Fun Photo Box which is similar to Photofunia, allows you to make funny photos with so many ready made pictures from billboard to Hollywood movies.

Time the United States March 18, from Tipping Point launched the Third Competition Pwn2Own began hacking technology. During the first day of competition, the contestants need to try to break through there is a complete patch hit the mainstream browsers (IE8, Firefox, Chrome, Safari) as well as severe restrictions on the smart mobile phone (Blackberry, Android, iPhone, Nokia / Symbian, Windows Mobile) . As a three-day awards competition, Zero Day Initiative will provide a browser vulnerability discoverer 5000 U.S. dollars and donated the use of computers, and intelligence found that the vulnerability of the mobile phone will be 10,000 U.S. dollars plus incentives smart break by one year the right to use the mobile phone .

Pwn2Own at the first day of competition, the smart cell phone security has stood the test, while mainstream browsers are not so lucky, the two winners were Charlie Miller and Nils break the Safari (twice), IE8 and Firefox .

Last year’s winners, one of Charlie Miller at the first day of competition in the browser attack, just two minutes when once again break through Mac OS X’s Safari browser.

Another participant Nils, while at the platform Windows7 goods IE8 successfully broke through the security protection, including protection of the use of Microsoft’s latest technology-DEP (Data Execution Prevention, Data Execution Prevention) and ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization, Address space layout randomization), this act so that the safety of IE8 again aroused widespread public concern, Nils finally won the latest Sony Vaio notebooks and 5000 U.S. dollars in prize money.

However the first two surprises are good only just begun. Not long after, Nils again allow participants Pwn2Own boiling, he used Safari a vulnerability mapping tool, Express win Apple Safari browser and access to 5000 U.S. dollars at the incentives and white apple. At the success of a breakthrough after two mainstream browsers, Nils moves FireFox browser will fall under the cut. It is the second day of competition at Pwn2Own Medium, Nils will challenge Google Chrome, and is likely to become four of the latest mainstream browsers 0day founders.

Good quality image with optimized size will do not only save your bandwidth but also speed up your site loading time. Smush.it is very useful when you want optimize your images without reducing the quality, for your web site. The service allows you to upload image files directly from your machine or given urls. You can also install Smush.it Firefox extension as well.

If you want to add watermark to your photos when you’re blogging from internet cafe or the machine that doesn’t have Photoshop or photo software, Picmarkr is best choice for you. Picmarkr is an online tool allow you to add watermark text and image with just few clicks. You can choose photos from your computer as well as your Flickr, Facebook and Picasa account.

After your photos uploaded, you can insert your custom watermark text or image and choose the position and text style that you want to display.

Finally, it will give you download images links that have watermark which you set in Picmarkr.

Jahshaka

Alternative: Adobe After Effects

Jahshaka give you the power of movie editing and effects in open source environment. You can edit with flexibility and speed and can create Effects in real time. With this software animate with unlimited features and Paint/design on moving video. It will let you work in any format at any resolution as well.

Continue Reading »

There are several lists of web design mistakes around the Internet. Most of them, however, are the “Most common” or “Top 10” mistakes. Every time I crossed one of those lists I would think to myself: “Come on, there must be more than 10 mistakes…”. Then I decided to write down all the web design mistakes that would come into my head; within half an hour I had over thirty of them listed. Afterwards I did some research around the web and the list grew to 43 points.

The next step was to write a short description for each one, and the result is the collection of mistakes that you will find below. Some of the points are common sense, others are quite polemic. Most of them apply to any website though, whether we talk about a business entity or a blog. Enjoy!

1. The user must know what the site is about in seconds: attention is one the most valuable currencies on the Internet. If a visitor can not figure what your site is about in a couple of seconds, he will probably just go somewhere else. Your site must communicate why I should spend my time there, and FAST!

2. Make the content scannable: this is the Internet, not a book, so forget large blocks of text. Probably I will be visiting your site while I work on other stuff so make sure that I can scan through the entire content. Bullet points, headers, subheaders, lists. Anything that will help the reader filter what he is looking for.

3. Do not use fancy fonts that are unreadable: sure there are some fonts that will give a sophisticated look to your website. But are they readable? If your main objective is to deliver a message and get the visitors reading your stuff, then you should make the process comfortable for them.

4. Do not use tiny fonts: the previous point applies here, you want to make sure that readers are comfortable reading your content. My Firefox does have a zooming feature, but if I need to use on your website it will probably be the last time I visit it.

5. Do not open new browser windows: I used to do that on my first websites. The logic was simple, if I open new browser windows for external links the user will never leave my site. WRONG! Let the user control where he wants the links to open. There is a reason why browsers have a huge “Back” button. Do not worry about sending the visitor to another website, he will get back if he wants to (even porn sites are starting to get conscious regarding this point lately…).

6. Do not resize the user’s browser windows: the user should be in control of his browser. If you resize it you will risk to mess things up on his side, and what is worse you might lose your credibility in front of him.

7. Do not require a registration unless it is necessary: lets put this straight, when I browse around the Internet I want to get information, not the other way around. Do not force me to register up and leave my email address and other details unless it is absolutely necessary (i.e. unless what you offer is so good that I will bear with the registration).

8. Never subscribe the visitor for something without his consent: do not automatically subscribe a visitor to newsletters when he registers up on your site. Sending unsolicited emails around is not the best way to make friends.

9. Do not overuse Flash: apart from increasing the load time of your website, excessive usage of Flash might also annoy the visitors. Use it only if you must offer features that are not supported by static pages.

10. Do not play music: on the early years of the Internet web developers always tried to successfully integrate music into websites. Guess what, they failed miserably. Do not use music, period.

11. If you MUST play an audio file let the user start it: some situations might require an audio file. You might need to deliver a speech to the user or your guided tour might have an audio component. That is fine. Just make sure that the user is in control, let him push the “Play” button as opposed to jamming the music on his face right after he enters the website.

12. Do not clutter your website with badges: first of all, badges of networks and communities make a site look very unprofessional. Even if we are talking about awards and recognition badges you should place them on the “About Us” page.

13. Do not use a homepage that just launches the “real” website: the smaller the number of steps required for the user to access your content, the better.

14. Make sure to include contact details: there is nothing worse than a website that has no contact details. This is not bad only for the visitors, but also for yourself. You might lose important feedback along the way.

15. Do not break the “Back” button: this is a very basic principle of usability. Do not break the “Back” button under any circumstance. Opening new browser windows will break it, for instance, and some Javascript links might also break them.

16. Do not use blinking text: unless your visitors are coming straight from 1996, that is.

17. Avoid complex URL structures: a simple, keyword-based URL structure will not only improve your search engine rankings, but it will also make it easier for the reader to identify the content of your pages before visiting them.

18. Use CSS over HTML tables: HTML tables were used to create page layouts. With the advent of CSS, however, there is no reason to stick to them. CSS is faster, more reliable and it offers many more features.

19. Make sure users can search the whole website: there is a reason why search engines revolutionized the Internet. You probably guessed it, because they make it very easy to find the information we are looking for. Do not neglect this on your site.

20. Avoid “drop down” menus: the user should be able to see all the navigation options straight way. Using “drop down” menus might confuse things and hide the information the reader was actually looking for.

21. Use text navigation: text navigation is not only faster but it is also more reliable. Some users, for instance, browse the Internet with images turned off.

22. If you are linking to PDF files disclose it: ever clicked on a link only to see your browser freezing while Acrobat Reader launches to open that (unrequested) PDF file? That is pretty annoying so make sure to explicit links pointing to PDF files so that users can handle them properly.

23. Do not confuse the visitor with many versions: avoid confusing the visitor with too many versions of your website. What bandwidth do I prefer? 56Kbps? 128Kbps? Flash or HTML? Man, just give me the content!

24. Do not blend advertising inside the content: blending advertising like Adsense units inside your content might increase your click-through rate on the short term. Over the long run, however, this will reduce your readership base. An annoyed visitor is a lost visitor.

25. Use a simple navigation structure: sometimes less is more. This rule usually applies to people and choices. Make sure that your website has a single, clear navigation structure. The last thing you want is to confuse the reader regarding where he should go to find the information he is looking for.

26. Avoid “intros”: do not force the user to watch or read something before he can access to the real content. This is plain annoying, and he will stay only if what you have to offer is really unique.

27. Do not use FrontPage: this point extends to other cheap HTML editors. While they appear to make web design easier, the output will be a poorly crafted code, incompatible with different browsers and with several bugs.

28. Make sure your website is cross-browser compatible: not all browsers are created equal, and not all of them interpret CSS and other languages on the same way. Like it or not, you will need to make your website compatible with the most used browsers on the market, else you will lose readers over the long term.

29. Make sure to include anchor text on links: I confess I used to do that mistake until some time ago. It is easier to tell people to “click here”. But this is not efficient. Make sure to include a relevant anchor text on your links. It will ensure that the reader knows where he is going to if he clicks the link, and it will also create SEO benefits for the external site where the link is pointing.

30. Do not cloak links: apart from having a clear anchor text, the user must also be able to see where the link is pointing on the status bar of his browser. If you cloak your links (either because they are affiliate ones or due to other reasons) your site will lose credibility.

31. Make links visible: the visitor should be able to recognize what is clickable and what is not, easily. Make sure that your links have a contrasting color (the standard blue color is the optimal most of the times). Possibly also make them underlined.

32. Do not underline or color normal text: do not underline normal text unless absolutely necessary. Just as users need to recognize links easily, they should not get the idea that something is clickable when in reality it is not.

33. Make clicked links change color: this point is very important for the usability of your website. Clicked links that change color help the user to locate himself more easily around your site, making sure that he will not end up visiting the same pages unintentionally.

34. Do not use animated GIFs: unless you have advertising banners that require animation, avoid animated GIFs. They make a site look unprofessional and detract the attention from the content.

35. Make sure to use the ALT and TITLE attributes for images: apart from having SEO benefits the ALT and TITLE attributes for images will play an important role for blind users.

36. Do not use harsh colors: if the user is getting a headache after visiting your site for 10 consecutive minutes, you probably should pick a better color scheme. Design the color palette around your objectives (i.e. deliver a mood, let the user focus on the content, etc.).

37. Do not use pop ups: this point refers to pop ups of any kind. Even user requested pop ups are a bad idea given the increasing amount of pop blockers out there.

38. Avoid Javascript links: those links execute a small Javascript when the user clicks on them. Stay away from them since they often create problems for the user.

39. Include functional links on your footer: people are used to scrolling down to the footer of a website if they are not finding a specific information. At the very least you want to include a link to the Homepage and possibly a link to the “Contact Us” page.

40. Avoid long pages: guess what, if the user needs to scroll down forever in order to read your content he will probably just skip it altogether. If that is the case with your website make it shorter and improve the navigation structure.

41. No horizontal scrolling: while some vertical scrolling is tolerable, the same can not be said about horizontal scrolling. The most used screen resolution nowadays is 1024 x 768 pixels, so make sure that your website fits inside it.

42. No spelling or grammatical mistakes: this is not a web design mistake, but it is one of the most important factors affecting the overall quality of a website. Make sure that your links and texts do not contain spelling or grammatical mistakes.

43. If you use CAPTCHA make sure the letters are readable: several sites use CAPTCHA filters as a method of reducing spam on comments or on registration forms. There is just one problem with it, most of the times the user needs to call his whole family to decipher the letters. (Via DailyBlogTips)

By Matt Raible

This morning, I added Dion and Ben’s talk titled Ajax: The State of the Art. Below are my notes from the event.

Ajax started out as a bunch of hacks. It showed that we could take our web interfaces and do a lot more with them. A hack isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Often, they turn into something much more elegant over time. The new browsers have many amazing capabilities that we haven’t taken advantage of yet. We’ve seen discussions on Ajax go from how to do XHR to frameworks and how rich and mature they are. Dojo is great for Enterprise Development (packing system, namespaces). jQuery is well-suited for lightweight developers (PHP). Prototype is fantastic for people who do a lot of JavaScript development and take it very seriously.

Today’s Ajax landscape is mature, really rich, and really exciting. Today, Dion and Ben are going to talk about technologies they’re really excited about for the future.

Canvas
The building blocks of the web are text, boxes and images. With canvas, it really makes a lot more things possible. You can do bitmap rendering and image manipulation. They’re showing a slide with Doom and Mario Kart running. Canvas 3D does true 3D rendering. Firefox and Opera have done prototypes of this. Can you do canvas-type things today in a browser? Yes, if you use Flash or Curl. Dion and Ben are excited about canvas over plugins for the following reasons:

• No start-up delay
• Available on mobile devices today
• Rendering fidelity with browser (especially important for typography)
• No bridges necessary (no marshalling/unmarshalling)
• Not a plug-in

The <canvas> tag originally came from Apple’s Dashboard. Dashboard’s programming model was in HTML and JavaScript. Dashboard is using WebKit under the covers. Today, canvas support exists in every major browser except for IE. The good news is there are Flash and Silverlight bridges to add support to IE. There’s also an ActiveX component that wraps the Firefox implementation and allows it to run in IE.

SVG
Dion and Ben aren’t that excited about SVG because it’s such a huge spec. We’ve been struggling with the HTML standard for the last 10 years and the thought of another huge spec for the next 10 years isn’t that appealing.

Fast JavaScript
Almost all major browsers have a Fast JavaScript implementation. Chrome has V8, Safari has SquirrelFish Extreme, Firefox has TraceMonkey and Opera has Carakan. This is exciting because of industry trends and how companies are trying to reduce computation cycles in data centers. The more computing that can be put on the client, the better. IE doesn’t have anything, but Dion and Ben believe they are working on something.

Web Workers
Interface latency is awful for applications. Jakob Nielsen once said:

0.1 second is about the limit for having the user feel that the system is reacting instantaneously. 1.0 second is about the limit for the user’s flow of thought to stay uninterrupted, even though the user will notice the delay.

Anything that takes longer than a tenth of a second should be pushed to a background thread. Unfortunately, there are no threads in the web. Maybe we can add threads to JavaScript? Brendan Eich has said that “Threads suck” and there’s very little chance for threads getting into JavaScript. Gears brought Worker Pools and this is going into HTML 5 as Web Workers. You could also use Java applets to do this. With the latest Java Plugin, many of applets’ long-standing issues have been solved.

Desktop Integration
The ability to build desktop apps as web apps is very exciting. There’s a few technologies that demonstrate this: Fluid, Mozilla Prism, Adobe AIR, Appcelerator Titanium and Gears. The Palm Pre demonstrates the logical extension of this. The Palm Pre uses the web stack as its developer SDK. It’s very cool that web developers don’t have to learn anything new to become a Palm developer. Desktop integration is exciting especially if we can access desktop applications like email and address book.

The Ajax frameworks that are out there have done a lot to make web development simpler. However, there’s still a lot of pain with CSS and cross-browser issues. What if you took canvas and combined it with a sophisticated grid-based layout in JavaScript?

There’s a lot of platforms out there: Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe Flash, Apple Cocoa and Sun’s JavaFX. The web often isn’t considered a platform. Dion and Ben believe there should be an Open Web Platform. The problem right now is there is no central location to find out how to get stuff done. You have to search and find resources from many different locations. Mozilla is putting it’s resources into creating an Open Web Platform. This site will consist of 4 different areas:

• Home
• Documentation (for different frameworks, browsers, quirks)
• Dashboard (state of the open web)
• Roadmap (what’s going on)

This is not just Mozilla, it’s very much a community effort. This is something that Ben and Dion have been working on. But there’s something else they’ve been working on too. They’ve been talking about all these cool things, but what about an interesting application to test all these technologies?

Bespin
As they looked at code editors, most of them provide awful user experiences. Bespin is the Editor of Your Dreams and contains the following features:

• Accessible from anywhere – any device in any location
• Simple to use, like Textmate (not heavyweight like Eclipse) – an editor, not an IDE
• Wicked Fast – performance, performance, performance
• Rock-solid real-time collaboration, like SubEthaEdit – it just works
• Integrated command-line, like vi – Fun like Quicksilver, social like Ubiquity
• “Self-hosted” environment, like Emacs – For extreme extensibility, but with JavaScript!

Dion and Ben are showed a screen shot of Bespin and now they’re doing a demo. The core editor has what you’d expect with syntax highlighting and line numbers. Canvas doesn’t have text-selection by default, so they had to write it from scratch. The command line allows you to get help, run core command and also to subscribe to commands that others write. You can change your keybindings to emacs or vi as well as many other settings. Much of Bespin is event-driven, so you can easily plugin new behavior for different events.

For viewing files, they couldn’t bring themselves to use a tree. Instead, they developed a file-browsing interface that looks very much like Apple’s Finder. Personally, I like Finder, but wish it had Windows Explorer’s path bar that allows you to simply type in the path without mouse clicks. Back to the command line. They’ve done a lot to make things more discoverable so users can easily find the power of the editor.

Bespin could be used to engage developers more with open source projects. Checking out projects, modifying code and creating patches can be a real pain. Bespin could be used to interface with open source projects in the cloud. You could login, modify code and easily patch/build with the click of a button. One other thing they want to do is to have the server do code-analysis as you’re developing.

Is it OK to love a software tool? You must love your software tools. What we do as Software Developers is one of the most difficult jobs on the planet. Programmers, like poets, start with a blank slate and create something from nothing. If you don’t love your tools, you’ll start resenting what you do. If you don’t love your tools, it shows in your work. – Dave Thomas at RubyConf08

Thunderhead
A GUI Toolkit written with canvas and JavaScript. Allows you to do layouts with very little thought. It’s a lab experiment that’s in progress, stay tuned for more information.

All users care about is the user interface. Dion and Ben believe there’s a key to creating compelling user experiences. It all has to do with managing expectations. It’s not that different from how you manage relationships in your life. Expectations for movies and games have changes drastically over the years. What used to be the web (animated gifs and awful web pages) has also changed drastically (video of Apple’s online store). What was cool with MapQuest got changed drastically with Google Maps. What we have today isn’t the end of the game – expectations will continue to change. However, users have different expectations for software.

Alan Cooper has done some interesting work in this area. The software designer needs to focus in on a user’s goals. There are basic things you can apply to all users, for instance “sex sells”. An example of this is Delicious Library. This application allows you to keep track of things in your home such as books, movies, music and games. They made $500K in 3 months and made $54K the first day, with no advertising.

The quality of any software is determined by the interaction. If the interaction isn’t good, it will poison the entire experience. Donald Norman has a good quote: “Attractive things work better”. In society, this is often called “Dress for Success”.

The Open Web is hear to stay because it has:

• An Easy Programming Model
• Easy Remoting
• Extensive Customization Vectors (e.g. GreaseMonkey)
• Easy Deployment
• Great Widgets
• Great Visual Effects
• Great Mobile Story
• Desktop Integration
• State-of-the-Art Plug-ins

Bespin is a tech preview that they hope to release next week. Thunderhead will be released at the same time.

Conclusion
This was a great talk and easily the most inspiring of the conference. Dion and Ben always do a great job and the sexiness of their presentation made it all the more appealing.

This is not an apology post for lack of posting. I was sick for several days because of unsual weather and tied in several projects. Now, I want to share some of posts and links that I have in these days.

KidRex is a search engine  for Kids and it is powered by Google custom search engine and Google’s SafeSearch Technology and KidRex’s own filtering system to prevent from explicit sexual content in Google search results.

Found useful Blogging Tips links collection in Blogschool.in and read 13 quick tips to make your blog stand out from the crowd lately.

You can use Snapcasa and Websnapr to get the thumnail version of any web site and integrate with your site/project easily. Free and paid versions available.

You can check when you lose or gain followers in Twitter using TweetEffect.

Data Liberation Team from Google released Google Blog Converters in Google Open source project. Google Blog Converters allows you to convert between export formats of Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal and Movable Type. Library and scripts are written in Python language and following sample are hosted on Google App Engine.

• Blogger to WordPress
• WordPress to Blogger
• LiveJournal to Blogger

You should notice that there is a limit size of a downloadable file on these Google Apps is just 1MB and can be used for small blog export files.

Download – google-blog-converters-appengine-1.0.tar.gz