Free and Useful Online Resources for Designers and Developers » Tutorials

7 Tools And Applications To Help You Save Electrical Power

DB — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 11:43:07 +0000

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.

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Save Your Bookmarks As Browser Homepage Thumbnails & Access Anywhere With SiteHoover

DB — Thu, 06 May 2010 02:09:35 +0000

A startpage is the thumbnails view of our favorite bookmarks. It helps us find bookmarks easily. Opera was the first browser that provided a startpage feature; now in addition to browsers supporting it, there are entire websites dedicated to the idea.

Online startpages have the advantage of accessibility. A browser created startpage is only accessible from a specific computer whereas an online startpage can be accessed from anywhere. Having reviewed many startpage websites, I have observed that many of them are somewhat the same. Sitehoover, however, is one truly unique startpage website.

Sitehoover is a website that provides its startpage feature to users for free. It creates small bookmark containers which it calls “hoovers.” On the homepage we enter the name of our hoover and click on the button reading “start a hoover.” We are prompted to sign up for an account which is a very short process.

With our account and hoover set up, we are ready to add new shortcuts to our newly created hoover. The hoover contains a gray field titled “click to add a page.”

Clicking it pops up a window asking us for the URL of our bookmark.

After we enter our bookmark’s URL, its thumbnail shortcut is shown on our hoover. We can add as many shortcuts as we like; their thumbnails are dynamically updated.

In the top right we can view a list of folders which is initially empty. New folders can be created and our bookmarks can be placed within them. Note that bookmarks in our created folders do not appear on the hoover main page. We access them by clicking the folders themselves. Like in the case of bookmarks, there is no limit to the number of folder we add.

Regardless of the web browser we use, we can set our hoover as our homepage and it will be appear each time we open our browser thus acting as a startpage.

For its list of unique features and ease of use, Sitehoover is an option that should be explored by anybody looking for a new / better startpage service. Click here to visit the site.

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Stuck With Some Windows Error? Microsoft One Click Fix It Tool Can Detect & Repair

DB — Mon, 03 May 2010 10:05:56 +0000

Windows computer users come across new situations often. Amateur computer users are completely baffled when a problem occurs; at times certain computer problems even leave the most experience computer user clueless. Calling technical support for our computers is not always helpful especially because the technician cannot see actually what our computer problem is.

Microsoft has finally recognized this extremely problematic issue and created a solution for it. The solution has been appropriately titled “Fix It.”

Fix It is a freeware solution by Microsoft that installs into your computer. It acts as an automatic troubleshooter that contains solutions to numerous problems commonly experience by Windows Vista and Windows 7 users. The list of supported operating systems includes Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server (2003 + 2008).

The installer we download is sized at 450KB which proceed with the remaining download. When our main download file has been obtained, the installation of Fix It asks us to specify the troubleshooters we would like installed.

Each entry contains a checkbox and an arrow in front of it. The arrow presents a description of that current troubleshooter. The best decision would be to select all troubleshooters and click on the Next button.

While the program’s installation proceeds we are asked if we would like to join the Microsoft Fix It Center Online.

Creating a free account there is advisable and can be a great help in case Fix It fails to successfully solves our Windows issue. An online account can be created using our Windows Live ID.

Whether you create an online account or not, you will still be able to use Fix It once the installation completes. Upon running the application for the first time you will be greeted with an introductory message.

The main Fix It window will list of problems.

Suppose your Windows Vista Aero features are broken and not performing as they are supposed to. Simply click on the RUN button in front of the appropriate troubleshooter.

The troubleshooter asks to automatically detect and fix the problem or automatically detect the problem but leave the decision of fixes to you.

Either way, our problem is automatically detected.

In case a problem exists, this troubleshooter finds it and either automatically fixes it or provides us with an option to fix it.

Microsoft Fix It is a great freeware release which will serve amateur and professional computer users alike. Get the application by clicking here.

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75+ Truly Useful Tutorials & Colorful Resources For Designers To Discover The Best Of The Web In March

AN Jay — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 00:51:15 +0000

We are always in search of great free resources, tips, tricks, etc. for our readers. Every day we work hard to find new resources and inspiration for designers like you. Today, we have another great post, “Discover the Best of the Web” on SmashingApps. In this, we made a list of 75+ Truly Useful Tutorials & Colorful Resources For Designers. We obviously cannot cover all the best from the web, but we have tried to cover as much as possible.

You are welcome to share if you know more best of the web in the month of March which 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.

Design Tips, Tricks and Tutorial

”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””

Balance 3D with mixed media

A Collection of Photoshop Business Card Tutorials and Free PSD Files

Create a Digital Camera With Wooden Accents Using Photoshop

90+ Smoking Cinema 4D Tutorials and Best Techniques

How to Create a 3D House Icon with Photoshop

The Ultimate Collection Of Brilliant Web Design Tutorials

The Ultimate Guide To Cloning In Photoshop

Use Photo Manipulation and 3D Layers to Design a Surreal Cover Art Illustration

30+ Best Apple Inspired Photoshop Tutorials

Melting Girl in Photoshop

Motion Graphics And 2-D Animation: 10 Tips For A Clean Workflow

50 Hot New Tutorials (Part2)

20 High Quality Photoshop Web Design Tutorials

Create a Call to Action Button With Adobe Fireworks CS4

Learn Adobe Illustrator: All the Basics for Beginners

Make a Surreal 3D Outdoor Room Scene in Photoshop

40 Detailed Drawing Tutorials for Adobe Illustrator

Photo Manipulation Techniques to Enhance Portrait Photography

15 Impressive Photoshop Tutorials

40+ Autodesk 3ds Max Tutorials for Beginners and Advance

Achieve Brilliant Lighting Effects in Photoshop

Massive Collection of Photo Editing Tutorials and Photoshop Actions

Artwork, Digital Photography and Inspiration

40 Brilliantly Illustrated Web Designs

66 Sinister CG Monsters

45 Creative Resumes to Seize Attention

25+ Beautiful And Creative Business Card Ideas

Inspiration: Awesome Dark Portfolio Sites

Fantastic Content Sliders for your Inspiration

30 Amazing Typographic Movie Poster Designs

5 Green Websites Built on Flash

50 Epic Digital and CG Artworks

50 Beautiful Sketchbook Scans

50 Beautifully Brown Web Designs

Showcase of Inspiration Typography Text of Modern Art

22 Most Unusual Google Earth Photos

55 Latest Examples of Perfect Slideshow Presentation in Web Design

Funny Examples of Celebrity Caricatures

Collection of 30+ Stunning Hand Picked CSS-based Layouts

50 Amazing Shots Taken in the Most Dry Regions

Web Design: 40 Fantastic Examples

Call to Action Buttons: Guidelines, Best Practices and Examples

Showcase of 20 Mobile-Friendly Popular Design Blogs

30+ Artistic Examples Of Colorful Wallpapers

Showcase of Textures in Print Design

Javascript and Ajax

20 jQuery Cheatsheets, Docs and References for Every Occasion

35
Fresh JavaScript/jQuery Tools and Resources

20 Helpful jQuery Methods you Should be Using

45 Fresh Useful JavaScript and jQuery Techniques and Tools

25 Amazing and Fresh jQuery Plugins

jQuery Resources for One-Page Portfolios

xHTML and CSS

47 CSS Tips & Tricks To Take Your Site To The Next Level

22 Handy HTML5 & CSS3 Tools, Resources And Guides

Basic CSS3 Techniques That You Should Know

The Future Of CSS Typography

Resources

40 Fresh Free Fonts For Your Next Designs

Tired Of Photoshop’s Complexity? Try These Free And Easy Apps For Your Photos

Interactive Flash Graphs and Charts For Your Website

11 Qualified Mobile Interface Tools and WordPress Plugins

Ultimate Collection of Free Buttons in PSD Format

10 Blank/Naked WordPress Themes Perfect for Development

The Best E-Commerce Icons All In One Place

29 Premium-Like Free But Extremely Tremendous Portfolio WordPress Themes

25 High Resolution Photoshop Brushes

Superb Free Vector Sets for Designers

9 Insanely Useful Firefox Add-Ons That Will Save Your Time

Miscellaneous Articles

Writing For The Web: Tips & Common Mistakes We Make

Principles to Become (and stay) Strong in the Search Engine Rankings

How To Add A “Print This” Button In Your Blog

11 Ways to Create a Mobile Friendly WordPress Site

Techniques for Squeezing Images for All They’re Worth

Custom WordPress Homepage with Customizable Widgets

5 Unique Ways to Do Keyword Research

What Every Designer Should Do Right Now

8 Tools to Analyze Your Website’s Level of Accessibility

Ten Tips to Improve your Freelance Portfolio

Progressive Enhancement: What It Is and How To Use It

8 Design Elements Your Blog Should Have

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How To Organize/View Your Feeds In A Magazine Like Start Pages In Chrome

Umar Anjum — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 12:26:52 +0000

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.

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How to Get Free Content and Media Hosting at Screencast.com

Chris Peterson — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:18:54 +0000

Let’s say you’ve created a video or image you want to share, but you don’t want it saved to your computer. You want to save it in a safe place, where you can access it at any time. You want some storage options, and the ability to share it in multiple file formats… or keep it private. You want its original integrity to stay intact. And you want complete control.

You’re picky… but you have a right to be. Good thing Screencast.com was designed for content creators like you. At Screencast.com, you’ll get all of the above and more—plus it’s free.

What is Screencast.com?

Screencast.com is a free web service from TechSmith Co. that lets you upload, manage and share your content without changing a thing. From high-quality videos, to presentations, documents and images—Screencast.com gives your content the perfect home.

How does it work?

Step 1: Upload files

Logging into Screencast.com automatically takes you to the Library where you can upload your content. You can use any content creation tool to upload your videos and images to Screencast.com. But when you use TechSmith software—like a video recorded and edited with Camtasia Studio, or a quickly marked up image and video with Jing—you can directly upload to Screencast.com from within the application.

- Keep the original quality. What you upload is exactly what your viewers see. Content hosted on Screencast.com isn’t compressed or re-encoded into a “one-size-fits-all” format.

- Control the rights to your own content. Anything you upload to Screencast.com still belongs to you. So feel free to delete files you’ve uploaded and make room for something new.

Step 2: Store and protect

Create a folder in Screencast.com and save the videos and images you want to keep in one place. Simply store your content… or turn it into a portal for viewers to access.

- Decide who views your content. Make a folder public and visible to everyone. Hide it so only you can see it. Password protect it. Or make it so only authorized viewers can access your content.

- Access the stats on your content. At a glance, you can see how many times a specific file has been viewed and how much bandwidth each file is using.

Step 3: Share in multiple formats

Uploading is only part of it. Share your stuff outside of Screencast.com easily with a URL or send a link directly to your viewers. Screencast.com even gives you HTML embed code so you can post images and videos on your own website or blog.

- Share in high-quality. With options like Flash, WMV, QuickTime and others, Screencast.com is sure to give you the highest quality playback available.

- Share conveniently. Provide your audience with anything from a link to your content, to a MediaRoll widget, or to an RSS feed that they can subscribe to.

How do you get started?

Start off with a free Screencast.com account to instantly begin storing and sharing your content. With the free version, you’ll get 2GB of storage space and 2GB of monthly bandwidth at no cost. Or sign up for the Pro version of Screencast.com and get extra storage, bandwidth and customization options. With the Pro version, you’ll get 25GB of storage space and 200GB of monthly bandwidth for just $9.95 a month.

Whatever you do, your content will never be changed at Screencast.com. What you upload is exactly what you’ll see. So when you’re ready to share that video or image, or just save it for later, give Screencast.com a try. You’ll get your content, your way—every time.

Post content provided by Nikki Wickham at TechSmith Corporation.

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How to Make a Killer Viral Photo Gallery

AN Jay — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 12:45:37 +0000

This post is by the online imagery experts at Shutterstock, a subscription stock photo agency.

You see photo galleries all over the web: The top 10 such-and-such photos, or 25 amazing this-or-that pictures. If you’re like us, you click on almost every one of them. Themed photo galleries on blogs work for a simple reason: Almost everyone appreciates great pictures and enjoys sharing them with friends. If you can dream up a good theme, write a good headline, and deliver a payoff of stunning visuals, you’ve got a viral hit on your hands.

The difficulty is getting the pictures legally and fairly. You could look for photos on Flickr or Google Images, but you face some time-consuming work: making sure you have permission to republish the pictures. Usually this means contacting every photographer or their agents individually. Some photographers will be delighted that you’re sharing their work, but others will be offended if you fail to give them a say in how the work is presented (or, of course, pay them for it). With rare exceptions (such as NASA images and very old photos), every photograph is copyrighted unless the rights holder says otherwise. You’ve probably read stories about web sites that have had to pull content offline after complaints or legal action from photographers. You don’t want to be in that position.

This tutorial will teach you how to use a stock image library to find images you can legally and safely use on a blog. Obviously, we’d love it if you get your images from Shutterstock (Spoiler alert: There’s a coupon at the end of the article) but we hope you find this information useful even if you don’t. This tutorial offers some basic guidelines for image searching and selection, and assumes you’re already familiar with the fundamentals of blogging and have access to Adobe Photoshop. Let’s get started on building a viral photo gallery for your blog.

1. Come up with an idea and a title.

Pictures of lightning? Underwater scenes? Ugly pets? Things with spots? Get creative, but keep in mind some ideas naturally lend themselves to great photographs. For this tutorial, we’re going to put together a gallery of pictures of impressive bridges. Your title should be short, catchy and as bold as possible without overpromising. Remember, this will be what people see in RSS feeds and social networking sites, so it should make it obvious that it’s a photo gallery. Audiences also respond well to titles that specify a number of images, so they know they’re not about to be overwhelmed with somebody’s collection of 1,000 vacation snapshots. For this exercise, let’s go with the title “Photo Gallery: The World’s 5 Most Beautiful Bridges.” (We might go with 10 or 20 pictures on a blog, but here we want to keep it short.)

2. Visit a stock library and start searching.

When you first start to search, you might be overwhelmed with your choices. If you type “bridge” into Shutterstock, you’ll get more than 65,000 results, including both illustrations and images. You can refine your search by limiting it to just photos and sorting the results by the most popular images. As you get a feel for what kinds of images are in the library, you might want to add more keywords, like “river” or “night” or “suspension.” If you see a picture you really like, you can display images similar to it by clicking on the similar images icon that appears below each thumbnail (on Shutterstock, it looks like two overlapping squares). You can also click on a photographer’s name to display more images by the same photographer, since there’s a chance they might have other images that fit your theme.

3. Build a lightbox and choose your favorite photos.

A lightbox is a folder you create on a stock site to keep track of images you might want to download. On Shutterstock, when you see an image you like, click on the icon that looks like a light bulb. Select “new lightbox” from the menu, give it a name, and start adding pictures to it. Go crazy – add everything you like.

Now, the editing process begins. Photo editing is a skill that improves with practice and some sort of an art background, but even if you’re new to it, you probably know more than you think. Do you see an image that makes you laugh, that reminds you of something you like, or that you would want to immediately share with a friend? Keep that one. Are there a couple of images that look really similar? Pick one and forget the rest. Edit tight. Don’t be afraid of passing up the wrong image, and go with your instincts. Remember, you want to give your visitors a surprise-and-delight moment, not bore them.

4. Download and resize your images.

OK, we’ve settled on the images we want. Now we visit each image page and download the size we need. This is a good time to check the usage terms for the site to make sure the usage we want is allowed. Shutterstock limits online usage to a maximum of 800 x 600 pixels. That restriction is in place to keep people from distributing print-quality images online, and it’s plenty big enough for most blogs. (This particular blog has a width of 540 pixels, so we’re in good shape.) For most of the images we’re about to download, the medium-size images will be the proper size, so we’ll download that size. (When in doubt, download a larger size than you need.)

Next, use Photoshop or another image editing program to make sure all your images are resized to the pixel width of your blog and saved as JPEG format.

5. Order your photos, write captions, and place them in your blog.

Like editing, sequencing is a skill that gets easier with practice. To start, you can’t go wrong if you arrange your photos in a way that tells a story, and write captions to match. Alternately, you can lead with your best photo, then alternate between traditional, conservative shots and unexpected, creative ones. Your captions should be short but contain enough information to answer any obvious questions a visitor will have when looking at the photo. (Such as: What is this, and why is it so great?) You should also credit the photographer and the source of the image. It’s useful to include a link to the source of the image as well.

When you’re happy with your images and captions, enter them into your blogging program, publish, and start spreading the word.

To show you what we came up with following these steps, here’s our mini list of bridges.

Photo Gallery: The World’s 5 Most Beautiful Bridges

The Brooklyn Bridge, New York, completed 1883.

Millau Viaduct, France, the tallest vehicular bridge in the world, completed 2004.

Tower Bridge, London, completed 1894.

Ponte Vecchio, Florence, Italy, completed 1354.

Tsing Ma Bridge, Hong Kong, completed 1997.

There are plenty of other beautiful bridges out there, but you get the idea.

We hope this leaves you feeling inspired to give stock photography a try as a source of content for your blog. Be picky, be creative, be funny, and above all give your audience something they’ll genuinely enjoy. If you want to try Shutterstock, they have monthly subscription packages that let you download up to 25 images a day, plus “On Demand” plans if you need just a few images. They invite you to save 10% with coupon code SMASH10*.

For more tips on how to use Shutterstock images, visit our blog: blog.shutterstock.com.

*10% Discount on Standard Licenses Only

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80+ Incredible Collection Of Inspirations, Tutorials And Resources For Designers To Discover The Best Of The Web In February

AN Jay — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:03:20 +0000

We are always in search of great free resources, tips, tricks, etc. for our readers. Every day we work hard to find new resources and inspiration for designers like you. Today, we have another great post, “Discover the Best of the Web” on SmashingApps. In this, we made a list of 80+ Incredible Collection Of Inspirations, Tutorials And Resources For Designers. We obviously cannot cover all the best from the web, but we have tried to cover as much as possible.

You are welcome to share if you know more best of the web in the month of February which 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.

Design Tips, Tricks and Tutorial

33 New High Quality Adobe Illustrator Tutorials

Realistically Light and Render Interior Scenes using 3ds Max and Vray

88 Ultimate Round-Up of Photoshop Photo Manipulation Tutorials

How to Create a Dark and Mysterious TV-Head Scene

100+ Maya 3D Tutorials For Beginners, Intermediate and Advanced Users

How to Create a Stylish Media Player in Photoshop

A Round-Up of 50 Fresh Photoshop Tutorials and Techniques

70 Ultimate Cinema 4D Tutorials & Techniques

How To Create A Vintage Camera in Photoshop

Create a Cartoon Car Similar to Cars Movie

30 Best Written And Explained Logo Design Tutorials

Design an Underwater Omega Code Poster

How To Draw A Funny Cop Illustration From A Sketch

Make a Freezing Cold Snow-themed Abstract Piece

50 Useful Cartoon Character Design Tutorials

How To Design a 3D Glass Icon in Photoshop

Create a Realistic Space Landscape Photo Manipulation

Artwork, Digital Photography and Inspiration

50 Breathtakingly Beautiful CG Landscapes

The Creative Examples Of Colorful Splash Pages

25 Examples of Incredible Ideas and Designs

25 Beautiful Examples of “Coming Soon” Pages

Creative Auto Ads

40 Trendy and Extremely Colorful Websites

Logo Design Inspiration: 65+ Brilliant Fresh Designs

40 Epic Digital Paintings

Email Newsletter Design: Guidelines And Examples

30 Visually Appealing Web Portfolio Designs

Showcase of Great Web App Interfaces

70+ Business Card Designs

Showcase of City Tourism Website Designs

60+ Amazing Digital Photo Manipulation Art

55 Examples of Huge Typography in Web Design

30 Free and Fresh iPad Wallpapers

Design Trend Showcase: 30 Horizontal Websites

25+ Breathtaking examples of Natural sky Photography

60 Creative Flash Websites You Should Not Miss

82 CG Superheros, Villains, and Iconic Movie and Video Game Characters

25 Beautiful Website Layouts

Javascript and Ajax

13 Useful JavaScript Solutions for Charts and Graphs

15 jQuery Plugins for Better Web Page Element Layouts

35 Useful jQuery Plugins for Slideshows, Graphs and Text Effects

24 Best Practices for AJAX Implementations

Animate Panning Slideshow with jQuery

You Can Use CSS3 Right Now

Creative Button Animations with Sprites and JQuery

How to Use jQuery to Make Slick Page Transitions

10 Best jQuery Gallery(Slideshow) Techniques

xHTML and CSS

20 CSS3 Tutorials and Techiques for Creating Buttons

The Most Common HTML and CSS Mistakes to Avoid

The Future Of CSS Typography

Design a Prettier Web Form with CSS 3

54 Awesome Tutorials To Satisfy The Appetite Of Any Web Developer

50 Awesome Animations made with CSS3

CSS Graphs And Charts: 11 Hand-picked Tutorials And Solutions

Resources

NEW Sets of Free High Quality Icons for Bloggers and Designers

45 Best Places You May Visit To Get Or Create Free 3D Models

100+ Vintage Textures and Photoshop Brushes to Decorate Your Design

60+ Latest High-Quality Free WordPress Themes

50 Free UI and Web Design Wireframing Kits, Resources and Source Files

Mega Collection of The Best Free Social Media Icons for Bloggers and Designers

20 Must-Have Image Optimization Tools for Designers

40 Detailed and High Quality Mobile Phone .psd Source Files

30 Websites To Download Free Stock Photos

50 Free High Quality Professional Fonts for your new Web Design and Project

33 Free Blue Patterns to Download

60 Beautiful Premium Icons (Free)

35 Latest High-Quality Free Fonts for Professional Designers

158 Paper Textures For Kickstarting Your Backgrounds & Designs

Top 20 Free Fonts for Distinctive Headlines and Titles

20 Fresh Sets of Free Icons for Web Designers

Miscellaneous Articles

Ways to Make your Banners More Click-able

The AIDA Marketing Model in Web Design

The Classic Look VS The Wow Effect

Finding Inspiration in Uncommon Sources: 12 Places to Look

4 Tips to Help Promote Your Website Using Facebook Fan Pages

10 Great Tools to Create a Mobile Version of Your Site

The Three Golden Rules of Site Redesigns

How To Find Great Keyword Ideas For Your Articles

Design Envy : Make it Work For You!

Design Multilingual Website: A Beginner’s Guide

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First Generation Of Google Buzz Tips, Tricks And Resources

AN Jay — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 06:51:24 +0000

Google Buzz is Google’s latest product for sharing updates, photos, videos, and more. Many people are saying that Google Buzz will start healthy competition in the micro-blogging industry where Facebook and Twitter was enjoying as leaders. Do not forget to follow us on Google Buzz to get updates with all the latest happening at Smashing Apps.

Google Buzz is a new way to publish your ideas to the world or just to your closest friends, and start conversations about the things you find interesting. It has an option to see thumbnails with each post, and browse full-screen photos from popular sites. Today, we are listing down few stuffs from the first generation of Google Buzz Tips, Tricks And Resources.

Let’s start with a video to find how Google Buzz works

Chrome Buzz

Buzz It For Firefox

Buzz It! will make a buzz status update via Gmail with the link and title of the webpage you are viewing. It will also shorten URLs with Bit.ly, allowing the user to monitor their link statistics.

Five Tips to Thrive on Google Buzz

With Google Buzz, users have found their inboxes converted instantaneously into a social hub. Google’s bold move has turned the web into a whirlwind of blog posts appraising or criticizing the service. Here are some of the ways you can maximize the use of Buzz if you want to give it a try.

4 Google Buzz Hacks for Users, Developers, and Haters

ReadWriteWeb came across a few tips and tricks worth sharing with you.

12 Undocumented Tricks for Google Buzz

AEXT proud to present you with 12 simple tricks to help give you a better Buzz.

Google Buzz API

Google Buzz Button WordPress Plugin

Google didn’t release any official button yet but Clickonf5 has released a WordPress plugin to add a button on a post/page. Once your visitor will click on this button, they will be taken to a page where they can add some note on your post’s link and title and share that on their Buzz. This way your post/page’s reach will increase by huge amount.

Google Buzz Icons

Unmatchedstyle released free set of 16, 32, 64 and 128 pixel versions, a photoshop file of all the icons and the buzz bee as an eps. You can use them however you want.

Google Buzz Social Icons for Bloggers and Designers

10 high resolution Google Buzz Icons of different Style and Sizes are included in this set.

Don’t Like Google Buzz Or If It’s Not For You? Then…

If you do not like Google Buzz or it’s really not for you so there is a way that you can keep it out of your Gmail inbox. You would need to go down on the inbox page and there is an option that say “turn off buzz ”

You are welcome to share more tips, tricks, hacks and any type of resources for Google Buzz that will be helpful and 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.

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85+ Excellent Resources And Tutorials Especially For Designers To Discover The Best Of The Web In January

AN Jay — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 07:42:15 +0000

We are always in search of great free resources, tips, tricks, etc. for our readers. Every day we work hard to find new resources and inspiration for designers like you. Today, we have another great post, “Discover the Best of the Web” on SmashingApps. In this, we made a list of 85+ Excellent Resources And Tutorials Especially For Designers. We obviously cannot cover all the best from the web, but we have tried to cover as much as possible.

You are welcome to share if you know more best of the web in the month of January which 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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