Archive for March, 2010
Win A Copy Of WordPress Theme Or jQuery Template By FlashMint
FlashMint is running a contest, where winners will get 12 wordpress template and 4 jQuery template licenses of (worth $55 each). Well, you guys know what FlashMint do. Lets say it once again for n00bs.
FlashMint is a leading and incomparable Flash Templates provider known to supply web masters with the exclusively sufficient collection of premium web layouts together with the most helpful and supportive service.
WordPress Themes by FlashMint comprise innovative possibilities allowing to use interactive options within your website powered by WordPress. Satisfying contemporary web design technologies, Flash Animated WordPress themes possess premium quality and ingenious design ideas making your site the most vivid and dynamic source on the web.
jQuery Templates developed by FlashMint will become an excellent solution for establishing a stunning dynamic website which will stand out by premium quality and high grade design. Using our unique jQuery templates you will be able to create any online presence you need for your particular purposes with minimum time and effort no matter whether it is a personal home page or a corporate project. You are not required to possess any development skills to set up a live and vivid website which will look unmatched and impress your every visitor due to the superb facilities of our exclusive jQuery Templates.
The screenshots of the WordPress themes and jQuery templates are available below and you can click on the template name or the screenshot to view the full preview of the theme.
WordPress Themes (2 licenses for each template)
Flipbook photo blog wp flash template
Freelance writer wordpress theme
Photographers blog flash animated wordpress theme
jQuery Templates (1 license for each template)
Crazy design portfolio JQuery template
Accordion jQuery Studio template
Strawberry jQuery slider template
There’s also a special 10% discount promocode available for the smashingapps.com fans at FlashMint for the purchase of any template during next 2 weeks: “smashingapps”.
This contest will run from March 31, 2010 to April 9, 2010 and we will select the winners randomly by running MySQL query. Result can be announced any day before April 15, 2010 so keep visiting here or subscribe to our rss feed to get the latest updates. To participate in the contest and win free wordpress and jquery templates, All you have to do is just tweet this :
Win a copy of #WordPress Theme or #jQuery Template by FlashMint @SmashingApps – http://bit.ly/9OQaoX (Plz RT)
1. After you retweet, just leave a comment with your retweet link.
2. Use valid email ID in the email box.
3. Not necessary, but you can subscribe to our rss feed and follow us on twitter, follow flashmint on twitter and do not forget to become our fan on facebook as well. (To track this contest and for future updates)
4. And thats it!
So what are you waiting for now? Let’s participate in the contest and good luck!
12 Coolest Web Apps To Simplify Your Business
This is one of the very best list of its kind where you can find incredibly useful and life saver FREE web apps that you probably never heard of and these would be great enough to bookmark or just for get in your knowledge. I hope everyone of you will like this list, you can try these whether you are an office worker, a manager, a supervisor, a student, a home user, etc.These are really amazing in respect to their features. This is the list of 12 Coolest Web Apps To Simplify Your Business (You Probably Never Heard Of). Just take a look at them and share your thought’s here.
You are welcome if you want to share more useful web apps that our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at smashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter , follow us on Google Buzz and do not forget to become our fan on facebook as well.
YourAM is a web based solution. There is no software to install. YourAM is built to automate your appointment management so that you can simply focus on your core business. This can be used for busy individuals or large organizations that need to automatically track, organize and manage appointments.
Sometimes you just want to know which night in the next few weeks is best to meet up with friends. You don’t need a intergrated lifestyle tracking solution you just need to know when people are free. Meetifyr is the worlds simplest online shared calendar. You create a calendar, add your name and availability then send the link round to your friends to see when they’re free. It’s really that simple, try it if you don’t believe us.
BetaEasy is equally useful for web sites/applications as well as for classic desktop applications. This service helps you to built your own community of users who will cooperate with you and contribute to your website/software improvement. All feedback is collected in one place, priorities are clearly identified, feedback is turned to improvement. It’s really easy to get started.
Springnote is a great way for you to create notebooks for ideas, interests, multimedia, projects, and documents. It allows you to create pages, to work on them together with your friends, and to share files.
Preceden is a free web 2.0 timeline visualization tool that lets you you make simple, powerful timelines for just about anything. This is perfect for autobiographies because our timelines lets you organize your life’s events into layers like relationships, location, education, jobs, etc. By organizing events in layers, you can see exactly how the important events in your life overlap.
Reddynote is a clear and comprehensive work platform, where all your tasks are being listed. Only a quick look on the platform allows you to see your status, tags (keywords) and progress of every single task you have.
CalendarFly is the next generation free scheduling solution. CalendarFly is uniquely suited for school systems, sports teams, families, and any other organization because it automatically maintains and updates the schedules of teachers, administrators, coaches, parents, and students–making it easy for all of them to connect in real time and real places.
With Bill4Time, you will always know where you money is going and how your business is performing. Monitor employee progress, client activity, unbilled time, and everything else you need to successfully manage your growing practice.
HiTask is a friendly and easy-to-use task management system that anyone can start using right away. It is designed to satisfy both sophisticated followers of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” methodology and anyone who just needs a quick and easy tool to manage their everyday tasks.
You can use Needtomeet’s free and simple calendar to find a time that works for everyone. It will help you to see everyone’s availability at a glance. It is simple no-fuss way to find a time for your event. You dont need to download anything, no registration, and best of all, it’s free for everyone.
Tracking time has never been easier. Keep your times organised by clients, projects and tasks with MakeSomeTime. This is super easy and having simple user interface. No clutter. Just what you need to get your work done.
Fileshare HQ is a great place to store and share files. You can upload files using the easy web admin, or you can use FTP and load direct to your account. You can use FileShareHQ from the web, or with your favourite FTP client, to upload files and share them with the team, clients or friends.
Woopra Is Becoming Another Feature Rich Alternative To Google Analytics
If you are a professional blogger or webmaster, there is a good change that you track your site’s traffic and analyze to learn how to better your website or blog. Such measures are an absolute must if you want your website to have a mark on the web. Most webmasters use Google Analytics for this purpose.
Although Google Analytics is the most popular application for this task and does a great job at tracking traffic, Woopra proves that there are areas in which Analytics falls short.
Before I get into Woopra’s features, let me tell my readers that this tracking solution exists as a desktop application (for Windows, Mac, and Linux), an online application, and very soon will be usable on the iPhone.
Woopra has been declared better than Google Analytics by a number of sources, including the Washington Post What sets this service apart is its comprehensiveness.
This amazing service lets users not only track their traffic using a variety of tools, but it lets them do this in real time. Moreover site owners can have live chats with their site’s visitors.
Woopra also lets users monitor multiple websites. A one-stop service is created for monitoring all your sites. Through the quick site tabs at the top of the Woopra panel, you have one-click access to your registered blogs.
This traffic tracking solution comes in free and paid plans. Click here for details.
If you have any questions about Woopra you can always check their FAQ page or visit their homepage here.
Packing features clearly better then Google Analytics’, all webmasters should give Woopra a go.
7 Situations When Designers Outsource (To Other Designers)
Have you ever missed a client deadline because you were too busy? Ever had a client request a type of design that you don’t offer? One of the best kept secrets of successful designers and studios is ‘designer-to-designer’ outsourcing. Designer-to-designer outsourcing involves one designer (such as a web design firm or graphic design studio) using another designer (often a freelance designer or sub-contractor) to help complete designs for their own clients. While there are scores of freelancers available (probably many in your own city), there are some emerging, and very powerful, online services that are setup specifically for designers seeking to outsource client projects.
For example, last month Entrepreneur.com featured DesignCrowd and its new Graphic Design Outsourcing Service that lets design studios outsource to other designers around the world. Whether you use a service like DesignCrowd, or a freelance designer you find in a directory, outsourcing is an important part of a designer’s toolkit. Here’s how design outsourcing works (using DesignCrowd as an example):
Once you acknowledge that, in general, outsourcing is useful – the main battle for a designer is selecting the right project or task to outsource and the right person or company to outsource to. This post focuses on the situations that a graphic design studio or professional designer should consider outsourcing to another graphic designer as well as some of the resources designers can use in those situations.
7 Situations Designers Outsource to Other Designers
Here are 7 specific reasons or situations where graphic designers will often seek to outsource to other graphic designers:
1) Preventing Client Loss (due to capacity) - if you find yourself turning away clients because you’re too busy – or (worst of all) find yourself taking on clients who become unhappy and then leave when you don’t meet a deadline – then you need to increase your ‘capacity’ to take on client projects. Outsourcing is a good option in this situation as it can add design ‘capacity’ to yourself, your team or your business with minimal setup time. For custom design projects, we recommend using DesignCrowd’s online design outsourcing service. As DesignCrowd has around 10,000 designers and lets you use multiple designers on each project you run, essentially, they can provide access to unlimited capacity.
2) Up-selling / Value-adding – outsourcing can also help you expand the services you offer clients. For example, if you’re a web designer and your client is a start-up business, up-sell them to a logo and then outsource it externally. If that works, try offering them stationery design as well and maybe even some banner ad designs to help with marketing their website and business. Doing this can help you offer services as a value add (and win clients that would’ve otherwise gone elsewhere) or simply make more money on each project by ‘up-selling’ (think the McDonald’s famous ‘would you like fries with that?’).
3) Completing Repetitive Tasks – often times, larger design projects involve detailed, repetitive design work. For example, if a brochure design project involves picture clipping of 200 bicycle photos then use an online picture clipping service. If you’re a good designer trying to grow your business, your time is better spent selling to potential clients than doing time-consuming grunt work. If you have a 50 page toy store website, and have the designs mocked up in Photoshop then a PSD-to-HTML conversion service like PSD2HTML.com is in order.
4) Meeting a Tight Deadline - this is a specific type of capacity problem. If you’ve got that sinking feeling you’re going to miss a client deadline, the solution might be a short term capacity boost – something to speed up that project. If your deadline is 12 hours or less and you can’t get an extension, consider buying a template design. Alternatively, use one an online service with a pool of international as they will A) have designers available 24/7 and B) you can potentially take advantage of timezone differences.
5) Enhancing Creativity - another genuine reason to outsource will be to keep your clients (whether they be regular or new) happy with the level of creativity and originality you’re producing. If you, or your team, find yourself creating similar designs for multiple clients or similar designs for the same client maybe you need a third party to give you some fresh ideas or add some diversity to what you’re delivering! In this situation consider running a design contest through a service like DesignCrowd (that pays designers participation payments even if you don’t use their design). The design contest approach is particularly useful for projects that require concepts such as web page layout design and logo design projects.
6) Technical Work – if you’re a graphic designer who’s familiar with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop but your project requires something technical (like website coding or Flash design), don’t knock back the client, consider taking it on and outsourcing the technical aspect. If you don’t know someone who has the skills to do the work, consider using an online service like Rentacoder.com to find a provider.
7) Outsourcing Components – where possible, consider outsourcing graphics components (such as photos, icons and buttons) of your broader design project. Break it down your project as if it were a problem and solve it in parts. There are loads of great stock photo and icon websites – Istockphoto.com is a good place to start. If you need a custom design, consider one of the online services I mentioned above or look to use a freelance designer.
Summary: offer fries with that!
Designer-to-designer outsourcing can help you take on more projects and offer a broader set of services to your clients – both of which can help you earn more money. The traditional approach to outsourcing design (using freelancers) can bring with it its own problems – for example, freelance designers can get busy with other clients; or they might be limited to a specific skill-set or style. Graphic design services like DesignCrowd.com can help solve these problems and are great resources, not just for designers who are seeking work, but also for designers that need to outsource client graphic design work. Remember, next time you’re pitching to a new client, don’t forget to smile and ask “would you like fries, a logo or a website with that?”
5 Excellent Text to Voice Free Applications
Many computer users take advantage of text-to-voice programs to make their computer tasks easier. With a voice command we can execute a task which otherwise might take a combination of keyboard-key presses and mouse clicks.
For my readers who have not yet tried out text-to-voice applications or are looking for something better than what they are already using, I have gathered a list of 5 great options they can go for. Read each entry in my list, find out which one interests you, and use the comments to let me know how it went for you.
You are welcome if you want to share more text to speech applications that our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at smashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter and do not forget to become our fan on facebook as well.
Windows Speech Recognition
I am placing Windows native speech recognition at first place because I believe it will be the easiest to use for most Windows users. You will not need to install anything extra and the voice commands will be easily integrated into other Windows functions. For Windows users new to text-to-voice, Windows very own speech recognition is a great starting point.
To Enable Windows Voice Recognition tool click Start > Control Panel > Speech Recognition Options
NaturalReader is a great text-to-voice option to go with. Some text-to-voice programs work by taking as input text files of a specific format. With NaturalReader however, all we have to do is highlight the text in any document (or webpage), click on the application’s hotkey, and have the text read back to us. Voice options are also adjustable: we can choose to hear either a male or female voice, and adjust the voice’s quality and speed.
Users who, for whatever reason do not want to or cannot install any new applications, iSpeech will serve beautifully. This is an online text-to-voice application. A signup is required before we can use this browser-based service. Once we login, we can either upload a document file of the supported format, or paste in any text we want in the assigned area.
eSpeak, although a tiny sized program, supports many languages other than English. The program includes different voice with modifiable characteristics. WAV files can also be produced of the generated voice. eSpeak has versions compatible with Windows and Linux operating systems.
The last entry in my list is DSpeech. Not only does this program offer us the option to choose from different voices the text is read in, but also allows us to combine the voice or compare them. This way we can even form a dialogue between the two voices. The outputs can be saved as WAV, MP3, and OGG files. Once you have already familiarized yourself with basic text-to-speech techniques, this program will allow you to have quite some fun in your free time.
50 Absolutely Stylish Vintage and Retro Graphic Wallpapers
Here is a new addition to our wallpapers collection that is based on Retro and vintage wallpapers. These two fundamentals are becoming more and trendier and have been used in a variety of design contexts. So here we are presenting a memorable image of Retro and Vintage years that usually refers to the decades before our present day, up to the last century. Hope you’ll like this collection. Please feel free to share your opinion by dropping a line in the comment box.
You are welcome if you want to share more beautiful and impressive Vintage and Retro Graphic Wallpapers that our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at smashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter and do not forget to become our fan on facebook as well.
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The Magnificently Captured Beautiful Places On Earth (Earth Hour Special)
Earth Hour is globally celebrated environmental event organized by World Wide Fund for Nature. This is held on the last Saturday of March annually, asking households and businesses to turn off their non-essential lights and other electrical appliances for one hour to raise awareness towards the need to take action on climate change. Earth hour was conceived by WWF and The Sydney Morning Herald in 2007, when 2.2 million residents of Sydney participated by turning off all non-essential lights. Following Sydney’s lead, many other cities around the world adopted the event in 2008. Earth Hour 2010 will take place on March 27, 2010 from 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., local time and we are trying to showcase few of the millions stunning photographs to give it a tribute and to create some awareness about this event. We would appreciate all of you who can create awareness in your circle and do whatever you can for our beautiful earth. You might be interested to see how we celebrated Earth Day in 2009.
I appreciate to all those talented photographers who taken these excellent photos with their efforts, imaginations and creativity to give us a chance to see these photographic wonders from their creative eyes. This list is not long in numbers but I promise you that when you start browsing these in detail it will surely refresh you and force you to know more about Earth Day and motivate you to save your planet. These are the wonder creations of photographers who use their creativity with a different angle and approach to get the result that makes a difference.
You are welcome if you want to share more creative photography that our readers/viewers
may like.Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter and do not forget to become our fan on facebook as well. You can click on the image to see its larger version and to go from where the images has been taken. Click on the images to go from where the images has been taken and learn more about their creators and to appreciate them.
Breaking the Ice by Arild Heitmann
Quebrada Calinca valley by Dirk Smith
Underneath the Veil by *justeline
Spring Field by Janusz Wanczyk
The last one switch off the light by acrux
Rainbow at Elgol by Freddie Ridge
Yukon – a start of a new day by Raymó
The journey II. by =realityDream
Symmetric Summit by John Parminter
Cameron in the morning by ~casanouva
The Flysch by Javier Miqueleiz
The Other Side by Stefan Bingham
Climate Change is not about what country you are from… It’s about
which planet you are from. So, please try to clean your environment for the
sake of earth’s future.
Before You Go Live, Test Your Website Security With Websecurify
Website security is one of the major concerns of developers and webmasters because when their sites go live, these are in the eyes of several threats. Hence testers put lots of efforts in determining and maintaining website security. Among different techniques used to test the security of websites, testing tools are the most popular. These tools generate security-related test cases and produce in-depth reporting to analyze statistics of the tests performed. None of the tools is 100% perfect, they have their limitations instead.
Websecurify is an automated web application security scanner that scans different security parameters of your website and generates detailed statistical analysis that helps you find security loop holes so as to keep your website safe and secure.
Websecurify is free and open source so that you can extend the functionality as per your needs. It is a cross-platform application developed with JavaScript but most parts can be redeveloped with Java, Python and C.
Key features of Websecurify include:
- Improved and easy to navigate user interface.
- Engine can be taken out and integrated with other web applications.
- Results can be exported in CSV, XML, HTML and JSON.
- Supports asynchronous testing so that while it tests, it generates reports.
- Support of multiple platforms i.e. Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
- Provides an integrated browser with the support of multiple sessions. All the browser traffic is recorded and can be easily formulated.
- Records sub-transactions as well so as to make it a good choice to test AJAX applications as well.
- The design of the application is modular hence it can easily be extended.
- Provides an API to support numerous types of commercial and free testing engines.
- Support of localization so that results can be translated in multiple languages.
How To Organize/View Your Feeds In A Magazine Like Start Pages In Chrome
Recently I came across a great website titled Fav4. It provides users with a four thumbnail shortcuts to websites. The websites can be selected from a list of the most social media websites. Fav4 has an appealing look and can serve as a great clutter-free start-page for any user.
But what if I need a start-page that does not only provide me a link to my most frequented sites, but also extracts the latest updates from them and shows them all to me neatly? I asked a blogger friend about this and his suggestion was more than satisfactory: Feedly.
Feedly is a wonderful extension for Chrome that can give us a magazine-like start-page. After installation of the extension, you will see its green icon in Chrome’s address bar.
To set up Feedly, click on its icon. A new tab will open up in which Feedly will try to organize the data from your bookmarks. This may take a little while during which you will see a “loading” message.
Once Feedly has loaded completed, you will be presented with your magazine-like start-page. On the first run you will see your bookmarks on top with suggestions on the bottom.
You can choose to create your magazine yourself or rely on Feedl to do the job. Under this yellow area you will find your magazine.
In addition to that if you’re interested in checking out any of the articles you like in your feed you wouldn’t need to open a new tab for it. Feedly allows you to view your favorite blogs in the same window. For example, if I want to view the first post that says “Stunning Pieces Of Digital Art That Would Make You Say “WoW” I would simply click it and view it right there. While external links will be opened in a new tab.
You can also categorize your feeds by simply dragging and placing them in your favorite category.
You will also notice a Search box where you can easily search for your favorite blogs with just a click of a button. Feedly provides seamless integration with Google Reader, Twitter, Delicious, YouTube and Amazon.
For a tiny Chrome extension, Feedly provides a great convenience to all internet users including me.
Create A News Aggregation Website With PHP RSS Reader
Imagine if there was a way to provide new, relevant content from thousands of different sources every minute, automatically on your website. How much more eager would a user be to come back for more? This is exactly why PHP RSS Reader was created, to give you the opportunity to automatically provide your users with an incredible amount of information in a compelling, simplistic format and provide this new, relevant content every single minute!
PHP RSS Reader is a full blown news aggregation script programmed in PHP that allows you to provide your users with fresh content 24/7.
How does it work?
The script pulls news articles in from RSS feeds that you specify in the administration panel. You can have “keyword-based” categories which automatically moves items with the keywords mentioned into the related categories, an innovative way to categorize news for those that want to have multiple feeds.
Keyword Based Category Population
When adding a category to PHP RSS Reader, you can assign ‘keywords’. These keywords are used to find relevant news from the news source you’ve specified for the script to crawl. This allows you to target specific keywords.
Crawl an unlimited amount of news sources (or tweets!)
PHP RSS Reader allows you specify which sources you’d like to be included in the site. All you need to do is specify the RSS feed of the news source you’d like to be crawled.
SEO URL’s
One of the biggest problems with web scripts is that most developers really don’t understand how optimise a site for search engines. PHP RSS Reader provides a true SEO URL structure that will allow your site to rank highly for the keywords you’re targeting.
Favicons to distinguish between posts
When you add a new source, the script automatically tries to assign the sites favicon to the source. If the favicon can’t be found, you can simply upload a new image of your choice.
Configure News Timescales
It’s completely up to you how you’d like the timescales to appear. You can add as many timescales as you wish.
Extensive Customization
Within the settings section of the admin panel you’ve got plenty of options. You can define how many news articles to display per category, how many popular news articles to display, edit the sites title, description and much more.
Prune Articles
You may eventually find the need to delete old articles, this is a simple process, made easy through the PHP RSS Reader admin interface.
CSS Styling
It’s easy to change the look and feel of your PHP RSS Reader, with some simple edits within the CSS file, you can adapt PHP RSS Reader into your current site design.
User Friendly Administration
The PHP RSS Reader control panel couldn’t be easier to use, it’s a simple process to kick-start your aggregator and you’re assisted every step of the way.
Simple and fast installation
It’s so easy to install PHP RSS Reader. You simply upload the PHP RSS Reader into the site directory you wish and then run the install.php and follow the steps.
Google Analytics Integration
It’s easy to integrate Google Analytics into the site. Simply enter your Analytics ID with the settings section of the Admin panel and you’ve got a powerful way to track all your stats.
There are 2 versions of PHP RSS Reader…
- free version (doesn’t allow you to create categories or take advantage of features such as inbuilt RSS feeds for each page)
- complete, paid version – includes all features.
