Clazh

Get 6 Paid Mac OS X Applications For Free

Arpit Jacob — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:13:18 +0000

Hurry up MacHeist is currently giving away 6 paid applications worth more than $ 175 for free. Just head to the homepage and signup. They will unlocked and give the serial keys to everyone when they reach 500,000 participants.

ShoveBox

Price: $25

Catch all the little scraps of information that you can’t immediately act on, but don’t want to forget. ShoveBox sits up in your menu bar, waiting for you to drag in text, images, URLs, and more.
ShoveBox makes it very simple to enter stuff, just drag it in from any app or use the handy QuickJot feature to type in notes, etc.

WriteRoom

Price: $25

WriteRoom is a simple, but powerful app that provides you with a distraction-free writing environment. WriteRoom does one main thing and does it incredibly well: It’s all about writing.

Twitterrific

Price: $15

Twitterrific is an exquisite app that enables you to make the most out of your Twitter experience. It has a clean user interface that’s designed to take up little of your precious desktop space.
Millions of people have discovered how much fun Twitter can be. Now you can make it an even more enjoyable experience with one of the pioneer Twitter apps. Twitterrific is packed with features, so that you’ll feel like you’re in total control over everything you do on Twitter.

TinyGrab

Price: $14

TinyGrab is a simple, powerful app that enables you to quickly share screenshots of everything on your Mac.
Simply press Command, Shift, and 4, then select the area on your screen that you’d like to grab. Or tap the spacebar to select a whole window to grab. Then TinyGrab quickly uploads the screenshot and puts the URL for it on your Clipboard so you can easily share it via email, IM, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Hordes of Orcs

Price: $25

Hordes of Orcs is a Tower Defense strategy game where you build walls and towers to defend your village from orcs gone rogue.
There are several different towers, each with it’s own unique abilities. Build Arrow Towers, Radiation Towers, Fire Towers, and more to keep your village safe from the deadly clutches of green meanies.

Mariner Write

Price: $50

Mariner Write is a fast, streamlined word processor that’s useful for everyone… professional writers, educators, students, casual computer users, and everyone in-between. It has a simple, elegant user interface so that you can create beautiful documents the very first time you start using it.
This is the word processor with perfect balance of features. Too many word processors bog you down with “kitchen sink syndrome”, while others skimp on important features. Not Mariner Write… you get all the tools you need to do the job, without any feature-bloat.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Apple, Software Tags: Apple MacOSX Software Free Download

Facebook Chat, Google Gtalk Intergration Coming Soon

Arpit Jacob — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:48:44 +0000

A year back Facebook had announced that they were building a XMPP interface for Facebook Chat. Which is the same protocol that Google has used to build Google Gtalk, Google’s popular Instant messaging service. Process One’s bot IMTrends has detected that Facebook has implemented the Jabber/XMPP Protocol.

So what is XMPP? XMPP formerly called Jabber, is a messaging protocol based on XML. The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is an open technology for real-time communication, which powers a wide range of applications including instant messaging, presence, multi-party chat, voice and video calls, collaboration, lightweight middleware, content syndication, and generalized routing of XML data. Unlike most instant messaging protocols, XMPP is an open standard. Like e-mail, it is an open system where anyone who has a domain name and a suitable Internet connection can run their own XMPP server and talk to users on other servers. The standard server implementations and many clients are also free and open source software.

This is big new this means you’ll be able to chat with Gmail and Google users. This means Google users will be able to interact with Facebook users using the same IM Chat clients. Which means you’ll be soon able to use Facebook chat on any of your favorite instant messaging desktop or web based clients.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Google, Internet Tags: Google, Internet, Social-Networks

Reborn, Resurrected, Relaunched, Reloaded, Redesigned

Arpit Jacob — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:15:48 +0000

So here we are at last, more than a year has gone by since I left this blog in limbo. To kick-start my blogging again I decided to redesign and re-brand the blog. As I mentioned in my previous post I am currently working as a freelance Web/UI designer for the last 10 months or so. So after an year and a half of procrastination, I present you the all new Clazh Technology and Design. Expect me start blogging regularly from now on. I am also advertising my skills as a web designer, very soon I will be selling a some really cool WordPress themes and templates so watch out. A lot of exciting things have happened in the last one year, I hope to keep that momentum going.

About the new design.

Well this is the longest time I have ever taken to design something, the design went through more than 40 revisions, it was partly my fault since kept putting it in the back burner and every time I brought it up to work on I would change something. I happy with the overall look and design. I know its not as colorful as my last one. The pink color in my last design became a running joke among my friends. Currently the site is still in beta.

Running on the latest and best WordPress 2.8.
Very Lightweight.
Uses only one image for the whole site, CSS Sprites.
All Javascript are hosted on External CDN
New featured content slider on the homepage.
New community submitted articles.

Please do provide some feedback, will really appreciate it. If something is broken get in touch with me using the contact form. Lots more new stuff coming up on the site just keep a watch.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2009. | Permalink | 12 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Blogging, Web-Design Tags: Blogging, Web-Design, Wordpress

Back from the dead

Arpit Jacob — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:23:49 +0000

Its going to be almost a year since I have blogged. Its time to get back to blogging and revive this blog again. Lot of things have been happening on my side. 2008 was one the best and worst year of my life, personally and career wise. A few things I would like to highlight are.

I was awarded the Microsoft MVP Most Valuable Professional.
I quit my IT Job at the software company I was working at.
I switched to a Mac, I brought a mac book pro 15′.
I been backpacking and traveling. Bhutan, Dubai, Goa, Kodaikanal etc.
I been doing volunteer work here and there.

So whats next.

Start blogging again.
Revamp the site and design.
Start Freelancing as a web designer and developer.
Lots more backpacking and traveling.

If you’ve been a long time reader, my apologies for the neglect. Do let me know what you like to see on this blog, and how we can improve it further.

How To Remove SpyWare, AdWare Clean and Fix Windows

Arpit Jacob — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 18:08:56 +0000

Recently my company gave me a laptop to use for work. It was riddled with SpyWare and AdWare. The instant I fired up IE the Virus and SpyWare would trigger up and redirect me to some random ad laden web page requesting me to download even more SpyWare. Since reinstalling the OS was not an option I had to clean up the system on my own somehow. I am listing a bunch of software that you’ll need before we proceed.

Update Window

The first step is to make sure your windows is updated with the latest security patches and fixes. If you are running Windows XP make sure you have installed Service Pack 2. Once you are done installing service pack 2 you should run Windows update and get the latest patches. Another alternative is to use AutoPatcher this is a utility which will download all the required patches and security fixes from Microsoft and store it in a folder on your system which you can later reuse to apply to other computers that you need to update.

Run A Full Scan Using AntiVirus and AntiSpyware Softwares.

There are a number of free AntiVirus software I have for now listed two of them. Virus can do all sorts of weird things to your computer. For example on my laptop the virus disabled the “View Hidden Files” option, even though I checked the option it would reset it back, it also set a number of scheduled tasks in my Task Scheduler to call a number of different copies of the Virus. Run a full scan of the system. Next run a Anti-SpyWare software I highly recommend AdAware.

Clean Up Your Start Up Items.

Most SpyWare and Virus configure your start up items to run the Virus when you boot up or log into your system. Use the MsConfig tool in windows to check which items are being loaded at start up. If you see any suspicious looking entries uncheck them also identify which file is being called and manually delete it. Sometime this might not work like in my case I had to log into widows using safe mode (When Windows is booting up press F8 you will see an option to load windows under safe mode) and delete the offending file. Use the process explorer tool to see if the processing running on your system are all legitimate. Also use AutoRuns to delete any entries that look suspicious especially DLL that are unsigned and have random looking names.

Clean Up And Optimise Your System.

There are a number of tools that can clean your system of unwanted and unused temporary files and registry entries. One of the best tools that I have found so far is CCleaner which provides a number of advanced options to clean up your system. Try to keep the number of items that start up when you boot the system to a minimum.

Prevention Is Better Than Cure.

Better safe than sorry. Ditch IE period and get FireFox. Run an Anti-Virus software and do a full scan periodically. Also do a full Anti-SpyWare scan periodically. Also scan external drives like thumb drives and external hard disk when you connect it to the computer.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2008. | Permalink | 13 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Featured, Technology, Tutorial Tags: Anti-Virus, How To, Repair, SpyWare

Notable Free Premium WordPress Themes

Arpit Jacob — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 17:59:03 +0000

Time for showcasing a few notable Free Premium Quality WordPress Themes that caught my eye. With a little a bit of creativity and extra work you could modify these themes to get yourself a free high quality theme.

LeoPress Leopard Inspired WordPress Theme

LeoPress is a free three column WordPress. The design is inspired by Mac OSX Leopard.

Download Link: Here

Preview: Here

Lemon Twist

A green coloured two column WordPress theme from farfromfearless. Theme was developed for the authors own site and later release to the public to download. The panels in the side block are collapsible, it also has a large footer in the front page to showcase your flickr images and latest posts.

Download Link: Here

Preview Demo: Here

Probama WordPress Theme

A politically inspired theme supporting Barack Obama. The home page is a two column WordPress theme with a large footer, for single posts and pages the layout switches to a single column layout. The menu supports sub pages and are shown as drop down lists.

Download Link: Here

Preview Demo: Here

Neoclassical Three Column WordPress Theme

This a clean Three column WordPress theme with great typography.

Download Link: Here

Preview Demo: Here

Massive Mobile

If you want to display your site or blog in a more user friendly way on the iPhone or PSP you can make use of this free theme.

Download Link: Here

Preview Demo: Here

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2008. | Permalink | 12 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Blogging, Downloads, Wordpress Tags: Free, Templates, Themes, Web-Design

CoolWater Two Column Free WordPress Theme

Arpit Jacob — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 19:32:03 +0000

This is another beautiful free CSS XHTML web template by Styleshout that I really liked and decided to convert into a WordPress Template. The WordPress theme design is called CoolWater. As the name suggests this theme is really clean and has a bright punchy look and feel. The Theme is a two column theme and has support for widgets and is supported for wordpress 2.3 and above. The template is released under a Creative Commons license, Please leave the original designers link intact.

Demo: Click Here to look at the demo.

Please link to this page do not link to the download link directly.

[download#6#image]

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2008. | Permalink | 10 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Downloads, Wordpress Tags: Free, Templates, Themes, Web-Design

Why Apple Is Good at User Experience And Design

Arpit Jacob — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 12:05:07 +0000

The first two point from Michael Lopp, senior engineering manager at Apple, Presentation at SXSW caught my attention.

Pixel Perfect Mockups

Most companies or designers are pretty ok with creating wireframes or paper prototypes. Apple on the other hand spends a huge amount of time and effort on making pixel perfect mockups. This gives a clear focus to what the application does and looks like.

10 to 3 to 1

Apple designer have come up with 10 completly different designs. A huge amount of creative energy is spent in coming up with the designs. Heck I have trouble coming with more than 2-3 designs and tend to get brain dead if I try too hard. Out of the ten designs, only three are selected. Then more time is spent on those three mockups. At the final stage they nail down the best design out of the three.

Read More about Apples Design process at Businessweek.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Apple, Design, Software Tags: Mac, Mac OSX, UX

Free Online Virus Scan Using Multiple Anti-Virus Tools

Arpit Jacob — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 15:41:46 +0000

Have you ever come across a suspicious looking file and you wished you could scan with multiple anti-virus tools. VirusTotal is one such tool which you can use to scan a file with a huge number of anti-virus tools and programs. It can even scan a zip file if it is not password protected. Etremely useful if you want to check suspicious looking attachments that people send.

AhnLab (V3)
Aladdin (eSafe)
ALWIL (Avast! Antivirus)
Authentium (Command Antivirus)
Avira (AntiVir)
Bit9 (FileAdvisor)
Cat Computer Services (Quick Heal)
ClamAV (ClamAV)
CA Inc. (Vet)
Doctor Web, Ltd. (DrWeb)
Eset Software (ESET NOD32)
ewido networks (ewido anti-malware)
Fortinet (Fortinet)
FRISK Software (F-Prot)
F-Secure (F-Secure)
AVG Technologies (AVG)
Hacksoft (The Hacker)
Ikarus Software (Ikarus)
Kaspersky Lab (AVP)
McAfee (VirusScan)
Microsoft (Malware Protection)
Norman (Norman Antivirus)
Panda Security (Panda Platinum)
Prevx (Prevx1)
Rising Antivirus (Rising)
Secure Computing (Webwasher)
Softwin (BitDefender)
Sophos (SAV)
Sunbelt Software (Antivirus)
Symantec (Norton Antivirus)
VirusBlokAda (VBA32)
VirusBuster (VirusBuster)

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2008. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Internet, Software Tags: Anti-Virus, Repair, Security

Download Internet Explorer 8 Beta, New Features In IE8

Arpit Jacob — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 16:20:43 +0000

Updated Post with more new under the hood features of IE 8.

In the recent news it was announced that IE 8 Passes the ACID 2 test and will render in standard mode by default. The folks at Neowin have managed to uncover links to Internet Explorer 8 Download page and also a list of upcoming features in IE 8.

Here is the link to download Internet explorer 8 beta 1 and a list of new features in IE 8.

Note: The download links currently don’t work try them later.

Below are the list of new features found in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1.

Whats New For Users

Activities

Activities are contextual services to quickly access a service from any webpage. Users typically copy and paste from one webpage to another. Internet Explorer 8 Activities make this common pattern easier to do.

WebSlices

WebSlices is a new feature for websites to connect to their users by subscribing to content directly within a webpage. WebSlices behave just like feeds where clients can subscribe to get updates and notify the user of changes.

Favorites Bar

In Internet Explorer 7, the Links bar provided users with one-click access to their favorite sites. The Links bar has undergone a complete makeover for Internet Explorer 8. It has been renamed the Favorites bar to enable users to associate this bar as a place to put and easily access all their favorite web content such as links, feeds, WebSlices and even Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents.

Automatic Crash Recovery

Automatic Crash Recovery (ACR) is a feature of Windows^®Internet Explorer^® 8 that can help to prevent the loss of work and productivity in the unlikely event of the browser crashing or hanging. The ACR feature takes advantage of the Loosely-Coupled Internet Explorer feature to provide new crash recovery capabilities, such as tab recovery, which will minimize interruptions to users’ browsing sessions.

Improved Phishing Filter

Internet Explorer 7 introduced the Phishing Filter, a feature which helps warn users when they visit a Phishing site. Phishing sites spoof a trusted legitimate site, with the goal of stealing the user’s personal or financial information. For Internet Explorer 8, we are building on the success of the Phishing Filter with a more comprehensive feature called the “Safety Filter.”

Whats New For Developer

Better AJAX Development

AJAX Navigation enables users to navigate back and forth without leaving the AJAX application and could be used navigating a page without performing a traditional full navigation. This allows websites to trigger an update to browser components like the address bar by setting the window.location.hash value, firing an event to alert components in the page and even creating an entry in the travel log.
DOM Storage is a simple-to-use method for storing and retrieving strings of key/value pair data. Data can be stored per tab instance for a session or persisted to the local machine. This allows pages to cache text on the machine which reduces the effect of network latencies by providing faster access to pre-cached data. Several innovative uses are possible. For example, use this in combination with the new network connectivity event to allow a page to cache data if it detects that the computer is offline.
Connectivity events allow websites to check when the user is connected to the network and receive notification of connectivity changes.
Six connections per host instead of two for broadband scenarios and a scriptable property allow for more improved performance by allowing parallelization of downloads in Internet Explorer 8. In addition, this increases functionality by ensuring a request is not blocked to a host if two connections already exist. Websites can optimize their downloads based on a scriptable property.
XMLHTTPRequest Enhancements include a timeout property that can be set to cancel the request if necessary, allowing developers to manage the request better.

Cross-domain communication is an integral part of AJAX development and mashup Web applications. Internet Explorer 8 includes two features to help you build cross-domain communications that are safe and easy to implement:

With Cross-domain Request (XDR), developers can create cross-site data aggregation scenarios. Similar to the XMLHttpRequest object but with a simpler programming model, this request, called XDomainRequest, is the easiest way to make anonymous requests to third-party sites that support XDR and opt in to making their data available across domains. Three lines of code will have you making basic cross-site requests. This will ensure data aggregation for public sites (such as blogs) will be simple, secure and fast.
Cross-document Messaging (XDM) APIs allow communication between documents from different domains through IFrames in a way that is easy, secure and standardized.

DOM Core Improvements

Internet Explorer’s object model does not distinguish properties from attributes. This makes it impossible for a property (.href) to return a different value than an attribute (getAttribute(’href’)).
Core attribute operations are broken: Getters and setters behave inconsistently given certain parameters. An oft-cited example is getAttribute(’style’), which returns the style object rather than a string as expected.

Internet Explorer 8 fixes many of the cross-browser inconsistencies in these two areas. Specifically, the following bugs in core areas have been fixed:

Separate URL handing for properties and attributes such that relative URLs can be retrieved via an attribute and absolute URLs can be retrieved via a property.
Fix element’s attribute array modifiers—getAttribute, setAttribute, and removeAttribute have cross-browser compatible implementations.
Other attribute-related API fixes implemented.

Platform Performance Improvements

Internet Explorer 8 includes several changes that improve the performance of Web sites. These changes affect many Internet Explorer subsystems, including the HTML parser, CSS rule processing, markup-tree manipulation as well as the JScript garbage collector and runtime.

The majority of these changes will affect performance only, with little to no functional effect on most Web sites. However, they may expose aspects of Web sites that depend on the timing of operations or performance of the browser. In addition, those Web sites that unknowingly access objects after they are freed may find such access failing in Internet Explorer 8.

Internet Explorer 8’s performance improvements affect each site loaded in Internet Explorer 8 regardless of the chosen rendering mode.

Circular Memory Leak Mitigation

Internet Explorer 8 includes improvements to memory management. These improvements mitigate memory leaks that were previously created by circular references between JScript objects and DOM objects.

This feature may affect the behavior of webpages that depend on garbage memory that, only as the result of a memory leak, existed in previous versions of Internet Explorer. In Internet Explorer 8, these pages will reference unallocated memory and generate a fault.

This feature affects each website displayed in Internet Explorer 8 regardless of the site’s chosen rendering mode.

HTML Improvements and ACID2

HTML uses elements to represent both structure and meaning in a document. To help developers take full advantage of the elements that HTML 4 offers, and to better provide the semantic meaning intended by Web author, Internet Explorer 8 has upgraded support of the following presentational elements:

The P element: Represents a logical paragraph.
The OBJECT element: May represent any object including images.

Through improved support of these HTML elements, Web developers may build more expressive and accessible HTML markup.

© Arpit Jacob for Clazh, 2008. | Permalink | 11 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Catergories: Microsoft, Software, Technology Tags: Web-Design, Web-Development, Web-Standards, Windows