He goes on to say that We’re excited to take part in ensuring future versions of the SVG spec will meet the needs of developers and end users.

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Posted in Browsers, Web Standards.

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In the past year, there was an alarmingly large number of Facebook-related scams, viruses, phishing attempts and malware attacks. And though most of these haven’t happened due to Facebook’s error, it’s still very much their problem.

Today, Facebook and McAfee announced a partnership and a program to help Facebook users protect their computers from malware.

If you’re expecting something revolutionary, though, you’ll be disappointed. It’s essentially a discount: to get it, visit the the Protect Your PC tab on the McAfee Page on Facebook. After you become a fan of McAfee, you can download a six-month subscription to McAfee security software for free, and you’ll get a discount on the regular price once those six months are over. However, to enroll with the program (which is only available in selected countries including the US, UK, Brazil, Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy and Spain), you will have to supply your credit card number; your card will be charged at the end of the 6-month period.

Tags: facebook, malware, McAfee, social media, social networking

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In the wake of its relaunch as an independent company, AOL could lay off around 1,400 people starting today, according to a memo to the HR team. It’s not going to be pretty.

We knew this was coming. Back in November, AOL revealed that it was going to need to downsize by 2,500 employees and asked for volunteers. According to the memo, the company found 1,100 people who offered to leave, all of them with voluntary separation packages.

That leaves 1,400 or so to be let go this week in order to reach the 2,500 mark. The memo states that most of the layoffs will occur on Wednesday, but that the process will continue even after January 13. Several European offices, including those in Sweden and Spain, will be closed entirely.

This will be a harsh and tough week at AOL. We’ll try to assess the fallout, both for AOL and for the companies that are likely snatch up the company’s exodus of talent. Here’s the full memo:

Memo to AOL HR Staff

“In November, we announced that the company would take a $200 million charge and that we planned to decrease the size of our global workforce by one-third. Late last year, we offered Voluntary Separation Program to enable employees to decide what was in their best personal and professional interest. We had approximately 1,100 employees opt to join the Voluntary program. At that time we announced the Voluntary program we noted that if we didn’t reach our target reduction of a third we would need to follow the voluntary program with an involuntary action. We did not reach that target.

The next phase of our restructuring plan will include an involuntary layoff. Our process internationally varies by country and is subject to local laws. We began meeting with employees throughout Europe today. For example meetings have already taken place in the UK, Germany and France, and we announced plans to shut down many of our offices in Europe, beginning with those in Spain and Sweden. In addition, we will be beginning the consultative process with the Workers’ Councils in relevant countries this week.

In the United States, we will begin notifying a limited number of individuals impacted by the involuntary layoff today, with the majority of notifications taking place in the U.S. on Wednesday, January 13. As of this point, this layoff will not trigger the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) in any of our locations. For many of the employees impacted in the U.S., Wednesday will be their last day in the office.

Since April, we have been moving through a process that started with strategy, then focused on structure, and has most recently been centered on aligning our costs with the company’s strategy and structure. As a part of this process, we’ve looked at every aspect of this business. We evaluated our competitive position and product portfolio in every market – and we asked the hard questions about areas that were no longer core to the strategy and our profit profiles in the businesses and countries where we operate.

We will be offering packages to impacted employees in the U.S. that will include severance, benefits and outplacement assistance, among other things.

All of our cost alignment work is about ensuring AOL’s sustainability and future success. Project Everest is the completion of phase one of AOL’s turnaround.”

[via Business Insider]

Tags: aol, business

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Scattrbrain is a lightweight program for managing the little tasks and reminders we keep track of in our day-to-day lives. Let is sit quietly on your desktop and feed it new tasks from time to time.

With Scattrbrain you can set a due date for a task, color code or re-order your tasks. It can also fetch your Google Calendar events and show them in your to-do list.

http://www.getscattrbrain.com/

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The most straightforward way of creating a basic compiler in javascript is to directly translate the basic into javascript functions. But this approach will not work for two reasons. First, there is “goto” which, although it is a reserved word, is not yet in Javascript. (Obviously, ECMAScript community finds “with”, prototype inheritance, and the rules of the ‘this’ keyword to be far less confusing than allowing “goto”). It is possible to automatically move statements around to eliminate GOTO, but you don’t want to go there.

The other problem is that browsers tend to freeze until javascript programs finish running. To avoid freezing the browser until the program ends, we break the program into small chunks, and execute a few of those chunks every so often using a javascript timer. This gives the appearance of a running program and doesn’t freeze the browser.

Bytecode solves both of those problems. By breaking the program into bytecode instructions, we can implement goto by just changing which instruction we are going to execute next. We can also suspend execution any time to allow the user to interact with the browser.

(thanks Shaun)

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Any developer can now go to the Palm Developer Center, sign up, and start developing and distributing applications for webOS devices.

“We’re thrilled to open the doors of a program that offers mobile developers unparalleled freedom and choice in how they distribute and market applications,” said Katie Mitic, senior vice president, Product Marketing, Palm, Inc.

“The combination of our highly accessible web-based platform, groundbreaking integration opportunities and open, flexible distribution program makes Palm webOS the best place for developers to create the next generation of innovative mobile applications.”

To kick off the official opening of the Palm Developer Center, the company is launching a $1 million Hot Apps bonus program for webOS developers. The program starts February 1 and runs through May 31. The program is open to developers worldwide and will award $1 million to the most successful applications distributed during this timeframe.

The developers of the top free and paid applications each will earn a $100,000 bonus; in addition, 40 developers will receive $10,000 (20 each for free and paid), with 400 developers awarded $1,000 (200 each for free and paid). Awardees will be notified in June.

Each element of the Palm developer program is designed to help developers promote their work and drive application sales and downloads. Developers receive a 70/30 split (developer/Palm) of gross revenues generated through sales (after applicable taxes).

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The goal of the Facebook Fellowship Program is to find candidates who can help solve problems surrounding the social web and Internet technology.

The Facebook Blog provides more details. "We are interested in a wide range of academic topics, including Internet economics, cloud computing, social computing, data mining, machine learning, and systems and information retrieval."

"Full-time Ph.D. students who are enrolled in U.S. universities and working on research in these topical areas qualify to apply for one of five fellowships, which will cover their tuition and fees and provide a $30,000 stipend in addition to conference travel and other benefits."

The deadline for application submission is February 15, 2010. Recipients of the fellowship will be notified by email of their acceptance on March 29.
 

Related Articles:

> Facebook Makes Some Changes

> Facebook Redesign Emerges

> Facebook Responds To Users Complaints

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Originally posted at The Social

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It has been a very different holiday season as everyone got ready for CES this year. This is my second time at the show (first time was having the honor to pick up an award for the Gears team) and was a very different experience.

It was great to come out with some good news today: from Verizon, to video recording, to Flash, to 3D games. From a consumer point of view the Palm Mobile Hotspot is pretty sexy. Tethering has been a pain, and I was eyeing up a MiFi when I got to learn that devices will be able to become MiFi hotspots. Awesome.

All good stuff, but I am obviously most excited about the developer side of things. This year it turned out that we got to turn on the full developer program today in conjunction with the other CES news. A ton of work went into this first launch of the full program and there is a lot packed in there:

New developer portal

When you work with Ben, you quickly learn that things should be as polished as possible. He really lead the charge on making a great new developer portal with a spruced up look and feel throughout, and some good new content. There is a lot more in the works and the community has been coming together nicely to provide some fantastic documentation too. We now have a good foundation to move quickly on, and to really help developers.

PDK: On-ramp for native code via Plug-in Development Kit

One of the things I love about the Web is its diversity. It isn’t just One Community. It has sub communities galore. On the server-side you have Java and PHP and Ruby and Python and [insert every other platform] camps all at home on the Web. Even on the client-side, despite the ubiquity of JavaScript, you see many different types of developers.

I am really happy that we are providing the Plug-in Development Kit (PDK) that will enable a path to native code on the platform enabling a role that we have seen on the Web via Flash, Gears, QuickTime, RealPlayer, and on and on.

The goals of the PDK are:

• Easy porting of C/C++ applications to webOS, including those that use OpenGL ES 1.1 or 2.0
• Easy integration of C/C++ components to enhance the capabilities of webOS applications

Read more about the PDK.

Flash 10.1

Flash 10.1 fits into this picture too. I am glad that we have a path for Flash developers to get their content to our users. Adobe has been working very hard to make their engine work on mobile. This has got to be a tough problem given the nature of it (event loop etc) and they are doing great. Can’t wait to see the finished product.

Hot Apps

We want to put our money where our mouth is, and want to reward developers in a fair way, so we decided to offer $1 million dollars in cash bonuses to webOS developers through our Hot Apps Program.

Contests are interesting, but having been involved in a few myself, they get very subjective and judging can be difficult. This is why this time around we wanted to try to let the market do its thing and reward developers based on downloads and how many devices have installed their application.

Some high level info:

The Palm Hot Apps Program will reward developers of the hottest webOS applications with a total of $1 million. The top rewards of $100,000 will go to developers as follows:

• The developer of the free webOS application that’s downloaded the most between February 1, 2010, and May 31, 2010 will receive a $100,000.
• The developer of the paid-for webOS app that generates the most revenue during the same period will also receive $100,000.

Developers of other top free and paid apps will also receive cash awards, as follows:

• The next 20 apps in each category: $10,000 each
• The next 200 apps in each category: $1,000 each

To qualify for an award, your app – either free or paid – must be available to webOS users via Palm distribution programs between February 1, 2010, and May 31, 2010. In addition, the following criteria apply:

• The app must have been developed using the Palm webOS Software Development Kit or the Ares Integrated Development Environment. Since the Palm webOS Plug-in Development Kit is not widely available, applications utilizing this development kit or any APIs not in the Palm webOS SDK are ineligible.
• Apps must be available for download through an official Palm webOS distribution program (App Catalog Distribution, Web Distribution, or Beta Distribution). Apps distributed through non-Palm methods do not qualify.
• Apps developed by Palm employees or their direct relations are ineligible for awards.

What do you think of this approach?

GitHub Palm Repository

I am a huge GitHub fan and I am really glad that we have opened up our Palm GitHub account with some goodies. We have various projects that contain sample code that go from ye olde hello world app, to Mitch Allen’s great news app from his book to the indispensable stylematters app that our great HI put out to show you how to make beautiful, usable applications.

I hope that this is just the beginning and that you will see more and more projects on GitHub to fork! Speaking of projects to fork….

Project Appetite

One of the new projects is Project Appetite which is an open source project showing how you can interface with the Palm application feeds that come out of our full catalog.

Early partners have already built sites using the feeds: PreCentral App Gallery, webOS App Catalog Viewer, the House of Palm, and on FreshMeat.

Now you can integrate the feeds yourself. There are a lot of different pieces in that one project, and I need some other posts to go into details on the front end code (some fun CSS transforms if you are in Safari on Mac and hit Ctrl-F!) as well as the backend (using Java, node.js and lots of good stuff). There is still a lot that we want to do to help people and this is just the beginning of that project.

Phew. What a way to start the new year. Thanks for joining me on this journey and I can’t wait to see what folks come up with (including us!)

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Originally posted at The Download Blog

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Sprint said it is expanding its open location platform with the addition of TechnoCom Corporation to give developers more ways to create new location-based services for Sprint customers. TechnoCom is allocation –based aggregator that provides customization and integration support services tailored to call center and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) based services.

“We are pleased to add TechnoCom to our developer program as a location-based aggregator,” said Len Barlik, vice president of wireless and wireline services for Sprint.

“Because developers can work with a variety of specialized service enablers, they can create and launch richer applications that benefit from the speed and utility of the Sprint network. We look forward to seeing the useful and cost effective applications that developers can create for call center management and for other industries.”

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Palm says its developer program extends the web orientation of the Palm webOS platform, providing developers with opportunities to leverage the web as a promotional channel for applications.

The Palm developer program offers more freedom and choice of how to get applications to market along more control to promote and grow a business. For developers looking to make money, it’s about speed, promotion, and reacting to customer feedback.

Palm’s ecommerce program in the U.S. has about 600 new paid apps available in just 2 months, and the company is hoping to achieve the same success in Europe.

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Cyrus Patten writes at TheBestofJoomla.com. He specializes in the role of technology in politics.

The Internet uses vast amounts of energy — one Google search reportedly requires enough energy to boil a cup of water. However, the web is slowly but steadily “going green.” The trouble is this means different things to different people. As more ways to lighten your web site’s environmental footprint are found, it becomes increasingly difficult to choose the combination of steps that is right for your business.

There are lots of reasons to green your web site. They range from economical to moral. Since not all energy is renewable and clean, we all have an obligation to go a bit greener.

Here are 10 of the most common and effective ways to green your web site.

1. Environmentally Friendly Web Hosting

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<img src="http://www.neurosoftware.ro/programming-blog/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/68c8f_green-web-host-eco-host-reviews.jpg" alt="green hosting image"

This is by far the biggest step you can take to green your web site. Web hosting servers consume immense amounts of energy to keep them running 24/7. As this industry grows, many web hosts are clamoring to establish themselves as green web hosting providers. Eco Host Reviews is the original green web hosting resource and can help distinguish between legitimacy and greenwashing.

Green web hosting typically involves several of the following elements:

- Servers directly powered by renewable energy.
- Energy use offset using a carbon credit.
- Energy use offset using a Renewable Energy Credit (REC).
- Hosting servers optimized for energy efficiency.
- The company subscribes to environmentally friendly practices.

Beyond these things, companies can do more. But these five are the most common steps web hosts take to “go green.”

2. Offset Your Carbon Usage

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Step one is getting your site green certified by CO2Stats.com. Step two is offsetting your web site’s energy usage completely. This will essentially negate your site’s impact on the environment, though it is important to make the distinction between offsetting a carbon footprint and not having one at all.

Companies like CO2Stats will “offset” your dirty energy use by contributing a proportionate amount to a program that will remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere or insert renewable energy into the grid equal to your non-renewable energy usage. The program also claims to drive traffic to your site and help you improve its energy efficiency.

3. The 350 lbs. Project

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BrighterPlanet has launched a program called The 350 Challenge. Any blogger can sign up by placing a badge on their web site. Once you notify them, they will offset 350 lbs. of CO2 on your behalf. This is a free and super-easy process.

This program is geared towards bloggers, starting with a goal of 350 blogs (hence the name). They shattered this goal within a month and now have signed up over 1,600 blogs, equivalent to 122,500 lbs. of carbon removed from the atmosphere. If you do nothing else to green your blog, do this.

4. Join 1% For the Planet

One way to show that extra commitment to the environment is to join 1% For the Planet. This program is for companies who commit to donate 1% of their profits to environmental programs. This is done through a certified list of recipients. With 1,908 non-profit programs receiving funding from 1,128 companies worldwide, this program is really taking off.

Giving 1% is a big commitment but sends perhaps the biggest message to your readers. To date, this program has given $50 million to environmental non-profits.

5. Offer Eco-Incentives to Subscribers

Getting subscribers, followers and return visitors is hard. One way to both green your web site and encourage visitors is to combine the two by offering an eco-incentive. This could be as simple as planting a tree for each subscriber or offsetting a given amount of CO2 for each Twitter follower.

To plant a tree for a subscriber, visit the Arbor Day Foundation. To offset carbon emissions for each reader, visit the Carbon Fund web site. Be creative, think of a small but meaningful step you can take in exchange for getting more readers for your web site.

6. Encourage Green Lifestyle Changes

Whether your blog is about the environment or the stock market, you have the power of information. You can encourage users to take steps to decrease their environmental impact, to set their computer to run more efficiently, and many other tips.

The following sites are great resources for green living tips that you can pass on to your readers:

- Hippie Magazine
- Treehugger
- The Green Guide
- Green Living Tips

7. Simplify Your Design

Each server request takes energy on both ends. The larger the transfer, the more energy consumed. Simple designs can be elegant and effective. You can also decrease your web site’s energy usage by posting fewer images with lower resolution, using fewer JavaScript widgets, and using less resource-intensive technology, like Flash. This will decrease load time and server requests.

Simplifying your site is not only eco-friendly, but user friendly as well. Some of the most popular blogs have very simple and user-friendly designs.

8. Speed Up Your Site

Search engines value speed. But slow sites also take up more energy. Not only does every server request consume energy, the more time people spend waiting for your site to load, the more energy is consumed.

If you run a blog, there are a ton of ways you can speed up your site. From the correct image formats to compression to caching. Here are some great resources:

- Speed up WordPress, And Clean It Up Too!
- Speed Up WordPress With Caching
- Speed Up Joomla
- Speeding Up Your Blog
- Speed Up Your Site With Image Formatting

9. Use Printer-Friendly Versions of Content

With the advent of smart phones and social networking, printing is becoming less necessary, but your visitors may occasionally need to print your posts out. Most content management systems and blog software offer plugins that will create a printer friendly version of your content, which saves on ink and paper in the long run.

This usually means erroneous graphics are removed and content is converted to text-only. Colors are removed (to use less ink), text is converted to serif fonts, links are underlined, font size is shrunk and navigation items are removed. Some sites also remove their advertising (or put in specific advertising like Mapquest.com does) and remove all JavaScript and other invisible coding.

Want more on going printer friendly?

- Make Any Web Site Printer Friendly
- 10 Minutes to Printer Friendly Pages
- What Does it Mean to be Printer Friendly?
- Printer Friendly Plugin for WordPress by Lester Chan

10. Consider Your Colors

Computer monitors use energy to display colors. The older CRT monitors used more energy to display lighter colors like white (which explains the dark design of the Google alternative Blackle), but newer LCD monitors use more energy to display dark colors like black.

Because of the widespread use of LCDs, the darker the color of your web site, the more energy it will ultimately use. Designing your site with a lot of white space may be helpful. Although each page load may only save a small amount of energy, over the long-term, it adds up.

Conclusion

Whatever combination you choose, visitors will appreciate your environmental efforts. None of these efforts will change the world alone, but every small step matters. It is estimated the IT industry generates about 2% of the world’s CO2 emissions, equivalent to the entire airline industry If we all change our habits slightly, the impact will be significant.

More Going Green resources from Mashable:

- 5 Green Initiatives Using Social Media for Good This Summer #FindingTheGood
- Green Tweets: 75+ Environmentalists to Follow on Twitter
- 10 Ways to Change the World Through Social Media
- 15 Ways to Use Social Media for #FindingTheGood
- HOW TO: Use the Web for Socially Responsible Shopping

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, danesteffes

Tags: blogging, environment, green, List, Lists, socialgood, web design

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Krento runs in the background from the system tray, and can be launched by either right-clicking the icon, clicking your mouse’s scroll wheel, hitting Windows + C, or double-clicking a toggled “pulsar”—basically a small, semi-transparent animated icon—in the corner of your screen. To launch a program, just click on its box (or “stone”, as Krento calls it). Or, if you don’t want to move from the keyboard, you can also hit ctrl + the function key that corresponds to the program. In the above-pictured case, for example, Ctrl + F5 for the Command Prompt.

To add programs to the launcher, just drag and drop them onto a stone. You can even create multiple “circles” for different categories of programs, so you’re not just limited to 12. Krento is also skinnable (it comes with a bunch of its own skins, but is also compatible with RocketDock skins), and takes up very little RAM and CPU, which is always nice—especially for something that looks this good.

Krento is a free download, Windows only.

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XPELO™ is a SEO software program that can process + validate your website for banned links to protect your search rankings. Turn 60 Hours of Checking Your Website for Banned Link Partners into 60 seconds.

http://www.xpelo.com/

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He called to ask about my video tutorial courses; he saw that we were covering much of the same material (as in the college program) for about $80-$100 worth of videos!

… He was wondering what the heck was going on here? Do all you need is just a few video tutorials and perhaps a book or two? Could you get the same value as a college program, that cost tens of thousands … for so little?

Short answer: easily.

With a good set of videos as your base, a road-map and occasional help from a good web design forum, you can indeed develop marketable web design skills.

… I’ll be talking much more on that in soon to come videos, podcast and articles.

The Dubious Advantages of a Web Design Degree

The one thing that the college will talk about, is the nice piece of paper (degree) they will hand you after you’ve spent years of your life and tens of thousands of dollars (possibly), of your cash.

If you’ll remember anything, remember this:

The fact of the matter is that YOU WILL PROBABLY NEVER BE ASKED IF YOU HAVE A DEGREE in web design or web programming.

… The one exception is, if you are dying to work for a really large company where HR red-tape and bureaucracy rule. Other than that, your portfolio and work experience is all prospective employers (clients) will want to know about.

When I hire web designers, the last thing I look at are degrees and certificates. Instead, I look for talent and ability.

Final comment:

I would strongly advise that you think not twice, but ten times before you get yourself into big student loan debt. Student loans can easily become onerous, evil shackles about your neck.

There is a whole generation of student/slaves who have huge student loan debts that can never be forgiven (unlike a business that can go bankrupt) that are forever working to pay off massive debts – with interest!

In the middle ages, there was a class of slave called the serf, they were technically not owned by the Lord, but they were considered part of the land and could not leave.

… Today, students with unforgivable student debts, are not owned by the land … just by the banks who hold the loans.

Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com

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As Shenaz Zack, a product manager, explained on the YouTube Blog, the Partner Program is pretty much a huge success.  He pointed out, "[M]any partners are earning real dollars from their videos.  Some users have quit their jobs to concentrate on YouTube full-time, including several who make six figures a year from the site."

There have been some other interesting real-world effects as a result of the Partner Program, too.  Fred‘s set to become a movie star.  Brownbagfilms already has, with a video entering the Oscar runoffs.  And Zack wrote, "Others have earned such awards as a Tech Award in Education, Digista Award in Japan, and the distinction of being one of TIME’s 50 best inventions of 2009."

This string of successes is almost sure to continue.  Indeed, since YouTube controls access to the program, it could open the figurative floodgates at any time, allowing all sorts of content creators the opportunity to step up their game and share revenue from ads.

Of course, this would mean having ads on all sorts of content, and would in turn generate a lot of revenue for YouTube.

Related Articles:

> What The Most People On YouTube Watched In 2009

> Watching YouTube Videos On Your Microwave

> YouTube Promoted Videos Branches Out Again

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Zeo is a new kind of educational tool and motivational program that helps you understand how you are sleeping, reveals habits and behaviors that may be helping or hindering your sleep, and teaches new ways that may help you get a better night’s rest. Zeo is a three-part personal sleep coach product, combined with a highly personalized sleep coaching program.

http://www.myzeo.com/

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The book, along with the tutorials contained within, were fun filled and easy to follow, imparting numerous helpful techniques and tricks of the Phoenix app as we went through it. There was only a short period of adjustment as we settled in to the unfamiliar UI and found our way around, with a lot of the functions being fairly intuitive. Not to mention that the tutorials included within the book range from beginner to advanced skill levels, so no matter if you are experienced with other graphics programs or not, there is something for everyone.

Another fantastic element that makes the book extremely useful beyond just the Aviary and Phoenix frameworks, is that the tutorials in the book will also work for any imaging program like Photoshop and GIMP. So if for some reason you do not feel like learning a new application, you can use the book to enhance your skills at whatever image program you are used to. The accompanying CD that comes with the book also contains all of the source files for the tutorials in the book so that you can easily recreate them.

Notes on Phoenix

• Very limited brush options and no ability to load or create new ones.
• You can however import custom filters
• Great forums, very helpful
• No pressure sensitivity yet for tablet users but they are working on it
• Only online now but Air versions to come soon
• Still kind of buggy since it’s in beta

We would also like to point out that even though Phoenix cannot currently load in or create custom brushes, when we contacted Aviary with this question, they asked for specific examples of what we were wanting to do, and they asked if we could send them some custom brushes that they are working to build in this incorporation of new brushes in future releases. So kudos to the team for so openly receiving and responding to our feedback. It shows that they are working with the community to improve their products and services, which is always encouraging.

Like with all products, there were a couple of hangups, but nothing beyond the lack of adding new brushes that made the program feel lacking or unusable, and the pro column definitely comes out ahead in this case. The book itself is such a useful skill enhancing guide, that even if you are not a fan of the Phoenix imaging software, there is still a world of developmentally helpful tutorials inside. So we definitely recommend More Than One Way to Skin a Cat to anyone looking to grow and hone their skills as a graphic artist.

Sponsored by

Advertise on Fuel Your Creativity.
Fuel Your Creativity 2009 cc (creative commons license)

More Than One Way To Skin a Cat Review

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There is an upside, however. Pixarra offers a fifteen-day free trial and sells the whole package for $129, a much more affordable deal than some of the other programs available. It only works on Windows though, so if you’re a die-hard Mac user and don’t run Windows, you’re out of luck.

Pixarra also claims that TwistedBrush is a good photo editing and retouching software. Again, I think it’s mediocre at best.

Functionality and User Friendliness:

Although it’s a standalone program, TwistedBrush has a sense of familiarity when you open it up, probably because a lot of the tools and features have been borrowed from more popular programs. But, a downside to TwistedBrush is that it seems to consume a lot of your computer’s resources (read: runs slow) when compared to the other programs I’ve written about and used in the past.

The Bottom Line:

When reviewing the program, I skipped the “features” section because I couldn’t really find any worth writing about. If you’re a Pixarra TwistedBrush user and you absolutely love this program, please tell me why. If you’re looking for a program to play around with some digital drawing, have some of the “real digital” effects, and do some photo retouching, this is a good buy for beginners because its much cheaper than Corel Painter.

Final Mentions:  

The cartoon and manga (anime) creations I saw from users of TwistedBrush were quite good. If that’s what you’re into, this would be a good choice for you. Definitely DON’T buy this program as a photo-editing tool, there are better, less pricey applications for that. (Adobe Elements, for example).

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This was no simple share-to-social initiative. The retailer created several incentives to motivate sharing behavior. Next, they tracked the number of invitations each customer sent to their friends and attributed those that actually “subscribed” to the loyalty program back to the initial inviter.

The results far surpassed previous email campaigns; in fact, the social program described above generated three times the number of subscribers than the previously launched un-socialized programs. Major results included:

• 1 new member for every 1.8 peer-to-peer invitations
• 10% of new members went on to purchase
• 4.3 emails sent, on average, by each influencer

While the program clearly extended reach and subscriptions to the loyalty program, the team believed there was an opportunity for optimization — and implemented two minor yet critical tweaks, both focused on enhanced targeting of the socialized campaign.

The company looked at their loyalty program members and created a segment based on engagement metrics: for example, how long a subscriber was part of the loyalty program. Targeting based on engagement is not a new concept to email marketers. Transactional email programs garner a higher response rate than broadcast campaigns do, because they target the customer at the point of maximum engagement: during a purchase cycle or some other lifecycle activity.

In addition to developing targets based on engagement, the company did more analysis to identify “Super Influencers” within their recipient lists. Super Influencers in this case are customers who already have a defined Web presence within a specific vertical.

In the retail space, there are a number of “Discount Bloggers.” These bloggers aggregate special offers on blogs or personal Websites. These customers can have a huge impact on campaign performance, since they already have a following relevant to a specific space with people looking for new content or the next great deal. The identified “Super Influencers” were added to the segment and the optimized campaign was ready to go.

The email program was launched to the new, targeted segment with the same offer and creative. The result? The targeting impact was off the charts.

• 420% Increase in loyalty member subscriptions from the initial campaign
• 326% Increase in purchase conversions from the initial campaign
• Thousands of additional subscribers and hundreds of new purchases

The lesson is a simple one: Do not abandon the best practices you have grown to rely on when developing programs in the social space. The same email strategies you have been applying for years need to be relied upon as you activate new channels.

At the same time, it is critical to understand that not all customers are created equal on the social Web. There is a big difference in extended reach between me posting an offer on my Facebook page and a serious blogger embedding the offer for their followers to take action on.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Monetizing Social Media Is About Targeting First, Everything Else Second

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FREE online magazine fundraising program lets your supporters purchase their favorite magazines on your personalized & secure online magazine store.

http://www.raiseo.com

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An simple, fun quiz program designed to supplement your Japanese kanji study.

http://www.readthekanji.com/

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"Wrap rage is real," said Dr. Nadia Shouraboura, vice president of Global Fulfillment for Amazon. "We launched packaging feedback and we were surprised by the customer participation and response world-wide. Our customers told us they want packaging that is easier to open, and is free of wire ties and impenetrable plastic clamshells."

"We are launching the certification program to share customer feedback with manufacturers and provide an easy way for manufacturers to modify their packaging to make it Frustration-Free. We want to give customers the best possible experience from the time the order is placed, to when they remove the items from the packaging."

Manufacturers that want to get their packaging Certified Frustration-Free can submit their packaging to Amazon’s team of engineers for free. The team will analyze the packaging and determine if it needs modifications. Manufacturers that become certified can then use the "Certified Frustration-Free" logo on their packaging.

Amazon said it has extended its Frustration-Free Packaging certification program to Germany, France, Japan and the United Kingdom.

Related Articles:

>Amazon Rolls Out Kindle For PC

>Amazon Shows Interest In Twitter Referrals

>Amazon Introduces PayPhrase

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Logo Design Process

Logo Design Team offers a great user experience through their simple, intuitive and user-friendly design process. All you have to do is take a look at their portfolio, decide that you have made the correct choice for your branding, complete the online order form and wait. After 2-3 days you will receive five or six logo concepts to choose from. You don’t even have to bother with files to download. Logo Design Team allocates you a portion of their website where you can check the design process. After you check out the concepts, you’ll give the final instructions and that’s it. You’ll receive your files shortly.

Reseller Opportunities

The best part about Logo Design Team is their reseller program. Basically it’s a great opportunity to make money.

It works like this : You can sell logo design services to your customers or contacts in your own name. You don’t even have to mention Logo Design Team. The logos will be of course designed in the background by Logo Design Team. According to the volume of work you can generate you’ll obtain the best possible discounts for your logo designs. You quote your clients at your own rates and the difference from the Logo Design Team price is your own profit.

Logo Design Team provides online support as often as necessary and whenever necessary. Their resellers handle localized support needs. You can go one step deeper and secure your own resellers, too.

The reason this is such a good system is because of the great rates Logo Design Team offers. They are able to provide such good rates because they deal in volume.

Affiliate Program

Logo Design Team also offers an affiliate program you can subscribe to and make money by referring clients.

Thousands of themes and templates on ThemeForest

Want to advertise here ? Contact us

Related posts

You might also like these similar articles:

1. Print your Business Cards – VistaPrint
2. LogoMyWay – Logo Design Contests
3. Logo Parodies
4. Great bus design
5. TemplateWire Giveaway – Win 1 of 3 CSS, Flash or Logo Templates

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Coca-Cola, Ford, McDonald’s, Microsoft, SunTrust, and Whole Foods are among the early adopters, which is quite impressive.  Another interesting detail is that CoTweet isn’t exactly begging for clients; the program’s existence was discovered by Wall Street Journal reporter Andrew LaVallee, and businesses in fact have to request an invitation to scope out the new offering.

As for what their interest (and monthly payments of $1,500) will net them, the CoTweet Enterprise Innovators Program offers engagement, influence, and reach analytics, along with archives of customer interactions and a couple other things.

Anyway, this development could provide a number of clues concerning the future of Twitter.  One point in the site’s favor is that corporate users are so fascinated by it.  This should give Twitter some staying power.

Also, although the launch of the CoTweet Enterprise Innovators Program might seem like yet another missed revenue opportunity (Twitter’s indicated before that it might try to make money by selling premium accounts and analytics services), Twitter could still presumably join the game at any point in time.

The interesting thing is that these well-connected companies didn’t wait for it to do so.  Microsoft and the others almost surely would have heard if Twitter had a service in the pipeline, and then would have held out another couple of weeks or months to use it.  So any sort of official offering may be quite a ways off.

One last item of note: a post on the CoTweet Blog made clear, "The CoTweet public beta remains free for consumers and enterprises."

Related Articles:

> 20 Goals For Business Social Media Use

> 8 Reasons You Need To Stop Ignoring Twitter

> A Suggested Users List For Twitter That You Can Actually Use

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Portable applications in general are software and programs you can run independently from a removable drives (like flash/pen drive) without going through the hassle of installing them. They are widely used and have been a favorite approach for professionals of different various industries.

With portable applications, you can leave your laptop behind; plug in the thumb drive in any client machine, run the application without worrying about leaving anything behind. In this post, we attempt to show a collection of useful and free applications you can run independently from thumb drives, sorting by profession by general. You’ll be surprise how many applications you can actually run without installation. Full list after jump.

Portable Apps For Bloggers

1. Mozilla Firefox

   Mozilla Firefox, portable version allows you leave no personal information behind on the machine you run it on, so you can take your favorite browser along with all your favorite bookmarks and extensions with you wherever you go.

   

2. Opera

   Full featured web browser, rapidly gaining popularity. Fully portable, keeping all data in its local folder.

   

3. Google Chrome

   

4. Portable Safari

   Portable Safari is packaged so you can carry around on any portable device, USB thumb drive, iPod, portable hard drive, memory card, other portable device (or also on your internal hard disk), taking your preferences with you.

   

5. Windows Live Writer Portable

   Windows Live Writer Portable has all your blog settings, ping server settings and FTP settings to redo.

   

6. Zoundry Raven

   Zoundry Raven™ is the next generation WYSIWYG blog editor that makes posting to your blogs easier and faster.

   

7. FileZilla

   FileZilla is a fast and reliable FTP and SFTP client. It includes a site manager and supports uploads/downloads queue, keepalive, timeout detection, SOCKS 4/5 and HTTP 1.1 proxy etc.

   

8. FeedReader

   Feedreader is a FREE RSS news aggregation solution that provides robust, state-of-the-art features in an intuitive, user-friendly environment.

   

9. GreatNews

   GreatNews displays full pages of news articles across rss feeds, optimized for fast reading.

   

10. Foxit Reader

    Foxit Reader is a small and fast PDF viewer.

    

11. StickyTweets

    A lightweight Twitter client built in C/C++ with Win32. No additional frameworks required.

    

12. Fruitfultime Bookmark Manager

    Bookmark websites from any web browser with a global hotkey and bookmark documents, pictures, and other files with drag and drop ease.

    

13. Web Design Toy

    Web Design Toy provides a deceptively simple split-window layout. Whatever HTML is typed in the editor window is instantly shown in web-page form in the display window.

    

14. Lingoes Portable 2.6.2

    Lingoes Portable is green portable version of Lingoes released by Lingoes Project.

    

Portable Apps For Designers

1. GIMP Portable

   The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

   

2. Artweaver

   Artweaver is a Windows Freeware program to simulate natural brush tools.

   

3. MobaPhoto

   MobaPhoto is a nice freeware for managing your digital photos. MobaPhoto allows you to resize, crop, correct red-eyes of all your pictures very easily in "batch-mode".

   

4. Active Pixels

   Activepixels is a neat full-featured photo editor. Interesting auto enhance options (including shadow/hilight recovery), many filters, correction and denoise settings.

   

5. Photoscape

   Photoscape is the fun and easy photo editing software that enables you to fix and enhance photos.

   

6. PhotoFiltre

   PhotoFiltre is a complete image retouching program. It allows you to do simple or advanced adjustments to an image and apply a vast range of filters on it.

   

7. Fotografix

   An image editor that can be used for image enhancement and graphic design.

   

8. Anim8or

   Anim8or is a 3D modeling and character animation program.

   

9. XBlender

   Blender is an integrated 3D creation software suite.
   It lets users create high quality 3D graphics, movies and replay real-time, interactive 3D content.

   

10. X-Inkscape

    Inkscape is a vector editor that supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface.

    

11. Inkscape

    Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor.

    

12. Diagram Designer

    Simple vector graphics editor for creating flowcharts, UML class diagrams, illustrations and slide shows.

    

13. FastStone Photo Resizer

    FastStone Photo Resizer enables users to convert, rename, resize, crop, rotate, change color depth, add text and watermarks to images in a quick and easy batch mode.

    

14. JPEGCrops

    JPEGCrops is a Windows program, created for preparation of a batch of images for printing. It provides lossless cropping with fixed aspects using jpegtran.

    

15. Riot

    Riot allows you to save images for web/email/other media with the best compression ratio and quality.

    

16. SmillaEnlarger

    SmillaEnlarger is a small graphical tool ( based on Qt ) to resize, especially magnify bitmaps in high quality.

    

17. PNG Optimizer

    Png Optimizer creates PNG screenshots and make them easily available.

    

18. IcoFX

    IcoFX is an all-in-one solution for icon creation, extraction and editing.

    

19. Greenfish Icon Editor Pro

    Greenfish Icon Editor Pro is a professional, yet easy to use tool for designing and retouching icons, cursors, animations and static images, and assembling icon libraries.

    

20. WinSnap

    WinSnap includes easy capture of non-rectangular windows with customized and transparent backgrounds, simple and automatic canvas transformations, coloring effects, and the addition of eye-candy drop shadows.

    

21. PicPick Tools

    PicPick features a powerful capture tool, image editor, color picker, color palette, pixel ruler, protractor, crosshair, whiteboard and etc.

    

22. SiteShoter

    SiteShoter is a free tool that can be used to take a screenshot of any webpage.

    

23. Greenshot

    Greenshot is a revolutionary screenshot tool optimized for productivity.

    

24. FastStone Image Viewer

    FastStone Image Viewer has a nice array of features that include image viewing, management, comparison, red-eye removal, emailing, resizing, cropping and color adjustments.

    

25. IrfanView

    IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative graphic viewer for beginners and powerful for professionals.

    

26. Cornice Portable

    Cornice Portable is an image viewer that has thumbnail previews, full screen modes, rotation, slideshow modes and more.

    

27. Osiva

    Osiva is a free image viewing program that opens and scale images fast — get images into view and out of the way

    

28. RealWorld Paint.COM

    RealWorld Paint.COM can display images using any zoom factor and always shows 100% accurate preview of the drawn shape. Tooltips are displayed throughout the user interface to explain meaning of controls.

    

29. AMP Font Viewer

    AMP Font Viewer is an easy to use but powerful font manager, which allows getting a quick overview of both installed and non installed fonts.

    

30. FotoSketcher

    FotoSketcher is a 100% free program which can help you convert your digital photos into art, automatically.

    

31. Dia Portable

    Dia can be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams and has special objects to help draw entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and many other diagrams.

    

32. Oiko CSS-Editor

    Oiko is a visual CSS editor. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) allows to separate the representation definitions of such structured documents as HTML, XHTML, XML from their content, which is an effective principle in the design of web sites.

    

Portable Apps for Business Purposes

1. OpenOffice.org

   OpenOffice.org Portable is a complete office suite — including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, drawing package and database

   

2. Notepad++

   Notepad++ is a free (as in “free speech” and also as in “free beer”) source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages.

   

3. SoftMaker Office 2006

   An Office Suite which contains components that compatible with Windows Office applications like Word, Excel, etc.

   

4. PNotes

   PNotes is fast and light-weight. It has flexible settings – both for the program in whole and for individual note.

   

5. AbiWord

   AbiWord is a free word processing program similar to Microsoft® Word. It is suitable for a wide variety of word processing tasks.

   

6. Jarte

   Jarte is a WordPad based, FREE word processor whose unique interface will make you feel like you are piloting a swift, nimble yacht by comparison.

   

7. Portable Office Exec

   

8. ToDoList

   A simple and effective way to keep track of your current programming tasks.

   

9. Task Coach

   Task Coach Portable lets you bring your to-do list and task manager with you so you always stay on top of things.

   

10. Date Reminder

    Date Reminder reminds you of recurring or nonrecurring events, like birthdays, bills to pay, appointments etc.

    

11. Sunbird

    Sunbird Portable is a standalone calendaring and task management application built on the same technology as the Firefox web browser.

    

12. Koma-Mail

    Koma-Mail is an email client which is comfortable and has very handy functions. It does not need an installation, so that you can run Koma-Mail from your flash drive but, of course, also on your desktop.

    

13. Thunderbird

    Mozilla Thunderbird is the safe, fast email client that’s easy to use. It has lots of great features including quick message search, customizable views, support for IMAP/POP, RSS support and more.

    

14. Qm – The Quick Mailer

    Qm – The Quick Mailer is a tiny program for sending quick e-mail messages without having to load your main email client program.

    

15. WinMerge

    WinMerge can compare both folders and files, presenting differences in a visual text format that is easy to understand and handle.

    

16. KeyDb

    Keydb is a password manager. With it you create and store strong random passwords required by many websites.

    

17. 7-Zip

    For ZIP and GZIP formats, 7-Zip provides a compression ratio that is 2-10 % better than the ratio provided by PKZip and WinZip

    

18. Express Burn

    Express Burn lets you create and record audio or data CDs with any CDRW drive.

    

19. Recover Files

    Recover Files is an award winning program that can undelete / recover deleted files after they have been deleted.

    

20. Team Talk

    TeamTalk allows you to talk to friends and colleagues using the internet as audio carrier. With TeamTalk any number of people can participate in a conversation and is only limited by the bandwidth you have available.

    

21. Blowfish Advanced CS

    One powerful file encryption and security tool for the Windows platform.

    

22. TrueCrypt

    TrueCrypt is a software application used for real-time on-the-fly encryption.

    

23. Tomahawk PDF+

    Tomahawk PDF+ is one of the most advanced word processing/pdf creation software packages available for the Windows platform.

    

24. GnuCash Portable

    GnuCash Portable is the open source financial management software packaged as a portable app, so you can take your financial data with you.

    

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California received $2.8 million, Indiana $1.3 million, North Carolina $2.035 million and Vermont $1.2 milliamp.

"Broadband will bring many benefits to the Nation, such as job creation and innovation, but these benefits have been delayed by the lack of comprehensive, reliable data on the availability of broadband service," said Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information and NTIA Administrator Lawrence E. Strickling.

Lawrence E. Strickling,
NTIA Administrator

"This program addresses an important need and will provide a valuable tool in bringing broadband and jobs to more Americans."

The NTIA says the national broadband map will publicly display the geographic areas where broadband service is available along with details about the service, speeds and if its offered at schools, libraries, hospitals and colleges. The national map will be searchable by address and show the broadband providers offering service in local areas.

NTIA received applications from all 50 states, 5 territories, and the District of Columbia to participate in the program. The agency is reviewing the remaining 52 applications and will continue to announce grant recipients on a rolling basis throughout the fall.

"The four award recipients submitted well-formed proposals that are both fiscally prudent and serve as a model for others," Strickling added.

"We are committed to making the program succeed nationwide and will continue to provide guidance to applicants where necessary to help them improve their proposed projects."

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Google build its Internet empire not just on the shoulders of its search engine, but also on the cash cow that is its AdSense advertising program. By targeting text ads based on relevancy on millions of websites, Google has become the de-facto leader on online advertising.

Mobile web technology has grown significantly in recent years though, a lot of it due to the iPhone and its sophisticated Safari mobile browser. Mobile ad networks (e.g. AdMob) have seized upon the mobile advertising opportunity.

But now Google is entering the smartphone advertising market with a new AdSense feature, AdSense for Mobile Content.

The program, which Google announced today, allows website owners to create ads specifically optimized for “high-end smartphones” (read: iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm Pre). It involves adding a new JavaScript snippet for adding these new mobile Google ads. The result are lower-latency ads with smaller text and images, perfect for the mobile web browser.

Google realizes that more and more of the web is going mobile, and it isn’t about to let any part of the online ad market slip away. The launched a separate mobile ad program last year, but this development makes it even easier to deliver Google ads on smartphones. With targeted and optimized mobile ads, Google’s in great position to be a leading mobile ad provider. This could be bad news for AdMob and other mobile advertising startups.

Tags: adsense, Google, iphone

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If you are a freelance designer doing websites and graphic design work for clients, there are certain services your client will often be in need of. For example web hosting would probably be the most common service needed. You probably know a few good hosting companies already and would simply recommend a few choices to a client, but why not sign up for the hosting affiliate programs and ask them to use your referral link?

A lot of hosting companies give you $50-100 for a referral! That’s a nice chunk of change for not doing anything if you ask me. If you do a lot of websites each year you could potentially make a few thousand more dollars a year just by getting clients to use your hosting affiliate link! If this sounds interesting to you, check out some other ideas for generating extra money from referring clients below.

How to Squeeze Money Out of Clients With Affiliate Programs

1. Printing

As a freelance graphic designer the thing you can promote the most is a Printing Company. Most graphic designers have a favorite printing company mine being UPrinting.com of course =). Printing companies like UPrinting often have a Printing Affiliate Program you can use to help your clients print work. This can help offset some of your expenses and can bring you in a lot of extra income each year!

2. Email Marketing

Many businesses want to build up email lists because they can be a very powerful way of keeping in touch with customers and bringing in new business. If a client asks you about an email marketing and list soultion you can tell them about one of the many great services out there such as MailChimp, which has a partnership program waiting for you.

3. Shopping Carts

If your client needs to set up an online store there are plenty of really great software solutions out there that can save them thousands of dollars on a custom coded store and earn you a few bucks as well. 1shoppingcart is a popular e-commerce solution that has an affiliate program you can promote.

4. Website Security

Some of your clients maybe be creating online stores or websites with private information that needs to be protected. Website can be secured with SSL certificates and that means you could recommend a quality SSL certificate service to your client and get a referral commission as well. Comodo is a good choice for SSL Certificates and they have an affiliate program you can sign up to.

5. Hosting

As mentioned earlier web hosting will probably be the most common thing you can recommend to a client as a web freelancer. HostGator is a very good hosting company with a solid affiliate program that has a tier based commission system starting at $50!

Feel free to recommend any other services design clients often need that have affiliate programs below!

Image Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/libraryman/78337046/

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The answer, of course, is a password manager. These days, I see PC security as a form of insurance. The more you have to risk, the more you should spend to protect it. Anyone who banks or otherwise transacts online will find the investment in a password and personal-data manager worthwhile. Fortunately, if your password-management needs are meager, the protection doesn’t have to cost you anything.

Siber Systems recently announced the beta version of RoboForm Online that lets RoboForm users store their log-in data securely online. Just log into the service from any browser and get fast access to the IDs you’ve saved on your PC. With just one you’re logged into your favorite Web sites.

Log into the RoboForm Online service to access your favorite Web services with a single click.

(Credit: Siber Systems)

The first time you use the program, you’re prompted to enter a master password. You can change the master password via the program’s Options drop-down menu and selecting Security settings, but if you forget a master password, you have to delete all the password-protected files and start over.

RoboForm prompts you to enter a master password the first time you start the program.

(Credit: Siber Systems)

There’s no end to the amount of personal data you can store in RoboForm. Along with the standard contact information, you can enter your Social Security number, credit-card and bank-account numbers, and employer information. You can even create custom fields. All the information is protected with industrial-strength encryption.

Enter as much or as little personal information in RoboForm's form fields as you like.

(Credit: Siber Systems)

When you register for the online version of the service, you’re prompted to download the free GoodSync synchronization program. You have to use a different password than the one you use to access your data via the desktop version of the program. To sync passwords among multiple PCs, simply log in from each machine.

RoboForm will generate strong passwords for you. It works with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and just about any other browser. The program is available for free, but some features are disabled after 30 days unless you pay $30. There’s even a portable version that runs off a USB thumbdrive. But the new online version appeals to me. If your data is going into the cloud, it might as well be encrypted.

Originally posted at Workers’ Edge

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On the last night of August, 2009, the MFA in Interaction Design at School of Visual Arts opened its doors to eighteen gifted students. The intense program will be like Project Runway, except that it lasts two years, and nobody will be “out.”

Created and chaired by Liz Danzico and Steven Heller, SVA’s MFA in Interaction Design is one of the only graduate-level degrees dedicated to interaction design in the U.S. Over two years of night classes, the program teaches students from diverse backgrounds (including design, computer programming, architecture, and even majors in English literature) to envision and create experiences across all manner of media, including the real world.

Students in this program will not merely become better web or interaction designers. They will develop user experience conventions in media where no such conventions exist.

In a beautiful post at Bobulate, Liz places the opening of the new program in the context of SVA’s history.

As a faculty member, I attended the opening orientation and have the crummy iPhone pictures to prove it.

It was a thrill to meet these talented students, who will spend the next two years haunting the program’s beautiful new design space at night (most of them after working at their day jobs, an SVA tradition).

To attend the program’s many free events, or simply to enjoy it vicariously, follow twitter.com/svaixd. And keep watching the skies.

ShortURL: zeldman.com/?P=2439

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Unfortunately, no one’s connected any sales figures to the program just yet; things have been difficult to tabulate because many people may have concluded their purchases in dealerships after starting the process online.  And there are concerns that the effort simply wasn’t effective.

But Rob Chesney, the vice president of eBay Motors, said in a statement, "This program succeeded in driving awareness of eBay Motors as a destination for new vehicles.  It also confirmed our ability to innovate by building out a custom program that could quickly deliver a high volume of quality leads over a short period of time across multiple automotive brands."

Chesney said, as well, "Our partnership with GM continues on several fronts, including the sale of Certified Pre-Owned vehicles and we are exploring additional opportunities to partner on new car sales," which sounds encouraging.

We’ll be sure to keep an eye out for sales figures, or for more exciting developments like other automakers becoming involved or a nationwide rollout of the program.

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Steve McGhee: Woodstock, Ontario (… soon to be Cambridge Ontario.) Born and raised in London, Ontario. Went to HB Beal Secondary (The best high school art program in Ontario- by far. The program supported Sculpture, Painting, Photography, Animation, etc… and the instructors were all professional artists. It was a good time and a great program.) After Beal, I was on to Sheridan College for Animation. I loved character design, location design, background design… all of it. But I couldn’t stand the actual animating. And I had a hard time getting around the fact that as a classical animator, I would be drawing only a few seconds in a film, and I’d be drawing exactly like everyone else.

So, it was on to George Brown College in Toronto, Ontario for Graphic Design and Advertising. Met some awesome people there and the program was great. In first year, I’d sneak into the third year bay, hide behind the monitor and take the Photoshop lessons that the third year kids were getting- an advantage to say the least- especially when my instructors couldn’t explain how my Photoshop skills were advancing faster than others in the class. Drove them nuts!

After college, I worked in various agencies, had fun, but really loved my own thing with Monster Media, my very own design firm. I’ve done a lot of “extreme sports” type branding and advertising- everything from festivals to new product launches. And now, Stevemcghee.com is the place where I hang my hat. Stop by anytime.

Where do you look for sources of inspiration?

I’m always looking for inspiration… always. Not just visual. A good song can sometimes spark creative inspiration for me. For example: “Cocktails With God” came right after the birth of my daughter and “I Came Apart” was a reflection of very personal loss in my life. Also, the wealth of info and inspiration online is HUGE… just type “photoshop masters” into a google search and voilà. Blogs like yours and others are also key in spreading the word – something I didn’t have access to when I was studying. But really… my stuff comes from everyday type situations. I try to think of things that scare the hell out of me and then I translate it to the screen and eventually to print.

What is your favourite aspect of __? (Graphic design, logo design, web design, blogging)

Design in general… I love it. The fact that one can translate dreams to visual reality is incredible. All you need is time… and a little creative & artistic ability. It’s all about styles. It’s cool that you can draw an apple- but can you draw that apple in a way nobody has ever seen before? Designers can.

What are your top 5 favourite websites?

1.Top fav. site and fav. designer all time… the imitated but never duplicated, gmunk. www.gmunk.com
2. photoshopcreative.co.uk
3. thefwa.com – HUGE resource of creative web talent.
4. http://www.photoshopuser.com/ I’m a member of NAPP
5. www.2advanced.com – the best… nuff said

Who do you look up to in your field?

There’s too many to name. Basically everyone has something to offer… something they do better than me – and I think that’s great. But, if I must choose it’s Bradly Grosh, a.k.a. gmunk. Through college, this guy set my world on fire. His stuff set a standard for me, and for most designers at the time… even if they didn’t know who he was.

Can you take us through your creative process from start to finish?

Here goes… I think of something bad. (fun huh?) For example… A plane crashes into a shopping center. What would that look like if it were featured on the news? Take 9/11 for example. Everyone on the continent was glued to their TV sets for days… watch the horror unfold. The images still haunt some of us to this day. The actual reporting was minimal, as there was no more that the reporters could say… the images were screaming over them. But, it brought people together in primal sence. The moment it happened, we all were 10 years old again. We all just wanted to hug our Moms and Dads… That’s the effect I try to capture in my work. Whether I get it right is debatable… but that’s the idea.

What sort of social media tools have you found most successful?

I really love photoshopcreative.co.uk. They’ve been super nice to me and many, many great artists call it home. Their mag is stellar as well – it’s a big, glossy, digital art mag that anyone can be a part of. I have written a few tutorials for it and will be a featured artist in the not too distant future. I’m also a member of Deviantart.com, behance.net and advancedphotoshop.co.uk. Of course, I’m on facebook.

What piece of work are you most proud of and why?

It would have to be “The Big Swallow”. I gave a tutorial on it in Photoshop Creative magazine (issue 43). After that, I entered it in the Photoshop User World Wide Photoshop Comp. and won. It took first in its category, General Photoshop. There were 11 categories in all. It’s now printed 20 x 30, framed, and hanging in my basement with a few others.

What programs do you use most?

I use Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Maya, Quark (when I have too), etc…

What music are you listening to right now?

Listening to Dropkick Murphys, Lars Frederikson, Black Keys, Keith Richards, Silver Sun Pickups, Wolf Parade, Wintersleep, Tim Armstrong … and Coldplay right now. But I like to put the headphones on and listen to God Is An Astronaut when I work on my personal stuff… it sets the mood.

What would be your perfect dream project?

I really would love to do something in the movie industry… I think my work lends itself quite well to that environment. Maybe the gaming industry… who knows. I’m always up for something new. But, I already had what some might consider a dream gig… I was an illustrator for a company that did children’s promo. So I basically just sat around all day in a studio full of creatives and illustrated crazy whacky kids stuff. Purple toucans balancing on beach balls, sipping an ice tea while turtles played beach volleyball… whatever, It was fun.

What advice would you give to someone starting out in the design industry?

Be honest with yourself. Show passion not perfection. Show your sketches. More times than not, it’s the concept that sells… not the finished piece. Don’t think for one second you’re better than anyone else… you’re not. You may have a better skill set than someone else, but nobody knows everything. And people who are starting out would be better suited to listen than to talk. And one more thing… never proof your own work.

Looking into a crystal ball, what do you think will be the next design trend?

It’s all so open now… more and more, people are accepting good design into their lives and their personal spaces. No more do classical paintings rule the walls of a perspective art buyer. The future? Who knows? I’d prefer not to know. I want designers to make it up as they go along. It’s healthier to just experiment…. most of the time. What I can tell you is, there’s a certain company that has a “New Shadow Shaping technology which creates images on the Moon that can be seen from Earth. Robots are used to create several small ridges in the lunar dust over large areas that capture shadows and shape them to form logos, domains names, memorials or even portraits.
K… too far…. we’ve gone to far now.

What can we expect from you in the upcoming year?

I’ll be a “Featured Artist” in an upcoming edition of Photoshop Creative… and I’ll be going for back-to-back category wins in the Photoshop User Worldwide Photoshop Comp. Baby!! …I think I have just the piece to do it with. =)

Cheers

Steve
www.stevemcghee.com

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