In my next few posts, I am going to take a deeper look at Google Apps (http://bit.ly/Z10S4). If you haven’t heard of Google Apps or if you have and hadn’t bothered to check it out, you may want to consider it when I am done. I am a big proponent of Google Apps and of course, a user. Google Apps is designed to help a small office manage email, calendar, shared documents, intranets, and chat. In theory, you could replace an IT consultant with Google Apps for a small office. In fact Google Apps works exceptionally well for a virtual office. You will save money on IT and software licenses. And you will enjoy improved reliability of applications. You only need to be able to connect to the Internet to get to your stuff. For $50 per user per year, you can make the great leap to Google Apps. Not ready for even a $50 commitment? Use if for FREE with some limitations. I’ll write more in the coming weeks on this topic. If you are interested in any particular application about Google Apps, let me know and I will address it the next few posts. – Joe
Updates from August, 2009
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Google Apps Part 1 of x
Joe Caridi
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Latitude and Longitude of Google Point
Shawn Brown
This is a great site for finding the latitude and longitude on a map. I think this could come in handy.Enjoy
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Online Color Palette Tools
Shawn Brown
Trying to decide on a color palette for your website or design projects? This list from Web Designer Ledger gives a great selection of online tools for picking colors.Enjoy!
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Check status of web sites with AreMySitesUp.com
Joe Caridi
If you host or manage or are responsible for a web site the number one thing you have to know is … Are my sites up? A service at AreMySitesUp.com handles this issue in a seamless and easy to manage way. So whether you are responsible for 5 sites or 100 sites, you can know within minutes if any of your sites are down and begin working to correct the problem – even before it is ever reported to you.
AreMySitesUp.com provides both FREE and paid service. The free service is great. It allows you to monitor up to 5 sites and receive email or SMS when any of the sites go down. It checks the sites about once an hour at this level. Not bad if you are running less than critical sites. For more important sites or if you monitor a lot of sites, you may want to check out their paid service. For $75 a year, you can monitor up to 100 sites with checks every 15 minutes. All the premium services check the sites’ status with greater frequency, provide RSS feed instant checks and are advertisement free when you visit the web site.
Other features include, iphone/itouch application, twitter integration (really not sure what this looks like or why anyone would care), and reports of time a site was down and when it came back up.
All and all a good service. The free service takes care of most our needs, but the paid service provide a little extra speed and the ability to monitor a lot more sites. For more information, visit http://bit.ly/17FBiu.
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Google Image Search for License Free Images
Joe Caridi
Google updated their image search feature today so that you can search for images with Creative Commons or GNU Licenses that you can use for FREE. All these pics are tagged as being usable by anyone. You can even search for images that you may be allowed to modify.
To use this feature, visit http://images.google.com and go to Advanced Image Search. Then select the type of license that you are interested under “Usage Rights.”
LEGAL WARNING: Keep in mind that the person who tagged them might not actually have the rights to the image. So be careful. You may have the rights to the artists creation, but not to the unrestricted use of the building or model. So this search is probably fine if you are looking for a picture of a flower or animal, but if there is a person or a building in the pic, you still may want to use one of the stock photo sites out there.
For more information on this service, visit http://bit.ly/v2WnL.
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Inkscape Vector Graphics Editor
Shawn Brown
This is a cool tool I came across.
Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.
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Find Latitude and Longitude Using This Geocoding Utility
Shawn Brown
Have you ever needed the latitude and longitude of a map? GPS Visualizer has a free geocoding utility. The utility will convert street addresses or other locations to latitude and longitude. The tool will let you do a single address or multiple addresses. After looking up the address you can create aJPEG, PNG, SVG, Google Map, or Google Earth KML/KMZ file.
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Turn Your Photos Into Tilt-shift Creations With Tilt-shift Maker
Shawn Brown
Tilt-shift Maker
Tiltshiftmaker.com is a really cool photo tweaking site. TiltShift Maker will turn your real life scenes into pictures that look like miniture model photographs. The site is very easy to use and will allow you to download your miniture creation. If you like what you make they’ve got a Tilt-shift flickr group you can add your creation to.
To create your tilt-shift photo you have a choice to upload a photo or type in the URL of your photo. In the examples below I grabbed the URL of one of my flickr photos.
After uploading the photo the fun begins. In step two you can change the width and position of the focus area on the photo. Once you are happy with your selections you can click the “Get full size” button to download your creation. And that’s it to creating a Tilt-shift miniture picture.
I’ve found this simple tool to be a lot of fun. I’ve added a few of my own Tilt-shift photos to my flickr page. Below is a before and after picture of the image I used in this blog.
Happy Tilt-shifting!
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Orb and your Wii
Shawn Brown
We recently joined the bands of Wii owners. When I first hooked it up I thought it was only something to play games on. Then after a bit of digging around on Google I realized I could hook the Wii up to my wireless Internet. One of the Wii channels is called the Internet Channel. Access to the Internet channel gives you access to the web. I soon discovered an article Use Your Wii as a Media Center by Lifehacker. I thought it was interesting so I gave it a try. Here’s a summary of some of the features Orb and Wii can do.
Access To My Photos
My family and I take a lot of digital photos. From birthday parties to kayaking trips we’ve got a bunch of photos stored on our computer. Now from my Wii I can access those pictures stored on my PC and view them individually or set it up to run as a slide show. Pretty cool stuff.
Access To My RSS Feeds
What’s better than reclining on the couch and having access to all my favorite RSS feeds. Orb gives a nice interface for viewing on the TV.
Access To My Videos
Do you have videos stored on your PC. Using Orb and Wii you can now stream those videos to your TV.Access To My Music
Most of us by now have a lot of music stored on our computers. We either listen to it from our computer, burn it to a CD, or load it on our favorite music device. How would you like to access your music from your TV. Using Wii and Orb you can now stream that music from your computer to your TV.
I give my recommendations to Orb. It’s a cool service and easy to setup. Happy surfing!
Visit orb: http://www.orb.com/
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Web Design Color Palette Tool
Shawn Brown
Today I came across a cool web tool. I was wanting to find a tool that would help me pick some colors for a web banner I was working on. That’s when I found this cool tool called Color Scheme Generator. The color generator gives you a color wheel or you can enter an RGB six digit hexadecimal color code to get started. Once the color has been selected it will give you a color palette.
The generator comes with 5 different color schemes which are Mono, Contrast, Triad, Tetrad, and Analogic.This is a cool web tool worth checking out!
http://www.wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2
