Ever since I compiled the original Open Source iPhone Applications post on this blog, I’ve kept an Evernote folder specifically for new open source apps. The list is long and I’ve simply selected some of my favourites and put them into a tidy list. I’d love to hear what sort of Open Source apps you use for your iPhone or Android smart phone. Please let me know via the comment section below and I’ll update the post with your suggestions and/or save them for ‘Part 3′.

Mobilesynth

Mobilesynth is an open source classic monophonic synthesizer, designed for live performance. Developers are encouraged to visit the website and contribute.
Visit website »

Frotz

Frotz lets you play hundreds of free works of Interactive Fiction (a.k.a. text adventure games) on your iPhone or iPod Touch. It includes several built-in games, and includes a web portal for downloading new ones.
Visit site »

LED Strobe Flashlight

Using the iPhone 4′s great and powerful LED technology, you are able to turn your iPhone into a LED flashlight, strobe light and a screen flashlight. Allows the screen to be a flashlight as well by using several different colours.
Visit site »

Simple RSS Reader

A Simple RSS reader for iPhone using PureMVC Standard for Objective-C licensed under the Mozilla Public License 1.1.
Visit site »

Task Coach

Task Coach is a simple open source todo manager to keep track of personal tasks and todo lists. It grew out of a frustration that most task managers do not provide facilities for composite tasks. Often, tasks and other things todo consist of several activities.
Visit site »

Tweetee

Tweetee is a cute Twitter client for iPhone released under the new BSD License.
 
Visit site »

Plain Note

Plain Note allows you to create, edit and delete notes using the standard iPhone user interface. You can sort notes by date and make use of the in app mailing system.
Visit site »

Doom Classic

Relive the First Person Shooter that defined a generation with DOOM for iPhone. As a space marine stationed on the planet Mars, you are all that stands between the armies of Hell and their invasion of planet Earth!
Visit site »

Colloquy

Colloquy brings the popular IRC client for the Mac into the palm of your hand with this mobile version. Built on the Chat Core framework, Colloquy Mobile is a full featured client optimized for the on-the-go experience.
Visit site »

Phone Monkey

Books.app is a simple eBook reader for the iPhone. It reads HTML and text files stored in your ~/Media/EBooks folder, and is smart enough to enter subdirectories, if for instance, you’ve broken a book down by chapters.
Visit site »

Phone Gap

PhoneGap is an HTML5 app platform that allows you to author native applications with web technologies and get access to APIs and app stores. PhoneGap leverages well-known web technologies such as HTML and JavaScript.
Visit site »

One of the questions I get asked quite a lot in relation to my WordPress theme review series is the following:

“Could you recommend a simple and clean WordPress theme for a new blog I’m about to create?”

The first thing I do is ask the person what they want to achieve with their blog and what their blog’s primary focus will be. The response to these questions usually helps narrow down the choice of themes. More and more, however, I find that there’s a strong demand for one-stop-shop blogging solutions: simple and professional themes with little to no set up required.

In a market saturated with daily theme releases from all sorts of developers, offering all types of support and legacy packages, it’s no wonder that functionality and reliability are qualities that are beginning to out-trump originality of design and bling. So what are some of the themes that meet this demand?

One of them is without doubt the Linen theme by ThemeFoundry, and you can read my review of it here. Another option (a review will be coming soon) is the excellent Canvas theme by WooThemes, but in this post I want to take a closer look at a third solution, it’s called the Standard WordPress theme and it was developed by a company called 8bit.

A few months ago, I came across the Standard theme via a very useful and well written blog called TentBlogger.com. If you’re interested in the art of blogging and working your way towards monetization at a pro-blogger level, then I strongly recommend that you subscribe to John Saddington’s blog.

John is the lead developer of the Standard Theme and he uses a default installation of the theme on his site. What immediately struck me with his blog was the power of its content. The material “spoke” to me straight away. Sure that’s the result of good blogging (timely post titles, clear image choices, and pertinent topics), but it’s also the result of a clutter-less and content-focused theme.

In this review, I take a look at the Standard Theme’s key features and discuss who and what this theme is best suited for and what the pros and cons of buying into a one-stop-shop blogging solution are.

WHY WOULD YOU USE THIS THEME?

The Standard Theme is set up to work like a Tumblelog with content divided among core types (text, photos, video, audio, links). But it can just as easily be used as a simple blog theme. The theme’s two main axes – the navigation bar and the content stream – make it a little too simple for someone looking to run a magazine, newspaper or multi-author community site. Standard is far better suited to solo bloggers.

Much in the same vein as Tumblelogs, the Standard Theme allows you to upload a personal portrait image in the sidebar giving your blog a sense of intimacy and persona. It also comes pre-packaged with a twitter and RSS follower count widget. This is a useful device for attracting new subscribers (though it would be good to make the widget clickable with immediate subscription options).

Simplicity is perhaps the strongest string in the Standard Theme’s bow. Simplicity of layout and navigation; simplicity of administration and simplicity of design. Coupled with clean code and two excellent SEO-oriented templates (the must-have sitemap for search engines and the archives template), Standard is a strong solution for content-focused, solo bloggers.

KEY FEATURES

Blogging Essentials: the default installation of the theme comes with everything you need to start blogging, including WordPress 3.0 navigation integration, changeable logo and favicon, an array of social links, essential sidebar widgets and the ability to manipulate elements of layout and style. All of these attributes are accessible via the theme’s admin panel.

Admin Panel: As you can see in the image above, the admin panel is easy to understand with clear labels and contextualised functions and the 8bit introductory video to the theme does a good job of walking user through the key admin tabs.

Layout and design: Design customisation options are fairly minimal as WordPress themes go, you have the ability to change background colour or to add a background image; you can shift the sidebar from left to right; you can also shift the top level navigation bar from above to below the site logo. Each of these manipulations happens in the admin panel, as does the ability to add your own logo image and define your favicon (the tiny 16×16 icon that appears in your browser’s url bar). This limited customisation is not necessarily a bad thing and is very much in keeping with the ‘ethos’ of the theme. The more options you have, the more difficult and time consuming it is to come up with an overall coherent custom design. With the Standard Theme, a few small changes will be enough for most people to differentiate their site from the hundreds of other people using this theme.

Ad Spots: The theme comes with multiple ad spots integrated in the design. These include a top level banner ad, a large square sidebar banner and 4 125×125 badge banners. Each ad spot is configurable in the admin panel. Good ad placement is a staple for any serious blogger and the developers of this theme have taken that into account.

Templates: As mentioned previously, the Standard theme comes with 4 custom templates which include a full width page, archives and redirect pages, and a site map page. Setting these up is as simple as creating a new page in the WordPress admin panel and selecting the relevant template from the composition screen. It’s a shame that 8bit didn’t develop templates for a gallery and a contact form, but that can easily be remedied with a couple of plugins. If anyone needs help with that, give me a shout in the comment section and I’ll be happy to oblige.

PROS AND CONS

So having had a quick look at the intended audience and application of the theme as well as its core attributes, it’s time to sum up with some of the main pros and cons that came from my demo installation test. Let me begin with the positive notes.

PROS

• + Very fast to upload and easy to use
• + Main emphasis is on content
• + Good ad solutions
• + Clean code and easy to customise for client work
• + Easy to use admin panel with ability to save and export theme settings
• + Excellent SEO potential with a dedicated sitemap template, archives and semantic coding
• + Well developed and evolving framework
• + Strong support package and active community forum
• + Total package including support and unlimited updates is cheap at $99 compared to a bespoke solution

CONS

• - Generic theme used by hundreds of people (although for most people this won’t be an issue)
• - Lacking dedicated gallery and contact templates
• - Would benefit from more bespoke sidebar widgets (perhaps the developers would consider implementing John’s own widgets in a future release?)

CONCLUSION

The Standard Theme certainly lives up to its name and by no means in a negative way. I found the theme easy to use and quick to master. Compared to other blank canvas type themes such as WooTheme’s Canvas for example, the number of custom options are clearly limited. But those limitations are not a bad thing since it by-passes the problem of lengthy configuration and optmisation time. The Standard Theme does at least two things very well: it works straight out of the box and it makes content presentation quick and attractive. For anyone seriously thinking about full-time blogging, this is a definite contender.

I leave you with a full screenshot of the demo version of the theme. Click on the graphic to go straight to a working demo version of the theme and stay tuned for more WordPress theme reviews.

From communication and organisation tools to social media and vlogging apps, this small selection of software covers a range of activities and interests. If you’re an iPhone user, check out my selection of open source iPhone apps and if you’re an iPad or Blackberry user then watch this space for more excellent apps coming soon.

ANDTWEET: AndTweet is a light-weight open Twitter alternative for Android. It is optimized for fast operation allowing the user to quickly navigate tweets and respond to them in an instant. Get this app »

VIDIOM: Vidiom captures MP4 video and allows you to publish your takes to a range of video hosting services. The app can also import previously recorded videos on your phone’s SD card and publish them. It integrates with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Videobin, and more. Get this app »

ANNOUNCIFY: Announcify reads out loud various kinds of information, like events or whole documents, for you.
It means that you don’t haveto take your phone out of your pocket anymore everytime someone sends you a message. Get this app »

MILEAGE: Mileage is a neat little app that helps you track car mileage, gas costs, etc. It allows you to import and export data in various formats making it easy to sync with your existing logs. Get this app »

SHUFFLE: Shuffle is a personal organizational tool, styled around the Getting Things Done methodology. It is a dumping ground for ideas and tasks. It lets you rapidly create and organize your actions and helps alleviate the stress of a busy schedule. Get this app »

FEEDGOAL: FeedGoal is an Open Source RSS/Atom feed reader for Android devices. It is an Android Library that allows you to build easily and quickly your personal news mobile app. Get this app »

COLLECTIONISTA: is an app to keep track of your collections. Not only of collectibles but also of more plain day-to-day items, such as a “wardrobe” of clothes. Each collection has some special functions to handle its items. Get this app »

ANDNAV: AndNav is a fully featured turn-by-turn navigation app that supports Location-Lookup, POIs, Text-2-Speech Instructions, Traffic-Feeds, Contact-Search, 4-day Weather Forecast, Via-Points, Avoid-Areas and more. Get this app »

DROID SAFE: Droid Safe is an easy to use anti-theft software for android. You can provide it with a phone number of a close friend or a relative along with a message, Droid Safe will send this message in the event of your SIM being replaced. Get this app »

YAAIC: Yaaic (Yet Another Android IRC Client) is a free and open source Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client for Android devices. Get this app »

Last year I did an interview with one of the co-founders of WPShower. At the time, this fledgling theme production duo from Eastern Europe had released a handful of clean and functional WordPress themes and had begun to garner a considerable social media following. Their work was picked up by several key online design outlets, including Smashing Magazine and WordPress Theme Garden, and rightly so since their free WordPress themes offer excellent solutions for anyone looking to set up a simple and functional blog.

Then in late 2010 everything fell silent. Despite the occasional murmur on Facebook, there was very little indication of what their next move would be. Had they stopped producing themes altogether? Were they gearing up for a major announcement? Had they been abducted by aliens? Such was the storm of questions swirling above the WPShower rain cloud. And then bam! WPShower staged its 2011 comeback last week by launching a complete overhaul of their website, and with it, a brand new premium WordPress newspaper and magazine theme called “Unspoken”. In this review I’m going to take a closer look at the Unspoken theme to find out whether it lives up to its $59 price tag and to get up to speed with WPShower’s latest endeavor.

Despite the quiet sentiment conveyed in its name, the Unspoken theme packs a feature-rich punch. It comes with enough bells and whistles to power a fully-fledged news website. In fact the design very much reminds me of the The Guardian Online website in terms of its treatment of content by media type and thematic field.

Whenever I visit the Guardian website, I instinctively know which areas of the front page to scope out relevant to my interests. The Unspoken theme offers similar content curation potential with the ability to color-code specific content groupings such as an Editor’s pick or Featured posts section for example. It also makes great use of integrating content carousels, multiple widget areas and extensive advertising spots. A lot of thought has gone into creating optimum ad spaces that are prominent without being intrusive.

But before we get carried away with complexity, let’s be honest for a moment, how many of us are likely to commit to the development of a new online newspaper or magazine? How many of us will actually make use of this degree of sophistication in a theme, brilliantly executed though it is? Very few, right? But this is where Unspoken starts to get interesting, because aside from the main newspaper layout there are two other templates to choose from: a blog layout and a magazine layout.

The magazine layout is essentially the same as the blog layout except that it features a gallery carousel at the top of the front page. What I absolutely love about the blog layout is the ajax switcher between list view and gallery view of posts in the blog stream. It is this ability to pair content down to a simple stream that opens the Unspoken theme up to a much wider audience. In fact, I think WPShower should have been even more radical in this shape-shifting exercise by allowing for the removal of complete sections of content such as the extended footer and secondary layer of navigation for example.

WordPress theme development today is a difficult balancing act. Not only do developers need the ability to balance the general with the specific, the aesthetic with the functional, mass market with niche market, but somehow they also have to make this experience as open to the WordPress beginner as possible. While the Unspoken theme excels in most of these tasks, there is still some work to be done in adding to the user-friendly admin panel so that the level of complexity displayed so brilliantly on the front-end becomes even more exploitable on the back-end!

As it stands the options panel is more than adequate and simple enough to use. It allows users to manipulate general settings such as theme styles, font types, custom logos, footer text and analytics code. There are also some neat single page options such as the ability to switch on or off social bookmark links, author bio blurbs, related post sections and ad spots.

Other noteworthy features include six unique styles ranging from serif to sans-serif font styles and black, blue and grunge backgrounds. The theme also comes with some bespoke page templates including a sitemap template (a must-have in terms of SEO), an innovative tag cloud template with an alphabetic listing of content tags, a wide layout template and a gallery template that taps into the native WordPress photo gallery function.

One final aspect of the theme I want to mention before rounding this review up are the number of bespoke widgets on offer; 10 in total! These range from the more conventional twitter and flickr widgets, popular and recent posts, comments and archives, to the more elaborate front page content and ad widgets allowing you to shape and position the newspaper/magazine elements with freedom and ease.

Overall, WPShower’s Unspoken theme is a feat of WordPress engineering that marks a very promising foray into the premium market. The theme’s ability to handle the complexity of a newspaper or magazine website and the simplicity of a solo blog, coupled with an elegant and clean design grants it a place at the top of the competition in this theme category. I look forward to seeing more work from this dynamic duo from Eastern Europe, and a hint at the next project has recently been announced on the WPshower Facebook page. All that’s left for me to say is: Go and check out the Unspoken Theme yourselves!

The concept of the book is still firmly rooted in a tactile, physical experience. The book as an object of knowledge has a firm historical and cultural standing. Its shift into a digital medium, no matter how close the simulation of digital paper to pages of a book – as in the case of Amazon Kindle’s E-ink screen for example – is still deemed by many a compromise not worth making. The E-reader is simply not a book, it’s an E-reader.

For a long time, I’ve been firmly in the E-reader skeptics camp. I’m a book fiend. I love the experience of book design, the smell of paper, the possibility of manual annotations, the sense of partaking in an age-old tradition and all the other idiosyncrasies that make up the relationship between humans and paper books. However, I’m also aware that E-Readers are of course much more than simple book emulation devices. They are interfaces with a vast distributed network of online content from blogs to newspapers and beyond. They are also the product of the digital revolution, just as paper books were once the product of the printing press revolution.

I recently came across a site that made me think twice about the whole thing. Actually, it’s less a site and more a collection of free e-books. The publisher is called Dodo Press and they’re based in the UK. Their growing collection of free e-books can be found on a number of online book seller sites. I prefer to access them via The Book Depository and they’re easily recognisable by their bright orange and black book covers.

But before I list some samples of Dodo Press books, let’s take a quick look at what sets this publisher apart from other collections of free e-books, which is also what prompted my own change of heart. Here’s the publisher’s mission statement:

Of the 30 million titles ever printed in the English language only a few million of these are in print. We are seeking to make available as many of these titles as possible (and working to do the same with foreign language titles). This way, we will have the largest breadth of titles available in the world.

Where books are no longer in print or poorly available we are seeking to make them available again by republishing. We do this through our Dodo Press imprint. At present, our Dodo Press imprint is re-publishing over one hundred out of print or difficult to find titles every week. We’re making tens of thousands of titles available to readers that were previous impossible to get hold of.

The section I’ve highlighted sums up my excitement over this project. Whereas most collections of free e-books are essentially repackaged versions of texts already available from the excellent Gutenberg Project, Dodo Press is committed to bringing out of print books back to life – hence their name. This is fundamentally important to the enrichment of knowledge and to diversifying the circulation of titles in our literary ecosystems.

So without further ado, I recommend you go and take a look at some of these amazing free ebooks yourself. Feel free to download them. If you have an e-reader then I’m sure you’ll be busy uploading titles to your collection. If you don’t have one, this could just be an initiative that helps you make that first step. If you’re still sticking with print books then the good news is that Dodo Press also offers print editions. Whatever your preference, let me know what you think.

Here are some of my personal favourites from the Dodo Press collection (click on the images to go straight to the book pages):

One day last week the thought suddenly occurred to me that I had mislaid my iPod. Gripped with panic, I spent the next 5 minutes rummaging through bag, coat and jeans pockets. Nothing. I tried remembering the last time and place I had used it. I checked that place. Nothing. I then began to reconcile myself with the fact that I might never see my iPod again.

As it happens, a kind soul had handed the device into reception and on leaving work that day, all was good again. I got lucky. But my relief wasn’t so much at having recovered the physical device itself – pleased though I was to see its beautiful, sleek allure once more and it’s cost is certainly not negligible – but more about the fact that I had been able to retrieve my collection of music and data. Not only the data, but its classification: the playlists and file structures I had spent time creating.

Why am I sharing this anecdote with you? Because it serves to highlight the point of the increasing value we place on data organisation. Usability, design aesthetic, build quality etc. these are all very important factors in our experience of consumer technologies, but it’s what we can do with our data, or what the device will allow us to do that has a lasting impact on our buy-in to a service or product. Access to data, the curation or aggregation of data and data retrieval are the three key ingredients of this Web era – the holy trinity as it were.

The triumph of Apple’s ‘iGeneration’ range of devices is without question its successful fusion of usability and design. By usability I am referring to all aspects of interaction with a device, the interface between cognitive and sensorial functions and the core functions of a technological. The key here is constructing the interface in such a way that the borders between function overlap and technology serves as an extension or enhancement of the body. By design, I am referring to the form and appearance the device is given. And of course both elements overlap.

But I’d be willing to wager a virtual bet that most people would trade those two functions for I called above the ‘holy trinity’. Why? Because data classification in this age of distributed networks and information proliferation is as important as the meaning of the data itself. The more information is disseminated, the more value we place on systems that allow us to ‘control’ or keep up with the complexity of its distribution. Traditionally, one of the key control mechanisms has been the press. But as we know, for a long time now, newspapers and journalism in general has merged with the broader publishing platform we call the Web.

The onus today is firmly on the individual to operate the filtration process for his or herself and this is probably one of the best outcomes of the Web as we know it so far. It has rendered us more accountable for our own world views. What we lack though is greater awareness of the tools that allow us to keep this world view as up to date and lateral thinking as possible.

Over the coming weeks, I will be highlighting some of my favourite data organisation tools, both open and closed source in an attempt to contextualise this void and go some way to filling it. So I’d really love to hear what sort of applications and devices work best for your own data classification, whether it’s creating a shopping list, creating a mixtape, processing your accounts or collecting references for a publication – let me know what works for you.

Top image: Tatiana Plakhova – Complexity graphic.

Ok so let me begin with a few simple truisms: 1) Blogging is still very much alive. 2) WordPress is still the preferred blogging platform. 3) Bloggers still need WordPress themes for their blogs. If these points are true, why is it that aside from a handful of exceptions (see list below), there are so few clean, professional and SEO optimized blogging themes being produced by premium developers?

What we have instead is a theme market awash with eye-candy, with graphic-heavy, jQuery-loaded, ajax-sporting, spinning, whizzing, all bells whistling WordPress themes that look great for about 5 minutes but prove utterly useless in the long term for serious bloggers!

And no, I’m not talking about a shift to ultra minimal, over white space designs either. What I am talking about are clean, user-friendly, uncomplicated themes that give a serious blogger the best chances of getting his/her content to an audience right out of the box.

It goes without saying that there are is a whole array of strategies for developing a professional blog, but if your base theme doesn’t give you the best possible head start in the blogosphere, you’ve already lost out to the competition. Earlier I spoke of some exceptions, here are 10 examples. That’s 10 in amongst hundreds of themes produced every month.

Let me point out that this is by no means a comprehensive list and if you know of other themes, free or premium, that fit the specification I’m talking about here, then please, please, please leave a link in the comment section and let me know why you think it’s a serious blogging theme.

• Theme Foundry’s Linen Theme
• John Saddington’s Standard Theme
• WooThemes Canvas Theme
• DIY Themes Thesis Theme
• Crowd Favorite’s Carrington Blog theme (Free)
• Brian Gardner’s Genesis Theme
• Pagelines’ Platform Pro Theme
• AJ Clarke’s Classico Theme
• Automattic’s TwentyTen Theme (Free)
• Theme Foundry’s Vigilance Theme

So to any developers who happen across this post, let us in on the secret, why are there not more clean and efficient blogging themes being developed? What’s the deal?

This is a short post I dreamt up while my finger hovered over the mouse button for an order of 30 sets of index flags. Yes, that’s right thirty. These are no ordinary index flags by any stretch of the imagination, these are 45 x 8 mm multi-coloured polythene index flags and there are very few places that stock them any more.

You may be wondering what I use all these index flags for. Well that’s very simple. I write tiny notes on them and insert them into books that I’m reading so that next time I need to find a thematic strand in a particular book, I check the index flags and find my page.

On the other hand, the thought has crossed my mind that if I had one of these, I would probably never touch another index flag again.

Many people would laugh at that and say that Penny Gadgets’ book is just a primitive cartoon version of one of these:

To which I would reply: well that may be true, but an E-Reader doesn’t offer the same emotional and sensory satisfaction that I get from a book printed on acid-free paper and typeset in Trump Medieval.

And again, many would snigger and point out that the Kindle’s high definition e-Ink screen does an excellent job of emulating the texture of paper. Not only that, both the Kindle and the iPad are revolutionary devices in terms of productivity. Who needs paper and plastic flags when you can have an entire library in the palm of your hand?

And I’m almost ready to convert to the digital way, but there’s still one tiny little voice in the back of my mind telling me not to forget the act of writing itself and the relationship between writing and memory – between the memory of writing and the writing of memory.

This is one of the paradoxes of the computer age. We have developed complex systems for the storage, filtering and retrieval of data, but what we lack and what we still underestimate is the epistemological significance of tactile interaction with data.

So I guess I still have a stationery fetish, but surely I’m not the only one? What about you? What bits of old world geekery do you still cling on to? Please let me know.

If you publish content online and you’re not a photographer then chances are that you will at some point have searched for images to illustrate your work. Finding the right photo to accompany a blog post, a magazine article or a new website is often crucial to the success of the project.

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but of course the reverse is also true. In this post, I want to highlight a number of excellent free photo sources; places you can bookmark and visit to find that perfect image that brings your work to life. Where possible, I’ve opted for sites that release photos under creative commons licenses to avoid any ambiguity regarding copyright. So here goes…

Google Image Search

The first two sites will be familiar to most readers and I’m sure many of you use them on a daily basis. They are Google Image Search and Flickr. Combined, they represent the Web’s largest collection of images. However, not everyone is aware of the fact that both of these sites allow for creative commons license image filtering.

On the front page of Google Image Search you’ll notice an “advanced image search” link on the right hand side.

Clicking this link will take you to a multiple choice options screen. At the bottom of that screen you’ll find a drop down menu box under the field name “Usage Rights”.

There you can select one of several Creative Commons licenses with varying degrees of usage. Applying this filter to your search will mean that any image returned on the search page will (in principle) have been released into the public domain under Creative Commons license.

Flickr Advanced Search

Similarly, Flickr offers an advanced search option allowing you to browse the gigantic Flickr photo pool for images labeled for reuse. Flickr is usually my first port of call for sourcing free and modifiable images.

On the Flickr front page simply enter the type of image you’re looking for and click “search”. On the next screen you will have the opportunity to shift to the advanced search mode.

Scroll down until you reach the Creative Commons section where you will be able to choose between searching for free photos to use commercially and photos to modify, adapt or build on.

Flickr really is one of the best resources for free imagery because the volume of images uploaded everyday to the site outweighs that of any rival. The site currently has an upload average of 7000 photos per minute!

CREATIVE COMMONS SEARCH

In case you’re looking for a solution that combines both Google Images and Flickr in one neat package then look no further than Creative Commons Search. Not only can you do image searches from a single search box, but you can also browse Creative Commons licensed music, videos and other media.

Free Photos Bank

Free Photos Bank is a site that does pretty much what it says on the tin. It offers a collection of free user uploaded photos organised with a comprehensive categorisation. However, you should be aware that the site asks for acknowledgment when using one of its images as follows:

You cannot download our photos to sell as is or modified from any source. To use our photos/pictures you must accredit us on the work that you used the photo/picture on/in for the use of them or we will consider it a copyright infringement.

Free Photos Bank differs from Google Image Search and Flickr in that it is oriented more towards stock photography. This is useful for instances where you need a generic image to use as content filler, but not always the most inspirational of photos. Another free stock photo site and one that I like a lot more is the long-running Stock.xchng.com.

Stock Xchng.com

Stock.xcchng is now owned by the legendary Getty Images and remains a superb outlet for free stock imagery. The quality is usually very good given that user uploaded images are screened before being accepted onto the site. It does require creating a user account and some of the images may ask you to contact the author for permission of reuse.

After more than a decade of intensive web usage, I’ve accumulated so many resources that I am into terabytes of hard drive memory! Today, I began to look back at parts of my collection and I came across some very neat tileable wood backgrounds, ideal for web designers or for anyone who wants to add a natural feel to their site’s background.

I’ve decided to create a new series of posts on this blog devoted to releasing parts of my “terabyte collection” under a GPL license. For the first post in this series, I’m giving away 3 seamless wood background packs. These are free to download and reuse as you see fit. If you do use them and want to share them too, please link back to this page so other people can enjoy this resource.

And be sure to follow this free web resources category for more goodies in the near future! Alternatively you can follow updates on Twitter or Facebook.

SEAMLESS WOOD BACKGROUND PACK 1

This pack contains an assortment of 25 high quality seamless wood background tiles, ideal for web design.

(Download via Mediafire)

SEAMLESS WOOD BACKGROUND PACK 2

This pack contains an assortment of 21 high quality seamless wood background tiles, ideal for web design.

(Download via Mediafire)

SEAMLESS WOOD BACKGROUND PACK 3

This pack contains an assortment of 21 high quality seamless wood background tiles, ideal for web design.

(Download via Mediafire)

If you like these backgrounds and would like to see more resources like this, please leave a comment below with suggestions for future posts. Thanks.