5 New Articles on MakeUseOf |  |
- Cool Websites and Tools [April 13th 2013]
- Just Manager – A Free & Portable Alternative To Windows Explorer
- Turn Your Email, SMS Inbox, Or Anything Into A Scoreboard With IFTTT And ESPN
- Let Droid Teach You To Draw
- Bing Adds Pinterest Integration, Letting You Pin Images Directly From Search Results [Updates]
| Cool Websites and Tools [April 13th 2013] Posted: 13 Apr 2013 09:31 PM PDT
These are just half of the websites that we discovered in the last couple of days. If you want us to send you daily round-ups of all cool websites we come across, leave your email here. Or follow us via RSS feed. The post Cool Websites and Tools [April 13th 2013] appeared first on MakeUseOf. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Just Manager – A Free & Portable Alternative To Windows Explorer Posted: 13 Apr 2013 07:31 PM PDT
If you’re always sorting through your files or managing your Dropbox, file management can be made incredibly easier if you look into something other than what Windows offers by default. In this article, I’d like to introduce you to one of the newest pieces of software that I’ve come across in this category. Download Just ManagerJust Manager is a huge solution to Windows file management packaged together in one small application. It works on every modern version of Windows, both 32 and 64-bit, and even comes available as a portable application. A lot of these alternative file managers are only available as a hard installation, and often even completely replace Windows Explorer as the default management system. This bothers me and I see it as completely unnecessary. With Just Manager, rather than having it forced upon you, you can simply launch the application whenever you’re ready to manage your files.
The interface is clean and nothing entirely special, but exactly what you’d expect from a multi-pane manager like Just Manager. Above each pane are shortcuts to your connected drives and your network. You also get an immediate snapshot of the available disk space for the drive you’re currently in.
More than just panes, which Just Manager can support up to 16 of, tabs are also a quality feature. By double-clicking in the blank space beside your tabs, a new tab will be opened that mimics the location of the tab before it. This effectively allows you to browse through multiple different folders on a single drive without opening several different panes.
Font highlighting is also a very appreciated and interesting feature. This allows certain files and folders, such as hidden folders and executables in the screenshot above, to be set apart from other items in a pane by taking on a different font color. This really allows you to save time and see important items at just a glance when scrolling through a tab.
The bar across the bottom of the interface gives easy access to buttons that offer file and folder manipulation options. These are prefixed by a hotkey, which allows them to be called by simple keyboard commands as well.
Under the View menu, you can change the tab layout per pane. In the above screenshot, the left pane is using small icons and the right pane is using standard icons. The default option shows details.
One feature that really impressed me, and surprised me to realize that I’ve yet to see before, is FTP support. With Just Manager, you can open an FTP session in a separate pane and essentially use Just Manager in the same way that you’d use a multi-pane FTP client such as FileZilla. This brings an entire new functionality to this file manager and allows you to completely replace another separate piece of software (if the basic FTP features it offers is enough for you).
Network drives are completely supported in the same way. It takes a matter of seconds to map a network drive and configure it so that you can have it opened in a pane within Just Manager.
Just Manger’s settings are extremely deep. The application is configurable in practically every way, and outlining all that is available in the configuration would require an article in itself. Shown in the View tab above, you’re able to hide or show certain panels or toolbars, change the number of rows and columns in the panel layout, and shift around practically every element of the interface.
The Shortcuts tab shows an extensive list of operations that can be triggered by shortcuts (or hotkeys). Just Manager does an incredible job at ensuring that every action can be performed right at your fingertips. Just Manager is one of the least popular Windows file manager alternatives, but I can’t see why. It’s got all of the features that many others offer, plus more. It’s portable and free, too. I highly recommend that you give this application a try if you’re fed up with using Windows Explorer. Let us know what you think of Just Manager in the comments below. The post Just Manager – A Free & Portable Alternative To Windows Explorer appeared first on MakeUseOf. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Turn Your Email, SMS Inbox, Or Anything Into A Scoreboard With IFTTT And ESPN Posted: 13 Apr 2013 01:30 PM PDT
You remember If This Then That, which allows you to combine any two web apps by designing simple rules. All you need is a trigger – in this case, sports scores and events – and an Action – that is, where you’d like that sports score or event to go. Dozens of triggers mean you can use ifttt’s ESPN trigger to get sports updates just about anywhere. You can set up whatever notifications you like : every time a game involving your favorite team begins or ends, or even when news breaks about that team. You can set up as many notifications as you want, too – just keep creating rules. This is the natural extension of an experiment ESPN and IFTTT offered during the Olympics last year, expect now the Disney-owned TV sports station is offering online updates from a variety of different leagues – from North America’s NFL (American football), MLB (baseball), NBA (basketball) and NHL (hockey) to the top European soccer (football) leagues, the ESPN trigger for ifttt allows you to stay up-to-date however you like. Creating The Ultimate Sports RecipeIf you’re reading this you’re probably already familiar with ifttt, but if not simply head to ifttt.com and sign up for an account. Register as many “channels” as you can, because the more channels you have the more possible combinations you can complete. Let’s focus on ESPN, though. This channel can only be used as a “trigger” – that is, as the event that causes an action to happen. Create a new recipe and you’ll be presented with the standard ifttt formula:
Click “this”, then click the ESPN channel. You may need to agree to terms first, but once you do you’ll be presented with potential triggers:
Your choices are:
Pick whatever sort of news you’re interested in getting updates for, and then – depending on which trigger you choose – you’ll be able to choose a league and (possibly) a team. The sports/leagues offered are:
Your trigger created, you now must set up an Action (the “that” part of “if this then that”).
You’ll be presented with a wide variety, but some will work better than others. If all you really want is to be notified when something critical happens in one of your sports, simply select email or SMS and you’ll be able to set up a custom text message. Here’s how that looks for final score, via SMS:
By default you’ll see the “Alert Body”, which is the news ESPN is sending you, alongside the “Alert URL”, which presumably links back to ESPN. Remove whatever you don’t want, and know that you can add the name of the team and the time of publication for the information you were sent. The process is basically the same for other Actions, and you can get really creative with this if you want. For example: you could set up a document in your Dropbox to always include the latest scores:
What could you do with a text file like that? You tell me. You could set it up to display on your desktop using Conky or Geektool, or simply have a text document you can check anytime you want to know the score. It’s totally up to you. You get the idea: be creative and there’s no end of places you could conceivably see sports scores. Heck, QuestionsThis does raise a few questions. Would ESPN shut down a Twitter account that does nothing but tweet up-to-the-moment scores using IFTTT? I suppose not, so long as the links to ESPN are maintained, but only time will tell for sure. Let us know your predictions in the comments below – personally, I hope this service simply keeps working as is. And while you’re commenting, please: let us know what kind of crazy brilliant recipes you’ve created using the new ESPN trigger. Links are much appreciated. And of course, if you’d rather not roll your own notifications like this, you could just install ESPN’s Sportscenter or Yahoo’s Sportacular on your Android or iOS device for instant sports updates. But if you’re looking for something more universal – not to mention more customizable – ifttt is the way to go. Oh, and be sure to check out our other ifttt articles for more tips and tricks! Image Credit: Hockey net and scoreboard by J.D.S. via Shutterstock The post Turn Your Email, SMS Inbox, Or Anything Into A Scoreboard With IFTTT And ESPN appeared first on MakeUseOf. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 13 Apr 2013 11:30 AM PDT
Recently, however, I felt the need to try to improve my drawing skills, and have looked around the Internet for Android apps which could help me. I have found three that have helped me quite a bit, and I hope that they are able to make some difference for you too. How To Draw Cartoons
Once you have completed the portion in red, just continue on to the next step until you have completely drawn the cartoon character. If you want to draw a different character, just repeat the process. It is really as simple as that, and the small steps that you complete make it easy to comprehend and to learn from. How To Draw – Easy Lessons
The other great thing about this app is that you can practice your drawing skills right on the screen — there's no need to have to get out a sheet of paper. However, if you’re using it on a smartphone, don’t expect drawing on the app to be easy (see the screenshot from my Nexus 4). How To Draw Manga
Then again, that's my opinion — some people might actually like the video better just because it can provide more information. A picture is worth a thousand words, and a video is usually 30 pictures every second. However, there are tons of high-quality videos that show you how to produce some amazing results. ConclusionHopefully these three apps will be able to increase your artistic abilities by a large amount. In this case, I really think that keeping things as simple as possible for beginners or noobs like me is ideal, because you can focus on what you need to do, and not any theory behind it. Theory doesn't really help if our ability is not good enough to turn it into something nice. So use these apps regularly, and practice a lot. With time, you will slowly get better and eventually you will not have to rely on apps like this anymore. Just remember not the get frustrated and keep trying! For more Android goodness, don’t forget to check out our Android Guide as well as our list of the Best Android Apps and Best Android Games. How difficult is drawing for you? What Android apps do you use to help you do other stuff besides drawing? Let us know in the comments! Image Credit: Barb Watson The post Let Droid Teach You To Draw appeared first on MakeUseOf. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Bing Adds Pinterest Integration, Letting You Pin Images Directly From Search Results [Updates] Posted: 13 Apr 2013 10:30 AM PDT
With this new feature, Microsoft aims to make Pinterest pinning as effortless as possible: not bookmarklets, no extra clicks. Simply find the image you want, pin it directly from the search results, and Bing will automatically include the right links and attributions to the original, high-resolution source, without you needing to look for it yourself. “Last fall, we hosted a group of lifestyle and design bloggers at the Bing headquarters to better understand their search and social media habits“, says Microsoft about the birth of Pinterest integration, “What we discovered is a community that does more than its fair share of image searches, with much of it tied to Pinterest.”
To take advantage of the new Pinterest integration, Bing search has to be set to United States. This is easy to do through the cog icon on the top right corner. After clicking the cog, scroll down to “Location”, and click on “change your country/region”. Choose “United States” from the list, and you’re all set. Next time you search for images on Bing, you’ll find the “Pin it” button below the image for quick pinning. Bing’s Image search has been playing catch-up to Google for quite a while, and now offers a slick interface that’s rather similar to Google’s new Image Search interface. You can filter your image search by color, type of image, layout, and people (how people appear in the images), but not by size or even time – a feature which was only recently added to Bing search and is only available in regular search at this time. Is this a useful integration? Will it be enough to make you switch to Bing? Source: Bing Blog The post Bing Adds Pinterest Integration, Letting You Pin Images Directly From Search Results [Updates] appeared first on MakeUseOf. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Check out some of the latest MakeUseOf discoveries. Most of the listed websites are FREE or come with a decent free account option. If you want to have similar cool website round-ups delivered to your daily email, subscribe 
It doesn’t matter if you’re running XP, Vista, 7, or 8, there are glaring weaknesses to Windows Explorer that we’ve all got to deal with. Fortunately, third-party developers have us covered (as always). If you’re turned away by Windows’ search indexing or the clunky feel of the Windows Explorer interface, you have other options. You’ve surely heard of alternatives such as 
Keep up with your favorites sports team, however you like. The new ESPN channel for If This Then That (ifttt) means you can easily set up SMS, email and even phone notifications for your favorite teams. You could even automate Twitter to send up updates every time your favorite teams scores, if you want – the only limit is your own imagination.
If you are like me, then your best drawing doesn’t get any more complex than the simplest of stick figures. Crooked lines and a lop-sided circle usually plague my drawn characters, and I'm not afraid to admit that. I absolutely envy those who are artistically talented, because it really seems like something that you are either born with or not. The only thing that makes me feel a little bit better is the fact that there are others who are struggling just like me (I'm sorry — I definitely feel your pain).
The Bing vs. Google race has just become tighter with the launch of Bing’s new Pinterest integration. The new feature adds a handy “Pin it” button to every image result on Bing, making it possible to pin it to your Pinterest boards without needing to go to the actual website, or even open the full-size version of the image.
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