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Read the rest of iTunes Accounts Get Hacked, You Might Be in Danger of Buying Crappy Apps & Not Even Know It [Apple Adds New iPhone Issue to Already Long List: iTunes Has Been Compromised]

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WWW – Clients – Browsers – Zoodles – Mac OS

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The details element, as explained by the W3C, is designed to be a “disclosure widget from which the user can obtain additional information or controls.” Think of the +/- control in Windows or the right/down arrows in Mac OS. (Check the demo page and you’ll see what I mean.)

This script by Mathias Bynens allows you to use the element with jQuery forcing support for those browsers that don’t yet natively support details. According to Mathias, currently no browsers natively support the element.

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For those unfamiliar with Boot Camp, it’s the dual-booting tool that allows Mac users to install to and boot Windows partitions from their hard drives, and this update gives Mac users looking to dual-boot Windows 7 something to be happy about. Specifically:

This update adds support for Microsoft Windows 7 (Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate), addresses issues with the Apple trackpad, turns off the red digital audio port LED on laptop computers when it is not being used, and supports the Apple wireless keyboard and Apple Magic mouse.

Boot Camp is a free download, requires Mac OS X.

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Poser 8 Training Videos offers over 7.5 hours of valuable lessons by accredited expert Dwayne Ferguson.  The CD / DVD is organized in 21 chapters and includes 117 lessons with all the work files included in the package. All 117 lessons are in audio and also have subtitles. The first 3 chapters with 15 lessons are free and can be viewed online here.

The training videos are compatible with Vista, 98, 2000, NT, XP, Mac OS and OSX.

You will also get your own free certificate (which can be verified online) to prove your credentials.

Free Vectors, Icons, Photoshop Freebies and Programming Goodies on Design Freebies

Want to advertise here ? Contact us

Related posts

You might also like these similar articles:

1. Adobe Illustrator CS4 Training Videos
2. GIMP Training Videos
3. Adobe Acrobat 9 Training Videos
4. Adobe InDesign CS3 Training Videos
5. Carrara 7 Tutorial Videos

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Web development can be tricky and time-consuming. To be more effective and productive, we, designers and developers, can integrate useful tools in our daily routine. Also, handy resources can be very valuable as they can help us enhance communication with clients and other developers as well as improve the quality of our work. We are permanently looking for new tools, techniques, resources and services that can improve your workflow and increase your productivity.

In this post we present a couple of extremely useful and valuable tools and resources that we found over the last months. Please make sure to follow us on Twitter for a stream of useful resources, tools and design-related articles.

Getting Inspired: Interesting Redesign Projects

Boarding Pass / Fail
A boarding pass redesign project by Tyler Thompson, the Creative Director at Squarespace. How would you design a boarding pass? The result is very impressive.

You’re killing me, Zappos
Andrew Wilkinson’s attempt to redesign Zappos.

Dollar ReDe$ign Project
An attempt to rebrand the US Dollar, rebuild financial confidence and revive our failing economy. Created by Richard Smith.

Useful Front-End and Back-End Tools

ie-css3.js
CSS3 pseudo selector emulation for Internet Explorer 5-8. ie-css3.js allows Internet Explorer to identify CSS3 pseudo selectors and render any style rules defined with them. Simply include the script in your pages and start using these selectors in your style sheets — they’ll work in IE. An alternative is Offspring.js.

CorMVC
CorMVC is a jQuery-powered Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework that can aide in the development of single-page, web-based applications. CorMVC stands for client-only-required model-view-controller and is designed to be lowest possible entry point to learning about single-page application architecture. It does not presuppose any server-side technologies, or a web server of any kind, and requires no more than a web browser to get up and running.

Typograph
A typographic tool that generates CSS for beautiful web typography, according to traditional scale and vertical rhythm.

Venkman JavaScript Debugger project page
Venkman is the code name for Mozilla’s JavaScript Debugger. Venkman aims to provide a powerful JavaScript debugging environment for Gecko-based browsers namely Firefox 3.x, the Netscape 7.x series of browsers, Netscape 9.x series, Mozilla Seamonkey 1.x and Mozilla Seamonkey 2.x. It does not include Gecko-based browsers such as K-Meleon 1.x, Galeon 2.x and Netscape 8.x. The debugger is available as an add-on package in XPI format. Venkman JavaScript Debugger has been provided as part of the Mozilla install distribution since October 3rd 2001.

JavaScript Frameworks Playground: jsFiddle
jsFiddle is a shell editor that eases writing JavaScript code by creating a custom environment based on popular JS frameworks.

jslib
Mozilla gives a great flexibility and power to Javascript. This popular client side scripting language can be used to create application level logic and services for cross platform application development.
Goal: jslib has a simple goal, “Make life easier for Mozilla Application Development by creating logical, easy to use API’s for general purpose routines that lend themselves to living in library code.”

PHP debug tools
A set of useful PHP debugging tools for debugging script trace, errors and database queries.

The Automatic CSS Inliner Tool
If you’ve ever sent an email campaign, you know that if your CSS is not coded inline, it is likely to get stripped out by email clients, which can make your email design pretty funky looking. Writing CSS inline can be time consuming, and repetitive. MailChimp has a CSS inline conversion tool built right in that will automatically transform all of your local styles into inline styles. Designers have found it so useful, we thought we’d share it with everyone else – even if you don’t have a MailChimp account.

HTML Purifier – Filter your HTML the standards-compliant way!
HTML Purifier is a standards-compliant HTML filter library written in PHP. HTML Purifier will not only remove all malicious code (better known as XSS) with a thoroughly audited, secure yet permissive whitelist, it will also make sure your documents are standards compliant, something only achievable with a comprehensive knowledge of W3C’s specifications. Tired of using BBCode due to the current landscape of deficient or insecure HTML filters? Have a WYSIWYG editor but never been able to use it? Looking for high-quality, standards-compliant, open-source components for that application you’re building? HTML Purifier is for you!

InAppSettingsKit
InAppSettingsKit is an open source solution to to easily add in-app settings to your iPhone apps. It uses a hybrid approach by maintaining the Settings.app pane. So the user has the choice where to change the settings.

Dabr
Dabr is a PHP web interface to the Twitter API for mobile devices.

SproutCore
SproutCore: JavaScript HTML5 Application Framework

Your Bookmarklets, On Steroids
Quix is an extensible bookmarklet, that allows you to easily access all your bookmarks and bookmarklets, across all your browsers, while maintaining them in only one spot. All you have to do is remember the shortcut for the bookmarklet, so, basically, it’s like a command line for your browser.

IxEdit
IxEdit is a JavaScript-based interaction design tool for the web. With IxEdit, designers can practice DOM-scripting without coding to change, add, move, or transform elements dynamically on your web pages. Especially, IxEdit must be useful to try various interactions rapidly in the prototyping phase of your web application.

minibuilder
Flash MiniBuilder is a lightweight IDE created for developing programs written in ActionScript 3.

Real-time HTML Editor
Type HTML in the textarea above, and it will magically appear in the frame below.

Unicode code converter v7.0.1
Type or paste text in any of the green or grey shaded boxes and click on the button Convert button above it. Alternative representations will appear in all the other boxes. You can then cut & paste the results into your document.

Detect Mobile Browser
Open source mobile phone detection script.

Show {if}
A script for a better targeting of site visitors.

typeQuery
typeQuery, change website typography with jQuery.

Gipetto’s wordpress.tmbundle
A WordPress focused TextMate bundle to rule all WordPress Textmate bundles.

Graudit
Graudit is a simple script and signature sets that allows you to find potential security flaws in source code using the GNU utility grep. It’s comparable to other static analysis applications like RATS, SWAAT and flaw-finder while keeping the technical requirements to a minimum and being very flexible.

WordPress Plugin Maker
This plugin is made for developers or WordPress users who love Cut and Paste and hate FTP . If you have ever been in a pinch where you wanted to create a quick WordPress plugin to do something but didn’t have FTP info or weren’t at your terminal you can use this plugin to be a life saver.

Web development and deployment tools
Free online-based IDE for professional web-development.

Create diagrams online Real time collaboration
Cacoo is a user friendly online drawing tool that allows you to create a variety of diagrams such as site maps, wire frames, UML and network charts. Cacoo can be used free of charge.

UKI – Simple UI Kit for complex web apps
Uki is a fast and simple JavaScript user interface toolkit for desktop-like web applications. It comes with a rich view-component library ranging from Slider to List and SplitPane.

snap{css}: an open-source CSS editor for Windows
snap{css} is an extremely light-weight, notepad-like application that allows css designers to easily edit their code in a familiar environment while having quick acccess to helpful features such as our beautify and collapse functions.

jQuery Browser Plugin
A jQuery plugin extending browser detection capabilities.

jsPDF
jsPDF generates PDF documents using pure JavaScript

Grid System Generator
Grid System Generator includes generated grids, tutorials and resources.

User Agent Switcher Firefox Extension
The User Agent Switcher extension adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser. It is designed for Firefox, Flock, Seamonkey and Songbird, and will run on any platform that these browsers support including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Useful Resources For Web Developers

ASCII Table – The Pronunciation Guide
The ASCII Symbols Pronunciation Guide

Five Awesome On-Screen Rulers
They’re not the sexiest programs in the world, but for many designers, on-screen rulers are must-haves. Here are five of the best- including the one I can’t live without. All free.

Using HTML Symbol Entities

Editorial Style Guides
This page provides a list of resources available for the web designer or developer who needs to create an editorial style guide for writing web site copy.

Open standards Web design with CSS, XHTML, Java servlets and Javascript
Code Style answers key questions for Web developers. Which Web fonts are most common? How to use media dependent style sheets? Make more robust, accessible Websites with open standards technology.

20+ Must have documents for Designers and Developers
In this post, you would find a list of over 20 free PDF files covering aspects of Web Development as well as Graphic design. These include cheat sheet for web developers, client questionnaires for Graphic and Web design, helpful checklists as well as some useful resources for designers and developers. All of these are available in PDF format as they are easy to print. I have a number of them hanging around in my work area and find them quite useful. It would be great if you have any helpful documents to share.

45 Incredibly Useful Web Design Checklists and Questionnaires
45 checklists to make your design process easier and more organized. Consider using these checklists as a jumping off point for creating your own customized list, based on your own needs.

PowerPoint Search Engine with detailed thumbnail results
SlideFinder: a search engine for slides and presentations.

Web Development for the iPhone: HTML & CSS Support
Safari and Safari for the iPhone support all HTML elements, including deprecated elements and even some proprietary elements that were never part of any W3C specifications. In addtion, Safari supports some HTML5 elements, even though the HTML5 specifications have not been finalized.

GrepDocs.com – all your docs are belong to us – PHP, Perl, CSS, HTML, Java, JavaScript, MySQL, Ruby, Python, and more
GrepDocs: a search engine for programming documentation

Last Click (= a bit of fun)

ASCII Fire Animation with JavaScript
This is when JavaScript is abused: ASCII Fire with JavaScript.

256b.htm (D)HTML Competition
256b.htm Competition: create a website in just 256 bytes

Browser Pong
This is definitely the best use of pop-ups for a long time. If you haven’t seen this, you must see it. It will make your day. Press “P’ for start.

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The Mac and iPhone development community is doing something pretty special to raise money and awareness for the victims of Tuesday’s devastating earthquake in Haiti: donating the proceeds of app sales to Haitian aid organizations.

Yesterday, Mac developer Mike Piatek-Jimenez did something really cool: He announced that through the end of January, 100 percent of the sales proceeds (minus the $3 processing fee) from his Mac OS X weather app, Seasonality, would be donated to Partners in Health for earthquake relief. Not only is the sentiment stellar, but the weather association adds a really neat twist.

This got Mac and iPhone developer Justin Williams thinking. What if a bunch of Mac and iPhone developers got together and decided to donate a day’s worth of sales to the Haitian relief efforts? He tweeted about the idea and then wrote a longer blog post. Immediately, other indie developers jumped on board with Justin’s plan.

Garret Murray volunteered to help with setting up the website and spreading the word. Right now, about 25 developers have joined the cause, and that’s just in the last 12 hours.

Indie Relief

The project is called Indie Relief and the website, IndieRelief.com, should be up later today.

Here’s how it’s going to work: On January 20, 2010 (so that’s next Wednesday), all the participating companies are pledging to donate their sales for the day to a charity of their choice that benefits the Haitian relief effort. Doctors Without Borders and The Red Cross are two of the most common charities, but the developers can choose any organization they want.

Indie Relief is going to aggregate these efforts, listing the participating companies and what products they are offering (some are going to donate the sales from all their products, some might just do it for select titles) and their charities. The companies themselves will make the donation. This is kind of like the OneFingerDiscount promotion that some devs worked together to create in lieu of doing a more traditional Mac software bundle.

If you’re a Mac or iPhone developer and you want to join in, just e-mail Justin at secondgearsoftware.com with your company name, product name(s) and the charity you want to support.

Mac Community Gives Back

It’s stuff like this that makes me so proud to be part of the Mac community. Donate to the Haitian relief effort, get a Mac or iPhone app for free. Plus, who knows, you might even discover some new software you wouldn’t have tried otherwise.

I’d also like to draw special attention to the employees at The OmniGroup, makers of such staples as OmniFocus and OmniGraffle: Between company funds and employee contributions, they are donating $45,100 to be spread across four different relief organizations. Kudos!

Do you know of any other software developers who will be donating sales proceeds to Haiti? Let us know!

Tags: Earthquake, haiti, haiti earthquake, indie relief, iphone, mac, software

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Podcasting may have seen the biggest amount of new features this time around, with OPML importing, HTML information, download limiting, and update interval customization as some of the top improvements. The download limiting especially should improve performance and give you back some of your used memory if Amarok was using too much. In addition, podcasts now group better and can automatically download logos for each of your shows.

The Amarok developers threw in some fun new features, too, such as the return of custom labels and a new moodbar that lets you change the color of the progress bar to fit your current mood. Font settings are editable, lyrics are easier to tweak, and you can also filter your music by BPM. There are tons of new fixes for this release, so if you’d like to see more, check out the release notes for more information.

Amarok is a free download, for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X 10.5. Note, however, that Windows and Mac builds are not officially supported, and are “download at your own risk.”

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Mind-mapping tools are great for corralling snippets of information and brainstorming details into one place so you can see how they fit together in the big picture. If this is your first foray into the world of mind-mapping apps, you’ll find VUE easy to set up and use. (Our previous guide to mind mapping is a great resource to help you wrap your head around mind maps.)

You’ll need to register at the app’s web site for a free account before you can download the Windows, Mac, or Linux version of VUE at no cost. Once installed, you get get started right away setting up nodes containing ideas or concepts, then linking them with arrows to form relationships between them. You can also include clickable URLs, images, files, and more. Want to include videos and documents? Just drag them over and drop them on your map.

Unlike many other mind-mapping tools, VUE can go a step beyond the mind map, turning your brainstorms into slide presentations so you can share them with others. They’re laid out so viewers can walk through the information contained in your map in a way that helps them understand how the concepts are laid out. VUE has tons of features that are likely to appeal to novice and expert mind-mappers alike. Check out this demo video to get a better idea of what VUE can do for you.

VUE is a free download for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

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Increasingly, new applications are being written as web apps, but native Cocoa applications still provide the best user experience on Mac OS X. Using Fluidium, you can wrap your existing web app in a pure, native Mac application shell and provide the best of both worlds to your demanding user base.

Fluidium is unabashedly Mac-only, and makes no cross-platform compromises. With the high quality of native Mac apps, cross-platform, least-common denominator approaches don’t cut it on OS X. Your Fluidium-based app will fit right in on OS X as a first-class Cocoa citizen.

Requirements: Mac OS X
Demo: http://fluidium.org/
License: Apache License

Sponsors

Pixmac: Stock Photos, Royalty Free Pictures and Images

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Every web designer and developer should have a good and reliable wireframe (mockup or prototype) tool at there disposal. The importance of such a tool differentiates amongst web designers and developers, some use them, some don’t. Personally, I use them. It is in this initial stage of development that makes web design enjoyable, the coming together of the clients needs and your own creative ideas onto a blank canvas, allowing you to plan effectively the visual arrangement of the sites content.

The downside is that a good and reliable wireframe application can come at a heavy price, have you seen the cost of a good wireframe application? Prices can vary from as low as $100 all the way up to over $4000. Who has this kind of mine to throw around? Certainly no freelancer developer I know.

So, what options do you have? There are certainly a fair few free web apps and tools you can use, and that is what I have collated for this article – The Ten Best FREE Wirefame/Mockup/Prototype applications for designers and developers.

Pencil Project

The popular and fairly powerful Pencil Project is a free and opensource Firefox addon tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping with a multitude of features.
With its built-in stencils for diagramming and prototyping, the option for multi-page documents with background pages, its on-screen text editing with rich-text support and with its new cababiltity of exporting to HTML, PNG or Openoffice formats, makes this addon essential for any developer or designer.

Web Site Wireframe Tool

The key to this tool is the simplicity of usage, lending itself to speed, both in wireframe creation, as well as being able to quickly share the results without having to send anything more than a web address.
This particular tool allows the wireframe to be built in minutes, and if desired, a link to view the wireframe can be sent through email, instant message, or even the phone. With both parties able to view the wireframe even from different locations, the wireframe can then easily be updated based on feedback, discussion, ideas, suggestions, and so on.
It is free to register and use, and works in modern web browsers including Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.

Hot Gloo – The Online Wireframe App

The first thing you need to know about Hot Gloo is that it is in Beta, the second thing you need to know is that it is currently free, but with plans to charge a fee later on this year, so, grab your chance now while its free, its worth it.
HotGloo is an easy to use and intuitive Flash built web-based wireframe app, that can create conceptual interactive prototypes of a website in the early development stages.
Features include drag and drop facilities, layers, grid and snap to grid, a fair rew preset elements, interaction between the elements and you get your own custom HotGloo URL that allow you to share your mockup/wireframe with your clients.

DUB – DENIM

DENIM is a free desktop application that is available for Windows, Unix, and Mac OS X. It describes itself well as "an Informal Tool For Early Stage Web Site and UI Design".
It is an outgrowth of the original SILK project, a pen-based sketching tool for designing user interfaces. SILK combines many of the benefits of paper-based sketching with existing electronic prototyping tools. It allows designers to quickly sketch an interface using an electronic pad and stylus. SILK preserves the important properties of pencil and paper: a rough drawing can be produced quickly and the medium is flexible. However, unlike a paper sketch, this electronic sketch is interactive and can easily be annotated and modified using editing gestures. SILK allows the designer to extend the interactivity of the recognized widgets using storyboards

Mockingbird

Mockingbird is an online tool that makes it very easy for you to create, link together, preview, and share mockups of your website or application.
With its clean and clear interface, drag and drop functions, snap-to-grid, unlimited page linking and pretty much all the UI elements you could ever need, it all adss up to making Mockingbird our favorite wireframe app on this page.

MockFlow

Let me start by saying that MockFlow is not entirely free, there is a free package (limited to 1 Mockup with 4 pages and 10MB of storage) which, to be honest, really isn't much use to anyone. The premium yearly package costs $49 (reasonable price), which gives you unlimited mockups, unlimited collaborators, 500MB of storage and, most importantly it gives you access to the marvelous Mockstore.
MockFlow gives you everything you would expect from an online wireframe app, with one added bonus – its Mockstore. This is a large library of templates and presets that you can freely use (with the premium package) and will help speed up your workflow and give some added professionalism to your wireframe.

Prototype Composer – Free Prototyping Tool

Prototype Composer makes it easy for business users and business analysts to collaborate on requirements by building simple, high-fidelity prototypes that simulate a working application.
It is a tool for prototyping data, processes, activities and most importantly, user interfaces. The app also works as a Project Management tool, which is fairly simple to use, but a little bit too much for what I need, making this application more suited for a larger company.

fluidIA

FluidIA is an emerging agile design tool for prototyping rich user interfaces. This web based tool allows for rapid refinement and exploration of concepts using an object-oriented approach to design.
The big idea behind this experiment is whether a group of interaction designers, IA’s, UX professionals and developers can create there own prototyping tool in an open way. They have almost succeeded. FluidIA is still a little bit buggy, but looks very promising.

Cacoo

Cacoo is a user friendly online drawing tool that allows you to create a variety of diagrams such as site maps, wire frames, UML and network charts. It allows for multiple users to edit the same diagram in a simultaneous collaboration with all the tools and features you would expect from an online wireframe app
Diagrams created with Cacoo can be shared and allows you to paste the code into Web applications such as Wikis and Blogs, and when the original diagram is edited the pasted graphic will be automatically updated, removing the need to upload the diagram each time it is updated.

Lumzy

With Lumzy, you can create prototypes of how the site or application will function by adding events within your Lumzy controls. For instance, what happens when the user clicks a button? You can create Message Alerts, Page navigation or Links to external content, when your client interacts with your Mockup, yet with the hand drawn feel of a sketch.
With Lumzy, you can easily create your mockups and send to clients on the fly. It also features collaboration tools for team editing, a chat engine for deliberating over designs, file versioning and so much more.

iPhone Mockup Web App

This very simple web app allows you to create your own iPhone app mockups, share them with other people, and make changes which will by synced to everyone who has the mockup’s URL.
This app is currently in Alpha and offers no password protection (everyone with the mockup’s URL can access and change it), so use this app with care.

You might also like…

A Collection of Useful Web Design Wireframing Resources »
10 Online Tools and Apps to Help Optimize and Format CSS »
CSS References, Tutorials, Cheat Sheets, Conversion Tables and Short Codes »
The Blueprint CSS Framework – Tutorials, How-to Guides and Tools »
50 Essential Web Typography Tutorials, Tips, Guides and Best Practices »
50 Useful Tools and Generators for Easy CSS Development »
20+ Resources and Tutorials for Creative Forms using CSS »
24 CSS (in some cases with jQuery) Navigation and Menu Tutorials »
22 CSS Button Styling Tutorials and Techniques »

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Firefox 3.6 has been a much-delayed release, but the release candidate means that the final release is just around the corner. The Firefox 3.6 release comes packed with Personas built-in (the no-restart theming functionality), better tools to keep plug-ins up to date, improved performance, and improvements for HTML5. (Speaking of, here’s HTML5 will change the way you use the web.)

Update: If you are using the about:config hack to change extension compatibility, it’s going to break with the new version, but we have you covered with the tip to make your extensions work with Firefox 3.6.

Firefox 3.6 RC1 is a free download for early adopters, works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

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RGBMusicLab is a portable application, available for Windows or Mac, that takes the RGB color values of an image and converts them, based on intensity, into sound. You have a high degree of control over the output of RGBMusicLab. You can adjust the size of the mosaic it creates for pieces of greater or lesser complexity, select from over a hundred instruments and sound effects that the Red, Green, and Blue color values will be represented by, and whether or not the individual color channels will play independently or harmonize, among other options.

The results won’t be a carefully orchestrated concerto, but we certainly had fun loading different types of photos into RGBMusicLab and seeing what the outcome was—Christina Hendrick’s photo, seen above, created a dynamic Broadway-musical-esque number and a photo of a tropical beach yielded a piece that started off fast and furious and then slowed to soothing melody. RGBMusicLab is freeware and available for Windows and Mac OS X.

Have a novel tool for turning one media into another? Created a particularly interesting piece with RGBMusic Lab? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

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Signed,
Tired in Tacoma

Photo by Tallent Show.

Dear Tired,

You’re right to be concerned about shutting down your computer at night—it’s a huge energy drain, otherwise. Leaving it on overnight once or twice isn’t a big deal, but over the course of several weeks and months it can have a significant impact on your electricity bill.

The good news: You’ve got lots of options for making sure your machine shuts down at night, even if you’ve already gone to bed. Windows, Mac OS X, and some Linux operating systems come with an auto-shut down feature baked right in, but there are plenty of free, feature-packed after market utilities you can try, so let’s start with those first.

Previously mentioned Smart Shutdown for Windows gives you lots of options before turning off your computer for the evening. Set it to complete certain tasks like emptying the Recycle Bin or close all your apps before turning off your machine, then decide how long you want your computer to be idle before Smart Shutdown leaps into action. If you’re a Mac user, then iWannaSleep will do the same thing for you. Linux users can turn to previously mentioned Auto Shutdown for Firefox.

Some apps you may already have on your computer do double duty—they’ll complete a task while you’re off doing other things and shut down your system when they’re done. Many popular BitTorrent apps, for instance, can do that for you, as can the computer maintenance app CCleaner.

Want to skip fancy software and just stick with your operating system’s native functionality for automatically shutting down your computer? Go for it! Mac users need to dip into System Preferences and set up the Energy Saver option to shut down the system at an appointed time. It’ll even wake it up again if you’d like.

The Spinning Donut has a great little tutorial on scheduling and automatic system shutdown on Windows XP and Vista. nixCraft explains how a couple of simple command line tweaks get the job done on your Linux box.

Still on the fence about whether you even need to shut down your computer every night? Read up on the subject and decide for yourself.

Love,
Lifehacker

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• It’s 2010—Who Listens to Five Hours of Radio Per Day?
  U.S. data consumption infograph details how folks in the U.S. manage to consume 3.6 zettabytes of data. [Gizmodo, Fast Company]
• Mac OS 10.6.3 to bring many fixes
  As Apple begins testing the next minor Snow Leopard release, it looks like it’ll be primarily a bug-fixing release. [TUAW]
• Chat on Translator Toolkit
  Google’s very cool Translator Toolkit now comes with built-in chat for collaborating while translating a document. [Official Google Blog]
• Find Out How Much Your Tweets Are Worth
  In case you were wondering. [Silicon Alley Insider]
• CES: The Network Is Our Top Priority, AT&T Says
  Can’t think of any AT&T customer who’d take issue with that. [WSJ]

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Today on the company blog, Boxee revealed the specs for the Boxee Box and announced that the Boxee Beta is now officially open to the public.

Lots of us at Team Mashable are big fans of Boxee, the media center with a social twist. The company and its software have made some big announcements at CES this week, including the unveiling of the Boxee Box that it’s releasing in conjunction with D-Link later this spring.

I’ve been using the Boxee Beta for several weeks and it’s quite impressive. The UI overhaul is significantly better, and moving from one app or programing source to another is efficient and quick. You can download Boxee for Mac OS X, Windows or Ubuntu Linux.

Boxee Box Specs

Barb had a hands-on with the Boxee Box and its super-cool remote yesterday, but today Boxee has revealed the guts of the $200 device.

The highlights:

Powered by the Tegra 2 (T20) — a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 CPU
NVIDIA Graphicsthat can play 1080p video from locally stored content and stream HD content
Utilizes Adobe Flash 10.1, meaning HD and web content should play back smoother and require fewer resources
RF remote (so you can hide the box behind a cabinet)
802.11n

Boxee also highlights what the Boxee Box won’t feature, namely a hard drive and an IR port. IR dongles will be supported (and I assume the Boxee iPhone app will work, since it connects via Wi-Fi), but the team was unable to get both IR and RF into the device. The QWERTY keyboard aspect of the Boxee Box’s remote does make a strong case for using the packaged remote, even if you’re a universal remote junkie (like me) with a Logitech Harmony One or similar controller.

As for the hard drive, it’s not being built into the box as a way of keeping costs low. The beauty of something like the Boxee Box is that it can take content from your entire network and display it in your living room. You can connect a hard drive directly to the Boxee Box via USB if you really do want to have more localized media storage and streaming.

As a Boxee fan, I can’t wait for this device to hit shelves. What about you? What do you think of the Boxee Box? Have you tried the Boxee Beta?

Tags: boxee, boxee beta, boxee box, CES 2010

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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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If you ever wanted to recreate iPhone, Macbook, some of their icons, wallpapers – here you will find a lot of really unique and not so well known tutorials teaching you how to do it in Photoshop or Illustrator!

1. Apple iPhone Mobile Phone Design

2. iPod Shuffle From Scratch

3. Create an Apple IPhone case from scratch

4. Create the Glass Shelf Dock from Leopard OS in Photoshop

5. Create a Slick Black iMac in Photoshop

6. Creating A Vector Style MacBook From Scratch

7. Create a Promotional iPhone App Site in Photoshop

8. Create iPhone from Scratch

9. Apple iPhone Photoshop tutorial

10. Recreating Apple Macintosh Logo

11. Design a Shiny Photorealistic Apple Remote

12. Create New MacBook Pro From Scratch In Photoshop

Icons

13. Create a Custom Mac OSX Style Ring Binder Address Book Icon

14. Create a Jaguar Style Folder Icon

15. Design The iTunes Icon For The iPhone And iPod Touch

16. Mac Os X Mail Icon Style

Effects

17. Creating a Mac-Type Background in Photoshop

18. A Cool Lighting Effect In Photoshop

19. Create Apple Navigation Bar in Photoshop

20. Create Mac Style PhotoFlip Gallery

21. Green Apple Style Design

22. Mac – Colorful Design

23. Brushed aluminium effect

24. Creating a Cool Brushed Metal Surface in Photoshop

25. iPhone Gift Ribbon

26. Recreating Apple iWeb photo reflection effect

27. Create Apple Style Banner

28. Make Your Own iPod style Photo

29. Design a Coldplay/Apple Inspired Portrait in Photoshop

30. Apple Leopard text effect

31. Apple logo and wallpaper tutorial

Related posts:

1. 15 Incredible Apple Webdesign Style Coding Tutorials
2. 90 New And High Quality Photoshop Web Layout Tutorials
3. 50 Really High Quality Photoshop Navigation Menu Tutorials
4. 32 Handy Gradient Tutorials Using Photoshop And Illustrator:Part 4
5. 30 Photo Effect Photoshop Tutorials Every Designer Will Love

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This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

More and more individuals are making the switch from PC to Mac. Even in the business world, more employees are requesting the option to work on a Mac, and plenty of businesses are full-Mac shops. For small businesses especially, the ease of use, ability to run Windows if you need it, and added security (spyware, malware and viruses just don’t exist on the Mac the same way they do on Windows-based PCs) can make a compelling argument for running Mac OS X.

And while the Mac might be best associated with creative work, there are plenty of great business and productivity apps available for the platform too. Here are five applications that can help boost your business productivity.

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OmniFocus

There are lots of good all-around task management applications for Mac OS X, but OmniFocus is one of the best for the small business owner. Building heavily on David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” book and methodology, OmniFocus makes it easy to capture and define tasks from practically any application so that you can keep things organized and focused. You can automatically sync with iCal and sync your OmniFocus database between Macs or your iPhone or iPod touch. The companion iPhone app makes it easy to keep track and add new items to your inbox while you’re on the go.

Cost: $79.99

TextExpander

If you find yourself typing many of the same words or phrases every day, you need to look at getting a text expansion program. Programs like TextExpander (my favorite) work by automatically inserting predefined text after you hit a set of keys. For instance, if I want to write “With best regards” I can just type “wbr” instead. You can see how New York Times columnist David Pogue uses text expansions in his workflow here.

Cost: $29.99

Evernote

Evernote isn’t a Mac-specific tool, it’s a service you can use on the Mac, PC, from the web and on a ton of mobile devices. Evernote lets you capture content from almost any place, organize it and then access it later from any device. It’s a great add-on to any professional’s workflow. [Free; premium option is $5 a month/$45 a year]

BusyCal

BusyCal describes itself as iCal Pro and that’s exactly what it is. Using an interface that is similar to Apple’s own iCal, BusyCal lets you seamlessly share enhanced calendars across your local network and sync with Google Calendar. Need to make a change to a group calendar? Do it on BusyCal and it will be instantly updated everywhere. You can also embed graphics, to-do lists and sticky notes. It syncs with Google Calendar without limiting you to 5 shared calendars, which is a nice touch.

Cost: $40 per computer, 20% discount when buying multiple copies

Bento

Bento is from FileMaker and is designed as their personal database tool. It’s also a powerful, easy to use tool for small businesses that want to create attractive and robust databases. Using Bento you can use pre-defined templates or create your own to link together different documents, photos, videos and contacts. You can use Bento with your existing spreadsheets for beta data-entry, searching and to add related-data fields. The latest version of Bento also lets you share with up to 5 other users.

Cost: $49/$99 for Family Pack (5 licenses)

More Mac resources from Mashable:

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- Mac Gift Guide: 10 Buying Ideas for Apple Fans
- HOW TO: Create a Mac Theme for Windows 7
- Top 10 iPhone Apps as Judged by Mashable Readers
- APPLE TABLET: Ultimate Gallery of Concept Designs and Prototypes
- 10 iPhone Apps to Avoid Work Disasters
- 20 Creative Apps For Your iPhone

Tags: apple, apps, bento, busycal, evernote, iphone, List, Lists, mac, OmniFocus, productivity, small business, textexpander

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The same could be said of intelligence. What they don’t tell you is that the “smart” people of the world are, in most cases, just better at researching and learning things than everyone else.

But researching is a learned skill, not something you’re born with.

And while some people might be predisposed to learn things more easily than others, it’s generally not enough to make a measurable difference.

By learning how to research, you can quickly and fairly easily become knowledgeable about just about anything. And with the Internet, almost anything you could ever want to know is at your fingertips. You just have to learn how to access it.

It’s all there, online, for free. Here are the techniques I’ve used to find pretty much anything online.

Start with Wikipedia

Whenever you try to learn something new on the Internet, start with Wikipedia. A wealth of information is there, covering practically every subject in an easy-to-use, easy-to-understand format.

The main reason to start with Wikipedia is that it gives a good overview of most topics.

Sure, any given page is bound to have some inaccuracies (as is the case on most user-generated websites), but most of the content is generally reliable. And when the accuracy of certain information is questionable, it’s usually tagged as such.

The key to using Wikipedia as a source, though, is in how you make use of the information. You have to pay attention to a number of things on a Wikipedia page aside from the main content.

First of all, read the introduction to the page. This is where you’ll usually find a quick description of the topic, along with alternate and related terms.

Skim the content to find the parts of the article that you need to know about most. Some articles are short and don’t have a list of contents. Others are several thousand words long. Reading the entire thing is usually unnecessary. Just skip to the sections that are relevant to you.

Next, check the references and related resources. The references is a great place to get in-depth information on your topic. These links often include scholarly journals and articles and other respected sources.

The related sources section includes external links to in-depth information. These websites often include professional associations and organizations devoted to the topic as well as general websites with good topical information.

Move on to Google

Once you’ve built a good foundation through Wikipedia, move on to a Google search (or whatever search engine you prefer).

Having read a bit on Wikipedia, you should know the main terms and keywords associated with the subject you’re researching. Start your general search with these terms.

When researching something, I always open a new window in Firefox. For each link I visit in a Google search, I open a new tab so that I can keep my original search results page open.

And if I click on additional links on pages that I have opened, I don’t have to go back through 10 or more pages to return to my original search.

Go Multimedia

Text isn’t the only educational content on the web. Video, podcasts and slideshows are out there to explain pretty much anything you can imagine.

The advantage of so much multimedia content being available is that it caters to people with different learning styles.

Some people learn well by reading. Others learn better by hearing an explanation or seeing a demonstration. And still others learn by doing (which is where step-by-step tutorials—either video, audio or text—come in handy).

If you learn best by watching demonstrations, then head on over to YouTube, Odeo, Vimeo or any of the many other video websites and start typing the keywords that you found on Wikipedia.

Make sure, though, whenever you deal with user-generated content to verify the information against reputable sources.

One often-overlooked resource for videos is the archive from the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conferences.

TED videos are available for free on the official website and cover (as you might expect) technology, entertainment and design.

While many of the videos focus on broad concepts rather than the nitty-gritty, they’re still a great resource to expand your horizon. And the lectures are given by leaders in their fields, so the information is generally reliable.

Check Out Free Educational Resources

A ton of colleges are now putting their course materials online, accessible for free.

MIT offers its entire catalog as open courseware, with lecture notes, resources and syllabi. Other two- and four-year colleges are following suit.

You’ll also find purely web-based open education initiatives that cover subjects you might not find at a traditional college. These free courses offer a ton of organized information on any given subject.

Some colleges offer their lectures in audio and video format. Princeton, for example, offers some of its lectures through iTunes, as does the University of Virginia, Duke, Emory, Yale and Stanford.

In fact, iTunes has an entire section devoted to educational podcasts called iTunes U. Non-educational organizations are also represented, including the Library of Congress and Wall Street Journal.

The educational podcast market isn’t monopolized by iTunes, though. Odeo has an education category with 466 channels and more than 67,000 episodes. Participating colleges and universities include Oxford University, the University of Melbourne and MIT.

Look for Tutorials

Depending on your topic, you may be able to find tutorials. For pretty much any practical skill (and a whole lot of unpractical ones), you can find an online tutorial that teaches you how to do it.

You can find tutorials through search engines (just add “tutorial” or “instructions” to the end of your keyword search). You can also find them on these websites:

Instructables is a general tutorial website that offers step-by-step instructions on projects in categories such as arts, crafts, food, kids, music, outdoors and pets. Every tutorial has photos and/or diagrams to illustrate the process.

eHow offers categorized instructions and tutorials created by users. They include both text and video tutorials on a variety of topics, including law, health, food and drink, electronics and computers.

WikiHow is a user-editable how-to manual that covers a ton of different topics. Because of its wiki format, tutorials and instructions are constantly being improved.

The Tuts+ Network offers tutorials on a variety of tech topics, including Photoshop, web design, Flash and photography. Its tutorials are split into separate blogs based on topic and are written by experts.

Tutorialized offers tech tutorials for a variety of software programs, including Photoshop, GIMP, Flash, Blender and Illustrator.

Good-Tutorials offers up tech-related tutorials, covering CSS, Flash, HTML, Photoshop, PHP and more. Tutorials are categorized and searchable.

Use Tools Available to You

A ton of tools are out there to make online research a bit (or a lot) easier.

Some help by organizing your sources, others let you save snippets of pages for later reference, and others do pretty much everything you could ask for from a research app. They make tracking your research and organizing it for later reference a much easier process.

Zotero is a Firefox add-on that acts like a research assistant. It lets you collect links and whole pages, organize them into folders and tag them. It even generates a “Works cited” list from them. You can jot down notes on anything you save, which makes it much easier to remember why you included it in the first place or to remind yourself later how you ended up using it.

Zotero has a ton of features. It automatically captures citations; it cites from within MS Word and OpenOffice; it accesses your library from anywhere; it searches PDFs and notes instantly; and it lets you create group libraries.

It’s also compatible with thousands of bibliographic styles, so when it comes time to create a “Works cited” list, you don’t have to spend hours reformatting the whole thing. The best part is that Zotero is free and open source, so you can extend and modify it to meet your needs (or find others who have already done the work).

Wired-Marker is a permanent highlighting tool for Firefox. You can highlight sections of a web page to refer to later on. It’s a great app if you want to be able to easily refer to a specific section of a website that you’ve bookmarked. Wired-Marker is itself also a bookmark organizer.

iCyte is a note-taking and bookmarking app that works with Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 and 8. It saves any pages that you highlight or bookmark, so that even if the page changes or is deleted, you still have the original version. You can save sections of a website or the whole thing. You can also invite others to join your projects, share information and access information that others have shared.

Similar Web is a great Firefox extension for finding websites related to the one you’re on. There’s also a web-based version for people who don’t use Firefox. The add-on is particularly useful if you’re on, say, Odeo and want to see other websites that offer podcasts.

Notefish is an online note-taking app that lets you custom-save content from any pages on the web. You can organize and share pages based on a specific subject. The app has many customizable features, including ones that let you annotate and color your notes. The downloadable Firefox add-on helps you use Notefish more efficiently.

Diigo lets you highlight and share pages all over the web. You can add sticky notes to pages for later reference and can access notes from your computer or iPhone. Saved pages can be organized with tags or lists. You can create groups to share resources for a project, and you can even enforce tagging rules among group members to keep things organized. Free and premium accounts are available (educators get a free premium account).

Concierge is a Safari plug-in that replaces the browser’s bookmark management scheme with an easier-to-use bookmark and information management tool. You can bookmark links and save links from email, Address Book cards, and folder and file links from Finder. It puts all of your relevant information in one place.

Information overload is a common problem when researching a new subject online. Great Summary helps combat the problem by summarizing the content of a web page, document or section of text for you. It identifies key topics on a page and presents relevant information without duplicating content.

EagleFiler is an information management app for Mac OS X that lets you archive and search PDF files, word-processing documents, images, web pages, mail and more. It has a three-pane interface similar to that of most email programs. Files are stored in a universal format, so they’re accessible from any application. Files can be encrypted, and you can add notes, tags, labels and meta data to them.

When you download something in Safari, no record is kept of where it came from. This can be a problem if you need to refer to it in a “Works cited” list or just want to know where to get similar content. DownloadComment adds a note in the file’s Spotlight Comments field with the URL of the original file.

HistoryHound lets you search the content of every web page and RSS feed that you’ve visited recently in Safari, as well as any bookmarked page. It ranks results by relevance. It’s a great way to track down information in resources that you’ve already discovered.

Reference Tracker is an app for Mac OS X that lets you store documents in one place for later reference and citation. It automatically creates a “Works cited” list in Harvard, APA, MLA or Chicago/Turabian format. It has built-in search and one-click referencing of web pages (in Safari or Firefox) and email (from Apple Mail).

Selenium is a research application for Mac OS X that combines a browser, PDF manager, word processor, bibliography manager and outliner in a single window. Research is much simpler because you don’t have to switch back and forth between different applications.

Evernote is an online note-taking application that lets you save just about anything, from notes to images to web pages. And it stores everything online, so you can access your notes from anywhere. There’s even an iPhone app.

Springnote is a free wiki-based online notepad. You can create personal or group notebooks and access them either online or through the iPhone app.

Google Notebook is a free online note-taking app that lets you create an unlimited number of notebooks and save notes, web pages and other information in a single place, accessible from anywhere. You can organize your notes by adding tags to them, as you would with Google Bookmarks.

Specialized Websites

Specialized online libraries exist for a ton of different subjects. Anything from language to science to technology to history has its own dedicated resource library somewhere on the Internet.

These collections can speed up your research, and they sometimes include only reliable websites. Here are some to get you started.

Arts

If you’re looking for information on art, whether museums, individual artists or art movements, Art Cyclopedia is the place to go. It lists 9,200 artists and has 140,000 links from 2,600 different art websites.

IMDb is a database of movies and television programs, dating as far back as film itself. You can search by cast member or title. Individual listings include all previous and upcoming roles. Movie results include cast and production crew, plot synopsis and other production information (often photos).

Medical and Scientific

BioMed Central publishes 200 open-access peer-reviewed medical and scientific journals. And you can search all 200 of them on the website.

History and Humanities

The Internet History Sourcebooks Project collects public domain and copy-permitted historical texts in one place. The collection includes ancient, medieval and modern texts, as well as ones of specific groups, regions and religions.

Digital History offers historical texts and resources from American history. It is run through a partnership with a variety of educational and historical organizations, including the University of Houston, the Chicago Historical Society and the National Park Service. It has resources for researchers and teachers, including multimedia resources.

The Perseus Digital Library is a resource of mostly historical texts from Tufts University. The digital collection includes material from Greek and Roman, Renaissance and 19th-century American history.

Project Gutenberg offers public domain books and written material for free. The collection includes fiction, non-fiction and poetry and is both searchable and browsable. Most of the content dates to the 19th century and earlier.

General and Scholarly

Intute helps individuals find the best websites on which to conduct their research. You can search or browse by category. It even offers free training on using the web for research and education.

Infomine is a search engine for scholarly resources. The categories, which are browsable, include the following: bio, agricultural and medical sciences; business and economics; cultural diversity; e-journals; government info; maps and GIS; physical sciences, engineering, computer science and math; social sciences and humanities; and visual and performing arts. It also includes general reference and advanced search functionality.

The Librarians’ Internet Index is a searchable directory of content from all over the Internet, broken down by category. It includes only reputable websites, making it easier to trust the information you find.

The IPL is another collection of resources from all over the web, broken down by category. The collections are targeted at children, teens, adults and educators. The collection covers art and the humanities, social science, law and government, computers and much more.

Find Articles from BNET lets you search articles from a wide range of consumer and trade magazines and newspapers. The articles are searchable and browsable by category.

The Library of Congress offers a ton of information, including digital collections. Its online collection includes history, performing arts, legislative information and international resources. It’s a particularly good source of government information, because its THOMAS system lets you search the full text of congressional records, bills and more.

You can learn just about anything with the resources and techniques mentioned here. As you research more topics and become accustomed to learning in this manner, learning new things will become easier.

Pretty soon, you’ll be able to gain a working knowledge of practically any subject after just a couple of hours of research.

Written exclusively for WDD by Cameron Chapman.

How do you find information online? Are there any other great resources that we missed? Please add them below…

If you find an exclusive RSS freebie on this feed or on the live WDD website, please use the following code to download it: I9tU8K

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A week and more than 1.5 thousand emails later, we have the winners of our 3rd Anniversary Giveaway. But first I would like to thank you all for the great support and also thank our sponsors for providing such amazing prizes.

Now, without further ado, let’s find out who the lucky winners are!

3 Smashingmagazine books http://www.smashingmagazine.com/

The Smashing Book is a printed book about best practices in modern Web design. The book shares technical tips and best practices on coding, usability and optimization and explores how to create successful user interfaces and apply marketing principles to increase conversion rates. It also shows how to get the most out of typography, color and branding so that you end up with intuitive and effective Web designs. And lastly, you will also get a peek behind the curtains of Smashing Magazine.

For more information about Smashingmagazine visit http://www.smashingmagazine.com/

Winners:

• Diego Machuca
• gwilkes
• Cristiano Valim

3 James White Posters – http://blog.signalnoise.com

James White has been drawing since the age of 4, scribbling down his favorite characters such as Superman, Batman, the Dukes of Hazzard, etc. Being from a military family, he made 3 big moves through childhood but never strayed from his colored-pencils.

Today, James creates personal posters and art prints for sale on his website, Signalnoise.com, while working with select clients looking to add new creative to their campaigns. He has worked with such clients as Toyota, Armada Skis, VH1 Latin America and MTV, and has been featured internationally in Computer Arts andAdvanced Photoshop magazines.

For more information about James White visit: http://blog.signalnoise.com

Winners:

• OktayOe
• nereski
• Igor Matos

3 Billings Copies – http://www.billingsapp.com/

Billings is an excellent example of a highly usable localized application, designed specifically for Mac OS X and small business users. Billings is designed to manage time-tracking and expenses for small business users and produce gorgeous invoices. Billings is built on Cocoa, and integrates with Mail, Google Maps, and iCal. It supports F-Script for invoice design, produces cross-platform PDF invoices using Quartz, and leverages the Address Book framework. Billings is localized in English, French, German, Japanese and Dutch. A companion iPhone app is on the way.

For more information about Billings visit: http://www.billingsapp.com/

Winners:

• thepeachdesign
• crixandstuff
• Kyle S Lambert

3 Copies of Pixelmator – http://www.pixelmator.com/

Pixelmator, the beautifully designed, easy-to-use, fast and powerful image editor for Mac OS X has everything you need to create, edit and enhance your images.

For more information about Pixelmator visit http://www.pixelmator.com/

Winners:

• tomkoff
• rseoane
• Max Wozniak

3 Premium Accounts at ConceptFeedback – http://www.conceptfeedback.com/

Designed specifically for small and medium business marketers, graphic designers, and web developers, Concept Feedback provides a simple tool to get quality feedback on marketing concepts

For more information about ConceptFeedback visit: http://www.conceptfeedback.com/

Winners:

• indigo
• andrewthong
• George Preoteasa

2 International Year of Astronomy 2009 Posters – http://www.astronomy2009.org/

“I initially designed these as self-promotional works but word gets around and last week I received an email from the IYA 09 that they thought the posters were great and would like to use them for their promotional work – this was awesome and I of course said yes.” Simon Page

For more information about the International Year of Astronomy visit http://www.astronomy2009.org/ and to see the posters check out this post.

Winner:

• tiago.design
• Jefferson da Silva

3 Abduzeedo t-shirts – http://abdutees.bigcartel.com/

“Goddess of Abduction” is the first tee for the Abductees Limited Edition Series designed by Draco. The shirt is printed on American Appeal color black, if you have any doubt about your size please check Guys Size Chart and Girls Size Chart

Winners:

• Ondaweb
• Josh Hemsley
• Vilson Martins Filho

1 PSD to XHTML Conversion by shopHTML

ShopHTML is a team of XHTML/CSS specialists that have provided conversion services and expertise in XHTML/CSS, WordPress, and Joomla for the past 5 years. The services guarantee (or full refund is issued) w3C validated code for XHTML 1.0 strict and CSS validation which is tested across Internet Explorer 6/7/8, Firefox 2/3, Safari 3/4, and Opera 9. — and they do all of this in a 24 hour turnaround time without compromising quality.

For more information about shopHTML visit http://shophtml.com

Winner: Carl Topham (Designer023)

1 Apple Macbook – http://www.apple.com/macbook/ *

2.26GHz : 250GB, 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB DDR3 memory, 250GB hard drive1, 8x double-layer SuperDrive, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics, Built-in 7-hour battery2, Polycarbonate unibody enclosure

Winner: jehuty.be

We here at Abduzeedo wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, and we hope to share and abduct lots of inspiration in 2010! Thank you guys again for an amazing 2009!

*The winner of the Macbook will be responsible for the taxes and other legal fees. The product will be sent from the US.

We will be contacting the winners next week on December 28th.

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.

Sponsored Links:

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This pre-alpha release is currently only available for Windows and Mac OS X users. Opera says a Linux version will be released soon. If you’d like to test out Opera 10.5, download links can be found at the bottom of the Opera Labs announcement page.

Much of Opera 10.5’s speed improvements come from the revamped JavaScript engine, known as Carakan, which Opera claims is up to seven times faster than the engine in the current shipping version, Opera 10. It’s worth noting that the Mac version is not nearly as far along as the Windows release, so Mac users may not notice a dramatic speed boost in this early release.

Also new under the hood is support for CSS3 transitions and transforms, which means that the cool CSS 3 transform tricks we told you about last week will work in this version of Opera (note that you’ll need to add the Opera flag to your CSS code, for example, -o-transition-property).

The pre-alpha release of Opera 10.5 also features a new graphics engine that can take advantage of hardware acceleration (when it’s available) to render SVG graphics. Given the possibility of very complex graphics thanks to HTML5’s canvas tag, we expect to see more emphasis on graphics engine in the coming year (think of hardware-accelerated graphics as a sequel to the JavaScript engine contests of recent months).

Opera is also one of the last browsers to jump on the private-browsing-mode bandwagon, but it is finally here in this release.

While the speed boosts in Opera 10.5 are noticeable, particularly on JavaScript-intensive sites and web apps, Opera 10.5 is very much a work in progress and lacks some very basic features — like printing in the Mac version. Also missing is support for Opera’s Unite web server tools.

As you would expect from the pre-alpha designation Opera 10.5 is also somewhat unstable, but if you’d like to test out the latest release, head over to the Opera Labs page and grab a copy.

See Also:

• Opera 10 Arrives: Turbo, New Tabs and a Fresh Coat of Paint
• Faster, Sleeker Opera 10 Is Built for Better Web Apps
• Opera Unite Puts a Web Server in Your Web Browser

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Although there is hardly a shortage of desktop Twitter clients, the native client options for Mac users remain more limited. A few weeks ago, Realmac Software introduced Socialite 1.0, an app that manages Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds and more.

Now another new Mac native client has entered the ring — Kiwi by YourHead. Kiwi doesn’t do multiple social networks like Socialite — its focus is Twitter. It’s a deceptively simple-looking client, but under the hood, the real audience is the power Twitter user.

Look & Feel

Similar to apps like Twitt and Bluebird, Kiwi offers users a number of different themes — they can even create their own. Kiwi’s theme API uses HTML and CSS, which makes creating and altering themes pretty easy.

YourHead is a big player in the RapidWeaver community and already some other RapidWeaver theme designers have created themes for Kiwi. The built-in selection of styles offers lots of different options for the customization junkie.

The first thing I noticed about Kiwi as an application is that it is FAST. Like, extremely fast. Switching from one account or group or saved item to another felt seamless and instantaneous.

For power users that don’t like to leave the keyboard unless it is absolutely necessary, Kiwi has a ton of keyboard commands. Creating tweets, going to replies, direct messages and favorites, selecting accounts, retweeting and more can all be done from the keyboard. Speaking of retweeting, you can do it the official way, and there is also an option to edit and retweet. One really nice feature — you can view a user’s timeline instantly or in a browser from their tweet.

When composing tweets, you can easily append pictures and shorten URLs before hitting send.

Groups, Account Types and Regular Expressions

Kiwi 1.0 does NOT support Twitter Lists. The feature was simply rolled out too late in Kiwi’s development process — but YourHead says it is planned for a future version — probably Kiwi 1.1.

That said, there are lots of options that can create a list-like effect. Kiwi is designed to be used not only with multiple Twitter accounts (if you have them), but with multiple types of accounts. For instance, you can group together a bunch of different Twitter followers’ timelines into one group and then view updates from all of them together. You can also add certain searches or certain search rules to these groups.

In addition to grouping those items together, if you want to keep a certain search term on tap for easy access, you can add it as an account type. Kiwi has a slick little quick account window that you can choose to have open that lets you switch from one account or search term to another.

Perhaps the most advanced feature Kiwi possesses is support for rules and regular expressions. This has tremendous potential, especially if there are terms and phrases you want to keep tabs on. For instance, you can create a rule to automatically hide tweets containing a certain phrase (so if there is a popular twitter meme you want to avoid, you can just add that hashtag to a rule and all of those tweets will be hidden from view). You can also create rules to highlight and color-code content so that you are able to spot it in your timeline.

Other Thoughts

Kiwi is a really impressive Twitter client. It takes the same vertical menu design that has been popularized by the earliest desktop Twitter clients and adds in a lot of features without cluttering things up. Other than lacking List Support and Growl notifications (that’s being worked on, too), this is easily as advanced as any other Twitter client, regardless of platform.

My biggest takeaway with Kiwi is that it is fast. Really, really, really fast. Switching between timelines, searches and search combinations is quick and easy, and updates come in elegantly and without any sense of slowdown.

Kiwi requires Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. It’s $14.95, but you can download a free trial and see how it fits into your work flow.

Tags: kiwi, mac, twitter, twitter client

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For one reason or another, a lot of freelancers use Macs. As a full-time freelancer and part-time geek, I really like to play around and tweak with applications on my Mac too. There’s little confusion that Mac is a popular platform for web designers and freelancers as it offers an enormous range of software for designing, managing, developing ,publishing websites and tracking, processing, administering your financial things.

It may be the raw power, the stability or the cool slim look? Well, we all know why that really is. It’s the applications! The software that makes the hardware bling, and it’s not necessarily depends on big gadgets and widgets, but often we rely on the smaller, even more useful applications. Here’s in this article we will round up some different web design and freelancing related apps that every Mac-powered freelancer and professional should consider.

You may be interested in the following application related articles as well.

• 16 Intelligent Sites For Application Review
• 15 Real Time Web Startups Around
• 10 Qualitative Tools to Improve Your Website
• 55 Best Ways To Track Your Website Daily Traffic
• List Of Top Social Media Network Sites

Please feel free to join us and you are always welcome to share your thoughts even if you have more reference links that our readers may like.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed and follow us on Twitter — for recent updates.

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Apparently, Tumblr users have been nice rather than naughty this holiday season, because the blogging platform is rolling out a slew of new features — including a nifty Backup app, customized Dashboards for Japanese and German users and a Tweetie-compatible API.

But Tumblr users aren’t the only ones reaping the seasonal cheer — the service itself has recently received the gift of more than 550 million pageviews a month, half of which generated by Tumblr users via the Dashboard (which is kind of like a Google reader for Tumblr users). Well, it’s nice to know that bloggers give as good as the get.

Keep Your Content Safe With the Backup App

As a blogger who hosts her content exclusively on Tumblr, this app is basically a gift from the gods. It’s basically my worst nightmare that my blog — which contains hundreds of posts — will somehow disappear, leaving me with nothing but regrets. Luckily, Tumblr created this app, which you can download here, which will allow you to make a copy of your blog’s content that can be stored on your computer, disc or as an archive of static html files. Unfortunately, the app only works on Mac OS X 10.5 and higher (which is a pain, considering I have version 10.4.11), and is not yet available for Windows.

Tumblr Takes Japan (and Germany)

Tumblr is also going to be rolling out Japanese and German versions of its Dashboard over the next few weeks. Apparently, these international incarnations with have some new features, which are still TBA. For now, check out the rad Japanese version below.

Integration With Tweetie

If you use Tumblr, you already know that you can send your posts to Twitter automatically via the “Customize” section of your Dashboard.

Well, now mobile users can get in on the action, too: Tumblr is launching a Tweetie compatible API — much like WordPress — which means you will be able to post to Tumblr from your phone. A lot of Tumblr’s features already closely resemble Twitter’s: Their reblogging option is basically retweeting, reblogging with commentary is basically akin to replying, “liking” a blog post is parallel to favoriting a tweet, linking can be equated with @ing, and reblog trees (in which Tumblr users engage in commenter-like conversations in the reblog) are essentially Twitter conversations. It appears that this feature has yet to be launched, but you can check out what it will look like below.

So what do you all think of Tumblr’s new stocking stuffers? Anything else on your list?

Tags: media, Mobile 2.0, social media, tumblr

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One such web app is The Invoice Machine from Bombia Design. This stunning invoice creator really is a machine and clearly built with design in mind. Let’s take a look at what The Invoice Machine can do for you, and what it can’t.

Produce Invoices that Look Great

After I discovered that trying to make invoices in Pages each month was not the best solution, I went on the search for the online invoicing app that would suit me best. After browsing the feature lists of many different sites, I settled on The Invoice Machine and I don’t look back.

It is one of the most beautiful invoicing apps I have come across and equally one of the simplest. The interface is divided up into five main tabs; Invoices, Recurring, Projects, Items, and Clients.

Creating a new invoice is a breeze. Simply click a little plus sign and fill in the details. Invoice Machine will make it look clean and presentable by its self.

The Invoice Machine gives you a nice range of options when creating or editing invoices. Take a look at the image below for the full picture, but it certainly makes things like taxes, currency, and language easy. Adding descriptions of charges is also not a problem, allowing you to add individual products and services, or a charge per hour.

Creating a new invoice is easy.

Click here to view an example of what the above invoice looked like after saving it.

Send & You Shall Receive

After creating your new invoice, getting it out to the client can be done via email directly through The Invoice Machine, or downloaded as a PDF file to send to clients yourself.

Email your invoices directly from the application.

A feature I particularly like is its PayPal integration. After sending out your invoice, if you’ve entered your PayPal details into The Invoice Machine settings and your client pays you via PayPal, then upon payment being made, Invoice Machine will automatically update the status on your invoice to ‘Payed’.

When payments are made by another means, you can input the payment manually. After the payment has been completed you are offered to send your client a ‘Thank You’ email, which is a nice touch.

Projects & Items

Along with the ability to send off automatic recurring invoices, you can also set up charges called ‘Projects’ and ‘Items’. These are useful if you often find yourself billing clients for the same thing over and over again.

You can create as many Projects and Items as required to add to your invoices later. A great thing that comes with the Projects is a timer, which opens up in a small window, letting you time in the background. When you’ve completed your task, clicking ‘Add Time’ instantly sends the new time to Invoice Machine and calculates the running cost so far. There is also a free Invoice Machine Dashboard Widget timer available for Mac OS X.

An attractive time is also available.

Plans & Pricing

The Invoice Machine has a very simple pricing system. Apart from a small link in the footer of free accounts, all of the different plans have the same feature set. The only difference is the number of invoices you can create each month and the number of users.

The pricing seems fair, and when you boil the price down even the Medium account is only really 40 cents per invoice provided you make full use of the plan.

The pricing is competitive with other options.

Conclusion

I have been very impressed with The Invoice Machine’s ease of use, its efficiency and flair. For some, the feature set may be lacking compared to other applications out there but if it looks like this could suit your workflow then I’d certainly recommend giving it a go.

Let us know what your experience has been with The Invoice Machine, if you prefer to bill from another app, or if you still love the good old invoicing book.

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Back in 2006, end of November to be exact, my design studio was robbed and as you guys might already know the story, I lost my computer and my backup drives with all my files and endeavors in the design field… A long time has passed since then– 3 years to this date, and today we can fortunately celebrate the day that I lost everything but gained even more in return.

Because of the robbery I created Abduzeedo, and what started as a simple means of backup turned into what is today my main job. The most important thing though is that I got the chance to meet up and interact with so many fascinating people, first with the guys who became contributors and now with of course all of you guys who read the blog everyday.

We love design. We’re crazy about it. Eat, sleep, and breathe it. I guess a less cheesy way to put it would be that we’re big design enthusiasts over here at Abduzeedo. We believe in good design and we’ve been doing our best to come up with inspiring posts for you guys every day. In turn, that constant search for inspiration has given us the chance to discover new and incredibly talented artists and designers. And because of that, we thank you all for these three amazing years.

We’re going all out and making a big party out of this, and we want to personally extend the invitation to all you guys. Join us in spreading design cheer around the world! We figured there’s no better way to party and thank you guys more (and kick-off the holiday season!) than to giveaway some amazing gifts. A very special thanks to James White, Vitaly Friedman, Ryan Cash, Simonas Bastys, Andrew Follett, Simon Page, and our sponsors for all their kindness in helping us make this happen!

Gifts

1 Apple Macbook – http://www.apple.com/macbook/ *

2.26GHz : 250GB, 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB DDR3 memory, 250GB hard drive1, 8x double-layer SuperDrive, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics, Built-in 7-hour battery2, Polycarbonate unibody enclosure

3 Smashingmagazine books http://www.smashingmagazine.com/

The Smashing Book is a printed book about best practices in modern Web design. The book shares technical tips and best practices on coding, usability and optimization and explores how to create successful user interfaces and apply marketing principles to increase conversion rates. It also shows how to get the most out of typography, color and branding so that you end up with intuitive and effective Web designs. And lastly, you will also get a peek behind the curtains of Smashing Magazine.

For more information about Smashingmagazine visit http://www.smashingmagazine.com/

3 James White Posters – http://blog.signalnoise.com

James White has been drawing since the age of 4, scribbling down his favorite characters such as Superman, Batman, the Dukes of Hazzard, etc. Being from a military family, he made 3 big moves through childhood but never strayed from his colored-pencils.

Today, James creates personal posters and art prints for sale on his website, Signalnoise.com, while working with select clients looking to add new creative to their campaigns. He has worked with such clients as Toyota, Armada Skis, VH1 Latin America and MTV, and has been featured internationally in Computer Arts andAdvanced Photoshop magazines.

For more information about James White visit: http://blog.signalnoise.com

3 Billings Copies – http://www.billingsapp.com/

Billings is an excellent example of a highly usable localized application, designed specifically for Mac OS X and small business users. Billings is designed to manage time-tracking and expenses for small business users and produce gorgeous invoices. Billings is built on Cocoa, and integrates with Mail, Google Maps, and iCal. It supports F-Script for invoice design, produces cross-platform PDF invoices using Quartz, and leverages the Address Book framework. Billings is localized in English, French, German, Japanese and Dutch. A companion iPhone app is on the way.

For more information about Billings visit: http://www.billingsapp.com/

3 Copies of Pixelmator – http://www.pixelmator.com/

Pixelmator, the beautifully designed, easy-to-use, fast and powerful image editor for Mac OS X has everything you need to create, edit and enhance your images.

For more information about Pixelmator visit http://www.pixelmator.com/

3 Premium Accounts at ConceptFeedback – http://www.conceptfeedback.com/

Designed specifically for small and medium business marketers, graphic designers, and web developers, Concept Feedback provides a simple tool to get quality feedback on marketing concepts

For more information about ConceptFeedback visit: http://www.conceptfeedback.com/

2 International Year of Astronomy 2009 Posters – http://www.astronomy2009.org/

“I initially designed these as self-promotional works but word gets around and last week I received an email from the IYA 09 that they thought the posters were great and would like to use them for their promotional work – this was awesome and I of course said yes.” Simon Page

For more information about the International Year of Astronomy visit http://www.astronomy2009.org/ and to see the posters check out this post.

3 Abduzeedo t-shirts – http://abdutees.bigcartel.com/

“Goddess of Abduction” is the first tee for the Abductees Limited Edition Series designed by Draco. The shirt is printed on American Appeal color black, if you have any doubt about your size please check Guys Size Chart and Girls Size Chart

1 PSD to XHTML Conversion by shopHTML

ShopHTML is a team of XHTML/CSS specialists that have provided conversion services and expertise in XHTML/CSS, WordPress, and Joomla for the past 5 years. The services guarantee (or full refund is issued) w3C validated code for XHTML 1.0 strict and CSS validation which is tested across Internet Explorer 6/7/8, Firefox 2/3, Safari 3/4, and Opera 9. — and they do all of this in a 24 hour turnaround time without compromising quality.

For more information about shopHTML visit http://shophtml.com

Rules

The rules are simple. Our goal is to promote and share design related links (photography, illustration, product design, graphic design, 3d…), so to be in the running for the prizes all you have to do is:

• 1 – Leave a comment here on this post with the title of the design link you are sharing and you believe it’s really cool.
• 2 – Follow Abduzeedo on twitter – http://twitter.com/abduzeedo
• 3 – Share the link with the title on Twitter using the hashtag #design at the end.

Example: “50 Beautiful Free Icon Sets For Your Next Design: http://bit.ly/7A3ruO #design

You can leave as many comments you want, but you will have to tweet them as well.

Winners

The winners will be selected at random and the last one to be selected will be the Macbook winner. Of course we’ll also check out the shared link to determine whether it’s valuable to the design community or not.

We will announce the winners on December 24th, so start looking for good design links to share and let’s get abducted by design!

*The winner of the Macbook will be responsible for the taxes and other legal fees. The product will be sent from the US.

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.

Sponsored Links:

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New features in APE 1.0:

• New and improved communication protocol :
  • Entirely using JSON and fully extensible.
  • Several commands can be nested in one request.
• New transport methods :
  • XHRStreaming : A single connection is used to send and receive data. Better performance
    and reduced transfer delays.
  • JSONP : Allows to place «cross-domain» requests.
• Support for BSD & Mac OS X (running the APE server) implemented by using KQueue
• ServerSide JavaScript (SSJS) Implemented by using TraceMonkey (Mozilla SpiderMonkey)
• Mootools support on the server side.
• Complete Server-Side JavaScript API:
• • Handling of users, RAWs, Commands, Channels, Sockets
  • Use of non-blocking sockets (Client & Server)
  • MySQL connector module
  • API for doing external HTTP requests
  • WebHooks
• Log files for errors, access and general information

They’ve also created an online comic book to get you familiar with what APE is all about.

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Below we’ve hand picked 20+ Tools for Quick & Clean Code Development that will help you code much faster and in an efficient manner.

AJAX

MiniAjax

MiniAjax is pretty much a large collection of downloadable AJAX scripts, for customization on your site. Most of these scripts are configurable, and guide you through the implementation.

Clean AJAX

Clean AJAX provides a high level interface to work with the AJAX technology. It’s created to solve problems found in AJAX applications. This tool will save you time and help you fix and tidy up your code.

Rialto

The Rich Internet Application Toolkit (Rialto) is an ajax-based cross browser library with lots of widgets. Rialto gives you quick and easy access to rich internet application development. As a developer, you’ll virtually need no understanding of DHTML, Ajax or DOM code.

ThinWire

ThinWire is mostly driven by an open source development framework that allows you to build applications for the web that have usable and interactive user interfaces. You’ll be able to complete projects at a fraction of the time, all while handling the view-layer of your Java EE (J2EE) applications.

AjaxDaddy

AjaxDaddy is a resource site filled with useful and time-saving AJAX scripts for your website. You can find anything from slide shows to customized feeds.

JavaScript

jQuery UI

With jQuery UI you’ll be able to design custom user interfaces for a number of web applications utilizing the jQuery library. This nifty tool lets you substantially cut-back on the amount of code you would need to write. You should also scroll to the demo page for some nice examples.

Venkman JavaScript Debugger

Venkman happens to be Mozilla’s JavaScript debugger, and it is a fully servicing debugging environment. It comes with numerous features and specialized options for the inspection of how well your script interacts and performs.

SproutCore

SproutCore is a framework that helps you build applications in JavaScript with little amounts of code. Best of all you won’t need any plugins, and they will work with any of the modern-browsers.

SimpleJS

SimpleJS is a lightweight JavaScript library that gives developers useful JavaScript functions when working with AJAX.

CSS

List-O-Matic

List-O-Matic lets you create CSS-styled navigation menus based on list items.

Blue Print CSS

Blueprint CSS, a framework that helps you save time by cutting down your CSS development time. You’ll be backed by a solid CSS foundation letting you build your project, organized grid, and more.

CSS Compressor

CSS Compressor allows you to easily compress your CSS code to increase loading speed and save on bandwidth. There are different levels of compression for you to choose from, this depends on the size of your code, and your desired load time.

Clean CSS

Clean CSS optimizes and formats your code and makes it much cleaner and more organized. Your CSS will be clutter-free.

CSS Color Chart

The CSS Color Chart page contains a neutral colors chart and a general-purpose color chart. The colors are compatible with CSS and HTML. You can copy in which ever format you desire, all you need to do is hit the toggle button and it will convert from Hex to RGB and back. This is ideal for designers that practice color-theory in depth, and use a lot of colors in their layouts.

HTML

BBEdit

BBEdit is an HTML and text editor for the Mac OS X. It was specifically designed for web designers and coders that want efficient editing, and text manipulation.

XHTML Markup Generator

Markup Generator is a simple and effective tool that takes the slicing out of having to slice your own work from the very beginning. You’ll be able to produce standard XHTML markup along with a CSS frame that’ll let you style your elements.

HTML CheatSheet

This is a pretty extensive and easy to read cheatsheet for HTML code.

HTML Entity Character Lookup

With this app you’ll quickly find an entity or tag based on how it looks. Save time by not having to visit another site to lookup a tag, or needing to remember its function.

PHP

CakePHP

CakePHP is a solid development framework for PHP that empowers you with a useful architecture for developing, and maintaining your apps.

XDebug

Xdebug is an extension for PHP that helps you debug scripts. Useful features include warnings, and error messages that are displayed after activation. If there’s a script that fails to prperly work, Xdebug will print an error message, along with function names, parameter values, source files, and line more.

SimpleTest

PHP_CodeSniffer is a PHP 5 script that vigorously detects conformance to a predefined PHP coding standard. It’s specially helpful on large projects, and for keeping uniform coding styles.

Pixy: PHP Security Scanner

Pixy is a Java program that performs automatic scans of PHP 4 source code, aimed to detect XSS and SQL injection vulnerabilities. Pixy takes a PHP program as input and creates a report that lists possible vulnerable points in the program, along with additional information for understanding the vulnerability.

About the Author

Joel Reyes is a web designer and web developer with years of experience in the industry. He runs a development studio called Looney Designer. Connect with him via Twitter, and through his Blog.

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A new app for Mac OS X lets you automatically lock and unlock your Mac based on the distance of your iPhone. Using Bluetooth, the app judges the distance between your Mac and iPhone, and if you get too far from your Mac, it locks it up tight.

(…)
Read the rest of AirLock Locks Up Your Mac [AirLock Locks Your Mac If Your iPhone Gets Too Far Away]

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Let’s start this list of tutorials with one that will definitely show you the potential of the text-shadow property. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create a stunning (and very popular theses days) text effect using CSS and the text-shadow property.

» Read tutorial

Creating cross browser compatible CSS text shadows

As text-shadow is a part of CSS3, some browsers (who said IE??) didn’t implemented it yet and you have to use some hacks to make it work properly.
The following article will show you how to create cross browser text shadows.

» Read tutorial

Improve the Quality of Bold Text in Safari with text-shadow

Although Mac OS X have a pretty good font rendering engine, bold text in Safari is often a bit dirty. Did you know that using the text-shadow property you can create beautiful bolds? This article will show you how to do.

» Read tutorial

CSS text-shadow Fun: Realtime Lighting Demo

Using the text-shadow CSS property as well as some JavaScript, funny experimental effects can be created. If you haven’t already, you can definitely say goodbye to Flash.

» Read tutorial

Cross browser text shadow

The filter non-standard property, which have been created by Microsoft, can fix some compatibility issues of IE 6, 7 and 8.
This interesting article will show you how to efficiently use the filter property to create text effects similar to those you can get with text-shadow.

» Read tutorial

Mootools text drop-shadow

When you need a full cross-browser compatibility and still want to use CSS3 properties, JavaScript is always here to help. This tutorial will show you how to recreate the text-shadow CSS property using the MooTools JavaScript framework.

» Read tutorial

Text embossing technique with CSS

Text embossing is very popular in the world of web design and front-end web development. Indeed, even if I’m quite bored to see it on so many websites, it looks very nice.
And it is also very easy to implement. Just read this tutorial and you’ll know how to do.

» Read tutorial

Photoshop like effects using CSS

Some browsers allow multiple values to the text-shadow property, which allow you to create effects like this one. I don’t think I’ll implement that kind of effect on my websites, but I’m happy to know how I can do it.

» Read tutorial

“Acid” text effect using text-shadow

Another nice text effect created using the text-shadow property. The page is in German, but happily everyone can understand the CSS code.

» Read tutorial

Super awesome buttons with CSS3

CSS buttons are very cool and they are a nice way to use your CSS3 skills. In this very nice tutorial, you’ll learn how to create stunning buttons using text-shadow and a few other CSS3 properties.

» Read tutorial

Get 20% off on the MyHomePro Premium WordPress Theme by using this exclusive code: wpcats20.

10 resources to get the most out of the CSS text-shadow property

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At long last, Google Chrome for Mac is finally in an official, publicly accessible beta. All we can say is, “It’s about time!” There’s just something extremely ironic about a Web browser based on WebKit (a layout engine that Apple created for its Safari browser in 2002 that didn’t even appear on Windows until 2007) taking 15 months to actually come to the Mac.

Ignoring the fact that Chrome Extensions aren’t supported on the Mac version of Google Chrome right now (although if you manage to get a copy of the extension file, you can actually install them — whatever), the question becomes: How does Google Chrome for Mac stack up against its Windows counterpart? Pretty well, as it turns out.

Look and Feel

As for similarities, the two browsers look virtually the same. The placement of the buttons and menu bars, the way tabs work — everything is uniform from one platform to another. Even the Preferences (called Options in the Windows version) are nearly identical.

The one exception is that Chrome for Windows can do Bookmark synching and install extensions and Chrome for Mac cannot.

Under the Hood

Google Chrome’s Developer Tools setup is equally identical under Windows and Mac. In Mac OS X, the Developer Tools take on the same theme as the rest of the browser (in Windows it uses the default Windows window styles), but the content is the same.

This makes sense, because Developer Tools is virtually identical to Safari’s Web Inspector. And by virtually identical, I mean they are exactly the same.

Differences

Right now, there are very few differences between the two programs, although two stand out.

Extensions — Chrome for Windows supports them, Chrome for Mac does not. Right now this appears to be due more to an imposed restriction rather to any actual technical compatibility issue, but we’ll trust the Chrome developers and hope to see Mac support soon.

If you really can’t wait, check out this tip from grack.com. Note: You’ll need to use either a compatible developer’s build or the latest Chromium for Mac nightly.

Menu Bar — One of the striking features about Chrome for Windows is its utter lack of an application bar (you know, File, Edit, View, etc.). However, in Mac OS X, there is a menu bar across the top of the screen that is always present. In addition, applications offer individual menus when that program is running in the foreground.

To Google’s credit, they decided to adhere to these guidelines, and, in the process, actually give Mac users some features that will be convenient to anyone who uses Safari, Firefox or Camino. This includes the standard File/Edit/View/Window menus, as well as a Bookmarks menu and a History menu.

Yes, you can access your bookmarks and view your history in a browser window from within the actual Chrome application, but these options make it a bit easier for users who are used to using the top Bookmarks menu or who want to see a list of recently closed tabs.

Overall

Mac users: What are your thoughts on Google Chrome for Mac so far?

Tags: chrome mac, Google, google chrome, os x, Windows

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Originally posted at Deep Tech

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The day has finally come. As we were expecting, Google has just released Chrome for Mac, and can now be downloaded by Mac OS X 10.5 or later users.

If you’re anything like us, you’ve been anxiously waiting the chance to get your hands on the new browser since last year’s release of the Windows version.

Of course, Google Chrome for Mac is just a BETA release, and as we’ve previously reported, you won’t be able to use applications like Gmail that run on Google Gears, but you can take advantage of other Chrome improvements such as speed and Google search right from the address bar.

After you first install Chrome on your Mac, you can optionally import your Safari or Firefox settings, which means your bookmarks and certain preferences can carry over from your existing favorite browser. Given that Google Chrome Extensions should launch any day, you might not even have to live without your favorite add-ons for very long.

We’ve just installed it for ourselves and our taking it out for a test drive, and our first impressions are that this thing is slick. While we compile our notes, let us know what you think of Google Chrome for Mac in the comments.

Tags: Google, google chrome, mac

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The other big announcement at tonight’s Boxee Beta Launch is the Boxee Box. Boxee runs on Mac OS X, Windows and Ubuntu Linux, but the plan has always been to expand to other set-top boxes, consumer electronics and even Boxee specific boxes.

The full technical specifications wont’t be announced until CES, but the Boxee did announce some basic details about the Boxee Box at tonight’s event. The big news is that the box is being made by D-link, is WiFi enabled and has an SD slot. Astro, the designer of the XBox 360 is designing the Boxee Box. Oh, and the price is expected to be around $200.

Boxee will have a live demo at CES but $200 for an Internet-enable fun machine will certainly appeal to a lot of users. The Boxee Box will have HDMI, SPDIF and RCA Audio connections, plus two USB ports and it will work on both 802.11n

In the press release, D-Link’s senior director of marketing, Daniel Kelley, said:

“By pairing Boxee’s innovative social entertainment platform with D-Link’s technology we’re able to create a solution that introduces people to what TV should be. Additionally we’re bringing a new level of social interaction to the living room.”

So $200, Q2 2010. Will you buy one? Let us know in the comments.

Tags: boxee, boxee box, dlink

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The games are powered by the “Effect Engine”, Joseph’s JavaScript/DHTML library that provides the framework for displaying and animating all the graphics, playing all the sounds & music, handling the keyboard & mouse, and sprite collision detection. It can smoothly render multiple layers of parallax scrolling tiles and sprites using pure DHTML. HTML 5 Audio is used where supported (currently Safari on Mac OS X 10.5 only, 10.6 and Firefox coming soon), and 3rd party extensions used elsewhere. All modern browsers and platforms are supported, including IE 6+, Firefox 3+, Safari 3+, Chrome 1+, and Opera 9+.

The team has also created a suite of online tools to allow developers to prepare and design their game online including managing graphics & audio, creating levels for their games and manipulating graphics in real-time using non-destructive filters (scaling, rotation, and a number of other transforms).

Developers can build their games locally on their Macs or PCs, and don’t have to upload any code until they are ready to publish. Once ready, developers can compile their code automatically using Google Closure, and receive a unique URL and embed code to share the game on their own site, blog, or anywhere they want.

In looking through the documentation, it looks like the whole API is very well laid out clearly documenting the breadth of methods available and the Getting Started guide is very comprehensive.

I didn’t find anything that discussed licensing or a potential pricing model so that’s something that you may want to look into before diving into this but from what I’ve seen, the engine looks very promising.

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In the context of the mobile platform wars, the contest is often framed as “the iPhone” versus Android, BlackBerry and rest of the smartphone market. However, even if the iPhone is the only phone that Apple sells, there is another device that runs on the iPhone OS: the iPod touch.

In fact, according to the mobile analytics firm Flurry, the iPod touch might even be Apple’s secret weapon when it comes to long-term results and platform retention. Flurry makes this argument in its November Industry Pulse report.

iPod touch, Training Wheels for the iPhone

A big part of Flurry’s assertion is that the userbase using the iPod touch is going to be more inclined to buy an iPhone when the decision to buy a smartphone comes up. Flurry is classifying iPod touch users as being young teens. While this might be true, we haven’t seen any demographic information regarding the average age of an iPod touch owner.

Flurry’s argument about the iPod touch building up brand loyalty, product familiarity and an existing repository of content (in this case, apps) mirrors the same trend that many computer and industry analysts wrote about beginning in 2004. The “iPod halo effect” was the idea that the good experience consumers had with the iPod would make them more likely to become Macintosh customers. Users were introduced to the Apple brand via the iPod, became loyal, and by extension were willing to switch computing platforms.

This halo effect has largely been cited as one of the reasons that the marketshare for Mac OS X is up so much since 2003, when the iPod first started to gain real momentum in the digital device space. Flurry’s argument extends this principle to the iPod touch, only instead of moving consumers towards the Mac (although that may still be a side effect), iPod touch users will be more likely to move to the iPhone.

To our knowledge there haven’t been any studies proving or disproving this relationship, but as a theory, it does make sense. Anecdotally, I can say that as a BlackBerry user before getting an iPod touch in 2007, it was only after owning the iPod touch that I was willing to resign myself to lower-quality cellular service in exchange for the iPhone.

iPod touch Users and Social Networking and Social Gaming

In Flurry’s latest report, they look at the average number of user sessions on the iPhone, the iPod touch and the Android platform. All three platforms have increased user sessions, but because the market as a whole has expanded, the iPhone’s percentage has fallen.

In the social networking and social gaming area, the iPod touch has gained the most ground since June. Take a look at the chart below:

The fact that the iPod touch is growing more than platforms like the Android in areas such as user sessions for social networking and social gaming is interesting, but it might not end up being statical proof of anything. After all, the reason for the increases could be more wireless hotspots or more use of applications with networked capabilities.

Still, as a gaming platform, the iPod touch offers some significant advantages over its competitors like the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP. Games tend to be less expensive and the download-to-device ability and potential integration with other social graph services makes the platform a real winner.

What do you think?

What do you think of the idea that iPod touch will end up converting more iPhone users in the future? If you own an iPod touch, do you or are you planning on getting an iPhone? Let us know!

Tags: android, flurry, iphone, iPod Touch, mobile apps

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The collection of tutorials feature text effects, illustration, web designs, photo effects and much more every aspect of Photoshop every designer should look into learning showcased all within one post.

The Creative Nerds team also run another blog called Design Chair which features the best Photoshop tutorials, illustrator tutorials and resources for designers worth checking out if you have some spare all want to search for a specific design tutorial.

I hope you enjoy this article and let us know in the comments which is your favourite tutorial featured within this post.

1. Create a Trendy Galactic Poster Design in Photoshop

2. Add Fantastic Color to 3D Text

3. Master special finishes

4. Fantastic Disintegration Effect inspired by Watchmen in Photoshop

5. Create a glowing effect scene in photoshop

6. How to Create a Flying Land Illustration On Fire

7. Create a Rebellious Skateboarder Using Digital Painting Techniques in Photoshop

8. Design a Realistic 3D Baseball Cap in Photoshop

9. Easy Star Light in Photoshop

10. Creating an Abstract Watercolor Wallpaper

11. Create A Fiery Face Explosion

12. How to Design the Firefox Logo in Photoshop

13. Awesome Milk Typography Effect in Photoshop

14. How to Create a Hellacious Flaming Skull in Photoshop

15. Design a Stylish Mail Icon in Photoshop

16. Create frozen liquid effects

17. 3D Typography in Photoshop

18. The Making of “Constant Slip”

19. Create a Steam Powered Typographic Treatment

20. Create a Retro Pop Art in Photoshop

21. Design a Beautiful Website From Scratch

22. Live Life

23. Create A Retro Cosmic Design in Photoshop

24. Create a Leather-Textured, Realistic Briefcase Icon

25. How to Apply Textures to Uneven Surfaces

26. Design a Vibrant Blackberry Inspired Ad in Photoshop

27. Shiny Calligraphy Text Effect in Photoshop

28. Create a Web Layout with 3D Elements using Photoshop

29. Create fab 1980s type effects

30. Create a Magnifying Glass Icon in Photoshop CS4

31. How to Create a Richly Ornate Typographic Illustration

32. Drawing an Abstract Lightbulb

33. Design a simple, modern web template

34. 3d text on fire

35. How to Create a Moka Express Icon

36. Earth-shaking Photoshop tips

37. Simple Coffee Cup Icon Photoshop Tutorial

38. 80’s Style Design Using Photoshop

39. Creating a Shoe Advertisement Poster Using Floral Elements

40. How to Create a Battlestar Galactica Badge in Photoshop

41. Super Easy and Cool Flower Text Effect in Photoshop

42. Create Simple Cartoon Characters in Photoshop

43. Design a Vintage Poster with Vector Pack 16

44. Give a Car Photo Super Slick Lighting Effects

45. How to Create a 3D Text Photo Manipulation

46. Create a Promotional iPhone App Site in Photoshop

47. Creative Photoshop Animal King Photo Manipulation Tutorial

48. How to Create Eroded Metal Text with Photoshop

49. Create a Cheerful Twitter Bird in Photoshop

50. How to Create a Vintage Radio Poster in Photoshop

51. Design a 3D Box Icon in Photoshop

52. How to Create a Contemporary Style Illustration Without Drawing Skills

53. How to Create a Surreal Scene of Flying Bombs on Fire

54. Create an Abstract Sea on Land Illusion

55. Create an Out of Bounds Fantasy Illustration

56. How to Create a Sleek and Textured Web Layout in Photoshop

57. Draw a Classy 3D Poker Chip in Photoshop

58. How to Create a Virtual Auto Using 100% Brush Techniques

59. Create a Stunning Text on Wild Fire Effect

60. How to Create a Side View Concept Car

61. Reader Tutorial: Create Vintage Traveler Diary in Photoshop

62. Earth Day. Green Planet

63. Use Over 40 Advanced Keyboard Shortcuts to Create a Reflective Timepiece

64. Grungy Rusted Carbon Fiber Text Effect

65. How to Design a Stunning, 3D, Sunset Type Illustration

66. Create a Furious Pink Panther Poster

67. Create a Magic Night Themed Web Design from Scratch in Photoshop

68. Photoshop Tutorial: Design the Mac OS X Leopard Folder

69. Create Smoke Text

70. How to Create a Basic House Icon in Photoshop

71. Reader Tutorial: Extinction by Chanito

72. Create Fantastic Stone Textures in Photoshop

73. Awesome Tutorial Portfolio Design

74. How to Create a Magician’s Hat in Photoshop

75. Super Easy Neon Style in Photoshop

76. Create a webdesign company layout in photoshop

77. Photoshop Tutorial: Create scorching effects

78. How to Create a Realistic IES Lighting Effect in Photoshop

79. Tutorial: Killer 3D Poster Design with 3DS Max & Photoshop

80. Create a Stylish Two-Tone Photo Montage

81. Bamboo Fun tablet

82. Create a Clean and Colorful Web Layout in Photoshop

83. Design a Vintage Radio Icon in Photoshop

84. Create Destructive Black and White Lettering with a Dramatic Splash Effect

85. Design a Slick 3D Ice Text Effect

86. How to Design a Beautiful Google Calendar Icon

87. Design an Awesome Geometric Shaped Typography with Grungy Background in Photoshop

88. How to Create a Severed Arm in Photoshop

89. Design an Intense Particle Illustration using Photoshop

90. How to Create a Unique Colorful Site Layout

91. Design A Killer Fashion Model Poster

92. Design a car dealer website layout with Photoshop

93. Dazzling Dance Photo Manipulation Photoshop Tutorial

94. Incredibly Realistic Water Text in Cinema 4D and Photoshop

95. Design a Golden Flame Text Effect in Photoshop

96. Design an Epic Fantasy Scene with Photoshop

97. How To Create a Retro Apple Wallpaper in Photoshop

98. Photoshop & Illustrator Tutorial: Create mile-high type art

99. How to Create a Chilling Photo Manipulation in Photoshop

100. How to Make a Creative Blog Layout

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To make the voting more interesting, Navicat offered up three licenses of their new and awesome Navicat Premium application, which is a tool for managing MySQL, Oracle, and PostgreSQL databases in one central and unified interface. Today, we’re happy to announce the three winners of the Navicat Premium licenses.

The Winners

• Ole – Navicat Premium (Windows)
• Jonathan Chee – Navicat Premium (Mac OS X)
• exe – Navicat Premium (Linux)

Congratulations to the winners and you will be contacted soon about claiming your prizes. For those who were not able to win, there are more giveaways in store for you so make sure to sign up for the Six Revisions RSS feed to get notified whenever a giveaway is posted.

An Exclusive Six Revisions Discount!

You can get 10% off the sale price of a Navicat product simply by using the following code:

• sixre20

This code will be valid until December 21, 2009.

Thank you!

On behalf of the Six Revisions community, I thank Navicat for furnishing these licenses and for hosting a wonder Six Revisions giveaway. Also, thank you to the participants who voted for their favorite RDBMS.

Related Content

• Top Five Best Database Management Tools
• Best Relational Database Management System?
• 7 Applications to Make Working with MySQL Databases Easier
• Related categories: Web Development and Tools

About the Author

Jacob Gube is the Founder and Chief Editor of Six Revisions. He’s also a web developer/designer who specializes in front-end development (JavaScript, HTML, CSS) and PHP development. If you’d like to connect with him, head on over to the contact page and follow him on Twitter: @sixrevisions.

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Looking for the perfect, unique gift for the Gmail addict this holiday season? Look no further than the Gboard, a keyboard just for Gmail users. Rather than commit all of those keyboard shortcuts to muscle memory, you can execute the same tasks with action-specific keys. At $19.99, it’s an interesting stocking-stuffer.

We’re not going to lie. When we were first heard about the Gboard, we were a little skeptical. Visions of the OOMouse insanity flashed in our heads and we wanted to hide. However, the nice guys at Gboard sent us a unit to review, and, we have to say, we’re impressed.

Setting it Up

Using the Gboard is extremely easy. Just plug it into the USB port on your computer (it works with both Windows and Mac, although we can’t imagine that Linux would have any problem either — we didn’t test it out) and then enable keyboard shortcuts in Gmail or Google Apps if you haven’t done so already.

To enable keyboard shortcuts, just click on the Settings button, and, in the general tab, select the radio button to turn keyboard shortcuts on.

That’s it, now all the buttons work exactly as they appear on the pad.

Tip for Mac Users: Mac OS X won’t recognize the Gboard when you plug it in, but it will see that a keyboard device has been conncected. Select the ANSI keyboard type and you’ll be good to go. Your regular keyboard will continue to work without interruption.

Using the Gboard

The Gboard has 19 buttons and each corresponds with a task in Gmail. From the board, you can search, go to results, go to starred mail, compose a message, reply, reply to all, forward a message, star and archive messages, delete and mark messages as spam, flip through your messages (and within message threads themselves), select messages and go right to the inbox.

In my tests, I found that the Gboard acted exactly as if I was using the regular shortcuts. Although there are some things you can do with Gmail shortcuts that you can’t do on the Gboard (like label messages or move messages to a different label), the most frequently used functions are all there and the layout is actually pretty ergonomic.

Moreover, the placement of the keys doesn’t seem to be totally random, and moving forward and backwards through messages was actually much nicer on the Gboard than pressing “k” and “j” repeatedly on my keyboard.

Why Not Just Use Keyboard Shortcuts?

Lots of people are going to question the Gboard’s mere existence. After all, can’t you just use the keys on your laptop or keyboard and get the exact same results?

Yes, you can absolutely get the same results from a regular keyboard (and, as I stated, there are a few things you can do with the keyboard that you can’t do with the Gboard). That doesn’t mean that the Gboard is without merit or that it doesn’t have its own benefits.

Lots of Gmail users — even heavy Gmail users — don’t use keyboard shortcuts, either because they don’t know they exist or because they can’t ever remember what keys do what. I’m one of those users who lives and dies by my keyboard shortcuts. However, because I typically use Mail.app for my mail needs, my muscle-memory shortcuts are all off whenever I try to use Gmail. In the past, I’ve gone through the motions of customizing my Gmail shortcuts so that they match what I use in Mail.app, but because I have about four or five different Google Apps accounts that handle my mail (and each account is different), having to set those for each and every mailbox has been something I’ve never really had the patience to do.

The nice thing about having a separate pad just for Gmail is you don’t have to memorize each keyboard shortcut (just look at the button, or if you are a touch typist like me, a few hours of use is probably all it will take to get the location of the buttons mapped to your fingertips).

For users who aren’t familiar with the concept of shortcuts and just how much time can be saved by not using your mouse to click on everything, the Gboard is a nice introduction.

Overall

Overall we’re impressed with the Gboard. It does what it says it will do, the keys are laid out in a way that makes sense, and, for heavy Gmail users, shortcuts can save a tremendous amount time throughout the day.

Tags: gboard, gmail, keyboard shortcuts, keyboards

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Epson has launched a new compact photo printer, the PictureMate Show PM 300. Wait a second there! It’s a digital photo frame too. Now I’m confused. Do I want a photo printer or a digital picture frame? Do I really need both?

Printing your favorite pictures from the convenience of your own home does sound interesting, especially with the holidays closing in fast. But a digital picture frame that also has attached to it a printer wouldn’t look so good on your bedside table or in the living room, would it?

The device is going to be available for $299.99 so let’s take a look at it before hurrying to purchase it, shall we?

The printer comes with the following specs:

• Advanced MicroPiezo technology optimized for photo printing
• 90 nozzle x 4 configuration
• 4-color dye
• Maximum resolution: 5,760 x 1,440
• Print speed: 4- x 6-inch photo in 37 seconds
• Maximum printable area: 4- x 6-inch
• Support for CompactFlash, Secure Digital, SDHC MMC, Memory Stick, Microdrive and xD-Picture Cards
• Windows and Mac OS support
• Software included: ArcSoft PhotoImpression

The digital photo frame will offer you a seven-inch display capable of 800 x 480 resolution. 12 different slideshows are available at your disposal and you also get a remote control to manage them. The PictureMate Show PM300 comes with 270MB of integrated memory space but as you have just seen above, the device is able to deal with most storage solutions available out there. A Bluetooth adapter would let you connect your smartphone or PDA straight to the printer / photo frame so as you can see you can send your pictures from virtually and smart device to the device.

And if the picture frame isn’t the most esthetically pleasant frame available out there, you could simply buy regular photo frames and use the new Epson printer to print new photos for them every day.

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For Mac OS X users, desktop social media clients almost always involve a trade-off. We can either use multiple apps to update our profiles and services or we can use programs like TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop that work with lots of services, but rely on Adobe AIR and thus have a tendency to eat up memory and bog down our processors.

Earlier this year, an app called EventBox entered the Mac marketplace as an option to fix this quandary. It was a native Mac OS X app but allowed users to access and update multiple social services. In October Realmac Software acquired the app and renamed it Socialite. Over the last two months, Realmac has worked to refine the interface, add features like Twitter Lists and just generally give the whole client a good coat of polish. Today Socialite 1.0 is available for download.

Multiple Services, One Clean Interface

As we’ve discussed in previous preview articles, Socialite handles Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Flickr, Google Reader and standard RSS feeds. What’s nice about Socialite is that you can view information from all of these services in one clean interface, without getting bogged down by columns or multiple windows.

Check out this video from Realmac that shows off how to add an account to Socialite:

Photos, Retweets and Lists

Since we last wrote about Socialite, Twitter Lists support has been enhanced to support lists you subscribe to, as well as lists you have already created. Creating lists and managing lists is a feature that Realmac is considering for a future update, but it isn’t available in the 1.0 release.

Socialite uses Twitter’s new RT system. You can do this by either hitting a key-command or selecting RT from a tweet’s option bar. You get confirmation of a Retweet by the appearance of a translucent black bar just above the status update menu. This is how Retweets look in Socialite:

One of the nicest features of Socialite is its integration with both Flickr and Facebook’s photo systems. Lots of Facebook clients can offer ways to update status messages and view status messages from others — and even view photos in-line — but uploading photos or viewing photographs in a more album like manner isn’t a common feature.

Socialite lets you upload and also view photos in both Facebook and Flickr in an easy to browse kind of way. For users who don’t like using the web uploaders, the ability to upload and tag within Socialite is really nice.

HUD Option

Socialite’s main interface window is uncluttered and easy to navigate, but if you are low on screen real estate or just want an easy way to see what’s going on with a particular feed, you can use the HUD, or Heads Up Display, option. It’s a nice alternative to having the full menu and you can perform almost every action from the main interface within the smaller HUD column.

Overall

Socialite is a solid Mac app with a great look and feel and great integration with different social services. We would love to see LinkedIn added as a supported service, especially now that they have an API, but Socialite covers the gamut of the most widely-used social platforms. Socialite is $20 but you can try the program out for free.

Have you used Socialite? What are your favorite social media clients for Mac OS X? Let us know!

Tags: digg, facebook, flickr, mac software, realmac, Socialite, twitter

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We all have our different opinions and thoughts, but does it really matter if we use a PC or MAC? I open it up to you… Recently I started a Group On LinkedIn called the ‘The Pro Designer’ with the goal of getting the opinion of other designers and sharing there thoughts about topics related to the design world.

First topic was a good one and we have had some really good feedback and thoughts, check them out below or visit the LinkedIn Groups Page>>

So here is what has happened so far, I would ask you to join in and have your say: -

Most recent hot topic is: -

I want to know what do you prefer – Mac or PC? We all have our different opinions and thoughts, but does it really matter? I open it up to you…

I prefer PC because I’m comfortable with it. Later down the line (once I have money) I’ll definitely get a MAC, it has a much more cleaner, more professional feel to it, though Windows 7 feels that way for me now. But that’s all psychological to me. I don’t think it really matters, as long as they both are compatible with the softwares like Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver that I daily use for my design and development I can work on.

I agree with Yung Tsai. It doesn’t really matter and is more psychological. Certain scalability would be for Macintosh, PC (if you build your own) can be more powerful in the desktop version. It would probably be more of an issue of programs/software that is worked on frequently. I am now of the mind after my “vista” experience to let everyone else be guinea pigs before switching OS’s. I have a home built PC workstation- cost around 2,800 to build, retail would have been well over 5,000 and still have to buy extra stuff. I love my Wacom, haha.
p.s. I don’t get to have a nice warranty or customer satisfaction as much as if i would have bought a dell- but it is a workhorse.

Mac all the way! The fact that I never have to worry about viruses or anything reduces stress levels, and gives a more professional feel. Some of the mac only features speed up my programming by at least double. It has all the software I could ever need (nothing I haven’t been able to find as of yet), and some not available on pc. Infact, I would use a mac, just because it has Coda (destroys dw in my opinion). Not that I have any problems with PC’s though. I use them at school, and had used one for programming up until a year ago.

I do all my design work on my Mac, but of course have to have a PC to check the website designs and make changes due to the different renderings on the various operating systems & platforms.

I am happy with the performance of Mac’s. I have built Windows machines in the past, and am perplexed with the Windows OS occasionally. The Mac OS is very stable and simple (and flashy cool at times) and I enjoy using the Final Cut Studio software.

i’m a mac user since two years, and before changing i was quite “scared” for compatibility problems, need of different programs, etc
i use for study and work all the adobe suite and rendering software, and the perfomance difference is incredible.
in my opinion, a mac does not something incredible or magnificient, it does its works.
and that’s the best feature when your competitor continues to produce personal computer that does not work, that in six months have their perfomance level dissolved.
now i’m very happy and i would never go back
ah, after two years everything is ok, while with my last pc two year were enough to have a lot of problems working on indesign and illustrator.
why?
i really don’t know…

I still don’t have MAC, but I would love to have it, still, all MAC users have to use PC or at least Windows from time to time, this is no thing for windows user, all they need is just windows.
But as I said, I would love to have MAC

To be honest I really don’t know what would be best, me personally I use both PC & MAC – 70% PC/ 30% MAC – but the reason I do that is because I find it alot easier when dealing with multiple firms, that I just adapt to there previous methods as it reduces time and more work can get done, but not everyone has that luxury.
The general perception seems to like the idea of having MAC due to I guess it’s sexy features and the stigma of top agencies really only going down the MAC avenue, and not even considering the PC option. But cost is a big issue, it is a lot more expensive to buy a MAC.
It’s really based on personal preference… I will say if I had to choose only 1, it would be PC…

I have to say I find this such a boring and inane debate. Quote Jack Nicholson in The Departed quoting John Lennon ‘I’m an artist. Ya gimme a f$#!ing tuba, I’ll get ya something out of it.’
If you have a modicum of creativity who cares?

Thanks Russell, If you really find it so boring why even comment and commit your time to such a completely worthless statement, go an do something that you want to do, because some people actually do care!

I don’t believe it is a worthless statement, your initial question stated ‘but does it really matter?’ and I’m saying no it doesn’t. My clients don’t give two hoots whether the work I create for them is done on a mac or pc. Both have their pros and cons but it comes down to what you are comfortable using.

Well,.. it is a ‘religous debate’ that really won’t go anywhere, but it’s great to hear the opinions of everyone. here’s mine:
A Mac is the way to go from a Designer’s perspective. It’s hassle free and most of the tools on the Mac make it so much easier to accomplish your work. though it comes at a very high price.
Windows, of course, can accomplish just as much, maybe even better. If you are skilled enough with the inner workings of Windows.(I’m referring to Windows XP and Not Vista ), you’ll find that it actually gives you more control and more flexibility with your system. For exclusive Mac applications, there are always alternatives for Windows that do exactly the same thing.
Finally for Windows 7, let’s not go into that yet. Win 7 is s till very young and surely still has problems. Currently, most of it’s appeal is through aesthetics, and that’s what lures in everyone to make the change.

Have your say today! Join in, because we want your opinion! Visit the LinkedIn Groups Page>>

No related posts.

Go to Source

We all have our different opinions and thoughts, but does it really matter if we use a PC or MAC? I open it up to you… Recently I started a Group On LinkedIn called the ‘The Pro Designer’ with the goal of getting the opinion of other designers and sharing there thoughts about topics related to the design world.

First topic was a good one and we have had some really good feedback and thoughts, check them out below or visit the LinkedIn Groups Page>>

So here is what has happened so far, I would ask you to join in and have your say: -

Most recent hot topic is: -

I want to know what do you prefer – Mac or PC? We all have our different opinions and thoughts, but does it really matter? I open it up to you…

I prefer PC because I’m comfortable with it. Later down the line (once I have money) I’ll definitely get a MAC, it has a much more cleaner, more professional feel to it, though Windows 7 feels that way for me now. But that’s all psychological to me. I don’t think it really matters, as long as they both are compatible with the softwares like Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver that I daily use for my design and development I can work on.

I agree with Yung Tsai. It doesn’t really matter and is more psychological. Certain scalability would be for Macintosh, PC (if you build your own) can be more powerful in the desktop version. It would probably be more of an issue of programs/software that is worked on frequently. I am now of the mind after my “vista” experience to let everyone else be guinea pigs before switching OS’s. I have a home built PC workstation- cost around 2,800 to build, retail would have been well over 5,000 and still have to buy extra stuff. I love my Wacom, haha.
p.s. I don’t get to have a nice warranty or customer satisfaction as much as if i would have bought a dell- but it is a workhorse.

Mac all the way! The fact that I never have to worry about viruses or anything reduces stress levels, and gives a more professional feel. Some of the mac only features speed up my programming by at least double. It has all the software I could ever need (nothing I haven’t been able to find as of yet), and some not available on pc. Infact, I would use a mac, just because it has Coda (destroys dw in my opinion). Not that I have any problems with PC’s though. I use them at school, and had used one for programming up until a year ago.

I do all my design work on my Mac, but of course have to have a PC to check the website designs and make changes due to the different renderings on the various operating systems & platforms.

I am happy with the performance of Mac’s. I have built Windows machines in the past, and am perplexed with the Windows OS occasionally. The Mac OS is very stable and simple (and flashy cool at times) and I enjoy using the Final Cut Studio software.

i’m a mac user since two years, and before changing i was quite “scared” for compatibility problems, need of different programs, etc
i use for study and work all the adobe suite and rendering software, and the perfomance difference is incredible.
in my opinion, a mac does not something incredible or magnificient, it does its works.
and that’s the best feature when your competitor continues to produce personal computer that does not work, that in six months have their perfomance level dissolved.
now i’m very happy and i would never go back
ah, after two years everything is ok, while with my last pc two year were enough to have a lot of problems working on indesign and illustrator.
why?
i really don’t know…

I still don’t have MAC, but I would love to have it, still, all MAC users have to use PC or at least Windows from time to time, this is no thing for windows user, all they need is just windows.
But as I said, I would love to have MAC

To be honest I really don’t know what would be best, me personally I use both PC & MAC – 70% PC/ 30% MAC – but the reason I do that is because I find it alot easier when dealing with multiple firms, that I just adapt to there previous methods as it reduces time and more work can get done, but not everyone has that luxury.
The general perception seems to like the idea of having MAC due to I guess it’s sexy features and the stigma of top agencies really only going down the MAC avenue, and not even considering the PC option. But cost is a big issue, it is a lot more expensive to buy a MAC.
It’s really based on personal preference… I will say if I had to choose only 1, it would be PC…

I have to say I find this such a boring and inane debate. Quote Jack Nicholson in The Departed quoting John Lennon ‘I’m an artist. Ya gimme a fucking tuba, I’ll get ya something out of it.’
If you have a modicum of creativity who cares?

Thanks Russell, If you really find it so boring why even comment and commit your time to such a completely worthless statement, go an do something that you want to do, because some people actually do care!

I don’t believe it is a worthless statement, your initial question stated ‘but does it really matter?’ and I’m saying no it doesn’t. My clients don’t give two hoots whether the work I create for them is done on a mac or pc. Both have their pros and cons but it comes down to what you are comfortable using.

Well,.. it is a ‘religous debate’ that really won’t go anywhere, but it’s great to hear the opinions of everyone. here’s mine:
A Mac is the way to go from a Designer’s perspective. It’s hassle free and most of the tools on the Mac make it so much easier to accomplish your work. though it comes at a very high price.
Windows, of course, can accomplish just as much, maybe even better. If you are skilled enough with the inner workings of Windows.(I’m referring to Windows XP and Not Vista ), you’ll find that it actually gives you more control and more flexibility with your system. For exclusive Mac applications, there are always alternatives for Windows that do exactly the same thing.
Finally for Windows 7, let’s not go into that yet. Win 7 is s till very young and surely still has problems. Currently, most of it’s appeal is through aesthetics, and that’s what lures in everyone to make the change.

Have your say today! Join in, because we want your opinion! Visit the LinkedIn Groups Page>>

No related posts.

Go to Source