As one of the most anticipated features in iOS5 (at least in my option) the quick camera icon is great for those quick photos, the problem is where is it? To access this button just double tap the home button (the button under the screen) and along with the music controls on the top, the photo button will show up next to the unlock slider on the bottom.
19 Aug
Changing themes in NewsRack
NewsRack is a great piece of software that makes reading RSS items a breeze, especially with its integrated web browser. Although one thing that you might not know though is there’s a preference to change themes for reading the feed articles. To change the theme just go into the preferences, than under appearance and click ether ‘light’ or ’rounded’.
18 Jul
A Look into Alfred
Lately I been using a new mac utility called Alfred for my app calling needs. Here are some reasons I started using this app over my old one launchbar.
1. A Cleaner more Customizable UI
Alfred is amazingly customizable and even allows you to create and share themes with other powerpack users.
2. Quick Launch Application Shortcuts
Everything that you want is now faster to use thanks to the the shortcuts on the right side of the program list. Say that the program that you want is say, fifth in the list (no program is perfect) instead of arrowing down to the program you can just press command (the button next to the spacebar) and the number that corresponds with the program in your list.
3. Fast Navigation and iTunes Controls
Alfred’s premium powerpack manages to have some great features like a built-in iTunes controller and quick music finder. This works really well if you are trying to find an artist and you don’t want to spend thirty minutes in iTunes going though the coverflow view or searching for it.
Also the fast navigation feature works really well for times that you want to find a file (say a picture) that you know where it is and don’t want to open up the finder and spend time clicking around. You could use spotlight for this but I just found that Alfred is just easier for this type of thing.
All in all I find that Alfred is a great all around utility that just works and looks great while it’s at it. I would highly recommend checking it out see how it compares with what you are using right now. The base program is free with the powerpack features costing around $17.00 US.
26 Apr
Fever
Recently I decided to switch from Google Reader to Fever. This switch was made partly because of my growing amount of RSS feeds that I had to read though and also the user interface of fever looked amazing.
What is fever?
Fever is a host-it-yourself RSS application that features many useful features like a ‘hot view’ that calculates the most used links in your feeds and posts the according to temperature starting with a base of 98.5. This view is great if you have many feeds that all have similar content (say a bunch of CSS tip sites or car sites et ceta).
The other two views are Kindling and Sparks. Kindling is similar to Google Reader or any other reader where it is a listing of posts that you can assign to categories and flip though using the spacebar. Sparks though are interesting where it is a place where you can put the feeds that put out alot of posts like Designfloat or Digg. These feeds than can in turn affect the ‘hot view’ by making the links in these post show up more frequently.
Save and chill!
The last view to cover is the ‘Saved’ view where you can save the posts of note to read another time by clicking on the little circle next to the title that turns into a plus symbol. You can than see all your saved posts in clicking the ‘saved’ button in the main toolbar, and delete them the same clicking the minus button by the post title.
One free mac add-on the makes fever worth it is Chill Pill by Conceited Software. This application makes use of fever by placing the application in it’s own window (making all the links you click open the in your default browser) and adding simple things like keyboard shortcuts , themes, integrated system-wide support and more.
So where can I get it?
You can get fever over at feedafever.com, the application costs $30, and is tied to one domain (you have to host fever on your own hosted account). Before you pay though you can download the files and the application will check compatibility and if it checks out okay you will be directed to fever to pay for the app.
I personally was weary of fever at first thinking “great, another RSS app…” but after using it for about a month now I thing that it is worthy of it’s calling: making RSS usable for busy people.
29 Dec
I’m Back
After two to three months of working out a new design, I am finally back with a new design. Some of the goals that I had when creating this design were:
- make the design clean as possible
- make the text clear and readable
- lighten up the design (this was my main goal)
- use wordpress to power the site
Why WordPress?
The main reason for the new design was to switch my blog over from rapidweaver to wordpress. I have been using rapidweaver for about two to three years now to power my blog while creating the rest of the pages in Dreamweaver. While I have been meaning for sometime now to bring all the pages together in wordpress I just didn’t have the time to port everything over to wordpress. Finally when rapidweaver would not accept my serial for some odd reason I thought it was time to switch.
Design, Code, Repeat.
One of my biggest dislikes from my previous design was how dark the whole site was, so that was the first thing I fixed. I redid the whole color scheme using white and green instead of red and black to give the whole site a lighter and more informal feel. Also my old design always felt really cramped so I originally decided to widen the whole page out and use tons of whitespace, that just didn’t feel right. So I compromised with a little bit more space in between the text and the border. The final big change was I decided to use as much CSS3 as possible, the reason for this was: one – it makes the whole site forward looking, unlike like alot of sites that still cater to older browsers and two – it was easier to use than many popular hacks, and does not require javascript to work.
Future Bound…
There are still some ideas that I would still love to play around with someday as well some surprises planed. As far as some topics I would like to cover in the near future are:
- fever
- PHP using Dreamweaver and WebAssist
- Photoshop tips
- Possible Q&A
Also if you have any questions or found any pesky bugs that are still around feel free to email me.