lead5.com

Microsoft plugs Office into Facebook

Robert — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 02:29:21 +0000

Microsoft has unveiled a new service that lets Facebook users create and share Office documents with their friends. Based on the Office 2010 Web Apps, Docs.com is a standalone website where users can either upload Office files or create new documents online. Those documents can then be shared with other Docs.com users and posted to your Facebook wall. Documents can be viewed and edited directly within a web browser, or you can download them for editing on a Mac or PC.

Lili Cheng, general manager of Microsoft’s Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Labs, said the Facebook integration brings together the best of software with the best of services.

‘The fact that we’ve been able to adapt the Office 2010 Web Apps technology to work directly with Facebook truly speaks to the flexibility and power not just of the Facebook platform, but also of the Office system’s rich “contextual collaboration” capabilities,’ she wrote in a blog post.Microsoft has said that it plans to release the next version of Office for the Mac – Office 2011 – later this year. It has already revealed a number of new features, including integration with the new Web Apps. They are expected to go live in June, when Office 2010 for Windows is released.

Samsung SP-H03 Pico Projector

Robert — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 02:18:03 +0000

HE WORLD’S BRIGHTEST PICO PROJECTOR
Samsung’s H03 is the first LED pico projector, and at just 200g it’s light, compact and capable of putting out a picture at 30 ANSI lumens – that’s about a quarter of the brightness of a proper home cinema projector. With Office software built in you don’t need a laptop attached to display slides and your presentation can last up to two hours before you’ll need to recharge.

ILLUMINATE US FURTHER…
There’s also a built-in speaker, USB slot and microSD. It was shown off at CES in January, but should be just about lumbering into shops by the time you read this.

Microsoft Office 2010: Tips and Tricks

Robert — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 02:11:42 +0000

1. Open Recently Used Files with Two Keystrokes: In older verisons of Office, the File menu always displayed your recently used documents, which you could open by typing Alt-F1, then the number of the document on the list (1 for the most recent, 2 for next most recent, etc.).

This feature isn’t turned on by default in Office 2010, but you can activate it by entering the Backstage view, selecting Recent, and a adding a check box net to Quickly access this number of recent documents. Change the number to whatever number of documents you want to see on the list. In the Recent Documents list, you can “pin” a document to the list so that it will always appear, even if you haven’t opened it recently. A nifty new feature lets you “pin” entire folders to the list of recent Places in the right-hand column on the menu.

2. Add a Redaction tool to Word: Unlike Adobe Acrobat and Corel Word-Perfect, Word doesn’t come with a built-in redaction tool, which means that you can’t permanently hide text in a Word docyment.Still, you can add that fuctionally to Word 2010?s Review tab by installing the Word 2007 Redaction Tool. Just be careful – when text is replaced by a black box, you can’t press Ctrl-Z to reverse the redaction.

3. Do Everything with the Keyboard: Office’s Ribbon interface looks as if it’s designed for the mouse, but you can fight carpal – tunnel syndrome and other wrist problems by using the keyboard instead. Tapping the Alt key causes boxed letters to appear on all the Ribbon’s tabs, and boxed numbers to appear on the Quick Access. For example, type “H” and the Home tab opens, complete with boxed letters (and a few sequences of two letters like “FN” and “PG”) that you can press to access all the features on the tab. Galleries – like the gallery of styles on the Home tab – have letters located on the scroll bar to their right. You can type “L” for Styles on the Home tab, and tap the appropriate letter to open the gallery, so you can navigate it with the arrow keys. Type Alt again to exit this mode.

4. Customize the Ribbon: Office finally lets you rearrange the Ribbon the way you want by clicking the File tab to go to Backstage, selecting Options, and then Customize Ribbon. In the right-hand column, you can create a new tab or a new group on an existing tab, remove or rearrange items already on the Ribbon by selecting them in the right-hand column, or select items that you want to add from the list on the left.

Long-term Office users may want to use the Commands not on the ribbon function because you can now add a command that you used in older Word versions that were nixed due to lack of demand.

5. Open Documents That Office Wants to Block: In Office 2007, if you tried to open a document created in very old versions of Office, an error message would appear, and you would be unable to open it. Office 2010, fortunately, makes it easy to override those blocks. In Word or Excel, go to File, Options, Trust Center, click Trust Center Settings, then select File Block Settings, and remove the check marks from the older Office files that you want Office 2010 to open.

45 Photoshop Actions To Enhance Your Photos And Stand Out

Robert — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 09:29:28 +0000

Actions come really handy when you have a need to enhance your photos, but you just don’t have a time for it or necessary skills. Photoshop actions contain various adjustment layers, filters, effects, who are originally recorded by author and you can play them back again. You can create actions yourself or you can just download professional ones here and get amazing results with just once click!

Explore how the action is built, choose which adjustments you want to apply and finally just enjoy great results. In this article you’re going to find 45 sets of actions that help you enhance the colors and change the main look of Your photo.

1. Powerful Colors 3.1 by Othman Fahd

2. i-Dark 3.03 by Othman Fahd

3. Exclusive Summer Heat Action by Danielle Gillain Svedin

4. Classic People Action by apartyintheUSA

5. Photoshop Action ver.3 by Gökhan Bartu Yüksel

6. StarDeviant action 1.06 by Stardeviant

7. StarDeviant action 1.08 by Stardeviant

8. Photoshop Actions – 78 by Julia Starr

9. Photoshop Actions – 75 by Julia Starr

10. Lomo Action Set by WingsOfAHero

11. Action set 03 by KissOfDeathXxX

12. Photoshop Actions – 32 by Julia Starr

13. Action Collection 1.0 by Philipp Soul

14. Photoshop Action by kahwe

15. rEDacrion by getinline

16. The Day Is Passing By by ArinThoughts

17. Actions 1 by allthebesthere

18. Photoshop Action 2 by saturn-rings

19. Red Action by sd-stock

20. Photoshop Dream Blur Action by Josh Janusch

21. Oscar Pilch Photoshop Action by Oscar Pilch

22. Black white sepia PS action by rosalindharrison

23. Retro by ShadowsInMyEyes

24. Photoshop Actions by wolf-minori

25. Retro Love by Patricia Nabong

26. Action Set 1 by ImaginaryRosse

27. One Less Lonely Girl Action by Nick Jonas

28. Photoshop Action 31 by miss-etikate

29. Landscape and Sky Action by fcpr

30. Sarah1 Action by supersarah089

31. sa-cool actions 1.05 by Othman Fahd

32. Nature Actions 2.09 by Othman Fahd

33. Action 2 by lolipopek

34. Vintage Dream PS Actions by Chitulescu Iuliana Amalia

35. Pure Luv by GSInteractive

36. Pack Actions 01 by Patricia Torres

37. Selective Sepia by Aditya Rao

38. Horizon Actions by LonelyDiary

39. Powerful Colors 3.2 by Othman Fahd

40. sa-cool actions 2.06 by Othman Fahd

41. Photoshop Action 22 by Oscar Pilch

42. Lomo-Cross Processing Action by efete-stock

43. A-Actions by LonelyDiary

44. Go Green Actions Set by LonelyDiary

45. Action 6 by Flurish

Customize your WordPress Backend for Personal Branding

Robert — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 09:29:17 +0000

With more and more people building custom WordPress themes, it only makes sense to want to create it more personal. I have found a few ways that I will share with you on making your WordPress powered site more personal. This tutorial will show you how to create a custom WordPress login, and explain how to fit it to your needs.

We will then take it a step further and create a custom admin panel footer, and also a custom admin header image for our WordPress site.

Let’s Get Started

Setting it Up

For this example we are going to modify our functions.php file. If your theme does not have this file you can create a blank file and name it functions.php – Make sure this file is placed in the theme directory of the current activated theme you are using.

Add the following to your functions.php file:

functions.php


php
function custom_login() {
echo 'wplogin/wplogin.css" />';
}
add_action('login_head', 'custom_login');
?>

Explanation of the Code

We are using the functions.php file to tell WordPress to override the default settings for the .css file used to make up the login screen. By doing this we are directing WordPress to use a specified .css file that we are going to create for our custom login screen. This .css file will be what we modify to design the login page.

Please make note that there are some very specific styles within the .css file that MUST be present, and changed accordingly for this to properly work. I have created the folder and placed the .css file in it to keep it separated from our regular theme files. If you want to the path can be altered as long as it points to the direct location of the CSS file within your theme.

The Setup

Next we will need to do two things. First, we will need to create a new folder in our theme directory. For this example we are going to use the folder name wplogin.

This folder will be placed within our WordPress theme file folder.

In this folder we will make a new blank file and name it wplogin.css

Taking a look at the setup

This is now what you should have. Remember that the location can be changed using the code we placed in our functions.php file – but for this example you should now have the following:

The file structure will be: wp-content\themes\YOUR_THEME_NAME\wplogin

The new folder we named wplogin will go into your theme folder, and the new .css file we created will be held within the new folder.

Now let’s view what we will be adding to our .css file:

wplogin.css


/* Page Background */
html {
	background: #eae2d5 url(bgimage-path);
	margin: auto;
	font-weight:bold;
}
/* WordPress Logo - MAKE SURE TO MATCH THE WIDTH AND HEIGHT */
h1 a {
	background:url(logo-path) 0 0 no-repeat;
	width:290px;
	height:150px;
	margin-left: 10px;
	margin-bottom: 0px;
	padding-bottom: 0px;
}
/* Top Bar Background Color */
body.login {
	border-top-color:#dac6ad;
}
.message {
	margin-bottom: 0px;
}
/* Login Button */
#wp-submit {
	background: #bc3d1d;
	border: #f24643;
}
/* Lost Password Link */
.login #nav a, .login #nav a:hover {
	color: #443030!important;;
}
/* Top Bar Link */
.login p#backtoblog a:link, .login p#backtoblog a:visited {
	color:#443030;
	font-weight: bold;
}
.login p#backtoblog a:hover, .login p#backtoblog a:active {
	color:#443030;
	text-decoration:underline;
}

Explanation of the .css

Now that we have both the functions.php code in place telling WordPress to use our custom .css file, and our .css file in place, we can start to modify it a bit. The comments within the .css example should explain most everything but we will break it down to further understand it.

Make a note that when changing the logo image you MUST match it with the width and height in the CSS file. That is noted up above in the comments within the CSS file but it is VERY important or it will not always work correctly.

Full Breakdown

I know the .css is commented well but I still want to cover each editable item. Let’s see below to take a look at it:

The Page Background will be the entire page background color and image. The example .css file above shoes a link to the image but there is not one set. You can modify this to create a full-page background image, or change it to a color of your choice.

The WordPress Logo: This is where you will need to be sure to change the width and height to match your image. As long as the dimensions fit your logo you are using it will work correctly.

Top Bar Background Color: This is the bar located at the very top of the page. This can be changed to any color you like.

Message: This is the bottom bar that can be changed to any color you wish as well.

Lost Password Link: This is the a:link button to retrieve your password if lost.

Top Bar Link: This is the a:link’s at the very top of the page within the Top Bar area.

Take a look at the image below for a diagram of items within the CSS file we can change:

Taking it a step further

Now to continue making our WordPress install more custom and personal, we will change the footer link on our admin screen. This can personalize our website just a little bit more.

Again using the functions.php file we can force WordPress to change something. We will be telling WordPress what we want in our footer area of our admin screen instead of the generic text that comes standard with a regular install of WordPress.

Here is the code we will be adding, but this can be modified to your needs:


function remove_footer_admin () {
echo 'Anything you want can go right here | Copyright © 2010 My Website name';
}
add_filter('admin_footer_text', 'remove_footer_admin');

Changing the Admin Logo

This can also be really useful when trying to personalize your WordPress powered site. Even if you are creating the site for a client they will always enjoy seeing their logo on the admin screen. This is easy to do, and can be done by editing the functions.php file. Add the following code and be sure it points to your image that you will be using:


// Custom Admin Top Logo
add_action('admin_head', 'my_custom_logo');

function my_custom_logo() {
   echo '