Once again it’s Friday… and we must have fun. I was trying to figure out a fun post, and at general, illustrations are fun, right? So I just had to post the work of Serge Birault, this amazing artist who makes beautiful art.

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He comes up with some great characters, absolutely beautiful pin-ups which take our breath away. For more of his work, visit this portfolio at DeviantART… I hope you all enjoy these! Cheers.

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Its gorgeous UI and incredible ease-of-use makes it just amazing to work with. It’s loads quickly, does exactly what you need and goes out of your way. Oh, did I mention that it’s perfect?

We’ve managed to “heist” 10 copies of Pixelmator worth $600 to give away for free to 10 lucky MakeUseOf readers.

I guess this is something that amazes me so much that I have to mention twice — Pixelmator loads so quickly, it’s unbelievable. When I need to make simple yet sophisticated adjustments to my images quickly while multitasking, forget about Photoshop, I launch Pixelmator.

It greets me with a simple Welcome window.

Then here’s the gorgeous (yet very usable) UI I spoke of earlier. All of the tools you need are laid out on the screen. Like Photoshop, it supports layers, advanced image correction, retouching tools, cool filters and effects. And before you ask — yes, Pixelmator is compatible with PSD files. In fact, take a look at the full list of features it has to offer.

If you’re harbouring some doubt as to whether Pixelmator is as powerful as Photoshop, don’t. Pixelmator has a very creatively driven community which share and help each other bring out the best from Pixelmator. Here are some web-based tutorials to demonstrate that Pixelmator won’t cripple your creative mojo.

And what about exporting images? Pixelmator saves to a native “pixelmator” image format but it will also allow you to export your images to any image format you desire. I mean any. In the screenshot below, notice that the common image formats have their own quick-to-reach tabs but within the Other tab lies a whole bunch of other image formats I’ve never even heard of.

Pixelmator is the perfect, cheaper alternative to Photoshop on a Mac. If you don’t believe me, download the 30-day trial and check it out for yourself.

How do I win a copy?

It’s simple. Just follow the steps.

STEP 3
	Post a link to your Facebook profile in the comments section below Make sure to enter your real email address so that we can contact you if you win!

This giveaway ends tomorrow, just the final one starts. You may participate in as many giveaways as you want, even if you’ve previously won!

Let the giveaway begin! Have fun! Want to know what else we gave away?

MakeUseOf would like to thank Simonas and the Pixelmator team for their generosity while participating in this giveaway. Interesting in sponsoring? We’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with us via email.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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For this Sites of the Week we have selected some great sites such as Akio and Rain Creative. Also we’re featuring the Jeroen Homan’s portfolio and much, much more! As usual we would love to hear from you, keep sending your suggestions to us and we will be more than happy to feature your site.

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You can send me your suggestions via Twitter twitter.com/FabianoMe or twitter.com/abduzeedo, and include #abdz_sites in the message.

DESIGN / CSS

Spiritual Formation – headhearthand.com

The Spiritual Formation Department desires to make more and better disciples of Jesus Christ. We come alongside the local church helping every child, student and adult become more like Jesus – one life at a time.

Rain Creative Lab – raincreativelab.com

Rain Creative Lab – Interactive Agency

APP / WEB APP

Akio – akiotheme.com

Akio contains clean written code with comments so it’s easy to modify or adapt. You can easily customize styles to fit your needs, and don’t worry about any later upgrade.

UpShot – upshotapp.com

UpShot is the Simplest and most Efficient way to send your pictures to your clients, colleagues or friends… and to track what they think about it!

COMMUNITY / PORTAL

Karo Mumkin – telenor.com.pk/karomumkin

Where Do You See Pakistan? For a nation, there is no power as constructive as its people’s ideas and their courage to make a difference. For giving Pakistan a promising future, all we need to do is start realizing the possibilities we have in our minds for the future of Pakistan, no matter small or big.

Fiverr – fiverr.com

Fiverr is a place for people to share things they’re willing to do for $5: Funny and Bizarre, Social Marketing, Graphics, Advertising, Technology, Business, Programming and more!

STUDIO / PORTFOLIO

Hughes – wearehughes.com

Hughes is a creative agency in St. Louis. We specialize in branding, web design, development, behavioral analysis, media, and business strategy.

Jeroen Homan – jeroenhoman.com

Hi and welcome! My name is Jeroen Homan, I am a Webdesigner/Front-end Developer from the Netherlands. I design clean, smart & effective websites, I love minimal design, develop amazing wordpress themes and code clean xhtml & css.

TEMPLATES

Expo – themeforest.net

EXPO is a highly customizable Wordpress Showcase and Resource Theme, integrated with rich feature and enhanced administrative options. You can use this theme to promote good products (themes, web, design) at your website and earn referrals money.

Portfolius – themeforest.net

This business theme helps you promote all your small and large services and products hence reaching out to a wider audience. To showcase your business proposals Portfolius v.12 has extremely functional homepage with unlimited number of featured pages, homepage sidebar, promo place, and mini features area.

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As organizations started spanning multiple sites, they started using WANs. What about the situations where organizations have offices spanning a number of countries? Surely connecting them with dedicated wires is no longer a cheap solution. An alternative solution that addresses most of the needs and is much more secure and reliable is that of Virtual Private Networks.

The Definition of a Virtual Private Network (VPN)?

There are a number of definitions of a Virtual Private Network depending upon which purpose it serves. The bits that are common and essential to every one of these definitions is that you use an existing network (generally a public network like the Internet) and then create a virtual network atop of that to serve some other purpose. To allow you to understand this better, let me give you an example.

Suppose your office has a network of computers which you make extensive use of when at work. Now one day you want to access your work from home, that is stored on the network computers. Obviously your home computer is not a part of the office network. You could remote login into your machine if that is an option and then use it as if you were present in the office.

The other option is that of VPN. It is a common practice these days to give employees access to VPN’s. With VPN you are essentially on the same office network although you may be at a different physical location. In this case the VPN would be configured to work over the Internet to give you access to the internal organization network.

You can thus exchange and share data as if on the internal organizational network although you are not directly connected to it. A VPN thus let you use the public network (the Internet in this case) to transmit private data.

How VPN’s Work?

There are two main technologies that facilitate the creation of VPN’s to allow you to transmit data safely and reliably over a public network. These are encryption and tunneling. Encryption in simple words, as you may know, is the act of scrambling data so that only the intended recipient can view or understand what you have sent and that it looks worthless and gibberish to other parties who may happen to view it.

Tunneling on the other hand refers to the act of creating a virtual tunnel of sorts where you place the contents of an entire packet into another packet to transmit it over the public network. The encapsulating protocol is so chosen that it is not understood by other computers or network devices over the public network which the packets may pass through.

The result of putting these two together is that you can now transmit your data without having to worry about security and reliability issues over the public network.

Advantages Of Using VPN’s

As would be clear by now, one can easily use VPN’s to connect multiple sites (think branch offices) onto the main corporate network and to gain remote access to internal organizational networks (or even your home network for that matter). It is also the cheaper solution in most of the cases when compared with traditional WANs. VPN’s are secure and offer reasonably good performance with high reliability.

Have you ever configured a VPN? What software did you use?

Image Credits: Cisco Inc, Microsoft Technet

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License information will be sent via email. Thank you for participating. Catch out next giveaway in an hour’s time!

MakeUseOf would like to thank The Omni Group for their generosity while participating in this giveaway. Interested in sponsoring? We’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with us via email.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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The better solution to plugins would be bookmarklets, which use little to no system resources and will also work with every browser and OS.

One Quix Solution To Bookmarklets

To work more efficiently with bookmarklets, you can use a little help from Quix – a bookmarklet which serves as a container for other bookmarklets. You can have all the functionalities of many bookmarklets using only this one, but how do you create bookmarklets within Quix?

Quix comes with tons of commands that can replace your existing bookmarklets. But as extensive as it may be, Quix still left many custom bookmarklets out of its list. Even though Quix provides you with the way to add your own sets of commands, there’s no clear explanation on how to do it that I could find.

There’s no point of having the powerful all in one bookmarklet container if there are still many bookmarklets that can’t be contained. So I sat back and tried to make sense of all the resources that I could find, and then experimented on adding custom bookmarklets into Quix.

Building The Chain Of Commands

Basically, to add your own custom bookmarklet commands to Quix, you have to create a text file with the lines of commands inside, and load it after Quix’ own script. Here are the steps to do it:

First: The Text File

Create a text file and fill it with command lines. There are three components to these lines:

1. the command: the name of the command or the shortcut you want to call this command with.
2. the executable: the actual script that this command will perform
3. the description: the explanation about what this line of command will do.

More detailed explanation could be found at the syntax page. Don’t forget to also look at the real example for comparison.

The hardest part is figuring out the “executable” part of the command. In some cases, you could just copy and paste the command used in the real bookmarklet. I compared the Evernote command from its own bookmarklet and the one I found on Quix, they are exactly the same. But you need to experiment here as this method is not always working.

To know what command is used by your bookmarklet, open the bookmark library (“Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks” menu in Firefox or “Bookmarks > Show All Bookmarks” menu in Safari)

Then select the bookmarklet to get the “executable command”.

Second: The Upload

After you are ready with the text file, you have to make it available online. The easiest way is to use Dropbox. Just save the text file inside your Dropbox folder.

Move it to the “Public” folder, right click on it and choose “Copy Public Link” from the Dropbox menu.

Then go to the Extend Quix page, paste the public link into the “Command file URL” field, and install the customized Quix bookmarklet by dragging and dropping the bookmarklet icon to your bookmark bar.

Congratulations! You’ve just upgraded your Quix with the commands that you need. Everytime you come across a new bookmarklet that isn’t supported by Quix, just add the command line in the text file, and you are good to go.

Have you tried Quix? Share your thoughts and opinions in the comments below.

em>Got Tech Questions? Ask Them on MakeUseOf Answers!

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