One of the greatest assets that the internet and its associated online communities is the availability of open source solutions to design problems. Some of these solutions are the ready availability of code examples that can be used in your project(s) to full-scale applications that provide complete solutions for today's designers.

Here are some recent finds for some of the projects I have been working on. JetPhoto is an open-source image management software like iPhoto. Although it is not an iPhoto replacement, it offers a different feature set than Apple's great app. [taken from their site: JetPhoto Studio is a personal digital photo management software to transfer, store, organize, edit, print, and share digital photos. JetPhoto provides easy-to-use tools to help user to efficiently organize digital photos with time, location, keyword tags and notes on your desktop computer. A photo calendar, a tags editor, an EXIF reader and a GPS-driven photo locator are provided in JetPhoto Studio. The software can generate beautiful Flash album movies, slide shows, screen savers, wallpaper with picture collages, or make pocket-size photos and send to cell phones. JetPhoto Studio also enables user to easily fix, crop, resize pictures or add watermarks in batches.]

SlideShowPro is a great application to develop Flash-based slideshows. It costs $20 and is available here. Before it was commercially available it was provided as an open-source project via his blog. My company bought Slideshow Pro for its ease of use and robust feature set, but you may not need such a fully-featured app.

If you would rather not use Flash for your project, there are many options available to you. FlickrShow is a great bit of code that can pull imagery from your flickr account (you are using flickr aren't you?) It is a very easy way to implement a nice slideshow to your site with very little overhead or coding.

There are also some great snippets of codes and easy to follow tuts at DynamicDrive. They provide a great resource to learn new techniques that will help you build your next site or web app. There are many more sites that provide equally rich alternatives for code, design and development of web sites. The great thing is that this community continues to grow and the quality of these open-source solutions only grows. From moo.fx to lightbox and beyond, the design community seems to be flourishing online. There are design forums providing open-source templates and numerous locations to get connected with forums and learn about the latest design movements and techniques. I encourage you to explore, and if you like report back with some of your favorite resources.

As always we are eager to speak with you regarding your web strategy and how our expertise can benefit you on your next project.

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