Tools

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Groovy Music

Programmers get into a serious zone when coding. In the MediaGirl studio we have a little help staying in that zone from our favorite radio station.... Lounge Radio. Lounge Radio is a non-commercial web radio broadcast out of Switzerland. The station broadcasts 24 hours a day and plays mostly nujazz.

We also like Radio Paradise out of Paradise, CA. The station plays an eclectic mix of music that will keep you going for hours.

Pandora is another great option for online radio listening. Pandora lets you build your own radio station around music you like. Just plug the name of an artist or a song into Pandora and voila!

Slacker is a great stop for those looking for lots of variety. You can listen online or download a player that you control on your computer. Similar to Pandora, you can also build your own radio stations based on artists you like.

Check out SomaFM for 11 channels of independent, commercial-free internet radio. The stations include underground electronica, chillout, ambient groove, downtempo, lounge, space music, indie rock and alt.country/americana.

Leave a comment with your favorite online radio station!

3 Comments | Post a comment | Filed Under: Tools

Saturday, June 2, 2007

Google Street View

If you haven't heard, Google just launched a new feature on Google Maps called Street View. It shows 360 street level views for New York City, Las Vegas, Miami, Denver and San Francisco. It's a little addictive so be careful! Here are a couple things to checkout:

1. This dorky video by Google demoing the new feature.


2. Here's a less dorky demo:


3. Search "1648 Charleston Road, Mountain View, CA" to see the Map team

4. A collection of odd findings submitted from viewers at Wired:
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/05/request_for_urb.html

5. For those who like to deconstruct, here are some details on the application:
http://gregsadetsky.com/?p=81

6. Here's the car doing the photography:
http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/31/check-out-the-immersive-media-street-scanning-car/

0 Comments | Post a comment | Filed Under: Tools

Friday, May 25, 2007

We Love Opera

If you are tired of inflexible web browsers, take a look at Opera. I've used it for years and with each new release I love it more and more. It's fast, secure, has an extremely customizable UI, has tabbed browsing with thumbnail view, integrated RSS reader, email and Bit Torrent downloader, password database... plus a ton more features that make it the top browser in my opinion.

Some of my favorite features are:

1. Ctrl+Z will open tabs that you've accidently closed. I use this all the time.

2. Page zoom. I use this to zoom in on problem areas in a design.

3. Easy keyboard short cuts (just click the Z key to go backwards in your history!)

4. Password storage. I don't remember life without this feature.

5. Page load progress bar. You don't just get a turning icon when a page loads, you get a bar that contains all the details of what's going on. This is great for troubleshooting web development work.

6. Extremely customizable interface. I've removed all the buttons that I don't use and I've added several tools bars where I add quick links to sites that I constantly access.

You can see screenshots of Opera in action here -- >

2 Comments | Post a comment | Filed Under: Tools

Saturday, March 31, 2007

Moving Big Files

Around the MediaGirl digs, file moving is a big deal since most clients are always sending 100MB+ files our way. Here is a list of companies that provide file transfer services... either free or paid.

Tirminal.com
velodoc.com
filesdirect.com
FilesAnywhere.com
Dropload.com
LeapFILE.com
SendThisfile.com
DropSend.com
BoxCloud.com

AttachMore.com
YouSendIt.com
Megaupload.com
zUpload.com
MediaMax.com
mytempdir.com
TransferBigFiles.com
esnips.com
diino.com

MediaFire.com
Senduit.com
ShareFile.com
use80.com
fileshift.com
fileflyer.com
sendyourfiles.com
pando.com

5 Comments | Post a comment | Filed Under: Tools

Saturday, March 17, 2007

Clean CSS

CleanCSS is a powerful CSS optimizer and formatter that takes your CSS code and makes it cleaner and more concise.

It works by automatically merging the same selectors and properties and returns to you well-formed CSS code. Clean CSS isn't a validator and won't spot your coding errors so make sure your code is valid first by using the W3C Validator.

CleanCSS is available in English, German and French.

0 Comments | Post a comment | Filed Under: Coding, Freelance, Tools