This has to be my current favourite icon set. It’s just beautiful, and it’s such a shame that it’s not available in vector form (just 48×48 PNGs). Follow the jump to see the whole pack. Continue Reading »

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was getting impatient waiting for my Dropbox invite to arrive. Well I’m pleased to inform everyone that it has arrived! I was/am very excited, and have spent a fair bit of time today experimenting with it.

I’ll quickly go through what I think about it…

In short, it’s a really awesome system. It is fast, intuitive and it does its job very well. I have to congratulate the people behind it for making a really nice application which, though not yet totally polished or feature-complete, is already indispensable.

After install you can find a drop box sitting in your ‘My Documents’ folder. This is your portal to your online sync and storage system. Anything that you chuck into it is very elegantly sent to the Dropbox site and to any colleagues or friends who you have opted to share the data with.

The web interface is pretty good. I really, really like the ability to recall past revisions of a document. Did someone go and delete or mess up your content? No worries, Dropbox has a copy stored away online for you to revert to.

Right now the service is still in beta, but you get 10 invites to give away upon account approval.

So go request your own invite and hopefully yours will arrive a bit quicker than mine. I didn’t think that the reality could live up to the demo I watched ages ago, but it does a fantastic job of doing everything it said it does.

I haven’t kept up to date with Adobe Air and the plethora of new applications that are being released on the platform, but these two in particular caught my eye (enough to make me download and install Air, and then not uninstall it).

For time management check out: http://www.johnwu.com/ora

And this little app http://toki-woki.net/p/Shrink-O-Matic/ is a lightweight (but very useful) image resizing tool.

Anyone else found some other nice apps I should try out?

 Every now and then I find something that is absolutely awesome. My latest find that I’m already very attached to is RocketDock.

The team of two who made this deserve a huge congratulations and lots of money. Go and download and if you like it as much as I do make sure you support them in some way!

RocketDock is really lightweight, fast and very customisable. I would definitely check out the available skins and add-ons (I downloaded the Vista skin pack shown in the screenshot).

Every month I try to put together a collection of really handy resources. I may not have discovered them this month, but I have certainly used all three and would encourage readers to investigate all of them.

I intentionally do not include many links here - it’s not a scatter-bomb approach, definitely quality over quantity.

ThickBox is one of those tools you take for granted. It just works. And it works well. I know countless projects I have worked on could use this little work horse - the only downside is the (obvious) dependency on javascript.
Check out ThickBox

Vector Magic (out of Stanford Uni) might not be a service you use very often, but whenever you find yourself in need of some vectorised images it should be your first point of call. The team that put this together seem to have spent a lot of time making it work pretty much perfectly. I was very skeptical when I first tried it, but have since become a convert.
Go visit Vector Magic

Another useful little javascript tool is this validation pack. Live Validation turns boring and hideously user-unfriendly web forms and turns them into an (almost) enjoyable experience for the end user. I use it, and recommend it.

 It’s been months now and I still haven’t received an emailing inviting me to join in the beta test for Dropbox - http://getdropbox.com/ .

I’m getting desperate now ;-).

If you are not familiar with Dropbox and what it does then you’ll want to check out their screencast on their website. It’s a very well designed online storage/sharing system that integrates with your desktop much more intuitively than current alternatives.