If you are developing a web site or a program, adding color and graphics is definitely a way to make your product look much more professional. Of course, not all of us are graphic artists so any free graphics are always welcome.

A while ago I posted a link to famfamfam’s fantastic icon set and today I’ll point you to another link which has lots more icon graphics you can use in your projects: Sweetie.

When you look at the graphics, they are very similar in style but are distinctly different. Both are 100% completely free to use and modify as needed, including commercial projects.

Does anyone know of any other similar collections available for free? If so, post them!

If you make use of the awesome Paint.NET graphics editing application, then this tip is for you. Did you know  about the rather sizable list of available Paint.NET plug-ins?

Take a look at the list and see what you like, but here are a few which caught my eye:

• Pyrochild Plugins
• Icon, Cursor, and Animated Cursor Format plug-in
• Smudge

Most all of these plugins are free, so take a look and download anything which catches your eye.

Everyone loves icons. Whether you are a developer looking for ways to ‘beautify’ your user interface or you are putting together a presentation, attractive icons make a good impression.

In the past, I have pointed out the excellent collections from FamFamFam which is free for both private and commericial use. So on that note here are a couple of sites which point out links to tons of free icon collections:

• Smashing Magazine
• LyteByte

While all these icons sets are free for personal use, if you want to use them commercially be sure to check out the terms of use for the particular collection to make sure it is ok with the author.

One resource to take note of is the Tango Icon Library which is an open source project trying to unify icons used in other open source projects.

If you have multiple monitors and do a lot of reading online, one thing you might want to consider is turning one of your monitors on its side and then changing the orientation. The reason for this is when you maximize your browser/PDF/emails/etc. on an upright monitor, the orientation resembles an 8.5×11 page (at least more so than a the monitor being in its typical orientation) and usually fits more text in the window.

Most flat panel monitors can be easily rotated to accomodate this change, so the only thing you would need to do is rotate your screen alignment. I know Intel graphic engines (what I use) can do this easily within the provided graphics software, so I am pretty sure most all other graphic drivers can accomplish this as well.

This change may not be for everyone, but as I mentioned earlier it is worth a shot if you do a lot of reading online.

Earlier this week I wrote about making use of the Windows Icon Set embedded in system DLL files. While this can be handy, it becomes somewhat of a burden finding the right DLL file with the icons you want to use. To eliminate this problem, simply extract the icon files with NirSoft’s IconsExtract.

This nifty utility allows you to select a file and it pulls all the icon and cursor files out which you can then save individually. Additionally, you can scan an entire directory (or drive) using a wildcard match, such as “\Windows\system32\*.dll” to pull out all embedded items in one swoop. This works great when you don’t know which DLL files have embedded icons.

When I ran an extract on my Vista installation on the system32 directory it found over 2,500 icons, so this is definitely a quick way to find the one you want.

Often times when I am doing development or support projects, I have users send me screenshots of their errors. Most people drop the screenshot directly into an email, however some users paste their screen captures into a Word document and send that instead. The problem with the image being embedded in an MS Word document is you can only size the image up to the size of the page in Word. If the user has a high resolution, it makes it almost impossible to see everything.

After much piddling around on my part trying to find a way to select the image and save it to an external file, I gave up and instead found another workaround: copy and paste. By selecting the embedded image, copying it and then opening a graphics program (I use Paint.NET) and pasting it there, you can see the full image. Problem solved.

I hope this tip helps save someone time, because it certainly took me a while to figure out.

For the most part, all graphics you deal with are traditional 2D raster (bitmap style) graphics. While many programs such as GIMP, Photoshop, Paint.NET, etc. are able to combine layers to produce a single image, the result is always a “flat” object. If you want to deal with 3D-esque graphics and manipulation power you get from them, vector graphics is the way to go.

If you are looking to explore vector graphics, give the open source editor Inkscape a look. Inkscape is a powerful editor which gives the ability to fully exploit vector graphics in a standards friendly XML format. There is extensive documentation and tutorials as well as a lengthy FAQ available to get you started. Additionally, you can view a lots of user contributed creations which demonstrate what others are using Inkscape to produce.