Google Keep App for Chrome

Speaking of new-style packaged apps for Chrome, here's a new app: Google Keep. It's another way to access the recently launched service for taking notes.

The app looks just like the Google Keep site, but it works offline. This means that you can access your notes or create new notes even if you don't have an Internet connection. Unfortunately, you can't insert images when you're offline. Another limitation is that new notes aren't uploaded in the background when you're back online, so you need to open the app.

{ via Chrome Blog }

Top 5 Free Blogger Templates To Download

You're looking for a professional blogger templates? If yes, then you are in the right place. It was a very common problem these days when blog authors and blog writers can not seek to create a blog / web page, a good professional stage as a model to show the personality Blogs. And his blog, so that the only case that may bring many visitors and Template.

Read More: How to Attracting 1,000 Daily Blog Visitors with top Six Steps

Means traction if your blogger blog template is nice and easy and professional, then you swing your webpage Blog. Actually is berkualiti many models, but they are not free than cost. You need to pay a large amount of money, meaning we have collected in the top 10 is a professional blogger templates useless 2013.

Read More: Submissions to the search engines in 2013

These cooked up and published by the authors differed, and we just teamed up with you, to make your life more harmonious blog.

I am at your disposal 5 beautiful themes for Blogger:

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3 columns, Magazine, Slider positions featured, fixed-width , drop-down menu ,Widget Social , Widget page navigation .

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2 columns , sidebar on the right , Webdesign, Slider positions featured , fixed width ,dark green background , Widget page navigation .

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Template 3: Agreement:

3 columns, Fashion, sidebar on the right , Slider positions featured, fixed width , gray background, banner header, dropdown menu , Widget Social , Widget page navigation .

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Template 4: ChromeGT:

2 columns , 4 columns footer, Modern, sidebar on the right , Slider positions featured ,fixed width , black , top menu, Widget page navigation .

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Template 5: Insomnia:

2 columns , 3 columns footer, Personnel, sidebar on the right , Slider positions featured , fixed width , black , top menu, Widget page navigation .

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8 Of The Best Band Websites On The Planet

I have never met anybody who doesn’t like music. I’ve met plenty who don’t share my taste in music, but none who reject it altogether. A love of music is clearly hardwired into our mainframes, being a key part of the human experience. The fact that we all like different genres and artists is a wholly positive thing too.

When one discovers a new music artist our first instinct is to head online to find out more about them and hopefully hear more of their music. So why do the websites of numerous musicians and bands suck so badly? I’ve lost count of the number I’ve visited only to be disappointed by the bland, insipid design that shows a complete lack of creativity or imagination.

Thankfully not all music artists suffer from this trait. Some actually spend the time, money, and effort needed to maintain a good presence online. Their websites are good looking, interactive, filled with great content, and are generally blessed with cool designs.

What follows are the current cream of the crop, along with screenshots showing their awesomeness. Websites naturally evolve over time, and bands often change the look and feel of their online properties in order to promote new material. However, the bands listed here have a history of offering a certain aesthetic on their websites, so this list should remain relevant for many years to come.

Nine Inch Nails

NIN comprises Trent Reznor and whoever he picks up along the way. Reznor is the driving force behind the band, which straddles genres but is generally regarded as an industrial rock group. The website is clean and efficient, but contains masses of content, including free downloads and more than 50,000 photos and videos spanning the history of the band.

MGMT

MGMT are an indie rock group who experiment with alternative and experimental sounds. Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden are the founding members, with the other band members having joined later. The website is a strange mix of the ordinary and the bizarre, with fan art providing the background for more traditional merchandising and forum areas.

U2

U2 are pretty much legendary at this point. Led by Bono, who is ably supported by The Edge and those other two guys, the Irish rock group are famous in all four corners of the world. The website has everything a U2 fan could ask for, with photos, audio, video, a discography, an archive, and a nice community feel that is rare for bands of such size and scale as U2.

The Killers

The Killers are an American rock band led by the always-entertaining Brandon Flowers. They’re big in the U.S, but arguably even bigger in the U.K. The website always looks good, with a color scheme and style matching the band’s current album. There is an active community, and members can enjoy additional features.

Radiohead

Radiohead are a British alternative rock group that have gone from strength to strength over the years, gaining fans and followers in most territories. Their sound is always evolving, with each album marking a new line in the sand. The website is absolutely epic, with multiple areas covering different portions of Radiohead’s persona.

Gorillaz

Gorillaz are a virtual group consisting of animated members taking the place of the evolving mix of actual contributors. Damon Albarn, formerly of Britpop sensation Blur, is the driving force behind the project. The band are currently on hiatus, but the website is still rocking, and Gorillaz are highly likely to return before long.

Flight Of The Conchords

Flight Of The Conchords are a duo from New Zealand comprising Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement. They’re primarily a comedy folk group, but thanks to a hit show on HBO they’re far more successful than such a moniker would suggest. The website has a retro feel to it, with a style and sense of humor which perfectly complement the band.

Muse

Muse are perhaps the best live band in the world at the moment. They make a lot of noise for a trio of musicians from the South-West of England, and their innovative style of genre-redefining music has earned them fans around the world. The website is heavy on graphics but has enough great content to justify the overpowering feeling this engenders.

Conclusions

You may not like some of the bands listed here. I’ll be honest and admit there are at least two of the eight who don’t do it for me personally. However, their websites ooze with an elementary cool factor, to the point that I’m happy to hang out on the domains of bands I don’t even like.

Which of the best band websites on this list do you particularly like, if any? Are there any band websites with cool designs you think should have made the cut? Do you feel music artists and their labels should try harder to foster a following on the InterWebs? As always we’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section.

Image Credit: Nina Matthews

The post 8 Of The Best Band Websites On The Planet appeared first on MakeUseOf.

The New Chrome Apps

Back in 2010, I wrote a post about the Chrome Web Store and the two kinds of apps that were available: hosted apps (mostly links to web apps) and packaged apps (local apps that work offline and are closer to native apps). At that time, many people complained that the apps from the Chrome Web Store are mostly bookmarks and Google didn't distinguish hosted apps from packaged apps. "Unfortunately, Google's store doesn't properly label apps, so it's difficult to find apps that work offline, apps that have a rich user interaction, apps that only live inside Chrome," I mentioned back then.



The Web Store has improved: Google started to label the apps that work offline and the two types of apps will have different names. Only packaged apps will be called "apps", while hosted apps will be called "websites".



Today's packaged apps are actually new-style packaged apps and have a lot of new features: "powerful APIs have been added so your apps can have native-like capabilities, and a serious security model is enforced to make sure these APIs are not abused." Package apps launch from outside of the browser, using the Chrome App Launcher - a new icon that will be added to the operating system's taskbar. The apps launch in a new window that has no chrome and no browser interface elements.

"These combine the best of websites and native applications — they're available offline & from any computer, are always up to date, and they can communicate with devices like USB drives & Bluetooth speakers," explains Google.



Here's the new Chrome Web Store interface that's displayed if you use Chrome 28 (Dev/Canary) for Windows or Chrome OS:

Install the Gliffy Diagrams app and you can use it almost instantly. Add some shapes, close the window, open Gliffy again from the App Launcher and your data is there.

"Many of these apps are works in progress, which is why we're only making them easily available on Chrome's dev channel. If you've written a packaged app, or are working on one, now is a great time to get some early feedback and polish your app before Chrome packaged apps become more broadly available," informs the Chromium Blog.



Some examples of apps: games, to-do apps, text editors, video editors, SSH clients, IRC clients, torrent clients, camera apps, calculators, image editors, weather apps and more.

Download and Sync Google Fonts to Your Computer

Google's Web Fonts are really popular. Google created a directory of open source fonts that anyone can use. They're hosted by Google and it's easy to embed them. The most popular font is Open Sans, which has more than 2 billion views only for the last week.



Fonts like Open Sans, Droid Sans and Roboto are only preinstalled if you're using an Android device and there are many other fonts that aren't preinstalled, so how can you use them? "If a page uses web fonts, then the font files have to be downloaded to the site visitor's computer before they can be displayed initially. The font files are served compressed for a faster download. After that initial download, they will be cached in the browser. As the Google Fonts API becomes widely used, your visitors will be likely to already have the font you're using in their browser cache when they visit your page," explains Google.



A search for fonts.googleapis.com in Chrome's cache page (chrome://cache/) returned font families like Open Sans, Tangerine, Oswald, Noto Serif, IM Fell English, Arvo, Droid Sans.



If you want to download some of these fonts to your computer and sync them when they're updated, you can install SkyFonts, a free software for Windows and Mac OS X. "SkyFonts automatically updates the fonts installed on your system whenever they are updated on Google Fonts – for example, when new characters are added – ensuring you always have the latest fonts to work with. And with the fonts installed locally, browsing websites that use web fonts will be faster, since your browser won't have to spend time fetching font data," mentions Raziel Alvarez, from the Google Fonts team.

There are 624 font families and 1105 fonts right now, but SkyFonts only lets you download fonts one by one. It's probably a good idea to visit the Google Fonts directory, sort font families by popularity and download some of the font styles from fonts.com.



If you don't need the syncing feature, you can also download fonts from the Google Fonts site: click "Add to Collection" next to the fonts you want to download, then click the "Download" button and download the font families in your collection as a .zip file and use these instructions.

GifCam – The Easiest Way To Make Animated GIFs Ever [Windows]

Quickly make an animated GIF of anything. GifCam is a free, portable app for Windows that provides you with a simple frame. Resize and position it, then hit record – everything that happens within that frame will be recorded. It’s the easiest way to create your own GIF of just about anything — from desktop demonstrations to clips from any video, online or off. If you love creating GIFs, but wish the process was quicker, you need to check this app out.

The animated GIF just might be older than you – it’s been around since 1987, and really took off in the early days of the web. It declined at the end of the 90′s, and to some it’s an obsolete way to show animations online – but you wouldn’t know that to look at the web today. Animated GIFs are everywhere. From the endless scrolling of Tumblr to reaction shots on Reddit, GIFs are probably seen by more humans today than any point in their history. Even Twitter’s Vine seems to be inspired by the prevalence of GIFs – short, looping videos with no sound.

We’ve shown you 6 places to create amazing, memeworthy GIF animations. We showed you how to make GIFs using GIMP or using Photoshop. These methods work, but all require you to do a lot of the work yourself.

GifCam, on the other hand, could not be easier: just set up the frame where you want it and hit record. Your mouse will work within it, just as before, meaning you could use this to add quick demonstrations to documents – but you could just as easily use this app to make GIFs of scenes from your favorite online videos or even TV shows. The only limitation is “things you can see on your computer screen” (or, if you’re in Windows 8, “things you can use in Desktop mode”).

Making GIFs The Easy Way

GifCam looks like any other window – except you can see through it. Think of the window as the frame of your virtual video camera – one you can resize and move however you like.

You can use this to record just about anything. Your favorite YouTube video. Yourself playing video games. Or highlights from a hockey game.

It’s just an idea, of course – you could just as easily use it to record a light-switch rave.

(Of course, The Cheat shouldn’t be doing that – we had that light-switch installed so he could turn the lights on and off, not so he could throw light-switch raves.)

You get the idea – position the window over what you want to record, then record it. Once you’ve made your recording you may want to make changes. For example: you may have recorded too much, and want to remove some frames so you can get the perfect loop. Making GIFs, after all, is an art – one you respect. You want to get this right.

Don’t worry, it’s easy: just hit edit. You’ll be able to scroll through all of the recorded frames and delete whatever you want.

Scroll to the right to see more frames, then right-click any you want to edit. As you see above: you can even delete every image before your after the one you’ve selected. This makes the process quick, and you’ll have your ideal GIF in no time.

You can also save space by applying color limitations. Click the arrow beside the “Save” button to see that option:

Once you’ve adjusted everything to be just right you can save your GIF. Congratulations: you’ve brought a new GIF into the world. Treat it kindly, spread it widely.

Download GifCam

Want to try this out? Check out this blog post at BahraniApps.com. It outlines the creator’s usage for the app, using (of course) animated gifs to demonstrate everything.

As for me, I used this to capture John from You know I’m a fan of Crash Course US History being shocked, because that’s something I feel like the Internet needs a GIF of.

You’re welcome.

What are you GIFing with GifCam? Share links in the comments below, because there is basically no point to reviewing this app if I don’t get some GIFs out of the deal. I’m looking forward to checking out your creations…and might contribute a few of my own. Let’s do this!

The post GifCam – The Easiest Way To Make Animated GIFs Ever [Windows] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Did you use CCleaner for computer optimization

CCleaner is a free and easy to use for your system free of unnecessary files software: historical, temporary files, cookies, recent documents, shortcuts, ActiveX controls, entries in registers, etc. ... This is to improve the speed of your system.

CCleaner also strengthens the protection of your privacy. This utility is able to quickly erase your Web browsing, cookies, history of sites visited, temporary files. CCleaner is compatible with most browsers: Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari and Opera also.

CCleaner does not stop there, it can also clean a variety of applications ranging from Microsoft Office suite of Adobe Reader via software download Peer to Peer. And better yet, it can also clean your registry.

And this software is also guaranteed spyware, adware. You will understand, we recommend unconditionally.

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Error 404 (Not Found)!!1

Jack Fellows, a reader of this blog, asked a question about Google's 404 error page: "Google changed their 404 error pages a couple of years ago now, and yet the title still says (and has from day 1) 'Error 404 (Not Found)!!1'. The exclamations marks don't look very professional anyway, but the '1' at the end looks really pants... or is it just me?!"

I don't think it's a mistake. It's probably a joke that references the "!1 phenomenon" meme. "In many cases, a string of exclamation marks followed by '1' can be read as a careless typo, though it has been increasingly used with intention to express a sense of urgency or excitement. While the configuration of QWERTY keyboard layout varies across different language zones, an exclamation point is almost always invoked by holding down the shift key and pressing the digit / symbol key (1/!). As a result, the erroneous input of '1' after a string of exclamation points became a common typo in online chat, especially when typing in haste."



On a related note, it's strange to see that Google's 404 error pages don't include useful information: a search box and a list of relevant pages. For example, when you type in the address bar www.google.com/chat, Google should suggest www.google.com/talk or this page about Gmail Chat.

How to Disable Google News for Tablets

If you don't like the tablet interface for Google News, there's a non-obvious way to switch to the desktop interface. Tap the "gear" button from the top-right of the page, select "Settings", uncheck "Use the new Google News (uncheck to revert to the old version)" and then tap "Save changes".

The tablet interface was launched in December 2012 and the goal was to add support for gestures. "You can find new articles, news sources, and even topics of interest with intuitive gestures. Swipe horizontally between sections – from Business to Entertainment, for example – or tap 'Explore in depth' to see multiple articles and other info related to a particular story." Google News for tablets is only available for English editions.