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.