The Designers Toolbox has tons of free resources that are very handy to designers: templates, contracts, lorem ipsum generator, and tons of other great freebies. They also have a portfolio hosting service – so theres really no excuse to not have your work out there!

Popularity: 1% [?]

Go Media didn’t get a chance to beta test Photoshop CS4, but it looks like a worthy upgrade. Here’s a collection of previews & feature lists of the latest & greatest Adobe Photoshop.

If you’re in a rush here is the meat of what Go Media gathered from picking through these previews:

Photoshop CS4 will…
- use the graphics card more aggressively, allowing for smooth zooming, canvas rotation, and other cool 3D effects with good performance
- have the same UI enhancements as the rest of the creative suit: tabs, frames, etc.
- include intelligent scaling, like the kind we’ve ooo’d and ahhh’d about for the past year
- be more flexible because of non-destructive editing via new adjustment options
- may possibly have multi-touch support
- have better masking.

And here is a taste of what’s new in Photoshop CS4 and Illustrator CS4 from PSDTUTS and VECTORTUTS.

Popularity: 1% [?]

It seems that the darling of the web design industry right now is the ability to create a “featured section”. While it once may have required a great deal of skill, that is no longer the case. In this screencast, Nettuts will show you how to easily create a scrollable featured section using one of Theme Forest’s popular themes as a reference.

Popularity: 2% [?]

PhotoQ

PhotoQ is a WordPress plugin that turns your blog into a photoblog. If you have a lot of pictures to post, PhotoQ is your ideal companion. With PhotoQ you can mass upload several photos at the same time thanks to its batch upload functionality.

Admin Drop Down Menus

Admin Drop Down Menus rearranges the existing default Dashboard/Admin menus into javascript driven dropdowns, making navigation around your Wordpress Admin quicker, easier and considerably more efficient.

Viper’s Video Quicktags

Just simply click one of the new buttons that this plugin adds to the write screen (rich editor included) and then paste the URL that the video is located at into the prompt box.

Tabbed Widgets

Tabbed interfaces are the most common on newspaper type website where they can save a lot of vertical space and make it look less cluttered. This plugin allows you to create them.

Hatena Star

Hatena Star is a recommendation service for webpages, popular in Japan.

Blinko Broadcaster for WordPress

The Blinko Broadcaster Plugin gives any WordPress user the opportunity to create their own broadcasting page, by signing up to an evaluation account to Blinko just by filling in an email address, all through a user-friendly interface in the Admin Panel.

WP MarkitUp

WP MarkItUp! is the Wordpress plugin that replaces the old “quicktags” toolbar with MarkItUp!, a jQuery plugin written by Jay Salvat that allows to turn any textarea into an highly customizable markup editor.

Find and Replacer

Find and replacer is a powerful search plugin for replacing tags and text throughout your blog installation.

WP Easy Digg

The plugin will add a digg button to every post, so your readers could digg the post if they really like it.

Popularity: 3% [?]

When Digg.com firstly releases their Digg badges, it easily became widely implemented in blogs and websites who wish to promote their articles up to Digg’s front page. This implementation of badges slowly evolves; webmasters and bloggers began to add more badges and mini icons of different bookmarking sites like Delicious, Reddit, Design Float, Stumble Upon, Mixx, etc.

Then some blogs (including HongKiat) want to make things a little bit nicer. Instead of placing it next to the title, it’s moved down, right below the last paragraph of an article. Together with some design, they thought it’ll be catchy enough to grab visitors’ attentions.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Tags are useful to any blog: As you know it, they allow the user to display a list of posts related to a subject. Most of the time, tags are displayed with in a tag cloud. If you have 20 different tags, that’s ok, but if you have 100 or more tags your tag cloud will be very hard to read, and no-one will click on it.

This is probably why many blogs recently stopped displaying their tag cloud, or put it on a separate page. But Hack WordPress has another solution.

Popularity: 1% [?]

When it comes to online publishing, most of us are firm believers of the same old rule – Content is king. We’d like to argue a point that, even with the greatest blog that constantly pumps great contents, it’s not to overlook the importance of interface design. This includes overall color matching, the typography, attractive logo, proper text and paragraph alignment, clear navigation, etc. Another way to look at things is when you put an image and a row of text side by side, image is where the eyeballs are while the text plays a supporting role.

HongKiat has spent weeks going through hundreds and hundreds of blogs in the blogosphere, looking for blogs with nice and interesting design. They marked down those with great interface, graphically beautiful, unique personalities and styles. Here they bring you – 100 Nice and Beautiful Blog Design. You might learn something or perhaps inspired by these designs. Full list after jump and get prepared to scroll.

Popularity: 2% [?]

ZK is the a proven Ajax + Mobile framework designed to maximize enterprises operation efficiency and minimize the development cost. With groundbreaking Direct RIA architecture, ZK simplifies and speeds the creation, deployment and maintenance of rich Internet applications.

By programming user interfaces directly, developing Web application is as intuitive as programming desktop applications. By programming database and enterprise resource access directly, developers no longer have to worry about exposure of business logic to the client and exposure of business data over the Internet .

ZK is an open source Ajax + Mobile framework. ZK developer community is extremely active with 20+ translations, 100+ articles/blogs, and 100,000+ lines of codes, 700,000+ downloads, from 190+ countries.

Alos, ZK is designed from the ground up to be secure. ZK protects enterprise applications from cross-site scripting, malicious JavaScript/SQL injection, exposure of business logic to the client, and exposure of business data over Internet. Scalability, Clustering and Failover: ZK supports high scalability and availability with serializable user interfaces, and pluggable failover manager. ZK is compatible with the clustering and load balancing support found in modern application servers.

Popularity: 1% [?]