Tools
The following are some to the commercial and open source tools I like using in creating blogs, Web sites, and content. All of the logos are registered Trade Marks by the product vendors.
“Our mission: To provide an optimal Internet presence for private users and small-to-medium businesses by offering a complete range of innovative, high-quality web solutions at value prices.
Since the company was founded, 1&1 has been dedicated to one goal: complete customer satisfaction. We’ve accomplished this by offering all-inclusive products and cutting-edge technology at some of the lowest prices around.”
“Raw file formats are becoming extremely popular in digital photography workflows because they offer creative professionals greater creative control. However, cameras can use many different raw formats — the specifications for which are not publicly available — which means that not every raw file can be read by a variety of software applications. As a result, the use of these proprietary raw files as a long-term archival solution carries risk, and sharing these files across complex workflows is even more challenging.
The solution to this growing problem? The Adobe Digital Negative (DNG), a publicly available archival format for the raw files generated by digital cameras. By addressing the lack of an open standard for the raw files created by individual camera models, DNG helps ensure that photographers will be able to access their files in the future.”
“Adobe® Photoshop® CS3 software, the professional image-editing standard and leader of the Photoshop digital imaging line, delivers more of what you crave. Groundbreaking creative tools help you achieve extraordinary results. Unprecedented adaptability lets you custom-fit Photoshop to the way you work. And with more efficient editing, processing, and file handling, there’s no slowing you down.
Adobe product box shot(s) reprinted with permission from Adobe Systems Incorporated.”
“Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom™ software is the professional photographer’s essential toolbox, providing one easy application for managing, adjusting, and presenting large volumes of digital photographs so you can spend less time in front of the computer and more time behind the lens.
Adobe product box shot(s) reprinted with permission from Adobe Systems Incorporated.”
“The Apache HTTP Server Project is an effort to develop and maintain an open-source HTTP server for modern operating systems including UNIX and Windows NT. The goal of this project is to provide a secure, efficient and extensible server that provides HTTP services in sync with the current HTTP standards.
Apache has been the most popular web server on the Internet since April 1996. The November 2005 Netcraft Web Server Survey found that more than 70% of the web sites on the Internet are using Apache, thus making it more widely used than all other web servers combined.
The Apache HTTP Server is a project of the Apache Software Foundation.”
“Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning desktop and notebook computers, OS X operating system, and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital music revolution with its iPod portable music players and iTunes online music store.
Apple, the Apple logo, and Mac are trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. The Made on a Mac Badge is a trademark of Apple Computer, Inc., used with permission.”
“Alien Skin Software Blow Up” The highest quality image resizing utility available. Better than bicubic, Blow Up renders accurate enlargements up to 10x (100x area) original size with no artifacts or halos.”
“BBEdit is the leading professional HTML and text editor for the Macintosh. Specifically crafted in response to the needs of Web authors and software developers, this award-winning product provides an abundance of features for editing, searching, and manipulation of text. BBEdit transforms text with high performance.”
“Design beautiful, innovative and fast-loading web sites… with a beautiful, innovative and fast application. CSSEdit’s intuitive approach to style sheets and powerful editing features will make you deliver awesome standards-based sites in no time!”
“DxO Labs is a software and intellectual property (IP) licensing company. We focus on research in applied mathematics for still and video image processing. We provide companies and consumers in various imaging business with advanced technologies and reliable, off-the-shelf solutions to achieve excellence in all aspects of image quality.”
“Microsoft® Expression® Media is a professional asset management tool to visually catalog and organize all your digital assets for effortless retrieval and presentation.”
“Full Spectrum RGB is a revolutionary digital color model that expands the spectral capabilities of your digital camera. This unique technology allows you to instantly reproduce all the colors of the visual spectrum in your digital images.”
“ImageWell is a small, but powerful, image editing application that lets you quickly resize, crop, watermark, edit your images, take screenshots and then upload them to the web, save to your computer or email them to a friend. ImageWell also lets you annotate your images with text, shapes, arrows and lines, quickly and easily. And it doesn’t stop there - add a drop shadow, a shaped border, flip or rotate your image, plus so much more.”
“LightZone provides a unique visual approach that focuses on what you want to do with your photos and not how to do it allowing you to retouch your photos in a simple and natural way. LightZone is based on photographic principles and on Ansel Adams’ Zone System.”
“Linux is a free Unix-type operating system originally created by Linus Torvalds with the assistance of developers around the world. Developed under the GNU General Public License, the source code for Linux is freely available to everyone.”
“MAMP PRO” is the commercial, professional grade version of the classic local server environment for OS X: MAMP. Designed for professional web developers and programmers, MAMP PRO allows easy installation and administration of their development environment under Mac OS X.
“Browser-based interfaces are slow, clumsy, and require you to be online to use them. While your blog’s web interface struggles to perform the simplest of tasks, MarsEdit uses the power of your Mac to provide an amazing blog editing experience. MarsEdit is a desktop blog editor, so you can write a blog without giving up the comforts of your Mac.”
“The MySQL® software delivers a very fast, multi-threaded, multi-user, and robust SQL (Structured Query Language) database server. MySQL Server is intended for mission-critical, heavy-load production systems as well as for embedding into mass-deployed software. MySQL is a registered trademark of MySQL AB.”
“Looking for an easy-to-use RSS and Atom reader for your Mac? You’ve found it! The Eddy award-winning NetNewsWire has a familiar three-paned interface and can fetch and display news from thousands of different websites and weblogs.”
“Noiseware™ is the highly-acclaimed, award-winning software tool from Imagenomic that is setting the standard for digital image noise reduction. Noiseware leads the field for speed, quality and ease-of-use in restoring image fidelity by eliminating digital noise and unwanted artifacts introduced by high ISO photography and less than optimal environmental conditions.”
“PhotoAcute Studio processes sets of photographs taken in continuous mode to produce high-resolution, low-noise pictures. It increases image resolution, removes noise without losing image details, corrects image geometry and chromatic aberrations and expands the dynamic range.”
“High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography is a combination of a specialized image capture technique and image processing. Photomatix Pro combines several exposures of a single scene, exposed for the darkest shadows to the brightest highlights. By capturing multiple images at different exposures, you can use Photomatix Pro to achieve detail throughout the tonal range.”
“PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.”
“Founded in 2001, Pixel Genius, LLC. is a unique collaboration of industry leading experts dedicated to creating leading edge products and services for the photographic and digital imaging industries. While PixelGenius is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, our members span eight time zones in five locales on two continents.”
“RapidWeaver is an easy to use and very powerful website building application allowing anyone to create and publish professional looking websites in minutes. No knowledge of complex html is required, RapidWeaver takes care of all that for you. Using easy drag and drop technology you can build a website tailored to your personal needs. Blogs, Photo albums, Movie pages, Styled text and more can be created at the click of a button and customised to make a site to be proud of. We believe nothing else on the market comes close to RapidWeaver’s ease of use and power. Create anything from a small family site with photos and movies, to a professional business site.”
“Publish web-ready photo galleries and slideshows of your content with SlideShowPro. Product features over 60 customizable parameters to control color, layout, size, and behavior for a virtually endless array of configuration options.
SlideshowPro Director provides content management and publishing for SlideShowPro.”
“The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential. W3C is a forum for information, commerce, communication, and collective understanding.”
“Using Xylescope is like surfing with an x-ray vision. You will immediately see beneath the surface of the web pages you are visiting. Experiment by changing CSS values in author style sheets - no matter if they are on the internet or on your own computer. Export interesting source code with ease and apply new and consistent formatting to your own CSS files.”
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