Another great to-do list written with Ruby on Rails.

Notepad++ – A super-powered version of Notepad. Has a massive plug-ins community base.

What tools do you use? What did I miss? Any suggestions for alternatives?

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Sight

Web Interaction started out purely visual, obviously being the sense of Sight.  This still is and will remain the most compelling and important aspect of the web. Where is Sight going?  It’s staying put on your monitors, but also going mobile. The iPhone has recently obtainted 0.87% of the web browser market. This is without having any Flash support. With the newly announced Google Android phone, T-mobile’s G-1, along with RIM’s Blackberries getting better support, the web is sure to be going mobile.

Hearing

Sound interaction of web design started well over 10 years ago with embedded midi and wav files. The main use was background music for users while browsing websites. At the time, this was very innovated, though very annoying when there was no option to turn off the background music.  Now, the use of Mp3s are primarily used on Musican websites to showcase their latest records, songs, or promote purchases.  Sound effects are also present in just about every single Motion Picture website out there. Primarily embedded in Flash for user interaction of opening doors, drawers, or anything else Flash designers can think of.  Where is Sound going?  It may go mobile, it may not. It all depends on how well Flash mobile gets adopted, if at all. The large bandwidth required is a limitation that cell phone companies don’t really want in their cell network. Remember, it’s “unlimited” data, which isn’t really “unlimited.”  Sound will not disappear, as it’s the main way for bands, musicans and the like to showcase their hard work.

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Today, Adobe held their web broadcast announcing the 4th version of their Creative Suite. It was an hour long session and definitely did not cover a lot of the new features and changes.

Gizmodo has already written up a brief summary listing PDFs of “What’s New” for each application along with the Press Release from Adobe.

VectorTips and GoMediaZine have taken a quick round-up of the new features of Illustrator.

Some things to note, a slightly cheaper version of the Web Design Suite (Web Standard) is available, which does not include Adobe’s Photoshop. It’s basically Macromedia’s old suite of Dreamweaver + Fireworks. Similarly, there’s also a Desgin Standard edition, which loses Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash, along with the “Extended” version of Photoshop.

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