keeftronics :: design | marketing » web tools

Hapnin for What’s Happening in NYC

keef — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 15:34:19 +0000

I went and did a little user testing this past week for a new startup based in Midtown called Hapnin NYC. The site hopes to be the place to go for stuff to do in New York City and I think they are on to something good. Lately I’ve been playing around with FourSquare which has tips submitted by users for stuff to do around where you are. Hapnin’s a little different in that they’re trying to show you everything that’s going on around you from art openings to happy hours. They want to help you plan your night on the fly. I’m looking to see them add more content in the near future but so far, so good.

Dead-simple Favicon Creator

keef — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 20:53:20 +0000

Came across this site today called favikon. Just upload your image and if the dimensions aren’t quite right use the simple cropping tool and your done.

(thanks web resource depot)

Future of Web Design in NYC

keef — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 15:48:52 +0000

This past week I attended the Future of Web Design conference at the Roseland Ballroom here in New York. Being able to attend events like this is one of the reasons I wanted to move here. There were a few really standout speakers which included:

Mike Cus of Carsonified – he spoke about web design in relation to art and how he belives web design is a nascent art form not unlike music or art
Derek Powazek of Powazek Productions – Derek spoke about crowdsourcing and group think, and while I thought this was going to be a super-lame social networking talk it was actually extremely interesting
Nicholas Felton of Daytum – I saw this guy’s work for the first time via Kottke, it was cool to hear him speak and talk about how exhausting it was for him to create his annual reports

I’m not sure if I would shell out $450 to go next year but it was definitely an interesting day. I also got to see a Microsoft Surface up close and while the technology behind it seems really cool the applications for it were underwhelming at best. There were about 20 people standing around and four people sitting at the Surface, one on each side, and they were playing PONG! I couldn’t believe that the people at MS couldn’t come up with anything more creative for four people to do sitting at this table.

Super-easy WordPress Upgrades

keef — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:01:54 +0000

I have been meaning to upgrade to the new version of WordPress after it came out a few weeks ago but just kept putting it off. Today I ran across this amazing little WordPress plugin that does the upgrading for you (link to download the actual plugin is buried near the bottom of the post under the orange donation button). After you install it and run it, you basically just click on a next button while it backs up your files, turns off your plugins, downloads and installs the new files, and the reactivates all your plugins. I would say it took all of 2 minutes to complete and no brain power on my part.

(thanks duct tape marketing)

Colorzilla – Great Little Firefox Addon

keef — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 20:51:07 +0000

I am constantly cutting and pasting screenshots into Photoshop in order to get a color match. I guess if I had stopped to think about it I would have realized there must be a Firefox Addon that could do something like this. Luckily I ran across one this weekend. Colorzilla’s dead simple to use and will save me heaps of time.

(thanks craig farrall)

Kick-Ass Vector Converter

admin — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 02:48:13 +0000

I ran across this awesome vector generator. I tried it and it works great. You can take a 50×50 pixel image and it will vectorize the hell out of it. You can download a decent .jpg version or cough up $5 for a month of unlimited use. This will definitely come in handy with logos.

(thanks noupe)