MakeUseOf.com: “Cool Websites and Tools [January 1st]” plus 7 more |  |
- Cool Websites and Tools [January 1st]
- Grab Screenshots On Your Windows Mobile Device With Screen Capture
- Make Your Own Sheet Music with LilyPond (Mac, PC, Linux)
- 6 Beginner Resources For Learning Mac Programming
- Put Your Child Into The Middle of A Story With Story Something
- Start Your Own Personal Photo Blog The Dead Simple Way With Posterous
- December Round-Up – MakeUseOf Authors
- FilmNet – A Place for Films, Filmmakers & Viewers
| Cool Websites and Tools [January 1st] Posted: 01 Jan 2010 07:31 PM PST
(1) Wordcounter – Are you a budding writer notorious for submitting wordy articles? Wordcounter is an online word frequency counter that counts and ranks the most used words in your text. Using this simple app you can find repetitive words so that you can re-write them and create better articles. Read more: Wordcounter: Online Word Frequency Counter (3) AutoCompleteMe – features a collection of weird and funny search suggestions from Google. You can browse through the collection by using tag clouds, in chronological order or search for a specific keyword. You can also vote an entry up or down. Read more: AutoCompleteMe: Weird & Funny Search Suggestions on Google (4) Airline Fees – is a useful web page from Kayak.com. It offers a quick overview to airline fees for baggage, pets, meals and more. All information is presented as a highly informative chart for over 25 different lines, listing fees for items like checked baggage, meals, pets, unaccompanied minor and seat assignment. Read more: AirlineFees: Find Airline Fees For Baggage, Pets & More. (5) Janta Loans – is a website from the Janta Foundation that facilitates microloans and scholarships to help poor students from all over the world finance their education. Through this website, people can find profiles of students and invest in them by lending at least $25. Read more: JantaLoans: Lend Money To Poor Students
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!
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| Grab Screenshots On Your Windows Mobile Device With Screen Capture Posted: 01 Jan 2010 03:31 PM PST
I often get asked how I take screenshots of my running Windows Mobile applications. I have jumped around from application to application and settled down on a simple program that allows me to either set a timer for a screen capture or use a hardware key to initiate the picture. The application I use is called Screen Capture and is a free application provided by a software company called Iliumsoft. Before I get into how to use Screen Capture let me explain to you why I need to use a timer for some of my screenshots and why I cannot use the hardware button. When I hit any key on my keyboard, it will often collapse the menu I had open or obscure the screen I was going for. With that being said let's see how to use it to capture screenshots on a Windows Mobile device. After you download the cab to your device you will need to run it. It installs quickly and then is ready to capture all your Windows Mobile screens.
Click the menu soft key to bring up the menu for the screen capture application. From this menu you can initiate the timer which will wait the amount of time specified in the options and then snap a screenshot of your Windows Mobile screen automatically. Like I said before, this was the main reason I grabbed this application and it has been good to me ever since. You can open the options which we will go into more detail about. More shows you other applications created by the software manufacturer and about screen capture will show you its version information and the website of Iliumsoft.
Go ahead and click the options button on the menu and we will see a screen where we can set two very important items – which key will activate the screenshot and how long the timer waits after being initiated before snapping your screenshot.
For me, I ran through each of the options for the select key, and the send key (hold) was the only one that worked for me. That means I had to hold down the talk button until I heard a camera snap. You can test your setup by turning on your sound and trying the key combination. If you get it right you will hear the clicking noise a camera makes. The select timer option has several options for me. I change it depending on how deep I need to get into the application before I want the screenshot. Remember you need to leave the application open for it to work. So open it and then hit the start menu and browse to where you need to go and hit your select key or use the timer and you are good as gold. Welcome to the world of professional screenshots on Windows Mobile! And as an example (well actually all the ones above were taken using the application!) here is my start menu as of today!
What do you use for Windows Mobile screenshots? Hit us up in the comments with your suggestions. Related posts
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| Make Your Own Sheet Music with LilyPond (Mac, PC, Linux) Posted: 01 Jan 2010 01:31 PM PST
You could use application suites of considerable pricing to make your own sheet music, but with a ridiculous amount of shortcomings – in the end, you’ve wasted even more time on realigning notes, spacing and special characters, and the like. Earlier this week, we already explored several freeware alternatives with 3 Tools To Write Your Own Sheet Music Online. However, with the notable exception of Noteflight, these were more fit for ‘casual’ use, rather than intensive composing. If you haven’t read it yet, check it out; It’s the first half of these article series. Today we’re going to focus on Lilypond, an offline, cross-platform application to make your own sheet music; and one that works from a very fresh angle.
LilyPond (Mac, PC, Linux)LilyPond is a very special application, and not just because it’s available on all the popular operating systems. There’s a reason why I’m not showing you a fancy screenshot below. You see, LilyPond doesn’t have a GUI – Graphical User Interface. In other words, it’s completely text-based. Please stop screaming, and allow me to explain.
Text To NotesLilyPond – which, once you get used to it, is in fact just as pretty as the picture above – converts text to musical notation. The reason why LilyPond hasn’t released a Graphical User Interface, is because it isn’t necessary – by far. You just drop your text document on your application shortcut, et voila, a PDF pops up – with all the perfect alignment and spacing, so you don’t have to worry about it. Scripting LanguageThis text input obviously cannot be random. ‘I want Für Elise, but with a Blues tone to it” will be met with a sad smile and frown. To append structure, LilyPond uses a sort of scripting language. It’s a bit like programming your music, with the exception that this language is very intuitive and easy to learn.
With it, you can compose almost any thinkable score of music. Incomprehensibly difficult arrangements will be lined out automatically. And you can do it from Notepad, Open Office, or Microsoft Word!
To demonstrate how to make your own sheet music using this software, the above score is generated by LilyPond, from a purely textual input. Incredibly FastOf course, LilyPond focuses on a very specific niche of composers. For simple, casual use, I would not recommend it. However, if you’re looking for a extensive application, with the power of a bulldozer and the delicacy of a feather, LilyPond is what you’re looking for. Yes, it takes a bit of time to get it down, and it won’t be anything like those other applications. But the next step, of course, is profit! With LilyPond, you can write down your music almost as fast as you type. That is to say, quite fast. Compared to other music writing applications – and a lot of you will recognize where I’m coming from – the difference is astonishing. In short, LilyPond is what you get when you cut off all unnecessary corners. No more time wasted with the visual aspects of your score. Just give LilyPond the input, and you’ll have a great-looking score within seconds. Quick Start & TutorialsI couldn’t have explained everything in about LilyPond in just one article. Luckily, LilyPond has a ready arsenal of tutorials to hold your hand while you venture off in the scripting. Check out their Introduction Crash Course, or really get to speak the music with their Extensive Turorial – an extensive guide, teaching you all you need to know. What are your personal thoughts on LilyPond? Or do you know of any other great, (free) musical notation software to make your own sheet music? Let us know in the comments section below. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!
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| 6 Beginner Resources For Learning Mac Programming Posted: 01 Jan 2010 11:31 AM PST
If you’re like me and are curious about learning Mac programming, you might be surprised to discover the amount of free resources to get you started.
Mac Automation Mad Simple
Waldie’s series includes great introductory topics for learning Mac programming, such as: Introducing AppleScript and Script Editor, Extending Automator with Third-Party Actions, Creating an Automator PDF Workflow, and Creating a Microsoft Word 2008 Automator Workflow. AppleScript is probably one of the most basic programming languages that new users can learn. Start with the first chapter of the Apple Training series to introduce yourself to the program and the language. Automator, on the other hand, requires no coding language. It’s a program for non-programmers, but it does help if you can think like a programmer, in terms of setting up logical workflows to achieve desired automations on your computer. If you’re an absolute beginner with no prior experience with say JavaScript, definitely start out with Apple’s Automator. My own Automator’s tutorial, Resizing Files Using Automator, will introduce you to the program. Apple’s Developers Tools
Apple itself provides a wealth of resources for programming. It’s part of the reason for so many iPhone apps and other applications being produced. After you sign up on their Developers Tools site, you can download PDF guides for learning languages like C, Objective-C, X-code, and Cocoa. You can download a free copy of X-code (which includes the iPhone SDK) Interface Builder for free. These programs, along with Dashcode, also come installed on the Mac OS X installation disc, but they don’t install automatically. iPhone Application Programming
It takes some time to work through, but it covers the tools and APIs required to build applications for the iPhone platform using the iPhone SDK. Handouts for the course, in the form of PDF’s, are included with the podcasts. Topics include: Introduction to Mac OS X and Cocoa Touch, Using Objective-C, View Controller Basics, Table Views, How to Build an iPhone App That Doesn’t Suck, Debugging Tips, Optimzing OpenGL for iPhone, and Unit Testing. Hello World
Nearly all courses will start off with a simple Hello World tutorial. After you download Apple’s coding applications, linked above, you might want to start out with this tutorial, An Absolute Beginner’s Guide to iPhone Development, to quickly introduce yourself to coding. While learning Mac programming is not as simple as adding and dropping files, it’s not rocket science. It can be learned. If you are a beginning developer, let us know how you got started. 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
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| Put Your Child Into The Middle of A Story With Story Something Posted: 01 Jan 2010 10:31 AM PST
The television wasn't all over the place as it is now. Stories narrated by elders had an aura of their own. Of course, the comics and story books were omnipresent. The stories worked on a fertile mind and I usually ended up placing myself as the central figure in all of them. I was one of the five in the Famous Five adventures, I bumbled through the Amazon with Snowy and Captain Haddock and it was me that flew across faster than a speeding bullet. Haven't we all played with our imagination? Story Something (beta) is a website which doesn't deny our young ones that 'adrenalin rush'. The tagline for this children's website reads – for the hero in all of us. So first, Story Something is an online destination for personalized and customized children’s stories.
Second, it takes mental numbness out of the equation when your child asks you to tell a tale. You don't have to scratch your head and jog your grey cells to remember a nice well timed story. Story Something has a whole kingdom full of ideas to create a story for kids. Well, nothing's new so far. Hold on before you turn the page. Third (and more importantly), Story Something lets you personalize the stories in its story bank by changing the names of the characters to your near and dear ones. Enter your child's (or children) name and the names get substituted for the one that's in the story.
Similarly, you can put anyone you want in place of the other principal characters.
So the child who is listening to the story becomes the central character (the hero or the heroine) and the entire adventure plays out with him in the lead. The stories come in two styles – Some are the normal types where you substitute the names and the story flows from the beginning to the end. The second type is where the child (or you, the storyteller) can choose between two outcomes. These are longer and more interactive. The choice between the two paths directs the story to further adventures with more choices in the next pages.
Selecting the stories which you want to occupy your kid with is so easy with the stories arranged around the male or female characters, themes from adventure to sports and finally by age groups (2 years to 10 years). You can read aloud the stories from the screen (though that does something to the image of pillow reading before sleeping) or better, take a printout and read it from there. Right now in the beta phase, the site promises to email stories only once a week. Personalizing the stories is simple fun. The storytelling is better for it. It doesn't take a psychology PhD to understand that a child can learn and absorb better with familiar names and characters. The harried parent also doesn't have to come up with a new story each day. Whether you are the storyteller or you hand the site over to your kid, Story Something gives something to fill the minutes with wide-eyed wonder. What does the parent in you say about a web tool like Story Something? Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!
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| Start Your Own Personal Photo Blog The Dead Simple Way With Posterous Posted: 01 Jan 2010 09:31 AM PST
I don’t remember the first time I heard about Posterous but I think I fell upon a quick post by Darren from ProBlogger on the MarketingNow Posterous blog about the slideshow from his talk. When I found it, I fell in love with the idea!
Here are a few articles on MakeUseOf so far about how to use Posterous:
This article is how to make use of Posterous in your quest to easily create and update a personal photo blog. So let’s look at four tips (or tricks) Posterous allows us to do in order to make photo blogging easier. 1. Send Multiple Photos At Once
Even though most email providers only allow 10 megs for an email attachment, if you play your cards right by sending low enough resolution photos, you can send multiple pictures in one email. The cool part is that if you do this, Posterous will automatically make them into a slide show with links to download either individual pictures or all of them (you can change the settings so that downloading is not possible, it’s up to you). 2. Set Up A Group Blog
If you checked out the link above to the Marketing Now conference’s Posterous blog, you’ll notice that the articles are sent by more than one person. Many of the people in attendance were able to blog real time during the conference directly to the same Posterous blog. That is one of the beauties of Posterous! Group collaboration can make a very interesting photo blog. You can also do neat things like start a family site specifically for sharing photos with each other. All of this can be done by sending invites to people you want as contributors. 3. Set Up A Private Personal Photo Blog
If you like the idea of starting a photo blog for family members, but you don’t like the idea of sharing all of these personal photos and names with the whole world, Posterous has another nifty trick up its sleeve. It is dead simple to go into the settings and set a password for accessing the blog. Pick a good password, share it only with those people you want to see the blog, and you’ve now got a private family photo site. 4. Photo Blog Via SMS With A Camera Phone
In my post on my personal blog about using SMS with Google Apps I mention the ability to send text messages to email addresses. This tip comes in handy when photo blogging with Posterous (check out Aibek’s post on sending email to cell phones to help you find out what email address to set up with your Posterous blog). What I started was a corny little photo blog solely from my camera phone via SMS! It doesn’t really have a topic, it’s more of a test to see how that kind of photo blog would turn out. Try it for yourself. In fact, you could set up multiple Posterous blogs and send photos of specific topics to specific photo blogs. Do whatever you want! Jeffry has previously outlined another method of starting a photo blog – by using Wordpress. Which method do you prefer to blog your pictures? Let us know in the comments. 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
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| December Round-Up – MakeUseOf Authors Posted: 01 Jan 2010 08:31 AM PST
December was the month for gifts and shopping so naturally, we released a MakeUseOf Shopping Guide. We see this guide as a general how-to on shopping, buying stuff online and tips on getting the most out of your money. So we’re sure that it will come in handy throughout the rest of the year — use it to shop wisely in 2010. In the past few months, MakeUseOf has seen astounding growth in readership and followers, especially since we’ve dipped ourselves in the social network pool of Twitter and Facebook. If you haven’t already joined us, come and find out what the fuss is all about. Our Facebook follower count has surpassed 5,000 making it a great New Year present. Aside from that, our online workplace has also gradually expanded. We hired 4 great new writers in December and they’re amazed us with their fresh ideas. MakeUseOf is constantly looking out for bright writers, so if you think you have what it takes, do apply for a job! So what have we served you during the last month of 2009? Flying on a Dime: The 3 Best Websites To Find Cheap Flights Ryan – BetterContent Qlock – An Awesome World Clock & Fancy Alarm For Your PC Simon – Wombat Labs How To Use Your PSP WiFi Scanner To Find A Wireless Internet Hotspot WhatsApp – The Perfect iPhone Messenger App 10 Free Online Advent Calendars With Gifts & Surprises For You & The Kids Varun – Tech Crazy Diet Chromium – A Slimmer Chrome OS That Supports More Hardware Jeffry – Super Subconscious Two Geeky Methods To Do Some Quick Tweeting [Mac] Saikat – The Things I Do Topikality – Improve Google Alerts & Get the Articles You Want Bakari – Mac Photography Tips Basics: Aperture and Shutter Speeds for Beginning Photographers Mahendra – Skeptic Geek 6 Cool Tips To Get More Out Of Posterous Tim L – timmyjohnboy How To Keep Flash Videos Full-Screen On A Second Monitor Write Your Name Graffiti Style using The Graffiti Creator Jack – Jack Cola 5 Tips To Reset The Administrator Password in Windows XP Justin – Justin Pot’s Blog Two Minimalist Linux Text Editors That Make Writing Easy Dean – Tapping Thought How To Value Your Blog Or Website To Sell It (Part One) Nathan – NathanChase How To Send Mass Messages on Twitter Effectively and Get More Clicks How To Create Your Own Homebrew Atari 2600 Games Nancy – Diptychal How to Turn Twitter Into Your One-Stop Lifestream 5 Tips To Improve Your Public Speaking Skills Grant – GrantBlog Technology Explained: How Do Websites Use Cookies? Tobias – personal tobias The Top 4 Risks You Face When You Use Facebook Angelina – Nothing Major Some Last Minute Tips To Tech Up Your Christmas Paul C – You're Stupid, I'm Not Daft Logic – A Quirky But Cool Website You Should Check Out Susan – tuxmachines.org openSUSE 11.2 – A Linux System Perfect For New Users and Pros Alike April – APRILOQUIES How To Rename Music Files from iTunes the Easy Way [Windows] Blog On Your Mobile With Wordpress 2.0 For iPhone Steven – Bizness Time HOW TO: Effectively Use Twitter Hashtags Dave – SystemBash The Top 10 Free Apps For Jailbroken iPhone [Cydia] Jorge – GeekLad How To Create a Google Talk Chatroom with Partychapp Top 5 Websites for Java Application Examples Ann – SEO Smarty How To Create Topical Brain Games To Embed On Your Blog Image Credit: Icesebra / CC BY-ND 2.0 Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!
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| FilmNet – A Place for Films, Filmmakers & Viewers Posted: 01 Jan 2010 07:31 AM PST
A serious film lover is also tries to keep his ear close to the cinematic ground. That's why you will usually find him populating the throngs of film festivals. Thankfully, these days we don't have to jet away from our homes to far flung cinematic happenings. It's all there on the net. Communities, forums, discussion groups, blogs…the platforms are many and when it's about movies and films, their numbers are never on the ebb. Heck, we even brought out an eBook on them a while back. Add the film site FilmNet to the numbers. In such a crowd, what will stop FilmNet from being an also ran? It's too early to speculate but if I have to lay one finger on the intangibles, it has to be intent and the community behind it. The community of this film site, as for all Web 2.0 startups, will be a huge determining factor.
FilmNet's A Place For FilmmakersA movie maker just starting out or already established will find something to talk about in the community that's on FilmNet. As of now there are nearly 720 filmmakers of various hues; from producers to directors, writers to animators and then the actors of course. Not any A-listers of course, but a lot of them have a good body of work behind them. You can easily search through the filmmaker listings by using the sort filters on the left.
FilmNet gives filmmakers a platform to showcase their work to a larger audience while the site aims to help filmmakers to distribute and monetize their work, as well as find collaboration partners, cast, crew or resources for their productions. FilmNet has an Upload page just for this very purpose. You can upload them, do it via FTP or send it across as a DVD. All movies featured on this film site have to meet certain quality specs. FilmNet's A Place For The Fan
The best thing about online film sites is that they are without the paparazzi but how can they be without the fans? When you sign up, you have to select a description from a dropdown. The account type defines your identity in the site. I started off as a fan. Apart from entertainment, it's a nice place to watch and learn from yet undiscovered talents. FilmNet Is Ultimately A Place For FilmsCurrently the site is showcasing about 800+ films, increasing with each day. The entire content library is arranged around a host of filters which makes it easy to browse through the collection. Videos are scattered across all possible genres even educational and instructional. If you are looking to launch your own music video, then FilmNet is a possible destination.
A mouse over on the preview thumbnail brings up a small information box and clicking on the thumbnail takes us to FilmNet's slick web player. Watch related videos, create playlists, rate films and comment about what you like or dislike.
FilmNet may not be about mainstream films just yet, but you can catch some reviews and discussions on them. The community thing is that anybody is welcome to add their reviews or start off a discussion. The social networking design will remind you a lot of Facebook with similar color schemes and a menu placed at the foot of the page. That takes the menu and the chat box conveniently out of the way of the page which is all about the films. There is a lot to like about FilmNet, especially if you have wide ranging interest different styles of films and can watch a work for its content rather than the stars. It is still very young. Another film site? Maybe, but which can yield some undiscovered gems. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!
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Happy New Year everyone! I hope you all had a good time last night! But back to the daily grind and my next article.
Writing, or rewriting, your musical scores digitally can be a tedious business. It takes a lot longer than doodling with pen and paper, but is infinitely tidier and more accessible – in a way, you’re making it timeless. In this time and age, it’s simply not done to compose your scores on a napkin. Sure, it makes for great storytelling, but you’re up for a redo if you want any credibility.
I’m determined to learn computer programming in my lifetime. Yes, it’s all a foreign language to me, but I so admire the work that developers do. I think they should receive Emmy awards or something. Many of them certainly don’t get the recognition (or financial backing) they deserve.
First off, if you’re totally new to programming, you should consider checking out Ben Waldie’s podcast series titled 
With the popularity of iPhone apps, Standard University, I believe, was one of the first educational institutions to produce a course on iPhone development. The entire course is available as a 
The guys behind this website where you can create a story for kids haven't forgotten their childhood. Some of us might have. When I came across this online place for children's stories, I was pleasantly taken back to my wonder years.
Here at MakeUseOf we love to talk about free things. We also like to talk about making things easier to do. When we find something that is both free AND easy, we start to get excited! In this article I would like to take a task like making your own personal photo blog and show you a dead simple way to do it! The answer? 
It’s time once again to look back at the month (and the year!) to review our published articles. In December, we published over 200 articles and the number will continue to grow with the new year and freshly-implemented publication schedule, bringing you more hints, tips and great apps. Doesn’t that sound good?
I am a film buff. But then aren't we all? We are, but in the same vein, some of us like to look beyond HBO and haggling for a film premiere ticket. Serious lovers find nothing wrong in dissecting a film, looking at its making and thinking how they could have made it better. In short, they love both the 'process' and the result.
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