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Month: October 2008

HTML Form Elements for Photoshop

If you are a web designer, you have probably found yourself needing an easy way to make HTML form fields when creating mockups of your designs in Photoshop (or any image editing application).  I know I have, and I usually resort to grabbing screen shots of web pages that contain forms that look close to the design I am trying to implement.  Occasionally I have found myself actually making form fields in Photoshop, which can take a lot of time.

I found a tool today that makes all of this much simpler.  It allows you to define the look and feel of every form element, including colors, widths, and other styles, and have them appear on the page.  Once you have the form elements looking spiffy, you can take a screenshot of the page and load it into Photoshop where you then crop out the elements you want to use and slap them into your mockup.  Very handy!

HTML Form Elements for Photoshop can be used directly from the developer’s web site, or you can download a copy for yourself and run it locally.

Configure Putty Settings For Improved Performance

Not sure about you, but I use Putty perhaps more than any other application on my Windows PC’s.  Putty is a powerful, fast, free application which can be used to connect you quickly and securely to your Linux/Unix environment.

A person named “dag” from the Field Commander Wieers blog has provided an excellent article on configuring Putty for optimal usability and performance called “Improving Putty Settings on Windows“.  After walking through the steps listed in the article, I fired up Putty and was amazed by the improved text rendering, colors, and more.

A brief summary of settings gleaned from the article:

Category: Session
Connection type: SSH

Category: Window
Lines of scrollback: 20000

Category: Window > Appearance
Font: Lucida Console, 9-point
Font quality: ClearType
Gap between text and window edge: 3

Category: Window > Translation
Character set: UTF-8
Handling of line drawing characters: Unicode

Category: Window > Selection
Action of mouse buttons: xterm (Right extends, Middle pastes)
Paste to clipboard in RTF as well as plain text: enabled

Category: Window > Colours
ANSI Blue: Red:74 Green:74 Blue:255
ANSI Blue Bold: Red:140: Green:140 Blue:255

Category: Connection
Seconds between keepalives (0 to turn off): 25

Category: Connection > SSH > X11
Enable X11 forwarding: enabled

Read the whole article here.

Geeky Greats: Useful & Interesting Web Sites

The timeline of Internet Memes is an amazing journey through time, all the way back to the early days of the internet.  What makes it funny and interesting is that it chronicalizes a thorough history of internet memes:  those funny themes that run through the internet subculture.

ColorCombos.com is a useful site which helps you test and select color combinations for use on your web sites or digital creations.  I love this type of tool, not being a person who can match colors very well.

For the desktop, I recommend carrying a copy of the awesome, free tool known as Color Cop.  I’ve been using it for years, so I donated to them a while back, and if you find it useful, you should too!  Color Cop is an eyedropper tool that provides much of the same functionality as the eyedropper in Photoshop, but is lightweight, versatile, and easy to use.

FormatFactory does and amazing job of converting your Windows media files from one format to another, and it does it all for free.

Do you freelance from home?  Check out FreelanceSwitch, who offers a bunch of good resources for freelancers.  I have found their page on Legal Resources for Freelancers to be very helpful.

This Web Site is Changing

As much as I love WordPress, I have found myself using Tumblr a lot more.  I like it’s mobile-friendly interface, simplicity, and ease of use.

You can find my regular blog posts at http://blog.willchatham.com now

I will be updating this site some day so that it all makes more sense now that I am relocating the blog portion of it.  Look out!