Free and useful online resources for designer and developers

Tips and Tricks

How To: Turn Android Based Phone Into Wireless iTunes Remote Control

The iTunes media player is used by many people. Its integration with the App Store allows you to easily stream and purchase the music you like. Although it has an unusually large download size (when compared to other media players), its interface features combine to form a competent media player that has many fans.

If you are an iPhone or any other Apple device user, you might already have stumbled across an application or two that enables remotely controlling iTunes. But if you own an Android smartphone, the chances to find an iTunes compatible app are very slim. TuneRemote however, is an Android application that is not only compatible with iTunes but also lets you control the player remotely through your phone.

Read on the following the 5-step guide to learn how TunesRemote can be used to wirelessly control your iTunes player.

Step 1: This is for Mac users. If you are a Mac user, you will first need to configure your firewall in order to enable remote controlling of iTunes. Go to System Preferences -> Security, then click on the Firewall tab. Click on the Set Access for Specific Services button and select iTunes from the Application list (click on the + to add application).

Step 2: This is the second step for Mac users and first for Windows users. Open iTunes and enter its preferences. In the Sharing tab, make sure the Share my library on my local network is checked. If you want tighter security, you can assign a password for the sharing.

Step 3: You can now start up TunesRemote on your Android smartphone. Most probably it will automatically find and add your shared iTunes library. In case the library is not automatically detected, you can manually add your library by accessing TunesRemote’s Manual Add option and entering your computer’s IP address along with the following pairing code: 0000000000000001.

Step 4: Now head back to iTunes where you will now be able to see an Android device option in the side pane. Click on this option and enter 0000 in the passcode screen; you will see a resultant screen confirming successful connection.

Step 5: You are all done. Congratulate yourself on being able to control iTunes through your Android smartphone. Now invite your friends over and show off your phone’s abilities.

You can search for TunesRemote at the Android Marketplace; if you cannot find it there, download the .apk from http://dacp.jsharkey.org/TunesRemote-r2.apk

Place Important Windows 7 Shortcuts Within Reach Of Every User

Windows 7 is relatively a new operating system. Applications are still being developed for it that explore and push its boundaries. If you are a Windows 7 user, you already appreciate its improvement over Windows Vista. But while 7 provides a great margin of user convenience, things can always be improved by third party applications. This brings to our today’s application – Preme.

Preme is a freeware program that helps place important Windows 7 shortcuts within reach of every user. There are a number of handy shortcuts provided by Preme which make 7’s usage a lot easier; for instance, you will be able to view all minimized windows in 3D style by just moving your mouse cursor to the top left corner. You can choose the view to be displayed in Flip 3D or Alt-Tab style.

Preme offers other useful features too; the tool gives you the ability to place your mouse pointer on the title bar of a window to keep it on top; with the mouse on the title bar, you can also scroll down your mouse wheel to minimize that window; again, with the mouse in the same position, you can click the middle mouse button (the scroll button) to close that window; the mouse cursor can be moved to the Start button area to automatically open the Start menu.

A number of other features are offered by the application; all these features are explained fully in its help file. Once you master the shortcuts offered by Preme, you will save a ton of time working on 7 and greatly improve your productivity.

5 Online Tools For Designers To Help Recognize Unknown Fonts

If you are designer you undoubtedly view websites critically. You judge their flow and overall design. An important part of a site’s design is the font used on it. If you like a font style, you would definitely want to incorporate it into one of your latest site designs. But in order to do that you first need to know what font style is actually used. Because of the sheer number of fonts available on the web and the number of new fonts being created, it is hard to recognize fonts simply by looking them.

This is why I thought I should create a list of 5 online font recognizers. These tools are must-haves for every website designers. Give each of them a read and decide which one will suit your usage best.

We would love to know what you are thinking while checking this post. If we missed any tool you are welcome to share with us. 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.

1. Identify Fonts

Identify Fonts is a free to use website that gives you the most simple way to find out what font is used on a website. When you are on the website having the font you like, simply take a screenshot of the text-included portion. The screenshot should not be greater than 1.8MB in size, must have the text in one line only, and must be in JPEG/JPG, GIF, or PNG image format. You then upload this screenshot image onto Identify Fonts and the site displays all results. You can choose to filter the results as free fonts only, commercial fonts only, or both. Click here to visit Identify Fonts.

2. Identifont

Identifont asks you a series of simple questions in order to determine which font you are looking for. The questions are easily answerable and are like “What type of tail does the upper-case ‘Q’ have?” There are diagrams provided so that we can select an answer. If we have only a set of characters of our desired font, we can answer character-specific questions to find the font. Click here to visit Identifont.

3. WhatTheFont

WhatTheFont recognizes fonts in the same way as IdentifyFont. The image we upload can be of GIF, JPEG, TIFF or BMP image format and must not have more than 25 characters. As the characters are scanned by the website, we are asked to confirm if the right character has been confirmed. The site then proceeds to analyze each character and find our font. Click here to visit WhatTheFont.

4. Font Trainer

Font Trainer will help you view fonts in various styles. It acts as a font recognizing quiz for the user. You can train yourself to recognize many popular fonts and reduce the need of font recognizing websites. Moreover knowing the names of many fonts will definitely help you impress your fellow website designers. Click here to visit Font Trainer.

5. TypeNavigator

TypeNavigator is a font searching tool that lets you go through a series of options in order to reach your font. The options to choose are much like the questions asked by Identifont. Alternatively you can search fonts by their names or by their designers. Click here to visit TypeNavigator.

I’ve Got a Blog, Now What Do I Do? [Slideshow]

These days we all are noticing that thousands of new blogs are starting every day to get in the race of influential blog of the industry. But only few of them could survive and stay in the battlefield fighting with existing giants. Well, I know this is not possible to fight but yes they at least try to find their place in the market. Well, to be honest many of the blogs owners really dont know how to get the word out about them and inspire their first time visitors to come again to create a strong community.

A friend of mine Syed Balkhi at WPBeginner recently created and launched a really useful and directive slideshow to make the new blog owners lives easier than ever. As the title of slideshow says everything “I’ve Got a Blog, Now What Do I Do?”, it would be enough good if someone will really want to do something to establish their blog in decent period as after reading this you guys would not need to invent the wheel again. huh! I mean he put all of his experience and mature understanding in this slideshow to deliver the actual knowledge that anyone could wish.

This slideshow consist worth-checking 50 slides which covers decision to start a blog to setting up and launching then content selection to excellent copywriting. After this, using all the possible platforms to spread out the word about your blog like getting you active on social media e.g. twitter, digg, reddit, stumbleupon etc for getting massive feedback on your posts. In short, it has so many things that you can learn to enhance your blog’s future and increase your reader base.

Google.com Powered With SSL For Encrypted Private Searching

If you spends more time on the internet then I am sure you want more control and security over your online communication. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) connection being used for encrypting information travels on networks. Its usually recognized by a web address containing “https” or a browser lock icon, as we have seen it with many e-commerce or banking sites, well not just for banking and e-commerce, people uses it for private exchange and for processing credential information as well.

Now I am sure you got the idea of what is SSL and encryption. So, if you concern about security then Google have now added SSL encryption to their search engine https://www.google.com.

Using https://www.google.com, a very secure connection is created between Google and your browser. This secure connection between you and Google make sure the protection of your search terms and search results pages from being intercepted by a third party on your network. A modified logo as given above helps you to indicate that your are searching via a secure connection.

Its a beta version. So, it only covers the core web search product, I mean you wont be able to see the links of image search, books search, and news search etc, as they do not support SSL at this time. Also, as the SSL connection requires additional time to create the connection between your browser and Google, you will experience searching a bit slower than regular Google Search but, the search results will be the same.

It will not be that slow as searching over SSL dosent reduce the data sent time to Google, it only hides the data from third parties. So, if you care about security more, then you should start using Google with SSL. Personally, I like Google and their products like I am anxiously waiting for their Google Chrome OS.

Here’s how searching over SSL is different from regular Google (In their own words) :

• SSL encrypts the communication channel between Google and a searcher’s computer. When search traffic is encrypted, it can’t be read by third parties trying to access the connection between a searcher’s computer and Google’s servers. Note that the SSL protocol does have some limitations — more details are below.
• As another layer of privacy, SSL search turns off a browser’s referrers. Web browsers typically turn off referrers when going from HTTPS to HTTP mode to provide extra privacy. By clicking on a search result that takes you to an HTTP site, you could disable any customizations that the website provides based on the referrer information.
• At this time, search over SSL is supported only on Google web search. We will continue to work to support other products like Images and Maps. All features that are not supported have been removed from the left panel and the row of links at the top. You’ll continue to see integrated results like images and maps, and clicking those results will take you out of encrypted search mode.
• Your Google experience using SSL search might be slightly slower than you’re used to because your computer needs to first establish a secure connection with Google.

7 Tools And Applications To Help You Save Electrical Power

Leaving our appliances on while we are not using them is a terrible waste of electrical power. There are parts of the world that do not have electricity at all; we should do our part to respect the resources we have and save them whenever / wherever we can.

Below you will find a list of 7 tools to prevent wasting electrical power. I believe that each entry in the list serves a useful purpose; read about each one and choose the one (or more than one) that suits you best.

If you want to share more tools that can Save Electrical Power 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.

1. MonitorOff

MonitorOff is a freeware application that lets a user fully control when his / her monitor turns off. CRT monitors in particular take up a lot of power. The operating system usually has built in time durations for the screensaver to begin or for the monitor to turn off. But these settings will take a little longer to reach; with MonitorOff we can access / modify al time durations and even setup hotkeys. The application is for Windows and sized at nearly 400KB. Click here to get MonitorOff.

2. SetPower

SetPower is a unique power management application for Windows that lets us set three different power plans: Balanced, Power Saver, and High Performance. We can edit the details of these plans (such as when the monitor will turn off) as well as assign the times when these plans will come into effect. For different hours of the day, we can assign our computer with different plans, according to our usage. Click here to get SetPower.

3. AppliancesEnergyUse

AppliancesEnergyUse lists the power input of almost 50 household appliances. By finding out how much power we are using simultaneously we can see if we are wasting energy. We can also set a personal power goal for ourselves and vow to never cross that wattage at a given time. Whether or not we are crossing our goal can then be determined by AppliancesEnergyUse. Click here to visit AppliancesEnergyUse.

4. Edison

Edison is an installable application for Windows. It offers the same features as SetPower, with multiple power schemes that can set to be implemented on different times of the day. An additional feature of the application is its ability to estimate the power we are saving and use the electrical unit price to calculate our savings. We can enter our own price was more accurate results. Click here to get Edison.

5. HomeEnergySaver

HomeEnergySaver is a free to use website that lets us answer a few question to learn our electrical power usage pattern. It then suggests ways in which we can reduce our power usage. We can view the report of each of these suggestions and see how much each would cost. Click here to visit HomeEnergySaver.

6. Microsoft Hohm

Hohm is Microsoft’s version of HomeEnergySaver. It requires users to have a Windows Live ID to register for an account before visitors can use the site’s services. Once the account is formed, we answer elaborate questions so that Hohm can fully understand our power usage patterns. We are then presented with suggestions of how we can cut back on our electrical power usage. Using Hohm’s service is free but restricted to users in the US. Click here to visit Hohm.

7. FuelCharts

FuelCharts is a free to use website. We can use the site to enter our electricity bills’ amounts over a two years’ period. Bar graphs are created of each bill. These bars provide us with a good enough comparison of our last year’s energy usage and this year’s energy usage. We can change electricity with anything we like (oil, biodiesel, etc.) and achieve an energy comparison for various resources. Click here to visit FuelCharts.

How To Organize Yourself Using Opera With Agenda

I have just finished writing about an Opera widget which Google users will appreciate. Now, on my path to discover great widgets for Opera, I have found yet another tool that will help anybody who likes to keep a virtual diary.

This tool is an Opera widget appropriately titled Agenda.

Agenda is our very own virtual diary. We can use it as an event reminder, alarm clock, and to-do list. After installing the widget, we need to open it from the widgets sidebar.

This is what Agenda will look like the first time you open it:

You can see that the form is that of a physical binder, with a page on each side representing today’s dates. We can see the yellow notepads where it is possible to store whatever notes we want to save.

There are sticky notes and can be moved around on the page.

The left page is where we can add events. First we use the calendar to highlight a date.

Today’s date is highlighted blue. Our selected date is the left one of the two rectangles. This date then becomes our page on the left.

Clicking on “Add Event” pops up a window with numerous options.

By default, the event we can add is Note. To add something else to the date, we click on the Note button and view our options.

Our options appear in a sideways menu on top. Starting from the left, these options are Note, Event, Meeting, Birthday, Anniversary, and a Yearly event.

Choosing an event enables the Alarm box.

Speaking of Alarm, we can choose for it ring on our event or an a specific time interval from right now.

A maximum of a 255 character length note can be added to each event. Saving an event adds it to the page on the left (the one we had highlighted).

In front of the time, we can see our note. At the end of the note we see two icons. The first one lets us delete the event and the second one signifies that an alarm is added to the event.

Agenda works in its own window so that you do not need to have Opera open to use Agenda.

Combining all these features of Agenda, we can easily use it as our virtual planner / diary. It will definitely be a useful widget for countless Opera users.

How To Draw Simple Sketches In Opera

If you are an Opera user who has not familiarized himself with its widgets, you are missing the best Opera has to offer.

Opera has gone with a completely different direction with its widgets. Unlike Chrome’s extensions or Firefox’s addons that need the browser to function, Opera’s widgets are standalone applications that can be executed without even opening the browser. They can sit neatly on your desktop and can serve a multitude of functions.

One the more fun Opera widgets I recently discovered is Artist’s Sketchbook. It lets you easily draw simple pieces with some great sketching tools.

This is what Artist’s Sketchbook looks like when first opened:

Color choosers are on the bottom of the widget. If you want to choose a custom color, you can click on the circular icon top pop up something like this:

This color mixer helps you get any color you want. The right pane lets you choose a sketching tool.

You can choose from an H or 2B pencil or a paintbrush, pen, sprayer, or marker. Options for an eraser, paint bucket, and image pasting are also available in this pane. The last four buttons in the right pane let you save your work.

Options of the widget let you choose the default language and canvas type, along with modifying other options.

With these basic tools, users can create quite impressive works, depending on their artistic ability.

Installation note for Artist’s Sketchbook : After you click on the “Launch” button on Artist’s Sketchbook’s webpage and install it, you can launch it from Opera’s widgets sidebar. Alternatively you can access it from the new shortcut placed either on your desktop or in your Start menu (depending on where your Opera shortcut is).

Supercharge Your Google Reader & Read Your Feeds In Style With FeedSquares (Chrome Extension)

To read updates on the Blogger pages I am following, I use Google Reader. If you are unfamiliar with Reader, it is Google’s service that lets us read any Atom and RSS feed online or offline. Every since its main release in September 2007, it has been tried out many Google users and is now quite popular. This is what the Reader interface normally looks like:

Although I am happy with the convenience that Reader provides (the ability to read all our Atom plus RSS reads on a single dashboard) I feel that Reader’s interface could be revamped and made more visually appealing.  One tool that achieves this is FeedSquares.

FeedSquares is a great browser extension for Google Chrome. The first change made by FeedSquare is the addition of a pink icon to Chrome’s address bar.

When this pink icon is clicked, a page like this is opened in a new Chrome tab:

The squares represent each blog / feed we are following or subscribed to (excluding the square titled TOP PICKS, ABOUT US, Rocket in-Bottle, and Friend’s Shared Items). By clicking on any square of a blog / feed, we open its feed beneath these squares (see image below).

The feeds are listed from newest to oldest (the newest is left most). Clicking on any feed opens it quickly in a pop up window right there, above our feed-line.

Blog entries can easily be read in this pop up window. In case we want to head on over to the post’s original link, we can click on its title in the pop up window (marked in the red region in the image above).

When combined with FeedSquares, Google Reader is a wonderful service that provides its users with a great online reading experience. Click here to get FeedSquares for your Chrome.

Get Google ToolBar On Opera To Improve Productivity

When I read about web browsers online it seems that all the headlines are captured by Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. With their massive library of useful extensions and addons, both these browsers offer a great user experience. But the web browser which I have only recently started to extensively use is Opera. Addons for Opera are called widgets and they, too, provide great convenience to their users.

A great Opera widget to jump start your widget experience is Google Toolbar.

Google Toolbar provides us with simple access to many of Google’s services. In case you are absolutely new to Opera, I should tell you that after installing the widget you will need to click on the second button in the left pane of Opera to view installed widgets.

This will open a widgets sidebar where you will find Google Toolbar’s entry along with any other widgets you have installed.

You should now double click on the Google Toolbar. Resultantly a toolbar filled with Google shortcuts will be displayed.

Shortcuts included in the toolbar cover many Google services ranging from the highly popular Gmail to Blogger. A search bar on the far left enables users to conduct a search on Google. By placing the mouse pointer on the search bar, an arrow icon appears.

This icon gives us access to the widget’s options. These options let us remove, add new or custom shortcuts.

Placing the mouse pointer on this options window will make visible a small box to the far right.

This box lets us minimize, close, and access the settings of the widget. Settings let us set the zoom level, the “Always on Top” feature, along with other options to adjust.

You might be wondering what the role of “Always on Top” could be. Google Toolbar is a window in its own right. In other words, it has its own entry in the Windows taskbar and stays open even if you have closed Opera. Therefore you can place this toolbar on top of any program you are running.

Overall this widget comes as a blessing for all Opera users who are fans of Google.