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Easily Remove Background From Images Online With Clipping Magic

Fatima Wahab — Tue, 21 May 2013 14:00:30 +0000

Photoshop isn’t something you can learn overnight and with Adobe moving its tools to the cloud, just using Photoshop for trivial things will be waste of money. You will most likely be on the lookout for tools that you can use for free, or pay for once, and that work just as well for your needs. Clipping Magic is a small web app that lets you remove backgrounds from any image. It is simple to use but surprisingly intelligent. You upload an image and mark the background as well as the foreground. The app mimics the magnetic selection tool in Photoshop and picks up edges that are hard for you to define. The final output can be downloaded to your computer and if you create an account with Clipping Magic, they will also be stored on the service’s own servers in the cloud.

Start by adding an image to Clipping Magic. It will take a little while to upload, depending on the size. While the image is uploading, a helpful popup will open on the right showing you how to use the app.

Once the image is uploaded, the green tool that outlines the foreground is selected by default. The red tool right next to it marks the background, and the blue eraser tools will let you remove markings from both the green and red tools.

Now that you know what the tools do, let’s put them to use. Start by defining the foreground and then move on to the red background tool. You will find that that tool picks up areas that you haven’t even selected simply because it isn’t included in the foreground. In many areas, it’s really great at picking up edges with precision. If there’s a slip up anywhere, just use the erase tool to fix it. The app shows the original image that you’re marking and a preview of the final output that refreshes as you mark the image. Once you’re done, hit the ‘Download’ button to save the final file to your computer.

Clipping Magic works pretty well but the lack of shape and size controls for the selection brush makes it difficult to really get the perfect image. Corners formed by diagonal lines are impossible to mark; the background tool detects some of them, but not all. The only workaround to this is to zoom in on the image (the brush size remains the same) and then mark it. It will take a little longer, but that’s what it takes to get the perfect result.

Visit Clipping Magic

[via Cult of Mac]

Read Easily Remove Background From Images Online With Clipping Magic by Fatima Wahab on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

Tumblr Gets Revamped Posting Options On iPhone & Web

Hamza Khalid — Tue, 21 May 2013 11:00:43 +0000

With the news of Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr still no more than a few hours old, everyone was a little surprised to see the service’s iOS and web versions getting significant updates. Almost certainly though, the updates don’t have anything to do with the acquisition because the new features don’t deal with any additional Yahoo! integration, and the service keeps getting updates pretty regularly anyway. The focus in both the updates seems to be on enhancing the user experience and offering a better interface. This doesn’t mean, however, that the main Tumblr UI has been overhauled. The changes have mostly occurred in the options that deal with posting new content to Tumblr blogs. On the web, you get a much cleaner ‘compose’ box for text posts, and a photo upload dialog that support drag-and-drop. For iPhone users, the app might appear unchanged at first glance, but when you try to compose a new post, a revamped selection list for post types shows up.

Tumblr For Web

In the service’s web version, the main UI has not changed a great deal, but the posting options have been freshened up. Hit the ‘Text’ button from the top bar, and you’ll see the new composition screen. Some of the buttons that were previously available on this screen have been taken away, but this makes the view a lot more simplified and easy to use. The compose box is pretty compact, and looks somewhat inspired by Tumblr’s mobile version.

When it comes to posting photos to your blog, the upload screen looks quite efficient now. You can post up to ten photos at a time, with support for both drag-and-drop and manual selection. Tumblr displays all the selected photos in a neat grid before you hit the ‘Publish’ button.

If you are still getting the old composing options on your Tumblr account, be patient; the changes are to be rolled out gradually to all users.

Tumblr For iOS

Tumblr’s official iOS app has received a couple of changes, the less eye-catching of the two being the newly added app attribution for posts. This means users can now check the source of a particular post or reblog. This might not be useful for everyone but for people with high-traffic blogs, the new feature can prove to be a big step towards making the Tumblr experience more complete on iOS.

The other change is the new ‘type selection’ list that pops up whenever you hit the compose icon. A lot of people have compared this list to different menus displayed by Path, though the Tumblr list is certainly more colorful.

Tumblr for iOS a free and universal app that you can download from the link provided below. Yahoo! might soon decide to add some features of its own to Tumblr, so watch out for even bigger updates for the blogging network in the near future.

Download Tumblr For iOS

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Flickr Gets New Web, Android App Design, Cover Photos & 1TB Free Space

Fatima Wahab — Tue, 21 May 2013 10:30:50 +0000

Flickr is a treasure trove of amazing photos. Comprising of stunning collections of original shots as well as stunning digital art created by its users, the service is one of the largest online picture collections you will find, and it has just been redesigned. I for one think it’s about time too; visiting Flickr in the past always made me ask myself why it was still the year 2000 on Flickr, but Yahoo has finally given the service a much needed makeover. The interface is now image-focused and instead of the tiny (and occasionally ineligible) text, you have an infinitely scrolling stream of images from your contacts as well as your own albums. There’s a new image viewer as well, and the service now offers you one terabyte of storage space, saving and viewing photos in full resolutions, and a very handy little tool that tells you just how many full resolution images you can fit into a terabyte based on their resolution. Flickr’s new design isn’t exactly unique or unconventional; it’s done what most image sharing services did a while back and plastered its background with images. Though regardless, it’s still a major improvement..

New Home Page

The new home page is split into two columns; the larger one is dedicated to photos you or your contacts have uploaded, while the smaller one on the right suggests content or useful links. Each image is accompanied by a thumbnail of the user who uploaded it. You can favorite an image, add a comment, or share it. If the image you’re viewing isn’t from a contact, a small ‘Add’ button next to the user’s thumbnail will allow you to add them to your contacts.

Profile & Cover Photo

Much like every other web service these days, your Flickr profile now has a cover photo, and it makes sense since Flickr is where you’re sharing and uploading images. As you scroll down, you will see that images are now displayed as large tiles. You can also view your photostream as a slideshow.

How Much Better Is Biggr?

Now that you have a whole terabyte of space, you might be wondering just how many photos you can upload to it before it runs out. Flickr’s new home page features a neat little tool that should give you a reasonable estimate of what you can do with that space. Depending on the resolution of the photos you’re uploading, the Biggr tool tells you how many photos of that same resolution will fill 1TB.

New Ad-Free & Double Storage Plans

Your free account with 1TB space features ads, and Flickr is asking for $49.99 a year to get rid of them. If you need more space, you can get twice as much as you get with your free account i.e. 2 TB for $599.99 a year.

Redesigned Android App

Flickr’s Android app, like its web interface, has followed in its iOS variant’s footsteps with a complete UI overhaul that undoubtedly surpasses its previous look. It does support cover photos yet, but photostreams now scroll infinitely and the images appear as large tiles.

Download Flickr For Android

Conclusion

The new Flickr interface is definitely much better than ever, but that’s just in comparison to the way it used to be. If you look at image sharing and hosting services like Instagram, you still feel just how overwhelming and messy Flickr feels. While giving the service a new look, the footer seems to have been left out (or forgotten) entirely. The changes are certainly welcome but for many casual users, the interface might still be more complex than it has to be.

Visit Flickr

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Bundle & Share A Group Of Links As One Webpage With FatURL

Moaaz Bukhari — Mon, 20 May 2013 15:00:45 +0000

Imagine for a moment that you’re a web designer and a client asks to see some examples of great websites you admire. Over the top of your head, you remember ten or twelve sites and start copy-pasting their URLs to send one by one, over and over again…awkward, isn’t it? It’s also really inconvenient. Well, if you’d like to keep that client around, how about sending them just one charming little FatURL that bundles together all your other links? All the recipient has to do is click it, and they’re led to an ordered page with its own table of contents, and different tabs guiding them smoothly from site to site. You will, in effect, “Say more with less [links]”, to quote the developer’s own service mark.

Let’s take a quick peek at the website. You’ll mostly intuit how FatURL works by just looking at it; copy/paste a URL, give a space, and type a caption for the link. You can add up to three dozen URLs for each FatURL. Next, click the scissors icon, and – ta da! – the service has created your very own FatURL to share. You’ll actually see a list of links, but don’t worry; they’re all the same – just pick whichever URL you fancy.

Let me put in a word about the options here. Click the little wrench icon on the side and a panel drops down.

FatURL basically creates miniature ‘websites’ for you, the content of which are other links. From these setting, you can – among other things – add a title your site, write a brief description, and even customize its FatURL that you’ll then hand out to people. There are some more cool, free features to try, such as managing your site and reviewing its viewership analytics, that are supposed to become available after you sign up for the service. Though in my testing, the registration process didn’t seem to work. If any of you get past the Captcha successfully to register an account, do let us know in the comments below!

So here’s what FatURL’s results look like when you or the person you gave the link to visit it. You have your site’s title and description above, and all the links listed below, with neat captions and icons. Click any link to open it in the same tab. To open them all in separate tabs, use the button below them (the one with the mouse cursor over it in the above screenshot).

At its heart, FatURL is nothing more than a link-sharing service that bundles up 30+ long or different URLs into one snappy little link. But it beats out the competition by offering gimmicks like link editing & rerouting, instant switching between shared sites, and even bulk link opening, as shown below.

You can find the Bulk Link Opener feature under ‘FatURL/More’. It basically provides you with a way to open a list of multiple links in their own tabs or windows, without having to manually open tabs for each of them and copy-paste the links into them individually. You can open these URLs one at a time or all together. If you want to take it easy and open, let’s say, ten links at a time out of thirty, check ‘Batch & remove processed links’ and type 10 in the text field. The first ten links will then open when you click ‘Open all URLs’, and will automatically be removed from the list. When you’re ready for ten more, simply click ‘Open all URLs’ again.

One final nugget of interest in FaURL: you can import any number of the most recent Atom/RSS/XML feed items for any site with one click via the import screen. This can be really useful if the links you want to share are all recent posts on the same site, in which case this feature will save you the hassle of even having to manually enter them into the list. While importing, four radio buttons give you more control over what to do with the links after importing, like creating shortlinks, editing the list, taking a snapshot etc.

To sum it up, FatURL is a great and hassle-free way to quickly create and share a list of links with anyone and allow them to open them conveniently, without having to send them multiple links manually.

Visit FatURL

[via Lifehacker]

Read Bundle & Share A Group Of Links As One Webpage With FatURL by Moaaz Bukhari on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

Search Selected Text On Major Websites From Firefox Right-Click Menu

Moaaz Bukhari — Mon, 20 May 2013 12:30:32 +0000

Did you know that surfing the internet is a great way to achieve flow? That happens when you’re so engrossed in your browsing experience that you’re all but lost to what’s happening around. Agreed, most of us feel guilty about being hooked online for hours on end and learning little more than that a certain celebrity had lived in her car, or that a cat dialed 911. Still, despite its addictions, browsing can be quite the meditative experience, and one way to make it even more so is to make it less visible. With Yet Another Context Search for Firefox, you can search for highlighted text right from your context menu, without the distraction of having to open a new tab and entering your search query there.

Visit the add-on’s page from the link at the bottom to install Yet Another Context Search. Once it has been installed, just highlight a portion of text and, from the right-click context menu, click ‘Search Google for ’ to search for it on Google. Alternatively, you can choose one of the different available search engines from the submenu as well. The extension offers all the options available in Firefox’s native search menu.

I’m doing a search for the term ‘larynx.’ As you can see in the screenshot above, I’m spoilt for choice for which search engine to go with. If I choose ‘Wikipedia’ from the list, the Wikipedia entry for ‘Larynx’ will open in a new background tab. To open the search in a foreground tab, i.e. bring its tab into focus, click your mouse’s middle button instead.

Another interesting feature about the add-on is that the context menu reflects any changes you’ve made to your search engines in the current session. In other words, if you use Wikipedia for your searches more often, ‘Search Google for…’ will change to Search Wikipedia for…’ in the context-menu. This sensitivity to quicker access gives the little add-on a boost in its quest to shorten search time.

Yet Another Context Search works on Firefox 20.0 or higher. It’s definitely a handy little tool to have and if you need a bit of a diversification in the available search engines, you can simply edit the list by clicking the drop-down arrow in the search box found in the URL bar, and clicking ‘Manage Search Engines…’.

Get Yet Another Context Search from Firefox Add-ons

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LinksWatched Notifies You When Duplicate Tabs Are Opened In Firefox

Fatima Wahab — Mon, 20 May 2013 10:00:25 +0000

Duplicate tabs i.e. the same URL opened in more than one tab clutter your browser window unnecessarily. Duplicate tabs are mostly opened by accident or forgetfulness, and rarely out of necessity. We tend to open some of our most frequently used sites multiple times because we forget we already have them open in a different tab, or we can’t find them. LinksWatched is a Firefox add-on that helps fix both these problems; it alerts you when you open a duplicate tab by adding a red border inside the window when a duplicate link is opened, and giving you a desktop notification alerting you that you’ve opened a link that’s already open in another tab, with the option to switch to it. Compared to extensions like Prevent Duplicate Tabs for Chrome that just close the duplicate tab, LinksWatched doesn’t dictate what is done with the duplicate tabs, so the control stays with you.

Once you’ve installed LinksWatched, you can continue browsing like normal since there isn’t anything to configure. Whenever you click a link and it’s already open in some other tab, a red border will appear within the window frame, even if the tab is in another window. The border appears only after the page has finished loading, and remains visible as long as a duplicate tab is open.

A desktop notification alerts you about the duplication and provides you with a link to close the new duplicate tab and switch to the one that you had opened first.

LinksWatched works great and I like it better than Prevent Duplicate Tabs because the duplicate tab isn’t automatically closed for me. The add-on recognizes that at times, you really do need to open the same page in multiple tabs. There are two things that need fixing though: first, when the link in the notification is clicked after the window that the other tab is open has been minimized, it will not be maximized/restored. The relevant tab will still be selected so that when you manually restore the window, you see the tab, but this is practical only if you have two windows open and can safely assume that the other tab must be open in the second window. With multiple windows open, you get no indication about which window has that tab.

Secondly, the add-on doesn’t identify a duplicate tab until the page has finished loading. This might be because it’s waiting for the page to perhaps load a script or query that might navigate to a different URL, but this results in the add-on taking its time to detect the page as a possible duplicate. If you open a duplicate tab in the background, the notification is the only thing that will alert you unless you switch to the tab itself.

Install LinksWatched For Firefox

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[Ask The Readers] Which Google I/O 2013 Product Announcements Excited You The Most?

Awais Imran — Sat, 18 May 2013 14:30:03 +0000

Google announced a huge number of new products, services and feature updates at Google I/O two days ago. Maps, Search, Google+, Android, Chrome – no major product line was left untouched. In this week’s Ask The Readers Poll, we summarize the major announcements made at I/O 2013, and let you decide and discuss which one excited you the most.

Google Gives Spotify A Run For Its Money

Google has a bit of a habit of looking at a successful product in a lucrative market, and then doing their best to make a better version of it. In launching Google Play Music All Access with an 18 million+ song catalog, track streaming, unlimited skips, virtually unlimited number of downloadable tracks and intelligent mixing of your own library music, all at $7.99/month (introductory offer), Google is trying its best to beat Spotify on Android and the web.

Be sure to check out our review of Google Play Music All Access.

Unified: Google Talk, Google+ Hangouts, Google+ Messenger Merge Into “Hangouts”

Hangouts for Android, iOS and the web is the ultimate, all-in-one messaging app. It combines Google Talk’s instant messaging service with Google+ Hangouts’ group video chats and Google+ Messenger group messaging features. What’s more? Support for Google Voice and SMS on Android is on the way!

Google+ Gets Redesigned; Adds Amazing ‘Auto Awesome’ & ‘Auto Enhance’ Photo Enhancement Features

Just about every techie I know agrees that Google+ is – features and looks-wise – miles ahead of Facebook. At Google I/O, the tech giant announced awesome features that make Google+ even better! Firstly, Google+ now follows the cards-based design language introduced with Google Now. Secondly, photos uploaded on Google+ are analyzed by Google’s algorithms and then automatically tweaked for noise reduction, tonal distribution, skin softening, red-eye reduction and more, in what Google is calling ‘Auto Enhance’. Lastly, ‘Auto Awesome’ finds patterns in your uploaded photos, and creates animated GIFs of shots taken a few seconds apart, panoramas of photos taken at same location, and choosing the best smiling photo out of a bunch of chaotic family photos to create amazing family portraits.

We have already discussed both the new unified Hangouts messaging platform and updates to Google+, so give it a read for more details.

The Next ‘Nexus’ Smartphone: A Galaxy S4 Running Stock Android

One of the most surprising announcements at Google I/O 2013 was that of a Samsung Galaxy S 4 running Stock Android, without any customizations from Samsung whatsoever. With a price of $649 for a 16GB model, it is the most expensive Nexus device on the market to date, but that is fine considering that – compared to the $349 Nexus 4 – it has a Full HD 1080p display, a 13 megapixel camera, a faster processor, LTE support, expandable storage and a removable battery. The phone will be available fully contract-free on Google Play starting June 26th.

Google Maps Redesigned On Desktop And Android

Google Maps is the most popular as well as most powerful consumer maps application in the world, and the new updates for its Android and desktop web apps further cement this fact. The updated web app follows a new “The Map Is The UI” approach, where the actual map takes over most of the screen, with only the header and a little search bar at the top – no more sidebar! Google Earth, vector maps, Google Offers and Zagat’s trusted restaurant reviews are integrated right inside Maps. To make for a more personalized experience, your home, workplace and local points of interest are also included automatically in the map based on data from Google Now.

The new Google Maps for Desktop is slowly rolling out to invited users. You may request an invite at maps.google.com/preview. Android users should update their apps from Google Play to get the new Google Maps.

Google Search Integrated With Google Now For Voice Search And Other Commands

The rumors were right after all. For Chrome and Chrome OS users, Google Now is now integrated with Google Search. Saying “OK, Google” activates voice search – no typing or tapping required. Voice search has been developed to be more intelligent, so Google remembers what you last searched for, and predicts future searches. But that’s not all; you can also send emails, set reminders and more – all without leaving google.com or the Google Search app.

Google Play Books Allows User-Uploaded EPUBs / PDFs; Syncs Everything Across Android, iOS & Web

Google Play Books has always been at a distant third/fourth place in the eBooks reading app market, but a new feature update is bound to push it up ahead: the ability to upload your own collection of eBooks to the service, and to keep your page positions, bookmarks and notes synced across all platforms on which the service is available, i.e. Android, iOS and the web.

Check out our post to learn how to upload EPUBs to Play Books and read them on Android, iOS and the web.

Developer Features for Android

Rather unexpectedly for an I/O event, Google didn’t reveal the next version of Android this time, though that doesn’t mean the world’s most popular mobile operating system was completely neglected at the event. Google did announce several new features and improvements to Android, but most of them were targeted at developers rather than end users for now. However, it will be the users who will benefit from the fruits of these labors in the end.

The biggest new developer feature has got to be Android Studio – a dedicated IDE built by Google to make developing for Android easy. Apart from that, new APIs and developer features were announced for Google’s Maps and Location services, and Google Cloud Messaging. Several new features were added to the Google Play Developer Console as well, making it much easier for developers to optimize, translate and beta test their apps, with the ability to automatically roll out a beta update to a percentage of users first, and then gradually increase that percentage towards a full release. Lastly, a few major APIs were announced for game developers, allowing them to implement features like cloud save, achievements and leaderboards without having to use their own or third-party cloud services for the purpose.

Synced Notifications Across Android Devices

A major new feature for the end users was also announced: notification syncing across all your devices, meaning if you dismiss a notification from your phone, it’ll automatically disappear from your tablet as well. We will likely have to wait for the implementation of this feature in the next (likely minor) update to Android.

So which announcements do you think were the most significant? Join the poll below to let us know. You may select up to 3 answers out of the 9 available.

Haroon Q. Raja contributed to this post.

Read [Ask The Readers] Which Google I/O 2013 Product Announcements Excited You The Most? by Awais Imran on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

Save eBooks Online Or To Dropbox & Read From Anywhere With QuietThyme

Fatima Wahab — Sat, 18 May 2013 13:00:05 +0000

There’s a large number of eBook readers available for both desktop and mobile platforms, and almost an equal number of apps that allow you to convert eBooks from one format to another. QuietThyme is different; it allows you to edit the Metadata of your eBooks, and search for them by title, author name, or ISBN code. It can connect with your Dropbox account and you can upload your favorite ebooks to the service. It will then provide you a link to your catalog that you can be added to an RSS reader, allowing anyone who’s subscribed to it to know when you’ve added a new book. Books can be uploaded to either your Dropbox account or to QuietThyme’s own storage. It also integrates with several popular eBook readers across popular mobile and tablet platforms like iOS and Android.

Sign up for a free QuietThyme account and you can then begin using the service by uploading one of your eBooks, connecting your account to your Dropbox account, or searching for eBooks. There is no proper dashboard for the service; just go to the ‘Books’ tab and click ‘Upload Books’ to select multiple books and upload them. If you’ve connected your Dropbox account with QuietThyme, you will have to choose which storage should be used by default each time you upload a book, under the ‘Settings’ tab.

QuietThyme will read the metadata for each book, including the cover art. The books you upload will appear under the ‘Books’ tab, where you can also search for books based on title, series, or ISBN code. QuietThyme searches for books online and provides you with links to stores like Amazon where you can buy them.

To edit the metadata of a book, select it from the ‘Books’ tab and it will show you the data saved. At the bottom right, you will find an ‘edit’ button that will allow you to modify this data. You can even upload different cover art or use a book’s title, author name, or ISBN code to search for the metadata and update it.

Lastly, there is the ‘Catalog’, accessible from the ‘Setting’ menu, which is the closet thing you have to a dashboard for the service. It gives you a link to your catalog, tells how many books you’ve uploaded and how much space is being used, and shows which service i.e. QuietThyme or Dropbox is your primary storage area.

QuietThyme claims to have a format converter as well, but it failed to load during our tests. Feature-wise, the service is pretty good, since it makes your books available across different devices and provides you with a neat way to keep things organized. We do feel that the interface isn’t exactly impressive. The feature a lot of users with multiple mobile devices are going to find useful is syncing support for quite a number of eBook readers including Aldiko, MegaReader, and eBook Search, across several platforms. You can see a full list of supported eReaders for your device by visiting the site.

Visit QuietThyme

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SoundControl Adds Pandora Playback Controls & Notifications To Chrome

Fatima Wahab — Sat, 18 May 2013 12:00:20 +0000

Extensions for controlling YouTube are very common and some of them can be quite powerful. What’s odd is that there aren’t nearly as many extensions made for services like Pandora, Grooveshark, or Soundcloud, Pandora possibly being the most left out of the three. If you’re trying to find a convenient way to control Pandora, SoundControl Beta for Pandora might be the perfect solution . It’s a Chrome extension that gives you one button to play, pause, and skip songs. The button must be clicked a certain number of times to execute the function associated with it, and is customizable. SoundControl Beta for Pandora also gives you desktop notifications when a new song plays, and lets you select the volume of the ads and directly switch to the tab you have Pandora open in. The extension remembers the last song you were listening to, along with its last position during playback, so if you close Pandora, the same song that you were last listening to will resume from where you left off, the next time you open it.

After installing SoundControl Beta for Pandora, head over to its settings to learn how many clicks are required for each function of the extension’s button, and modify them if you want to. By default, a single click will play/pause the current song, two clicks will open a small pop up that you can use to change the the radio station and view the Pandora player controls, three clicks will close the mini player, and four clicks can be set to one of the other available functions like skipping a song. You can also select the tab style, toggle notifications or choose their duration, set how loud the advertisements should be played, turn album art display on the button on or off, and check the ‘Remember Play/pause state’ option.

You will need to sign in to Pandora to start using the extension. The popup has a mini player that is similar to the player controls on Pandora. Click ‘Stations’ to reveal the list of radio stations that you’ve added in order to switch to any one of them. The ‘Tab’ button will bring the Pandora’s tab to focus in the browser.

Desktop notifications appear each time a new song is played, letting the user see what’s playing without having to switch to the Pandora tab. Perhaps it would be better if the notification appeared each time playback was resumed or switched, regardless of whether it was paused before, or a new song started playing.

Overall, the extension does a great job of letting you control Pandora without switching to its browser tab, and what’s most noteworthy is that the developer has kept things minimal by offering only one button for executing all the most frequently used functions.

Install SoundControl Beta for Pandora From Chrome Web Store

Read SoundControl Adds Pandora Playback Controls & Notifications To Chrome by Fatima Wahab on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

Find The Right Fonts For Your Projects & Test Them Online With FontPro

Fatima Wahab — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:30:46 +0000

Web designers have a lot riding on their shoulders whenever they set out to design a new app or service; everything from the layout and the flow of the content to its color scheme has to be carefully considered and crafted. One very important aspect of design is the choice of font that’s used. It might sound somewhat trivial, but fonts come in a huge variety and they certainly aren’t a one-size fits all deal. FontPro is an excellent service that helps you choose the right font for any project. It’s free for now, but might not stay that way. The service allows you to search fonts by specifying different parameters such as the weight, slant, and width of the letters. The search can further be classified into serif, sans serif, slab serif, monospaced, script, handwriting, black letter, and decorative. Let’s take a more detailed look at it after the jump.

You can preview what each font looks like either by using one of the preset sentences, or by entering custom text of your own. You can also preview how the font would appear in different sizes, in paragraph form, or in text you’ve entered yourself. The service requires an account to use and you can save all your favorite fonts to your collection. If the parameters aren’t enough for you to decide, FontPro gives you a blank canvas to create your own project and test different fonts on it. The font search in a project allows you to search Google fonts, and other sources are planned to come soon.

To get started, sign up for a free account. You can start either by creating a blank project and trying out different fonts and sizes, or going through through the collection of fonts that FontPro offers. Click ‘Try It Now’ to start a project or use one of the two templates, or ‘Browse all Fonts’ to check out the FontPro font collection and narrow down your search using one of their filters.

A blank project will have one text box, referred to in the service as an element. You can add more text boxes by clicking ‘add element’ or a second column by clicking ‘add block’. Each text box can have a separate font, and you can type anything you want in it. The font size and weight etc. can be increased or decreased from the set of floating buttons that appear when the box is selected. The selection menu that should read ‘Pick a font’ by default will let you search and select fonts to try out. You can change the color of the background and text, the text orientation, font size, line height, and character spacing.

For now, Google is the only source that’s working, but there are several others that will be added soon. Don’t forget to save your project or you will lose all the fonts you’ve tried out in it. You can download the font you’ve used in a box from the ‘download’ button that appears in its title.

If you’re completely clueless about what font you want, browsing all available fonts would be a good idea. For both experienced and inexperienced designers, the toolbox on the right will help narrow fonts down by their type and category.

You can select one of the eight font classes and from the properties, select how heavy, slanted, and wide the font should be. As you make your selection, the fonts listed on the right will be updated to match it. To get a more accurate idea of what the font will look like when you use it, pull down the ‘Custom preview’ drop-down and select a different sentence or numbers, or simply enter your own text.

Like with the text boxes in the project you created, you can download fonts from the preview generated here. Each box has a ‘download’ button at the bottom. You can get a more detailed preview of what the font looks like by clicking the eye button at the bottom of a font box. Clicking a font itself will take you to its own page, where you can view its license and other details.

The preview lets you play around with the font or see how it would appear on the whole. ‘Display’ lets you view the font at different sizes, while ‘Paragraph’ shows you how entire paragraphs appear in the font. ‘Test Drive’ lets you enter your own text, and ‘Glyph’ shows all characters in the font.

We’ve reviewed quite a few tools in the past that help users identify fonts, but FontPro is really in a league of its own. For designers, it might be worth paying for, should the service discontinue its free account, add the option to purchase premium fonts, or add paid subscriptions offering access to a wider selection of premium fonts. Remember that fonts’ use is subject to their license. Not all fonts will be free, and their license information can be found on the font’s own page.

Visit FontPro

Read Find The Right Fonts For Your Projects & Test Them Online With FontPro by Fatima Wahab on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

How To Upload EPUBs & PDFs To Google Play Books And Read On Web, iOS & Android

Awais Imran — Thu, 16 May 2013 19:25:11 +0000

Google announced and discussed updates to almost all of their major services yesterday at what is being regarded as one of the biggest Google I/O event yet. Many of you must already be aware of the feature additions in Search, Maps, Play Services etc. by now, but you may have missed one very useful feature update to Play Books in all the chaos that is the technology blogosphere on the day of a new keynote. The latest version has a couple of new features that give it a serious edge over competing products from Apple and Amazon. This includes the ability to upload your own eBooks in EPUB or PDF format to your Play Books account, and keep your reading progress across all your devices in sync! Check out the details after the jump.

The ability to upload your own eBooks to the Play Books makes for a killer feature, as this means you longer need to worry about carrying your entire eBook collection with yourself all the time, and then doing manual labor to keep things synced across multiple devices.

Uploading books is great and all, but what really makes the difference is the second feature i.e. how you can then read these books on your Android smartphone/tablet, iPhone, iPad or desktop/laptop PC through the Play Books website and keep things synced. Apart from just keeping your eBook library itself in sync, the service ensures that the last page you read before dozing off last night, your personal bookmarks, any notes you added – everything is saved in the cloud, and can be accessed from any of the aforementioned devices, providing a seamless reading experience no matter where you open your eBooks to read them.

You have two options for uploading your personal collection of eBooks. You can either upload them manually, or have Play Books go through your Google Drive folder to look for compatible files and transfer them to Play Books. Both options are available on the Play Books Upload page after you sign in (shown above).

Speaking of signing in, you must be living in the US – or have some way of fooling Google into thinking you are in the US by using VPNs or proxy services – to be able to access the service and upload your books to it. This is one area where Play Books still lags far behind iBooks, Amazon Books and many other competing services.

Once you have uploaded your favorite books, you can download these books to your mobile device in the Play Books app for Android and iOS (linked below) for reading them on the go.

Now, whenever you read a chapter of Dune, add a note in 1984, or bookmark a page in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy on your way to work, it will be there on Play Books across all your devices.

Download Play Books For Android

Download Play Books For iOS

Read How To Upload EPUBs & PDFs To Google Play Books And Read On Web, iOS & Android by Awais Imran on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

Google Play Music All Access: What It’s About & How It Works

Fatima Wahab — Thu, 16 May 2013 18:00:32 +0000

Google finally unveiled its much anticipated music subscription service yesterday; while the service was still just a rumor, the general opinion about it was that it would give services like Spotify and Rdio a run for their money. The service is called Google Play Music All Access and as the name suggests, it has been built as a subscription-access component of the existing Google Play Music service, which has itself been revamped interface-wise as well. It’s currently available in the US only, and comes with a one month free trial, after which it’ll cost $7.99 per month to those who sign up by June 30, and $9.99 per month after that. Subscribers will be able to listen to the thousands of songs available on Google Play without having to purchase individual tracks.

You can sign up for All Access here. You will be able to start listening to the songs you’ve recently played from the ‘Listen Now’ tab in the left side bar, go to your Library, create a radio station or discover new artists based on the ones you like.

The service keeps tracks of your favorite music and creates a ‘Thumbs up’ playlist containing all songs that you’ve liked. The Radio and Explore sections are the main features of All Access, letting you discover and play music based on what you like. When listening to tracks from a radio station, you can remove them selectively from the queue, and add them to one of your playlists or your library. You can also curate a new endless radio station from any of the songs in the queue, which will be automatically and intelligently compiled by the service based on that song.

The mobile apps of Google Play Music have also been updated to add the new features, in addition to revamping the old ones. In addition to having a much more organized interface using the Holo Light theme, the Android app lets you access the Radio and Explore section just like the web version, and you can tap on the menu button while any song is playing to curate an unlimited radio stream based on it. You can also explore radio stations suggested by the service. If you don’t like a song in the list, you can simply swipe it away on either side to dismiss it. You can also start playing any of the songs instantly, or even curate a radio station based on them any time you want.

Google Music All Access differs from other similar streaming services in that it has no free plan for streaming music that you haven’t yourself uploaded or purchased, which is the least Google’s audience expects. When compared to services like Spotify, Grooveshark, or Pandora, it is possible that the absence of such a free plan might end up keeping many users to stick to the basic Play Music without the subscription. The aforementioned and other similar music services do impose some form of restrictions or limits on users with a free account, but most of them still consider having a free offering important enough. Perhaps this might not effect Google since it’s a huge company that can wait a few years before churning out a profit, and because Play Music itself remains free for streaming the music you upload or purchase, and accessing it from anywhere. In the meantime, any bugs in the service can be ironed out, and better features can be added. If you’ve tried the service out, let us know what you think of it and if it’s tempting enough to earn your patronage.

Visit Google Play Music

Read Google Play Music All Access: What It’s About & How It Works by Fatima Wahab on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter