Server Monitoring software and Tools helps us to keep a real time update on the performance and functionality of the servers from any location. Owing to complex social networking systems and our dependency on the internet, we can’t let go our precious customers go away due to down-times. Investing on useful server monitoring tools and software  is a wise decision which give you both short and long term benefits. Check out our today’s post to know about ten of these Really Useful Server Monitoring Tools and software.

10 Really Useful Server Monitoring Tools and Software

Simple Server Monitor

Simple Server Monitor is an affordable, powerful, and user-friendly server monitoring utility that will continually monitor the status of your servers and web applications.

More Information on Simple Server Monitor

Pingdom

The Pingdom service monitors websites and servers from multiple locations on the Internet, making sure that they are working. You can use Pingdom to monitor both your public and password-protected websites, your FTP servers, your email servers, and any other kind of service that should be accessible from the Internet.

More Information on Pingdom

McAfee SECURE Technology

McAfee technology helps you manage online risk. Whether you turn to McAfee for vulnerability scanning, PCI certification or trustmark validation, it deliver security solutions that are simple, effective and affordable.

More Information on McAfee SECURE Technology

interSeptor Pro

interSeptor Pro is an advanced ethernet Data Centre and Rack Monitoring System that monitors room and rack environmental conditions and provides early warning alerts in the event of air-conditioning failure and other conditions that may threaten business continuity.

More Information on interSeptor Pro

AppFirst

AppFirst works on every application written in any language. With AppFirst, you’ll never need your users to tell you there’s a problem again. You can download free trial for this server monitoring software

More Information on AppFirst

PA Server Monitor

It can be difficult to work in IT department and still maintain work life balance. But PA Server Monitor helps ITicians to reduce their stress by constantly monitoring the servers and while not letting it to hamper your other works.

More Information on PA Server Monitor

Uptime software

Virtual Server Monitoring, Physical Server Monitoring, Cloud Monitoring and more. One server monitoring tool across platforms. Monitor services, monitor applications, and monitor system resource levels without the complexity of ‘Enterprise’ tools

More Information on Uptime software

Nimsoft

Get the monitoring insights you need to optimize the performance and availability of the vital servers in your organization. The Nimsoft Monitoring Solution (NMS) for servers supports Windows, iSeries AS400, Netware, Linux, and UNIX – all from a single, easy-to-use console. NMS monitors core server resources (CPU, memory, disk, event logs, counters, etc.) and enables centralized management of remote processes and services (i.e. automated and manual start/restart/stop).You can download free trial for this server monitoriing tool

More Information on Nimsoft

Neustar Webmetrics

Webmetrics Monitoring services enable companies to track, identify, solve and prevent web performance issues before customers are impacted. Webmetrics tests, monitors and measures the performance of web sites, web applications, web services, network services and streaming media to ensure 24/7 uptime and performance integrity.

More Information on Neustar Webmetrics

Dotcom-Monitor

Dotcom-Monitor is an advanced Website Monitoring service that ensures the performance and uptime of your e-business by bringing together Monitoring, Reporting, Notification, Escalation and Analysis in the combination best suited to your needs.

More Information on Dotcom-Monitor

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Photoshop is the revolutionary software by Adobe, which is famous for Editing Images, Creating, Managing, Graphic Designing, Professional Image working many many more works. But it needs the training period and we can’t do our works on it easily if we didn’t undergo any training as its having many options like filters, actions, brushes, plugins etc.

No doubt Photoshop is the most powerful tool but its not the recommended tool for beginners, as its designed to meet high end professional designers.As you might come to the analysis, why I started this Photoshop alternative article. Instead of using highly loaded software for simple tasking like photo editing, cropping its meaning less to use Photoshop, it like “Killing the rat with AK-47″. So here are the Top 7 free alternatives to Photoshop

7 Best Photoshop Alternatives

1.Gimp

2.Photo Pos Lite

3.Seashore

4.Krita

5.Photo Plus

6.Splashup

7.Paint.NET

These 7 are considered as best alternatives for photoshop.
Gimp : GIMP(GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free softwareraster graphics editor. It is a best  Photoshop alternative, well known for its efficiency for image editing, cropping, photo retouching and many more.

Photo Pos Lite: Photo Pos Lite is  onother good photoshop alternative. It is available in 2 forms free as well as paid software. Photo Pos Pro allows you easily create, edit, enhance, print, and manipulate your digital photos, and many more.

Seashore: Seashore is an open source image editor and good photoshop alternative for Mac OS X’s Cocoa framework. It features gradients, textures and anti-aliasing for both text and brush strokes and many more.

Krita: Another good photoshop alternative Krita is a creative sketching and painting application based on KOfficetechnology. Whether you want to create art paintings, cartoons, concept art and many more. Krita is a KDE program for sketching and painting, offering an end–to–end solution for creating digital painting files from scratch by masters.

Photo Plus: PhotoPlus is the good photoshop alternative for amazing  photo editing software from Serif that enablesyou to enhance your digital photos and images, create stunning bitmap graphics & enhancing your digital images and photos for print, email and theweb.

Splashup: Splashup is the online Photoshop alternative with good features.  Splashup is the only full-featured, free range, image editor online.Create new images, edit existing images and manipulate layers with filters and sharing via Picasa and many more. Splashup Light works perfectly on your desktop as well as on your mobile PCs.

Paint.NET : Paint.NET is free photoshop alternative for  image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows.  An intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, anda wide variety of useful and powerful tools.

These are 7 Best photoshop alternatives. Give them a try and pick the best photoshop alternative for your task.

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Adobe Lightroom is a photography software program, designed to assist professional photographers in managing thousands of digital images and doing post production work. It’s an image management application database which helps in viewing, editing, and managing digital photos. In this post you will find some of the best Adobe Lightroom presets, and most important these presets are all available FREE for downloading. With these professional presets, you will spend less time in front of the computer and more time behind the lens.

11 presets for night-shots by Sarah

2 presets for weddings

Oldschool skintone Ð revamped

CSI Miami look preset II

Get that 80Õs look

Get that old retro look

Turn day into night with a preset

A preset for your architectural photos

A preset that make your photos soft and fashionable

A preset that goes dark in black and white

Faded colors for light photos

Intensify your blue heaven

Vintage New York Look

Polo / Ralph Lauren Style

Warm and Fuzzy Effect

Hard Edgy Look

2 Polaroid presets for Lightroom

Black & White Infrared 01

3 presets from Dominic

LIDF Fuji & Ilford B&W Collection

The “300″ Look

ItÕs time to get polaroided

5 New free presets Ð Creative Catalyst

34 free Black & White film presets for Lightroom

ÒFrosty SeasonÓ

12 + 12 new presets from Sarah

Let the sunshine get cold

6 free Black & White presets from Wonderlandpresets

The Prairie

Albumen (1860′s Civil War era) Preset

499 Lightroom Presets by Nellkas art

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Gimp is one of the best open source software for editing images. Here we have collected 1200+ high-Resolution Free GIMP brushes that will be perfect for any project you may happen to be working on. They will speed up your work and make life easier. Most brushes have been converted from Photoshop so don’t worry if they say Photoshop in the image, but follow the terms before using it.
if you are using Gimp 2.4 or above version, now all the Photoshop brushes are Compatible with Gimp so you can use all the Photoshop brushes as gimp brushes

GIMP Brushes

Mask Brushes

Download GIMP Brushes Set here

More grunge brushes

Download Brush Set here

Grunge brush set 3

Download GIMP Brushes Set here

GIMP Grunge Brush Pack 2

Download GIMP Brushes Set here

GIMP Scratchies

Download GIMP Brushes Set here

Blood Brushes

Download Brush Set here

Inner Universe Brushes

Download Brush Set here

15 Vector Brushes

Download Brush Set here

Creating Spikey Brushes

Make a .GBR Brush

Cloudy Brushes

Download Brush Set here

GIMP Brushes: Moon

Download Brush Set here

Splatter Brushes

Download Brush Set here

1100 Gimp Brushes

Download Brush Set here

15 Vector Brushes

Download Brush Set here

Pine – MEGA PACK

Download Brush Set here

Lightning Brushes

Download Brush Set here

Snowflakes

Download Brush Set here

animal prints/textures as brushes.

Download Brush Set here

Wings brushes

Download Brush Set here

Flames

Download Brush Set here

Ouch!

Download GIMP Brushes Set here

Abstract clouds

Download Abstract Clouds  Brush Set here

Footprints

Download Foot Print  Brush Set here

Cracks

Download Cracks GIMP Brush Set here

Odysee

Download Odysee GIMP Brush Set here

Water Brushes

Download Water Brushes - GIMP Brushes Set here

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The arrival of Google Chrome in late 2008 led many web developers and designers to consider switching from Firefox, their industry standard browser. Most have stayed loyal to Firefox, however, and with good reason. It takes a long time to create a browser environment that you feel comfortable with and at home in. Getting the right balance of plugins, of which there are lots more available for Firefox than Chrome, is an evolutionary process which takes a long time.

Fast forward a year (and a bit) and the situation has changed. Google Chrome’s Extensions site is offering tons of great extensions created with developers and designers in mind. People have started to notice too that Chrome is faster than Firefox, uses less CPU and comes with a suite of web development tools built in. Extensions are incredibly quick and easy to install (and uninstall), without even the need to restart your browser. Take a look at the 15 Must Have Chrome Extensions for Web Developers & Designers below and decide for yourself whether it’s time to make that switch.

1. Firebug Lite

Firebug is an incredibly good Firefox extension used by pretty much all serious web developers. It gives you the ability to inspectt various elements on a page and edit CSS, XHTML and JavaScript on the fly. These two features compliment each other perfectly, allowing you to first inspect” to find a problem before fixing it quickly with the “Edit” tab. Firebug Lite is a lightweight version of Firebug for Chrome users.

Download

2. Pendule

Pendule offers a fantastic portfolio of useful web development tools, packaged in a really unfussy, simple way. It offers a colour picker and ruler as well as the ability to view page source, disable CSS, hide images and show alt text, dimensions and paths. It even validates CSS, HTML and Feeds.

Download

3. META SEO Inspector

META SEO Inspector uncovers the useful, invisible data that you, as a web developer, want to see. It lets you verify the description tag of your site for SEO purposes and to follow Google’s webmaster guidelines. It even alerts you when Meta data is not within certain ranges and links to info-sites about the pages you’re viewing.

Download

4. Aviary Screen Capture

Aviary Screen Capture is a useful extension for everyone to use, but web designers will find it particularly valuable. It lets you take a screenshot of any webpage and edit it in your browser. You can edit (crop, resize, rotate), do markup (draw arrows and shapes), add notes and get exact pixel colours.

Download

5. Lorem Ipsum Generator

Simple but very effective, this extension is of use to all web designers, giving them instant access to an easy-to-use lorem ipsum generator. The extension has been designed to simplify things as much as possible, using less code, which is not only less confusing, but uses less memory.

Download

6. Resolution Test

With this lightweight extension, developers can change the size of their browser window to test their sites at different screen resolutions. You can choose from a list of common resolutions or specify your own. All you need to do is click the resolution test icon in the top right of the browser, choose resolutions, and press “View all selected”.

Download

7. Chrome SEO

Chrome SEO is a must for all web developers. With its suite of SEO tools, you can perform all SEO tasks, including competitive analysis, keyword research, social bookmark counts, traffic, ratings and backlink checks.

Download

8. IE Tab

IE Tab uses Internet Explorer to display web pages in Chrome, perfect for developers who want to test the IE rendering engine, use the Explorer view for local files, or those who want to use ActiveX controls. At the moment it’s Windows only.

Download

9. iMacros for Chrome

Find yourself performing repetitive tasks again and again each time you go online? Don’t we all! iMacros makes your life that little bit easier, letting you record long actions and repeat them at the touch of a button. Web developers find it particularly useful for regression testing, performance testing and transaction monitoring.

Download

10. Picnik Extension for Chrome

For those of you that don’t know, Picnik is a free browser-based image editing tool used by impoverished web designers the world over. It really is a great, free alternative to Photoshop. This extension brings the power of Picnik to the fore, letting you pick an image from a page, edit, annotate and share it.

Download

11. Speed Tracer

Use Speed Tracer to identity and then rectify problems that you’re experiencing with your web apps. It identifies problems caused by everything from JavaScript parsing and execution to CSSstyle recalculation, DOM event handling, timer fires, XMLHttpRequest callbacks and much more.

Download

12. Validity

Validity is a quick and easy way to validate a current web page. Simply validate by clicking on the Validity icon in the address bar or pressing “Ctrl+Alt+V”. You can even use your own installation of the W3C Validation Service if you wish.

Download

13. Snippy

Snippy is a really useful extension for collecting snippets of screenshots from a range of different sites. All you do is navigate to a web page, click on the Snippy icon, select which elements from the page you want to save, and press Show Snippets to bring up a window with all the elements you’ve selected. You can combine as many snippets as you like, from as many different sites as you like.

Download

14. Chrome Flags

Chrome Flags simply displays a flag icon in the address bar showing the physical location of the website you are viewing. Click on the flag and you’ll be presented with additional information about the site’s servers, owners and traffic. It’s perfect for establishing the trustworthiness of a site you’re unsure about.

Download

15. BuiltWith

BuiltWith gives you details of all the technologies used on the site you’re viewing. You’ll get information about widgets (snap preview), analytics (Google, Nielsen), frameworks (.NET, Java), publishing (WordPress, Blogger), advertising (DoubleClick, AdSense), CDNs (Amazon S3, Limelight), standards (XHTML,RSS) and hosting software (Apache, IIS, CentOS, Debian). Simply click the BuiltWith icon.

Download

About The Author

Tom is a writer and designer from the UK who works online full-time for a specialist supplier of Epson ink, toner and paper based in Manchester. His writing covers a wide variety of topics from advertising to modern art and can be found at CreativeCloud.

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Adobe AIR is one of the most under appreciated application platforms but it has become a popular platform for internet-enabled desktop applications and If you’re a designer, Adobe AIR applications will help you with a multitude of tasks that will make your life easier! Today we have selected 30 Extremely useful Adobe air Apps for Designers.

What is Adobe Air? – Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) is a cross-platform runtime environment for building rich Internet applications using Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, HTML….

Don’t have Adobe AIR installed, you can download it free from www.get.adobe.com/air.

Color – Adobe Air Applications

Color Browser

Store and manage sets of color palettes with colorbrowser. Open or drag and drop ASE files from Kuler or ColourLovers into colorbrowser to add the color palettes to your collection.

Kuler Desktop

kuler desktop brings Adobe’s fantastic color scheme creation and management application Kuler, to the desktopit View RSS feeds of the newest, highest-rated and most popular color themes, as well as random ones.

Random Patter

Random Patter lets you create random patterns based on images and other parameters. The outputted file can be saved as an SVG document.

Contrast-A

Contrast-A is a tool for checking the contrast between different colors, according to both WCAG 2.0 and 1.0. It allows you to view RGB colors in a three-dimensional model

COLOURlovers Desktop Color Finder

It’s a basic app but very useful when you’re looking for new and creative color schemes for designs and other ideas.search the COLOURlovers entire database from your desktop to find fantastic new color creations and collections.

Typography and Fonts Adobe Air Applications

.merlin – An AIR Font Organizer

merlin is an Adobe AIR based application which extract the actual font name, and rename the file based off of that. Then put that font into a folder of the first letter. So Arial would go in the “a” folder. Some of the options you can configure for processing is to move, rename, or delete files. It reads OTF, TTF, Type1 (AFM, PFM, PFB, INF) font files.

Font Picker- An AIR Font Organizer

Font Picker shows you all the fonts installed on your computer and helps you choose which one is most suitable for a particular project. It lets select favorites, get rid of fonts you don’t like.

Adobe Air Apps for Image

Caliper Project
The Calilper floats above other applications on screen can be used to measure anything on your monitor. Draggable, Rotates through 360°, Pixel Perfect Measurements, Floats above all other applications.

ImageSizer

ImageSizer is a batch image processor tool built to Quickly resize, rotate, optimize and rename a batch of images as a single zip file.Drag and drop the images you want to edit, customize the settings and you’re done.

JustResizeIt!

With JustResizeIt! you can drag and drop images to quickly resize them. Use it to create widgets for specific uses like e-mail, web galleries, web designs, templates and lots more.

Flickr Desktop Search
Flicker One of the best resources available for free images from around the web. Flickr Desktop Search lets you search for Flickr photos, groups and people right from your desktop.

PhotoTable

It is a highly useful Adobe AIR application, you can easily save images from the web via a drag-and-drop interface.

Icon Generator
The Icon Generator helps you create CS3 and Web 2.0-style icons in three easy steps.Pick a color, enter your text and save it. It can generate four sizes ranging from 16×16 px to 128×128 px.

XeIMG Image Editor
Xe-IMG Editor is a ultimate image editor. Because of AIR’s cross-platform capabilities – designers who work with multiple operating systems that need a quick and easy image editor will find this tool helpful.

Splashup Light

It allows you to change levels, contrast/brightness, hue saturation, text editing, and shapes. Basically it is an image editor for simple image enhancements.

Management Tools

timeloc

Timeloc tracks the time you spend working on projects. It can handle multiple projects and clients, lets you edit the billing period and change the rate per client and uses audible alerts and reminders.

Google Calendar Invoice Creator

If you use Google Calendar for time management, this app makes it easy to create invoices from your calendar’s RSS feed. It creates text and HTML-formatted invoices.

Ora Time and Expense

Ora Time and Expense is a free, easy-to-use application for creating and managing timesheets, expense reports and invoices.

Designing & popular Adobe Air Apps

htmlText Editor

htmlText Editor is mainly used by Flex developers, it provides a shortcut to having htmlText generated in a WYSIWYG type editor.

RichFLV

With RichFLV you can edit flv files’ metadata, cuepoints, sound and more. Convert them to swf or mp3. It’s a lightweight application for quick, basic editing.

Designview

This AIR app is for creating Flex Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) and is great for designers wishing to easily craft interfaces for their Flex-based apps.

Livebrush
Livebrush is a motion-based drawing tool. Toss graphics around the screen or elegantly swing the brush around your cursor. There are over 100 styles and decorations that can all be customized and shared.

Pixus
Pixus is a nice application that enables us to Measure screen objects with both keyboard and mouse control. we can also preview how your design will look in the real environment.

Fractal4D
With the Fractal4D Adobe AIR application, you can draw fractal swirls that can then be exported as a vector file or in PNG format. Use the fractals you create to enhance your graphic designs.

TweetDeck

This is a great app for managing you Twitter account(s). It lets you update, post images, shorten links, and group those you follow. And there’s even an iPhone app you can use that will sync with your Air version.

Analytics Adobe Air Applications

Demandbase Stream

It allows you to filter the data, set up a watch list, see the search keywords that visitors used to reach your website and see the pages that visitors are currently viewing.

SEO Analyzer

SEO Analyzer checks your page rank and analyzes your links and keywords for their search ranking effectiveness.

Framework Tools

Boks

Boks provides a User Interface for Blueprint CSS’s framework.

Em Calculator

Use Em Calculator to get all the correct values converted from pixels to ems and calculate the correct vertical rhythm for your designs. It’s a simple but effective and useful tool.

Wireframing and Prototyping Tools

iPlotz

iPlotz is an application for wireframing and creating clickable and navigable mockups of websites and app interfaces.It also comes with collaboration and project management tools for designers working in teams.

Balsamiq Mockups

The desktop Air version is $79, but you can try it for free (although you will not be able to save any of your files without a license key).

Do you know of an Adobe AIR tool not mentioned here? Share your thoughts and experience in the comment section.

Hope you had liked the collection for 30 Best Adobe Air apps for Designers

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Most of us use Dreamweaver as a CSS Editor for Editing CSS , but there are some light weight best CSS editors which are free. Here we have collected Best CSS Editors to make your work simple , have a look  at  8 free & Best CSS Editors For Web Designers

1. Notepad++ :

Notepad++ is a free & Best CSS editor which supports several programming languages under Windows environment. It’s also a lightweight replacement of Notepad. The supported languages by Notepad++ are: C, C++, Java, C#, XML, HTML, PHP, Javascript, RC file, makefile, nfo, doxygen, ini file, batch file, ASP, VB/VBS, SQL, Objective-C, CSS, Pascal, Perl, Python, Lua, Unix Shell Script, Fortran, NSIS and Flash action script. Notepad++ main features are: Syntax Highlighting and Syntax Folding, User Language Define System, Regular Expression Search, WYSIWYG (If you have a color printer, print your source code in color), Unicode support, Full drag-and-drop supported, Brace and Indent guideline Highlighting, 2 edits and synchronized view of the same document, User Language Define System.

Download

2. PSPad :

PSPad  is a free  CSS editor,  ready to work immediately without requiring customization. The editor supports many file types and languages, with syntax highlighting. There are macros, clip files and templates to automate repetative tasks. Integrated HEX Editor, Project support, FTP Client, Macro Recorder, File Search/Replace, Code Explorer, Code page conversion… these are just some of the many features that PSPad offers.

Download

3. Simple CSS :

Simple CSS is a free  CSS editor which allows you to easily create Cascading Style Sheets from scratch, and/or modify existing ones, using a familiar point-and-click interface. Support Macs, Windows and Linux operating System.

Download

4. TS Webeditor :

TS Webeditor is other free  CSS editor which also edits  HTML, PHP, Perl, JavaScript, CSS and many other languages. It displays the source code colored (syntax highlight), code hint for functions, code completion (PHP, JavaScript, ASP, HTML), code browser, PHP debugger and syntax validation, help, CSS wizard, HTML tag editor, HTML syntax validation, and an easy to use SQL Designer.

Download

5. CSS Stylesheet Editor :

The CSS Stylesheet is a free css Editor which provides an easy method for creating and modifying CSS stylesheets for use with your HTML documents, without the need for knowledge of the CSS syntax. It provides intuitive fields for all of the CSS properties you’re ever likely to need.

Download

6. Eledicss :

Eledicss is a  free CSS2 editor (GPL licensed) implemented as a server-side PHP script. It allows editing CSS files using a web browser.

Download

7. CSSED :

CSSED is a free CSS editor which features syntax highlighting, syntax validation, MDI notebook based interface, quick CSS properties and values insertion, auto-completion and dialog-based insertion of CSS complex values.

Download

8. JustStyle CSS Editor :

JustStyle is another fre CSS Editor is full-featured, yet easy-to-use, software for webmasters. It is a specialized style sheets development environment, featuring everything needed to develop and deploy cascade style sheets.

Download

Note: a good looking site and choosing one of the best web hosts is a killer combination.

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