Web Review

Goodbye, Steve

riccardo — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:18:29 +0000

Steve Jobs died today when he was 56 years old. Raneri Web Design remembers and simply wants to say “thank you” to a visonary man that changed the way the World looks at computers.

Aroundly finally available on iPhone

riccardo — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 09:28:37 +0000

Turin (Italy), 30th September 2011 – Raneri Web Design is pleased to announce the launch of Aroundly, the new social sharing app available from today for Apple iPhone. Aroundly works like a photographic Wikipedia, where everyone is user and contributor of a unique and continuous stream of pictures coming from every part of the World.

The concept is based on simplicity and immediacy: users only have to use Aroundly instead of the default Camera app; every photo is instantly geolocalized and uploaded on aroundly.com, where anyone can follow the live flow. All of this occurs without any need of signup: both uploaders and viewers can use Aroundly freely and anonymously.

If you ever asked to yourself if it’s worth to go to that party tonight, or if you’re just curious about what is happening on the 5th avenue in New York City right now, you have just to check on www.aroundly.com if someone is using Aroundly there. If so, you’ll get a near-live photo of the situation.

Aroundly also represents the world photo album of the last month. Photos are stored for 30 days: users can connect to aroundly.com and center the map on an exact date/time/location in the past to get the corresponding images. If you are looking for a solution to get all the pictures that people are taking with their iPhones at your friend’s wedding, Aroundly is the answer.

Services on aroundly.com are free for everyone, without limitations. The Aroundly app is now available for the download from the App Store and it will be free for a limited period of time.

App Store link:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/aroundly/id464912746

Aroundly website:
http://www.aroundly.com/

The recipe for a perfect project offer; Honesty, experience & approachability

riccardo — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 08:15:33 +0000

It’s an experience that is common to many freelance web designers out there; you join an online platform, find an interesting (and lucrative) project that you think fits perfectly to your expertise and background, you submit a bid on this project and then find yourself battling it out with other freelancers. In this scenario it’s easy to get lost amongst the crowd and one thing that all freelancers share in common, is the need to rise above the competition and showcase their skills and expertise to potential clients effectively.

Therefore, more often than not, first impressions will count for everything when a client is making a choice between many web designers who on paper all look like the best bet for their project. So how can you secure the project?

Showing a genuine interest in the project;
A lot of the time, many freelancers who are members of online platforms will get an automatic email whenever a project is published that falls into their area of expertise. Due to the amount of notifications these freelancers usually send off a standard, typical response to these projects signaling their interest. However, the customer can usually notice straight away if the offer that has been submitted for their project is a standard offer, or if the web designer has actually taken some extra care and interest into the specific details of the project. What you can do to signal your genuine and unique interest is;
. Detail your expertise in relation to specific aspects of the project. For example if the project requires the construction of WordPress templates then describe your specialised knowledge in this area.
. Suggest concrete ideas for a solution to the customer’s problem.
. Contact the customer for more details of the project, so that you can submit a better offer. This is sure to signal your passion for the job.

Talk to the client as a human being;
No matter the size of the web design project, what will really boost your chances of landing the job is if you are able to bring the personal touch to your project offer. If you treat the customer as an equal and strive to bring a more human touch of your services then this will enhance your chances. For instance, if the details of the project are insufficient or unrealistic (say perhaps the proposed deadline is not long enough), if you communicate this to the client and work with them to find a compromise then you can be sure to leave a very good impression on the client. This will mark out your honesty and professionalism right from the start and shows that you can be a valuable and knowledgeable business partner. Moreover, it may sound simple but address the customer by their name (or at least address your offer to the contact person given).

This sounds way better than “Dear Sir/Madam”.

Showcase your skills!
Sometimes actions speak louder than words, and it could be that from a wide selection of candidates, your portfolio of past work may swing the balance in your favour.
. Provide examples of previous web designs that you have created, this will show your diversity as a web designer and display your skills to the customer in the fastest sense possible.
. If you have worked on a number of different projects including the creation of Ecommerce websites, then showing these examples will show the diversity of your talents.
. If you have not worked on a large number of projects, then why not include certificates and qualifications as well? This will demonstrate your skilled expertise in web design and should put any fears as to your ability at ease.
. Take the initiative and supply a small portfolio of previous templates and themes that you have designed in the past together with your project offer.

What is important to remember that with any project offer, you will not only need to convince the client of your professionalism and skills, but you will also need to give an impression to the client that you are down to earth and very approachable. You must convince the client that you are happy to work with them at every step along the way, and that you’ll always be willing to provide your aid and assistance to their web design project.

This is crucial as not every expert is happy to work with the customer in a collaborative effort and will rather not take the customer’s objections seriously because they feel their more qualified opinion is correct. Thus, by making the extra effort to contact the client directly on a human level, you can show that you are ready to combine your expertise and enthusiasm with the customer’s dreams and desires.

Robert from twago

No HDD LED on your PC? Put it in the systray

riccardo — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 19:14:20 +0000

Thanks to a brilliant designer at Dell, a new laptop I bought has the Hard drive LED behind the LCD panel, so it’s impossible for the user to see the disk activity. I tried a couple of software utilities to provide a replacement to this lack; the best I found is a freeware. DiskLED, by Sepago from Germany, is a brilliant – and portable – utility that puts a tiny light in Windows systray. It is very speedy, near to the real LED:

Note: if you receive an error on opening, open the configuration and remap the three parameters (Object, Counter, Instance). It is based on Windows metrics, that differs with system language. They must to be set to: PhysicalDisk, _Total, %Disk time (or the correspondent in your language, of course).

Jailbreakme 3.0 is released!

riccardo — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 06:45:55 +0000

Breaking news – Comex has finally released the new version of Jailbreakme, the online tool capable to jailbreak 4.3.3 iOS devices, including the iPad 2. First reaction and positive reports are appearing on Twitter. Happy jailbreaking!

JailbreakMe 3.0

14 years of Apple in 14 screenshots

riccardo — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 10:59:09 +0000

Everyone is talking about Apple. One of the best way to visualize the history of a tech company is through its website, and how it has changed in the years. Here we present you a series of screenshot of the home page of Apple.com: one for each year, since 1997 to 2010. Have a nice trip!

TIP: We didn’t add any “special effect” to the screenshot links, so you can open them in full screen. If you want to open them in a new window (and you’re reading this web page from a computer) just click on thumbnails with your mouse wheel to open the full size image in a new tab.

July 15, 1997
4 days earlier, president Gil Amelio resigned from Apple. Steve Jobs has just came back as advisor. At 1997 Macworld Expo, Jobs announce a partnership with Microsoft, to release a new version of Office for Macintosh.
May 8, 1998
The new iMac will sell about 800,000 units in five months. Its designer leader, Jonathan Ive, will prepare some years later the design of iPod and iPhone.
October 5, 1999
The Power Mac G4 is classified by US and Chinese governments as a weapon because of its speed of 1 Gigaflop (a billion floating-point operations per second).
October 17, 2000
2000 is the year of the iBook, launched on July, 21th. Apple is still “stuck” as a personal computers firm.
September 17, 2001
Like many websites around the globe, Apple dedicates a tribute to 9/11 victims.
May 29, 2002
Apple tries to debut in the server market with the Xserve 1U rack mounted server. It was a dual-G4 machine, running on two ATA Drives instead of SCSI. The price of Xserver 1U was relatively cheaper than other machines of same class. A new iMac, with a… strange spheric design, was launched in the early 2002. It will be discontinued in 2004.
November 29, 2003
Introducing iTunes for Windows, too. Macs are still on G4 and G5 processors, and the operating system of the year is Mac OS X Panther.

July 14, 2004
While 100 millions songs were bought from iTunes, design of Apple products (look ad monitors in the left-bottom side) are already similar to today.
October 1, 2005
The iPod Nano hurricane. It will be a insane success, that hasn’t stopped yet. Side by side with a real hurricane: Katrina was the biggest natural disaster in the US history.
June 14, 2006
“I’m a PC, I’m a Mac”. The new advertising campaign of Apple is a very hit, with hundreds of ironic parodies on the web. It seems that Apple marketing choices are now pointed to accentuate the war of its fanboys against MS people.
January 10, 2007
2007 is the year when “Apple Computers, Inc.” becomes “Apple Inc.”, and it’s not a coincidence. With iPods, Apple TVs, and finally with the iPhone, Apple is not a simple computer productor anymore.
February 15, 2008
Mobile computing is now a core business for Apple. It seems that users are interested to mobile computers, to use with their new mobile devices. So it’s the time to launch a laptop that is really mobile: the Macbook Air is the thinnest and lighter laptop on the market.
July 15, 2009
Even lighter, with a music player that looks like… a lighter. The iPod shuffle doesn’t have a display, but it reads titles of songs directly to the listener.
7 May, 2010
At begin, iPad is derided. But in less than a year, it will revolutionize a part of computing world: many persons will buy it INSTEAD a real computer, because it “is sufficient” to browse the web and use emails. Oh, and to use Facebook. Also the commercial world is hit by iPad: business men can now show their products on a little and speedy tablet without open, connect and wait for load of a traditional laptop.
Like the iPhone, it lacks of Adobe Flash. But at last nobody cares.

How to Disable “show-desktop-on-hover” in Windows 7

riccardo — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 10:56:51 +0000

This feature of Windows 7 (its correct name is “Aero Peek“) is often hated by users that want to be free moving the mouse anywhere in the screen, without that anything happens.
The new “show desktop” corner in the right is a really good idea and I use it everyday, but I also prefer to click on it – when I want to minimize everything: it’s really rare that I want only to take a little… preview of what is going on my desktop.

Disabling only the “mouse over” version is really simple: just click with the right mouse button on the Windows Taskbar and choose “properties”, then uncheck the option “Use Aero Peek to preview the desktop“. That’s all! Now you can click on the show desktop button, but hovering it will do nothing.

Live Video from the “Oil Spill Cam”

riccardo — Sun, 30 May 2010 10:21:29 +0000

The Internet’s got a new talent: that damn hole in the Gulf of Mexico that is spilling roughly 200.000 gallons of oil a day into the ocean. For the moment, every attempt from BP to stop it has failed; in compensation, they had no problems with the installation of a camera that broadcast from deep underwater a live video feed of the oil spill.

http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/homepage/STAGING/local_assets/bp_homepage/html/rov_stream.html

(Sorry, the original video feed is only in Windows Media format, if you have problems I suggest to search on a live video site like Ustream, to find an alternative source)

Windows 7 “Show Desktop” button on XP

riccardo — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 01:12:11 +0000

It could sounds ironic, but the main feature I miss from Windows Seven – when I’m using a PC with Windows XP – it’s that little button on the bottom-right corner of the screen. Nina, an MBA accounting student I know, talks about how useful this button used to
be. It has the same functionality of the old “Show desktop” button on XP, but its position allows me to “launch” the mouse in that direction, without any precision, and click it to get all windows hidden.

Of course, someone released a tiny (and free) utility to backport this feature to 9 years ago, on Windows XP
It doesn’t need to be installed, just download and start it (and maybe put it into the “startup” section of your Start Menu)!

http://ceiiular.deviantart.com/art/Show-Desktop-133022210

SugarSync synchronizes your documents for free, brings them to your smartphone

riccardo — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 12:34:45 +0000

I was looking for a complete solution to keep the office PC with my laptop in sync: SugarSync does more: it offers a free 2.5Gb storage space to synchronize an unlimited number of folders between two computers; in addiction, they gives you a mobile application – available for Android, iPhone, Windows Mobile and Blackberry – to access your file also in mobility.

You’ve only to select the directories you want to keep in sync (tipically the “documents” folder, and maybe your music or pictures archive), the SugarSync client will run in background, automatically monitoring every change. If the other computer is switched off, it will be synchronized the next time you will power it up.

It is a direct competitor of the famous (and good) Dropbox (2Gb for free), but it offers several addictional features: Dropbox syncronizes a single folder and it gives a mobile app only for iPhone, even if the free accounts are elegible to be linked to an unlimited number of computers, while SugarSync free supports only two (plus a phone). SugarSync is available for Windows and Mac OS X (Dropbox has also a Linux client).

You can expand the space limitations of your free account referring your friends: SugarSync offers you 250Mb of addictional space for every new user you refer (and your friend will get the same, starting with 2.75 Gb of free storage space!); if someone you referred will upgrade to a paid plan – starting from $4.99 per month for 30Gb – you’ll get an addictional 5Gb for free.

Go to SugarSync website