Our Good Friends

This outstanding group of software utilities, web sites, and books represents the focus, quality and intuitiveness we aim for when Expandable Language® releases its products. This list concentrates on smaller, lesser-known utilities and resources that target distinct areas and master them.

Web Color
	VisiBone arranges the web-safe palette colors in a whole new way. Their online Color Laboratory for selecting compatible web-safe colors is deeply cool, as is their Color Code table, which names and orders web-safe colors by hue. They also have a beautiful color poster for sale.
	The ColorMix mixer approximates any true color by using web-safe colors. You select the color from a color cube (or type in the RGB color value)—ColorMix creates a dithered swatch that matches it. Copy it to your hard drive and use it as your page or table cell background.
	Hot Door's Harmony (Power Mac only) is a PhotoShop plugin that uses color theory to help you create harmonious color schemes. Simple yet powerful!
Web Graphics
	NetStudio is a graphics program specifically built to generate web graphics. NetStudio has a free web graphics service that allows you to interactively create banners, buttons, and headings. The site prompts you for your text, image files, choice of colors, and choice of effects including embossing, engraving, and shadowing. It is a great example of an interactive web application, and when you are done you can save the resulting graphic to your hard disk for use in your current project.
Web Design
	Dream Ink has a series of basic web design tutorials on their cleanly­designed site. We learned about the "one­pixel preload images with HTML" trick in their Lean HTML section.
HTML Validators
	WebLint—there are several versions of WebLint out there, please help us find the most up to date, useful one!
Converting HTML Content
	Converting Content for Web Publishing by Janine Warner, Ken Milburn, and Jessica Burdman is the only book of its type, explaining how to efficiently convert existing word processing, spreadsheet and other documents into HTML. The move of Microsoft Office into the realm of HTML may make this less of an issue for Word and Excel documents; however, the HTML conversion functions in previous Office suites have been poor. This book is getting dated (published in late 1996), but it is still worth looking at if you have a ton of documents to convert. Covers both Mac and Windows. Disclaimer: the authors are our friends.
Web Magazines and Sites
	Web Techniques is the magazine we read every month (or at least try to)! The web site archives are a great resource for clear, in-depth coverage of a wide range of web topics, from JavaScript mouse-overs to web server issues.
	Evolt.org is "a world community for web developers, promoting the mutual free exchange of ideas, skills and experiences". Web developers post articles to the site about software, site development, design, backend server, and other issues. The site contains downloads for every browser ever created! Very informative and very cool.
XML Resources
	The best way to learn XML is to read the specification. Tim Bray's "Annotated XML Specification" makes this much easier. The document itself is an interesting application of XML technology; it generates footnoted HTML from the original, XML-formatted W3C XML specification. It puts the footnoted HTML in the left frame, when the reader clicks on one of the footnotes the explanatory text appears in the right frame. Very slick.
	http://www.xml.com has articles on XML usage, late breaking news, and an online XML syntax checker, among other things. A great central resource for XML developers or those who are interested.
Security
	Gibson Research Corporation's ShieldsUp can do an online probe of your system to detect security holes—including whether you are unknowingly publishing all of your files to the Internet! When we ordered our cable modem we were confused about firewalls and the configuration of network protocols. Steve Gibson has done a tremendous service to the Windows community in clearly explaining these issues and providing free, online diagnostic tools. (Mac users are luckier with security issues, but the online probe of ports is still interesting to run.)
Site Mirroring Utilities
	Teleport Pro from Tennyson Maxwell Information Systems (Windows only) is a great webspider for downloading entire web sites to your hard drive.
CGI Scripting
	The CGI Resource Index in an online scripts compendium with thousands of scripts written in Perl, C, and other languages. Some of the scripts are remotely hosted, so you can use those scripts without installing anything in on your (or your ISP's) web server. The scripts provide clocks, counters, chat, cookies, mail list, form processing, searching, and other services for your web pages. Most are free of charge, the rest are shareware or retail software.
	Matt Kruse's HTML Replace Script allows you to create data-entry and display screens from an HTML template. "You just specify a file on your local hard drive that follows the right format, upload it to the script, and the script generates a form for you to fill in. Submit the form and your values are inserted into the same document and you get finished HTML."
	PerlBuilder is a graphical tool for building common Perl-based CGI scripts
Mac & PC TCP/IP Networking
	Dave from Thursby Software Systems allows Macintoshes to talk NetBIOS over TCP/IP to Windows machines. You can share Mac printers and see Mac volumes on the PCs and Windows drives and printers on the Macs. We have been running Dave in our offices for over two years and are very pleased.
	WinGate by Adrien de Croy allows computers on a TCP/IP LAN to share a single machine's modem for the connection to the Internet (it works with cable modems, ISDN, and DSL lines as well). Simply install WinGate on the Windows machine with the modem connected to it, and configure your other computer's browsers, e-mail clients, and other Internet-related software to use the WinGate machine as a proxy server. The latest (OSR2) release of Windows 98 provides similar functionality—you might go that route. However, WinGate is so easy, we spent spent five minutes with version 1.3 two years ago and haven't thought about it since.
Website Hosting
	Crosswinds.net gives you free unlimited space for your website and total control over your pages, with no add banners, frames, or popup window advertising. Ideal for a personal portfolio or other small site. Expandable Language is using Crosswinds.net as a secondary backup, so that if our primary web host runs into trouble, Crosswinds.net can help pick up the slack.
Website Search Engines & Resources
	Find sites that link to yours. In either AltaVista or Google, type "link:www.yoursite.com" into the search box to find all of the sites that link to your site, or "link:www.yoursite.com/page.htm" to find all of the sites that link to a page in your site.
Printing
	FinePrint (Windows only) is a utility for printing multiple pages on a single sheet of paper. Use it to print the draft of a web page at half size, leaving the other half of the paper for annotations. Or turn that 20 page document into 5 printed pages—much more manageable. FinePrint installs as a Windows printer driver, so you can print to it directly from any application. It scales and substitutes fonts to make text extremely legible. Since it does substitute fonts, FinePrint is better suited for textual listings than for highly stylized documents.
Screen Capture
	SnagIt from TechSmith (Windows only) is a powerful yet simple-to-use screen capture utility for Windows. SnagIt captures text and video as well as screen shots. Use text capture where normal cut-and-paste does not work; for example, to get the list of files or folders from Windows Explorer. Use video capture to create AVI movies for software training. Use image capture to save directly into GIF or JPEG format for web graphics.
	Snapz Pro from Ambrosia Sofware (Macintosh only) is a powerful, easy-to-use screen capture utility for the Macintosh. Snapz Pro can capture screen shots of dialogs, menus, and other windows in interlaced GIF or JPEG format for web use. It can capture a part of the screen and turn it into a QuickTime movie for training, and allows capturing the Mac's sound or overdubbing your voice on the movie.