Tools That Allow You to be Creative with your Photos!

Posted on February 25, 2010 by mistygirlph

Okay you brought your digital camera with you and you took photos of anything and everything that caught your attention.  But what will you do with them to make them more interesting.

You can always make use of the ever reliable Adobe Photoshop, but what if you do not have the tool or have not really learned how to use the editing platform.

Well, you don’t have to worry, there are a lot of tools online that you can use that will allow you to be creative with the photos that you have taken and showcase them online after you are done with your masterpiece.

What is wonderful with the world we live in now is that  developers are hard at work to ensure that we have the tools that are easy and simple to use.  They know that as more and more people go online, we will need different arsenal to make our experience enjoyable and really worthwhile.

We at layered bytes are also on the look out for some of the new ways we can help our readers find the best solutions for their tech driven lifestyle.  Here are some fun tools we hope will be helpful.

1.  LooGix.com – Loogix.com is a free opportunity for you to create animated pictures and animated effects from your photos.  It very easy and fast.
a. You can create animated picture from our main pape. Just upload at least two photos ( maximum ten ), select desired size and speed and click to “Generate Animation” button.
b. To create animated effect, please, select one from the listed on the main page effects, upload necessary number of photos, select effect size and click to “Generate Animation” button.

2. Daily Booth - Document and share your life with others. Get real time updates on what  your friends and family are doing every day.

3. Alpoy -  A tool that allows you to create an avatar using your photos.  What is cool is that it is a Free service.

4. Closrit -  Welcome to ClosR, the simplest way to share and zoom your images.  They  would like to deliver a simple, easy and fast solution to help you in solving the common task of displaying images on the internet, more over if they are big images.

5.  Face.com – Stop tagging on Facebook, let the amazing face recognition app do it for you – automatically!

So no matter what your goal is when you took those pictures, there are a lot of ways for you to share them and before you share them, there are tools that allow you to be creative! If you know of any other tools that will help, please share it by leaving a comment below or tweet us at @layeredbyte on Twitter or email me at mistygirlph@layeredbyte.com.

Main image source Teddy’s photo on Flckr

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Tools To Manage Your Online Identity

Posted on February 17, 2010 by mistygirlph

It seems that more and more people are spending time online.  Ever since my journey online which is about January last year, I have seen the tremendous growth of people engaging via social networking platforms like FaceBook and Twitter.  There are also more blogs written.

The biggest increase is the number of social sites that people join at one time.  You will have people having profile pages on FaceBook, FriendFeed, Digg, Stumble Upon, Delicious etc.   Plus people are more active in sharing via comments on other people’s blogs.  With so many profiles around, we thought of putting together some tools that might help you manage your Online Identity.

Here  are several tools and applications  to manage your profiles online:

1.  Hi I’m -  Featuring your latest content from your favorite networks, your Hi, I’m page tells everyone who you are and what you’re about all on one page.

2.  Card.ly - Make your “tiny” portfolio online in which you’ll be able to integrate your networks (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.), a little about you and how to contact you. Choose between many nice skins and features.

3. DooID – One central digital contact card with all your info.
Get your own design, evaluate your networks (like Twitter, Facebook, etc.), add your video-bio and decide who may see what!
Registration is free.

4. Gravatar - Your Gravatar is an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things like comment or post on a blog. Avatars help identify your posts on blogs and web forums, so why not on any site?

5. ClaimID - is a free and easy way to manage your online identity. With claimID, we provide you an OpenID you can use to log into OpenID-enabled sites without having to create a new account name and password. At the same time, you can use claimID to verify, track, classify, annotate, prioritize and share the information that is about you online, giving people a better picture of your online identity.

6. SpyShakers - Security is on everyone’s mind; if you want to keep your info safe, take a look at SpyShakers. SpyShakers is an Identity Management System (IMS), which lets you access your favorites and passwords securely from any computer. All your personal info—bookmarks, passwords, log-ins, favorites, etc. can be stored safely in your SpyShakers account.

Do you have a favorite site?  Share it with our readers by commenting.  Let us know what tools you use  by tweeting @mistygirlph or @layeredbyte or email me at mistygirlph@layeredbyte.com.  Enjoy!

main image source

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Hey Sarah, All The Media In The World Won’t Make You Smart

Posted on February 6, 2010 by Alex Wilhelm

tl;dr Palin is bullshit, and she scares me with her power. | Also, this is mostly unedited.

The title selection process for this post was just too much fun. After “Ralin’ Palin,” and others fell aside, I decided to make it honest as possible. Palin is a laughable fool. And with her new platform she is now a dangerous, laughable fool.

Let’s reweind back to the first night she hit the national spotlight, her nomination for the candidacy of the Vice Presidency of the United States. Personally, I was drinking beer and eating dinner with the Clicky crew when the news came. We had been kicking ideas back and forth as to who it was going to be all week. I was pulling for Ron Paul as a dark horse, being a Libertarian myself. Didn’t matter what I thought, somehow Palin got tapped.

She was the real dark horse. So dark, no one really looked under the hood before tossing her into the arena. Continue reading →

Posted in Featured, Headline, TL;DR | Tagged | 1 Comment

7 Tools to Enjoy Music Online

Posted on February 3, 2010 by mistygirlph

Music will always be a part of our life.  We often work with music blasting through either our headphones or earphones.  We relax and exercise with music playing on the background.

Music as they say is a universal language. And it does soothe the savage soul.  There are so many means for us to enjoy music now, from our iPods, MP3 Players,  through our mobile phones.

More often than not, we online peeps also love sharing music to our friends and family via You Tube, Blip.fm, Spotify, Twisten, Grooveshark and last.fm

But there are other websites that you can actually check out and experience music, here are some of our picks for the week.

1.  TubeRadio.fm – It’s the internet music video player. Think of it as iTunes meets YouTube meets Spotify. It’s absolutely free and there’s nothing to install.

2.  Blyper – They will notify you will when your favorite music artist releases a new CD or single.

3. KissTunes – is a fun tool that lets you play and record simple tunes in real time using your computer’s keyboard. You can save your recorded tunes and share them with others. The simple drag n’ drop note editor allows you to adjust the pitch and timing of the notes. You can edit your own tunes, and also the ones posted in the music library.

4. Meuzer -  Lets you listen to music online without having to download or install anything.

5. Charts.fm -   is the ultimate tool to create your personal music charts by (re)mixing the charts of more than 2650 radio stations.  Affect the creation-process by defining certain parameters like period or style, choose one specific station, some or all , include the top 100 of the chosen stations or just the top songs , finally define the number of results you want to see.

6. JamLegend -  Enjoy music and gaming? Then you might enjoy this application.  It’s guitar hero minus the guitar.

7.  MixCloud – The tool helps connect radio content to listeners. It also helps DJs distribute and promote their mixes and radio shows more effectively, while helping fans easily discover relevant DJs and content.

Do you have a favorite site?  Share it with our readers by commenting.  Let us know what you love,  by tweeting @mistygirlph or @layeredbyte or email me at mistygirlph@layeredbyte.com.  Enjoy!

Main Image Source

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Why You Need to Reconsider the iPad

Posted on February 1, 2010 by Hunter Clarke

Since my buddy Alex over at the TL;DR column decided to completely bash the iPad, I think that I should try and explain to him why the iPad will be on its way to success.

Apple is, no doubt, an amazing company. They have single-handedly created an empire surrounding their exclusive products. Ever since they branched out into media players and phones, they have made the industry rethink what the standards are. But for Apple, the iPad is an entirely new device in an emerging market.

When Apple set out to create the iPod, they took the status of the MP3 player and thought of a way to revolutionize the way people will listen and buy digital music. They did even more with the iPhone and app store, creating a new standard in the smartphone world. However, the trend here is that every market that has made Apple successful (outside of their computers), was already established. Which brings me to the tablet.

Sure people have had tablets for years now. But they were the lame excuse for a computer, barely functioning at a high enough level to keep up with what a user really wants out of the device. And in that way, the Tablet market has not developed in the way the MP3 market and phone market had when Apple entered them. So what’s the standard features of a tablet? What capabilities does it allow and what things will have to be left behind? What do the consumers really want? That is what Apple tried to solve.

Now let me point out another trend. Apple is pretty conservative with first generation products. They usually test the waters to see how the public will react and if the product is worth keeping around. Let’s take a look at the iPhone. The first generation was not anything like the iPhone we see today. It had no app store, no GPS, and a barely functioning network. But what it did have was enough ground-breaking features to make people curious. Just enough to make them bite that first time. And it was a huge success.

So naturally, what has worked before will surely will work again. Apple wanted to enter the tablet market with a conservative device that has just enough features to make the target demographic curious. Then rely on word of mouth to do the rest.

My biggest gripe with this entire iPad business (minus the name, it is atrocious), is that people were expecting a computer from the heavens. Anyone who has known the Apple product releases for the past 10 years would agree that the first generation of a device is pretty much “letdown” by hype standards. But not only that, they have always created an amazing second generation product that makes the first seem on track with some genius master plan.

Apple is a company. Remember that. Their job is to please a consumer and as many as them as possible. I wouldn’t get too bent out of shape if the iPad is not all that it is meant to be. And if it is, then Apple is ready to respond in the second generation of the product to make it all that it was meant to be in the first place. They have done it before. They can do it again.

Posted in Featured, Gadgeteer, Headline | 1 Comment

Fatal Error: Uncaught Excep….. – Introduction to Exceptions

Posted on January 30, 2010 by Tyler

I know that all of you have probably came to a website, or maybe your program, and have seen one of those annoying PHP errors. If you haven’t, it looks something like this:

Parse error: parse error in H:\cha_frame\public_html\index.php on line 6

That error was one that I manually created on my home computer, but all of them pretty much look a like. A blank page, except for some text at the top, usually describing a page error in some weird lingo that could only make sense to a very enthusiastic code monkey.

But I’ll give you a hint: Most code monkeys don’t really know what they mean!. The errors that PHP makes are very ‘machine’-like, and it would probably take you a minute or two to figure out exactly what they mean. These are example of bad errors, ones that don’t clean up gracefully, meaning that if they are there, any user that sees them is just going to sit and wonder what they did wrong, or worse, think your site is broken and leave. The fact is that these errors are very hard to get rid of, and we’ll discuss in another post about how to get rid of them. In this post, we are going to talk about YOUR errors.

Let’s say that you want to create an application. Of course the application is going to have errors. You could use PHP’s built in user_error(“Error Message Here”) function to report errors, and they would show up something like above. However, those error messages are ugly, and we want to create pretty error messages so that our user’s don’t relive the horrible experience of the PHP error message. This is where Exceptions come in handy.

Think of exception like a football. At the beginning of a script, PHP hands the code a football, and the script starts running. It executes all of the messages, but eventually it might get to a snag. Let’s say we are getting information about a user, and it doesn’t exist:

$user = get_user();

We can use an Exception to throw the football, and then catch it somewhere else to handle the error message.

$user = get_user();
if($user == false)
{
     throw new Exception("No Users Exist");
}

What this does, is it tells PHP that the code being ran right now has come upon something unexpected, and doesn’t know what to do. So, it throws the football, and expects something to catch it. But how do we catch it you may ask? Using try and catch blocks, similar to if and else blocks, we can catch the statement. Take the following code:

try{

	$user = get_user();
	if($user == false)
	{
		 throw new Exception("No Users Exist");
	}

}
catch(Exception $e)
{
	die($e->getMessage());
}

What this does is pretty straight forward. We put a try block around our code that can throw the exception. Then, we told PHP that we can catch an Exception, and to assign the object it creates to $e. Then, $e is an object that we can use a function inside called getMessage to grab the message that was sent.

Check out PHP’s Exception Documentation for a more thorough look through.

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The iPad Literally Breaks Every Use Case I Had For It

Posted on January 30, 2010 by Alex Wilhelm

tl;dr – the iPad is shit, and broke all the use-cases that I had in mind for the tablet the I will (eventually) buy.

We have all seen the laundry list of faults with the device. It comes up short in so many categories that to quote them all would be redundant.

But what about use-cases? Features combine to create use-cases, situations where the device would be an excellent fit for a life activity. After the CrunchPad went the way of the Buffalo, I began to hunt for a replacement product to fill my tablet yearnings. The iPad was supposed to be it.

I had a number of scenarios when I would love to ditch my desktop or tablet laptop (both Windows 7 machines), and use a pure tablet device. What happened? The iPad killed them all. Every last one. Interesting thought for you to contemplate: what activities did you have in mind for the iPad before it came out, that you can no longer do?

My list: Continue reading →

Posted in Featured, Headline, TL;DR | Tagged , | 18 Comments

Tools that every new blogger should know and have!

Posted on January 27, 2010 by mistygirlph

According to Social Media Web 2.0 and Internet Stats that I recently read there are about 133,000,000 number of blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002.  Just goes to show that there are a lot of blogs being written everyday.  Blogging experience is different for everyone.  Some find it easy and others find it a bit of a challenge.  There are a lot of tools that a new blogger must know before he or she embarks on before even starting to write and publish their article.  Here are some essential tools that we highly recommend that you check out.

1.  WordPress - is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

2. Adobe Photoshop - is a graphics editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems. It is the current market leader for commercial bitmap and image manipulation software, and is the flagship product of Adobe Systems.

3.  FireFox - You can read feeds using an online Web service, a client-side feed reader or by creating a Firefox Live Bookmark. So there’s no need to comb the Web for the latest news and updates. See the latest headlines in the toolbar or menu and go directly to the articles that catch your eye.  Plus so many add ons that you can use to personalize your browser.

4.  BackType – is a real-time, conversational search engine. We index and connect millions of conversations from blogs, social networks and other social media so you can find out what people are saying about the topics that interest you.

5. Digital Camera - This can be the high end or the not so expensive ones.  It really depends on what type of blog you have.  It is good to constantly have one handy.

6.  A NoteBook -  A simple notebook that can be easily carried around is a must I believe, always good to jot down ideas that come to mind, you will never know when an inspiration might hit you.

7.  A Twitter and a FaceBook Account – Being present in social networking platforms also enable you to engage and reach more people with your message.

Writing a blog and maintaining one is no walk in the park.  So many things you need to understand and learn but once you have gotten things planned and if you use the right tools that you are comfortable with, then it will become easier and more exciting.

Of course, there are a lot of other tools that you might want to use and maybe you might have some other suggestions.  Let us know here.  Or you can email me at mistygirlph@layeredbyte.com.

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iTunes Might Finally Have a Legit Competitor, doubleTwist

Posted on January 26, 2010 by Holden Page

doubleTwist, a music player that strives to work with any device that plays music or videos has made, yet, another impressive move today. T-mobile, the biggest proponent of Android, has announced that they are officially backing, and distributing, doubleTwist for all Android phones they are currently carrying.

Maybe it is the blogger drama in me (or the depression I am feeling from looking at stats), but I find this to be a big deal and a reason for Apple to be a little fearful.

We all know Android is growing, this is quite evident and in my opinion, the market will turn out just like the PC market is, with Android holding the majority of the market share while Apple maintains a smaller, but very profitable (as well as dedicated) portion of the market. Since T-mobile is the main proponent of Android, though you could argue that Verizon with the Droid has brought Android *out of the dark*, I believe many other carriers will play, “follow the leader” in this decision. There is no way around it, for Android to become a success, there needs to be a great, singular music experience across devices. This is simply expected from consumers due to the superior music experience the iPhone offers.

After using doubleTwist all day today, I have concluded the product does offer a singular experience that consumers have come to expect, due to the iPhone. Syncing is flawless and managing music is simply a breeze, and another plus is doubleTwist is a lightweight on resources compared to iTunes. Purchasing music within doubleTwist and transferring it to my Android phone was also a breeze. doubleTwist is music management for Android devices done right. This puts iTunes in a less prominent position as Android devices become more prominent in the marketplace.

Of course, what I am assuming here is that doubleTwist will become what iTunes is to the iPod. In all reality, this could change over night and it only takes one carrier to break standard and fragment the media manager market for Android.

So am I just off my rocker here or do you think iTunes should be slightly worried?

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Startups, Ignore Us Bloggers and Focus On The Numbers

Posted on January 25, 2010 by Holden Page
Unless you have been living under a rock (and sometimes I wish I could) you know about the latest debacle between Jason Calacanis and comScore. If you don’t, fellow LayeredByte column writer, Alex Wilhelm, has a nice little synopsis of the situation over on TheNextWeb.

Now that you’re caught up, I think you readers can take a good guess that the blogosphere, as well as the twitterosphere, has been all up in arms over this. As we should assume, comScore has been taking the brunt of the beating while Jason has been getting most of the praise. After all, Jason is a well respected figure in the tech industry and the internet in general expects all things web to be free. Impressively enough though, even with most of the social media world against comScore, they are still sticking to their guns and touting an amazing amount of confidence in their latest business decision.

Start ups should take note.

Bloggers tend to bitch, a lot. It is easier to bitch rather than praise. It also helps traffic is usually doubled compared to a post that puts a company in a positive light, and since advertisers only care about numbers, it’s only natural that we bitch. So you can expect every product release and feature added will be reviewed in the most negative light possible due to the numbers game. We have seen this play out countless times, whether it be Google enlarging their text field or Facebook changing their design for the fiftieth time, overall response is amazingly negative. Still, very rarely has Google or Facebook decided to change their positions on certain feature or product releases.

This is because they most likely know based off of countless studies and looking at the data that this is the most beneficial decision for the majority of their users and for furthering their business. This leads to a lot of confidence in their decision, even if it seems like the majority is up against them.

So, start ups, instead of listening to bloggers when they trash your latest product, use the numbers available to you to determine if a feature really needs to be changed or added. The numbers don’t lie and while it doesn’t matter much, it earns brownie points from at least me. Even if I do truly disagree with your decision, it shows confidence in your product and what decisions you are making. Changing every feature or adding features at the whim of a bloggers complaint shows you have a weak spine and don’t know exactly where you want to go with your product.

So the take away from this? Have a bit of confidence, don’t take shit from us number obsessed bloggers and show a bit of backbone when releasing new features. I promise, it is most likely in your best interest as a start up to grow and make it as a business in this fast paced world.

Posted in Featured, Headline, Pages Are Social | 5 Comments