Freeze.com Blog

I’m a web developer. I have been for years. I thought my MySpace profile would be a piece of cake to design, layout and conquer. Afterall, it’s just one page, really – right? And to add music and a slideshow?

PFFFF…

My original, actual “real” MySpace profile took me days and days to get perfected. And that was before I even thought of adding music or a slideshow. And I have code from every nook and cranny on the Internet pasted in every possible profile editor box in my profile. To go in and modify it… yeah… I’ve had nightmares about that. What a mess!

Anyway…
I recently discovered MyLayout Profile Editor. I clicked through a few things – chose my stuff, picked a few colors… then I found the slide show maker! I uploaded a few pictures and a song (one of the mp3s living in my iTunes library), then picked the Grapelicious skin for my players. Clicked “Generate code”… copied and pasted it on into my “about me” profile editor box, and I had created profile that I love. In just a few minutes!

Tags: MySpace, slideshow, profile editor

You hopeless romantics (or wannabes)… here’s how you pull off something totally perfect for one of your Valentine’s Day surprises.

Download the 3D Moonlight Lake ScreenSaver from Freeze, shut off the lights, grab that special someone and stare at the stars. Even though it’s a ridiculously cheesy move, I can personally guarantee some excellent brownie points for this one.

…and…

As an added bonus, if you’re techishly geeky enough to have one, hook up that InFocus Projector machine and shine that thing up on the ceiling.

Tags: stars, InFocus projector, Valentine’s Day

So… I nearly fell out of my chair in hysterics today. One of my coworkers sent me an instant message and said he just took a big ol’ swig out of “the dirty fish water.” Now I know he’s got a fish bowl on his desk, but I couldn’t imagine…

Wait….
“The dirty fish water?”
This is WAY too hilarious to actually be the story I’m imagining it is.
Then I asked.

Yep – turns out this sweet little fish bowl he has on his desk… well – in the midst of removing “Dot” from his bowl, placing him in the holding cup, and going back to work while he let the water in the freshly cleaned bowl temperature acclimate…. he forgot there was nasty rancid fish water in that cup. AND a fish. Took a big ol’ swig.

Now – I can’t imagine how horrifying it was for him the second he realized what happened – but can you imagine how terrified poor little Dot was? Holy moly.

People… even though I, too, have a fish in a bowl on my work desk… this might be a good reason to stick to just having the Living Marine Aquarium Screensaver v2 be the only place there are fish swimming back and forth anywhere near our desks while we’re working. You can’t drink the water, and the fish won’t ever croak either.

Tags: screensaver, fish, fish bowl, aquarium, fish aquarium

You might already know – I’m a fan of pink.
Yeah, yeah… I’m osbsessed with it.
To the point where… if they made something like car tires in pink, I’d have them.

Anyway, I also love scrounging around the web and downloading pink-themed wallpapers. And, if necessary, modifying wallpapers I find online to BE pink. I started my “pink wallpaper” collection a few months ago. Well, the task of changing out my wallpaper every day, or every hour (because I like to have a fresh, fun look on my desktop every hour) got to be a huge drag. Then I remembered the sweet little application we have here at Freeze that could handle all of that for me automatically.

YourScreen™ was installed, set up, and running within minutes. I dropped about 5 of my favorite wallpapers into the rotation list area, selected to have my wallpapers swap out every hour, and viola! Every hour I had a fun new wallpaper gracing my desktop. Heck, if I wanted to – I could have a new wallpaper thrown up there every minute. I think right now I have it set to swap out every 30 minutes. That seems about right.

I also have a small (but sweet) collection of screensavers that I have gathered, and guess what? Yep. YourScreen™ manages those for me too. Any screensaver that is installed on your machine is automatically added to your collection within the YourScreen™ interface. You can then easily browse through all screensavers available on your system, click one, and immediately activate it. All the settings are available for tweaking right there, too.

You can actually throw up pictures of your kids, your dog, your family, etc. and have them rotate as a custom made screensaver, complete with transition options such as fade, the blinds effect, and a ton more. You can even play music. It’s brilliant.

Plus, YourScreen™ has a search tool built right into it so I can search for fabulous new pink wallpapers and screensavers right there.

Tags: wallpapers, screensavers, Freeze, desktop manager

Man…
It’s cold outside.

Just for fun, I decided to take a peek at the evil thermometer posted up outside my south-facing window. It said one degree. ONE DEGREE. Uugh.

I cranked up my little space heater under my desk and wondered if a screensaver could maybe help. So… I surfed over to the Freeze ScreenSaver Collection to find some sense of psychological relief from the cold.

The choice seemed obvious – I went for the 3D Tropical Sunsets ScreenSaver.

Aaaah… yeah. Winter can just stay outside. If I wasn’t so pasty white and in need of a little “toning up”, I might even consider throwing on my bikini while I “surf” tonight.

Tags: screensaver, Freeze

Carol Gee of South by Southwest, as it turns out, is an obsessive collector of “stuff” just like I am. If I find something that’s pink, I gotta have it. I’m obsessed.

However, it seems as if Carol doesn’t care about specific color, dimension, or even tangibility of the “stuff” she likes to accumulate – she just likes really, really cool and useful “stuff”. That’s why it comes as no surprise to us that when she stumbed across the Freeze Clip Art Collection, she chose a funky cool piece of clip art (a bright yellow letter I surrounded by cool green designs) to lead off her blog post announcing her status as an “Inveterate collector”. Carol, you have great taste. The only thing that would make that piece of clip art cooler on that page is if it was pink.

Freeze offers over 18,000 pieces of clip art, available in small (160 X 120), medium (320 X 240), and large (640 X 480) sizes. The best part? It’s all FREE. When I started working here and was tasked with managing the strategy for this product category, I initially spent a good share of my time browsing through the collection. I have found everything from school buses and dragonflies to skulls and beer mugs. And the graphics are actually very good – not cheesy like most clip art collections. I was impressed to say the least.

Psst – want a little inside scoop? Rumor has it that plans are also in the works to offer vector-based downloads in Q2 of this year! Perfect for you graphic design geeks (like myself) out there who are constantly on the lookout for great graphics that you can actually SCALE UP to the size you need. Oooh, sweet! VECTOR for president!

Tags: clip art, graphics, graphic design