What day is it? Flowchart Friday of course. Old but new to me. Based on the Total Eclipse of the Heart flowchart, this one takes on Hey Jude. Don't get stuck on an infinite loop of na na na na na na na na na...
[Love All This via Laughing Squid | Thanks, John]
A lot of social media analysts are predicting that curation will help solve the issue of social media overload. Curation has been touted as “the chosen†social media buzzword du jour and the new form of search that will prove more useful than Google’s spammed result pages. Rather than paying attention to just anyone and everyone, we will defer to the nine percent of people who actively search for content, and  listen to them on networks like Twitter or Quora.
How does this paint a very different perception of reality? After all, we will be listening to very select sources and filtering out the inconvenient users of social media who may just so happen to disagree with us. We then listen to these same sources over and over. What happens when we happen to encounter someone who either contradicts our life paradigm or is simply too unfamiliar with our priorities to even make conversation?
Visualizing social media data allows us to make sense of massive amounts of raw data in a very clear way. Rather than relying on someone to sift through the noise to find the useful nuggets of information, data visualization gives us a holistic view so that we can make sense of a lot information within seconds. Â It also prevents us from shielding our eyes to the inconvenient truths provided by those who just so happen to be outside our social streams.
Rio Akasaka, a first year Master’s student in Human Computer Interaction at Stanford and Infochimps user, created a good use case of how data visualization can help us make sense of what occurs via social media. Rio first downloaded an Infochimps data set of tweets pertaining to the Haiti earthquake that occurred a year ago. Using the Google Maps API, he plotted these tweets on a map to show when they occurred are where they came from.
You can actually see this data visualization in action here and learn more about how Rio created it here.
How would it alter someone’s perception to see only curated stories about the Haiti earthquake or the aftermath of the Gabriel Gifford shooting versus a bird’s eye version Rio’s visualization provides?
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Today we hosted a webinar with Zephyr on using JIRA for Test Management.
Zephyr and its optimized, true 2-way integration with JIRA provides teams with more testing time. There may never be enough testing time, but Zephyr and JIRA are providing teams with close to 100 more hours of testing time per ten person team.
With Zephyr and JIRA, testers will be able to do everything they need to do with JIRA from within Zephyr; submit, search, assign, modify, etc. Testers no longer need to toggle between multiple apps and reorient themselves every time. Plus, all JIRA issue metrics are inherited into the Zephyr dashboard which offers software teams a holistic, consolidated view of all their testing assets dynamically and in real-time; issues, test cases, documentation (incl. Confluence), requirements (incl. Greenhopper), test automation, as well as full traceability.
From an administrative database perspective, Zephyr uses the JIRA database - no duplicating of the database. This architecture means accuracy and provides teams with more testing time rather than worrying about syncing, end user duplication errors, conflicts and other pitfalls.
There was a lot of interest in this webinar based on how many registered, how many attended live and how many questions came in during Q&A. See the video now:
For past webinars, please hop on over to Atlassian TV where you can sort videos by products and categories. For upcoming webinars, please visit our events page. If you would like to be in our webinar series, please contact us.
Also, don't forget about following us on
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Web design community is strong and hard-working. We have plenty of useful resources, tools and services created, developed and released every single day: apart from goodies such as free fonts or icons, there are also many educational resources and little time-savers that can significantly improve designer’s workflow. We permanently look out for the new projects and support them by presenting them on Twitter, Facebook, in our e-mail newsletter and, evidently, in Smashing Magazine’s posts.
Today we are glad to present one of such posts: an overview of handy new resources for web designers; most of them were released recently, but some of them are a bit older. Still, they were included to supplement the overview, making the post more comprehensive and complete. Please feel free to discuss the featured resources in the comments to this post. And, of course, thank you guys for creating and maintaining all these useful resources. Your efforts are deeply appreciated.
Fonts in Use
This site presents a catalogue for real-world typography samples and innovations in branding, advertising, signage and publishing. The regularly updated collection of trends and case studies is commented on by typography experts and gurus from around the world. The sharp, interesting comments and discussions will keep you engaged, all backed up by real examples.
Note and Point: Keynote and PowerPoint Gallery
Note and Point highlights the most beautiful Keynote, PDF and PowerPoint work on the Web, which happens to be mostly Web design-related, although various topics are covered. No doubt these presentations — which really do look that much better — might surprise you by the attention given to color, illustrations and typography.
Free High-Quality HTML Email Templates
The page presents 38 free HTML email templates (including PSD and HTML files), created by talented professional designers. Every template has been tested in more that 20 popular email clients, including Outlook 2010, Gmail, Lotus Notes, Apple Mail and the iPhone. All of the Photoshop documents are layered and ready to be tweaked. You can download all of the templates for free (320 MB) and use them for any private or commercial project. In case you use Campaign Monitor to send out newsletters, you’ll also get Campaign Monitor’s templates as an extra goodie. Mailchimp users can choose from the professional templates for Mailchimp.
The Grammar Cheat Sheet
Never mix up your dashes again, learn how to set quotations marks and remind yourself to keep paragraphs short and topical. Overall, this article is a nice little overview of suggestions that would help you improve the quailty of your copy. For a closer examination of what else might go wrong, check out “The Trouble With EM ‘n EN (and Other Shady Characters)†by Peter K Sheerin.
FPO: For Print Only
For Print Only is a blog that is dedicated to everything related to pint design. FPO celebrates that print is not dead by showcasing the most compelling printed projects. Print is alive and well as witnessed by this well organized and inspirational resource.
Graphic Atlas: History of Printing
The site is a virtual study collection that showcases printing processes from early woodcuts to modern digital print. The print-identification tool guides you through a number of explorations that replicate the experience of identifying prints using common tools. Among other things, you’ll learn about such printing techniques as relief, letterpress, gravure, silver-dye bleach, dye sublimation and direct thermal. The object explorer allows you to view two images side by side to compare traits across processes. Characteristics such as size, format, color, texture, sheen and layer structure are explained as well.
Smarthistory
Smarthistory.org is a free and open, not-for-profit art history textbook. The website covers a wide variety of the artwork usually found in art history classes, ranging from ancient cultures to post-colonialism. In addition to the audio and video, Smarthistory contains articles and images organized by style and chronology. As a bonus, the user interface itself is worth looking at. The appealing design and intuitive navigation (which allows you to browse by era, style, artist and theme) makes this experience not only educational but enjoyable. A comprehensive overview of the seeds that helped sew the graphic design field.
The Photoshop Etiquette Manifesto for Web Designers
This site lays out a number of guidelines for creating Photoshop files and workflows that are conducive to productivity and team collaboration. By following these guidelines, you make it easier for others to work with your files, and more likely that your project will go smoothly. Some of the things included are common-sense (proofread before exporting), but others aren’t necessarily something you’d think of if you’re not used to collaborating or working on big projects (use folders, keep logos as vector smart objects). It also includes helpful illustrations for each example, so there’s no confusion.
Desks Near Me
This site features places all over the world that designers and developers might like to work in, be they offices or cafés. The website provides detailed information, including hours of operation and reviews. Some places charge a small fee for use, and many throw in a few goodies like food, drink and access to equipment.
Dark Design Patterns
Dark Design Patterns aims to expose these black-hat designs whose sole aim is to misdirect and deceive visitors. Anti-usability design patterns that are currently identified on the website include the “Roach Motel,†“Bait and Switch,†“Privacy Zuckering†and “Forced Information Disclosure,†among others. Examples of each are included, and visitors can add their own in the comments on each page. It’s a great website to show clients when they ask you to implement a questionable “feature†on their website.
The Anatomy of a Perfect Landing Page
Formstack explains how design translates to users and ten key landing page features that draw them in. A useful breakdown of elements to include in your designs and things to keep in mind during your design-work.
100 Principles for Designing Logos and Building Brands
Inspiration can come from anywhere, but sometimes the simpler the better. From Brand Identity Essentials, here are some principals for designing logos and building brands. These cover example shapes, consistency, voice, meaning and flexibility.
Design Is History
A wonderful reference site for all designers and provides brief overviews of a wide range of topics — for us, designers, it is improtant to understand where design originates from.
NounProject
NounProject provides a huge collection of highly recognizable symbols, available for free download and use. The designers are committed to quality in what they do, and so the icons are indeed designed very well.
Ethics for Web Designers
Robot Regime is dedicated to ethics and Web design, and it discusses what our ethical obligations are — to ourselves, our colleagues and our clients. The site already features some nice pieces, including posts about fair pricing, misrepresenting yourself as a designer and giving clients what they want.
Politely Decline Speculative Work
“I won’t do free design work to win your business — here’s why†is a Web page that offers a stock letter you can send to clients explaining why spec work is bad for everyone involved. It’s concise and professional, and it presents clear arguments against spec work, with links to additional information. Plus, you can personalize the letter by adding the recipient’s name to the end of the URL.
Type Tips
A nice short overview of quick useful tips on all things related to Web typography by Harry Roberts from CSS Wizardry.
OnTwik
The website brings together lectures, screencasts and conferences from around the world. Both expert and novice developers and designers should be able to find topics of interest, whether it’s CSS and HTML5 or start-ups and creativity. Ontwik is free, and anyone can suggest content for the website; you can even submit your own lectures.
Design Moo
“Join together and share valuable free Web design resources.†This could be the slogan of this design community, created and curated by front-end developer Chris Wallace. The project is a network of designers and a high-quality collection of free design resources: fonts, icons, illustrations, patterns, textures and Web layouts. All goodies are tagged for easy navigation, and you can follow new releases on Twitter. You might want to check Boxtuffs and Premium Pixels as well, another websites featuring free high-quality resources.
Design Kindle: Free High-Quality Design Files
This site offers a ton of free high-quality design files that you might actually want to use, all without restrictions on personal or commercial use. Everything from design elements to images to full themes is included. Design Kindle doesn’t have a big library of files just yet, but more are sure to be added soon.
365psd: A Free PSD Every Day
Every day, this site offers a free PSD file for you to download. These files are almost all design elements that you can use in Web and application designs, including buttons, progress bars, navigation elements and more, and they are well designed. Currently, there are more than 300 days worth of freebies, all tagged, browsable and searchable.
Guidelines for Mobile Web App Design
This article presents a comprehensive list of links to official user interface and user experience guidelines from various manufacturers. The guidelines include samples, tips and descriptions of common weaknesses for mobile platforms such as iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian, webOS and Mee Go. Many of the guidelines focus on native application development, but they can be applied to design of mobile applications in general, too.
List of Freely Available Programming Books
Here is a list of programming books on programming languages or about computers in general with open-source licenses and others. If you’ve been searching for some freely available programming books on the Internet, this list will surely give you some good tips.
Secure Password Generator
The tool lets you enter parameters, including the length of the password, whether to include uppercase and/or lowercase letters or numbers or punctuation and whether to eliminate characters that resemble each other (such as i and l, 1 and I, and o and 0). Then, just select the number of passwords to generate, and it returns a list. It even includes phonetics for each password to make it easier to read out loud (in case you’re giving a password to someone over the phone, for example).
Keyonary
This tool is a nice little application for finding shortcuts in Mac OS X, Photoshop and so on. Currently, more than 300 Photoshop shortcuts are available. Simply type the name of application in the search box, and it spits out a long shortcut list.
Let’s Swap
A place where artists and designers can swap art for free. The site is an experiment: if you are an artist or designer, you probably have something hanging around and you’ll be willing to swap it for something else. The site gives you the opportunity to do exactly that; just put out an open invitation and see what happens. Very interesting idea.
Starting with Git: Cheat Sheet
After freshening up her git skills, Loma Jane Mitchell shares her ‘cheat sheet’ — the commands that she uses on a day-to-day basis when working with git. Also note that GUI tools and IDE plugins are available for Git, so it is worth taking a look at what is available for the development environment you use.
Rails 3 Cheat Sheets
The site provides Rails 3 Cheat Sheets for Activemodel, Actionmailer and Actioncontroller, XSS protection and UJS, Activerelation, Bundler and Routing API.
Bounce Rate Demystified
If you are doing business on the web and have Google Analytics set up for your website, it’s very likely that you know the bounce rate for your website. But, do you know anything about how it’s calculated, what your industry’s average bounce rate is or even what factors affect your bounce rate? Inspired by common questions, KissMetrics created this infographic to give you answers and some tips to help you improve your bounce rate.
InspireUX
User Experience quotes and articles to inspire and connect the UX community.
Quotes on Design
A growing collection of useful quotes by designers for designers and developers.
IA TV
Information Architecture Television features a collection of videos from around the Web that all focus on information architecture. Hundreds of videos dating back to 2008 offer a great wealth of information on everything from design thinking to usability.
The Bazaar
On this site you can create galleries, upload your artworks and specify your products which you would like to sell. Once the buyer has checked out and has made the payment, your artwork is printed, wrapped and delivered.
A Collection of Materials Related to Interaction Design
This IxD library provides you with an ultimate collection of posts, articles, PDFs as well as videos related to interaction design for you to read and gain more knowledge and inspiration.
Pinterest — Catalog the Things You Love
Pinterest is a social catalog service. Think of it as a virtual pinboard — a place where you can post collections of things you love, and “follow†collections created by people with great taste.
WordPress Snippets
WP-Snippets can come in handy when you’re designing a WordPress theme. Rather than start from scratch when building some functionality or another, why not grab a snippet of code that has already been tested? The website includes many useful snippets, from highlighting author comments to listing random posts to filtering the loop. Make sure to read the comments for each snippet because they could contain helpful information on whether the code works in certain WordPress versions.
CSS Terms and Definitions
This article discusses the consistency in the use of terms with reagrds to CSS.
CSS Vocabulary
“I realized quite late that to say something meaningful about CSS, I would have to know exactly what the terms used means. Often, I have asked for help in forums, and have got stuck wondering how exactly to describe my problem. So I thought it would be a good idea to describe all the common terms of CSS.†A nice overview of common CSS terms and definitions and a good addition to the article “CSS Terms and Definitions†described above..
Bagcheck
BagCheck lets you share your personal collections and also lets you browse through other ‘bags’ to find out common hobbies or activities that helps you connect with people and their interests.
ManyBooks: Repository of Free E-Books
This site offers a huge collection of public domain e-books, as well as other newer books that have been released in the public domain or under Creative Commons licenses, in a variety of formats. You can download classics such as Pride and Prejudice, as well as newer books such as The Gospel of the Knife, in formats such as ePub, Mobi, PDB and even PDF and plain text. Books are also browsable by genre, author and title. And of course, there is a search function.
Should I Work for Free?
Who’s ready to stop working for free? Hopefully you are! If you have any doubts, consult this handy chart below. Start in the middle and work your way to your answer.
Email Etiquette for the Super-Busy
In a recent blog post, venture capitalist Fred Wilson talked about his ongoing struggle with email management and the various solutions he’s tried, concluding: “Every time I make a productivity gain, the volume eventually overwhelms me.†It’s a familiar problem. We’re all extremely busy, and we all get too much email. So what to do?
The Future of Advertising
An article on advertising; stating that advertising is on the cusp of its first creative revolution since the 1960s brings us to a new prespective. This involves the ad industry that just might get left behind. Click here to read and find out more. Very interesting read.
Why Your Form Buttons Should Never Say ‘Submit’
When you see a ‘Submit’-button on a form, what comes to your mind? One could easily reason that clicking the button submits the user’s information into the system for processing. A ‘Submit’-button describes what the system does well, but it doesn’t describe what the user does at all. The article suggests to stop using the wording ‘Submit’ on buttons and provide more meaningful, task-specific names instead.
© Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2011. | Permalink | Post a comment | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: education, resources, time-saving, tools, useful
Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address
No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don't want to die to get there.
And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it.
And that is as it should be. Because death is very likely the single best invention of life.It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new.
[…]
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
None of us should ever have to face death to accept the inflexible and, too-often, novel sense of scarcity that it introduces.
In fact, it'd be great if we could each skip needing outside permission to be awesome by not waiting until the universe starts tapping its watch.
A simple start would involve each of us learning to care just a little more about a handful of things that simply aren't allowed to leave with us--whether today, tomorrow, or whenever. Because, I really believe a lot of nice things would start to happen if we also stopped waiting to care. A whole lot of nice things.
If that sounds like fancy incense for hippies and children, perhaps in a way that seems frankly un-doable for someone as practical and important and immortal as yourself, then go face death.
Go get cancer. Or, go get crushed by a horse Or, go get hit by a van. Or, go get separated from everything you ever loved forever.
Then, wonder no longer whether caring about the modest bit of time you have here is only for fancy people and the terminally-ill.
Because, the sooner you care, the better you'll make. The better you'll do. And the better you'll live.
Please don't wait. The universe won't.
â€No One Needs Permission to Be Awesome†was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 17, 2011. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"
If you’re not familiar with Dropbox, it’s free desktop synchronization software that lets you store a copy of a file on your computer and then access that same file from anywhere. You can store up to 2GB for free. Go over that amount, and it’ll cost you $10 a month for 50GB and $20 a month for 100GB.
Here’s the scoop from our experts for three different levels of Dropbox users:
Sync between two computers: This is the most basic task, where you install the Dropbox application onto two computers and synchronize files between them.
Undelete: We were so relieved when we first discovered this feature. Simply go to the Dropbox website, click the arrow that appears to the right of the file when you position your cursor over it, and select Previous Versions. Look at that — it’s your own Time Machine.
Share a folder to collaborate: We do this all the time here at Mashable, where everyone has access to the same files, and if someone else is working on that file, it lets us know so we won’t overwrite each other.
Learn the keyboard shortcuts: Just like any application where you’re a power user, you can work much more efficiently with shortcuts, jumping all over the place by pressing just a few keys. For example, you can show/hide deleted files just by pressing “d.†Move up a directory with the letter “u.†Check out all 13 keyboard shortcuts here.
Password/Vault synching: Apps such as 1Password, KeePass and Tiny Password will let you store your secrets in your Dropbox, and then access them from any other device where you have these applications installed. Or, do like we do and use LastPass, a browser plug-in that performs all the synchronization in the cloud for you itself.
Sync between desktop and iOS device: Here’s what one expert called “beautiful, quick syncing,†where you never have to click “save†to save your notes. Mac users, he recommends using Notational Velocity on the desktop and PlainText on any IOS device to sync notes through Dropbox. For PC users, you can store notes in .txt format (using an applet like Notepad) and save them in Dropbox, where you can open them using the PlainText app (which we love) on your iOS device.
Sync music for your car: As our expert tells it, “I’m using Dropbox to sync a small netbook in the trunk of my car with my music library, and then have that connected to my head unit for playback. Anytime I’ve added new music to the library on my home PC, the next time I get in my car I will set my Android phone as a mobile hotspot, use that to hook the netbook up online, and I have the local Dropbox account on the machine selectively synced out of every folder except my music. It syncs the new music while I’m driving around and I now have way more songs in my car than I could ever fit on an iPod, including my favorite new edition of Arcadio.â€
Chrome data syncing: Chrome browser users, try moving your Chrome data file to Dropbox, and your entire session — everything, including windows and settings, opens just how you want on any other computer. Our expert warns of a downside, though: conflicted copies of your settings files if Chrome is open on two computers at the same time. Here’s more info for the adventurous.
Compute anywhere: “One of the lesser known features of Windows Server 2008 R2 (and the currently-in-beta Windows Home Server “Vail†which is based on R2) is called RemoteApp. Basically it allows you to launch a self-contained streaming instance of an application that is installed on the server and delivered via
a remote desktop session where you only see the app on the client side.
“It’s cool because, on a Windows machine, it can be run one of two ways: via an RDP file, or taking it a step further, using an MSI installer package which makes it look like the app is installed on the local machine, complete with file associations. You can also run multiple instances from multiple remote locations at the same time. This is particularly cool for special file types like PSD’s where it may not be convenient or possible to install the app on the remote machine.
“Tying in to Dropbox, I had two folders: one called RDP and one called MSI. I was able to take my apps with me anywhere and if it was a Windows machine I had control of, I was able to “install†the remote app as well. The end goal was to be able to remotely launch a single copy of iTunes from anywhere and possibly even map the USB ports (you can set that up when you make the MSI) so I could sync my iPhone remotely. It was also great for controlling apps that needed some horsepower (i.e. Handbrake) from much more underpowered devices.â€
Commenters, let us know how these tips worked for you, and tell us more ways to get the most out of Dropbox.
We’d like to thank all those at Dropbox who helped us prepare this post.
More About: Dropbox Tips, expert tips, file sync, hacks, how to
