Add your gamer profile (PS3, Wii, XBOX 360), create and share game lists, write and share video game reviews, discuss game news, meet like minded gamers, get points for participating on the site…and become the ultimate GAME GOD

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Previously on Fubiz

• Cocoon – Comets
• Master Plan Architecture
• DJ Light Installation

Copyright Fubiz™ – Suivez nous sur Twitter et Facebook

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An essay in three tweets:

Morality isn’t how you think, it’s what you do about your violent carnal greedy cowardly natural impulses. #

Good religion attempts to explain our deep connection to others. Bad religion scares us out of being monkeys. #

God loves my sin more than it shames me. Ladies. #

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Micro-blogging for Christians. Share what God is doing in your life and read other peoples testimonies and praise.

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Help the members of your congregation develop their God-given ministry assignments. They’ll be blessed and you will be blessed by spending more time with your family and by spending the time with God that is necessary to keep your congregation pressing forward with purpose.

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Although I admire their transparency and use of social media for this brilliant marketing campaign, I have one question: Is it possible to be too transparent? Right now, on http://www.pizzaturnaround.com, there is a live Twitter feed with feedback on the new recipe. I’ve been monitoring that feedback for several days, and I’m sad to say that much of it is negative. Is anyone else getting a flashback from when Coke changed their formula back in the 80s?

Did they take their transparency too far? Would they have had more success changing the minds of consumers and changing their company’s reputation if they didn’t put themselves in such a vulnerable position by putting the Twitter feed on the site?

I spoke to @ShellyKramer who knows almost everything about branding and these were her thoughts: “Domino’s had something really, really bad happen to them. And it shook them to their core. As a result, they take social media, and its inherent power, very seriously. It’s not as if someone couldn’t see those same comments if they did a search. Domino’s is just being ballsy enough to put them up there, in front of God and everyone, for the world to see, in real time. Is it good? Is it bad? Is it harmful to the brand?

Heck, I don’t have all the answers. But the more I think on it, I think it’s kind of cool. There is nothing like instant feedback. And nothing like showing the world “We value our customers; we care about what they have to say, we listen when they talk.” This is that, to the Nth degree. It actually kind of makes me respect them. A lot. That is brave. Very brave. Who knows where it will go. Who knows if they’ll leave that functionality on their site. But, for me, I think it makes an impressive statement.”

What about the old Domino’s pizza recipe? Don’t worry, according to http://www.colbertnation.com, “If you get nostalgic for the classic recipe, you can always order the new pizza and then spread some ketchup on the box and eat it.” You can see the twitter feed and learn more about this by visiting http://www.pizzaturnaround.com.

Thank you to http://www.flickr.com/photos/roelestcoolest/2847716917/ for the Domino’s logo photo above.

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You’ll find them accompanying many different styles. They’re handy effects for web designers because they’re attractive, useful and easy to create with any graphics program. But they have a dark side: they’re frequently abused.

Using amateurish drop-shadows or gradients is almost as bad as affixing a scarlet letter to your shirt to let the world know you’re a beginner or a hack. Even subtle, barely noticeable mistakes can create tensions that undermine otherwise beautiful and effective designs.

In this article, we’ll look at what drop-shadows and gradients do, we’ll talk about how to use them effectively and we’ll look at some examples of mistakes and how to fix them.

What Do Drop-Shadows and Gradients Do?

The job of a web designer is to create patterns of color for glowing two-dimensional screens. (There are a few exceptions to this: websites can be viewed on, say, a Kindle screen, which doesn’t glow; and websites can be printed out on paper.) These screens do not reflect the real world; they’re not even very much like the real world. For this reason, we have no real imperative to make the patterns on our websites bear any relationship to objects in the three-dimensional world we live in.

Operating systems like Unix and DOS have an interface that is nothing but colored text on a screen. Others, like Windows and Mac OS X, are filled with the illusions of real objects. OS X, for instance, has a dock that looks like a table with a shiny surface that recedes in the distance, a menu bar whose beveled edges make it look like it bulges out slightly, and scroll bars that appear to have translucent lozenges.

All of these effects are metaphors. They treat certain elements that we can interact with on screen as though they were three-dimensional objects that interact with light sources in the way that objects in the non-digital world do. It’s a funny thing to do, in a way: all of these light sources and edges and shapes are pure fantasy. Because the objects on the screen are imaginary, why should we relate them to the objects in the real world?

The illusion of space connects the imaginary to a world we are comfortable living in.

The most important reason why we relate imaginary objects to real-world ones is that we are experts at interacting with objects in our three-dimensional world. We have experience in dealing with three-dimensional objects, and we have accumulated knowledge of the visual code that tells us about the relationships of objects to each other in space.

It’s partially because the feat of interpreting light is so remarkable that we take such pleasure in illusion, or in creating the appearance of objects. We are often more engaged by dramatically life-like paintings of common objects like houses and apples than we are by the objects themselves. We humans have created drawings for thousands of years that are intended to present the ideas of objects. Illusory lozenges and tables on the screen are nothing but the most recent manifestation of this long tradition.

There’s more to it than pleasure, though. Shape and position give us information about how objects relate to each other. The long vertical lozenge shape of the scroll bar in the Safari window, for instance, creates the illusion that it sits “higher,” or closer, to me than the elements surrounding it. This gives it greater importance in the design, which is appropriate because the scroll bar is an essential interface element for navigating the page.

Visual metaphors create perceived affordance.

By appearing as an object, the scroll bar creates “perceived affordance.” That is, it links itself by way of metaphor to the properties of real objects that lend themselves to particular uses. A beveled button on a web page, for instance, communicates that it affords pressing. We can make anything on a page clickable, but associating a clickable element with the image of something pressable suggests its function in a clear, obvious and even pleasing way.

Drop-shadows and gradients are basic tools for creating the illusion of space.

Drop-shadows and gradients are two tools that help create the illusion of three-dimensionality and suggest the spatial relationships of objects on the page. When done well, this three-dimensional information makes a design more beautiful and more understandable.

In the real world, drop-shadows are created when an object blocks a light source from striking a surface that is behind it. This is one of the reasons why people say that drop-shadows make two-dimensional designs “pop”: because they make objects appear to stick out from, or float above, other elements.

Gradients appear when one part of an object is closer to a light source than another part. As a result, the closer part appears lighter, and the farther part appears darker. (Gradients get more complex, of course, when multiple light sources interact or when light sources have different colors.)

So, by mimicking the effects of light in the real world, drop-shadows and gradients communicate information about metaphorical objects, imaginary light sources and their relationships.

How To Use Drop-Shadows and Gradients Effectively

Here is one possibility: don’t use drop-shadows or gradients at all.

I mean this, seriously. This is the surest way to avoid drop-shadow and gradient mistakes, and the option should always be considered.

Because tossing drop-shadows on random objects is so easy, they can be an excuse to avoid simpler, better solutions to problems. For bits of text that need to be more prominent, for example, designers will often neglect color, size, weight of the type and many other elements in favor of a drop-shadow.

Similarly, designers often use gradients to make a field of color seem less boring, without figuring out why the overall composition is not dynamic.

If you’re working on a comp for a website, save three-dimensional touches such as drop-shadows and gradients for the end, if at all possible. Use spacing, placement and color to make the design effective before adding the final layer of polish. If you focus on making your designs work without these tricks, you may find that you don’t need them as often, and that they are more effective when you do use them.

Before you plop in a drop-shadow or a gradient, ask yourself, “Is a three-dimensional metaphor necessary for this design?” Am I using it to add useful information about the way objects are related or as an effective component of a sound aesthetic approach, or am I using it as an excuse?”

The Subtler, the Better

For drop-shadows, almost never use Photoshop’s default settings. Photoshop’s default drop-shadow is very dark and is cast to the lower-right corner of an object (the default global light source being 120°, in the upper-left).

Shadows tell you about the light in your environment. Suppose you’re in a dark room with no windows, and you turn on a flashlight. Any object that you shine it on will cast a shadow that’s almost black. That’s because the object is blocking light from the only light source, meaning that no other light is coming from anywhere else to brighten that area.

Now, the shadow won’t be completely black because of the reflected light. Some of the light from your flashlight will bounce off the walls and hit the shadowed area from a direction that’s not blocked by the object. And if you turn on a lamp in another corner of the room, the shadow will brighten considerably. The object will cast a second shadow: the new shadow will appear where the light from the lamp is blocked but will be filled with the light from the flashlight, while the area of the first shadow will still be blocked by the light from the flashlight but will be filled with the light from the lamp.

When we add drop-shadows to our designs, we suggest an imaginary environment for our web page. Dark, hard-edged drop-shadows suggest a dark room with a single light source. Light, soft-edged drop-shadows suggest a room rich with diffuse light.

A well-lit room is the most comfortable environment for users, because it is similar to the kind of environment where we use our computers: an office or study. Unless we deliberately want to avoid that comfort zone, we should bring the drop-shadow settings in Photoshop way down from their defaults. Bring the opacity down to 30 or 40%, or even lower.

Also, keep things simple so that people understand the metaphor without thinking about it. A light source at 120° does not makes much sense. Mac OS X, for instance, puts its light source at 90°, or straight above, which seems more logical. I like to make it even simpler and put the light source directly perpendicular to the screen. To do this, just bring the distance setting on your drop-shadow to zero (this represents the distance from the object that casts the drop-shadow to the object beneath it). At this point, global light doesn’t matter: it’s simply as if a big diffuse light source is coming from behind the user to illuminate the design.

This effect is very common in “trompe-l’œil” designs, the most common of which features the background image or frame of a desk surface, as if one were looking at it from straight above. Film directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorcese and Wes Anderson employ the same effect for their signature God’s-eye-view shots. Such web designs have a kind of effortless comprehensibility, and maintaining consistency across a design becomes easier for the designer.

If you’ve brought the distance setting down to 0 and the opacity down to about 30%, you’re at a good starting point for a drop-shadow. Play around with the size to change how far the surface of the object appears to be from the background on which it sits. Setting the size to 1 pixel, for example, gives you a beautiful effect that’s almost invisible but quite pleasing. Designer Dan Cederholm has made small, simple effects like this an integral part of his style (as demonstrated in his seminal A List Apart article on “Mountaintop Corners“).

You can certainly bring the opacity up if the effect is invisible, but starting subtle and then dialing it up is much better than the opposite. The effect should not be the slightest bit more overt than it needs to be.

For gradients, Photoshop has a lot of fancy defaults. These may have some good uses, but they certainly have unlimited poor uses, so steering clear of them is usually wise.

Instead, select the default black-to-white gradient. Then select both the black and the white and make them both the base color of your element. Now that you have a base, pick either the dark side or the light side and adjust it to be just slightly darker or lighter. Again, the subtler, the better. (Some of the best gradients I’ve come across I had to verify with the eyedropper tool in Photoshop to make sure they were there at all!)

The greater the contrast between the light and dark, the rounder the surface will appear. For some things, such as navigation menus and buttons, some roundness is appropriate. But for objects that should appear flat, keep the contrast low.

And remember, the lighter side should face the direction of your light source.

This kind of gradient is wonderful because it mimics the gradients we see around us all the time. Nothing in the real world is truly a single color field, because it always has some kind of relationship to a light source. Look carefully at the pages in a book or at the ceiling around your overhead light: you’ll find gradients everywhere.

Examples of Mistakes and How to Fix Them

The web has many obviously ugly gradients, but these are not usually done by professional designers. Rather than show egregious mistakes, I’ll illustrate a few ways in which subtle errors can create tensions in otherwise excellent designs.

Uniform Shadows for Overlapping Objects

Overlapping objects imply a difference in their distance from you (determined partly by their thickness). Designers, though, frequently use identical drop-shadows for overlapping objects. So, the information conveyed by the drop-shadows conflicts with the information conveyed by the overlap, undermining the illusion of dimensionality.

Seeing conflicts such as these makes me uneasy, and the more I focus on them, the more my head hurts. Users should take pleasure in your design, not feel pain!

You can read more about this issue in “Build a Better Drop-Shadow,” a guide by Jacci Howard Bear on About.com.

Abrupt Edges

The corners of real drop-shadows wouldn’t have hard edges unless they had absolutely no reflected light—which would be a very unusual situation. Rather, their corners are usually rounded by the rays of light that creep around them.

Here’s a drop-shadow with an unrealistically hard edge:

This otherwise lovely design has almost no dimensional illusion anywhere but has a drop-shadow along the right sidebar. The designer perhaps wanted to lower the sidebar’s hierarchy on the page, an effect that its blue background helps achieve. Not only is it unnecessarily dark, though, but the implausibly hard edge stares the visitor in the face.

At the bottom of the sidebar, you can see a rounded transition, where the designer has created a more plausible effect. But you can see why he didn’t repeat it at the top, because it would jar with the clean horizontal line set by the well-aligned top elements. Rather than demand the realism of this rounded transition, let’s fix it by toning down the drop-shadow as much as possible.

Here, I have made the drop-shadow so light that it does little more than suggest it is sitting farther back. Because it’s so light, the clean line of transition isn’t ugly or distracting.

What the heck is going on behind that object?

Sometimes, a drop-shadow goes nuts for no obvious reason, as with the blue box surrounding the W3C logo below.

Why is the drop-shadow so far back from the object, and so rounded? The more I try to understand the story being told by this drop-shadow, the more confused I get. My guess is that the designer wanted to give more prominence and weight to the logo, which the drop-shadow helps accomplish, but it disrupts the harmony of the page so much that it’s not worth it.

Don’t let your gradients suggest different light sources.

In this otherwise excellent design for WolframAlpha, objects on the page have gradients ranging from white to pale orange. The problem is that the gradient in the header region has white at the top, implying light from above, while the page elements lower down have white at the bottom, implying light from below.

You could argue that I’m over-thinking this, that gradients don’t have to match up with light sources. That’s possible, but subtle gradients like these have an inherent metaphorical relationship to the gradients we see in the real world. Let’s switch the direction of the gradients lower down on the page so that they imply a light source from above:

And we get light source harmony.

Ultimately, you’re free to do as you please.

Because the objects on a web page relate to real objects only by metaphor, their effectiveness is essentially subjective. The connection between an image of a button and an actual button has no reality beyond the mind of the user.

We designers are not required to make our metaphors consistent with reality, but being thoughtful and careful about the many levels of communication in a design helps us make our websites more harmonious.

And our care and consistency helps make the user’s experience of the website comfortable and even delightful.

Written exclusively for WDD by Nate Eagle. He studied philosophy in college, an education that prepared him perfectly to design and develop web pages for PBS KIDS. You can read more from him and his PBS co-workers at Design.PBS.

Do you think this level of detail is important when designing drop-shadows and gradients? Do you have your own pet peeves about how drop-shadows and gradients are used?

If you find an exclusive RSS freebie on this feed or on the live WDD website, please use the following code to download it: z0Vk1W

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Sullivan, author of Stop Getting Ripped Off: Why Consumers Get Screwed, and How You Can Always Get a Fair Deal, writes at The Consumerist blog that the key to paying off a card with a balance is to stop using it, so as to avoid accruing day-to-day interest charges that start the month you can’t pay the balance. For small items of convenience that you know you can pay off by the end of the month, carry a separate “clean card.”:

Card one is a “charge card.” You make all your workaday purchases with this card. You vow to whatever God you believe in that you will pay off this card in full every month on time. To make sure you do that, you sign up for electronic bill pay at your bank and send a payment to the credit card firm automatically every month five days before the due date. You make the payment for your average budgeted amount; you can always manually adjust the amount.

Card two is a ” line- of- credit card.” You pull it out for big, emergency purposes that you can’t pay off in full within thirty days. Then you put it back in your wallet, purse, or holster, with the safety latch on.

Going cash-only until you pay off a credit card is an idealistic but often unmanageable solution to debt problems. This seems like a nice halfway compromise.

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Markdown is intended to be as easy-to-read and easy-to-write as is feasible.

Readability, however, is emphasized above all else. A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters — including Setext, atx, Textile, reStructuredText, Grutatext, and EtText — the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.

If you’re an ASCII-head of any kind, you will feel immediately at home in Markdown. It was so obviously designed by someone who has done a lot of writing online, as it apes common plaintext conventions that we’ve collectively been using for decades now. It’s certainly far more intuitive than the alternatives I’ve researched.

With a year and a half of real world Markdown experience under our belts on Stack Overflow, we’ve been quite happy. I’d say that Markdown is the worst form of markup except for all the other forms of markup that I’ve tried. Of course, tastes vary, and there are plenty of viable alternatives, but I’d promote Markdown without hesitation as one of the best — if not the best — humane markup options out there.

Not that Markdown is perfect, mind you. After exposing it to a large audience, both Stack Overflow and GitHub independently discovered that Markdown had three particular characteristics that confused a lot of users:

1. URLs are never hyperlinked without placing them in some kind of explicit markup.
2. The underscore [_] can be used to delimit bold and italic, but also works for intra-word emphasis. While a typical use like “_italic_” is clear, there are disturbing and unexpected side effects in phrases such as “some_file_name” and “file_one and file_two”.
3. It is paragraph and not line oriented. Returns are not automatically converted to linebreaks. Instead, paragraphs are detected as one or more consecutive lines of text, separated by one or more blank lines.

Items #1 and #2 are so fundamental and universal that I think they deserve to be changed in the Markdown specification itself. There was so much confusion around unexpected intra-word emphasis and the failure to auto-hyperlink URLs that we changed these Markdown rules before we even came out of private beta. Item #3, the conversion of returns to linebreaks, is somewhat more debatable. I’m on the fence on that one, but I do believe it’s significant enough to warrant an explicit choice either way. It should be a standard configurable option in every Markdown implementation that you can switch on or off depending on the intended audience.

Markdown was originally introduced in 2004, and since then it has gained quite a bit of traction on the web. I mean, it’s no MediaWiki (thank God), but it’s in active use on a bunch of websites, some of them quite popular. And for such a popular form of markup, it’s a bit odd that the last official update to the specification and reference implementation was in late 2004.

Which leads me to the biggest problem with Markdown: John Gruber.

I don’t mean this as a personal criticism. John’s a fantastic writer and Markdown has a (mostly) solid specification, with a strong vision statement. But the fact that there has been no improvement whatsoever to the specification or reference implementation for five years is … kind of a problem.

There are some fairly severe bugs in that now-ancient 2004 Markdown 1.0.1 Perl implementation. Bugs that John has already fixed in eight 1.0.2 betas that have somehow never seen the light of day. Sure, if you know the right Google incantations you can dig up the unreleased 1.0.2b8 archive, surreptitiously posted May 2007, and start prying out the bugfixes by hand. That’s what I’ve had to do to fix bugs in our open sourced C# Markdown implementation, which was naturally based on that fateful (and technically only) 1.0.1 release.

I’d also expect a reference implementation to come with some basic test suites or sample input/output files so I can tell if I’ve implemented it correctly. No such luck; the official archives from Gruber’s site include the naked Perl file along with a readme and license. The word “test” does not appear in either. I had to do a ton more searching to finally dig up MDTest 1.1. I can’t quite tell where the tests came from, but they seem to be maintained by Michel Fortin, the author of the primary PHP Markdown implementation.

But John Gruber created Markdown. He came up with the concept and the initial implementation. He is, in every sense of the word, the parent of Markdown. It’s his baby.

As Markdown’s “parent”, John has a few key responsibilities in shepherding his baby to maturity. Namely, to lead. To set direction. Beyond that initial 2004 push, he’s done precious little of either. John is running this particular open source project the way Steve Jobs runs Apple — by sheer force of individual ego. And that sucks.

Since then, all I can find is sporadic activity on obscure mailing lists and a bit of passive-aggressive interaction with the community.

On 15 Mar 2008, at 02:55, John Gruber wrote:

I despise what you’ve done with Text::Markdown, which is to more or less make it an alias for MultiMarkdown, almost every part of which I disagree with in terms of syntax additions.

Wow, that’s pretty strong language. I’m glad I’m provoking strong opinions, and it’s nice to see you actively contributing to Markdown’s direction

Personally, I don’t actually like (or use) the MultiMarkdown extensions. As noted several times on list, I do not consider what I’ve done to in any way be a good solution technically / internally in it’s current form, and as such
Markdown.pl is still a better ‘reference’ implementation.

However I find it somewhat ironic that you can criticise an active effort to actually move Markdown forwards (who’s current flaws have been publicly acknowledged), when it passes more of your test suite than your effort does, and when you haven’t even been bothered to update your own website about the project since 2004, despite having updated the code which can be found on your site (if you dig) much more recently than this.

I despise copy-pasted code, and forks for no (real) reason – seeing another two dead copies of the same code on CPAN made me sad, and so I’ve done something to take the situation forwards. Maybe if you’d put the effort into maintaining a community and taking Markdown.pl forwards at any time within the last 4 years, you wouldn’t be in a situation where people have taken ‘your baby’ and perverted it to a point that you despise. If starting with Markdown.pl and going forwards with that had been an option, then that would have been my preferred route – but I didn’t see any value in producing what would have been a fifth perl Markdown implementation.

It’s almost at the point where John Gruber, the very person who brought us Markdown, is the biggest obstacle preventing Markdown from moving forward and maturing. It saddens me greatly to see such negligent open source code parenting. Why work against the community when you can work with it? It doesn’t have to be this way. And it shouldn’t be.

I think the most fundamental problem with Markdown, in retrospect, is that the official home of the project is a static set of web pages on John’s site. Gruber could have hosted the Markdown project in a way that’s more amenable to open source collaboration than a bunch of static HTML. I’m pretty sure SourceForge was around in late 2004, and there are lots of options for proper open source project hosting today — GitHub, Google Code, CodePlex, and so forth. What’s stopping him from setting up shop on any of those sites with Markdown, right now, today? Markdown is Gruber’s baby, without a doubt, but it’s also bigger than any one person. It’s open source. It belongs to the community, too.

Right now we have the worst of both worlds. Lack of leadership from the top, and a bunch of fragmented, poorly coordinated community efforts to advance Markdown, none of which are officially canon. This isn’t merely incovenient for anyone trying to find accurate information about Markdown; it’s actually harming the project’s future. Maybe it’s true that you can’t kill an open source project, but bad parenting is surely enough to cause it to grow up stunted and maybe even a little maladjusted.

I mean no disrespect. I wouldn’t bring this up if I didn’t care, if I didn’t think the project and John Gruber were both eminently worthy. Markdown is a small but important part of the open source fabric of the web, and the project deserves better stewardship. While the community can do a lot with the (many) open source orphan code babies out there, they have a much, much brighter future when their parents take responsibility for them.

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So believe me when I tell you I got very happy when I found this little tutorial on how to make instant ice. I was amazed by the coolness and the geek factor it had and I can’t wait to try it out. God knows if it will work but judging from the tutorial itself it looks plausible at least.

No matter what it does it still looks heavily cool, doesn’t it! I have heard and seen “dry ice” in action but I still need to get a closer look at this “hot ice” that they refer to in the clip. The effect generated from the liquid created is stunning in every way and it truly looks like ice.

I am off to the kitchen to see if this really works! Hmm, was i talking about too little time just now? Well, I don’t care this needs to be tried and if any of you try it out please report your results. Stay safe though. Use the necessary protection and enjoy!

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My marriage resulted in a daughter, Ava, and a dog, Emile. My daughter, thank God, is fine. But Emile has become ill, first with pneumonia, which he survived, and now with pulmonary hypertension, which is going to kill him.

The pneumonia manifested as coughing, fainting, dramatic weight loss, and lack of energy. A week in a veterinary hospital’s intensive care unit saved his life. And, for a few weeks afterward, although still underweight, he seemed to be recovering.

Then he began fainting again, often falling into his own urine and feces, sometimes while emitting what sounded like a scream of terror. The light would go out of his eyes. Grabbing his feet, patting his side, I’d lie on the floor, coaxing him back from the other world. Then it was back to the veterinarian, or, as two days ago, to the veterinary hospital’s ICU.

At the hospital, they prescribed a new medicine, which he starts today. They also told me, in doctor language, that he won’t be with us much longer.

It’s too soon to give up hope, too soon to pull the plug, but the day of horrible choices is approaching.

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Christmas Giveaway Grand Prize Winner

And a big congrtulations to Deva (aka Daniel or Dev4stat1on on deviantART) — Daniel was selected as the recipient of our grand prize announced yesterday. Enjoy the package of prizes Deva.

To everyone else, thanks for participating once again and enjoy the day with your friends and family!

One Last Announcement

The past five months have been a blast for me. Running a site for Collis and the team at Envato was a joy and a privilege. However, the time has come for me to move on and spend more time on my own business. Not to worry though — Web.AppStorm is in good hands and will only get better in 2010.

The talented Jarel Remick — who has been posting a bit over the past weeks — will be taking the reins. He’s already been manning the Twitter account for the last bit, so if you’re following us there, you’ll see that he’s got his finger on the pulse of all things web app related.

Make sure that you’re following Web.AppStorm for all your web news in 2010 — Jarel’s going to bring you the very best in web coverage. Enjoy and thanks for reading!

Cheers.

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If you love technology you must have surely heard about Psystar, a little company that decided to play God and sell cheap Mac clones to anyone interested. You can guess what happened next, can’t you? Apple filed a suit against Psystar, Psystar filed a suit against Apple and after more than a year of hearings the court sided with Apple, granting them a permanent injunction against Psystar.
(…)
Read the rest of Psystar Not Closing Down Business [Mac Clones Seller Won’t Go Down Despite Permanent Injunction]

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Automattic has just rolled out the latest upgrade to its popular self-hosted blogging software – WordPress.org – version 2.9.

This release is called “Carmen” and includes a number of notable additions, including the beginnings of a WordPress image editing tool (cropping, scaling, and rotating), simpler video embeds, and batch plugin updating that should save you a bunch of time.

Writing on the official WordPress blog, founder Matt Mullenweg says that this release saw a total of “over 500 tickets, bugs, and enhancements” addressed. The release comes a little more than six months since the last major WordPress release, version 2.8.

With a major snowstorm expect to blanket the east coast this weekend, thank Automattic for giving you something you can do indoors The release is available for download here. For an in-depth overview of what’s new, you may also want to check out WordPress guru Aaron Brazell’s 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.9.

Additional WordPress Resources

WordPress Themes: “Top 12 Stunning WordPress Themes“, “30+ WordPress 3 Column Themes,” “20 WordPress 4-Column Themes,” “30+ WordPress 1-Column Themes,” “10 Unusual & Original WordPress Themes”

Plugins: “50+ WordPress Plugins for Multimedia,” “30+ WordPress Plugins for Statistics,” “30+ WordPress Plugins for Comments,” “30+ WordPress Plugins to Get More Blog Readers.”

Miscellaneous: “WordPress God: 300+ Tools for Running Your WordPress Blog,” “The 7 Weirdest and Wackiest Uses for WordPress“

Tags: WordPress

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On Monday past we published the post 49 Most Creative Photoshop Tutorials of 2009, a collection of the best artistic tutorials for Photoshop from this year. As a follow up to that post, today we have The Best 40 Photoshop Text Effects from 2009, a collection of diverse and unique effects and type treatments that will add a little extra to your next design.

Add Fantastic Color to 3D Text

Create Smoke Text

Create a Metal Piece with a Graved Text

Impressive-Looking Text Effect

Water Text Effect

Furry Text in Photoshop

Sparkling Text Wallpaper

Deep Grunge Text Effect

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I can tell that Photoshop was the almighty software of the decade… but along with all the guys that have mastered the tool, there are also the ones that didn’t… and just got to amuse us. Thank God for them!

So, the greatest Photoshop Disaster blog of all time is an endless source of these, and we through looking for the worst of the worst…. and found some pretty heavy stuff. People, if you got yourself a weak stomach, you should not continue. If you got a weak heart, know that you are in danger… because there might be something BEHIND YOU. Well… keep going and you’ll understand later. Anyways, I hope you enjoy my selection, and we want to ask you: which Photoshop Disasters you think are the worst of the decade? Cheers!

Janet Reger: Regrettable Hand Job

Vizio: Your Experience May Vary

Swedish Taxi: Hard To Handle

PES Soccer: World Keepy Uppy Champion

JCPenney: You Broke The Baroqueometer

Victoria’s Secret: Mostly Invisible Handbag

Ralph Lauren: The Hits Keep On Coming

Mega Magazine: Worst Hand Job Ever

Formoza: We Are Competent Formoza The Time

MacMall: Perspec-you-what?

Microsoft Poland: At Least They Left The Asian Guy In

Toast Chee: Ants Probably The Least Of Your Problems

Dust Jeans: Let’s Hold Hands

Spider-Man Meets Squid Boy

Syms: Face Off

Crescer: BEHIND YOU!

Veja: Lettuce Never Forget!

Braking The Cycle: We Broke The Cycle

Closer: The Cutout Of Delight

Salazar: Chick Unfingers

Wacom: Wacom Mole

computerdesks.com: Wat!

Unwigged & Unplugged: Cannot Undo

Gillette: Reveal The Deformed Freak In You

Burda: Limbo

Maxim: The Pond Of Implausibility

Mystery Meat: Knee To No Basis

Kaiser: Perspective? Pah! Anatomy? Pah!

Maxim Ukraine: Footloose And Fancy Free

Bild: A Quick One Off The Wrist

BMW: Ghetto Spinners Come As Standard

Austrian Newspaper: The Clone Arranger

Think about grip

Solidea: Detachable Pelvis

Gap: Wristful Thinking

JVC: Gonks Love Headphones

The Star: Back Handed

Pet Vet: Crap Trap

My Life In Ruins: Down With Perspective

Bell Internet: Porn For Vampires

Transparentes Sichtfeld = This should be transparent, moron!

Nestle: Unfinnished

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Getting people to interact with others and upload content to a community-driven site enough may sound easy, but engagement doesn’t happen automatically. It takes time and work, and much of the right formula is deduced through trial and error.

Here are 10 tips for increasing user engagement that work for news community web sites, but can apply to all types of online user-engagement communities.

1. Make It Easy to Participate

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This sounds like a no-brainer. If it is not clear that people can do things on a site, they won’t. Create multiple entry points and ways to access the online community and use actionable language to turn observers into contributors.

“I’ve gotten feedback from people who didn’t quite know how to participate and if it seems to be a problem for many, we reevaluate how we’re displaying the message. Sometimes you need to put out a call for action: ‘Post your own blog,’ ‘Upload photos,’ and the like.  Sometimes the registration process is just too cumbersome,” said Angela Connor, WRAL’s managing editor/user-generated content and author of 18 Rules of Community Engagement: A Guide for Building Relationships and Connecting With Customers Online, in an e-mail interview.

Each week CNN’s iReport.com posts at least one new topic to its Assignment Desk page for people to respond to by submitting photos, video or audio. iReport.com has more than 412,000 registered users who have signed up and contributed content, according to CNN.

“Our hope is that once they’re comfortable with the system and they happen to be in breaking news, they’ll think of iReport.com as a way to have their footage seen,” said Lila King, a senior producer for CNN.com, who leads the site’s user-participation efforts.

That strategy has paid off. For example, there was an Assignment Desk topic on beating the heat and a man in North Carolina submitted content for the topic and then a few months later a tropical storm came through his town and he filed an iReport.com about it that was used on the air at CNN.

Andy Carvin, senior strategist at National Public Radio’s social media desk, said in an e-mail interview he’s a firm believer in getting people to rally around an editorial project that has a specific goal with a beginning, middle and end. Those who want to get involved have a clear understanding of what’s expected.

For example, during last year’s hurricane season NPR signed up hundreds of volunteers to create tools like Google Maps of evacuation routes, a wiki of state and local emergency resources, and galleries of user-generated content.

2. Be a Leader

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Connor said she feels strongly that every community is different and a manager must adapt accordingly. She described the skill set needed to be a good community leader.

“I’m talking about razor-sharp interpersonal communication skills, the ability to exhibit an enormous amount of tact, an extremely thick skin and a boatload of compassion for people you would rather not give an ounce. Did I mention grace under pressure, courage under fire, openness to criticism and tolerance beyond belief?” she said.

Matt Thompson, interim online community manager for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, said in an e-mail interview, the best communities tend to coalesce around leaders.

“The best leaders inspire leadership in others. In news site comment threads, people tend to respond to the story, not to each other, leaving behind a long stream of essentially unrelated comments,” he said, which is why strong leaders are important for building community engagement. A good leader can step in and encourage users to interact with each other.

3. Interact With the Community

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Don’t ignore participants in the community — they’re the ones behind the content.

Thompson suggested talking to site commenters, being colloquial, and laying out guidelines for participating.

“Don’t hesitate to delete contributions that shut down rather than encourage discussion; don’t listen to anyone who tells you doing so will leave you open to liability. At the same time, contact people one-on-one before you delete their comments or ban them,” he said.

Interacting with the community lets them know someone is listening. Connor blogs and comments on content posted by others in her community. “You can never go wrong when you respond to your users. Answering e-mails in a timely manner is engagement when those e-mails are from community members,” she said.

iReport.com’s contact with contributors starts with its vetting process, which means the content has been approved by a CNN producer for use on any of CNN’s platforms and is labeled as such. King said the staff also reaches out to regular iReporters who do interesting work.

“The whole thing works because of the relationships we’ve been able to form,” she said. “I don’t think it would work if we stopped communicating.”

4. Welcome Newbies

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As an online community grows and becomes more established, newbies might feel like intruders. That’s where a community manager comes in.

Thompson said a good community manager will constantly be seeking opportunities to diversify the community in a productive, organic fashion.

“The danger is creating a community that feels insular, groupthinky, and hostile to outsiders. I’ve heard horror stories about online mom communities that slowly warped into being totalitarian enforcement regimes for particular ideas about maternity,” he said.

Connor said it can be hard to get newcomers to engage the way the older members do, so she specifically reaches out to newbies.

“Once that culture develops it isn’t easy for others to go against it, even in a good way. I am working hard to be supportive of newcomers. I even have a group called the Welcome Wagon that reaches out to newbies. They’ve even created tutorial for newcomers that I had nothing to do with, and they are awesome,” said Connor.

5. Identify and Nurture Power Users

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Don’t forget about frequent content contributors in the community. They can offer great insight and feedback from a point of view potentially better than the site’s own manager.

“One of my constant findings is that you have to identify, befriend and nurture your super users. Especially when you’re small and starting out, interact with your users to a degree one step shy of creepy,” Thompson said. “The culture you create amongst your most hardcore users early on will be the biggest influence on your site’s culture when it’s, God willing, flooded with loving users.”

Getting to know the community doesn’t have to be exclusively online. The Public Broadcasting Service held a national unconference called PublicMediaCamp that bought together more than 250 people who represent the general public, developer community and public broadcasting, according to Carvin.

“By getting together with them as equals and co-conspirators, it helps bring more volunteers into the fold, because we give them a vested interest in our success. Remember, ‘Public’ is National Public Radio’s middle name. The community is perhaps our biggest asset, so we’re creating new platforms and strategies to strengthen that relationship, and hopefully strengthen our journalism in the process,” he said.

6. Showcase and Cross Promote UGC

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Curating and then showcasing community content energizes and motivates users and can help get new content contributors. User-generated content can also add depth to stories reported by news organizations.

Connor said she’s been successful with featuring a member each month with GOLO (short for Go Local) Profiles. “I ask probing, introspective questions that allow members to see another side of the person and people love it.”

She also compiles and posts lots of lists such as top 10 blog posts, top 20 commenters and most visited profile pages.

iReport’s King said their site gives CNN a new way to tell anniversary stories. For example, an iReporter submitted a photo of her grandmother walking down the street with Calvin Coolidge for an Assignment Desk topic on Presidents Day.

7. Reward Contributors

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iReport labels its top members “superstars.” The designation is determined by an algorithm that tallies members’ contributions, ratings, popularity and site activity, and scores in the top 20 percent every week make Superstar status, according to iReport.com.

Thompson described a reputation management system called karma that is used at Vita.mn, a site he managed, which rewards people with points for contributing particularly engaging content.

“We gave a prize monthly to the users who accumulated the most karma over the previous month, and that worked like a charm. Eventually, the super users stopped aiming for prizes, but settled into a regular, engaging rhythm,” he said.

Disclosure: Vita.mn is owned by the Star Tribune, where Leah was previous employed.

8. Be Timely About Posting UGC

---

Time lags on user-submitted content getting posted to the site interrupts the conversation. Connor warned that moderated comments that do not post in real-time are a killer. Why would a user, who is interested in starting a conversation, submit a comment knowing it may or may not post within 24 hours, she asks.

“If I continue to come to your house, and you’re not there or if I’m dying of thirst and you know it but refuse to offer me a glass of water, I’m not coming back,” she said.

9. Allow Profile Creation

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Fleshing out a community site with user profiles, preferences and even UGC stats for each member helps contributors to get to know each other and fosters community building.

iReport profile pages list details such as bio information, stats for comments posted, iReports posted, page views, iReports on CNN, how many iReporters the user is following and how many are following that person.

“Good online communities tend to allow users to have profiles, where records of their contributions are stored. A profile is the foundation of reputation management,” Thompson said.

10. Engage With Popular Existing Communities

---

Starting a new online community might seem like reinventing the wheel compared to behemoths such as Facebook. Hooking a community site up to these social media sites gives users the best of both worlds.

Carvin said NPR believes strongly that it’s important to engage people in their own online communities rather than assume they will engage with theirs. He said that means having a strong presence on communities such as Twitter and Facebook. He pointed out that NPR was one of the first news organizations to partner with YouTube as part of its YouTube Direct service, which allows them to embed YouTube upload widget onto the NPR site and create curated content galleries. They recently launched their first experiment with it called the WonderScope.

“It never surprises me that an NPR story that got 25 comments on our site gets 250 comments on Facebook, or gets retweeted 100 times on Twitter. It’s the nature of those communities to contribute and share,” according to Carvin. “That’s why tools like Facebook Connect, Open Social, etc., are so interesting — they lower the barrier of participation for people in more active communities, making it easier for them to participate in sites that may not have as much of a history with social media.”

More journalism resources from Mashable:

- How Programmer/Journalists Are Changing the News
- 8 Must-Have Traits of Tomorrow’s Journalist
- 10 Ways Journalism Schools Are Teaching Social Media
- The Journalist’s Guide to Twitter
- Why NPR is the Future of Mainstream Media

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, mattjeacock

Tags: community, journalism, List, Lists, social media

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Deviant art has a lot of great design talent showcasing their work and I was lucky enough to stumble across the beautiful designs of Rockfield last week. Now I’ll let you get to know his style. I hope you like it as much as I do!

Amphritite

And Die..In Peace

Blue Fish

Car Love

Colourful Candy

Digital Tree

Eclipse

Freedom Days

Gloria 79

God Have Eyes

Me And My Frozen Heart

MTV

Nuclear Atom

PINK Peace

Sky Soldier

Take Your Illusion

Tech-Matrix

The Future Is Tech

Time Machine

Type

If you like this post you may also want to look at:

Designer Showcase – Mike Campau

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Why not follow me on twitter: @atikusdesign
or to ensure you are updated with every D-Lists posts follow: @d_lists

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I cry a lot. It isn’t always a bad kind of cry, many times it’s a good cry, but I cry about once a day. Sometimes more. It feels good to me, like I’m overflowing with emotions and have to let it out. I should buy stock in waterproof mascara.

When I was researching crying during sex, if found a few reputable websites that said, “Consult a doctor about this just like you would any other problem.” and I also found some other just as reputable websites that basically said, “This is just a release of emotion. It’s not a problem.” Since I am a very experienced crier, I’d like to weigh in on this, and I agree with the latter.

Of course, there are exceptions to the rule when a woman could be getting hurt or be reminded of a bad memory during sex, and I would never ever want to downplay the sadness or seriousness of that situation.

However, most of the time, I think it is just an extension of the intense emotions she is feeling (tears of joy).

No, it’s not because we saw a glimpse of God or anything like that, it is much simpler. It just feels really good, and if we are deeply in love with you, it is just going to intensify that emotion.

If you are the man in this situation, I can see it could be very confusing. This could be yet another reason why you think women are impossible to understand. What should you do in this situation? Don’t roll over and say, “I love you” if you don’t mean it, just because you are confused. Haha! It’s ok. Some of us are just emotional, and in most cases, you should take it as a compliment.

Oh, and ladies, just so we don’t feel alone, there are men out there who also cry during sex. Just read this short paragraph entitled, “Weeping Willy” on http://www.askmen.com

This video explains it perfectly, and you will understand more after you watch this. Thank you TMIweekly, for making this clip and explaining it in such a light hearted and funny way!

I would like to give credit to http://www.flickr.com/photos/29440446@N08/ for the great main image in this article.

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Tom Veiga is a 28 years old art director from Curitiba – Brazil that is completely crazy about design, art, waves and the surf culture. After years trying all kinds of art and techniques to find his own style, Tom decided to give digital art a try and loved the result. Since then he doesn’t go anywhere without paper and pen, so he can capture his ideas in the instant they happen to digitalize them later.

Tom Veiga’s work was introduce to us by one of our readers and Tom’s friend, Felipe Mendes. He sent an e-mail suggesting Tom’s work and we really liked. Besides being a surf lover myself, I liked the style of his work. The retro look, the shapes, the lines and the colors really got me, so I decided to talk to Tom to present a bit more about him and his work here for you guys.

So here goes the selection I made from the Wave Series. To check out the whole collection go to seriewaves.com. I hope you like he images as much as I did!

My name is Tom Veiga and I have 28 years old. I already worked for some agencies here in Curitiba and around. I worked for midiaweb, for Chleba from Sao Paulo and for the last two years I’ve been working at Midiadigital in Curitiba.

I simply love waves, design and the surf culture. And from this mix between my work as a designer and my passion for surf, the idea of the Wave Series was born in the beginning of 2009. The series shows art collections inspired by the feelings that the ocean breeze, the sun heat and the waves movements transmit to us.

I really believe that God was really inspired when He designed the waves… everything turned out perfectly. Each wave has a color and a unique style, all of that inspired me to reflect that beauty throughout design.

My inspiration come from a trip to beach with my family, a dvd, a surf magazine or from places that I wan’t to visit, as the arts I made from Jbay, Mentawai and Sunset.

Today I don’t go anywhere without paper and pen, so when I have an idea I can draw it immediately and when I get home I digitalize it, work on illustrator to redraw it and finalize it on photoshop.

The name Waves Series came from the series idea, something continuous, always in movement. A surfer dreams with the perfect series of waves and my collection has the same concept and idea. The collection is not closed, it’s something that is always in motion, because there is always a swell of creativity coming…

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On Tuesdays we’re typically greeted with new album releases on iTunes, and today is no different. But this Tuesday, iTunes has also gifted us with iTunes Rewind 2009: a look at the top-performing songs, albums, movies, TV shows, apps, audiobooks and podcasts of this year.

Given iTunes’ growing prominence, especially as it pertains to music and apps, the look back at 2009’s top downloads provides insight into the year’s most widely experienced media moments.

When it comes to top music sellers, the Black Eyed Peas’ “Boom Boom Pow” sold the most singles, while the Kings of Leon’s “Only By the Night” was the top-selling album for the year.

Top-selling iPhone apps include The Sims 3, The Oregan Trail and Need for Speed Undercover. In the movie department, the original Twilight got the biggest bang and brought in the most buck as the year’s top rental and seller. Pineapple Express and Quantum of Solace came in a respective second and third place as top sellers in the movie category.

Apple decided to have a little fun with their 2009 iTunes top performers, going so far as to dole out honorary awards to a handpicked group of celebrated movies, music and TV shows. It should come as no surprise that Lady GaGa was declared Best New Artist, while the Artist of the Year award went to Michael Jackson.

Of course Apple wouldn’t be so bold as to share how much their top performers pulled in, but it’s still an interesting look at the year’s hottest digital content. For a full look, make sure to check out and explore iTunes Rewind 2009 — meanwhile, we’ve included the top 10 music, movies, television and apps lists below. Take a look and weigh in on the results in the comments.

Hot Music

Top-Selling Songs:

“Boom Boom Pow,” Black Eyed Peas
“Right Round,” Flo Rida
“Poker Face,” Lady GaGa
“I Gotta Feeling,” Black Eyed Peas
“Gives You Hell,” The All-American Rejects
“Just Dance,” Lady GaGa & Colby O’Donis
“Party in the U.S.A.,” Miley Cyrus
“The Climb,” Miley Cyrus
“Dead and Gone (feat. Justin Timberlake),” T.I.
“Use Somebody,” Kings of Leon

Top-Selling Albums:

Kings of Leon, “Only By the Night”
Various Artists, “Twilight (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)”
Lady GaGa, “The Fame”
Taylor Swift, “Fearless”
Dave Matthews Band, “Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King”
Michael Jackson, “The Essential Michael Jackson”
The Fray, “The Fray”
Jay-Z, “The Blueprint 3″
Eminem, “Relapse”
Black Eyed Peas, “The E.N.D. (The Energy Never Dies)”

Hit Movies

Top Sales and Rentals:

Twilight
Pineapple Express
Quantum of Solace
The Proposal
Star Trek
Zack and Miri Make a Porno
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Paul Bart: Mall Cop
Up
Bolt

Must-See TV

Top-Selling Shows:

Mad Men, Season 3
LOST, Season 5
24, Season 7
Grey’s Anatomy, Season 6
NCIS, Season 7
Top Gear, Series 12
The Office, Season 6
South Park: Uncensored, Season 13
House, Season 6
Gossip Girl, Season

Popular Apps

Top Sellers – Games:

The Sims 3 ($6.99)
The Oregon Trail ($4.99)
Need for Speed Undercover ($4.99)
Medden NFL 10 ($6.99)
Tiger Woods PGA Tour ($4.99)
Assassin’s Creed ($4.99)
Flight Control ($0.99)
Cooking Mama ($6.99)
Civilization Revolution ($6.99)
Wheel of Fortune ($4.99)

Top Sellers – Apps:

MobileNavigator North America ($89.99)
MLB.com At Bat (Free)
Textfree Unlimited ($5.99)
Tom Tom ($99.99)
Golftshot: Golf GPS ($29.99)
SlingPlayer Media ($29.99)
ColorSplash ($1.99)
Pocket God ($.99)
Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite ($9.99)
The Moron Test ($0.99)

Tags: itunes, itunes rewind 2009

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Everyone respects and has air kissed everyone else, no one harbors hard feelings, the whole burning bush in a mousetrap is passing into one more half-forgotten legend of the internet, except for this:

Dear folks who compare using Favrd to having a problem with drugs and alcohol, please stop.

Checking to see if people liked your joke on the internet is not a problem. Compulsively checking to see if people liked your joke on the internet is hardly a problem in the sense of, say, compulsive hand-washing or coupling or masturbating. If checking to see who liked your joke on the internet is a problem you actually struggled with in 2009, consider yourself wildly blessed and thank God whether you believe in him or not. If you truly believe that, by closing Favrd without notice, Dean Allen freed you from a self-destructive cycle of self-abuse, don’t be surprised when your therapist bitch-slaps you.

Losing one’s home was a problem in 2009. Losing one’s job was a problem in 2009. Checking a website to see who liked one’s joke does not even make the top 1,000,000 problems of 2009.

Lying awake shaking and crying because you have no more cocaine or heroin or alcohol is a problem. Not caring if that next hit kills you, and quietly hoping that it does—there is a problem, and shutting off a website won’t fix it.

Hoping people will understand your joke does not compare to any real suffering on this planet of suffering, no matter how out-of-control you may think you were, and no matter how grateful you are that someone fixed you by shutting off their website.

And, just so you know, recovery doesn’t mean the drug dealer disappears. It means walking past the guy who sold you dope and not needing it any more.

Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=3225

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The dating arena can be a dangerous place. It’s a battleground out there, and you need every tool at your disposal. It’s not cheating — it’s just using the resources available to you.

Here we’ve hand-picked 10 iPhone apps that will help you navigate the dating minefield and avoid potential disasters. From asking that special someone out, to knowing what fork to use, to how to make a hasty escape if things don’t quite go according to plan, these apps should be part of every dater’s arsenal.

1. Awesome Pickup Lines

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To get to the dating stage you’ve got to meet someone first. Imagine you’ve just seen the human of your dreams across the room but your mind’s gone utterly blank. There are tons of apps offering pickup lines on the App Store, with some even specializing in pirate, ninja, vampire or robot-themed conversation starters. But we like the “Awesome” offering as it serves up hundreds of tried and tested lines added by users — you know, real people like you.

Price: Free

2. Date Smart

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You’ve aced the ask, but now need an amazing date idea to really make that crucial first impression. Based on your location or the input of a zip code, Date Smart will generate tons of ideas for what you could do on your outing. Categories include cultural, outdoors, adventurous, romantic and novel, with “first date” options offering suggestions for the yet-to-be-properly-acquainted.

Price: $1.99

3. Romantic Recipes For Dinner Dates

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He/she has just taken you up on your casual suggestion, “Why not just have dinner at my place?” Now, assuming your noodle sandwich special is not going to impress, this app will provide you with particularly romantic dinner recipes, advice on creating a great atmosphere, as well as some random dating tips thrown in, which we’re less sure about, such as: “Women will ask questions about your prospects. Even if they pretend it isn’t important, it is”.

Price: $2.99

4. Fine Dining Etiquette – Mind Your Manners

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You may have been dragged up rather than brought up, but your date doesn’t have to know this. Remember the scene in Pretty Woman with the silverware confusion? That will never happen to you with this handy app, as it will guide you through the pitfalls and perils of fine dining. There’s advice on how to order your meal, and that all-important section on “napkin usage.” Good manners are free, you know. Well, technically they’re 99 cents if you get them from this app.

Price: $0.99

5. Conversation Starter

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When the small talk runs out and you’re a little tongue-tied from sitting across from such a stunning specimen, you may need a bit of assistance to keep the conversation moving forward. This app promises provoking, intriguing and challenging conversation starters that you can use to spice up the dialogue. Having topics readily at hand will also stop you from blurting out what should really be a third date revelation (”Did I mention I collect airline sick bags?”) just to avoid an awkward silence.

Price: $0.99

6. AnswerWiki

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Everything’s going well, the conversation is flowing, but in your eagerness to match tastes, you’ve just found yourself agreeing that Bob Dylan is God’s gift to music. It’s not technically a lie, as you did own a Bob CD way back when, but the finer points of his huge catalog are lost on you. This sticky situation calls for AnswerWiki. Just excuse yourself for some digital brush up. In minutes you’ll be explaining why you’ve always loved Nashville Skyline, and who knows? In years to come you could both be laughing about it together.

Price: $0.99

7. Excuse Me

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“Oh really, Robert/Roberta, I had no idea there were so many ways to preserve insects in formaldehyde. Oh, there’s five more methods? Oh, hang on, my phone, sorry… Hello, what’s that? Trapped in a well, you say? I’ll be there right away.”

Fake call apps are a dime a dozen, but this one lets you set a timer, displays the “slide to answer” screen and even offers an indistinguishable male or female voice. It’s ideal for those times when you absolutely, positively have to leave.

Price: $1.99

8. Taxi Magic

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After a date’s gone well (or if it hasn’t, see #7 above) you want to make as smooth an exit as possible in order to maintain the positive impression. Avoid any awkward hanging around on street corners and get you and/or your date safely in a cab faster than you can say “back to my place for a drink?” Taxi Magic lets you book a cab with the tap of the iPhone’s screen, and offers live updates on where the cab is on a map.

Price: Free

9. Cover Up

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You know how when you first meet someone you pretend you generate no gaseous bodily emissions? This app will help you keep up that polite pretense. Not to put too fine a point on it, a press of the screen and the app will generate socially acceptable bathroom noises (flushing toilet, running water, hand dryer) to mask any more unpleasant audio.

Price: Free

10. 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover

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To use a cliche, breaking up can indeed be hard to do. If you really can’t think of the words, then this app offers you the proverbial 50 to get you out of an unwanted romantic entanglement. With audio clips (so you can hear how bad it sounds aloud, perhaps?) there’s letting-them-down-gently lines as well as harsher options, presumably for those that have done you wrong. If you’re still indecisive, then the “random” feature will present you with one option out of blue. That, or just slip out the back, Jack.

Price: $3.99

More iPhone resources from Mashable:

---

- iPhone TV: Top iPhone Apps for Live Streaming Television
- Top 10 iPhone Apps as Judged by Mashable Readers
- 7 iPhone Apps That Can Save Lives
- 5 Must-Have iPhone Apps for Wine Lovers
- 20 Creative Apps For Your iPhone

Tags: dating, iphone apps, List, Lists

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For the past six days, much of the world has been riveted by the fallout from the Thanksgiving car accident of Tiger Woods and its aftermath. The story has been driven in large part by the online tabloid media and the all-knowing eyes of TMZ, who has speculated about the athlete’s marriage, affairs, and perhaps even prescription drug use before taking the wheel.

As it turns out, much of what TMZ’s been reporting is true, as this morning Woods issued a statement on his website, acknowledging extramarital relations and writing that “I have let my family down and I regret those transgressions with all of my heart.”

But Tiger goes on to bring up what is perhaps a more interesting issue about the world we live in. The extremely private superstar goes on to write that “Although I am a well-known person and have made my career as a professional athlete, I have been dismayed to realize the full extent of what tabloid scrutiny really means.”

Continuing, Tiger writes:

“But no matter how intense curiosity about public figures can be, there is an important and deep principle at stake which is the right to some simple, human measure of privacy. I realize there are some who don’t share my view on that. But for me, the virtue of privacy is one that must be protected in matters that are intimate and within one’s own family. Personal sins should not require press releases and problems within a family shouldn’t have to mean public confessions.”

Tiger’s right. While we’ve come to expect a certain level of transparency from companies, brands, and even public figures thanks to social media, it’s not our God given right to know what Tiger does in his personal life, as many seemed to think it was in the days following his accident.

Of course, as the world’s first billion dollar athlete, you can argue that Tiger is a company and brand, but nonetheless, as a man, it’s his right to remain private and accept the consequences, whether they’re lost endorsements or unforgiving fans. That right was seemingly stripped away from him by the “we deserve to know everything about everything” culture we now live in.

As a sports fan, a social media connoisseur, and a man, today is a sad day.

Tags: social media, tiger woods

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Ambient

1. Skin Cancer Towel

2. WINZIP Compressed House

3. WPPED Cream Elevator Award

4. Neglected/ Invisible Children

5. McDonald’s Pole

6. Piano Stairs

7. Human Meat

8. Life Is Too Short for the Wrong Job

9. Kleenex Soap Dispenser

10. Elm Grove Police Department: Slower is Better

11. Unicef Land Mine

12. 2012. We Were Warned

13. Nikon D700: Papparazzi

14. Pantene Anti-Breakage Shampoo: Rapunzel

15. Swiss Skydive Elevator

Billboards

1. Panasonic nose trimmer: Fatty

2. Nestle Billboard

3. Sign from God

4. Formula Toothcare Bite

5. Imodium AD Toliet Tissue

6. Allstate Auto Insurance

7. Zimbabwean Money Billboard

8. iPod and iTunes

9. Powerhouse Gym

10. Get Organized with Peter Walsh

Print

1. Findus FraichíFrites: Granny Fries without the Granny

2. International Vegetarian Union: Vegetables Are All Your Body Needs

3. Bose Noise Reduction Headphones

4. Clorets: Fishy Breath

5. Gun Central Alliance, South Africa

6. The Joy of Pepsi

7. Utopolis: Reality Sucks

8. Fortis Bank: Plastic Surgery Loans

9. Target Dri Bots Nappies: No One Likes a Bed Wetter

10. McDonald’s Baby Ronald

Commercials

1. Honda Cogs

2. Adidas/ FIFA Women’s World Cup 2003

3. Yellow Pages

4. Jack in the Box/ Meaty Cheesy Boys

5. BMW/ Theo Jensen

6. Apple Macintosh/ 1984

7. Dove/ Evolution

8. Heineken

9. Traveler’s Insurance/ Prized Posession

10. Vizzavi/ Pixar

About the Author

Jacqueline is an artist and a writer who spends an inordinate amount of time playing Super Nintendo and watching Star Trek. You can find out more about Jacqueline on her website, and follow her updates on Twitter.

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Just the other day someone tweeted me with IMHO in the tweet. What the heck does that mean? How does someone figure that stuff out? I remember it took me a month to learn that TY stands for thank you. I know… duh!

If you are new on Twitter, I’m about to save you a whole bunch of time and shorten your learning curve a lot. I made this master list of 35 Twitter abbreviations for us to share. I’m sure there may be some I’ve forgotten, so please leave them in a comment below.

Enjoy!

b/c = Because

BG = Background (when someone refers to their Twitter background page)

BFN = Bye for now

BR = Best regards

BTW = By the way

DM = Direct message

EM = Email

FB = Facebook

FTF = Face to face

FWIW = For what it’s worth

Gr8 = Great

IMO = In my opinion

IMHO = In my honest opinion or in my humble opinion

IRL = In real life

J/K = Just kidding

LI = LinkedIn

LMK = Let me know

LMBO = Laughing my butt off

LMAO = Laughing my ass off

LOL = Laughing out loud

NP = No problem

OMG = Oh my God

OMFG = Oh my f—- God

PLZ = Please

RT = Retweet

RTHX = Thanks for the retweet

TMB = Tweet me back

TMI = Too much information

TTYS = Talk to you soon

TTYL = Talk to you later

TY = Thank you

WTH = What the heck

WTF = What the f—

YW = You’re welcome

<3 = This is the text version of a heart

The delicious photo of the Twitter cupcake above is courtesy of:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bakerella/3330087454/

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So, as I was deciding to write this article, I wanted to get a diverse group of people to answer the simple, yet powerful question: “What are you thankful for?” I apologize for the length, but I guarantee you that reading through these inspiring messages from people around the world is well worth your time.

When I asked the question, no background was given, only the question. I chose random people from different backgrounds to include in this article to show that while we are all unique, we are all very much the same.

If you are not celebrating Thanksgiving this week, please at least take a few moments to appreciate and cherish what means most to you, and celebrate what you are thankful for in life.

What Are You Thankful For?

@TrendyDC from Washington, DC

“Just returned from Peru helping out orphan boys & grateful to be blessed with a family, job, food, comfortable shelter and healthcare.”

@Alyssa_Milano from Los Angeles, California

“This year, I’m thankful for my husband, who every day inspires me to be a better woman.”

@StaciJShelton from Cleveland, Ohio

“I’m so very thankful for love, family, friendship and the power of connection. Pure love for people changes lives.”

@Minervity from Stockholm, Sweden

” I am thankful for my wonderful & beautiful daughter. Thankful for all the creative inspiration my friends share and project. I am thankful for all the wonderful friends I’ve made this year.”

@BenParr from San Francisco, California

“I’m thankful that our society has love and friendship, for they are the most fulfilling part of our lives.”

@SusanLorelei from Pittsburgh, PA

“I suffered a horrible loss this year & am truly thankful for people God has brought into my life to provide cheer & strength.”

@GaryVee from New York City, NY

“Easy answer: The health of my loved ones!”

@ChrisTuff from Atlanta, Georgia

“I’m thankful for my friends and family who make me fired up to wake up every morning and excited for the next day.”

@PrayForAidan from Concord, North Carolina

“My oldest son surviving and thriving…” http://prayforaidan.com

@ItStartsWithUs from Milwaukee, WI

“I’m thankful for the surprising number of people who are willing to give of themselves to help others, with no expectation of reward.”

@ButtercupD from Los Angeles, California

“Thankful for my family, friends and relatively good health!”

@fjfonseca from Barcelona, Spain

“For life, the biggest gift of all, with its good and bad things, ups and downs I am thankful for life itself.”

@ShellyKramer from Kansas City, Missouri

“I am thankful that my family is well & healthy, for the great friends I have, for a roof over my head, food on my table, family in my arms & love in my heart.”

@Msaleem from Chicago, Illinois

“What am I thankful for… a lot of things, my health, friends, great jobs and colleagues, what’s not to be thankful for?”

@ClementYeung from North-East UK

“I am grateful for love, for without it our actions would hold no meaning. I am grateful for my life, for without it I would not be here to experience that love.”

@AdamsConsulting from Atlanta, Georgia

“I’m thankful for my son,my Twitter friends & that I’m able to help others during this season. It’s a blessing to be a blessing.”

@Toad_Mario from Atlanta, Georgia

“I’m thankful for my family, my dog named Sunny and my Nintendo DS.”

@BelindaAng from Singapore

“I am thankful for…. waking each day to see the sun, blue skies, white clouds and knowing that I am loved.”

@Zee from London, UK

“For meeting the most wonderful person in the world and getting to spend the rest of my days with her.”

@ChrisBrogan from Boston, MA

“Thankful for a supportive family who knows there’s a method to my madness.”

@RayBeckerman from New York, NY

“I’m thankful for the privilege of being part of a social media revolution which makes it much easier for all people to be citizen journalists.”

@MarySarahMusic from Texas, USA

“I am SO thankful for life! I have the greatest, most supportive parents ever! And mostly just for the life I get to lead and hopefully can help others in return.”

@Jaycbee from Atlanta, Georgia

“I am thankful for the many blessings I have received in life. For my family and friends, old and new, near and far. thankful for my Faith.”

@soulboykirk from Nova Scotia, Canada

“Thankful to be gifted in different disciplines; for great music, the arts in general; for the net/Twitter/FB giving me helpful global friends.”

@AbsolutelyTrue from South Carolina

“I’m thankful for those who truly care about me and carry me in their hearts.”

@Milagro88 from Vietnam

“I’m thankful for my amazing family, our health, freedom from financial worry, intelligence, spirituality & peace at home and for friendships!”

@Ruth_Z from Tel Aviv, Israel

“I’m grateful that I have a job that causes me to create something new every day and to be the wheel that drives the wheel.”

@Iconic88 from Sydney, Australia

“I am thankful for my family, friends, culture and every experience I’ve had in my life to share the lessons with others.”

@ModelSupplies from Detroit, MI

“So grateful for the chance to connect with all of my Twitter & FB follow-friends whose love and support shows in each and every character!”

@AdNys from Los Angeles, CA

“Thankful for: Family (2 young sons). Life (love). Love (purity). Wilderness (keeps humans sane). Journalism (long live the 4th estate).”

@Lotay from Los Angeles, California

“I’m most thankful for God.”

@HeyKim from USA

“I am thankful for family… friends and NBA basketball.”

@Ostrick from Los Angeles, California

“I am thankful for my health, loving family and sharing stories and ideas.”

@StefanieWood from Bristol, UK

“I’m thankful for my friends and family, my job and car, and generally the quality of my life.”

@Cheth from Manipal, Bangalore, India

“Thankful to all the people who didn’t help me, so that I could learn it myself. Thankful to all those people who criticized me! And to all who supported me.”

@TrendTracker from New Jersey, USA

“I’m thankful for my family and friends – and for the freedoms and blessings I enjoy from so many who have sacrificed so much.”

@JeffRago from Studio City, California

“I am thankful for the people in my life and the experiences that bring us together.”

@DelWilliams from Los Angeles, California

“I’m thankful for the friends I have made on Twitter, and the opportunities this platform has brought me.”

@KrystynChong from California, USA

“I’m thankful for my health. Hard to enjoy anything when your body isn’t functioning as usual.”

@ChiniehDiaz from Manila, Philippines

“I’m thankful for my awesome family & my sense of humor. Life can never get you down when you have those.”

@HappySoul from London, UK and Asia

“I’m thankful for my blessed family & friends, my life & love experiences & choices, bad & good, that have made who I am today”

@Daniel_Barta from Örményes, Hungary

“I am thankful for this wonderful world and for this wonderful life to God. And things like having wonderful friends is amazing.”

@AdventureGirl from LosAngeles, California

“I am thankful for Twitter. Without it, we would not be able to help change the world along with those less fortunate who hopefully now will have a voice.”

@KyNamDoan from San Francisco, California

“I’m thankful for family, good luck, and San Francisco.”

@IgorBuhovec from Riga, Latvia

“I’m thankful that… I didn’t spend a minute in fear. It’s about wars and terror. I live in quiet EU country and that’s great.”

@ColourOfAir from Cluj-Napoca, Romania

“I am thankful for the gift of life, my wife, music, art, friends, being healthy. God bless!”

@WTFJAY from Toronto, Canada

“I am thankful for the time I get to spend with my family.The last few years have been difficult, and they have helped me through it.”

@Cupcakes5 from Pittsburgh, PA

“I am thankful for freedom and all that entails.”

@Virtuosoblogger from India

“I am thankful for all the love and support shown by my friends and family.”

@binoyxj from Bangalore, India

“I am thankful for friends..the ones i manage to keep up with….both online and offline.”

@jmdc88 from Washington, DC

“Thankful to wake up each day to have a chance to do whatever I can to make the world a better place. Being alive, and being loved by family & friends.”

@phaoloo from Taipie, Taiwan

“I am thankful for living on this earth.”

@Dublins98Dave from Dublin, Ireland

“I’m thankful for finding my best friend Tracy, marrying her and starting a family. She makes my life utterly amazing.”

@ProjectKpaz from Boston, MA and Brazil

“I am thankful for having found relatively early in my life what it is that I really can’t live without, music.”

@LarisaBelliveau from Rochester, NY

“I am thankful for my “learning experiences” because they polish my soul.”

@BerniePiekarski from Orlando, Florida

“To be alive. Had heart attack & triple bypass 4/6/09 Health is good today. For my family & friends. Without them I really have nothing else.”

@Blogomomma from Chicago, Illinois

“God’s intercession of grace. Thru my good, bad, and ugly – epic failures,biggest regrets,worst heartbreaks-He NEVER left me!”

@Sloane from New Orleans. Louisiana

“Thankful for trusting in myself, willingness to open my heart to friends, faith and love of my family and ability to give back to others.”

@PrintedProof from Massachusetts, USA

“I am thankful for my freedom more than anything. I love the ability to raise my children my way, work a job I love, and sleep in peace & comfort next to the woman of my dreams.”

@ChrisPirillo from Seattle, Washington

“I’m thankful for my friends. I’m thankful for the internet and I’m thankful for the opportunity to say Happy Thanksgiving.” (More from Chris in this video.)

For those who wonder why I chose Chris Pirillo for the bottom of this list, he responded with a video. And while it did not quite fit with this article, it was lots of fun to watch.

And finally, I am thankful that I was able to bring so many wonderful and amazing people together for this article. Thankful for family, friends and associates. Thankful for yet another day on this Earth. Thankful that peace is always a possibility.

And now…What are you thankful for?

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Today Thanksgiving may be a family feast and the collective giving of thanks, however history tells us its not the same gathering we see portrayed on TV. After doing some reading I found a few things that I’m sure were not said at the first Thanksgiving dinner…

“Happy Thanksgiving Everyone”
Thanksgiving was a religious holiday in which they would go to church and thank God for a specific gift or event. The feast was a secular celebration, so it never would have been considered “thanksgiving” to the pilgrims. The dinner was actually a celebration of the harvest and was served weeks before when we now celebrate the holiday. Plus, the Indian friends were never invited to religious events.

“I like that buckle on your hat Bill”
Contrary to many modern images of the Pilgrims, buckles did not come into fashion until later in the seventeenth century. Also, they would have addressed him as William. Bill was a nickname not yet adopted.

“Can someone please pass the potatoes?”
Nope, no potatoes in Plimoth, Massachusetts. We dont even know if they ate turkey… birds were served as a side dish. Turkey on Thanksgiving was made popular by the Victorians in the 1860’s. We DO know that the pilgrims had served deer and fish… yum.

“How’s the new Log Cabin coming John?”
No Pilgrim has ever lived in a log cabin. The Germans and Swedes introduced the idea of a “Log Cabin” in America late in the seventeenth century. Sorry famous artist renderings, they all lived in wood clapboard houses made from sawed lumber.

“After dinner there will be a get together at Plymouth Rock”
Not unless they had a rock named “Plymouth” in Provincetown on Cape Cod.

“This was fun, let’s do it again next year!”
The harvest feast with the Indians was not an annual event. The next ”Thanksgiving” was not recorded until a good harvest season in 1622.

“Who’s in for a game of football… Pilgrims vs. Indians?”
First, they called themselves “Saints”. The term “Pilgrims” was given to early settlers by Americans in the 20th century. Second, no football. However, there may very well have been a Saints versus Redskins marbles match.

Let the history books and tradition fight it out.  I say put on the silly hats and enjoy the turkey. Have a great Thanksgiving – from your friends at Bit Rebels!

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I’ve just discovered that Wonderland can be a creepy, creepy place. Unlike the Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland has a much darker side, and artists really love to show it off. Oh little Alice, what happened to you?

Disney’s version of the tale is absolutely obsolete as I can see… people don’t believe it as the cute story of a girl lost in a different land, but they do believe that Wonderland is one hell of a wicked place to be lost at. Poor Alice has lost her way… and thank God for illustrations like these to show us this dark side of the story… but still, there are some cute images in here, just to remember the good old days. Oh, and don’t forget to visit each author’s page! They’ll love it! Cheers.

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By Aquil Akhter

3-D computer graphics (CG) art is capable of generating the most eye-catching and incredible effects, and that’s why we love it. The extent to which 3-D CG can replicate human characteristics is simply unbelievable, It can generate graphic details that could easily be mistaken for live photography.

For this post, we have looked for truly fantastic artwork that demonstrates the incredible rendering power of CG. Have a look at these portraits and see for yourself how inspired you get.

Amazingly Realistic CG Portraits

Biker
Created by Piotr Fox Wysocki of Poland, using Maya, mental ray, Photoshop and ZBrush.

do you want fries with that?
Created by Albert Susantio of Australia, using Maya, mental ray, ZBrush and Photoshop.

Bravery! doughty! heroical
Created by Rui Dai of China, using 3ds Max, mental ray, Photoshop and ZBrush.

The Boxer
Created by Jeff Miller of the USA, using 3ds Max, Photoshop and ZBrush.

The last move
Created by Jose Mª Lazaro of Spain, using 3ds Max, BodyPaint, mental ray, Photoshop and ZBrush.

Dr. House
Created by Fabio Barretta, using Maya, mental ray and ZBrush.

Last Elf
Created by Piotr Fox Wysocki of Poland, using Maya, mental ray, Photoshop and ZBrush.

Muriel_2
Created by Mauro Corveloni of Brazil, using Lightwave 3D, Photoshop and ZBrush.

Mage
Created by Joel Mongeon of the USA, using Lightwave 3D, Photoshop and ZBrush.

Chimpanzee
Created by Jacques Defontaine of Belgium. The base mesh was done in Modo, and the detailing done in Mudbox. The artist did about 80% of the textures in Mudbox and the rest in Modo. Shading, lighting and fur was rendered at the end in Modo 401.

Charging Kudu
Created by Bill Melvin of the USA, using Cinema 4D, Photoshop and ZBrush.

Rain Street
Created by MR Zhangnaigang of China, using 3ds Max, Photoshop and V-Ray.

A Tribute to Ingrid Bergman
Created by Max Wahyudi of Indonesia, modeled in XSI and ZBrush, and rendered in Maya using mental ray.

John Locke
If you don’t know who this is, Locke is one of the main characters on the TV show “Lost.” The artist has modeled it with 3ds Max 9 and rendered with V-Ray. The background and final retouches were done with Combustion.

Bernadette
Created by Stephen David Molyneaux of the UK, using 3ds Max, mental ray, Photoshop and ZBrush.

The Artist himself
The artist spent about one and a half months on this image, working by night. He used Maya, Maya fur and mental ray to create it, and used ZBrush 2 and Photoshop for the textures and color correction.

Captain Jack Sparrow
Here is a portrait of Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow, created by Jeremy Roberts. It was done using 3ds Max, ZBrush and Photoshop.

Kathryn
This is portrait of Richard Turic’s favorite actress, the beautiful Kathryn Morris. It was made with 3ds Max, ZBrush and Photoshop.

FATJON’s performance
A rendering of FATJON, a music DJ. Created by Yu Cheng Qu using Maya, Photoshop and ZBrush.

Young girl
Created by Viki Yeo of South Korea. The base mesh was sculpted with ZBrush. The final mesh was modeled in 3ds Max, textured in Photoshop and rendered in mental ray (with Hair & fur used for the hair).

Unfinished
Created by Adam Potter, using Maya, VRay and Poser.

Old Samurai
Created by Rodrigue Pralier, using ZBrush, 3ds Max and Photoshop.

Russell Crowe: Gladiator
Created by Mihai Anghelescu and modeled in 3ds Max, rendered in mental ray, textured in Photoshop.

A commander
Created by Jian Xu of China, using 3ds Max 9 and Photoshop, and rendered in mental ray.

Kid
Created by Rakesh Sandhu, using Maya, mental ray, Photoshop and ZBrush.

Digital portrait
Created by Anto Juricic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, using Maya, Silo and ZBrush.

The Final Battle
Created by Max Kor of Israel, using Maya and mental ray.

Driver 4 Character
This is one of the 30 characters created for the latest FMV project, “Driver 4,” modeled and rendered in LightWave, and rigged and animated in Maya.

A Girl
Created by Jiro Sugiyama of Japan, modeled and rendered in Blender, and finished in Photoshop.

Patient
Created by James Busby of the UK, modeled and rendered using Lightwave 9.3. The skin was done with the new simple skin shader. Textures and post was done in Photoshop and Fusion.

God’s Mastiffs
Created by Silvia Fusetti of Italy, using Photoshop, Poser and XSI.

Good-bye
Created by Chengjie Wang of China, using 3ds Max, After Effects, mental ray and Photoshop.

Open Green
Created by Andrius Balciunas, using 3ds Max. The textures were hand-painted.

Healing Girl Zoom
Created using Maya, mental ray, Photoshop and ZBrush.

Yuji

Created by Rui Shen of China, using 3ds Max, BodyPaint, mental ray, Photoshop and ZBrush.

Hue

Beauty Monica

TheFountain
Created by Pasquale Giacobelli of Italy, using 3ds Max, mental ray and ZBrush.

Girl with Earring
Created by Steven Sun of China, using BodyPaint, Maya, mental ray, Photoshop and ZBrush.

Opal Child
Created by Olivier Ponsonnet of France. Everything was modelled and rendered using 3DS Max and mental ray. The textures were hand-painted using Photoshop. Final color correction, grain and depth of field were also added in Photoshop.

Old Guy: displacement study
Created by Jarek Switalski of Poland. The base mesh was modeled in 3ds Max and scuplted in ZBrush. The displacement map was done in ZBrush.

Amy is Absinthe
Created by Petr Chegodaev of Russia, using 3ds Max, Maxwell Render, Maya, mental ray, Photoshop and ZBrush.

A Portrait of My Grandfather
Created by Gabor Cseh of the Netherlands. Modeling and rendering was done in MAX with Vray, the sculpting in ZBrush, and post in Combustion.

Cross of iron
Created by Eric Zhang of Canada. He started from a sphere in ZBrush, with retopology done in Maya. He used a displacement map for the face and a normal map for the finer details.

La Espera
Created by Jorge Suarez of Argentina, using Lightwave 9.6, which has the latest technology nodes (FAST SKIN).

NY City Apartment
Created by Marc Gruber-Laux of Germany, using 3ds Max, Photoshop and V-Ray.

A Short Story
Created by Jimmy Chow of Hong Kong, using Maya, mental ray, Photoshop and ZBrush.

Ashya
Created by Riyahd Cassiem of South Africa, using ZBrush to sculpt and texture the base mesh, and then Photoshop for additional textures and post effects.

Boy
Created by Alberto Blasi of Rome, using Cinema 4D.

(al)

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Since we launched Mashable’s 3rd Annual Open Web Awards this past October, you’ve cast over 349,000 votes for your favorite nominees. Over the past few weeks we’ve continued to track the leaders in each category, and now, with just two days left in the nominations period we thought it would be appropriate to take a look at 500 of the current leaders in the competition’s 50 categories.

Below are 500 of the top nominated individuals, tools, and organizations (in no particular order) — each selected by you, our readers. Add your voice to this list by nominating your favorites at mashable.com/owa. Nominations will remain open until 11:59 pm ET on Sunday, November 15th.

Best Brand Use of Facebook

- The Children’s Place
- Newegg.com
- Comcast4College
- Dogs Trust
- Zynga
- Playfish
- Pet Society
- Bigzig Connect
- Facebuko
- Mousehunt

Best Brand Use of YouTube

- TotallyTrucked
- Coldwell Banker
- Shane Dawson
- Internet Killed Television
- Smosh
- YTwatchdog
- The Hardy Show
- SHAYTARDS
- BooneOakley
- Open University

Best Brand Use of Twitter

- @TrueBloodHBO
- Crayola Creativitycast
- @NHLBlackhawks
- @LiveLifeSolid
- @Philips_vs
- @140hours
- #socialmedia
- @Smartcares
- @Digsby
- @KiWeets

Best Corporate Blog

- Playstation Blog
- Grown Up Thinking by Mr Youth
- uTest
- OkTrends
- SoGoPro
- ArcelorMittal: The Inside Story
- Precision Time
- Picnik Blog
- Kikikannibal
- Milford Equity Living NYC

Best Non-Profit Use of Social Media

- Spirit Jump
- Alex’s Lemonade
- A Billion for A Billion
- Frougal Dougal
- Lupus Foundation of America
- PETA
- Voices of Survivors
- Sports Grants Foundation
- Space Tweep Society
- Thank A Soldier

Social Media Ad Campaign

- Grasshopper 5,000
- Comcast4College
- MadMenYourself
- People’s Choice Awards on MySpace
- Sarah Ezekiel
- Hallow-Dega
- Fiesta Movement
- Exploiting Chaos
- Flowersophy
- #BeatCancer

Social Media Agency

- Mr Youth
- Pixel Farm
- Jam
- TheKBuzz
- Rocket XL
- SocialMedia8
- Synhergy Entertainment
- 360i
- Room 214
- Rockfish Interactive

Social Media Gadget

- Digsby
- AddThis
- ShareThis
- AddToAny
- Property-Bee
- Wetoku
- Tigerbow
- SocialGo
- Yoono
- WiseStamp

Best News Source to Follow

- @BreakingNews
- @Statesman
- Tweetepedia
- @CNN
- @ivetesangalo
- @TheFeed
- @Causecast
- @TheOnion
- @FingertipNews
- TweetPortal

Funniest Tweet

- @Shitmydadsays
- @Serafinowicz
- @Ivetesangalo
- @JonathanRKnight
- @ricky_martin
- @BlakeShelton
- @Dougiemcfly
- @tommcfly
- @kpereira
- @phillisdorris

Tweet of the Year

- “This is history.” @BarackObama

- “From orbit: Launch was awesome!! I am feeling great, working hard, & enjoying the magnificent views, the adventure of a lifetime has begun!” @Astro_Mike

- “#Firefox reached 1000 million downloads on 2009-07-31 15:00 UTC.” @FirefoxTweets

- “http://twitpic.com/135xa – There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.” @Jkrums/ Twitpic

- “I #BlameDrewsCancer for asking @sarahcooley to marry me on Twitter…and for the impending parental smackdown for doing so.” @Drew

- MonaTweeta II [Flickr]

- “Whoever started the RIP Kanye West hoax…Imma let you finish, but Balloon Boy had the best hoax of all time.” Unattributed

- “29/08: nothing is completely wrong. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.” @Paulocoelho

- “The dog don’t like you planting stuff there. It’s his backyard. If you’re the only one who shits in something, you own it. Remember that.” @Shitmydadsays

- “I’m not a blogger–I just tweet a lot.” @Jshirk

Most Interesting Twitter User to Follow

- @Ivetesangalo
- @KitchenBitch
- @PauloCoelho
- @DerrenBrown
- @MaureenJohnson
- @Tornadoliese
- @Donniewahlberg
- @Shitmydadsays
- @StephenFry
- @Alyssa_Milano

Twitter User of the Year

- @SookieBonTemps
- @Mpaynknoper
- @Ivetesangalo
- @Realwbonner
- @Alyssa_Milano
- @Collective_Soul
- @Donniewahlberg
- @StephenFry
- @Tommcfly
- @Tornadoliese

Best Twitter App

- Favotter
- TweetDeck
- Power Twitter
- Tweetie
- Digsby
- Favstar.fm
- Seesmic
- Brizzly
- Echofon
- Twitter Karma

Best Facebook App

- Mousehunt
- Ghost Trappers
- FarmVille
- PackRat
- Pet Society
- Battle Stations
- Eyesores
- Mafia Wars
- Restaurant City
- Fish Wrangler

Best Facebook Game

- Pet Society
- Ghost Trappers
- Mousehunt
- PackRat
- Battle Stations
- Restaurant City
- Mafia Wars
- Fish Wrangler
- Cafe World
- Farmville

Best Facebook Fan Page

- Twilight
- True Blood
- Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations
- Paulo Coelho
- Sugarland
- The Office
- Girls Guide To
- Newegg
- Pooflinger’s Mousehunt Tools
- Everything is Rent

Most Creative Use of Facebook Connect

- Girls Guide To
- Startlike
- OCBC Cycle Singapore
- JibJab
- OrgSync
- Digsby
- Test Tube Telly
- Gaia Online
- Pet Society
- The Gamers Force

Best YouTube Channel or Personality

- MattG124
- Vlogbrothers
- LoraandLayton
- Shane Dawson
- Shaytards
- Charles Trippy
- Sxephil
- Jeff Takeover
- Community Channel
- xxxjoelpolexxx

Funniest YouTube Channel

- Smosh
- LoadingReadyRun
- ShaneDawsonTV
- SHAYTARDS
- Nigahiga
- Friday Night Cranks
- Community Channel
- CardGamesFTW
- Internet Killed Television
- YTwatchdog

YouTube Video of the Year

- Iran, Tehran: wounded girl dying in front of camera, Her name was Neda (Warning: very graphic)
- The Secret of the Sauce
- A Very Potter Musical
- The Guild – Do You Want to Date My Avatar?
- Carl Sagan – ‘A Glorious Dawn’ ft Stephen Hawking (Cosmos Remixed)
- The Bag Heads: Quest for the Milk
- Knees Up Mother Brown
- CTFxC: Surprise Marriage Proposal In Spain! (10.4.09 – Day 157)
- Behind the Scenes: Mid-Autumn Romance @ Chelsea Mansion
- Bounce

Best Online Video Web Series

- Internet Killed Television
- Nostalgia Critic
- The Guild
- YTwatchdog
- The Philip DeFranco Show
- SHAYTARDS
- Totally Rad Show
- Angry Video Game Nerd
- The Joker Blogs
- Anyone But Me

Best Flickr Photographer

- Shadi Eideh
- Heychrissmith
- Chanelle Richardson
- Nickpickles
- Mmitchelldaviss
- Stefjosimovska
- Khosey1
- Stuckincustoms
- AHockley
- JaredEarle

Flickr Photo of the Year

- Mesmerized
- Highspeed Water
- The Canine of Rhodes
- One Sad Puppy
- Limitado
- President Barack Obama speaks with a foreign leader in the Oval Office on his first day in office 1/21/09
- Men Repairing Fishing Boat, Zanzibar
- Trent Reznor
- Kevin Pollak challenging Darth Vader to Space Invaders
- Masificación (01) por Rodrigo de Oliveira

TwitPic of the Year

- Plane in the Hudson
- Beautiful little girl in Railton Township, SA
- Social Tattoo
- #cozytweetup
- Pepe. The mouth that swallowed the south
- Go-karting
- RnR Hall of Fame
- Puppets
- at teh cdd reelase parrty *hic*
- untitled by @christiankane01

Best Actor/Actress to Follow

- Tom Felton
- Alyssa Milano
- Peter Facinelli
- Stephen Fry
- Hilarie Burton
- Felicia Day
- Eliza Dushku
- Selena Gomez
- Crystal Chappell
- Nathan Fillion

Best Blogger to Follow

- Lora and Layton
- Derek Michael Sheldon
- MattG124
- Mercedes Sanchez
- Please Find This
- Faris Yakob
- Jonathan Valdez
- Perez Hilton
- Charles Trippy
- Mitzi Szereto

Best Celebrity to Follow

- Britney Spears
- Alyssa Milano
- Donnie Wahlberg
- Stephen Fry
- Peter Facinelli
- Tom Felton
- Tom Fletcher
- Olivia Munn
- Crystal Chappell
- Hilarie Burton

Best Musical Artist to Follow

- Miyavi
- Britney Spears
- Collective Soul
- David Cook
- Pepe Aguilar
- Donnie Wahlberg
- Sugarland
- BT
- Pepe Aguilar
- Ivete Sangalo

Best Social Media Maven to Follow

- Mari Smith
- Annaliese Nielsen
- Almitra
- Erin Blaskie
- Mia von Doom
- Brian Solis
- Ron Callari
- BuzzEdition
- Karen Robinovitz
- GI Wayne

Funniest Person to Follow

- Noah Antwiler/ @TheSpoonyOne
- Peter Serafinowicz/ @serafinowicz
- Justin/ @shitmydadsays
- Shane Dawson
- Maureen Johnson
- Misha Collins
- Tim Siedell/ @badbanana
- shaycarl
- Lora and Layton
- Jonathan Knight

Most Educational to Follow

- Marina Orlova/ @hotforwords
- Elizabeth Kricfalusi/ Tech for Luddites
- Alyssa Milano
- Big Cat Rescue
- Stephen Fry
- Kelly Drennan/ @ecofashionista
- Duncan Maile/ @mobilephone2003
- Paulo Coelho
- @Ringorang
- Kelly Drennan/ @ecofashionista

Most Inspiring to Follow

- Lora and Layton
- Paulo Coelho
- Hydrocephalus Association
- Drew Olanoff
- Alyssa Milano
- Donnie Wahlberg
- Billy Ray Cyrus
- Rev Run
- Hilarie Burton
- BelievaBelles

Best Location Based Mobile App:

- Gowalla
- Foursquare
- Zillow
- MomMaps
- RunKeeper
- Google Maps
- iKidNY
- GPS Assassins
- Aloqa
- layar

Best Mobile Based Twitter App

- Snaptu
- Gravity
- Tweetie
- UberTwitter
- TweetDeck
- echofon
- Twidroid
- Tweed
- m.twitstat.com
- MovaTwitter.jp

Best Mobile App

- ebuddy
- Opera Mini
- YinzCam
- Nimbuzz
- Zillow
- Mobypicture
- Evernote
- Snaptu
- Tweetie
- Gowalla

Best Mobile Game

- Ramp Champ
- Gowalla
- Peggle
- Tap Tap Revenge 3
- Doodle Jump [iTunes Link]
- Astraware Solitaire
- Pocket God [iTunes Link]
- Glyder by Glu Mobile
- Word Ace
- Geodefense

Best Social Network iPhone App

- Facebook
- WhosHere
- Tweetie
- TweetDeck
- Fring
- Vodafone Update
- echofon
- Junaio
- Twitterrific
- Whrrl

Best Mobile Music Site or App

- Pandora
- Spotify
- Last.fm
- iheartradio
- Bandsintown
- Midomi
- Slacker
- Shazam
- Blip.fm
- Lala.com

Best Mobile Travel Site or App

- TripIt
- TripAdvisor
- Kayak
- Whereivebeen.com
- DealBase
- OnTheRoad
- Zagat to Go
- Boarding.fr
- NileGuide
- Viva Travel Guides

Best Breaking News Site

- BNO News
- CNN
- BBC
- Drudge Report
- allkpop
- Twitter
- TMZ
- Fox News
- Detik.com
- Sky News

Best Local News Site

- The College Reporter
- utahtweets
- Fwix
- Didim Today
- Chatham-Kent Daily Post
- Everything Long Beach
- Street Mavens
- MyFOXAustin
- <a href="JumpEround
- Northumberland View

Best Online Music Label

- DFTBA Records
- G-Unit Records/ Thisis50
- TheNext2Shine
- slicethepie
- OOiZiT
- WM Recordings
- blocSonic
- PublicSpaces Lab
- enoughrecords
- Bumpertunes

Best Political News Site

- Demotix
- Tweetminster
- Huffington Post
- BBC
- politics.co.uk
- Washington Post
- Political Wire
- The Young Turks
- Politico
- Stuartking.net/blog

Best Site for Publishers

- HubPages
- PitchEngine
- Global for me
- Squidoo
- DevHub
- You Scoop It
- BestThinking
- BuySellAds
- Newgrounds
- uCoz

Best Local Blog

- fusildechispas.com
- Let’s Adopt
- The Lichfield Blog
- BeChicMag
- Style Quotient
- LA Snark
- A View From An Ad Guy
- Sunday Morning Soliloquy
- Duke City Fix
- Three Day Rule

Best Online Magazine

- Bike EXIF
- ArchDaily
- The Escapist
- Generation C Magazine
- Obvious Magazine
- Resolution Magazine
- The Neave
- LadyLUX
- Dazed Digital
- Autostraddle

Best Online Newspaper

- The Guardian
- The New York Times
- MeeHive
- The Twitter Tim.es
- Huffington Post
- New Europe
- The Onion
- Herald de Paris
- ionline.pt
- Toledo Blade

Best Site for Journalists

- HARO
- IJNet
- News University
- Gameleon
- Overheard in the Newsroom
- Journalism.co.uk
- Global Radio News
- Trendsmap
- Columbia Journalism Review
- Demotix

Best TV Network Online

- blip.tv
- Hulu
- MomTV
- BBC
- G4tv
- ComputerTV
- Travel Channel
- NBC
- Syfy
- ReadersEntertainment.TV

Continue to nominate your favorites at Mashable.com/OWA

Thanks to our Partner: MOTOBLUR

MOTOBLUR from Motorola was built expressly for the way people communicate today. It’s the only service that automatically delivers and organizes your conversations, contacts and content from all your favorite sites and sources in easy-to-manage streams. Whether it’s Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, text messages, Gmail or work e-mail, MOTOBLUR keeps track of it all and serves it up on a customizable home screen and integrates it through the phone. Plus, with MOTOBLUR you have peace of mind, because all of your info is backed up and secure. Discover MOTOBLUR on Motorola CLIQ available at T-Mobile. It’s time to spend less time managing life and more time living it.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, mevans

Tags: open web awards, owa

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Now, that I got your attention. I want to tell you a secret.

I could never think of a more effective tool in reminding me of the things I need to do, of creating a stick man flip book, of communicating with others during meetings, of Tagging emails print outs, bookmarking the last read chapter of my favorite novel, etc.

Lets Travel Back

If you are one of those unfortunate ones who is not familiar with Post-Its, here is a brief description of what they are. A Post-It note is a piece of stationery with re-adherable strip of adhesive on the back. It was designed to temporarily attach notes to documents and other surfaces such as walls, desks, computer screens, and so on. The most common color you would see is the yellow 76 cm square note (see image below). The unique thing about Post-Its note is that it uses low tack adhesive the can enables the note to be easily attached and removed on any surface without leaving marks or residues.

It was co-invented by Art Fry and Spencer Silver of the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company or 3M, in March 9, 1970. Leveraging its yellow note success, 3M decided to manufacture other product related to the Post-It brand such mini post-its, highlighter pens with post-it tabs, etc. Computerized versions came out soon after.

by misocrazy

Common Uses of Post-Its

As I was researching on ways to use post-its, I stumbled upon a very interesting article that provided a good laugh of various ways of using that yellow stationery note.

1. Leave a Love Note for Your Spouse (Who does not love a kinky note stuck in your briefcase?)
2. Create Your Daily To Do List
3. Take Notes on What You’re Reading.
4. Let Everyone Know a Machine is Out of Order
5. Write a Book in a Few Hours
6. Be Passive Aggressive With Your Boss (Afraid to ask for a raise?)
7. Give your toddler something to do
8. Create a Stick-Man Flip Book
9. Torture Cat (Stick a post-it on the cat’s hip and watch her go dizzy trying to get if off. I’m serious, it’s fun. Only one at a time though, more than that would be cruel.)
10. Communicate with others during seminars/meetings
11. Cover the surface of your co-worker’s entire cubicle with Post-It’s
12. Create wall art
13. Brainstorming with Others.
14. Remind Yourself of the Name of Person Lying Next to You (One night stand? Don’t forget the name, stick a post-it on her/his head)
15. Personalized Notes as a Gift.
16. Be Passive-Aggressive with Your Roommate (Hate your roommate? Leave him/ her Post-It
17. Use a stack of yellow post-it notes to get offered a job (Jim Kukral got creative in a job interview & got the job …see his video below or at http://jimkukral.com )
18. Write a Note to God.
19. Nag Yourself to Save the Earth
20. Take Notes at a Seminar
21. Use for a wedding dress.

by lightwerk

A Designer Tool: A Challenge To Creativity

But, how does Post-It benefit us designers? One of the greatest challenge that designers face is creativity. I previously wrote an article on Mind Mapping and described various ways mind mapping can spur our mind to be more creative. In conjunction with mind mapping, Post- Its is another effective and creative way to keep us developing interesting ideas. I developed a system for myself to bring a pad of post-its to wherever I go. If I suddenly get inspired or get a “light bulb” moment, I scribble it down on a my post-it and stick to my visual diary to mind map later. It may or may not be useful but it keeps me entertained and my mind working.

In addition, post-its are a great way to get your brain to ?re up. What do I mean? In my previous article, I mentioned that there are times when creative designers experience blocks similar to a writers block. In my experience, post-its have helped me get my mind working by creating alternative uses for them. Here are some of examples of what you can do with post-its:

by ih8gates

Challenging The Paper Napkin

More importantly, Post-Its are effective management tools. As a freelancer, apart my calendar, I use post-its to remind me of the things I need to do for a client. I make sure that I keep a folder of every client I work with and in that folder, ideas or discussions are sometimes written in post its which I can review and work on later.

Recently, I read an article written by Bill Bartman, a self made billionaire and author of the book, Bailout Riches. In his article, he challenges the business owners and entrepreneurs to ?t critical elements of their businesses on a table napkin. My own proposal is use Post- its instead of napkin. Post-Its are smaller. Ergo, if you can identify the critical business elements to ?t in the small colored stationery then you know what your business is all about.

Some of the ideas, I mentioned here may or may not be useful to you. In my mind, these are just some example on how common day items can be a source of inspiration for us designers. I guess, the only ingredient needed is just our imagination.

Other Creative Uses

by Sidereal

by bwillen

About the Author
Giancarlo Gallegos is a writer, communications designer, photographer, entrepreneur, and a post production professional based in New Zealand. He is the official photographer for a little pink pig’s travel blog called The Adventures of Spider Pig. You can view his work on giancarlogallegos.com. In his spare time he travels, cooks, drinks coffee and mind maps new ideas.

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I crossed the last street before the hotel, keeping an eye on both the short-cycle light and the short-tempered traffic. Not that there was any particular reason for them to be short-tempered—it was a Sunday afternoon and there were hardly any cars on the bridges and roads that grid the downtown area—but I knew from experience that pedestrian intimidation was something of a sport for the locals, and I really didn’t feel like tempting fate, or at least somebody’s ideas about what constituted a bit of fun.

Having threaded through the small bunch of oncoming pedestrians and reached the relative safety of the sidewalk, I came upon a large man with two children in tow, all bundled against the cold in parkas and scarves and hats. He asked if I had a minute, and I immediately knew what was coming. Sure enough, it came out: the request for a dollar, some change, anything I could spare. I glanced at him, at the children, back at him. Something for bus fare, he said. They’d missed dinner at the Mission the night before, he said. Just a little help, anything I could do, he said.

How many times had I heard this before? I gave the usual excuses about not having any cash, I only travel with credit cards, so sorry, had to go.

And went, the wind biting into my cheeks as I strode to the hotel’s front door, the overhead heater blowing a curtain of warmth across the entryway. Into the lobby. Into the elevator. Thirty floors into the air. And in my sight, still, the children looking at me. The boy of maybe eight, looking up at me curiously. The girl of six, peeping at me warily from behind the man’s bulk. Props? Accomplices?

Did it matter?

I stood at the counter of the lobby gift shop, stacks of nutrition bars in my hands. A bottle of water in the side pocket of the jacket I had yet to shed. An apple in the other. My credit card between two fingers, ready for the attendant to take and swipe.

Through the doors, into the cold wind under the canopy, the plastic shopping bag weighing down my hand. I reached the sidewalk and there they were on the same corner, looking like they were getting ready to cross the street. I caught the man’s eye, signaled him to wait. As I approached his face shifted, softened, something like relief warring with shame melding into a curiously childlike expression.

“God bless you,” he said to me, and I chose to believe that he meant it. The little boy smiled up at me, a tiny edge embedded in the corners of his mouth. The girl still peeped warily, maybe even more so now. The man and I were shaking hands, looking squarely at each other for a moment. I told him to make sure to get the kids to that Mission dinner. I could think of nothing else to say, because it was the only thing I was thinking. Get the kids fed, keep them as healthy as possible, no matter what else.

As I turned into the recessed, canopied area that sheltered the hotel’s front door, I glanced back at the street corner. The three of them were waiting to cross toward the small park to the north, the gift shop’s white bag ludicrously small in the big man’s hands, and then they were occluded by the wall. I walked back through the wall of warm air, into the dim lobby and out of the bright outdoors, thinking that there was every chance I’d been suckered, and knowing that it didn’t matter.

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You don’t have to be a web designer to create an amazing portfolio – maybe you’re a photographer or illustrator or God knows what other type creative soul. And you don’t have to spend two months waiting for some friend to help you with a microsite. Noo sir! – there are very easy ways of doing this by yourself in just a few simple steps and this is one of them!

First you’ll need to sort out your projects and make sure you’ve selected your best pieces that you’re going to showcase. Once you’ve done this you should be ready to cut out some images of the project that you want your visitors to see. You can start creating the thumbnails (220px by 162px) and your main project images (with a 700px width).

After this you’re ready to set up your portfolio! You can download this free xhtml/css portfolio theme called Medifolio made by our friends from LogoMoose, upload your files and your own thumbnails & images to your own server. All you need to do now is make sure that you’ve got the image URLs right. More info on how to do this and on how to edit the projects info is available in the Help file from your download.

Mediofolio | Free | Demo | Download

Note: To get the contact form working you still need some help from a programmer :-]

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Section 8

By Alessando Baldasseroni

SEGA’s VIKING

By Michael Kutsche

Starcraft: Protoss Hero

By ProlificPen

Dawn of War

By Cheol Joo Lee

Ninja Gaiden

By Tomonobu Itagaki and Hiroaki Matsui

Gears of War

By Michael Heilemann

Red Steel

By Renaud Bec

Beacon (Unreal Tournament 3)

By Mavor

Halowars

By Alessando Baldasseroni

For the Horde (World of Warcraft)

By abraaolucas

Assassin’s Creed Fanart

By kerembeyit

Godfather

By Tyler West

Stranglehold

By Stephan Martiniere

Riddick Concept 02

By torvenius

Wanted: Weapons of Fate

By Nacho Yagüe

Elveon

By Radoslav Javor

God of War

By Eduardo Gonzalez

Killzone 2 – Extrasolar War

By skybolt

Assassins Creed

By Nicolas Bouvier and Patrick Desgreniers

Path of Neo

By Rick Majon

San Marco (Assassin’s Creed 2)

By Ubisoft

Half Life 2

By Jeremy Bennett

Starcraft

By Harley Huggins

The Path

By Auriea Samyn

Killzone

By Marcos Domenech

Hitman game

By Cynthia Iurinic

Project Gotham Racing 2

By Ben O’Sullivan

U-Wars Concept-Art

By leopardsnow

STF Lighting (Fable II)

By Lionhead Studios

Frontlines

By Alessandro Baldasseroni

Wagon (Assassin’s Creed 2)

By Ubisoft

Riddick concept

By torvenius

Smoke (Grand Theft Auto IV)

By Rockstar Games

Full Auto

By Vince Chui

Warhammer Online

By Alessando Baldasseroni

Johnny Shotgun (Grand Theft Auto IV)

By Rockstar Games

LCPD (Grand Theft Auto IV)

By Rockstar Games

God of War PSP Concept

By andyparkart

Fable II spell concept

By PeteAmachree

Halo wars

By agnidevi

King on Throne Concept

By aaronsimscompany

The Witcher

By Damian Bajowski

Gears of War

By Michael Heilemann

Damnation Moodpainting

By Mavor

Making of Perry Rhodan

By Sven Sauer

Terran Marauder Concept

By ProlificPen

Lair

By Deak Ferrand

The Hunter

By Alessandro Baldasseroni

Fable Village

By skybolt

Rise of Legends

By Dylan Cole

Related Content

• Popular Logos with Hidden Symbolisms
• 40 Useful and Creative Infographics
• 20 Beautiful Vintage Photoshop Brush Sets
• Related categories: Digital Art and Design Showcase / Inspiration

About the Author

Tomas Laurinavičius is interested in web design, graphic design and web development, based in Lithuania. He’s also the founder of WebDesignFan.com, a blog about Photoshop, web design, WordPress and inspiration. If you’d like to connect with him, you can follow him on Twitter.

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1. I’m Allergic to the Sun

I’m not as hot as Kate Beckinsale but I’m just as allergic to the sun as she was in Underworld. The second I see the sun I sneeze. What’s odd is that I used to play outside endlessly as a child — it wasn’t until I became a programmer that I developed this strange allergy to the sun. Today my skin is very white — a monitor tan is the only tan I get these days.

2. I Get Nosebleeds Often

No true nerd gets their official credentials without proof of frequent nosebleeds. Unprovoked and unexplainable, my nosebleeds just appear out of thin air…literally. These pick up quite a bit during the winter. I’ve broken my nose three times but no way to confirm that being a contributing factor.

3. I Have No Immune System

Most of my “vacation days” (PTO) are used up by illnesses that range from migraine headaches to pneumonia to bronchitis. I have the sniffles 365 days a year. I’ll wake up with a sore throat in mid-June. My body has no desire to fight viruses. A perfect excuse to avoid manual labor and sit behind a monitor inside my condo.

4. I Have No “Real Life” Skills

You know how grown men are supposed to be able to change their oil, cook breakfast for their significant other, and do their own laundry? Yeah, not me. No joke — I tried making eggs a few months ago, messed something up, and my kitchen smelled funky for the rest of the day. I’m a complete train wreck when not located within three feet of a computer.

5. I Have No “Social” Skills; Computer > Human

I’m not what you’d consider a “people person.” I’d rather spend 20 minutes typing an email than 3 minutes on the phone. I simply don’t have that gene. When coworkers say hello to me at work I usually reply with “email me.” I’m charming via email, stone cold in person.

6. I Think I’m Much Smarter Than I Really Am

Like any good egotistical programmer, I feel I’m much smarter than I am. Yeah, I slang terms like “prototypal inheritance”, “event delegation”, and many other impressive programming terms, but can I make eggs? No. Doesn’t matter. Why? Because I can slang terms to people who aren’t computer savvy and help fix email problems. I think I belong in MENSA — most other things I belong in on a seat in the corner of the room with a coloring book and non-toxic crayons.

7. Fashion == null

I cannot stand “bros” that wear $200 jeans and $50 Hollister/Abercrombie/American Eagle T-Shirts. I see a Broseph walk down the sidewalk with white shades and a fro-hawk and choke on my own vomit…..yet I have no problem with wearing one of my 5 MooTools shirts to any event. Wedding? Yes…because MooTools has Class. So simple.

I’m a complete nerd for those scoring at home. The life of a programmer as a tough one…God only knows how I can get through each day.

Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter and be sure to visit Script & Style for the best Javascript and CSS articles around!

Sponsor the David Walsh Blog and get your brand in front of several thousand users per day!

7 Signs I Knew I Was Born To Be a Programmer

Related posts:

1. 8 Ways For A Programmer To Stay Sane
2. 9 Signs You Shouldn’t Hire THAT Web Guy
3. Why Do You Love Web Programming and Design?
4. Startup Schwag: A Web 2.0 Goody Bag
5. Fun With Source Code

Go to Source

September was a very prolific month. We are all working hard after a really cool summer but you can take your time to read these fantastic article written by helpful people for the design community.

Two new items this month: “The Best of Month from Web Design Updates” and “Must-Follow, Women of the Month on Twitter” (ladies… I apologize for the delay).

I hope you’ll find useful these bookmarks.

Amazing Tutorials for Web and Graphic Designers

SixRevisions.com | Create a Realistic Space Scene from Scratch with Photoshop

Tutorial9.net | Design a Stylish Retro Game Boy Poster in Photoshop

Blog.SpoonGraphics.co.uk | How to Design a Skate Deck with a Cool Skull Pattern

WebExpedition18.com | How To Create a Retro Grunge Apple Wallpaper in 5 Easy Steps in Photoshop

Line25.com | How To Create a Pure CSS Polaroid Photo Gallery

ThreeStyles.com | Coding Apple’s Navigation Bar Using CSS Sprites

DesignM.ag | Coding Apple’s Navigation Bar Using CSS Sprites

SpyreStudios.com | WordPress Tutorial: How To Display A User Welcome Message

Articles and Interviews

FreelanceApple.com | 3 Ways to Skyrocket Your Income as a Freelancer

WebDesignerDepot.com | The Difference Between Art and Design

DailyDesignMag.com | 3 Simple Tips to Boost Productivity for Designers

Inspiredm.com | Inspired Talks – 10 Simple Ways to Instantly Boost Your Inspiration

TheWebdesignBlog.co.uk | Interview with John O’Nolan of Lyrical Media

DesignInvestigator.com | How Important is Your Logo?

Freebies and Resources

Hongkiat.com | 60 High Quality Photoshop PSD Files For Designers

1stwebdesigner.com | 76 Dirty, Extreme And Creative Free Grunge Fonts

ScarletBits.com | 15 HQ Material Textures

FudgeGraphics.com | 15 HQ Material Textures

1stwebdesigner.com | 60 Free, Yet Premium Quality WordPress Magazine News Themes

CatsWhoCode.com | 10+ extremely useful PHP classes

Woork.Blogspot.com | jQuery Visual Cheat Sheet

VisionWidget.com | 20 Fantastic Latest jQuery Plugins

Showcases and Inspiration

ScarletBits.com | 31 Websites Using Huge Type

SpyreStudios.com | 25 Creative Retro Styled Website Designs

WebDesignerDepot.com | How to Create an Organic Web Design (and Showcase)

VandelayDesign.com | 25 of the Best Websites of Bands and Musicians

GeekSucks.com | 30 Special Footer Design for your Design Inspiration

ffffffive.com | Well-Constructed And Designed Weblogs

Inspiredology.com | 21 Retro Website Designs PT2

InstantShift.com | Music Inspiration Behind a Web Design Work

InspectElement.com | Recent Web Designs that Don’t Follow Recent Trends

Illustrations and Digital Painting

Glenn Jones on Behance.net | glennz.com Tee Designs

Sheharzad Arshad on Behance.net | Strange and Creepy

Oission on DeviantArt.com | Ter 02 digital painting

andyparkart on DeviantArt.com | God of War 2

THZ on DeviantArt.com | Impossible Love

WebSite of The Month – CubeClub-Chemnitz.de

Cube Club Chemnitz

Must-Follow, Men of The Month on Twitter

Gerrel Saunders

Richard Darell

John O’Nolan

Must-Follow, Women of The Month on Twitter

Robin Wood

megAlone

Angie Bowen

Must-Read, Blogs/Magazines of The Month

SpyreStudios.com

FuelYourCreativity.com

Inspiredology.com

The Best of Month on Web Design Updates

DailyDesignMag.com | 6 Absolutely Stunning Design Portfolios

AcrisDesign.com | 62 Beautiful Icon Tutorials designed using Photoshop and Illustrator

9lessons.Blogspot.com | 9 Most Useful jQuery Plugins

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My answer is going to seem a little flip, but it is the honest, best answer.

Answer: You need more inbound links – of equal or higher quality – than what your competitors have.

Albert Einstein argued that any mathematical formula that required pages of calculations did not contain within it “the mind of God”.

So when Albert Einstein developed E=mc2, then Einstein had fulfilled the promise of a simple formula that could encompass the brilliance of God.

When people wonder as to how many inbound links they might need to acquire in order to rank in the Top 4 of Google’s search results or even the Top 10 of Google’s SERPs, they are generally hoping that someone will be able to give them a numeric answer, so that they know whether they can afford to undertake the process or not.

I understand the WHY of the question, but there is no canned answer that will work for everyone.

Remember, your competitor may be asking the same question and undertaking the same processes as you are, trying to accomplish the same goal.

No one can truly begin to understand the answer to this question, until one has take the time to do an Inbound Link Comparison Analysis of all of your competitors in the Top 10 spots of Google’s SERPs.

• You need to look at the Top 10 listings in Google for a particular keyword.
• You need to do backlink checks for all ten URLs in Google’s search listings, and you need to check those numbers across a variety of sources, including Google, Yahoo and any other tool you can find to do a check. (Google and Yahoo both tend to understate the actual link counts. While Yahoo will show you more than what Google does, they also show a number of “no consequence” links in their results.)
• You need to look at the quality of a few of the pages that offer links to the URLs in the search results.

This is not an easy process to undertake. I have done it before, but the best you can hope for is a “snapshot” of what is out there, and therefore, what you need to accomplish.

Note: If Wikipedia turns up in your search query, few people with small budgets will ever be able to dislodge Wikipedia in the search results. What they make up for in a small number of inbound links, they more than make up for with links from dozens or hundreds of PR4, PR5 and PR6 pages. Wikipedia is the king of Internal Linking, and they use that to a great degree to rank extraordinarily high in Google’s search listings.

Your analysis should seek to uncover how many links a page has to it.

As a general rule of thumb, Google will show you less than 1% of the existing number of links for a web page. Yahoo will sometimes show closer to 5% of the existing number of links for a web page, but they will not show you the highest quality of those links.

So, as you strive to gain a “snapshot” picture of the playing field, you want to take Google’s Inbound Links number and multiply that by at least 100. Then you want to take Yahoo’s Inbound Links number and multiply that by at least 20, then cut the number in half to acknowledge the number of worthless crap links they have in their database. Once you have achieved these two numbers, then I tend to call the truth “somewhere in the middle”.

With your “somewhere in the middle” number in hand, then you need to look at the quality of links to a few of those search listings, to get an idea of whether those links exist on higher quality pages or simply junk pages.

If those links are on junk pages, then the goal could be achieved by just working the numbers. But if there are a lot of high PageRank pages in the mix, then whatever number is in your hand, should be multiplied, perhaps 100-fold, to overcome the quality of pages that link to your competitors.

If you get the idea that my simple formula leads to a complicated answer, then you are right.

All of the numbers that I have included in my sample formula are based on rough speculation, as the “snapshot” offers you your best hope of understanding the challenge in front of you.

While the number of inbound links may be relatively easy to determine, the link quality is a factor that is really hard to pin down.

• If you determine that you only need 300 inbound links to rank with the big boys, you may be right.
• Your 300 inbound links number should also be quantified against the number of links that Google will count worthy, so you may need 1200 links to get 300 links that Google will deem worthy. This calculation depends more on the “quality of your content”, rather than the “quantity of your content”.
• When all is said and done and your 300 Google-worthy links have not yet put you on page one, then you know that the quality of the links pointing at your competitors is greater than the quality of the links pointing to you.

If you were hoping for an easy answer, I am sorry that I could not help you with that.

But with this explanation of the challenge, you may be better prepared to answer the big question, the question that is really on your mind:

=== Are my hopes of achieving good rankings in Google within my reach?

I tend to throw “worry” to the wind and just start working. I don’t worry if I can afford to do it or not. I simply start doing, and I know that in one month, one year or five, I will have built enough value in my website that my competitors are going to be the ones who are trying to figure out if they can unseat me!

Bill Platt has provided SEO services since 2004. In 2009, he transformed his SEO service, into one that helps people defeat negative search results in Google. By improving the rank of positive website reviews in the search results, negative search listings begin to disappear from the public eye. If you would like to learn more about how Bill’s Reputation Management SEO service can help your business, visit: http://911reputation.com/ Bill has also owned http://thePhantomWriters.com/ since 2001.

Read more articles written by: Bill Platt

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

How Many Links Does It Take To Get To The Middle Of Google Page One?

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So many people look at Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as a game of influencing the keywords that are important to their business, but they don’t realize that SEO can also be used to diminish the negatives in the search results.

Are You Losing Business As Result Of A Bad Review In Google?

Remember that guy who bought your product 3 years ago, and he did not follow the instructions for use, and then complained about how your product let him down? He could be hurting your business right now.

How do you measure the sales that your business is losing, because some guy complained on some website about how your product or service is “crap”.

A Real World Example

Ah… I remember when I was selling TV’s for a living.

There was this fellow who came into the store and bought a 52-inch projection screen TV. We had a bonded delivery crew on hand to help people get their purchases home, but although this guy had just spent $2400 on a television set, he decided that he did not want to pay $40 for delivery of his new TV set. I bet you can see where this story is going…

So, we loaded his new TV in the back of his pickup, and he proceeded to tie down his TV in the back of his pickup truck.

He thanked us for his TV and started the drive home.

45 minutes later, our most recent happy customer pulled into the parking lot, toting a big-screen TV box.

As we went to meet him at the door, we could hear the glass falling as the box moved across the floor.

He was pissed! And to our surprise, we were at fault!

You might be asking yourself why we were at fault. That is a good question, one I even posed at the time.

We were at fault, because we did not offer free delivery!

A gust of wind had caught his box, snapping the twine that he had used to tie it down, blowing his $2400 Phillips Big-Screen TV onto the highway.

He said it was our fault, because we should have given him free delivery. Never mind that we had already given him a $300 discount on the purchase of his TV.

We had offered him bonded delivery, but he refused, and now it was our fault that his TV was broken.

The store where we worked was one of those chains that keep all of the power to make things right at the home office. We could not simply exchange his TV, without permission from our superiors. If we had authorized the exchange with the guy, without the District Manager’s permission, the company would have taken the cost of the Television out of the salesperson’s and the manager’s paycheck.

I was the assistant manager, and I was NOT going to pay for this guy’s broken television. The company did not pay me enough to fix this problem for them, out of my own pocket.

We called the DM. Of course, even though we worked until 10 at night, the DM went home at 6pm. So, we kept dialing his cell phone number, until he answered the phone.

He was pissed, but that was okay. We were already dealing with “pissed”, so we did not mind two people pissed at the same time.

Thank God I was not the manager in charge that night. Thank God for small favors…

Our District Manager said the guy was tough out of luck. I am glad I don’t work for those clowns anymore.

I agree that it should not have been our responsibility, but surely we could find a solution for this guy. After all, he just spent $2400 with us.

Nope. The District Manager said No, then he said No, and he said No again.

So, the DM hung up telling us not to call him again that evening. And we were left with the poor guy who had just signed a two-year finance contract on a TV that was busted to hell.

Yes, I bet the guy pays for delivery next time. But the story does not end here…

It Wasn’t Your Fault, But It Is Your Problem…

The story now moves online. It moves into the newspaper. It moves onto our sales floor for more than a week. It goes ballistic…

The customer went home that night, and turned to the power of the Internet with his complaint. A few days later, he followed his Internet complaints with a paid advert in the local newspaper. Our store was getting skewered.

The guy was in the store every day, throwing a tantrum. And he was spending his money and his time to skewer us for letting him make a foolish decision.

It just worked out well for him. On about his tenth trip to the store, throwing his daily tantrum in front of people who were looking to buy a TV, he just happened to arrive on a day that the DM was in the building. Ah… A new face behind the counter. The customer picked out the new face in the building as being someone over us. And wham, he let the District Manager have it, with both barrels…

Persistence paid off in this case.

He overwhelmed the District Manager with his complaints.

The District Manager broke down and did only what the District Manager could do for our customer. He used his privileged status to type in the appropriate commands into the computer and make things right for this guy.

In the end, we got him a new television for the price of delivery to his house.

The store ate the cost of the new television. (I ended up paying a portion of the TV anyway, because the bookkeeping department deducted the price of the television from the sales sheets for the month, so some of my monthly bonus was lost when that man’s television was cut from the store’s profits.)

The victory that we received was that the guy was not in the store every day scaring away our customers.

But that victory came only after we took a serious hit in our Reputation Management. Every person that guy talked to for the ten days after his purchase, up until he got his replacement, knew that he had a bad experience with us. What is more, everyone who read his paid advert in the newspaper knew that he had a problem with our store. Even more, who knows how long his complaint survived online…

You know what they say, “What is posted online, stays online.”

I left my job at that store in 2005. That store closed in 2008.

I am not going to say that the store closed on account of that guy’s complaints. But I am willing to say that the store was hurt by the guy’s complaints. He did manage to drive a lot of prospective customers out of our store, during his daily rants. (I just checked and could not find his complaints online anymore.)

I am willing to bet that the store closed due to the recession. It closed about the same time that Circuit City bit the dust.

I think this story clearly illustrates that a problem does not have to be your fault, in order for your business to pay a high price, as a result of the problem.

Does Applebee’s Really Suck?

To help illustrate the extent of this problem, I just typed into Google the name of my favorite restaurant, Applebee’s, the name of my town, and the word “sucks”.

I saw dozens of Google search results that were in effect saying that my favorite restaurant “sucks”. Many of them went to describe this restaurant as having the “worst food ever.”

Wow!

Now to be sure, restaurants everywhere suffer from this treatment. And the big name brand restaurants can survive, because their large customer base has a different opinion.

But what if you are a local restaurant or an obscure Internet company?

As an permanent online fixture, I tend to be jaded about the complaints I read about others. But I have to admit, while one or two complaints will not sway me, several complaints in the search results will even cause “me” to hesitate.

Can you afford for jaded internet marketers like myself to hesitate?

You can bet that if we “jaded internet marketers” are hesitating to purchase what you sell, those “who are not internet marketers by profession” are running away from you!

Fixing The Problem…

You are already aware that by utilizing SEO techniques that you can help your website rank better for some keywords in Google and the other search engines.

But did you know that you can also create a wealth of positive reviews for your business on a variety of web pages, and to get those positive reviews to rank higher in the search engines than the negative reviews?

This is how we help our customers.

We use our SEO expertise to get the positive reviews of our client’s website to outrank the negative reviews of our client’s website.

If we get enough positive reviews to occupy the top of the search results for the target keywords, then those negative reviews of our client’s website will be buried on page two, three, four, five or six of Google’s search results.

If people will NEVER SEE the negative reviews of your website, product or service, then as far as most people are aware, there ARE NOT ANY negative reviews. If there are no negatives about your business, then everything must be positive.

You are in control of your business’ reputation online, if only you are willing take the reins and force the negatives down in Google’s search results.

We know that not everything in the search results is true or honest. After all, the guy with the broken TV was blaming us for his bad judgment. We know that you may not deserve what is in Google’s search results that is affecting your online reputation in a negative way.

If you don’t let us help you get the negatives out of the sight of your prospective customers, then do it yourself or hire another company to do it for you. Because as long as those negative reviews exist in Google’s search results, there is a good chance that someone is going to let those negative comments prevent them from buying from you!

About The Author:

Bill Platt has provided SEO services since 2004. In 2009, he transformed his SEO service, into one that helps people defeat negative search results in Google. By improving the rank of positive website reviews in the search results, negative search listings begin to disappear from the public eye. If you would like to learn more about how Bill’s Reputation Management SEO service can help your business, visit: http://911reputation.com/ Bill has also owned http://thePhantomWriters.com/ since 2001.

Read more articles written by: Bill Platt

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

How Is Your Reputation Holding Up In Google’s Search Results?

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Ted Nelson is, shall we say, a character. He has gone on record many times with the four maxims that guide his life. He isn’t shy about sharing them with anyone he meets:

1. most people are fools
2. most authority is malignant
3. God does not exist
4. everything is wrong

And that, in a nutshell, is pretty much everything you need to know about Ted Nelson. He is the archetypal borderline autistic, non-conformist, free-thinking technologist. Any resemblance between Ted and your average programmer is, I’m sure, completely coincidental. That’s why his story is so fascinating to me. It hits close to home.

Like most programmers, Ted’s reach often exceeded his grasp. Ted’s vision of hypertext was far more grandiose than the motley assortment of links that is today’s web. His vision was (and is) a bit of computer history lore that has become the stuff of legend: Project Xanadu.

Xanadu, a global hypertext publishing system, is the longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry. It has been in development for more than 30 years. This long gestation period may not put it in the same category as the Great Wall of China, which was under construction for most of the 16th century and still failed to foil invaders, but, given the relative youth of commercial computing, Xanadu has set a record of futility that will be difficult for other companies to surpass. The fact that Nelson has had only since about 1960 to build his reputation as the king of unsuccessful software development makes Xanadu interesting for another reason: the project’s failure (or, viewed more optimistically, its long-delayed success) coincides almost exactly with the birth of hacker culture. Xanadu’s manic and highly publicized swerves from triumph to bankruptcy show a side of hackerdom that is as important, perhaps, as tales of billion-dollar companies born in garages.

Among people who consider themselves insiders, Nelson’s Xanadu is sometimes treated as a joke, but this is superficial. Nelson’s writing and presentations inspired some of the most visionary computer programmers, managers, and executives – including Autodesk Inc. founder John Walker – to pour millions of dollars and years of effort into the project. Xanadu was meant to be a universal library, a worldwide hypertext publishing tool, a system to resolve copyright disputes, and a meritocratic forum for discussion and debate. By putting all information within reach of all people, Xanadu was meant to eliminate scientific ignorance and cure political misunderstandings. And, on the very hackerish assumption that global catastrophes are caused by ignorance, stupidity, and communication failures, Xanadu was supposed to save the world.

The above text is excerpted from the definitive 1995 Wired article on Project Xanadu, which is still as electrifying to read today as it was then. The hubris and sheer scale of the Xanadu dream are at turns both inspiring and desperately, hopelessly out of touch.

Xanadu has 17 rules defining its behavior. As you’re reading through this list, ask yourself how many of these rules are satisfied by the current world wide web, even in part:

1. Every Xanadu server is uniquely and securely identified.
2. Every Xanadu server can be operated independently or in a network.
3. Every user is uniquely and securely identified.
4. Every user can search, retrieve, create and store documents.
5. Every document can consist of any number of parts each of which may be of any data type.
6. Every document can contain links of any type including virtual copies (“transclusions”) to any other document in the system accessible to its owner.
7. Links are visible and can be followed from all endpoints.
8. Permission to link to a document is explicitly granted by the act of publication.
9. Every document can contain a royalty mechanism at any desired degree of granularity to ensure payment on any portion accessed, including virtual copies (“transclusions”) of all or part of the document.
10. Every document is uniquely and securely identified.
11. Every document can have secure access controls.
12. Every document can be rapidly searched, stored and retrieved without user knowledge of where it is physically stored.
13. Every document is automatically moved to physical storage appropriate to its frequency of access from any given location.
14. Every document is automatically stored redundantly to maintain availability even in case of a disaster.
15. Every Xanadu service provider can charge their users at any rate they choose for the storage, retrieval and publishing of documents.
16. Every transaction is secure and auditable only by the parties to that transaction.
17. The Xanadu client-server communication protocol is an openly published standard. Third-party software development and integration is encouraged.

It is instructive, then, to consider the primary ways in which the modern web is functionally broken:

• Link rot. The odds of a hyperlink working are inversely proportional to the age of that hyperlink. Old links frequently break, because the server hosting the content disappears for any number of reasons over time. I’ve gotten to the point where I dread clicking on links from old web pages, because the per-click success rate is so abysmally low.
• Every website has unique usernames and passwords. There is almost no reliable centralized form of identity on the internet, and those few that do exist are often poisoned by explicit commercial affiliation, such as Facebook Connect and Microsoft Passport. This is why curated anonymous, lightweight participation dominates the net — best illustrated by Wikipedia.
• No redundancy. If content is driven offline by temporary high traffic levels or, worse, catastrophic data loss, there may not be any way to recover that content. I know that Digg has services which auto-mirror highly rated links because Digg traffic can be so toxic to the destination links. (Ironically, all duggmirror.com links redirect to amazon.com now, which illustrates how ephemeral all this stuff tends to be.) I suppose if you’re lucky the wayback machine will eventually pick up a historical copy of the content, or the Google cache will hold a copy for some unknown amount of time while the site is offline. You’d probably have better odds praying for missing content to reappear.

Let’s put aside the more ambitious parts of Project Xanadu for the moment. The current world wide web does basically one thing: simple, stupid, mindless hyperlinks. But even that alone was enough to build a functional and useful internet for the world. And Google was able to build a zillion dollar algorithm out of discovering the relationship between those dumb hyperlinks.

All that, when the most fundamental building block of the web, the hyperlink, barely works at all. Hyperlinks are fraught with peril and pitfalls even under the best of conditions. The current state of hyperlinking is almost literally the stupidest thing we could build that works. Frankly, the current system sucks beyond belief, as Ted himself notes:

HTML is precisely what we were trying to prevent — ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can’t follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management.

The next time you’re about to embark on a grandiose, glorious software Xanadu Dream of your own, take Dare’s advice.

The bottom line is that a lot of the time it’s OK to create a solution that solves 80% of the problem. Always remember that shipping is a feature.

Consider the reality of what’s actually possible, what people can understand, and what us all too human programmers can practically implement. It might not be the Xanadu you dreamed of — heck, it might even suck — but it’ll at least have a fighting chance of existing in reality rather than fantasy.

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The mobile space has blown up exponentially in the past year. The CTIA semi-annual wireless industry survey was released a few weeks ago and it included some mind-blowing numbers. 4.1 billion SMS messages are being sent daily, and there are now over 276 million wireless users in the US. And Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker gave a recent presentation at the Web 2.0 Summit showing that the mobile web is taking over the world.

Whatever your feelings about the iPhone, it’s almost impossible to dismiss the notion that Apple introduced the idea of smartphones and always-on mobile connectivity to the masses. And while not the first makers of a mobile marketplace, they were the first to capitalize on creating a developer ecosystem to bring thousands of applications to iPhone owners. Apple’s iPhone also contributed to the astronomical rise in AT&T’s mobile data traffic, which is up 4,932% from three years ago.

Now we live in a world where there are countless mobile applications and markets which include the Ovi store and the Android Marketplace, the latter of which will become even more important as more and more carriers release phones running the Android operating system. By Reuters account, Google Android is forecasted to take over the number two spot in the smartphone market by 2012.

Regardless of your carrier or mobile device, you’re clearly turning to the mobile web and using mobile applications more than ever before.

Vote for your favorites

Mobile is more important than ever, with the application choices you make defining market trends. Your Open Web Awards pick for best location based mobile app, best mobile based Twitter app, best music site or app, best travel site or app, best mobile app, best mobile game, and best social network iPhone app, will help serve to create a pulse of what’s hot in mobile.

The nominating process is simple, just visit the Open Web Awards site, sign in with Twitter or Facebook, and tell us your favorites. Nominations will remain open until 11:59 PM, ET on Sunday, November 15th.

Some of the leaders in the Facebook categories so far are (in no particular order):

Best location based mobile app:

- Gowalla
- Foursquare
- Zillow
- iBurgh [iTunes Link]
- WHERE
- Google Maps
- Qype Radar
- GPS Assassins
- Aloqa
- layar

Best mobile based Twitter app

- Snaptu
- Gravity
- Tweetie
- UberTwitter
- TweetDeck
- echofon
- Twidroid
- Tweed
- Twitterific
- SocialScope

Best mobile app

- ebuddy
- Opera Mini
- YinzCam
- Nimbuzz
- Zillow
- Mobypicture
- Fring
- Snaptu
- Tweetie
- Gowalla

Best mobile game

- Ramp Champ
- Gowalla
- Peggle
- Tap Tap Revenge 3
- Doodle Jump [iTunes Link]
- Flight Control
- Pocket God [iTunes Link]
- The Sims 3
- Canabalt
- Geodefense

Best social network iPhone app

- Facebook
- WhosHere
- Tweetie
- TweetDeck
- Fring
- Vodafone Update
- echofon
- Junaio
- Twitterrific
- Whrrl

Best mobile music site or app

- Pandora
- Spotify
- Last.fm
- iheartradio
- Bandsintown
- Midomi
- Slacker
- Shazam
- Blip.fm
- Lala.com

Best mobile travel site or app

- TripIt
- TripAdvisor
- Kayak
- Whereivebeen.com
- DealBase
- Dopplr
- MonNuage
- Boarding.fr
- NileGuide
- Viva Travel Guides

Continue to nominate your favorites at Mashable.com/OWA

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Tags: Mobile 2.0, owa

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This will probably shock you but I’m a programmer. Not a designer, not a copywriter, just a simple programmer. I’ve done some self analysis and realized that becoming a programmer wasn’t a choice — it was destiny. The following is my logic for why I became a programmer.

1. I’m Allergic to the Sun

I’m not as hot as Kate Beckinsale but I’m just as allergic to the sun as she was in Underworld. The second I see the sun I sneeze. What’s odd is that I used to play outside endlessly as a child — it wasn’t until I became a programmer that I developed this strange allergy to the sun. Today my skin is very white — a monitor tan is the only tan I get these days.

2. I Get Nosebleeds Often

No true nerd gets their official credentials without proof of frequent nosebleeds. Unprovoked and unexplainable, my nosebleeds just appear out of thin air…literally. These pick up quite a bit during the winter. I’ve broken my nose three times but no way to confirm that being a contributing factor.

3. I Have No Immune System

Most of my “vacation days” (PTO) are used up by illnesses that range from migraine headaches to pneumonia to bronchitis. I have the sniffles 365 days a year. I’ll wake up with a sore throat in mid-June. My body has no desire to fight viruses. A perfect excuse to avoid manual labor and sit behind a monitor inside my condo.

4. I Have No “Real Life” Skills

You know how grown men are supposed to be able to change their oil, cook breakfast for their significant other, and do their own laundry? Yeah, not me. No joke — I tried making eggs a few months ago, messed something up, and my kitchen smelled funky for the rest of the day. I’m a complete train wreck when not located within three feet of a computer.

5. I Have No “Social” Skills; Computer > Human

I’m not what you’d consider a “people person.” I’d rather spend 20 minutes typing an email than 3 minutes on the phone. I simply don’t have that gene. When coworkers say hello to me at work I usually reply with “email me.” I’m charming via email, stone cold in person.

6. I Think I’m Much Smarter Than I Really Am

Like any good egotistical programmer, I feel I’m much smarter than I am. Yeah, I slang terms like “prototypal inheritance”, “event delegation”, and many other impressive programming terms, but can I make eggs? No. Doesn’t matter. Why? Because I can slang terms to people who aren’t computer savvy and help fix email problems. I think I belong in MENSA — most other things I belong in on a seat in the corner of the room with a coloring book and non-toxic crayons.

7. Fashion == null

I cannot stand “bros” that wear $200 jeans and $50 Hollister/Abercrombie/American Eagle T-Shirts. I see a Broseph walk down the sidewalk with white shades and a fro-hawk and choke on my own vomit…..yet I have no problem with wearing one of my 5 MooTools shirts to any event. Wedding? Yes…because MooTools has Class. So simple.

I’m a complete nerd for those scoring at home. The life of a programmer as a tough one…God only knows how I can get through each day.

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7 Signs I Knew I Was Born To Be a Programmer

Related posts:

1. 8 Ways For A Programmer To Stay Sane
2. 9 Signs You Shouldn’t Hire THAT Web Guy
3. 5 Simple Ways Programmers and Designers Should Give Back
4. Codelish – A Programmer’s Life Language
5. August Mailbag Q & A

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A longing for love and approval. That’s the dirty little secret of success.

Yes, you must make something people want. Of course, you must improve and extend it. Certainly, you must give 110% where customer satisfaction is concerned. Definitely, you must convert your customers to evangelists. All of that is true, always has been and will be.

BUT.

But you won’t be able to do those things, not really, not all the way, not as they must be done, unless there is a brokenness in you that continually craves attention and affection you somehow missed out on.

You have to have been abandoned, betrayed, ridiculed, unsupported at some point when you needed it most.

This sounds terrible and it is. But it’s the facts.

A contented person with a whole heart, who has never doubted for a moment that she is loved by God and the universe, should not bother trying to succeed as a creative entrepreneur. She should get a job working for someone else, turn it off at 6:00 PM, and come home to the people who love her.

Only a restless, broken heart can drive you to do what is necessary.

And that’s how to succeed in business without really crying.

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We’ve seen some great Marvel super-hero movies already, such as Spider-man, Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk… and one that we’ll get to soon see hitting the silver screen is the scandinavian god Thor. Mighty Thor. And he shall kick ass.

I’ve never read any Thor comics, but I gotta admit that this blond dude looks pretty badass, for being the god of thunder. I mean, you gotta be be a tough guy to handle and use thunders to attack your freaggin’ enimies or so. Ok, the geek alert has sounded, so I better shut up and let you guys check these awesome illustrations. I recommend you to visit each artist’s page! Pretty cool stuff there! And I hope you all enjoy these. Cheers!

Marcio Takara

Pencils by Brian Williams, Colors by Xiwik

Chamba

nesmosfactory

Lines by Bryan Hitch, Colors by Liam Shalloo

saganet

Lines by Dougie Braithwaite, Colors by Brian Reber

Lines by Jon Buran, Colors by Nicolas Viig

kizer180

Yildiray Cinar

Reilly Brown

Lines by Jonboy Meyers, Colors by Charlie

Lines by Ed McGuinness, Colors by Jason Kieth

Lines by Olivier Coipel, Inks by Mark Morales, Colors by BoOoM

Lines by Olivier Coipel, Inks by Mark Morales, Colors by BoOoM

Enymy

Stefani Rennee

Admira Wijaya

Mike Mayhew

nebezial

Go to Source

This post is part of our daily series of posts showing the most inspiring images selected by some of the Abduzeedo’s writers and users. If you want to participate and share your graphic design inspiration, just send us, via email, the image with the link from where you found it, also use “Daily Inspiration” in the subject, and don’t forget to send your Abduzeedo username; or via Twitter sending to http://twitter.com/abduzeedo

If possible use the HTML code: <p class="imgC"><a href="Link to the page you found the image"><img src="Link to the Image" /></a></p>

Do you want to see all the images from all the Daily Inspirations? Check out http://daily.abduzeedo.com

akuji rocks

al b sure

anoop

BlackSniper

DDA

B. Romain

Dragos M

eDsanca

eidan

Fabio

Bave Circus from DuDuF on Vimeo.

“Wail to God” Music Video from Anthony Schepperd on Vimeo.

Orange Top Ups from Malcolm Hadley DoP on Vimeo.

Gary Holmes

Gisele

Laalaa

osbjef

Nojiko2

Sascha Schreiter

Stephane

theon.

VR90

xiondzz

Via Twitter

Send your suggestions via Twitter to http://twitter.com/abduzeedo using #abdz in the end of the tweet.

@createdbyTN

@djbennett999

@timcruicky

@jhaypzz

About the author

My name is Fabio Sasso, I’m a graphic/web designer from Porto Alegre, Brazil and I’m the founder of Abduzeedo. I hope we can share lots of information, tips, and ideas through Abduzeedo. Also you can follow me on Twitter or my personal site at http://fabiosasso.com.

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On a recent trip to the Pea Ridge Military Park (Pea Ridge, Arkansas), I took my camera and grabbed some random shots of panoramic views, old canons, and even some nice textures. If you see any photos you can use in any way, feel free and don’t worry about credit – God made it all, I just snapped a photo.

jump to the textures

Panoramic and Close Up Shots