5 New Articles on MakeUseOf |  |
- Cool Websites and Tools [May 19th 2013]
- 5 Interesting Calculator Alternatives For Mac OS X
- Music is Global: 11 Free MP3 Album Downloads [Sound Sunday]
- 3 Gamification Plugins To Take Your WordPress Blog To The Next Level
- What Is Your Favorite Google Product Announced This Week? [MakeUseOf Poll]
| Cool Websites and Tools [May 19th 2013] Posted: 19 May 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 [May 19th 2013] appeared first on MakeUseOf. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 5 Interesting Calculator Alternatives For Mac OS X Posted: 19 May 2013 06:01 PM PDT
For this article, we scoured the Mac App Store for the best calculator applications, each for a very different usage scenario. No matter how you’re used to crunching your numbers, there are a number of Calculator alternatives worth looking into. Always on Top Calculator ($0.99)One of the things that can be most irritating when you’re multitasking on Mac OS X is having to switch to and fro between Calculator and the app or apps you’re working in. Admittedly, this is a problem most calculator applications suffer from, those covered in this article included. The exception appears to be Always on Top Calculator, a cheap little calculator that—you may have guessed it – always stays on top.
You won’t be able to do all the same things as you would in a more powerful calculator application. Powers, roots and goniometric formulas are out of the question. However, Always on Top Calculator will suffice for standard number crunching and for the menial price of $0.99, you’ll never again lose your calculator application between the clutter of other applications. Soulver ($19.99)Soulver does the kind of number crunching you’d expect from expansive spreadsheets. However, contrary to those applications, Soulver is very fast and intuitive to use. If there’s any way to describe Soulver, it would be as a smart, contextual calculator. Instead of wrestling for control of intricate formula chains, Soulver allows you to use (something very close to) natural language.
With a $19.99 price tag, Soulver is the most expensive Calculator alternative we’ll cover in this round-up. Whether it’s worth that price depends on how often you have to crunch your numbers and how complicated the operations are. In any case, Soulver will speed up the way you work, allowing you to juggle different currencies and current stock prices with intuitive natural language constructions. PCalc ($9.99)Mac’s Calculator app includes a scientific mode, granting access to a wide variety of functions. Although the sheer amount of features packed into the Calculator app is impressive, it still hasn’t reached the same level of calculator goodness that is PCalc. Although the application is especially popular among fans of the RPN mode, PCalc is an all-round great scientific and programmer calculator.
At just under ten bucks, PCalc isn’t cheap either, but you’re buying a whole lot of functionality packed into a good-looking and user-friendly application. Even more impressive is the developer’s dedication to the application. The first version of PCalc was released over twenty years ago, in 1992. A special release of PCalc 2 was even shipped with Mac OS X in the United States and other countries in 2002. Looking at its track record, it’s easy to see why PCalc 3 does not disappoint. Wolfram AlphaYou’ve no doubt already made acquaintance with Wolfram Alpha, a ‘smart’ computational knowledge engine. If not, it’s high time to learn about the true power of the Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine. More interesting uses can be found in Saikat’s article - 10 Search Terms To Put Wolfram Alpha To Good Use Everyday. Any one of these examples is reason enough to integrate Wolfram Alpha into your workflow as a computational knowledge calculator.
The default way to access Wolfram Alpha on your computer is through your browser. However, other apps allow for a more tight integration of Wolfram Alpha. My personal favorite in this area is Fluid, which allows you to turn any website into a standalone application. You can create a standard desktop application for free, or purchase the $4.99 premium version of Fluid to create a menu bar application. To keep things nice and tidy I prefer to use Wolfram Alpha’s mobile website, as can be seen in the above screenshot. Magic Calculator ($3.99)Most calculators allow you to save some intermediate results to a spot in memory, remaining there for later perusal. For more complicated calculations, one such spot in memory quickly proves to be insufficient. Magic Calculator is an advanced calculator, with support for functions and variables. Save any number (or formula evaluation) to a chosen variable name and start juggling intermediate results like an expert.
More advanced usage is also possible. Magic Calculator lets you define functions yourself. Adding to this user-friendly function plotting and Magic Calculator proves itself to be a very powerful calculating tool. All of this for the decidedly low price of $3.99. What calculator tools do you use in your workflow? Share your favorite applications (or websites) with the other readers in the comments section below the article! The post 5 Interesting Calculator Alternatives For Mac OS X appeared first on MakeUseOf. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Music is Global: 11 Free MP3 Album Downloads [Sound Sunday] Posted: 19 May 2013 01:31 PM PDT
Note that name your price albums can be downloaded for free by entering 0 in the price field. That said, we strongly recommend you to donate a few dollars for music you enjoy! You are welcome to submit your music, send suggestions with free albums you have discovered, or request genres I haven't covered in a while. For all Sound Sunday related inquiries, please contact Tina @ this domain. Andrés Correa – Un LugarGenre: alternative, latin, folk, pop, rock, jazz Andrés Correa is a singer-songwriter and guitarrist from Bogotá, Colombia. His music is a unique mix of folk, pop, rock, and some of his tunes melt completely into jazz. Very relaxing and laid-back music. Un Lugar (English: a place) is a free download from Bandcamp. Sant Gatxo – LlumGenre: alternative, indie, rock Sant Gatxo from La Vila Joiosa, Spain delivers energetic indie rock with popular melodies. The six-piece band is committed to the social reality around them, which is reflected in their lyrics, as well as in their stage performances. Llum (English: light) is a name your price download from Bandcamp. La Teoria del Caos – SelftitledGenre: indie, rock La Teoria del Caos hail form La Plata, Buenos Aires Argentina. The selftitled album is their debut. La Teoria del Caos (English: chaos theory) is a free download from Bandcamp. UN PLANETA – SelftitledGenre: alternative, indie, noise, pop, post rock, shoegaze Un Planeta is another band from the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Originally a trio, they added a fourth member to better design their sound. The selftitled album released in 2012 is also their debut. UN PLANETA (English: a planet) is a free download from Bandcamp. Morbo & Mambo – SelftitledGenre: experimental, rock, stoner, afrodub, afrobeat, dub funk This shall be the last band from the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Marbo & Mambo don’t want to be associated with any one genre. They claim not to make afrobeat, stoner, dub, or funk, but all together. This makes for a fascinating mix indeed. Marbo y Mambo (English: curiosity and mambo) is a name your price download from Bandcamp. EP: Holden Avenue – Wybierz DrogeGenre: alternative, punk, rock Holden Avenue is quintet from Wroclaw, Poland. Their powerful and melodic punk rock, with hard rock guitar elements, has earned them numerous awards at festivals and band competitions. Wybierz Droge (English: choose the way) is a name your price download from Bandcamp. Humlow of Pizza Killers – SelftitledGenre: hardcore, acoustic, punk, rock, ballads From the banks of the Yenisei river in Krasnoyarsk, Russia, this quartet creates a panic among their audiences. Some songs start harmless enough, with acoustic pop-rock melodies. You could almost think this was lovely mainstream, until the Russian punk vocals cut in and the instruments pick up speed and intensity. Fantastic album to relief some steam. Humlow of Pizza Killers is a name your price download from Bandcamp. XAXAXA – Siromašni i bogatiGenre: indie, punk, rock, post-rock XAXAXA (HAHAHA in Cyrillic alphabet) is a band from Skopje, Macedonia. With Siromašni i bogati the trio released its sophomore. In their songs Vasko, Nenad, and Dzano address unfair differences between people, imposed social norms, and carelessness of those in power. To allow the interested listener a full immersion in their songs, the band provides English translations of all lyrics. Allos XAXAXA to take you into their world, despite all superficial differences. Siromašni i bogati (English: the poor and the rich) is a name your price download from Bandcamp. Bernays Propaganda – Zabraneta PlanetaGenre: alternative, indie, rock, punk, post punk With this band it might finally seem like I ordered the albums not only according to genre, but also according to location. This is not the case, but purse coincidence. May I introduce: Bernays Propaganda from Skopje, Macedonia. From the album page: “Signature new wave/post-punk sound with strong danceable basis, delivering firm drum beats accompanied by thick and groovy bass lines, upon which layers of noisy and disharmonic guitar chords are played, though less funky and broken as before. Add more of that strong and remarkable female voice shouting political lyrics over catchy atmosphere and bursts of energy, and there you go – 9 new songs, 9 new stories, 9 new manifestos calling for radical changes. Bernays Propaganda once again outdid themselves, presenting us with material that shows how a band can reach full songwriting and arranging maturity while losing none of the basic postulates of the philosophy they grew up on.” Zabraneta Planeta is a name your price download from Bandcamp. Martas Asinis – Ceturtais AlbumsGenre: alternative, indie, dance, lo-fi Martas Asinis is the works of Filips Derums of Riga, Latvia. Filips is also a member of several Latvian indie rock bands. In this project, however, Filips and his two band members produce progressive dance music. The indie rock influence of course shines through. Ceturtais Albums (English: the fourth album) is a free download from Bandcamp. EP: Zessho x Kerberos – Remixed EPGenre: beats, hip hop, rap Japanese rapper Zessho remixed by Kerberos with classic sample-based beats. Remixed EP is a name your price download from Bandcamp. And More…Enjoyed one of these albums? Pay it back and share this article or the albums you liked. If you really appreciated a particular album, please donate to the respective artist, so they can continue releasing great music. New to Sound Sunday? Past editions of Sound Sunday are available here. Are you using ifttt? Check out these recipes for receiving notifications of new Sound Sunday releases to GTalk and Pushover for mobile devices. Thank you @Vampie! Feel free to get in touch with me [tina at makeuseof dot com] to share free material, suggestions, and feedback or simply add your comments below. The post Music is Global: 11 Free MP3 Album Downloads [Sound Sunday] appeared first on MakeUseOf. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 3 Gamification Plugins To Take Your WordPress Blog To The Next Level Posted: 19 May 2013 11:31 AM PDT
But how easy is it to actually add gamification to a WordPress blog? As it turns out, it’s quite easy actually – and it needn’t cost a bomb. Here’s 3 plugins, compared and judged. Captain UpCaptainUp is a relative newcomer to game mechanics, but appealed to me right off the bat. It has a distinct cartoon-esque visual style that really makes it seem user-friendly – much more “game like” than some other systems, which come across as mere corporate marketing. Setting up requires a total of 4 or 5 form fields, and starts on the captainup.com website. Click sign up, and enter your:
Copy and paste your API key from the WordPress install tab, and paste that into the Gamification WordPress plugin setup page. I swear life would be so nice if all gamification systems were this simple.
For the most part, that’s all the setup you need. You can connect to a Facebook page to give points for liking the page, and the plugin automatically detects when something has been shared by a user.
I say for the most part, because we use the ShareThis plugin to provide a share button; it correctly detected a Google +1 share, but not a Tweet. As someone used to dealing with these systems, I know it’s due to the use of “native” buttons vs custom coded ones; Google does not provide any kind of customization or API, so you get the button they give. ShareThis has customized the Tweet button however, so it’s serving custom code. The easiest solution to make share buttons work with Captain UP then is to just serve native buttons – most plugins will do this, it’s just that ShareThis has a particular style to it. (Digg Digg is a very simple set of share buttons, and works fine). I only mention this because most site owners might just assume it’s broken.
The only thing I’m not too keen about with Captain Up is the basic widget overlay on every screen – not the popup, that’s nice. The overlay just seems a little garish. CaptainUp has a superb set of features including:
Creating new badges is also incredibly easy, and can be integrated into your own custom site functionality thanks to a target condition based on “clicking on specific element”.
The only downside to CaptainUp is that it doesn’t appear to have paid plans; whether this is because the service is still in beta isn’t apparent, but this ultimately limits it’s reliability. There’s also no rewards program: just PBL (points, badges and leaderboards). PunchTabBy far a more established gamification program, PunchTab covers everything from rewards and giveaways to single sign on – though not all in the free package. PunchTab is separated into 3 sections, each of which is a distinct UI component:
The loyalty program are rewards given for attaining a certain number of points, similar to what we run here at MakeUseOf. On the free plan, you have no control over what rewards are offered – but they’re pretty impressive even so, and offered at absolutely no cost to you. For example, installing a loyalty program, any visitors who gets 8,500 points will get a $5 Starbucks eGift card. To get your site licence key, visit the punchtab dashboard, create a new loyalty program, and go to developer. Copy and paste your access key from there.
The paid plan for running your own rewards starts at a very reasonable $99/month. The achievements program is your standard badges, levels etc – “traditional” gamification. It’s not quite as comprehensive as the achievements provided by CaptainUp – you can change badge images and description, but not specify custom actions to be rewarded as easily. Also, if you do want to change anything, you need to disable all the default badges. Thirdly is the Giveaway program. This is for running a DIY giveaway, and is very comprehensive. Just provide an image and description of the prize (and obviously, the prize itself), specify how users can enter, the time frame, and any additional entry methods you want to provide – “liking” your Facebook page, tweeting the contest.
On the downside, I did find the WordPress plugin to be a little buggy. The widget wasn’t sized correctly, for example, and it didn’t appear to allow for the new bottom share bar option. Therefore, I’d suggest a bit of coding experience so you’re able to add the Javascript snippets directly to the template. Kazooky LoyaltyThis one struck me as a scam initially, especially given their “$100 free promotion” (for your site visitors though, not you, similar to PunchTabs default rewards program).
After signing up, just copy and paste the access key into the WordPress plugin. You should then get a large and kind of obnoxious black bar at the bottom of your site.
Hovering over the present or any of the icons reveals the message that I should sign in to win an Amazon gift card; unfortunately, only the Twitter and email buttons actually worked – Facebook did nothing. Added to which, it’s not clear where adding your email will actually go – I still can’t help thinking it’s some kind of scam to gather emails.
The control panel is decidedly lacklustre compared to the other systems available, so given all of this it’s to recommend anything other than staying the heck away from Kazooky Loyalty. There’s actually not that many decent gamification WordPress plugin; InCrwd was an exciting contender, but the domain is dead and the plugin developer appears to have stopped last year sometime. Others require BuddyPress, or manual assigning of badges, so I haven’t included them. My favourite for the average blog has to be CaptainUp – it’s just such an easy plug and plug system that’s it’s hard to fault it. The lack of a premium option and rewards ultimately limits the system though. PunchTab on the other hand is a well developed product and more focused on actionable, business-led objectives – sharing, rewards and giveaways. Have you had a chance to try gamification on your site, and what do you think? Do these systems just annoy you? The post 3 Gamification Plugins To Take Your WordPress Blog To The Next Level appeared first on MakeUseOf. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| What Is Your Favorite Google Product Announced This Week? [MakeUseOf Poll] Posted: 19 May 2013 10:31 AM PDT
Out of 841 votes in total, the breakdown was as follows: 4.4% said they will pay for YouTube content, 8.5% will pay, but only if it’s the only option, and a full 87% of the voters will not pay a dime to watch YouTube content. Full results and this week’s poll after the jump. Don’t forget to check out last week’s best comment by Arron Walker, who once again won 150 reward points for his insightful comment!
This week’s poll question is: What Is Your Favorite Google Product Announced This Week? Want to make some extra MakeUseOf reward points? The most useful comment on the poll will be awarded 150 points! Risking your scorn for yet another Google-based poll, this has truly been a busy week for Google, and one we cannot easily ignore. As usual, Google I/O brought a flurry of new features and products, which are going to affect you somehow, no matter how you look at it. From a new Google Maps preview to a Google Talk replacement, this has definitely been an exciting week for Google and Google users. Did you get a chance to try some of the new features? Which one is your favorite? Which one looks like it would be the most useful in your every day life? Can’t see your favorite announcement? Be sure to tell us what it is in the comments! We’d also love to hear why you chose the way you did, and what makes your choice the best. The post What Is Your Favorite Google Product Announced This Week? [MakeUseOf Poll] 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 
Compared to other standard calculators, Mac OS X users definitely can’t complain. The Calculator app that ships with Mac OS by default is diverse and incredibly powerful. However, you simply can’t build an app as general as a calculator to satisfy all possible user scenarios. For different users, different apps will always come out on top. Luckily, there’s no shortage of calculator alternatives in the Mac App Store.
Don’t be surprised if this week’s 
Points, badges and leaderboards – the staple of gamification is found in 
Last week we asked you if you 
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