The 10 Best Beginner Projects for New Programmers

The world of programming seems endless in every direction. If you’re not mastering PHP, you’re looking to Python. If it’s not a language, it’s a framework.

You’ve got to start somewhere. Yet when there’s so much to learn, where should you begin? While you’ll hear programmers stress the need to find creative projects, you’ll need something small to build your confidence.

Here are the best beginner programming applications you can create in a few hours, start to finish.

Where to Begin as a New Programmer?

If you’re an absolute beginner, and don’t have to skills necessary to attempt a project, here’s a primer of the bare-bone basics regarding two basic markup languages: HTML and CSS.

If you’re comfortable with the basics, you can then venture out and create projects. While programming allows for a seemingly endless array of projects, the best projects end up being crash courses in coding themselves. That means they push the boundaries of what you already know, allowing you to consider a language, or a bit of code, in a new light.

The following projects are simple by design, even if they’re not exactly easy. While you aren’t going to end up with a beautiful UI or completed web app, you will walk away from the project with two things: a portfolio piece you can show to prove your ability, and a better understanding of just how wide-ranging programming can be!

1. Make Your Own Chess Game

Chess is a game as old as time, and has always followed the same rules (deviations aside). The logic of chess, however, matches up very nicely with the same logic you would use to program a game. Additionally, Chess makes for a fantastic starter piece—pun intended—towards a programming career.

You’ll start by mapping out both your board and your pieces. Then, you’ll go on to giving specific movements for your pieces. From brainstorm to final product, you’ll be forced to think of chess as less of a physical game and more of data-driven mental gymnastic! Click on the video above to begin learning how to maneuver your way through creating your very own chess program (and how to modify it to create your own version of chess).

While the video above isn’t exactly a step by step tutorial to create the program, it is an absolutely necessary insight into how programmers think and code in order to create a final product.

2. Program a Soundboard

If a blinking cursor gets your stomach in knots, know that there are other, simpler alternatives to text-based coding that can assist in understanding how programs operate. MIT App Inventor, an adult alternative to the kid-friendly and highly popular Scratch, allows users to create an Android app using a simple and understandable UI.

Creating a soundboard is highly educational for a variety of reasons. For example, you are forced to understand how sound files and user interactions mesh together. Individual files, pieced together, become the immersive audio environments you enjoy when playing your favorite games!

3. Build Your Own Calculator

Inputs are absolutely vital to learn as a programmer. Creating a calculator allows users to perform simple tasks using simple operations like multiplication and division.

It may not be the most exciting application, but you can rest assured it’s absolutely necessary for a beginning programmer.

 4. Create a To-Do List App

Building a to-do list app is how you know you’ve gotten somewhere. It involves most of what you would need to create a simple UI: buttons, animation, user interaction, and events.

Because the above video uses the big three—HTML, CSS, and Javascript (learn more about JavaScript)—you can then upload it to a portfolio of your choice for showcasing, or integrate it into a website instantly.

5. Develop a Weight Conversion Tool

Along the same lines as a to-do list, you can also add a few simple formulaic operations to create a great looking weight conversion tool. Keep in mind that with projects like these you can add or subtract as much functionality as you’d like.

The above example integrates Bootstrap toolkit into your project as well, which some would consider an absolutely crucial experience for modern web development.

6. Code a Rock, Paper, Scissors Game

Rock, Paper, Scissors is kind of a catch all. It requires both user input and a randomizing element. You’re essentially playing against a robot, which you created, in a game you also created.

Additionally, it provides beginner coders with a tangible, interactive product you can pick up and play immediately. Since there are various graphic objects to interact with, you can be as personal and creative as you’d like!

7. Build Your Own Tic Tac Toe

Whereas a successful Rock, Paper, Scissors app can be created using randomized parameters, Tic Tac Toe requires a bit of strategy. Using HTML, CSS, Javascript, and a little math knowhow, you can learn how to create an unbeatable Tic Tac Toe bot.

You can even use the program as a Tic Tac Toe teacher of sorts, expanding the amount of teachable moments you can achieve with this project.

8. Web Scraping With Python

Python is famous for automating boring things, and the above project is no different. You can use Python, along with a Python library called Beautiful Soup, to extract data from HTML and XML documents, even if you’re a complete newcomer to python.

The above example exports data you’ve scraped into a CSV file, so you can even use a program like Excel to create charts, graphs, plots, and so on from your data.

You will have to download a Python distribution named Anaconda before you undertake this project, as it’s not present on your PC by default. This is the case with many programming languages, so it’s best to get used to the process early on.

9. Build a Basic HTML5 Website

Few projects will teach you as much as a basic HTML and CSS website. From learning simple design principals, file linking, and web hosting, creating a simple website is always a great way to either begin, or further, a programming portfolio.

The complexity and general impressiveness of your website will grow the more you learn. Most other programming languages you learn in your coding journey can also be applied to websites, making them a fantastic go-to when flexing your programming skills.

10. Code Snake With JavaScript

After you’ve been coding for a while, you gain an almost intuitive sense of the logical progression of an application. A game as simple as Snake, for example, is not a complete chunk. It’s a sequence of logical pieces.

The above video perfectly exhibits an actual programmer undertaking a casual project (which I wouldn’t try coding along with in real time). With a thorough understanding of the language you’re coding in, along with a mental coding library developed through practice, you too can recreate in parts what always previously seemed like a solid chunk.

While a game of Snake isn’t the most impressive project you’ll undertake, the workflow exhibited in the above example is what you’re aiming for as an amateur programmer.

Start Small, Think Big

Programming projects bleed into each other. Pick up a project with HTML and CSS. Next thing you know, you’ll be playing with JavaScript. Before long, you’ll be creating Python games in your sleep. It’s miraculous what a steady, consistent flow of projects can do for your programming knowledge.

Now you have ten to pick apart and piece together. Or rather, a starting ten. Choose one, two, or all, but whatever you do: get coding!

Read the full article: The 10 Best Beginner Projects for New Programmers

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The What-If Tool: Code-Free Probing of Machine Learning Models

Posted by James Wexler, Software Engineer, Google AI

Building effective machine learning (ML) systems means asking a lot of questions. It's not enough to train a model and walk away. Instead, good practitioners act as detectives, probing to understand their model better: How would changes to a datapoint affect my model’s prediction? Does it perform differently for various groups–for example, historically marginalized people? How diverse is the dataset I am testing my model on?

Answering these kinds of questions isn’t easy. Probing “what if” scenarios often means writing custom, one-off code to analyze a specific model. Not only is this process inefficient, it makes it hard for non-programmers to participate in the process of shaping and improving ML models. One focus of the Google AI PAIR initiative is making it easier for a broad set of people to examine, evaluate, and debug ML systems.

Today, we are launching the What-If Tool, a new feature of the open-source TensorBoard web application, which let users analyze an ML model without writing code. Given pointers to a TensorFlow model and a dataset, the What-If Tool offers an interactive visual interface for exploring model results.

The What-If Tool, showing a set of 250 face pictures and their results from a model that detects smiles.

The What-If Tool has a large set of features, including visualizing your dataset automatically using Facets, the ability to manually edit examples from your dataset and see the effect of those changes, and automatic generation of partial dependence plots which show how the model’s predictions change as any single feature is changed. Let’s explore two features in more detail.

Exploring what-if scenarios on a datapoint.

Counterfactuals
With a click of a button you can compare a datapoint to the most similar point where your model predicts a different result. We call such points "counterfactuals," and they can shed light on the decision boundaries of your model. Or, you can edit a datapoint by hand and explore how the model’s prediction changes. In the screenshot below, the tool is being used on a binary classification model that predicts whether a person earns more than $50k based on public census data from the UCI census dataset. This is a benchmark prediction task used by ML researchers, especially when analyzing algorithmic fairness — a topic we'll get to soon. In this case, for the selected datapoint, the model predicted with 73% confidence that the person earns more than $50k. The tool has automatically located the most-similar person in the dataset for which the model predicted earnings of less than $50k and compares the two side-by-side. In this case, with just a minor difference in age and an occupation change, the model’s prediction has flipped.

Comparing counterfactuals.

Analysis of Performance and Algorithmic Fairness
You can also explore the effects of different classification thresholds, taking into account constraints such as different numerical fairness criteria. The below screenshot shows the results of a smile detector model, trained on the open-source CelebA dataset which consists of annotated face images of celebrities. Below, the faces in the dataset are divided by whether they have brown hair, and for each of the two groups there is an ROC curve and confusion matrix of the predictions, along with sliders for setting how confident the model must be before determining that a face is smiling. In this case, the confidence thresholds for the two groups were set automatically by the tool to optimize for equal opportunity.

Comparing the performance of two slices of data on a smile detection model, with their classification thresholds set to satisfy the “equal opportunity” constraint.

Demos
To illustrate the capabilities of the What-If Tool, we’ve released a set of demos using pre-trained models:

• Detecting misclassifications: A multiclass classification model, which predicts plant type from four measurements of a flower from the plant. The tool is helpful in showing the decision boundary of the model and what causes misclassifications. This model is trained with the UCI iris dataset.
• Assessing fairness in binary classification models: The image classification model for smile detection mentioned above. The tool is helpful in assessing algorithmic fairness across different subgroups. The model was purposefully trained without providing any examples from a specific subset of the population, in order to show how the tool can help uncover such biases in models. Assessing fairness requires careful consideration of the overall context — but this is a useful quantitative starting point.
• Investigating model performance across different subgroups: A regression model that predicts a subject’s age from census information. The tool is helpful in showing relative performance of the model across subgroups and how the different features individually affect the prediction. This model is trained with the UCI census dataset.

What-If in Practice
We tested the What-If Tool with teams inside Google and saw the immediate value of such a tool. One team quickly found that their model was incorrectly ignoring an entire feature of their dataset, leading them to fix a previously-undiscovered code bug. Another team used it to visually organize their examples from best to worst performance, leading them to discover patterns about the types of examples their model was underperforming on.

We look forward to people inside and outside of Google using this tool to better understand ML models and to begin assessing fairness. And as the code is open-source, we welcome contributions to the tool.

Acknowledgments
The What-If Tool was a collaborative effort, with UX design by Mahima Pushkarna, Facets updates by Jimbo Wilson, and input from many others. We would like to thank the Google teams that piloted the tool and provided valuable feedback and the TensorBoard team for all their help.

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This unique vacuum-extraction coffee maker is Colombia’s own

If you had a cup of delicious coffee this morning, there’s a good chance those beans came from Colombia, which has famously been growing and selling them for centuries. But the country hasn’t produced any coffee makers — until now, anyway. The FrankOne is a clever device that puts a versatile vacuum-extraction technique in a compact, single-cup form factor.

Of course, it’ll have to hit its Kickstarter goal first. Eduardo Umaña, the designer of the FrankOne, explained that he encountered the idea one day when chatting with a Colombian roaster.

“He was making coffee then by using the ‘reverse french press’ method and I thought I could improve on that,”  Umaña told me in an email. “Some time after, I got very curious to test what high vacuum brewed coffee would taste like. I did some simple experiments and was very surprised by the rich and sweet flavor. One thing led to another and I ended up designing a new product.”

The FrankOne is closest in operation to the big glass vacuum drippers you might have seen in fancy coffee shops. This interesting and quite old method uses the gas pressure created by the boiling action to force the water upwards through a tube into the grounds, and then as it cools, the brewed coffee is pulled back down through a filter by the changes in air pressure. The siphons you’ve seen are elegant but not exactly convenient.

“They implement a similar principle in a very different way,” Umaña said. His device doesn’t require this dance of hot and cool;  You put the cylindrical device, about the size of two cans of tuna perhaps, on a carafe of the right size (or mug for that matter) and add the ground coffee in. Pour in the hot water, put the lid on and wait a bit for the oils and such to extract. Then hit the button on top and let it do its thing.

A pump extracts air from the carafe, drawing the coffee down through the metal filter. In a minute or so the process is done, leaving what Umaña says is the bitter crema up in the grounds. The result is a sweet and clear cup of coffee. Its taste (I haven’t tried) is likely closest to Aeropress, as opposed to drip, due to the active force pushing (pulling, actually) the water through the grounds.

The device will accept various grinds and amounts of coffee, producing a different cup — not a possibility with French Press and not advised with pourover or espresso. And it’s definitely a lot smaller than an Aeropress.

It does run on a battery, but with 150 cups per charge, you probably won’t have to worry much about it. And there’s no bait and switch with custom filters or something — you just wash the thing and it’s ready to go again.

Incidentally, I had to double check with Umaña that no one from Colombia had gone on to create a coffee maker. The industry is so old and so important there that it seemed impossible.

“Unbelievable, right?” he wrote. “It was also very meaningful to me as Colombian to work on the first Colombian designed coffee brewer. Perhaps through this project we can bring some much needed economic development to the country by innovating in coffee; it grows right in our backyard and we can do so much more than we are currently doing!”

Umaña and his company, Frank de Paula (after the second president of Colombia, who started the coffee export business there in the 19th century), are looking for $120,000 to finance the device. At $50 for the early birds it’s likely a steal, at least if you’re a coffee brewing fiend like me — I collect stuff like this. Everyone needs a hobby, right? It’ll cost a bill when it comes out in retail, so if you like the idea, save yourself a couple bucks and support good design with a pledge.

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Ericsson and T-Mobile ink $3.5 billion deal for 5G

New 5G networks are coming and big companies are spending big bucks to roll them out.

Ericsson is going to be providing T-Mobile with its latest 5G new radio hardware and 3GPP for a cool $3.5 billion.

As it moves from LTE Advanced networks to 5G, T-Mobile said it will use the Ericsson portfolio of products to expand its existing LTE capacity while readying the network for the 5G jump.

Included in the deal are Ericsson’s digital services like dynamic orchestration, business support systems and Ericsson cloud core, which will be used to help T-Mobile roll out 5G services to its customers.

“We have recently decided to increase our investments in the US to be closer to our leading customers and better support them with their accelerated 5G deployments; thereby bringing 5G to life for consumers and enterprises across the country,” Niklas Heuveldop, the president and head of Ericsson North America, said in a statement. “This agreement marks a major milestone for both companies. We are excited about our partnership with T-Mobile, supporting them to strengthen, expand and speed up the deployment of their nationwide 5G network.”

As Mobile World Congress Americas gears up there will be several of these announcements coming down the pike. Already Nokia and Sprint announced they’d be unveiling a demonstration of 5G new radio connections and the Nokia Massive MIMO (multiple input multiple output) technology.

New 5G networking technology promises to deliver high speeds and high-reliability, energy-efficient service in areas of high-device density with extremely low latency.

The partnership with Ericsson means that T-Mobile’s already installed base of Ericsson Radio System radios will be able to run 5G NR with a remote software installation.

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Facebook’s ‘Rosetta’ system helps the company understand memes

Memes are the language of the web and Facebook wants to better understand them.

Facebook’s AI teams have made substantial advances over the years in both computer vision and natural language recognition. Today, they’ve announced some of their latest work that works to combine advances in the two fields. A new system, codenamed “Rosetta,” helps teams at Facebook and Instagram identify text within images to better understand what their subject is and more easily classify them for search or to flag abusive content.

It’s not all memes; the tool scans over a billion images and video frames daily across multiple languages in real time, according to a company blog post.

Rosetta makes use of recent advances in optical character recognition (OCR) to first scan an image and detect text that is present, at which point the characters are placed inside a bounding box that is then analyzed by convolutional neural nets that try to recognize the characters and determine what’s being communicated.

via Facebook

This technology has been in practice for a while — Facebook has been working with OCR since 2015 — but implementing this across the company’s vast networks provides a crazy degree of scale that motivated the company to develop some new strategies around character detection and recognition.

If you’re interested in some of the more technical details of what they did here, check out the team’s research paper on the topic.

Facebook has plenty of reasons to be interested in the text that is accompanying videos or photos, particularly when it comes to their content moderation needs.

Identifying spam is pretty straightforward when the text description of a photo is “Bruh!!! ” or “1 like = 1 prayer,” but videos and photos that employ similar techniques seemed to be more present in timelines as Facebook tweaks its algorithm to promote “time well spent.” The same goes for hate speech, which can much more easily be shared when all the messaging is encapsulated in one image or video, which makes text overlays a useful tool.

The company says that this system presents new challenges for them in terms of multi-language support as it’s currently running off a unified model for languages and the bulk of available training data is currently in the Latin alphabet. In the company’s research paper, the team details that it has some strategies to conjure up new language support by repurposing existing databases.

As Facebook looks to offload work from human content moderators and allow its news feed algorithms to sort content based on assigned classifications, a tool like this has a lot of potential to shape how Facebook identifies harmful content, but also put more interesting content in front of you.

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Alivecor gets a green light from FDA to screen for dangerously high potassium levels in the blood

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has granted AliveCor the designation of ‘breakthrough device’ for it’s ability to detect a rare but dangerous blood condition called hyperkalemia without taking any blood from the patient.

Hyperkalemia is a medical term describing elevated potassium levels in the blood and is usually found in those with kidney disease. The correct amount of potassium is critical for the function of nerve and muscles in the body, including your heart muscle. A blood potassium level higher than than 6.0 mmol/L can be dangerous and usually requires immediate treatment, according to the Mayo Clinic.

A surprising 31 million people in the U.S. suffer from chronic kidney conditions leading to potentially elevated levels of potassium. Nearly 500,000 of those with the condition are on dialysis as their kidneys are no longer able to function.

AliveCor is able to detect elevated levels of potassium in the blood using the company’s specifically trained deep neural network and data from its electrocardiograms (ECG) technology, similar to those captured by AliveCor’s KardiaMobile and KardiaBand devices.

The new designation means the FDA will begin to fast track the technology, enabling patients with kidney disease to use AliveCor for home-based detection of elevated potassium levels.

AliveCor was cleared late last year by the FDA to use its Kardiaband technology as a medical device for the Apple Watch to detect abnormal hearth rhythm. Allowing kidney and heart patients to use this technology at home would potentially save lives by detecting and warning them that something is wrong before heading into the doctor’s office to get checked.

“We are gratified that the artificial intelligence work we’re doing at AliveCor has been deemed so meaningful that it has achieved FDA ‘Breakthrough Device’ status,” AliveCor CEO Vic Gundotra said in a statement. “We view it as a key milestone in our corporate history and look forward to the further development of our non-invasive Hyperkalemia detection tools.”

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How to Build DIY AI Projects Using Google TensorFlow and Raspberry Pi

Machine learning is the topic on everyone’s lips. It’s easy to see why. It is the future of data manipulation and is already used in almost every modern business setting. But can it be combined with a Raspberry Pi? Is the Pi up to the task of sustaining a working neural network? With Google TensorFlow, it can!

Here’s how to install TensorFlow on a Raspberry Pi, with some examples of usage.

What Is TensorFlow?

Before diving into examples of how TensorFlow is used, it’s worth knowing what it actually is.

In short, TensorFlow is Google’s trainable neural network, which can perform many different tasks. By actively learning from a user-curated dataset, TensorFlow neural networks makes accurate predictions when given new data.

In short, TensorFlow neural networks think.

Check our list of Tensorflow examples for more information.

How to Install TensorFlow

While understanding the subject of machine learning takes serious study, basic TensorFlow usage is easy to follow. Our Image Recognition with TensorFlow tutorial covers installing the library onto your Pi. It also covers testing it, and running the basic Inception image classification program.

In this instance, TensorFlow provides an already trained neural network. All the user must do is input the correct data type, and TensorFlow will guess what the image contains. Even the basic implementation of TensorFlow is capable of classifying images into 1000 classes. It gets a surprising amount correct!

But what else can you do with TensorFlow on the Raspberry Pi?

Portable Image Recognition

We have covered how to make a smart webcam before, but this talking mobile image classifier takes it to a new level.

This detailed post outlines the hardware setup and custom software integrated with the Inception image classifier. The example code shows just how easy it is to integrate TensorFlow with a project (provided you are comfortable with the basics of the Python Programming language). The article goes into great detail about the process of image recognition. It is an excellent resource in general for anyone interested in the field.

One excellent element of this setup may not be initially clear:

“An added bonus many pointed out is that, once installed, no internet access is required.”

Previous image recognition has always relied on a huge amount of processing time, or an internet connection. A Pi cannot always pass off information to the cloud, and has limited processing power. This is the solution, a self-contained offline object recognizer you can make at home. It’ll even tell you what it is looking at. Isn’t the future marvelous?

TensorFlow Magic Mirror

Homemade smart (or “magic”) mirrors are about the coolest thing you can build. Requiring only a Pi and an old laptop screen along with basic DIY supplies, it’s a great beginner project. Alasdair Allan decided not to settle for the average smart mirror and built the TensorFlow magic mirror with voice recognition.

Unsatisfied with the cost of web-based speech recognition, Alasdair decided on TensorFlow as an offline alternative. Integrating TensorFlow’s pretrained voice recognition model into the already utilized AIY kit code adds custom wake words to the project.

Google assembled a dataset with over 65,000 crowdsourced words. This open-source dataset trained the neural net to understand some words.

In this case, it added several possible wake words but still runs into a familiar machine learning problem: it takes a lot of data to train a neural network.

Unless you are willing to create a unique dataset with tens of thousands of entries, you are limited to what is freely available. This project shows the limitations of TensorFlow on the Pi in its current state. It is fully functional but pushes the Pi’s computational capabilities. As with all new technologies, this early implementation is a glimpse into the future of smart home devices.

TensorFlow Autonomous RC Car

Given Google’s history with self-driving cars, it is no surprise that TensorFlow is well suited to autonomous driving.

The DeepPiCar is an excellent example of this kind of neural network in action. Alongside standard remote control this Raspberry Pi robot features something altogether cleverer. Trained on a dataset provided on the GitHub project page, the network learns to stay on a predetermined track.

This project is not for beginners. The hardware required can be found in almost any cheap robot kit. The software implementation takes some more in-depth knowledge. You should have a good grasp of machine learning before taking it on.

Cucumber Auto-Sorter

One of the best-known deployments of TensorFlow on the Pi, Makoto Koike’s cucumber sorter is a sign of things to come.

The sorting of fresh produce for different markets is a massive cost for smaller providers. Sorting cucumbers by size and quality is a task which until recently could only be performed by a human operator. Machine sorting was very difficult to achieve, and costly. TensorFlow solves this problem by categorizing cucumbers in real time via camera.

Using over 7000 images of cucumbers, Makoto trained a neural network to distinguish between different types. In operation, webcams capture images from three angles. The Pi classifies the images, before forwarding them to a Linux server for further classification. The result triggers a conveyor belt and servo system which sorts the cucumbers into boxes.

The Start of Something Smart

We’ve seen Raspberry Pi’s used for everything, so it’s unsurprising that TensorFlow has arrived on it. The Pi struggles to keep up with the demands of machine learning, but it’s great for learning the basics.

Read the full article: How to Build DIY AI Projects Using Google TensorFlow and Raspberry Pi

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10 Tips for Every Dropbox User Who Wants to Share a File

If you work on a computer, in a team of people, or if you’re a freelancer, Dropbox is the default part of your life now. But Dropbox is much more than just a place to save and sync your work files between your laptop and mobile devices.

Dropbox has turned into an ecosystem for collaborating on projects, collecting documents, and sharing important files. But as your entire work life moves into Dropbox, it can be difficult to manage the different parts of Dropbox. The simplistic folder structure surely definitely doesn’t help when you want to share your files. That’s where our tips and tricks come in.

1. Instantly Share Any File With Anyone

Dropbox used to have a separate system for sharing files from your Dropbox account. You had to use the Public folder and it would automatically generate public links for anything in the folder. Now, Dropbox has simplified the workflow.

There are now multiple ways to share a file or folder on Dropbox.

When viewing a file, you can quickly go to the Share section and create a link. Now anyone with the link can access the file.

If you’re looking to collaborate with people on a file or a folder, it’s best to add them to Dropbox sharing directly.

2. Restore Deleted Files

Accidentally deleted a file from Dropbox? Don’t worry, there’s an easy way to get it back, as long as it’s been less than 30 days since the deletion process. If you want to keep deleted files for up to 120 days, you’ll have to upgrade to Dropbox Professional.

Open the Dropbox website, go to the Files section and click on Recently Deleted. Just like the Recycle Bin on your computer, you’ll see a list of files you’ve recently deleted. Select the revenant files and click on the Restore button to put them back to their original place.

3. Revert Back to an Old Version of a File

One of the best features of Dropbox is its revision history. If you’re a writer or an editor, you’ll appreciate the ease with which you can instantly revert to an older version of the same document.

Click on the menu button next to the file and select Version History. You’ll see a list of every different version of the file that Dropbox saved, along with the time stamp and the user who made the change. Click on one version to preview it. Use the Restore button to switch back to it.

4. Request Files

If you’re using Dropbox to collect different kinds of files from different users, Request Files feature will save you a lot of time. Using this feature, you can create a link and a unique folder associated with it.

You can send this link to anyone and they can add any file to the folder. They don’t even need to be a Dropbox user.

From the sidebar, click on File Requests and then use the Request Files button to get started. Enter the name of the folder, where to save it, put up a deadline, generate the link and send it along!

5. Star Important Folders for Quick Access

Dropbox might be a repository of all of your important work files, archive documents, home documents and even your photo library. If you simply use Dropbox’s folder structure to organize it all, you’ll spend a lot of time just finding the right folder.

This is where starring comes in. Pick a couple of folders you use frequently and Star them. The next time you open Dropbox website or the app, you’ll see these folders right at the top.

6. Save Files for Offline Use

You can’t be connected to the Internet all the time. It’s a good idea to save a couple of important files for offline use. If you’re using Dropbox Basic account, you can save individual files offline (using the iOS and Android app), for free. To save folders, you’ll have to upgrade to a Dropbox Professional account.

Tap on the menu button when you’re viewing a file and tap on the Make Available Offline button to save the file on your device.

7. Use Selective Sync to Save Storage Space

Once you’ve installed Dropbox on your Mac or Windows PC, head to Settings and find the Selective Sync option. Using this feature, you can choose to sync only a selected number of folders with your computer instead of your entire Dropbox account.

This is a good way to make sure that your photo backup or other large files don’t take up space on your computer.

8. Change URL to get Direct Download Link

Here’s a cool little hack to bypass Dropbox’s UI for previewing a file. Instead of dodging a popup that keeps asking you to sign in to Dropbox, just change the URL a bit. At the end of a Dropbox shared URL, replace the “dl=0” part with “dl=1“. Reload and the file will be downloaded instantly.

9. Use 2-Factor Authentication and PIN Lock

If you’re like me, you’re using Dropbox to sync not just important documents but also a password vault for services like 1Password. This means that you’ll want to protect your Dropbox account. And a complex password isn’t enough.

The best thing you can do is to enable 2 Factor Authentication (with an SMS OTP or Google Authenticator). Go to your Personal Settings > Security and turn on Two-step Verification.

On your iPhone or Android phone, go to the Settings section of the Dropbox app and enable the lock feature. You can use a Pin lock, fingerprint or even Face ID authentication on your iPhone X.

10. Scan Documents Directly to Dropbox

Dropbox is probably where your scanned documents end up. No matter if you use a third party scanner app like CamScanner. Now, you can cut out the middleman and directly upload scanned documents using the Dropbox app on your iPhone or Android smartphone.

After opening the app, tap on the + button and select Scan Document. Follow the prompts on the screen to capture a picture and convert it into scanned document format. Then, choose where you want to save the document.

Now, Master Dropbox Paper

Now that you’ve got a hang of Dropbox, it’s time to take on Dropbox Paper. Paper is Dropbox’s answer to Google Docs. It’s a modern take on a document collaboration tool and it’s actually quite nice. In many ways (the design, mentions, built-in task management), it’s downright better than Google Docs.

Read the full article: 10 Tips for Every Dropbox User Who Wants to Share a File

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Tinder launches its curated ‘Top Picks’ feature worldwide

Earlier this summer, Tinder began testing a new feature that surfaces a curated list of your best potential matches, called “Top Picks.” The feature, which is only available to paying subscribers on Tinder Gold, is now available worldwide, Tinder says.

Top Picks had also quietly launched in the U.S. and U.K. last week following initial tests in Germany, Brazil, France, Canada, Turkey, Mexico, Sweden, Russia and the Netherlands, in addition to the U.K. However, Tinder waited until the global rollout was underway to announce its arrival.

The idea behind Top Picks seems a bit inspired by the dating app Coffee Meets Bagel, which similarly focuses on curation of matches to reduce users’ impulse to continue swiping through what feels like an unlimited number of profiles. Humans don’t do well with too many choices – an overabundance of options can actually lead to anxiety, and – in the case of dating apps – an inability to settle on a decision, as users know there’s always another potential match just around the corner, or so it’s been argued.

Tinder’s solution for this is Top Picks, a more limited set of potential matches it thinks users will like based on information in users’ profiles like education, type of job, hobbies and interests. Tinder then uses this data to organize users into groupings, like “foodie” or “creative” or “adventurer” and so on.

This information is combined with users’ previous swiping behavior to determine the day’s Top Picks, which area available to toggle over to (via the diamond icon) on the app’s home screen.

While Top Picks will refresh daily, users can opt to buy more Top Picks in packs of 10, 20 or 30 a la carte, Tinder says. (Yes, by “packs” we do mean groups of user profiles – Tinder has turned people into in-app purchases you can buy. Yeah. Great.).

The feature is only available to Tinder Gold subscribers, meaning it varies in price. Tinder charges older users more for accessing Gold, and weights other factors like region, length of subscription, and recent in-app promotions when showing you its pricing.

Paid features like Top Picks have helped to fuel Tinder’s growth and its revenue.

Following the launch of its subscription service, Tinder Gold, the app quickly became the top grossing app in the App Store. And it has held a top spot ever since – even becoming the number 5 top grossing app of all-time, according to a recent report of the App Store’s biggest apps.

Paid subscribers are also soaring. Tinder parent company Match Group reported that Tinder added 299,000 paid members in the second quarter, totalling 1.7 million additions in the past year, and more than 3 million to date.

“We’re excited to finally share Top Picks with our users around the world given its early success,” said Brian Norgard, Chief Product Officer at Tinder, in a statement. “Data suggests users in test markets have loved the feature, and we’re happy to make one Top Pick available to all users each day with this global rollout. The feature refreshes every day, highlighting the diversity, talents and passions of our users in a simple, fun and useful manner.”

The launch of Top Picks arrives at the same time that a new documentary about Tinder’s outsized influence on dating culture, Swiped, has debuted on HBO.

The film takes a fairly damning view of online dating via apps like Tinder, by highlighting some of its worst attributes – like the men ordering women to their home the way they do Seamless; the swipe addicts who always think there’s someone better out there; the unsolicited sexual photos women receive; as well as the overall decline in value for genuine human connections, due to the abundance of choice offered by dating apps’ massive “catalogs.”

Top Picks won’t necessarily solve these problems. At best, it may at least help users narrow their focus and begin to understand there aren’t actually endless dating options when you have certain criteria in mind. At worst, it may encourage users to view people as even more of a commodity, as they click to pay merely pennies for more Top Picks “packs.”

The feature is rolling out globally on iOS and Android as of Monday evening.

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Tinder launches its curated ‘Top Picks’ feature worldwide

Earlier this summer, Tinder began testing a new feature that surfaces a curated list of your best potential matches, called “Top Picks.” The feature, which is only available to paying subscribers on Tinder Gold, is now available worldwide, Tinder says.

Top Picks had also quietly launched in the U.S. and U.K. last week following initial tests in Germany, Brazil, France, Canada, Turkey, Mexico, Sweden, Russia and the Netherlands, in addition to the U.K. However, Tinder waited until the global rollout was underway to announce its arrival.

The idea behind Top Picks seems a bit inspired by the dating app Coffee Meets Bagel, which similarly focuses on curation of matches to reduce users’ impulse to continue swiping through what feels like an unlimited number of profiles. Humans don’t do well with too many choices – an overabundance of options can actually lead to anxiety, and – in the case of dating apps – an inability to settle on a decision, as users know there’s always another potential match just around the corner, or so it’s been argued.

Tinder’s solution for this is Top Picks, a more limited set of potential matches it thinks users will like based on information in users’ profiles like education, type of job, hobbies and interests. Tinder then uses this data to organize users into groupings, like “foodie” or “creative” or “adventurer” and so on.

This information is combined with users’ previous swiping behavior to determine the day’s Top Picks, which area available to toggle over to (via the diamond icon) on the app’s home screen.

While Top Picks will refresh daily, users can opt to buy more Top Picks in packs of 10, 20 or 30 a la carte, Tinder says. (Yes, by “packs” we do mean groups of user profiles – Tinder has turned people into in-app purchases you can buy. Yeah. Great.).

The feature is only available to Tinder Gold subscribers, meaning it varies in price. Tinder charges older users more for accessing Gold, and weights other factors like region, length of subscription, and recent in-app promotions when showing you its pricing.

Paid features like Top Picks have helped to fuel Tinder’s growth and its revenue.

Following the launch of its subscription service, Tinder Gold, the app quickly became the top grossing app in the App Store. And it has held a top spot ever since – even becoming the number 5 top grossing app of all-time, according to a recent report of the App Store’s biggest apps.

Paid subscribers are also soaring. Tinder parent company Match Group reported that Tinder added 299,000 paid members in the second quarter, totalling 1.7 million additions in the past year, and more than 3 million to date.

“We’re excited to finally share Top Picks with our users around the world given its early success,” said Brian Norgard, Chief Product Officer at Tinder, in a statement. “Data suggests users in test markets have loved the feature, and we’re happy to make one Top Pick available to all users each day with this global rollout. The feature refreshes every day, highlighting the diversity, talents and passions of our users in a simple, fun and useful manner.”

The launch of Top Picks arrives at the same time that a new documentary about Tinder’s outsized influence on dating culture, Swiped, has debuted on HBO.

The film takes a fairly damning view of online dating via apps like Tinder, by highlighting some of its worst attributes – like the men ordering women to their home the way they do Seamless; the swipe addicts who always think there’s someone better out there; the unsolicited sexual photos women receive; as well as the overall decline in value for genuine human connections, due to the abundance of choice offered by dating apps’ massive “catalogs.”

Top Picks won’t necessarily solve these problems. At best, it may at least help users narrow their focus and begin to understand there aren’t actually endless dating options when you have certain criteria in mind. At worst, it may encourage users to view people as even more of a commodity, as they click to pay merely pennies for more Top Picks “packs.”

The feature is rolling out globally on iOS and Android as of Monday evening.

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Tesla’s sleek wireless smartphone charger will soon be available again

Last month Tesla introduced a limited edition smartphone charger. Even though it was overpriced and slow, the charger quickly sold out. Now Tesla says the charger will soon be available again and at a lower price.

The charger features 6,000mAh of juice and 5W of wireless output charging and 7.5W through USB. The first time around, the charger was $65 but now it will cost $50. Still, as The Verge points out even at the lower cost, similar wireless chargers can be had for less money and often sport a larger battery. But they don’t say Tesla.

This charger is the latest in Tesla’s small electronic lifestyle items. They’ve long sold USB chargers designed to mimic the design and appeal of its Supercharger line. This latest version looks like the Tesla Powerwall battery — but as awesome as the Powerwall is, it cannot wireless charge a smartphone.

@verge tipline @nickstatt check out the cut in cost and refunds for Tesla's phone charger. Still not an Anker, but pretty sweet move pic.twitter.com/n9WG6xHPIs

— Jᴀʀᴇᴅ Hᴀssᴏɴ (@JaredEzz) September 10, 2018

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How to Return an Item on eBay

Sometimes an eBay purchase goes wrong. Maybe the goods weren’t as described by the seller, or the product arrived damaged. In that case, you need to apply for a refund.

Thankfully, even though eBay is a marketplace predominately driven by individuals, the site’s refund process is robust. You shouldn’t encounter any difficulties in getting your money back.

If you need to return an item on eBay, keep reading. Here’s the full eBay refund process explained.

Are You Eligible for an eBay Refund?

You are not automatically eligible for a refund if you decide you simply don’t like the product you bought.

If you have changed your mind about a purchase, you can still approach the seller and ask about a rebate. Most of the well-established, high reputation sellers will be open to your request, but someone who’s just sold a random item they wanted to get rid of might not be so willing.

Otherwise, check out the eBay Money Back Guarantee Policy to see if you’re eligible for a proper refund.

How to Return an Item on eBay

If your product is damaged, faulty, or not as expected, you are eligible for a refund. You are covered by the eBay Money Back Guarantee Policy, even if the seller states they do not accept returns. The Guarantee states that the seller has three days to resolve the issue.

If no resolution is found, eBay will take control of the matter. You and the seller will both be asked to provide details of the case, and a decision will be reached in 48 hours.

To start the returns process, follow the instructions below:

1. Log into your eBay account.
2. Go to My eBay > Purchase History.
3. Click on Return this item.
4. Select your reason for the return from the drop-down menu.
5. Upload pictures if necessary.
6. Hit Send.

You will get a notification when the seller responds. After the seller receives the returned item, they have two days to issue a refund.

To learn more about shopping on eBay, check out our article about how you can win any eBay auction with automatic bidding.

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You Can Name Your Price on these 10 Top Mac Apps

Every Mac comes with a bucket load of useful features. But to get the most out of your gleaming Apple machine, you’re going to need some third-party apps. The PWYW The Ultimate Mac Bundle offers ten of the best, from task managers to PDF editors. Better still, you can currently name your price on the bundle at MakeUseOf Deals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9wpm_GZKM8

The Top Ten

There are many great apps in this line-up, but the headliner has to be 2Do. This well-reviewed task manager helps you stay organized, without slowing you down.

The app lets you create tasks at speed or set up recurring tasks. You can easily attach links, Google searches and addresses to your tasks, and drag them into a logical order. Thanks to the advanced search feature, you can also filter your tasks by date, tag, location, and other criteria. The app syncs with the iOS version on your mobile devices, and with your online calendar.

The bundle also contains PDF Manager Ultimate. This powerful productivity tool helps you view, edit and annotate PDF documents with ease. The app can even convert scans into editable text, thanks to built-in OCR.

Other highlights of this bundle include RoboForm password manager, Future DJ mixing software, NetSpot Home Wi-Fi scanner, and Airy, an intuitive YouTube video downloader.

Name Your Price

To get the bundle, simply name your price on Art Text 3 — a design app for creating logos and mock-ups. Beat the average price paid to get the full line-up, worth $437.

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How to Check Google Chrome for Incompatible Software Conflicts

If you use Google Chrome, chances are that it’s one of the most important programs on your computer. We do more than ever in our browsers, meaning that stability issues are a huge problem.

To that end, Google has introduced a new feature in Chrome on Windows. This will check your computer for software that can cause stability issues in Chrome and help you remove it. Here’s how to take a look.

How to Check Google Chrome for Software Conflicts

1. Open Chrome and head to Menu > Settings.
2. Scroll down to the bottom and click Advanced.
3. All the way at the bottom of the next page, you’ll see an option titled Update or remove incompatible applications. Select this. If you don’t see it, you don’t have any of these apps installed.
4. You’ll see any software that Chrome labels as incompatible.
5. Click Remove, and Chrome will open the Apps section of Windows 10’s Settings app with a prompt to uninstall the software in question.

Don’t immediately uninstall software you see here, though. Take a minute and consider whether the apps are helpful or not.

Chrome reports all apps that use code injection to modify its behavior, as they’re more likely to cause the browser to crash. Code injection can be for nefarious or helpful purposes.

For instance, you can see that Malwarebytes Premium shows up in Chrome’s blacklist here. Since MB Premium has tons of security benefits, I’m not going to remove it just because Chrome may have an issue with it.

However, you should remove unknown or dangerous software shown here. While you’re at it, you should remove bad Chrome extensions too.

If you aren’t experiencing Chrome crashes, you don’t need to take any action yet. But if you are suffering from poor performance, try updating any software that Chrome lists on this page. If updates don’t fix it, you may want to remove that tool if it’s not essential to your workflow—or switch to another browser.

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