Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Monday, May 18, 2009

EeeRotate Orients Your Laptop Screen for Easy Reading [Downloads]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/erSCXYVKmAg/eeerotate-orients-your-laptop-screen-for-easy-reading

Windows only: With the proliferation of lightweight and wide-screen notebooks, it was only a matter of time before someone realized that they make decent e-book readers when they're sideways. EeeRotate makes swapping orientation easy.

Photo by TeleRead.

Once installed, the tiny application rotates your screen and trackpad input using keyboard shortcuts. CTRL+ALT+RIGHT rotates your screen and touchpad input 90 degrees clockwise, CTRL+ALT+UP returns it to normal. Interestingly, in our tests EeeRotate would rotate the touchpad input, but not the input from the USB mouse plugged into the laptop. The navigation wasn't difficult using either one of them, and you'd likely not have an external mouse plugged in if you were using it as an e-book reader, but it's worth noting. Next time you find yourself reading lengthy documents on your wide screen laptop or netbook, EeeRotate can help you take advantage of your expansive screen space. EeeRotate is freeware, Windows only.

EeeRotate [via TeleRead]

Rendeznew Locates a Midway Point for Multiple Travelers [Travel]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/whlIZZjZV-4/rendeznew-locates-a-midway-point-for-multiple-travelers

You and some friends need to meet up. Free webapp Rendeznew eliminates the ten-minute arguments about fair driving distances and provides a list of equi-distant meeting spots.

Unlike previously reviewed MeetInBetweenUs and Mezzoman, which only allow for two addresses, Rendeznew allows you to enter up to four addresses in order to find a middle ground between all of the locations.

For the screenshot above, we put together a hypothetical Lifehacker Editors' Road Trip, which would—fingers crossed!—end with us arriving at a turkey ranch in Kansas. You can drill down through local listings to find various spots like coffee shops, bars, museums, restaurants and more. If the midway point ends up being, well, not exactly an inspiring destination—ours was 40 miles north of Wichita— you can simply drag the big green arrow to a new location. Each search has a unique link you can share with your friends, and every suggested midway point has a set of directions for each of the four addresses. Rendeznew is a Google Maps mashup with search results provided by Google and Yelp.

Rendeznew [via MakeUseOf]

How Do You Get Your News? [Ask The Readers]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/kDoAx-6gW5A/how-do-you-get-your-news

With the multitude of competing mediums these days, it's easy to pick and choose your information inputs. Newspapers, television, RSS, Twitter—how do you mix and pick your news sources?

Thomas Baekdal details the patterns of communication over the last hundred years and the shifts that have occurred. If your great-grandparents wanted to stay current on the news, for instance, they had to make a conscious effort to be places where people were talking about it. Now you can have it streamed, beamed, and delivered.

Where do you fall on the chart pictured above? Newspaper reader? Avid talk radio listener? All internet news, all the time? Tell us how you get your news, and where you think you'll be getting it in years to come, in the comments.

Where is Everyone? [via Digital Inspiration]

ColorRotate Creates Design Color Palettes [Design]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/IBPM1RuibKU/colorrotate-creates-design-color-palettes

Need a new color palette for your next design project? ColorRotate is a color palette generator with a heavy dose of eye candy and easy-to-use controls.

The default setup for ColorRotate is a 3D diamond shape, which you use to set the tint, hue, and the blending for your palette. If you prefer a more traditional appearance, you can switch it over to a series of sliders. You can create a completely new palette or browse through popular user-created palettes, or modify them. If you create an account, you can save your palettes, but even without an account you can export palettes in .ACT format, which allows for import into Adobe products.

Palettes can be created in a variety of color schemes including RGB, CMYK, and LAB. For another interesting way to generate a color palette, check out Color Palette Generator which extracts a color palette from an image.

ColorRotate [via Download Squad]

Why Should I Want This MID

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/yankodesign/~3/cfRUS87jROo/

Really, why would I want this MID (Mobile Internet Device) over the current iPhone I use? Lord! I know you're up to your neck with Apple banging, so for a change let's compare it to an LG Arena, Samsung I7500 or even BlackBerry Storm 2. Where does this MID score over the rest of these Internet efficient phones? Two places: Prime Real Estate i.e. a three screen setup that opens to 210 x 210 mm and an Integrated Stand.

On the flip side, this MID is merely a concept, but is pompous enough to include a clip-like anti-theft mechanism! I'm not going to get into the tech-specs, coz any dandy designer can pump out just about anything they like these days. So my focus stays on the screen.

How important is the screen of a mobile phone anyways. Plenty! Those who chanced on the LG Arena etc. will have to admit, that when you are using a device that small for net browsing, you wished for that moment the screen was a bit larger. Unfortunately I do need to quote Apple here, but damn; the panning in and out on the iPhone, sure compensates for not having a large computer screen handy. So yeah, a mobile device with a three tier screen layout giving easy keyboard access to fat fingers really scores, even if it's a concept!

Designer: Petr Kubík