Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Freebies: 15 Free Icon Sets for your iPhone



 
 

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via MakeUseOf.com by Joel Reyes on 4/22/09

As many of you know the iPhone is a powerful device that combines incredible sleek design with advanced graphic user interface technology. Millions of users rely on the iPhone daily to aid them in smoothing out the rough edges of life, but why not apply creativity to technology with a collection of attractive icons?

All of these icons have been designed according to the style used in the original iPhone icons, which turns them into really eye-catching designs

Here are 15 absolutely free icon sets for the personalization of your iPhone courtesy of MakeUseOf!

Enjoy!

Comic iPhone Icons

Social Bookmark Icons

SummerBoard

Hand Draw iPhone Icons

Aquaticus Socia

Some beautiful iPhone icons

ultra colors

IPhoneStyle Dock

Radiance

Aluminium and White

Chalkwork

Web 2 Icons

Sleek Icons

Toolbar Icons

Spiffy Icon Pack

Installing Your iPhone Icons

First off, you have to start off with the basics. iPhone icons arrive in two sizes, one of which you see most; the home screen icons are generally 59×59 pixels, whereas some icons can also be seen in 29×29 for list size; an example of the list sized icons can be seen within the iPhone's settings area.

The icons for each application on the home screen can be found in the bundles, which you can easily find on your iPhone's /Applications folder. For example, for changing the Weather app icon, you have to place your icon.png in /Applications/Weather.app/, this will immediately overwrite existing icon.png.

And there you have it! That's how you can install an icon on your iPhone.

Customizing your iPhone can be a fun way to put technology to an inspiring use. Let your iPhone reflect whatever you'd like it to and which icon set did you like the best? Feel free to leave us a comment below to share your valuable thoughts.

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Pixelpipe adds drag-and-drop uploading to Firefox



 
 

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via Webware.com by Josh Lowensohn on 4/22/09

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Pixelpipe, the multi-service file uploader and metadata management tool, has a new experimental Firefox extension out that should delight its regular users. It adds a sidebar to your browser where you can simply drag and drop digital media from your hard drive or things you find on the Web to upload directly to your Pixelpipe account.

Once you've picked all the items you want to upload, you hit a single button and it sends it off to Pixelpipe, which will instantly distribute it to all the services you have turned on by default. These can't be edited right from the sidebar, but there's a quick shortcut button that will take you to your settings page where you can turn certain services on or off.

You can also pick the privacy level of the upload to Pixelpipe itself, which can limit who is able to see what you've uploaded based on your relationship with them.

If you're a heavy Pixelpipe user this is definitely worth a download. I only hope that in future versions it will let you toggle the services you want on and off from the sidebar itself, and without the user having to visit the site. I'd also like to see it add a little microblogging tool like it has on the site, so you could use it to send out a short message or blog post to multiple services.

Previously: Pixelpipe lets you easily mass distribute media


 
 

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5 Really Easy-to-use Freeware Video Converters



 
 

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via MakeUseOf.com by Israel Nicolas on 4/22/09

Our lives have turned into a big media center. Each of us likely have our own set of desktops, laptops, mobile phones, portable media players, handheld consoles, and MP3 players. The many video formats needed to run our gadgets just add more stress to our already media-entangled lives.

With so many video formats and too little time to organize our video files, we need an easy-to-use and intuitive video converter that handles all our video files on the go. Let us look at 5 of the best freeware video converters that will keep your video collection a little less insane. For converting other files, you can choose an online file converter that were covered earlier.

Quick Media Converter

Quick Media Converter is a powerful freeware video converter that handles all current formats such as FLV, AVI, DIVX, XVID, MPEG 1-4, iPod/iPhone, Real Media, and M4A. In addition, this whale of a free video converter allows you to record videos from your DV camera or webcam in the classic AVI format and convert the file to any format you need.

Quick Media Converter has two modes. The Easy Mode gives you quick access to all conversion options available in an all-in-one interface. Once you have your video file or folder loaded, just click the file that you want to convert and select the conversion format that suits you. The Expert Mode is less intuitive but it gives you full control of video conversion options like codec rendering, aspect, bitrate, FPS, audio synchronization, and recording volume.

Super Video Converter

Super fits the bill for a simple, no-frills interface that converts videos on the go. Super is actually a shell for different command line conversion scripts. Super handles a large number of video formats like 3GP and 3G2 for mobile phones, ASF, DIVX AVI, MOV, MPEG, flash video, real media, PSP video, and more. Super also handles audio conversion for those who want to extract their videos and rip the audio out for easy listening. Super handles large files quickly, and you can find the settings easily making it convenient for users to set their options and start converting.

Any Video Converter

best video converter

Any Video Converter is perfect for your younger mother/ brothers/sisters who do not want to be bothered with the myriad of options and just want a fast solution that gets the job done while looking good doing it. The converter handles all popular video files with batch-convert and user-defined options. Any Video Converter also has a dumbed-down interface to make video conversion as simple as possible, although it can handle advanced video conversions if you tinker behind the interface and experiment with options.

MediaCoder

open source video converter

Mediacoder is an open source video converter which works on a large variety of formats. New features, conversion options, and conversions formats are constantly being added to support newly-released devices. Mediacoder dubs itself as the "swiss army knife for media transcoding"… simple, quick, and does everything that it is asked. Mediacoder gives straightforward tools that you won't easily find in other converters like video compression, extracting audio from video files, and repairing corrupted or partially downloaded video files.

Format Factory

This full-featured converter allows conversion to and from popular formats including video formats for PSP, iPhone, and other video formats. The conversion options are easy to find within the interface and you can even perform batch conversion options for mobile video, pictures, audio, DVD videos, and more.

If you can find other freeware video converters hotter than these, just hit the comments button and share them with the MUO community. Cheers!

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Saturday, April 11, 2009

Tonido: Cloudless Computing On Your Desktop



 
 

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via MakeUseOf.com by Damien Oh on 4/10/09

While there are plenty of sites that allows you to upload your files and share with others, there might be a handful of you that are paranoid about the privacy of your data or who are concerned that your data will get lost when the third party sites go out of business. Tonido could be the solution to tackle this. With Tonido, you can now create a web server and access/share your local files online.

The concept behind Tonido is simple. Instead of storing all your data on a third party site and worrying about your privacy, you can instead keep all your files on your local hard drive and use a web server to connect to your computer. There is no need to worry about your data being lost, and you are able to have access to your files, be it online or offline.

tonido-dashboard

In fact, if you take the extra effort to try out Tonido, you will find that it is more than just a web server. It is more of a desktop suite that comes with various extensible applications to allow you to organize your photos, music, project collaborations and a Personal Information Manager (PIM) to manage your personal life.

When you first install Tonido, it will prompt you to create a profile. This profile will be the account that you use to access your desktop, both online and offline.

Once you have logged into the dashboard, you should see all the applications line up on the left pane.

Jukebox

tonido-jukebox

The Jukebox module is where you can import all your music and play them over the Web.

Photos

tonido-photos

Instead of uploading all your photos to Flickr or Photobucket just to share them with your friends, you can easily create a share group and share all your photos with others within this Photos modules. You can also tag and comment on other people's photos.

Thots

tonido-thots

Fancy a personal blog but do not want others to see it? The Thots application serves as a diary or a personal journal where you can post random thoughts to it.

Several things that Thots allows you to do: keep a personal journal to record the events in your life, Twitter support to share individual thots, bookmark webpages and clipping text from the web (with Firefox plugins) and many other things you can do with a blog.

Webshare

tonido-webshare

Whenever you need to share a file or folder from your desktop, there is no need to zip it up and upload it to the web anymore. With Webshare, you can easily add your folders and share them with your friends.

Workspace

tonido-workspace

Tasks, Calendar, Contacts, Notes and Files all in one place. You can use the Workspace to enter your appointments of the days, the tasks that need to be done and all the contacts you have. On the front, you will be able to see a quick summary of all the appointments for the day, to do list and so on. There is even a feed module that you can subscribe to so you won't ever forget anything.

One thing that I find lacking is an email module to access your email.

Remote Web Access

By default, the remote web access is disabled. Luckily, you can quickly turn it on without much fiddling around. On the center of the dashboard, you can find a link "Run Web Access Setup Wizard". Click on that and follow a few steps. In as little as 5 minutes, you will be able to get a connection to the web and access your data anywhere with Internet access.

tonido-webaccess

Tonido runs on multiple platforms (Windows, Mac and Linux) and it is free for personal use. There is no mention of pricing on the site, but it seems that there will be a premium version in the future.

Overall, Tonido is a great software with plenty of useful applications for web workers. I certainly find myself using it very often on my Linux computer. What about you?

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MyEbook: Ebook Creation & Publishing Made Easy



 
 

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via MakeUseOf.com by azim on 4/10/09

MyEbook is a free ebook creation and publishing platform with social networking features. It allows anyone publish ebooks to an online audience and get feedback from the community. The site lets to upload ready made ebooks or use multifunctional ebook builder to create one from scratch by adding colorful covers, graphics, importing  web videos, audio, documents, images and more.

ebook creation

The site  also has a library section that lists user published ebooks, anyone can browse them by popularity, categories and view on sleek ebook viewer.

ebook publishing

Features:

  • Free browser-based ebook publishing platform.
  • Upload, build and publish your ebooks online with one click. Nothing to install or download.
  • Create and publish any kind of ebooks: novels, children's books, magazines, comics, brochures, instruction manuals.
  • Include beautiful colors, graphics. Link to videos, audio, documents, images and flash files from the ebook.
  • Join and interact with the community, browse ebooks published by other members and get feedback on your own ebooks.
  • More than 1100 published ebooks in the database.
  • Browse published ebooks by popularity, categories (Business, History, Travel etc.).
  • Free, browse ebooks and read them online. Register to post comments and create your own ebook

Check out MyEbook @ www.myebook.com

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