Matthew Buchanan (Home)

An image processing and storage service with a URL-based API for creating thumbnails and other image transformations such as squaring, cropping, resizing and rotating. The service creates and hosts transformed versions of images from originals located anywhere online, using a URL structure like this:

http://urlimg.com/resize/300x400/example.com/image.jpg

A user account is required, with the first 50MB of images processed for free, and $0.01 per megabyte payable thereafter. I can think of one or two client sites without native image resizing this will be perfect for.

A very clever bookmarklet by Steve Souders that examines the background images on a page and automatically generates CSS sprites (and recomputes all background positions!) based on how the images are used in the page, and grouping by size. The interface displays a running tally of the number of HTTP requests saved as well as the reduction in filesize. My only (very minor) complaint is the manual work required to fold the changes back into the source CSS files, but this is genius. (via Tim Dawson)

Fast and easy online utility to convert images to icons in a variety of sizes and formats. (via Dan Cederholm)

An impressive online image optimiser by Stoyan Stefanov and Nicole Sullivan. You can upload images from the browser, provide URLs or use a Firefox extension to grab all images on a page. The optimisation puts even Fireworks to shame, a 23KB 32-bit PNG using the web export function went down to ~10KB in one of our tests today. Would be even better if you could send it a zip file of an entire image folder and have it return an optimised zip with the folder structure intact. (via Lee Majors)

Nathan Smith interviews eight interaction designers on the pros and cons of both apps. I’ve used Fireworks since version 1.0 and am only a quarter as productive in Photoshop, but many others find it difficult to grasp. Either way there’s some good advice here for users of both.