A collection of the best time-saving apps, tools, and widgets from around the web.

Initializr is an HTML5 templates generator to help you getting started with a new project based on HTML5 Boilerplate. It generates for you a clean customizable template with just what you need to start!

Just choose a country and a way to create your map by color, type values or by uploading your excel files (you can even use your zip / postal code column to get the best and most accurate maps!)

Helping you build a solid stylesheet foundation based on your markup

Instructions: paste or compose a document below. Click Check Writing to get feedback on your writing. Click an underlined spelling error, grammar suggestion, or style suggestion to see more options.

Placeholder Images for every case. Webdesign or Print. It's simple and absolutely free! Just put the custom url in your code like this:
<img src="http://lorempixel.com/400/200" />
to get your FPO / dummy image.

Tableau Public is a free service that lets you create and share data visualizations on the web. Thousands use it to share data on websites and blogs and through social media like Facebook and Twitter. Tableau Public allows you to see data efficiently and powerfully without any programming.

OutWit Hub explores the depths of the Web for you, automatically collecting and organizing data and media from online sources.

OutWit Hub breaks down Web pages into their different constituents. Navigating from page to page automatically, it extracts information elements and organizes them into usable collections.

Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your development time. It gives you a solid foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, useful plugins, and even a stylesheet for printing.

I will convert your Excel data into one of several web-friendly formats, including HTML, JSON and XML.

Reader Chris sent me a great idea using Text Expander to remove formatting from text. Create a plain text snippet with nothing but the $clipboard command. When activated, it pastes sans format. Slick.

Whether you write movies or television — or write about them — it’s often helpful to be able to include short blocks of dialogue and scene description. Unfortunately, most blogging and forum systems make it difficult.

Let’s change that.

With Scrippets, you can add boxes of nicely-formatted script to your blog. It even works in comments.

Good news: very powerful free testing tools are available for Web designers today. Some are more user-friendly than others, and some have significantly better user interfaces. Don’t expect much (if any) support with these tools. But if you’d rather not spend extra money on testing, some great options are here as well.

HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.

Create and view beautifully informative animated maps, for free!

Learn Photography: Online SLR Camera Simulator!

AppCleaner is a small application which allows you to thoroughly uninstall unwanted apps.

Love the ease of RSS, but hate when feeds don't display the whole article, forcing you to click through just to read it?<br />
Regain control by entering the URL of a feed below and clicking the submit button to receive a full-text feed URL you can use anywhere.

Fivesecondtest helps you fine tune your landing pages and calls to action by analyzing the most prominent elements of your design.

I'm getting back into OmniFocus. I was turned off GTD by the proliferation of dubious websites offering how-to/productivity tips; I've recently invested the time in getting 'back on the horse' and it's been all the better for it.<br />
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"The following AppleScript are those which are extremely handy and I use on a daily basis. There are many others available on the forum and other places, but many of them didn’t really add much value to my workflow, which is a pretty standard one, or solve problems I never encountered."

If you want to "trickle" your photos into Flickr instead of dumping in dozens of pictures at one time when your contacts will only see at most 5 in their "Photos From" tab, this is your tool.<br />
Instructions: Just upload your photos as private and add the tag "flickrtrickle" to them. Then visit this page and I'll pull your 5 oldest (by date posted) trickle photos. Hit the button and I'll update the date posted to the current time, remove the tag, and make the photo public. This way you can trickle in your photos as you see fit.

ifttt puts the internet to work for you by creating tasks that fit this simple structure:<br />
<br />
ifthisthenthat<br />
<br />
Think of all the things you could do if you were able to define any task as: when something happens (this) then do something else (that). 

Word Counter is a Macintosh OS X application that performs a word count and a character count, but it can do much more. It can be used independently or in conjunction with other applications such as TextEdit, Microsoft Word, Pages, TextWrangler, and others.

This page falls somewhere between a tool and an essay. It sets out to explore how the intertwined typographic concepts of scale and rhythm can be encouraged to shake a leg on web pages. Drag the colored boxes along the scale to throw these words anew. For the most part, this text is just a libretto for the performance you can play upon it.

We’re a little ashamed that we haven’t covered some of the basics about building your home bar here on American Drink. So when Cary, aka Monkeyfrog, asked us via email how to decently stock her home bar, we figured our long-ass response would make a pretty decent Part One.

Below is an assortment of various links that will help you assemble the ultimate Fireworks toolbox, so you can get the most out of this under used member of the Adobe Creative Suite family of design tools. So if you are a Fireworks enthusiast, or looking to become one, take a peek through the gathered resources below so that when you dive in to the works, you can dive in with style and preparedness.

With ge.tt you can share any number of files, no matter how large, within seconds.

The most common emails I get about this blog are questions about physics, astronomy, and some very speculative theories. But second most common are questions asking where I get my pictures.

Creating a Projeqt is simple and intuitive. In fact, you have probably done most of the legwork already. We play nicely with the other social platforms out there so you can embed your videos from YouTube or Vimeo, post pictures from your Flickr account, include RSS feeds from your blog or even your Tweets. Through Projeqt, you can orchestrate all these integral pieces of content to form one coherent story. And then share that story with the world in exactly the way you want it to be heard.

If you’re new to programming (or new to programming in a particular language) you might be looking for an IDE — that’s an integrated development environment, the handy, dandy piece of software that acts as text editor, debugger and compiler all in one sometimes-bloated but generally useful package.

Red Cross Social Media Strategy

Lately, Apple Keynote has been gaining popularity among designers as a wireframing and prototyping tool. Features like multiple slide masters, styles, grouping, animation and hyperlinks make it ideal for crafting interactive prototypes and UI narratives. Today’s freebie, Keynotopia, is a free set of interface elements for Keynote that makes it possible for anyone to create these prototypes in minutes. All elements are hand-crafted in Apple Keynote, and organized in nested groups for easier manipulation and customization. The templates can be used in Keynote 09 and 08 and are designed by Amir Khella.

Bernadette Mayer's List of Journal Ideas:

Disc Cover is a slick and intuitive Mac OS X software for creating CD/DVD labels, cover art and more. A variety of professionally made designs give you a quick start. This program imports data and images from iTunes, iPhoto, Finder, iDVD and many other sources. You can easily experiment with styles and graphic tools. Disc Cover will serve to bring you more and more design ideas.

"Readability is a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you're reading."

"Scrivener is a word processor and project management tool created specifically for writers of long texts such as novels and research papers. It won't try to tell you how to write - it just makes all the tools you have scattered around your desk available in one application."

Fantastic all-purpose bookmarklet. "Like a command line for your browser!"

"Having accurate information about competitors is vital to your company's ability to maintain its competitive advantage. With a structured way to manage competitive knowledge, your company can maximize opportunity in your market while minimizing the threat of current and potential competitors. Competitious is an easy, confidential way to discover and share competitive information collaboratively across your organization, and keep your company competitive."

"You've always wanted to learn how to build software yourself—or just whip up an occasional script—but never knew where to start. Luckily, the web is full of free resources that can turn you into a programmer in no time."

Interesting things on Twitter.

Great alternative to OneNote - excellent for ubiquitous capture, as it runs on Mac, PC, iPhone, Blackberry etc.

Upcoming gigs in your area by bands you like.

Might use this for a stag do I have been charged with organising... gulp.

I tend to use Evernote as a dumping ground for my GTD projects, but here's how you could set it up as a full GTD app.