Every month, the guys from Smashing Magazine dig the web for the nicest free fonts. Here's the march set:

» Download GrauBlau Sans
» Download IPAP
» Download M+ Outline
» Download Moi Chambre

When you think of javascript frameworks, you think Prototype, Mootools, JQuery or YUI. But hopefully, the web 2.0 world is moving and changing fast, and new players show up everyday. So now, when thinking javascript framework, you'll have to think Ext JS as well.

Ext JS is an open-source JavaScript library, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as AJAX, DHTML and DOM scripting. Its first particularity comes from its origin: it was built as an extension of YUI, and was later extended to jQuery and Prototype. Today, it's able to run stand-alone without relying on any of those external libraries, though they remain an option for integration.

The main feature of Ext JS is to allow developers to integrate a desktop-like experience in their web applications by providing a rich set of controls (or "widgets"), including (but not limited to) text fields, dialog boxes, textareas, date fields, pop-up date-picker, comboboxes, radio and checkboxes, html editor, data grid, tab and region panels, toolbars and window-style menus.

Needless to say, Ext JS outputs 100% XHTML-compliant code, is fully "stylable" with CSS, and provides an extensive documentation, a blog, a forum and numbers of tutorials. Finally, the complete library (including all the controls) weights only 70Kb (compressed), and can be extended thanks to themes and plugins written by the community.

Jack Slocum, the man behind Ext JS, also features numbers of nice things about its baby on his own blog, so make sure you stop by from time to time.

» Visit ExT JS website
» Download Ext JS
» Read the documentation
» Browse through the tutorials
» Get additional themes and plugins

When it comes to vector drawing, there isn't much choice available: only a few big names come to mind, like Adobe Illustrator, Adobe FreeHand, Corel Draw or Microsoft Expression Graphic Designer. All these applications are well known, with a strong reputation and a long list of success stories. The downside is, as always, the price — often quite high — that you have to pay to get your hands on these.

Now, not everyone may know, but there are alternatives, such as open source applications that provide the same level of features and functionalities, while beeing free. One of the best available is InkScape.

Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to the big names quoted above, which relies on the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format, and which provides a surprisingly powerful set of tools for creating graphics from scratch, or for editing existing vector graphics or bitmap images.

Supported features include 2D/3D shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, grouping, color management, and more. It also supports Creative Commons meta-data, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XML editing, just to name a few. It imports JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and others and exports natively PDF, EPS, PNG, XAML as well as multiple other vector-based formats.

InkScape is available in multiple languages for many platforms. It runs on Windows, MacOS X and Linux, and the source code is available through SourceForge if you feel like putting your hands in the engine. A large community exists around the software, and you'll find dozens of third-party tutorials and examples to get started.

Needless to say, this is a must-have !

» Visit InkScape website
» Download InkScape
» View InkSpace documentation

Google launches a new activity called Google App Engine that actually works as an application cloud service. It provides the environment, the infrastructure and the storage needed to develop and deploy new applications. In other words, it's designed to completely house your project, and to integrate easily with Google services. It's been opened up to the first 10,000 developers that request an account — free of charge. And, in the pure Google-style, it's expected to remain free — at least to some extent.

There's, however, one major constrain with this new system: you’ll be particularly limited in your development style. Are you a PHP developer? ASP/.net developer? Just about any kind of developer? You’re likely going to be out of luck here. No, this isn’t a proprietary Google way of coding things, but it is limited, at present, to Python as the development environment.

On the practical side, Google App Engine makes it easy to build an application that runs reliably, even under heavy load and with large amounts of data. The environment includes the following features dynamic web serving (with full support for common web technologies), persistent storage with queries, sorting and transactions, automatic scaling and load balancing, APIs for authenticating users and sending email using Google Accounts, and a fully featured local development environment that simulates Google App Engine on your computer. With the basic account, you get up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month. And finally, there's also a sandbox that places your application in its own secure, reliable environment that is independent of the hardware, operating system and physical location of the web server.

» Subscribe to Google App Engine
» Read the documentation
» Read more about it on Google App Engine's blog

There are a multitude of date-picker scripts available on the internet but, with only a few exceptions, they all require either the use of a nasty pop-up window or the inclusion of an embedded JavaScript block within the HTML. That's no good practice.

Brian McAllister coded an Unobtrusive Date-Picker that is accessible using the keyboard, that requires no embedded JS blocks and is suitable for use within documents served as application/xhtml+xml (as no document.write statements are used). The date-picker attempts to auto-detect the language of the users browser installation and download the corresponding language file from the server. It also has a nice fade-in/out effect. And finally, the script is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license, so it's free to use in both personal and professionnal projects.

Here's a quick feature list:

• Fully keyboard accessible
• Multiple date formats and date dividers supported
• Unobtrusive and nameSpace friendly
• Fully skinnable with CSS
• Both upper and lower date limits can be set
• Certain days of the week can be disabled
• Certain dates can be disabled/enabled
• Exclusions can be set using wildcards
• Includes "smart" localisation (16 languages currently available)
• Bespoke days of the week can be highlighted
• Works with single text inputs, split text inputs or select lists
• It’s free to use, even commercially

» Read the documentation
» See the demo
» Download the .zip archive

Bringing quality to the community, as they always do, Smashing Magazine released a free RSS/Feed icon set (designed by Dirceu Veiga from Brazil). The set contains 8 icons which you can use for private and commercial projects, blogs and web-sites for free. The icons are available for both Mac and Win-users in resolutions 16×16px, 24×24px, 32×32px, 48×48px, 128×128px, 256×256px and 512×512px.

Those guys love high-quality freebies. Over the last years, they've featured a number of designers and developers who released their work for free. Every release helps to make the Web a nicer place, which is why they support designers and challenge them to release something for free in order to be featured on Smashing Magazine. And the results are quite often pretty impressive.

» Get the exclusive free RSS/Feeds icon set

Photoshop Lady is a new online repository for graphic designers and graphic artists, that aims to provide the best existing Photoshop tutorials in one single location.

This repository is updated daily, and categorizes the tutorials into 3D Effect, Abstract Effect, Drawing Effect, Photo Effect, Text Effect, Texture & Patterns and User Interface Design. You can also bookmark your favorite tutorials easily and create your own private tutorial collection.

» Visit Photoshop Lady

It's always interesting to dig into others's pages. Not for stealing, but for learning. It's good to interact with other developers/designers, because you can always learn from anyone, regardless if they are a newbie or an expert. Now if you have Firefox, you can simply stick to the web developer toolbar, that contains lots of useful features. But what would you do if you had the ill famed Internet Explorer or any browser which does not have the features like Firefox. XRAY rescues you from such situations.

XRAY is a bookmarklet (a link that you drag in your bookmark toolbar and that you invoke from any page on the web) that allows you to see within the elements of a web page and get informations about any element in this web page.

The installation of XRAY is, again, deadly simple : just drag and drop the bookmarklet on the browser's bookmark toolbar and it's done. Now all you have to do is navigate to the page you want to examine, and let the magin happen...

XRAY has been tested on Safari 2 and 3 on Mac OS X and Mozilla based browsers (Firefox, Camino and so on) on Mac OS X and Windows, and most likely Linux as well. The most exciting thing is that XRAY now works with Internet Explorer 6+ on Windows.

» Get XRAY
» Read detailed instructions