Web designers are always on the lookout for resources that speeds up delivery of projects, sites and design work. Icons and brush sets are always an easy and effective way to quickly get a consistent set of graphics that can add to the look and feel of the site.

Icon Finder is a service which at the date of this post has already nearly 60,000 icons ready to be searched and used. With a new version of Icon Finder launched in April, it offers a Google like interface for easy and efficient searching. With a quick and intuitive user interface, it may become an excellent resource tool in every designers toolkit…

To use the site, simply navigate to their website at http://www.iconfinder.net.

The interface is simple and clean and you can either search for a specific item/tag or browse through the icon sets.

For example, if i was to search for Twitter (because I seriously am in need of a twitter and RSS icon set!), simply type “Twitter” in the search box and hit search.

At this point, the power of this clean system becomes apparent. The set of buttons on the top allows you to dictate how many icons you want to see on the page, the background color of the icon can be changed to show you an immediate preview of the button as well as the size of the icon.

Even more impressive in terms of user friendliness, clicking on a particular icon will take you to the set the icon came from, so you can quickly scan through and pick out other icons you may wish to grab.

Each icon/set comes with licensing information and most of free for commercial use (provided you link to the package) and you can download in either PNG or ICO format.

Browsing Icon Sets are just as easy. Simply click on Browse Icon Sets in the top right menu and you can browse through the entire collection:

Clicking on any of the tags in the tag cloud gives you a nicely filtered list for that Tag:

Icon Finder recently put up a forum on their site and it encourages users to add additional icon sets and/or tags to existing icons to help with the indexing. Its a pretty impressive site and features are being added to cater for user feedback. Seems like they care about their site and have worked hard to provide a simple interface that allows users to focus on creativity and ease of search rather than make the user go through many hoops and advertising just to get what they are looking for.

The collection is already impressive at nearly 60,000 icons and seems to be growing regularly. This may become an extremely popular site if it continues to index these icons. I found this site to be fast, intuitive and easily accessible. Its not crowded with advertising and encourages user interactions.

Relevant Links for Icon Finder:

• Home Page: http://www.iconfinder.net/
• Twitter Page: http://www.twitter.com/iconfinder
• Forum: http://www.iconfinder.net/forum/

It has a simple user interface and in a few simple steps, the user can grab a video, convert it to a number of formats and download onto their computer.

It supports conversions to the following formats:

• AVI (Divx)
• MOV
• MP4 (for iPods and Sony PSP’s)
• 3GP (for Mobiles)

To use it, firstly you need to get the URL of your video. This is simply the web address that you see in your address bar when viewing the video on youtube. As an example, I’m using http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pXfHLUlZf4 as my video to download. Easiest way to do this is to go to youtube, to your video and select the address bar and copy it to your clipboard.

Step 1 – Open up your favourite web browser and go to http://www.vixy.net. Paste your copied URL into the URL box, and select which format you want vixy to convert the video to.

Step 2 – Hit Start when you are ready. At this point, vixy will connect to youtube and start doing the conversion on their servers. There is a progress bar that shows how far along they are as well as expected size.

Step 3 - When finished, the application should show you a file save dialog box. This is where you’ll actually be downloading the converted video to your computer. If a dialog box doesn’t show, there is a link in the resulting window that you can click to download the video.

Converting and downloading can take some time with longer videos. And I’ve found the vixy servers to be a little on the slow side.

Once the video is downloaded onto your computer, you can then view it in your favourite media player or transfer to your mobile/iPod devices for viewing on the move.

I find vixy.net to be extremely easy to use and excellent for downloading shorter videos (ie, less than 10 minutes viewing). However its not perfect. There are occasions where the video comes through but the audio doesn’t or vice versa as well as conversions failing due to load on their servers. You just may have to try again or at worst, look for a similar video. I’m not too sure on HD videos though. Someone may need to try them out and see if both audio and video comes through.

There is also now a desktop version of this application. However, it is still in Beta and while its free (currently), the application does feature advertisements. I did not install the application on my machine for this review.

Vixy.net is one of many online transcoders out there (Orbit, Ares Tube as examples) and its being continuously improved so expect the developers to put in some increased stability and performance across the board.

Well in this case, we’ll have a look at an application that allows us to create such videos. Now, I’m NOT going to do the monotone voice thing.. however, I will endeavor to get some form of recording going to show you how its done.

The application is called ScreenToaster and it meets my criteria of being free and functional! ScreenToaster is a web-based screen recorder designed to capture your screencasts, do some minimal post-recording activities (such as adding sub-titles, audio etc) and then either stream them directly from their site or download as a video file.

So lets start shall we?

Step 1 – Open up your favorite web browser and go to http://www.screentoaster.com. Here you will have to do the obligatory "registration" by following the Register link on the top menu. Fairly standard stuff.

Couple of things to note:

When I completed the registration, a pop up appeared that stated that a confirmation email was sent out (good), but there was a "Record" button at the bottom!.. I had to click on the "Close" button on the top right of the dialog box to get off that screen and back into the main page. Not a biggie, but may surprise newbies..

Because we want to create and host a video, we have to register. If all you want to do is to watch videos (made by others of course), then you don’t have to register.

Step 2 – Right.. registration done. Confirm your registration by checking your email and clicking on the verify email.. Again, fairly standard here.

Step 3 – The first thing I tried to do once registered is of course to hit the "Start Recording" button to see if anything fancy comes up. Well something did.. I use Chrome for my home browsing and I immediately got a plug-in install request. ScreenToaster requires the latest version of Java to be installed, so if you don’t have that, then you’ll need to download and install that first before you can do anything else. Which is fair enough, so I went ahead and installed it by following the prompts (in Chrome, you get a fancy little bar on the top that says that a plug-in is required.. then you just follow the steps, or alternatively, go here to download and install for Chrome.

Step 4 – If you had to install Java, you’ll need to restart your browser for the install to complete successfully. I did that and finally hit the Start Recording button.

The first time you run this application, you may get some warnings pop up by the Java engine asking for permission to allow ScreenToaster to run. Click on Run to allow it.

Once the applet has loaded, you’ll see this screen. ScreenToaster is hotkey driven (default being alt-S). You can choose whether to capture the whole desktop or a slice as well as microphone and webcam settings.

Its at this point in time where you’ll need to experiment a little :) If you are capturing part of a screen, a black box will appear that you can resize using the corners or move using the top right corner button. It will take some time to get used to the interface. Also, hitting the record button gives you a 5 second grace to get what you really want to capture in front and ready to go :). Hitting Alt-S while recording will naturally pause the recording.

Step 5 – Once you have finished recording, you can hit the Stop Recording button and the following window will pop up.

Here you can preview your video and add subtitles and voice if you like. Adding subtitles can be done by simply pausing the video where you want your subtitle to be, and hitting the subtitle button and entering your text in.. resume.. pause.. enter text in.. resume.. and so forth. Again, it takes a bit of practice. I didn’t play with the mic option. There is even a handy button to change the "preview" image (ie, the first image that pops up when first going to the video or seeing its thumbnails.

Step 6 – Up until now, that video is local… So in order to "Save" it, you will need to upload the video somewhere. Currently you can upload the video to YouTube or to ScreenToaster themselves. Or alternatively, you can "download" it as a flash or movie file.

If you use ScreenToaster to host your video, it will get saved in High Quality. Means it looks better, but takes longer to load, so be aware of your "audience".

As an experiment, I uploaded a video of my uber FreeCell skillz (not!) to ScreenToaster. The resulting page (Click here :)) showed me a screen very similar to youtube :) It also had embed and url links that i can use to share the video. As i have done below..

Your videos can be marked "private" and you can delete them from ScreenToasters servers.

Conclusions

ScreenToaster is a good application.. however, you really need to get used to the interface. The thing that really got to me was that once i uploaded a video to screentoaster, it gave me no way of going back to my video to then upload it to youtube or download it as a flash file… that meant that i had to do the same video all over again.. They are currently working on a way to edit published videos… but not sure when that would be available.

Other things that struck out was the amount of buffering it had to do when playing the HQ videos in ScreenToaster. It was not the fastest shall we say.. But i’m hoping it will get better in the future. This is dependent on your ADSL speed of course, but I get a lot faster responses in YouTube then ScreenToaster.

Lastly, I had a bit of a problem actually getting the recording going on Chrome, so I tried in IE and it worked, and then worked magically in Chrome too.. *shrug*

ScreenToaster has a good FAQ section that does give some general guides and the application’s interface, once gotten used to, is actually quite simple to use.

It has a blog, twitter and rss support, though i didn’t seem to see any forums. That would have been of immense use to give support to this product. I did see in their Twitter page that they are looking into this too.

All in all, a fairly good set of functionality, a little rough around the edges, but excellent idea and once again, free cannot be sneezed at :)

I believe this application will only get better with time and I look forward to actually using this for future articles :) Excellent potential. Good luck chaps and lets see them forums and post-publish functionalities working!

UPDATE: 19th April, 2009 – Updated news on ScreenToaster and forums etc here: http://www.newbtech.com/2009/04/screentoaster-news-and-updates.html

Related Links:

• http://www.screentoaster.com – Home Page
• http://twitter.com/screentoaster – ScreenToaster Twitter