Archive for May, 2010
HeadMagnet Helps Remembering & Memorizing Names, Faces, Dates, Quotes and More
Our memory always loses some stuff that we do not use regularly. This is something all of us know. This is why some of us do not know fractions anymore and cannot explain them to our children; this is also why we cannot sometimes remember the names of certain celebrities or places.
What we need is something that helps us revise everything we do not want to forget. What we need is Headmagnet.
Headmagnet is a free to use website that lets us stay in touch with anything we never want to forget. After creating a free account we can create study lists of flashcards.; these flashcards can be used for remembering anything we want.
Flashcards need not only be textual. In case we are trying to memorize what people’s names are, we can add faces to flashcards via the “What’s My Name?” feature.
The flashcard feature is offered by numerous other sites and, while helpful, is not what makes Headmagnet unique. What makes the site special is that after letting users create flashcards and custom modes of memorization, the site records and studies the areas we are weak in.
When we use our Headmagnet account to go over our created flashcards, the site records all things we get wrong and provides them in a statistics list. It then quizzes us on our weak areas so that anything that has leaked out of our memory is pulled back in. This “pulling back” concept is where the name of the site is derived from.
We can share our list on numerous social media networks. Moreover we can view other people’s lists and go over them in the same manner as our own.
Overall Headmagnet is a wonderful site to improve one’s memory. Visit the site by clicking here and drop a comment letting us know what you think about it.
Free Cooking Apps That You Can Download On iPhone Today
You find yourself in your apartment, hungry. You had pizza the previous night and do not want to order any fast food. You want to treat your taste buds with something out of the ordinary and delicious.
Smartphones like the iPhone can help you out in such situations. If you want to find a new place to eat, then Urbanspoon will be greatly helpful. But if you want to enjoy the fruit of your labor and cook something yourself, then a number of iPhone applications can be used to obtain a unique and tasty recipe.
The next time you want to cook for yourself or to impress a date you have invited over, load up these applications to prepare something scrumptious.
Containing more than 25000 recipes, Epicurious is a great cooking application for beginners and experience chefs alike. The recipes are organized in a neat manner and the instructions are easy enough to follow. But the best part is: Epicurious is absolutely free.
Another great free iPhone cooking application Dinner Spinner includes thousands of delicious cooking recipes. We can find recipes by specifying our meal, ingredients, and total preparation time. We can view how other people who have tried these recipes rated them. If your diet is of a special type (vegetarian, gluten-free, etc.) you can turn on special filters to help get your desired recipe.
Incredibly Captured Beauty Of Reflection In Photography
Reflection Photography is a most popular way to beautify your photographs and bring life to them. All you have to do is dig deep enough into your imagination and come up with new and exciting ideas on how to make a lifeless photo look extremely incredible. You can satisfy your hunger of creativity with Reflection Photography. You just have to master your skills of photography and this post will help you in doing so. Enjoy this mind blowing post about Reflection Photography.
If you want to share more fantastic examples of Reflection In Photography so please comment about them below. 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. Click on the images to go from where the images has been taken and learn more about their creators and to appreciate them.
Pausing for a moment of reflection
Reflections Of Amsterd@m – Jesus In A Puddle
Michaelmas daisy dewdrop refraction
Half Dome Reflections II, Yosemite
Even dogs enjoy the beautiful nature
Lotus Flower Reflections IMGP6812-refl
The Wine Glass Travels to Red Rock Canyon
Reflections Of Amsterdam – The Magnaficent View
Reflection – Sometimes We Are Clear Inside And Abhorrent Outside 
Mirror mirror who is the fairest of em’ all
Un gatto e nove vite – a cat and nine lifes
Luxand Blink will Log You Into Windows by Recognizing Your Face
Normally users log into Windows by selecting their username and entering their password. Suppose you are conducting an exam which requires students to log in to the Windows running computer. Any person can log in as a student if they know their username and password.
Therefore a better, more secure log in solution is required. That is exactly what Blink delivers.
Blink is a software product by Luxand, a software company that has created numerous facial imaging related applications. The function of Blink is to recognize users by their face and then log them into Windows. What makes Blink special is that it does not need to be run by the users – it automatically starts prior to any user’s logging in.
The algorithms used by Blink to recognize faces are advanced and detect the faces of users without requiring any special positioning or lighting. The advanced biometrics identification algorithms will recognize a face even if the person has recently gotten a haircut, shaved, worn or taken off their glasses.
What developers say:
Changed Haircut? Swapped Glasses for Contacts? No Problem!
Advanced biometric identification algorithms used in Blink! help it cope with changes of your personal appearance. Grow or shave off beard and mustaches, use makeup or dye you hair, wear or remove glasses or contact lenses – Blink! will let you in to your PC no matter what.
Logging in with Blink will mean that we no longer need to remember lengthy passwords. Also login attempts by unauthorized users will immediately be detected. Overall, the impact of Blink on computer usage will be immensely positive.
Blink comes as an 8MB download and is compatible with 32 bit versions of Windows Vista and Windows 7. Get the application by clicking here and remember to let us know what you think about it.
BYTubeD Makes It Easier Than Ever To Download Multiple Youtube Videos In One Go
Streaming videos online is a great way to kill our time. We often find humorous videos that are bound to cheer us up. Sometimes we stream these videos to view what our favorite band’s latest video looks like; at other time we stream educational video to increase our general knowledge. Whatever the purpose of our video streaming, YouTube is the site to visit.
At times after watching a video on YouTube, users want to download it and store it on their computer for easy access later (and also to transfer it to their phone or portable media player). There are numerous tools to perform this task; their main functioning involves the user entering the YouTube video’s URL in the program, after which the download proceeds.
Usually when we want to download multiple YouTube videos, they are all related. Normally these videos can have their shortcuts on the same page as the video we are viewing. Taking advantage of this fact, the developers of BYTubeD created a new way to obtain YouTube videos.
BYTubeD is a browser addon for Mozilla Firefox. The addon install quickly. Suppose you are watching this video and want to download all the related videos; the links of these video can be seen in the current webpage (in the bottom right pane).
In Firefox, we click on Tools -> BYTubeD.
The addon’s window pops up which contains all links of the YouTube videos available on that webpage.
In this popup we can select the videos to download, output video format, and whether or not we want to obtain the high quality version. After choosing our videos we click on the “Start” button to proceed with the download. After displaying us a message of “successful processing” the addon begins the download in Firefox’s own download manager.
I personally found the addon to be quite helpful in batch downloading any type of YouTube videos. I am positive BYTubeD will serve any user as well as it served me.
Learn New Things And Get Your Questions Answered With BlurtIt
Are you wondering whether Robbie Williams like the color blue? Are you trying to find out how many molecules make up 2 grams of salt? For questions like these, the internet does not have direct sources that can provide us with clear answers. For example the Wikipedia page on Robbie Williams or Salt will not be helpful in finding the answer to the above mentioned questions.
What can be helpful however, is BlurtIt.
BlurtIt is a free website that lets users sign up and post their question online, on the BlurtIt forum. Unlike other forums, It is dedicated solely to answering people’s questions on any subject.
To sign up for an account, use the buttons on the top right of the homepage. You can also use your Facebook account to log into BlurtIt. After the sign up, you are provided with the option to invite your friends over to BlurtIt.
Once signed in, your dashboard has a clear area in which you can post your query.
Below this box you can find the latest and most popular questions on BlurIt.
You will quickly realize by browsing through the questions that there are literally no restrictions to the nature of questions asked. Browsing BlurtIt is a great way to increase one’s general knowledge.
The site can be browsed by randomly jumping into the available questions or by choosing a category in which these questions are placed. Searches of particular keywords can also be executed.
Just like other users can respond to your questions, you can respond to questions posted by other users. A leaderboard is maintained of the users answering the highest number of questions.
BlurtIt, overall, is a great website with a simple interface which any computer user can quickly grasp. Click here to visit BlurtIt and remember to share your thoughts in the comments.
Free iBooks On iPad For Books Lover
If you are a book lover and love to read then you must know about the free iBooks app for iPad that has a built-in iBookstore with access to thousand of books you can download and begin reading immediately.
iBook on iPad is an amazing way to download and read books. You can browse your library on a beautiful bookshelf, tap a book to open it, flip through pages with a swipe or a tap, and you can also bookmark your favorite passages. You can get free iBooks app from here, just drag the ePub files into your iTunes 9.1 Library and sync your iPad with your computer. The books will appear on your shelf in iBooks.
Some Attractive Features:
1. iBooks supports amazing feature like speaking a word on a page, find a word, character, or phrase anywhere in your book with the built-in search feature.
2. Users can quickly find a required page using the page navigator at the bottom of every page.
3. Users can change the font size and pick from five included type faces to make your book more easy to read.
4. Using built-in bookmarking feature you can highlight your favorite passages.
5. Download many of your favorite books from iBookStore and record on your bookshelf or browse them in a list sorted by title, author, or category.
6. Users can read a free sample of any book on the iBookstore before making it a part of your collection.
7. Dont forget to enjoy a complimentary copy of the beautifully illustrated classic, Winnie-thePooh by A. A. Milne.
Requirements to use iBooks:
1. You must have an iPad.
2. Unfortunately, the iBookstore is not available to customers outside the United States.
3. You must have an iTunes Store account to download from the iBookstore.
4. iBooks only supports books published in the ePub electronic book format.
5. To add ePub documents from outside the iBookstore to iBooks, they must be DRM-free and synced to iPad using iTunes 9.1 or later.
Favitt Gives You A Customized Search Engine, Which Google, Yahoo and Bing Can’t
Nowadays, Search is the basic mechanism which drives the Internet space. If you surf the internet quite often, you really can’t live without using a search engine. People use search engine in a variety of ways, from searching images, videos, texts, products and so on.
A Search engine like Google, Ask and Yahoo lets you quickly find relevant information, blogs and websites. You can use them to find information on any subject or product, just go to a search engine’s home page, type some text in the search box and hit the return key to get a list of webpages which may contain the information you are looking for.
But what if you need to use multiple search engines? What if you need to search videos in YouTube, search music in Last.fm , search books in Amazon simultaneously? You have to open multiple browser windows or tabs and open all these websites one by one. This can be tiring and confusing as well and for novice Internet users, this is not the most easy interface to deal with.
It would be far more convenient if we can use a single search engine to search multiple sites at once. And above all, the user should be able to do some customizations so that he can choose the features he likes and removes the stuff he doesn’t.
The folks at Faviit have come up with just what you have been looking for ages – a customized search experience so that you can choose the features yourselves.
Faviit – Search Multiple Search Engines From One Page
Faviit lets you perform the same search on multiple search engines from a single page, thus saving you from the frustration of opening multiple browser tabs and typing the same words again and again. When you go to the Faviit.com homepage, you will see the following interface:
Don’t fall for the background image, you can always change it later on.
To perform a search, just enter the keywords in the search box and hit the Search button. You will immediately see the search results load with results from different websites which include Google, YouTube, Bing, Amazon etc. Here is how a search result page looks:
You see those links in the sidebar, just click a site’s name and Favitt will perform a search in that site and show you the results in the same page. Great!
For example, I searched for “iPad” and the Google search result page was shown (see the above screenshot). Then I thought “Ok, now I want to see some videos of the iPad”. Hence I clicked the YouTube link in the sidebar and here is what I got:
You can already feel the difference, don’t you? The video thumbnails are shown in the same page and clicking a link takes you to the video page straight away.
Quite similarly, you can search in news sources ( e.g Google News ) and micro blogging sites like Twitter, Digg or Q and A engines like Yahoo Answers. The interface works quite the same way, each search result being shown on your Faviit home page.
As you might have noticed, the search box consists of five tabs by default but you can always add other sites to the tab list. To search on other sources, simply click the “+” button placed at the right corner of the search box as shown below:
Next, type the words in the search box and click on a search engine to see the results. Another feature which Favitt offers is real time search results. When you do a search and if there are any images, Tweets, YouTube videos or news articles related to the searched keyword – it will appear at the bottom of the search results page.
Found an interesting search result ? Use the share buttons placed at the bottom of search results to share a link with your friends at Facebook, Twitter or other social sites.
Signing up for a Free account with Favitt
Signing up for a free Favitt account has it’s own advantages. First, you can add your favorite sites as bookmarks and these bookmarks appear in the home page for quick browsing.
For example: I am a Facebook addict and when I get some free time, I visit my Facebook profile to see what my friends are up to. Favitt is my homepage and I have got Facebook and other social sites bookmarked as shown below:
So I can access all the sites in one click and do not have to worry about browser bookmarks or manually type the address in the browser address bar.
Another advantage is that you get a personalized page such as http://favitt.com/bob, so just type that address from any computer and you get a personalized engine to start kick start surfing, that too on a customized environment. Signing up is pretty easy and you need just an email address to get it done.
The third advantage that Favitt offers is “backgrounds”. Yes, you can choose a custom background for your customized Favitt homepage. Google, Yahoo and other search engines have boring backgrounds – just a white screen and a text box. Bing shows some images but you don’t have control over the images and they are changed in random order.
With Favitt, you can either upload an image from your computer or grab an image from a publicly accessible web URL. Then you can use that image as the background of your Favitt homepage.
Here is an example:
Choosing a custom background gives a feeling of “being home” when you are surfing from a friends computer or an Internet café. Further, you can adjust the position of the search box and move it to any of the four corners.
The impressive thing regarding the images is that you can upload multiple images from your computer and Favitt will rotate them on a daily basis.
Conclusion
It turns out, Favitt gives you a customized environment for search and it’s a better way to search and surf popular sources like Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, Amazon and the like.
Yes there are advertisements in the search result pages but all the search engines have ads in their SERP’s. From Google to Yahoo, from Digg to Yahoo Answers – no one is an exception. But the advertisements at Favitt are far way from the search results and do not appear obtrusive.
The site is completely free to use so why not try it at least once ?
Highlight & Annotate Any Web Page Before Sharing With Webklipper
Suppose you just finished reading a hilarious comic strip online. To share this strip with your friends, you can deploy the URL of the comic on your social networking account. Adding any comments with the ‘share’ will only indicate what you felt about the strip as a whole. If you want to specify which part of the strip you liked you cannot do so without going into great details.
What we need is a commenting tool that lets us add comments to webpages themselves. Our comments can be placed right next to the webpage area the comment is referring to. That way our contacts can read a part of the webpage and find out immediately what we thought about it. It can also be a way to highlight the most funny / interesting part of a webpage which our contacts can skip to.
To perform exactly such type of website commenting, Webklipper was created.
Webklipper is a free to use website that performs all the functions I have outlined above. We start using the service by adding the URL of the website we want to share in the assigned box on Webklipper’s homepage.
Once the URL has been entered, we click on the “Klip It” button. Consequently that URL is opened with a menu bar displayed at its bottom. This menu bar enables commenting.
From the left, the first option in the menu bar is to highlight any text on the webpage. We do this by selecting a piece of text, then clicking the “Highlight” button; this action gives the selected text a yellow background.
The second button lets us add comments to any part of the webpage. Comments boxes can be resized and repositioned to suit our purpose. Our changes are saved as we make them.
Webklipper has already generated a new URL where we are making all these changes. Clicking on the “Share” button lets us share this URL either by entering the email addresses of our contacts or by sharing the URL on our Twitter / Facebook accounts.
Apart from adding comments to websites, Webklipper also lets users create simple webpages that include text. This can be done via the “Create Your Own Page” tab on Webklipper’s homepage.
The resultant webpage includes no advertisements, just the simple text we enter. Changes can be made to this webpage using Webklipper’s comments bar; after making our changes we can share the URL using the same “Share” button.
For users who plan to use Webklipper regularly, the site’s browser addons will prove to be a very useful tool.
The browser addons come for Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer 8; with these addons installed, adding comments to any open webpage becomes only a mouse click away.
Overall, Webklipper is a unique concept and a wonderful new way to share online content. Click here to visit the site.
10 Excellent Tools To Customize Your Windows
Windows customization is just another step in personalizing our computers. Just like we personalize our office space with our favorite coffee mug or family photos to make it more comfortable, Windows customization gives us a more comfortable environment to work in. Consequently we get things done faster and have an improved efficiency.
While there are many Windows customization tools out there, getting by free and good ones is not that easy. That is why I am sharing 10 great freeware tools for Windows customization with all of you. Read each entry in the list and see which tool suits your needs best.
You are welcome if you want to share more tools 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
MouseExtender requires no installation. It is a 110KB download overall and includes EXE which we run. The application is a small window that lets us customize our mouse menus. We can use the little window of the program to quickly access our control panel, shut down our computer, or set up a custom shortcut for any program, file, or folder.
Many application lets us change the theme and background of our desktop but only Logon Studio lets us change the Windows login screen. The program works best with Windows Vista and is a 3MB download only. Brilliant backgrounds are included in the application that replace the default Windows login screen background. More backgrounds can be downloaded from the application’s website.
Fences is an application I used and got many friends to start using. The program is 9MB to download and creates docks on our screen with titles. We can arrange our desktop icons in these docks to keep things tidy and easily accessible.
I remember being thoroughly impressed by Radian. It gives our mouse massive shortcut power. We can hold down the right click button to bring into view a circle containing shortcuts for files and programs which we set. Radian is a brilliant technique to empower the mouse.
If you are looking for an easy to use (yet very powerful) Windows theme changer, then Window Blinds will serve your needs well. The download is relatively large (33MB) but the interface is beautiful to justify it all.
RKLauncher is another dock-adding application. But unlike Fences, it provides a singular dock with all our applications. We can scroll through our applications. The highlighted ones are magnified into view. The interface is visually brilliant considering that RKLauncher is merely a 720KB download and requires no installation.
Actual Window Minimizer is a 4MB download that adds an additional button to the most-left of each window’s top right pane, where the close, restore, and minimize buttons are located. Clicking this new button minimizes the window to the System Tray rather than the Taskbar. In this simple way, users are able to free up space on their Taskbar.
T3Desk is a wonderful Windows customization program. It lets us set an angle to all our open windows so we can always have the desktop in view. We can set which side of the screen the window will be aligned to. We can also set the transparency and exact angle of the window.
SecondShell is an application many Windows users will be able to benefit from. It is a tiny program that requires no installation. All it does is add new hotkeys and mouse shortcuts for the tasks we perform daily on our computer. Once mastered, these tasks end up saving a lot of our time. Laptop users in particular will find SecondShell to be immensely helpful.
Iconizer is a free website to create our own custom icons. We can have detailed customization of Windows by creating our icons and assigning them to our folders and files.
