Have you ever designed a flash button or image animation that you need to redo and then you find out that you misplaced the original files?

Well usually this means that you end up eating your own time and starting over from the beginning. In some cases its not the end of the world but it can be seriously annoying.

Well this is where you would want to make use of a decompiler program or in this case an online service.Flash probe is meant to provide web developers and design enthusiasts a means of quickly creating HTML pages out of Flash-based websites. The free tool will decompile your SWF and show you the images, text and links that are contained in it. Apart from usage statistics, Flash Probe does not collect, resell or permanently host third party content on its server. After submission of a file, the text and images are available for around 30 minutes after which time all content is deleted.

For the most part you can’t expect to get everything that was part of the project but you should be able to grab enough parts to get started again.

Simply upload or enter the url of the flash object that you want to decompile and let the service do the work.

In a short time you will be presented with what they could retrieve from the file.

Again you are not going to endup with the total source that you can just modify and recompile but it is a starting point.

Visit their website

http://www.flashprobe.com

The one good thing about buying your stock photos is that even if someone might see them on another site you at least know that they come from a photographer that wants to sell them and they aren’t random photos you grabbed off of google images.

This can be important if you are designing a business website and you need a few pictures as fillers.

In any event it is always difficult to get images of people and what is really strange some cities and monuments and other historic places that you might think are fine to use in your work are protected by copyright. Meaning if a random person takes a picture on vacation they can’t legally sell it without the permission and a payoff to a government permit office.

It can get really strange.

Anyway if you are looking to buy or even sell your images take a look at

www.StockPhotoSpot.com

Sites that offer video or image hosting often require membership.

If you want to store your files you need to signup and then uploading files means you need to login.

This is one of TinyPics best features. The files that you upload are anonymous and require no membership.

If you place images on their site you can link to them either directly for placement within your pages or you can use their site url to offer other options.

Videos are placed in a flv player that is branded but they are easy to embed within your site.

Recently they have started to offer other value added image processing options that can stylize and add interest to your images. These products are placed on your pages with a flash player.

So what are the drawbacks?

Once you upload a picture or video it is there for as long as tinypic hosts the file which is usually about a year. This means you can’t delete it but it also means they reserve the right to delete files when they see fit…. so don’t depend on TinyPic to host your primary website layout files.

Also Video files are comressed to reduce file size. This means that the quality of the video won’t match the original and it may not be as good as services provided by other websites. The best thing to do is give it a test and see if it lives up to your needs. More then likely it will.

TinyPic.com is a quick and easy way to get your files online and it is a resource that you should keep in your bag of tricks.

www.tinypic.com

isCool.net offers 4 domains that you can use to redirect users to your website.

This service is good for people that have a free hosting account or make use of a social network account.

simply select the url that you want to use and then select if you want the visitor to just be forwarded to the url or if you want them to see your site under the url while they visite pages within your site.

The sevice does cause a popup banner to be displayed when someone uses your url.

To create your own redirector, fill out the small Sign Up Form. You’ll amongst others be asked for a name for your redirector. You can choose from four domains,

• yourname.isCool.net
• yourname.areCool.net
• yourname.isFun.net
• yourname.tux.nu

Once you’re finished with the form and pressed the Submit button, your redirector will be created for you instantly and you can start using yourname.isCool/areCool/isFun.net right away. There’s only one but: every time someone accesses your pages through the isCool address, a tiny window containing an ad will pop up. This is how we get the funds to run this free service. However, it’s also possible to pay for your redirector and have the banner window removed. For more details please refer to our ordering page.

Please note that we do not provide free web space. We only create a redirector, an alias to the location of your current homepage.

URL hiding
A nice feature of your isCool address is URL hiding. Without URL hiding, a visitor of your isCool address will be redirected to your page and the location of your page will be shown in the Location bar of his/her browser. With URL Hiding, the user will see your isCool address in the Location bar. When using URL hiding, be sure to add a TARGET=”_top” to all your off-site links, else the pages behind those links will also appear to have your isCool address. This may seem nice to you but many siteowners do not appreciate this.

For more information visit:

http://iscool.net/

Joining is free

You get a free subdomain URL with your account
like http://yourname.myphotoalbum.com

Add Unlimited Photos

There is NO LIMIT to the number of photos you can add to your MyPhotoAlbum account. We make it easy to upload directly into an existing album, or create a new one for any specific occasion or theme. All of the most prevalent photo formats are accepted: gif, .jpg, .png.

You can upload via your camera phone, Email or their easy upload tool

You can also upload your videos.

You get a free layout and album for your image collection

Personal web address
Create your own personal, memorable MyPhotoAlbum address at registration. This allows you to give personality to your MyPhotoAlbum gallery, and moreover provides a simple and unforgettable means for friends and family to easily visit your photos and videos in the future.

Best of all the service is free unless you decide to print off your images from their service.

http://www.myphotoalbum.com

Well probably the guy staying up all night for 16 weeks writing that special ap that you love so much… He needs pizza too :o)

But really there is a lot of software that is best in class that is free / opensource and taking advantage of it even if it is just using it and telling your friends about it is a nice way to give props to coders that like to do it for love or learning.

Another great thing about open source software is you can adapt it to meet your needs and contribute back that code to be included in the original version or in a branch project.

The fact is no one can know everything but by sharing we can all raise our understanding to a higher level.

Maybe you know how to make a great video editing program but you have no idea how to put your resulting files on a dvd. Well all you need to do is add your project and someone else’s together and you have something that helps more people.

Anyway if there is an idea there is probably software to do it at SourceForge

And if not start your own project and maybe others will join in to help.

visit http://sourceforge.net

The product is very simple to setup just go to their website and check if your domain name is still available.

Once you are happy with the name you selected you will enter the url of the site where you want your visitors to go.

So you register mydomain.tk and when people put that in their browser they will see  http://username.freehostingplace.com/

They are also offering mail forwarding services that can work along with your domain name

You can have up to 100 .tk email accounts that will forward to a gmail account or where ever you read your mail.

Since the products are free there is nothing to lose.

However if you don’t use your domain for 30 days it will be released and up for others to register.

Remember this is a Ghosting domain you do not have the ability to use the free domains in your own domain name servers. Your site will be displayed inside a hidden html Frame.

Go get your free domain name today before someone else registers it.

http://www.dot.tk

Simply visit www.v3.com and select the domain url that you want to use and enter the place that you want people to go when they enter the url in their browser.

If you create an address like i.am/fred, all of the addresses below will forward website traffic to the same destination address:

i.am/fred
www.i.am/fred
fred.i.am
www.fred.i.am

Mail forwarding:
Every i.am address comes with its own free email address that can forward to any other email address you want. For example, if you set up i.am/fred, you’ll also get the email address fred@i.am. It really is the only email address you will ever need!

Fast and easy setup: It takes only seconds to get started with our service. And once you’ve activated your account, you can start using your new address immediately. No more waiting for your domain name requests to be processed!

Easy account management: If you change hosting providers, want to set up additional addresses, or need to temporarily divert your traffic to a different site, our Account Manager lets you make changes in a matter of seconds. Your changes will be live instantaneously: no waiting for domain servers to catch up!

Search engine friendly: With over 100 million domain names now registered, it can be almost impossible to find one that suits your needs. Our short web addresses are ranked highly in search engines, and you can set up as many addresses as you like from a single account. Say goodbye to www.the-only-decent-domain-left.com and set out your storefront at i.am/myshop!

Reliable service: Our servers process millions of redirect requests each day. We’ve been at this for a long time and can easily handle your heaviest traffic loads. And our better than 99.999% availability record means you’ll never have to worry about downtime!

Thousands of uses: Your i.am address is perfect for so many applications that we can’t even begin to list them here. Just a few examples are:

• Make email-friendly and text-friendly short web addresses
• Perfect for your blog, Myspace or Facebook account
• Ideal tool for webmasters and newsletter publishers
• Use our addresses to boost your search engine rankings
• Replace your cumbersome web forum URL with a cool short address
• Get the web address that is ideal for your business!

To start your own account visit www.v3.com or http://i.am/

If you are use to using Illustrator you will notice that some of the tools are different which will require another learning curve to forget your normal habits and adapt to new ways of doing things.

But this package does provide enough ways to draw controlled images with a variety of tools that it is definitely worth it.

The major drawback is export options at this time. If you are use to jumping between Illustrator and Photoshop or a desktop publishing package you will need to be able to use one of the 10 or so formats available to export your work.

Since PostScript is one of the options your images should still be able to be used however we have not pumped any files through a prepress processor to check how they will print.

The most important tools are all there.

You can draw freehand and bezier curved lines.

There are a few presets like drawing 3d box shapes or spirals … the developers must like spirals heh.

Rotation of objects can be done through a dialog box or by double clicking with the arrow select tool.

Blends and fills are available including directional fills.

There are a variety of ways to create clipping paths.

All in all this is a pretty nice tool that we are just getting use to playing with.

If it continues to perform as our first trials have shown then it will be a likely replacement for illustrator.

Inkscape is a project with a few years work behind it so you can depend that it will continue as long as a project of this type is needed.

We hope to do a few howtos with this software in the future and you should go download your own copy.

Linkscape is available for Windows, Mac and linux variants.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/inkscape/

The setup is fast and your website is presented through a framed page

When you join the network you are also provided free link and banner sharing with other members.

standard 468×60 pixel banners are used and can be animated.

This is an interesting service that also provides link sharing to help you promote your site within their network.

For more information or your own url visit

http://webalias.com/