Write With: online group document management

WriteWith is a simple, free (for now, anyway) online document editing program, which has incredible potential for journalists, educators and anyone who collaborates.

Here's the description of the creation/intent:
"Most of Writewith got built in the last 6 weeks, but it’s been a few years in coming. One of us cofounders, Martin Goldman, started out wanting to solve a big problem — the student newspaper at SUNY Binghamton, Pipe Dream, would sometimes accidentally publish the wrong versions of articles. At the end of a hard night at the copy desks, editors would lose track of which Word document drafts on their computer desktops were the final drafts."

I tried it, using a brownie recipe from yesterday's NY Times (a spectacular recipe, I might add). It worked like a dream: upload the original draft; edit; output new document in a variety of formats from MS Word doc format to blog entry to pdf (yep! FREE pdf creation!).

Collaboration: the future of the internet!

Online Image Tools

From the March archives of the Self Portrait Challenge comes a list of clever (and free!) online image manipulation tools:

1. queeky - drawing tool
2. offtype - drawing tool
3. artpad - painting tool
4. scribbler - fun tool - can’t save image but can do a screen save
5. flashface - make a face using many variables
6. typedrawing - draw an image with letters
7. websketch - sketch and save and crop and alter your image online
8. mr picasso head - fun make a face tool
9. textorizer - turn your photo into a text image
10. face transformer - upload an image to be morphed
11. polaroid-o-nizer - turn your photos into polaroids
12. typeorganism - turn your photo into type
13. pikipimp - change your photos
14. movie poster flickr tools
15. hockney-izer - flickr tools
16. image mosaic generator
17. cartoon magic
18. magick image
19. wanted poster

There is, of course, the granddaddy of all: fd’s Flickr toys. Lots and lots of options on this page alone. Go make art! Now!

Historic Colors

On his blog, Gerry has posted some 'Colors for Historic Preservation'. They are nice deep rich tones. Unfortunately, this palette was established in the minds of the paint companies and of the public in the first wave of historic preservation in the 1980s. The reality is that historic paint colors for the rich were gaudy. Our founding fathers and mothers seemed to have ascribed to the theory of 'if you've got it; flaunt it.'
Pictures from the same room in Mt Vernon - the tasteful blue was done in 1980; bright green is the most recent restoration, done using more accurate techniques and analysis. For more information on this renovation, see: Architecture Week
You can view the Biltmore House colors online. Nowhere do they actually say that these are the historic colors. In fact the exact wording is: "Inspired by Vanderbilt’s Estate".

In reality, the house was a tad more garish, as demonstrated by this restoration of the "gilded Italian 22 karat gold leaf" walls of Mr Vanderbilt's room.

It is true that the average and poorer families had to make do with earth-toned paints, often suspended in a milk binding medium.

Peep Fest

Celebrations are always good. Today was a new one: Peep Fest - celebrating those little dabs of marshmallow and sugar. Market Street Books was the kind sponsor. They had trays laden with Peeps of many colors, a chocolate fountain for Peep dipping and even Peep salsa. Lots of fun photo ops. On straight sugar, I'm good now for another year.

Color Tools for Use Outside Photoshop

More color tools:
1) ColorCop
Color Cop is a (Windows only) freeware eyedropper and color combination tool that makes grabbing a color your like, along with a few complimentary colors, quick and easy.

Color Cop also offers variable magnification, average sampling of 3x3 or 5x5 squares, and quite a bit more.

2) ColorZilla "is an extension for Mozilla Firefox and the Mozilla Suite. It assists web developers and graphic designers with color related tasks - both basic and advanced.

With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. You can Zoom the page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page. The built-in palette browser allows choosing colors from pre-defined color sets and saving the most used colors in custom palettes."

Smashing Color Cards

Smashing Magazine has decided to create color cards for web designers. Their first card is green. The card itself has a range of one hue of (apple) green in a range of saturation. Set into this background are a variety of tastefully complimentary text colors. Reportedly, Smashing will be creating more of these cards. Handy!

More palette options

It's spring. The current issue of Country Living has pronounced that pink and green are the colors for spring (this spring? every spring?). They're easy colors to warm up to when things are a bit too gray outside. Today I've been working on two similar color palettes. The palette above is based on a hooked rug, featured in Country Living (want to see a bad online magazine? Try to find expanded content at Country Living Online) .

The palette below is based on an idea that Amelia put forth: "...in times of greatest upheaval, films became brighter, colors more intense and the lighting more artistic to highlight certain aspects of a character's emotion." The colors below are from a 1931 Jello cookbook. The colors are pretty cheerful!