The chalk gives way to the mouse. The canvas to the screen. But essentially online whiteboards try to do the same thing that real world whiteboards used to do in our good ol’ school days. Online whiteboards though have gone a few steps beyond the mimicry.
Dabbleboard, a whiteboard application brings its own host of features to heighten the whiteboard feel. Call it a ‘thinking’ whiteboard.
For the uninitiated, let me just define virtual whiteboards. Whiteboards are software applications that allow for collaborative communication through writing or drawing, in fact all the attributes of a real world whiteboard (and more).
A recent article by Jim Henderson about getting your pictures noticed in Flickr got me thinking about making Flickr easier to use, getting more out of it. So, I’ve come up with the definitive list of the ten top Flickr Greasemonkey scripts.
10. Flickr PM - Adds useful links next to a users buddy icon
9. Flickr2Facebook - Makes it easy to upload Flickr images to Facebook
8. Flickr Cross-Recommendations - What people who faved this image also faved
7. Flickr Auto Page - Loads all photostream or pool images on one page
Do you work with FTP sites on a daily basis for work or fun? If you don’t use FTP maybe you are an ImageShack junkie or a RapidShare addict? Do you have to open up a FTP client or use Internet Explorer to log-in and upload files?
I sure do and I work with a lot of different FTP and HTTP image sites. I use them all day long everyday. I got fed up and went out looking for something to cut down on my clicks. Enter Rightload for Power FTP’ing and uploading to popular online file sharing services.
If you love taking pictures as much as I do, then you’ll be sure to love the great image toys over at BigHugeLabs. You can make calendars, motivational posters and badges, among many other things.
Listen to the podcast for a rundown of some of the ways you can use this to spice up your photos.
Here’s a calendar I made. Click it to see the large version. You can use it on your computer or even try printing it, but I don’t think the print quality would be very good.
Browser plugin Cooliris (formerly known as PicLens) has been mentioned several times on MakeUseOf but never covered in detail. So for those who are hearing this name for the first time, Cooliris is a plugin which is compatible with Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer. It prides itself by enhancing your browsing experience when it comes to viewing photos on certain Cooliris-enabled sites (elaborated below) and when watching video clips on YouTube.
Image search is evolving quickly. Today you don’t even need to use words to search images. Now you can use colors!. That’s right you can search images by color.
Let’s search the web for an autumn-like palette (yellow, red, brown) using the following 3 services. Let’s see how the search results are like.
PicItUp is a visual image search engine that combines word-based with color based search.
Test it: search for [autumn] and choose any color from the left column (I chose yellow). Now let’s look at the results:
Impressive, isn’t it?
Pictures are visual memories and story tellers. Creating images, enhancing a photo, revealing details and adding effects is like changing the perspective, like telling a story with different words from different angles. The list of tools available is endless.
Here are three very simple ones.
LunaPic
Beware, the interface is pretty ugly and it’s lined with ads. BUT besides supporting basic editing, you can easily add some artsy effects and animations to your images. The gif animations are pretty cool.
TinEye is an image search engine by Idée that lets you find where a particular image has been used on the web.
You are probably saying, “Oh, but there is Google image search for me. Why would I need another one?”. But TinEye is an entirely different kind of image search. While Google image search uses text to search for associated images, TinEye uses an image as a query for searching. Google can’t do that - at least, not yet.
If you’re in a hurry, here’s a quick video explanation from Idée on how TinEye works. Or read on for my explanation.
Wallpaper is an ever fascinating topic for me. Earlier this year I wrote an in depth article on pimping wallpapers and we’re constantly adding new desktop wallpaper resources to the Make Use Of directory. Today I have a very cool tool for you.
John’s Background Switcher is different from all previously mentioned applications, because not only can it load images from a predefined folder on your machine, it can also load them from online sources such as Flickr, Picasa and Yahoo. Let’s take a look at how to set it up to work with Flickr.
Be it your desktop, a post to your blog or your homepage banner, the right image can help bring your point across, make it stand out and shine or simply look very cool.
What does royalty free mean in the first place?
Simply put, you don’t have to pay royalties or license fees for using the material. It doesn’t necessarily mean the material is completely free, in most cases you will still need to pay a small initial fee to obtain the image, icon or sound. Then however, you can use it in any way the end user license agreement allows you to, meaning no further license fees will have to be paid.
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