MakeUseOf.com: “Cool Websites and Tools [December 19th]” plus 6 more |  |
- Cool Websites and Tools [December 19th]
- Top 10 Websites For Free & Legal MP3 Music Downloads
- Make Your Printer Inventory A Breeze With Page Countster
- 10 Common SEO Mistakes that can Destroy Your Website [Part I]
- 10 Must-know Introductory Photoshop Skills For Beginner Photographer
- 4 Sites To Watch & Download Video Game Cutscenes Online
- WriteMonkey – A Simple Text Editor For The Easily Distracted
| Cool Websites and Tools [December 19th] Posted: 19 Dec 2009 07:31 PM PST
(1) OrderPizza – is a very simple yet highly useful online pizza ordering app for the iPhone. It eliminates the need to remember or search information about pizza parlors. Once you launch the app on your iPhone, it would show you a list of nearby locations that you can deliver/pick-up pizza from. Read more: OrderPizza: Cool iPhone App For Online Pizza Ordering
(2) EzyImageResizer – What do you do if you are blogging and you need to insert images? You have the images and they are HUGE! Way too big for your site. They would slow the entire site down, not to mention that they would take up a big portion of screen real estate. Go and check out the simple batch image resizing tool EzyImageResizer. Read more: EzyImageResizer: Batch Image Resizing Tool Online (3) ReKindleIT – Sometimes you may come across webpages that are worth reading on your Kindle. RekindleIT is a javascript bookmark that allows you to send webpages from your browser for quick reading on your Kindle. Read more: ReKindleIT: Easily Send Webpages To Your Kindle (4) Templatr – Do you need a quick way to create custom wordpress template? Then you should bookmark Templatr. This website allows you to generate simple, ready to use templates on the fly. Read more: Templatr: Create Custom Wordpress Templates (5) TeuxDeux – There are tons of to-do apps and task managers around but none of them have a greater focus on design than TeuxDeux. TeuxDeux is a simple and free web-based to-do list application that is visually compelling and highly intuitive. Read more: TeuxDeux: Minimalist Web-Based To-Do List Tool These are just half of the websites that we discovered in the last couple of days. If you want us to send you daily round-ups of all cool websites we come across, leave your email here. Or follow us via RSS feed. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!
Related posts
| ||
| Top 10 Websites For Free & Legal MP3 Music Downloads Posted: 19 Dec 2009 03:31 PM PST
Music stimulates the brain. It’s this deep rooted cultural pleasure that drives us to consume more and more of it. If you’re sick of the commercial pabulum and ready to discover new and fresh artists, dive into this list to explore ten of the best sites for legal and free mp3 downloads. Get your mp3 player connected, here comes cargo! 10. Free Kids MusicAs the name reveals, this page hosts free music for children.
Artists can be listed alphabetically. A separate category is traditional music, which contains songs such as My Bonnie, Amazing Grace, Kumbaya, Frère Jacques, or The Alphabet Song.
9. DramacoreDramacore is a netlabel that publishes music under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
The people behind Dramacore furthermore emphasize that their netlabel is a serious project. The website is hosted professionally and funded until 2012. 8. MP3.comThe idea of MP3.com is to provide artists with the opportunity to promote their work, and music fans the chance to discover new talents.
MP3.com has been around for quite some time and is the most comprehensive archive for free music downloads. Being so popular, it also attracts some of the bigger performers. You will find streaming music from the Pet Shop Boys, Eminem, 50 Cent, Linkin Park, and The Beatles. Free MP3 downloads are available from thousands of artists. Unfortunately, the free music tracks are very hard to browse or find, unless you know what you’re looking for. 7. Last.fmLast.fm not only provides free music streams and recommendations, but also features some great tracks for free download.
Currently, there are over 200 free mp3 downloads, including songs from Jaydiohead, Peter Björn and John, The Thermals, White Lies, John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Guns N’ Roses, Moby, and Nine Inch Nails. You can sort the free downloads by genre. Check out my previous review on TheLastRipper if you want to record Last.FM tracks to your computer. 6. AmazonA little known fact is that even Amazon offers tons of free mp3s.
You can choose from over 1,000 tracks, which can be sorted by several criteria. The top five genres are Rock (338 songs), Alternative Rock (275 songs), Classical (195 songs), International (158 songs), and Pop (134 songs). Artists include Calexico, Ingrid Michaelson, The Lemonheads, Alice Cooper, and Paul McCartney. But you need to be a US resident and have a US Amazon account to be able to download the tracks. So this one is only suitable for our American readers. 5. 7digital7digital is a global digital media platform.
It’s their business to sell mp3s, but they also provide a great collection of free downloads, which are updated weekly. The sample tracks are categorized into rock, hip-hop, reggae / roots, various, and audiobooks. 4. Spinner Mp3 of the DaySpinner is an AOL project, which runs an MP3 of the day section.
Some better known artists featured recently were of Montreal, The Swell Season, The Futureheads, Simian Mobile Disco, and The XX. Clicking on MP3 OF THE DAY under EXCLUSIVES on the left-hand side opens Spinner’s web-based radio station. 3. NME The Daily DownloadThe UK’s New Music Express (NME) supplies music addicts with their Daily Download fix.
Generally, songs can be downloaded days, weeks and even months after they were published on The Daily Download. Recent artists include Paper Route (recently saw them supporting Paramore), Yeasayer, The Antlers, Exlovers covering Chris Isaak, Joensuu 1685 covering Bruce Springsteen, Röyksopp, Maximo Park, The Prodigy, and Metallica. 2. Free Music ArchiveThe Free Music Archive is an interactive library of high-quality, legal audio downloads.
The music on this page was picked by established audio curators and pre-cleared for online use. It’s suitable for podcasts, videos or any other format of digital use and publishing. You can browse the material by curator, genre, recently added highlights, and most interesting highlights. 1. EpitonicEpitonic is a curated site, which offers free mp3 downloads along with a web-based audio stream, artist profiles, and reviews.
The site can help you explore new genres with short audio guided tours. Go to genres/radio to have a look at the walk-throughs. Epitonic’s releases include artists like Grand National, Groove Armada, Zero 7, Mogwai, Belle and Sebastian, and Peaches. When logged in you can create an individual playlist of songs hosted on the site. Where do you explore and discover music, and how do you retrieve your music fix? Image credits: uqaldew Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too. Related posts
| ||
| Make Your Printer Inventory A Breeze With Page Countster Posted: 19 Dec 2009 01:31 PM PST
The creator of this printer inventory tool created it for his environment where they needed quick tallies of what was going on the network with printers – and it had to be easy enough for a sales person to use – gasp! Go ahead and check out the download here. It was created for an ongoing contest from Donation Coder. The download is Windows only and weighs in at a meager 278KB. What more can we ask for? Download and run the portable printer inventory tool and you will see a blank chart of a screen that looks like the screenshot below. You will see entries for IP Address, Mac Address, Host Name, Model Name, Serial Number, Total Page Count, Color Page Count and color toner levels. And not only that – this thing runs VERY VERY fast. Faster than any other network scanner I have used before.
Now you get to tell it what you want to scan. I tried once with my local subnet and then with a broader range and a different subnet mask. Both scans ran super fast and returned pretty much what I was looking for. If you do not change the community name in your environment leave it at public, but if you do modify it please add your community name here.
It is normal to see errors as it is scanning, if the commands are not understood by the specific printer it is talking to, or your community name has been modified. You will still see results as the scan is running and then you can get a better look at the results when you close the Network Scanning Status window.
Blamo – when my scan was done I saw lots of informational goodness!
Now you can double-click on an entry to get a closer look at it – or even modify its settings! Check it out:
You can change any of the fields and have it save the settings back! Wow pretty impressive. And what is even more impressive is the fact that the application outputs this data to the ever so popular CSV format by clicking on Reporting from the top menu and then Save As…
You can also email the report directly to the person who requested it from here. All in all a very handy and useful portable application for printer inventory or just simple administration. Do you have another free lightweight printer inventory tool? Let us know in the comments! Related posts
| ||
| 10 Common SEO Mistakes that can Destroy Your Website [Part I] Posted: 19 Dec 2009 11:31 AM PST
I initially stumbled upon the industry while I was struggling to win contract bids at freelance project bidding sites in order to earn extra income for my family. I took on a very underpaid role with the owner of a small interior design business who wanted to use a blog attached to his business website in order to draw in potential customers. He wanted what just about every blog owner out there today wants – highly optimized content that would draw in crowds from the search engines. The SEO Learning ProcessHere’s the first thing that I learned the moment I jumped into the SEO pool – the industry is full of sharks and “gurus.” Often, I would find advice from someone who seemed to know what they were talking about, but it turned out the advice was 1990’s-era SEO, filled with common SEO mistakes and no longer an effective technique in today’s Web 2.0 world. And the sharks, – there are some SEO experts so fed up with the bad advice and the SEO scam artists that there are now entire blogs devoted to exposing bad SEO and revealing those common SEO mistakes – such as the aptly-named bad-seo.com.
I pity the folks that make the hit list of a blog like that! With that said, blogs like this serve an important purpose – they educate businesses and blog owners about the serious dangers of hiring an SEO “expert” who either (a) doesn’t really know what they’re doing, and/or (b) makes use of “black hat SEO” techniques that can gather significant immediate traffic, but will ultimately destroy your long term ranking with Google. The Top Ten Most Common SEO Mistakes To AvoidIn the process studying SEO techniques over the years, I learned that many of the older techniques and myths from the 1990’s are not only ineffective anymore, but in some cases they can seriously hurt your website or blog search engine ranking. So I would like to share a few of those SEO mistakes and help you avoid driving your blog or website straight off of the information superhighway and into the ditch. SEO Mistake #1: Packing Meta-Tags Full Of Keywords Will NOT Optimize Your PageDuring the 90’s, the extent of “SEO optimizing” for many webmasters was simply to insert relevant keyword phrases into the meta-tags for a page. Here’s an example of a site that’s heavily focused on the meta-keywords:
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with adding keywords into this field that represents valid information on the page itself, but placing a long list of similar phrases with duplicate words (reaching 10 or 12 phrases) is a major SEO faux pas. And as of this year, September 2009 to be exact, due to many years of webmasters constantly using meta-keywords to spam keywords, Google no longer even looks at the meta-keywords in order to rank your website. This doesn’t mean the meta-keywords are not useful for aligning the page with particular valuable search phrases – but it certainly is nowhere near as valuable as it used to be, and overusing it can put your site at risk for a lower ranking. SEO Mistake #2 & #3: Using The Keywords In Your Title & PermalinksWhen you visit MakeUseOf, you’ll notice that not only are the titles descriptive and relevant to what the article is actually about, but the URL link (otherwise known as the permalink) is as well. Every SEO guru worth his salt knows that the two most effective areas of a webpage that you can get the most bang for your efforts is the title and permalink.
They don’t always necessarily have to the be same, but they do need to focus on the a primary keyword phrase that you’re trying to target with your article. If you don’t target that phrase in your title and permalink, you’re wasting your time and you’ll only reach a small fraction of your intended online audience. In Wordpress, you can set up your permalink to be descriptive like this.
As you can see, I’ve set up my blog TopSecretWriters to use the month/name and post title. Never set it up to use some nonsense numbering system. SEO Mistake #4 & #5: Using Javascript Or Using Only Flash/AJAXI would never suggest that a web designer shouldn’t make use of the latest and greatest website scripting languages that offer a more interactive online experience, but to use scripting to serve up all or a majority of your website content is SEO suicide. Take the website of fashion entrepreneur Marc Ecko for example.
The site is completely written in Flash. It is actually touted by most web design experts as one of the best-designed Flash websites on the net. Flash and AJAX websites are aesthetically superior to most traditional websites, however they struggle when it comes to search engine ranking because there’s virtually nothing for search engines to crawl. The same goes for websites that utilize Javascript to generate web pages on-the-fly depending on user interaction. Search engine crawlers cannot touch those script-generated pages at all. The creator of Marc’s website tried to make up for this by listing about half a page of keywords in the Meta-Keyword tag – but how much will this help now that Google no longer looks at meta-keywords to rank websites? These sort of sites are excellent, but there should always be hand-coded primary HTML content that you can optimize even though there’s Flash on the page. Build Your SEO Optimized Site From The Ground UpThe fact is that SEO optimizing should begin from the moment you lay down the first stone of your website’s foundation. That’s not to say that an existing site can’t be “fixed,” but you’ll see far more success if you get your website off on the right foot from day one. The tips above focus on how your website is built, and the elements that identify each web page to the world. In part two, I’ll discuss the actual content of your page and how you can optimize your site without ruining the quality of your content. Do you have any SEO tips of your own? Did you make any mistakes that you’ve learned from? Share your experiences in the comments section below. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!
Related posts
| ||
| 10 Must-know Introductory Photoshop Skills For Beginner Photographer Posted: 19 Dec 2009 09:31 AM PST
If you don't have a copy of Photoshop, you can download a trial version here. I’m using version CS3 of Photoshop for this article. The skills described in this article should work with the latest, CS4, and previous versions of Photoshop. Here’s a copy of the original image used in this introductory photoshop tutorial. Notice it’s lacking control and saturation of color. It’s a little flat.
1. Duplicate The Background LayerThe first thing you want to get used to doing is making a copy of the background layer of your image. The Layers palette should open by default, but it is also found by clicking on Windows>Layers in the menu bar of Photoshop.
Select the Background Layer and click on the little triangle at the top right of the palette. When the palette options open, click Duplicate Layer, or you can use the shortcut keystroke, Command+J (Mac users) or Alt+J (PC users.) By duplicating the background layer, you can make all types of adjustments to duplicate layers without permanently changing the bottom background layer. If you make some adjustments you don't like, you can drag the duplicate layers (with all the adjustments and effects you made to them) to the trash at the bottom right of the layer palette. 2. Automatic Image AdjustmentsWhen you start learning how to use Photoshop to improve your photos, you might want to try out some of the automatic adjustments that can be made, even if you don't understand the tools themselves. The basic image enhancement and adjustment tools in Photoshop are found under Image>Adjustments in the menu bar. In the Adjustment palette, there are various tools like Levels…, Auto Contrast, Curves, Brightness/Contrast.
To introduce you to these adjustment tools in this introductory photoshop tutorial, I’m going to suggest that you use the automatic and preset features of these tools. As you begin to understand them more, you will make use of manual adjustments. So with your background layer duplicated and selected, click on Image>Adjustments>Auto Levels in the menu bar. When you release the mouse of the menu item, the automatic Levels adjustment should enhance or at least affect the shadow (dark), midtones, and highlights (bright) areas of your image. Often, a photo can be improved in Photoshop with just the automatic adjustments applied.
3. More About LayersNow let's revisit how layers work. Go back to the Layers palette and click on the little eye next the Duplicate layer that you just applied the Auto Layers adjustment to. When you toggle that little eye off, it means that you're turning off the adjustment or effect that you made in that layer. Since the adjusted layer is on top of the background layer like a clear transparency, you can toggle the eye off and on to see how the adjustments are applied to the background layer (also remember: you can drag the duplicate layer to the trash to get rid of the adjustment(s) all together).
4. Automatic CurvesOkay, let’s return to a few other automatic adjustments and enhancements you can make to your photo. Go back to Image>Adjustments and then click on Curves. The Curves box will open. This box may look seriously scary with its grid, points, lines, and ear droppers. But don't worry about that. We're simply going to use some automatic adjustments to see how Curves can impact your photo.
Click on the button next to the word Preset. In the drop-down box, select Medium Contrast (RGB). If you don't see much of a change in the contrast of your photo, go back to the Preset button and try Strong Contrast. You should be able to see the effect of the Preset on your photo before you click OK. Curves works similar to Levels but with more intensity in contrast. Much more could be said about Curves and Levels, but this is just an introduction. You can play around with the points in the Curves box and see how they affect your photo. Remember, the changes you make are non-destructive to your photo, so you can experiment as much as you like. The illustration below explains a little about how the three main points in the grid function. If you make a mess of things, simply click Cancel and start over, or click OK when you're satisfied with how the photo is looking.
5. Make Colors PopOkay, now lets move on to learn about other enhancements that can be made. One of the tools I use on nearly all the images I bring into Photoshop is one called Soft Light. Here’s how it works. Go back to the Layers Palette, drag all the layers, except the background layer to the trash. Click on the Background layer and create another duplicate of it. Now click on the Normal button at the top of the Layers Palette. In the drop-down box, select Soft Light. When selecting this adjustment, it should make the colors of your image pop, or at least intensify the contrast of your images. The contrast of most digital images always need to be improved. This technique does that job extremely well without too much loss to detail.
If the Softlight application is too strong, select the Opacity button at the top of the Layers Palette and decrease the opacity of the layer/effect.
6. Black-And-White ConversionOne easy and popular tool you want to know about in Photoshop is how to make a black-and-white conversion of an image. There are entire books written about black-and-white or monochrome conversion using Photoshop, but I'm going to show you a quick, down and dirty way to do it.
Again, duplicate the background layer, and this time click on the little black/white circle at the bottom of the Layers Palette. When the drop-down box opens, select Black & White. The adjustment box will open and you should automatically get a preview of the black-and-white conversion of your image. Again, you can play around with the settings, but the one I suggest is clicking the Tint box and then moving the Saturation slider all the way to left and then moving it back a little towards the right. When you select the Tint box, you might get a sepia effect on the image, so just desaturate the sepia effect until it looks okay to you. After you click OK, you'll now have your black-and-white conversion. 7. Resizing & Cropping ImagesMany times you'll bring images into Photoshop and you will want to print them. Well, printing photos requires that you resize your photos to fit the size of the paper you want to print on. Say I want to print this photo on standard 8.5 by 11 paper. Well, to get the image to fit well on the photo paper, I need to change the size. When I click on Image>Image Size in the menu bar, I can see that the original size of the photo is 15.84 by 10.5. That's of course larger than I want. But when I try to change the numbers to 11 by 8.5, the proportional sizes don't quite fit. So what I need to do is crop the photo for the size I need. To do this, click on the Crop tool in the Tools Palette. It should be open by default, but you call also open it by going to Windows>Tools.
Now drag your cursor over the image. The resulting crop box should only allow you to stretch it to 11 x 8.5 inches. You can move the crop box around to get the framing and crop you want.
8. Image BorderAnother tool that beginning Photoshop users might want to know is how to add a border around an image. Again there are a few ways to do this. One way is to select the top layer in the Layers palette. Next click on Image>Canvas Size. In the dialogue box that opens up, change the Width and Height to both to .2. Choose a color for your border. Make sure the center of the Anchor box is selected. Click OK and you should see a border around the image.
9. Saving For The WebOne of the biggest issues with digital images is that many people don’t know how to resize photos for emailing and web posting purposes. How many times have you clicked on an image or received one or several in an email and they were too large for good viewing? Photoshop comes with a Save for Web feature that helps you resize photos. First off you can click on Image>Image Size in the menu bar to view and resize an open image in Photoshop. You can either change the pixel dimension or document size of the image for the size you need. For example, the average size for web posting and emailing photos is 800 x 600 pixels. This is also a good size for slide show presentations. Images should rarely be larger than 1024 x 768 pixels, because that is the typical size of largest computer monitors. If you need a particular print size, you would change the document size, making sure that the Constrain Proportions box is checked so that the image won’t get stretched on either size. You might have to use the cropping tool as explained above to get the correct size you need.
With your image resized, you’re ready to save it for web posting. Click on Save>Save for Web posting and devices. In the resulting dialogue box you want to check the number on the bottom left of the image box, which is the current resolution size of the photo. It also gives you an idea how long will take that photo to download at its current size. On the upper left side of the window, you can select up to four views of image, each giving you a preview of the image quality at various sizes. When the resolution size is reduced, pixels are taken away, which results in a loss of detail or sharpness in an image.
You want to reduce the size of the image to say less than 100K, but maintain good image quality. In the top box on the upper right side, click the Preset button and select PNG-24 or JPEG High. PNG format typically gives you a smaller resolution size without too much loss of quality. The Quality button on the right side of the box can also be used to lower or increase the resolution size. The presets typically work fine. Just make sure you notice if the size you choose causes the image to look slightly blurry or smudgy. After you change the resolution size, check the size again (bottom left) to see if a good size for posting. Finally, click the Save button. Photoshop will save a copy of the image where you tell it to. It will leave the original untouched.
10. PSD vs Non-PSDFinally, when you go to save a file that you have been working on, there are two things you want to consider. You can save it in the Photoshop (PSD) format which means that you will save all the adjustments you made to the image, plus the various layers that you created when making adjustments and adding effects. This means that your file is typically going to be larger than the original size you started off with. But it also mean that you can reopen the file, and the layers and edits you made will be retained so that you can make more changes or complete the job. Another way to save a file in Photoshop is in a non-PSD format, such as JPEG or PNG. Saving a file in one of these formats means that you’re not going to retain the layers when you save. What will be saved are all the changes you made and applied to the original photo. The layers will be gone. If you didn’t make a copy of the original photo before bringing it into Photoshop and you save it as a JPEG, you will lose that original state of the photo.
So when saving a image in Photoshop, it’s best to first save it in PSD format (even while you work on it) and then click File>Save As to save it in a non-PSD format. You can always delete the PSD file when you no longer need it. There are many other techniques that could be explained for beginning Photoshop users, but the few included in this introductory photoshop tutorial should be enough to get you started. If these were helpful, let me know what questions you have about Photoshop that might be addressed in a follow-up article on this topic. Also be sure to check out our Photoshop section as well as Karl’s Photoshop manual. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too. Related posts
| ||
| 4 Sites To Watch & Download Video Game Cutscenes Online Posted: 19 Dec 2009 08:31 AM PST
The list of gripes can go on and on, but whether you love or hate them, most games these days will feature these cinematics or in-game movies to some extent. A cutscene is simply a sequence in which the player has little or no control over the game. It usually interrupts gameplay action for the purpose of advancing the plot, presenting character development, and providing things like background information, dialogue, clues, and atmosphere. Taking advantage of new game engines, stronger processors, and techniques like CGI animation, cutscenes these days can be really impressive and maybe even worth seeing again. Let’s get right to it and find out how to watch and download video game cutscenes online. GameTrailers & GameVideosBoth GameTrailers and GameVideos offers loads of video game clips, including trailers, previews, reviews, shows, and recording gameplay footage uploaded by its users. Simply search through their massive media collections for your favorite video game cutscenes.
On GameVideos, just look for the download links under each video (MOV or WMV) to start downloading. This time, registration is not required.
Blue Laguna
For fans of role-playing games (RPGs), especially those of the Final Fantasy series, Blue Laguna is the place to download full motion videos (FMVs) and cutscenes from your favorite titles.
The site’s FMVs & Cutscene Movies page offers a wide variety of videos to download in AVI or MPG formats. Simply choose one of the games from the list to view the main content of all the video game cutscenes. The title of the movie is available, along with the file size, duration, and a plethora of screenshots. If you like what you see, you can download the video for free. YouTube
As for the downloading, we have extensively covered the topic of how to download videos from YouTube here at MakeUseOf. Just check out the following articles to find out how to get it done:
What’s your take on video game cutscenes? Do you enjoy them or just skip right through? Also, where do you go to watch or download your favorite cutscenes? Be sure to let us know in the comments. Image Credit : Matt Brett Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too. Related posts
| ||
| WriteMonkey – A Simple Text Editor For The Easily Distracted Posted: 19 Dec 2009 07:31 AM PST
We have seen how easy it is to become a slave to these powerful tools. Word applications with a bouquet of features have their uses, but just sometimes, writers who write for pleasure rather than for filling up the whitespace need something simpler. Such simple tools are dressed down text processors. Minimalist text editors remove distractions that can come between the writer and the creative process. Perhaps, the most well known of these is Darkroom for Windows and Writeroom for the Mac. Then again if you want to stick to MS Word, take a look at how to turn MS Word 2007 into a minimalist text editor. WriteMonkey is another tool for writers to toy around with. Granted, there is very little to toy around with a simple freeware text editor that's all about keeping thing sparse, but WriteMonkey still has a few features behind its dark facade. Firstly, WriteMonkey is a lightweight download at just about 1.4MB. Extracted into a folder, it does not need an installation. That makes it usable as a portable application. Clicking on the WriteMonkey exe icon brings up a black screen occupying the entire screen. The text color is in high contrast green. Start typing away.
WriteMonkey – Features Behind The Darkness
This minimal text editor is not about green writing on a black surface only. It gives the creative writer some tools to make his workflow a bit smoother. Right click and you get a menu with all features listed. Let's take a look at some of them. Toggle between full screen view and a windowed look with a single click. The window mode comes with a menu while the full screen occupies the entire screen and gives a more focused work area.
The Repository holds all unfinished notes or drafts in the same text file. Think of it as a scratch pad for your writing. You can toggle between the main text area and the repository from the right click menu.
Spell-check using the inbuilt engine and dictionaries. A lot of the major languages are available for download as are additional dictionaries.
Use Jumps to navigate between different parts of your document. If it's a long document, jumps can handle navigation between paragraphs, headings etc and also make sections quickly accessible with bookmarks. Toggle segment focus and display only a section of a document while hiding the rest. In long documents, this helps to focus and work on a particular area.
Check your writing progress with the Progress bar which can be set to a definite word count. The Progress menu also gives you stats feedback on things like character count, paragraphs and percentage of work done. You can also set a timer to limit your writing within a certain time.
Lookup internet resources like dictionaries, thesauruses, search engines, Google images etc from the right click menu.
WriteMonkey is completely configurable. The Preferences dialogs let you set up WriteMonkey for your way of working. The look of the interface can be changes via the background color and the font colors. More important than cosmetics, WriteMonkey can be setup to create auto-backups of all your writing and along with its auto-save feature, safeguards your work.
Hark back to the old days with the clickety clack of typewriter sounds or use any sound scheme of your choice. Or turn it all off for some silent work. Well, all these features don't make WriteMonkey seem that minimal anymore. WriteMonkey tries to give the writer a bit of both worlds – a vanilla interface with some amount of control. The other mobility enhancing feature is its portability. Documents are saved in the TXT format and thus can be opened by any word processors. So, is WriteMonkey more fun than a barrel of monkeys or does it still needs to fine tune its act? How does it compare with Darkroom or any other stripped down text app you might have used? Let us know. WriteMonkey (v 0.9) simple text editor is compatible with Windows XP/Vista/7 and requires Microsoft .NET framework 3.5 (or higher). Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too. Related posts
|
In today’s world, music is omnipresent. It has swept into all aspects of our lives, be it TV, movies, shopping malls, public toilets, ringtones or waiting loops. Yet we still crave more.
I have multiple offices with lots and lots of printers. Some networks are on Active Directory and some are not. Some are configured with print servers and some are not. Now when I am asked for a printer status report for a specific office or warehouse I have a lot of digging to do. There are applications out there that could help but nothing that is easy to use and 
For many reasons, the last decade has been both very difficult to me and also very kind to me in a variety of conflicting ways. I’ve had personal tragedies in my life that have brought me to my knees, while at the same time (and in some cases because of those tragedies) I’ve stumbled upon one opportunity after another. One of those opportunities was entering the Search Engine Optimization industry almost half a decade ago.
For many beginning photographers, any version of the image editor, Photoshop, can look quite daunting to use. With all the menu options, palettes, tools, filters, layer styles and various changes you can make to an image, it's difficult to know where to start. This article provides some ways to get started with the most popular image editor in the world.
Ah, the video game cutscene. It’s kind of a hot topic among hardcore gamers. ”Why are the cutscenes so long?” “I can’t skip this crap? Are you kidding me?!” “What is this, a movie?”
If you still can’t find what you’re looking for, there’s always of course YouTube. The video sharing website probably has the largest collection of cutscenes out there. Simply search for the cinematics from the video game of your choice and hopefully users have uploaded some for you to view.
Writers in the last century had their white pages and the ink pen. It was a medium which made for straightforward penning down. We in the present age have a lot more. Specialized writing tools like MS Word or any other, with their bundle of help aids. In-built dictionaries, spell checkers, format commands and what not.
| You are subscribed to email updates from MakeUseOf.com To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
No comments:
Post a Comment