TutWow » Roundups

7 Sleek NetNewsWire Styles

Ben Lind — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 04:18:14 +0000

Though there are many, many RSS feed readers out there for Mac OS, my absolute favorite is one called NetNewsWire. It is simple and streamlined, and it makes it very easy to plow through LOTS of feed items if you’re like me and have over 300 subscriptions.

Below I’ve compiled a list of seven of my favorite NetNewsWire “styles”, which are basically just different looks that you can give to it.

Feast your eyes on this goodness, and choose the one(s) you want to install!

Default

For reference, here is the default NetNewsWire style that comes pre-loaded with every installation:

JetReader

Bullit

Serif Black

Serif White

ReadLight

Hardcover

Daring Serif

10 Essential iPhone Apps

Ben Lind — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:36:12 +0000

With over 150,000 apps in the iPhone app store, it can be hard to sort through and find the worthwhile ones. Admit it – there are lots (and I mean lots) of apps that shouldn’t have been allowed to slip through Apple’s approval process, and are only downloaded to be immediately deleted. I’ve had an iPhone for quite a while now, and have downloaded an immense amount of apps (32 gigabytes is really nice…). Currently, I have almost 100 apps sitting on my home screen – my choice picks from months of evaluating and sorting. Out of these hundred, I have selected what I consider the top 10 apps of all time and put them in order below. Enjoy!

1. Evernote – Free or $5/month

Whenever you get a new gadget, there is always the initial scramble to find the easiest and best way to do important tasks, whether it be viewing photos or checking email. One such task, note taking, is on the top of the list, and I personally think the best note taking app of all time is Evernote. It has both iPhone and desktop apps, and it syncs between both, so you can make notes on your desktop and view/edit them on your phone. The interface is easy, and you can make text, photo and audio notes to capture anything that comes your way. The free version of Evernote has a 40MB/month limit, which is plenty for me and my simple note taking, but if you need more space, you can pay $5/month and get 500MB.

2. Facebook – Free

Who doesn’t have Facebook? Almost everyone you know has it, and that’s what makes it so powerful. Their official app does an amazing job of simulating the full website, so you can do virtually everything on your iPhone that you can do on your desktop.

3. 2Do – $6.99 or Lite

In the current GTD craze, todo apps are becoming more and more popular. I’ve tried many iPhone apps, but the best I’ve found is one called 2Do. It has a beautiful interface, it’s simple to use, and it syncs with a server for extra backup security. If you don’t want to pay $7 for it, they have a free version that is almost as good as the full one (it doesn’t have sync or themes).

4. Dictionary! – Free

I’m always scrambling around looking for a dictionary to look up unknown words, so I thought I would see if I could find something for the iPhone. As the saying goes, “There’s an app for that!” Enter Dictionary! – the fastest, light-weight English dictionary on the iPhone. Why should you try it? Well, it’s free.

5. myLite – Free

When I first downloaded myLite (the pocket flashlight), I thought that it was going to be some extremely pointless app with only a white screen. However, as it turns out, myLite has a wide array of cool effects that you can use in many situations. Just to give you a few, it has Strobe (basic strobe light), Color in Motion (changes colors when you wave the phone around), Police Car (flashes red and blue), SOS Flash (flashes dit-dit-dit-dah-dah-dah-dit-dit-dit), and, my favorite, Rock Concert (a cigarette lighter that you can flick on and off).

6. Pandora – Free

Everyone has their favorite on-demand-radio service, and mine happens to be Pandora. It is easy to set up, has great song suggestions, and even has an accompanying website for use on your desktop. One thing I love about Pandora is that it has account support, which means that when you sign up, it tracks every song you like/dislike and customizes the radio accordingly. So if I was listening to a song I really don’t like, I would just press the “dislike” button and it would never be played again on that station.

7. Momento – $2.99

Have you ever wanted to keep a diary or journal, but could never find the time to write it? I know exactly how you feel, so I went on a quest to find a good quality diary app on the iPhone. I ran into something even better than I had hoped – Momento, a $2.99 app that is worth every cent.

Basically, Momento lets you record little “moments” or “snapshots” of your life whenever you have a minute to spare. If you have a great experience, all you have to do is grab your iPhone and write a few words about it in this app.

Other features include importing twitter and facebook statuses to the “stream” in the app and adding tags, people, ratings, locations, and even photos to your moments.

8. WordPress – Free

For you die-hard WordPress bloggers out there (you know who you are), the WordPress app is a must-have. Inspiration attack on the go? Never fear – open up this app and create a new post draft for your next article.

The new version added many features, so that you can now add/edit posts and pages, sort through and reply to your comments, and even control multiple blogs from the same app.

9. Fring – Free

Not only can you post to your blog from your iPhone, but you can now chat with your friends in real-time. Fring, a slick app with push support, enables you to hook up with your contacts on Skype, Google Talk, MSN, Yahoo, AIM, and more. You can hold multiple conversations at the same time, and even better, you can exit the app and get notifications when someone is chatting with you.

10. Eliminate Pro – Free

What would an iPhone app list be without a game? I have downloaded and tried lots and lots of games on my phone, trying to find the one that both fits my style and has enough gameplay time. I have to admit, there are a lot of good games out there (maybe I will do an article rounding them up sometime), but none of them come close to the replayability (computers create so many instances for making up new words, don’t they?) of Eliminate Pro, the best First Person Shooter on the iPhone. You create a character, battle either robots or other humans around the world to earn “credits”, and then spend those credits on new weapons, armor, and upgrades. The more credits you earn, the higher the level of your character will become, giving the game an endless feel.

Conclusion

These 10 apps are essential for getting the most out of your iPhone. Not only do they increase productivity, but most of them are free, meaning you can delete them with no regrets if they don’t meet your expectations. So what are you waiting for? Go check them out!

12 Incredibly Useful Logo Inspiration Sites

Ben Lind — Sun, 10 May 2009 02:26:30 +0000

A whole lot of sites have been popping up in the past few months that all have the same topic – design inspiration. It seems like many designers today are having problems getting inspired for their work, and don’t know what to do about it.

Design inspiration sites are sites that link to interesting and cool designs that can be used to “boost the creativity” of other designers. Usually the links are to web or illustration designs, but sometimes a gallery links to creative logos or brands.

Below I’ve put together a list of 10 of these such sites that link to cool logos. If you’re in the process of creating your own brand, then these sites can really help you out.

1. Logo Pond

2. Logo Galleria

3. Logo Faves

4. Logospire

5. Creattica

6. Logo Fury

7. Logo of the Day

8. LogoMoose

9. Design Dosage

10. LogoGala

11. Logotwo

12. Logolog

13. Logoed

And Finally…

Though it isn’t exactly logo inspiration, YourLogoMakeMeBarf.com is a great site to go to if you want to know how not to design your logo. Warning: not for the queasy-stomached!

10+ Slick Smooth Scrolling Portfolios

Ben Lind — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 19:37:51 +0000

If you’re in the process of building your design portfolio, then you’re probably scouring the internet looking for other cool portfolios people have created that you can draw inspiration from. While doing this, you’ve more than likely run into some “smooth scrolling portfolios”, or in other words, portfolios that use javascript smooth scrolling to navigate throughout the page.

I always find these types of portfolios especially fascinating because of the amazing effects you can achieve with smooth scroll. You aren’t just limited to vertical scrolling, though. You can scroll horizontally, diagonally, or basically however else you can think of.

Below is a list of 10+ of my favorite sites that utilize smooth scrolling to impress their visitors. But before we get to the list, let me give you an idea of how to implement this effect on your own site.

There are many ways you can use smooth scrolling on your own site, but my personal favorite is the dfSmooth Scroll script. To use it, go to the download page, download the script, and simply follow the instructions on that page to set it up.

1. Moziweb

2. Andrew Greig

3. Carrot Creative

4. Red Crown Studio

5. shn.me

6. Edit Studios

7. Black Estate Vineyard

8. GIANT Creative

9. Dean Oakley

10. Greg Wallace

11. Work at Play

7 Free Twitter Apps for Your Mac

Ben Lind — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 01:01:00 +0000

Twitter, the amazingly popular “what are you doing” site, has quickly become one of the largest social networks on the internet. Because of this, users have found lots of ways to make posting to it even easier than going to twitter.com and typing in their 140 character status. Now, not only can you text message Twitter to post your statuses, but you can install widgets on your blog, put the Twitter widget on Google Desktop, and even download Twitter applications for your iPhone/iPod Touch.

If you’re like me, and just recently got a Mac, you’re probably looking around to find a good Twitter app to use with your new operating system. Below I’ve put together a list of some of the best Twitter apps that I’ve found on my Mac. Most of them are free, so you don’t have to worry about your thin wallet disappearing altogether.

Twitterific

(image by the Iconfactory)

Twitterific is the most popular Twitter client for the Mac, having a great-looking interface and lots of nice features like multiple account support, auto-refreshing, and lots of keyboard shortcuts. If you get the free version, you’ll notice that there are ads displayed periodically along with the tweets. This can be removed if you pay $14.95, but otherwise the free version is fully functional.

Link to Twitterific

DestroyTwitter

My personal favorite Twitter app, DestroyTwitter has all of the features you would want in a Twitter app – auto-refreshing, URL shortening, searching the Twitter database, and more. It has a great dark interface, and multiple “tabs” where you can see your friends’ tweets, your replies, saved tweets, messages, sent message, and others.

Update: In the new beta version 1.5.1, you can now download free themes to customize DestroyTwitter even more. Just go to their website and look for the ones that catch your eye.

Link to DestroyTwitter

Lounge

The Lounge Twitter app, still in beta, has some interesting features besides the ones in the previously mentioned apps. Some of these include pressing the spacebar to scroll up one tweet and looking at your following/followers lists.

Link to Lounge

EventBox

For $15, you get this very sophisticated Twitter app from the Cosmic Machine. Not only does it do everything you’d want, but it also supports Growl notifications and other services like Facebook, Flickr, Reddit, and even Google Reader.

Link to EventBox

TweetDeck

TweetDeck, similar to DestroyTwitter, has multiple tabs for different tweet streams. You can view your replies, messages, friends’ tweets, and more. Though it is still in beta, it has a lot of potential.

Link to TweetDeck

Twhirl

Twirl not only does a lot of the features mentioned above, but also has support for identi.ca, laconi.ca, Friendfeed, and Seesmic. It has a very clean interface which can be customized with your own colors to fit your style.

Link to Twirl

AlertThingy

(image by AlertThingy)

AlertThingy also has support for other services besides Twitter. You can see updates from your Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, and more accounts all in one place.

Link to AlertThingy

Conclusion

As you can tell, there are many different Twitter apps that you can use on your Mac. They all offer different advantages – some have support for multiple services, some let you shorten URLs, and some have multiple tabs for you to see different tweet streams.

If you find a different app that you like and want to share with everyone, let me know in the comments and I’ll post it here!

34 Websites That Are Still in 2008

Ben Lind — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 17:11:33 +0000

Every year, around this time, I love going to popular websites and seeing if they have changed their footer copyright dates yet. I guess you could call it one of my hobbies. This year, I was especially surprised with some of the websites I saw, so I thought I would share them with you.

Before I actually get to the list, I want to give you a quick tip on how to keep your blog updated forever without having to manually change the footer date. You can use this tip on any website that supports php 4 and 5. Let’s say that your blog’s footer looked something like this:

Copyright © 2009 TutorialWow.com - All Rights Reserved

To make it never have to be updated, just change it to this:

Copyright ©  TutorialWow.com - All Rights Reserved

As you can see, all I did was replace “2009″ with “< ?php echo date(“Y”); ?>”. This simply outputs the current year number, and makes for a care-free footer!

Without further nonsense, here are 34 websites that are still in 2008 (or even 2007 for some) – in no particular order.

Google

BuySellAds

You the Designer

WebUrbanist

Speckyboy

Six Revisions

GoMediaZine

Design Bump

Designflavr

David Airey

CreativeSync

Color Overload

CrazyLeaf

FBrushes

Think Design

Digital Artist Toolbox

Hongkiat

CSS Count

Knowtebook

BrushKing

DesignNerd

Vectips

BittBox

Veerle’s Blog

Colorburned

Twitter

Noupe

ImJustCreative

Just Creative Design

My Ink Blog

Fuel Your Creativity

9rules

Function

Web Designer Wall

Enough of my rantings – go update your blog footer!

16 Font Articles That You Should Read

Ben Lind — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 23:01:00 +0000

Picture this: You’re sitting in front of your computer, you have Photoshop up, and you’re staring at a blank white document with nothing in it. You are trying to get a message across to an audience, but you just can’t think of the right font to use that would fit the mood you want to create. What do you do?

Below, I’ve rounded up some of the best font articles on the internet to help you out. So without further ado, “16 Font Articles That Your Should Read”…