By The Awesomer, The Awesomer – November 21, 2012 at 12:30PM
Key & Peele crack us up once again with their public service ad for the Vincent Clortho Public School for Wizards, a school that’s clearly not as nice, or well-funded as Hogwarts.
Grad School Scam
Cheating in Middle School
Back to School Boot Camp
Wizard of Meh
Wizard Wars
By Melanie Pinola, Lifehacker – November 27, 2012 at 11:30AM
Portion control is one of the keys to maintaining a healthy weight. Instead of counting calories or using measuring cups, quickly estimate portion sizes for your proteins, veggies, carbs, and fat by looking at your hands, as these visual guides illustrate.
Using your hand to estimate your portions is familiar territory we’ve discussed before. While other guides have shown us how to measure an inch, teaspoon, or ounce with your hand, these portion control guides from Livestrong are much easier to remember and simpler to follow. You only need to know four hand equivalents for the portions of a complete meal:
-Your palm determines your protein portions.
-Your fist determines your veggie portions.
-Your cupped hand determines your carb portions.
-Your thumb determines your fat portions.
There are two guides, one for men and one for women (click to expand or right-click to save):
While everyone’s hands are different sizes, Livestrong points out that because your hand size is relative to your body size, it’s a great personalized food measurement tool.
Check out the full article for more details on the recommended food portions and flexible meal planning.
A Quick and Easy Way to Estimate Portion Size | Livestrong
By Dieter Petereit, noupe – November 27, 2012 at 07:05AM
 |
2013 will see a new resource for web designers. ByPeople is going to bring you a market packed with icons, templates, PSDs, logos and lots more. ByPeople promises to deliver everything web-ninjas could ever need. To shorten the wait its creators decided to put up a large archive for free. The archive, containing hundreds of design elements, comes at a weight of around 700 MB to a desktop near you. All you need to do is get your hands at an app that’s able to unpack a 7z-archive and tell ByPeople your mail address.
By Simon Slangen, MakeUseOf – November 26, 2012 at 04:30PM
One of the harder steps in the creative process of developing an application is right between the idea’s conception and the baby steps of its implementation.
Sure, you can open Xcode and start populating your screen with preliminary code and interface elements. But if you jump right in, chances are good you’ll get stuck or end up with an application that doesn’t resonate with your original idea as well as you thought it would.
Especially with more complex application ideas, it can be useful to work out some of the general details before you take the leap. What form will the application take? What’s it going to look like, and feel like? Framework or mockup applications are useful to create such an application prototype. They’re the proverbial napkin you use to connect the dots of the idea forming in your head.
Below are three such tools for the iPhone and iPad, with the hope that they will aid you in the design process for applications targeting those same devices.
We mentioned the proverbial napkin above, but inspiration doesn’t always come from staring at a blank screen. More often, inspiration itself is inspired by mundane events, and you won’t always have your iPhone at hand when a solution starts forming in your head. It all comes down to this: be prepared to use an actual napkin.
Whether it’s circumstance or preference that has you prototyping an app on paper, you don’t necessarily have to recreate your doodles on your iPhone manually. POP, an acronym for ‘Prototyping On Paper’, helps you translate your drawings into a functioning interface prototype. Just take a picture of your interface drawings with your iPhone’s camera, and add links between drawn interface elements and other pages in your storyboard.
Afterwards, you can easily share the prototype with friends and colleagues, who can take it for a spin on their iPhone, iPad, or web browser, and leave constructive feedback.
AppSketcher is available for the iPad only, but you can use it to create apps for either platform. The app is aptly named, as it doesn’t provide any preset interface elements. Rather, it gives you a blank canvas which you can use to sketch different views of your application using a number of consecutive pages. This makes the app mostly useful for the design of applications that define their own interface elements and don’t always follow the storyboard app structure, such as games.
As you download the app, you’ll be able to access a number of different coloured pencils with a text box tool. Initially, only three application templates are available: the iPhone horizontal and vertical views, and a blank slate. Similar templates for iPad mockups can be acquired through an in-app purchase of USD 0.99, as can a grid paper template. When you’re done, you can save your app sketches as a PDF, to your Photos, or upload them to DropBox.
If you’re willing to pay a few bucks for a more complete prototyping tool, you should take a look at iMockups. At USD 6.99, it’s priced mid-range, but has surprisingly powerful features. iMockups is only available for the iPad, but you can use it to create wireframes and mockups for web, iPhone and iPad projects.
Populate your canvases using the many included interface elements, with snap-to-gridlines. The latter is very easy to get used to and not only makes iMockups a joy to look at, but gives you a highly professional mockup. The size, position and arrangement of your interface elements can be meticulously fine-tuned using the element-specific controls shown in the screenshot above. When you’re done, send your project files to your colleagues, or export it in PNG or Balsamiq BMML.
How do you work out the initial details of an app idea? Do you tend to use paper or a computer? Let us know your mockup tips in the comments section below the article!
The post 3 Tools To Create iOS App Prototypes On Your iPhone Or iPad appeared first on MakeUseOf.
By Saikat Basu, MakeUseOf – November 26, 2012 at 01:00PM
The Googleplex must be a busy place indeed. There is always something happening around Google. Take their flagship product, Google Search for example. Google Search alone is a maze and it takes quite something to use it in different ways to call oneself as a ‘power user’. Google Search operators and Advanced Search are just barrels of a multi-barreled canon.
Too confusing? No…look at it this way – each filter and operator on Google Search is designed to be a crosshair on a scope mounted on that ‘canon’. You need to use them appropriately for the relevant search result. So, I am advancing this article with the assumption that you don’t use most of the search tools as much as you should every day. Let’s explore a few neat search tools which we miss in the flurry of typing in the queries.
The Google Search page was minimalistic to begin with. But when there’s so much to dig around on the web, it practically turned into a maze. Earlier this month, Google went in for a more uncluttered look. The update took a cue from the Google interface on tablets and mobile devices. The idea is to provide “more breathing room, and more focus on the answers you’re looking for”.
Most of the filters that were on the left have been moved to the top. Now, the More menu hides other Google search services like news, books, blogs and a few more. Search Tools to its right gives you a set of filters to finetune the primary results. Let’s take a look with an example.
Yes, you can just search for free (or paid) applications on Google, completely removing the clutter of irrelevant results.
Put in the keyword for the app you are searching for.
Click on More – Applications to view filtered search results from a variety of app hosting sites and stores.
Now, you can click on Search Tools and filter the already narrowed down results by Any Price and Any Source.
You can use Search Tools with any of the other search services to finetune the results. For example, you can use Google’s Recipe Search for getting low-cal diet recipes that can be quickly prepared.
In my lazy hours, I also find it interesting to look at what major companies are up to. As you may know, every company is trying to make a beachhead in the patent wars. Also, filed patents give us an early teaser into how the world is shaping up. Check out this screenshot which uses Google’s patent search tells you about an interesting swim wear developed by an inventor which has a retaining device for swim goggles. Try out some of your own searches.
The Filters that you see in the above screenshot are supplemental to advanced search operators you can use. The filters make it a one-click deal as opposed to typing it out. Let’s look into how we can use each filter to not only get better content, but also cut short the time it takes to separate the wheat from the chaff on a regular Google Search results page.
A Use for Sites with Images: You can do a regular Google Image Search. But Sites with Images gives me a better view of images organized around sites hosting them. With a glance I can see how the image I am searching for and the sites hosting it are connected.
A Use for Related Searches: A related search helps you to cast your net wide and then bring it close. Let’s say, you are unsure about what you are looking for. Try a general search and then start narrowing it down by using related search. Alternatively, related search helps you go deeper into results and discover more. For example, you can use it to sieve out ‘brand’ names that have already been trademarked. One of the more common uses is to find related keywords for quick search engine optimization.
A Use for Reading Level: Filtering your results by reading level is very useful, from a teacher to a Nobel laureate. You’ll now see a percentage breakdown of results by reading level on a bar graph. If you are a teacher looking for basic reading material for kids, you can click on Basic. If you happen to be a Nobel laureate reading this humble post, click on Advanced.
A Use for Dictionary: This filter gives you the meaning of the word in a single click. It is also what you get when you use the [define] operator and click ‘More info’ below it. You will get links to definitions on other sites, and also an option to translate it to another language.
A Use for ‘Nearby’: Using this filter is a trigger for a local search. One of the uses could be to find local businesses or someone like a freelancer based near your city, state, or region.
A Use for Translated Foreign Pages: Translated foreign pages can have some great content too in comparison to the English ones. It is also a great language learning aid. If you planning a visit to a foreign locale, you can read through some of the native language sites in their translated English versions pr any language of your choice. As you can see from the numbers below, there are quite a lot of them.
A Use for Verbatim: A search using the ‘Verbatim’ filter gives you exactly or the exact literal word you search for. It makes Google ignore your browsing history, synonyms, similar terms, spelling corrections etc. It is also a replacement for the ‘+’ operator, that now finds use in Google Plus. But I didn’t find it absolutely accurate but nearly so.
Google Search tools and filters can be worked around in alternate ways. The idea is to grab the vast information out there and make use of it in ways not envisaged normally. What about you? Do you use these filters consciously? Have you explored them lately? Tell us if you use them in some specific ways. We would love to grab a few hints without ‘Googling’ around for them.
The post More Free Google Search Tools You Might Not Be Using So Much appeared first on MakeUseOf.
