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Glassical: A Free WordPress Theme

Smashing Editorial — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 04:30:19 PST

We love our readers. We respect the hard work of designers and developers across the globe. And we do our best to make the web design community stronger and the Web a little bit prettier. Therefore we ask talented artists and creative professionals to showcase their skills and release something unique and beautiful as a gift to the community. And when designers agree, impressive works see the light of day.

Today we are glad to release Glassical — a free professional Wordpress-theme created by Abdullah Ibrahim. This theme was designed with the main focus being on typography, clean look and simplicity. Hopefully, you will be able to use it in your projects or at least use it as a foundation for your next projects. The theme is released especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

Download the theme for free!

The theme is released under GPL. You can use it for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. Please link to this article if you would like to spread the word. You may modify the theme as you wish. The theme supports the WordPress 2.8 nested comment system and it is also customized for the WP Pagenavi plugin. Also, Cufón is used for embedding the Nevis font into the theme.

large preview 1 (front page)
large preview 2 (post page)
download the theme + PSD source (.zip, 2.1 Mb)
release post

Screenshots

Below you’ll find more screenshots of the theme. You can click on an image to see the enlarge version.

“Filed under” and “Comments”-section

“Categories”-section

Design of a <blockquote>

Last but not least…

Thank you, Abdullah! We appreciate your work and your good intentions.

We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists. You may not know it yet, but we might feature you in one of our upcoming posts.

If you want to release a high-quality free font, a Wordpress-theme, some wallpapers or an icon-set, please contact us — we would like to support you.

You may be interested in the following free Wordpress-themes as well:

EXPLOSIVE: Ft. Hood suspect reportedly shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’. (Via The BlogProf). On NPR I heard…

Glenn Reynolds — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:28:39 PST

EXPLOSIVE: Ft. Hood suspect reportedly shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’. (Via The BlogProf). On NPR I heard — I can’t find the story on their website yet — that he had given a presentation on the Koran at a professional conference where he claimed that unbelievers should be beheaded, burned, etc. to the discomfiture of the attendees.

UPDATE: Here’s the NPR segment. Key bit:

He gave a Grand Rounds presentation. . . You take turns giving a lecture on, you know, the correct treatment of schizophrenia, the right drugs to prescribe for personality disorder, you know, that sort of thing. But instead of giving an academic paper, he gave a lecture on the Koran, and they said it didn’t seem to be just an informational lecture, but it seemed to be his own beliefs. That’s what a lot of people thought.

He talked about how if you’re a nonbeliever the Koran says you should have your head cut off, you should have oil poured down your throat, you should be set on fire. And I said well couldn’t this just be his educating you? And the psychiatrist said yes, but one of the Muslims in the audience, another psychiatrist, raised his hand and was quite disturbed and he said you know, a lot of us don’t believe these things you’re saying, and that there was no place where Hasan couched it as this is what the Koran teaches but you know I don’t believe it. And people actually talked in the hallway afterwards about ‘is he one of these people that’s going to freak out and shoot people someday?’

Kind of reminds me of that old Saturday Night Live skit on “The Shooting of Buckwheat.” You know: “What was he like?” “Nice guy, quiet, kept to himself.” “Are you surprised he shot Buckwheat?” “Oh, no — it’s all he ever talked about.”

MORE: Reader Dan Friedman writes to note that AP has changed the headline in the “Allahu Akhbar” story — the report is still there, now buried in the middle, but the headline now reads “Neighbor: Fort Hood suspect emptied his apartment.” Soft-pedaling?

STILL MORE: Interestingly, the substance of the NPR segment linked above is the same, but now the words are different, and the segment is in a different order. I transcribed the above while listening online earlier; I don’t know if they’ve substituted a different segment, or what.

MORE STILL: I spoke with a very nice woman named Emily at NPR listener services, who told me that these links aren’t stable until the afternoon, when the final West Coast version is laid down and transcribed. So this is a different live interchange than the one I transcribed earlier, explaining why the substance is the same but the wording is different. She said it may change again before 3 pm Eastern. That’s not very blog friendly! But she explained that they roll the story out in different order across the country because of different time zones. Oh, well. There’s actually some additional news in the new version, which is that Walter Reed has been told not to talk to anyone outside the military, even the FBI.

And more from NPR: “A source tells NPR’s Joseph Shapiro that Hasan was put on probation early in his postgraduate work at the Uniformed Service University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. He was disciplined for proselytizing about his Muslim faith with patients and colleagues, according to the source, who worked with him at the time.” I’ve gotten flak in the past over my praise of NPR, but they do good work, though they’d benefit from more diversity. They’re certainly playing this straighter, and less PC, than a lot of media outlets.

FINALLY: Reader C.J. Burch writes: “You’re right on NPR. I heard them this morning. They’ve been pretty good on this. We shouldn’t spit nails at people because they have a slant. Lord knows, I do. We all do. As long as they get the facts right they’re doing their job. At the end of the day people of good will on the left and the right are going to have to live together. Newsweek and some other places, they’re not doing their job as well. But I’ve already run off at the keyboard about that…”

RETURN OF THE INFLATION TAX: “All of those twentysomethings who voted for Barack Obama last year ar…

Glenn Reynolds — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:18:01 PST

RETURN OF THE INFLATION TAX: “All of those twentysomethings who voted for Barack Obama last year are about to experience the change they haven’t been waiting for: the return of income tax bracket creep. Buried in Nancy Pelosi’s health-care bill is a provision that will partially repeal tax indexing for inflation, meaning that as their earnings rise over a lifetime these youngsters can look forward to paying higher rates even if their income gains aren’t real.”

Good grief, these people really are trying to bring back the Carter era. Or worse.

NEW AD: “If the government can’t run a flu program, can we trust it to run America’s entire hea…

Glenn Reynolds — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:23:24 PST

NEW AD: “If the government can’t run a flu program, can we trust it to run America’s entire health care system?”

I don’t know about that, but charges of favoritism are already appearing.

5 smart albums to help you organize your iPhoto library

Sang Tang — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:00:00 PST

Filed under: iLife, How-tos

Like smart playlists in iTunes, smart albums in iPhoto provide a way for you to better organize your photos. Whether it's a list of your most recent photos or photos with a specified aperture range, there are countless smart albums you could create to fit your needs. Here are a few of my favorite.

Recently added: I always like having my most recent photos with me, and this is the smart album that gives them to me.

Match the following condition.
Date is in the last "90 days" (or whatever date range you prefer).

The smart family album: Say there are three family members in a family -- Tobias Fünke (dad), Lindsay Fünke (mom) and Maebe Fünke (daughter) -- and you want pictures of all of them in one place.

Match any of the following conditions.
Face is "Tobias."
Face is "Lindsay."
Face is "Maebe."

The camera-specific smart album: We've recently added a new member to the camera family, the Canon EOS 40D. But, like many a household, ours is one with several different cameras, and sometimes it's nice to see where each photo originated from.

Match the following condition.
Camera Model is "Canon EOS40D"

A smart album for videos: Some digital cameras these days can also function as "good enough" alternatives for camcorders. Here's a smart album that collects all of your videos imported from your digital cameras.

Match the following condition.
Photo is "Movie."

The best of the best: Your highest rated photos in one place

Match the following condition.
My rating is greater than "*" (or however many stars you desire)

Readers, tell us about some of the iPhoto smart albums that you've created.

TUAW 5 smart albums to help you organize your iPhoto library originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Lego

(author unknown) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:00:00 PST

DANIEL HENNINGER: The Permanent Tea Party. “What was learned Tuesday is that the American voter is…

Glenn Reynolds — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:38:19 PST

DANIEL HENNINGER: The Permanent Tea Party. “What was learned Tuesday is that the American voter is absolutely, totally, unremittingly disgusted with both political parties. More than anything, the American voter is desperate for political leadership.”

Magnatune: How Record Labels Should Approach the iPhone

Frederic Lardinois — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:08:35 PST

Magnatune, a small and eclectic online record label, just released its first iPhone app. As far as we know, this is the first time that a record label has released an iPhone app that allows its users to play every song of every artist on its label for free and as often as they want. The only restriction on the app is that every song is followed by a short announcement with the name of the artist and title of the song.

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Magnatune

Magnatune has always done things differently. It was one of the first online music services to allow its customers to choose how much they wanted to pay for an album. From its inception, the service never featured DRM'ed music and always offered its albums in alternative formats like WAV, OGG, FLAC and AAC. On its website, Magnatune offers a commercial-free streaming plan starting at $5/month (users can choose to pay more) and a download membership that starts at $10 a month.

Sadly, the first version of the iPhone app doesn't support these membership options, but according to Magnatune's announcement, the next version will allow paying members to stream announcement-free music.

Features

The app itself is pretty straightforward. You can browse Magnatune's catalog by artist, album and genre. One neat feature of the app is that it remembers where you left off when you turn the app off - or when you get a call - and prompts you to return to that song when you start the app again.

Shopping

The Magnatune store allows users to buy songs right from their phones. Most of Magnatune's artists are featured in the iTunes store, and the app simply takes users to the iTunes app to buy the song. This, though, also means that potential buyers can't choose how much they want to pay for an album.

Record Labels on the iPhone

Another label that has also released an iPhone app recently is Ghostly International. This app (iTunes link) features only a selection of Ghostly's catalog, however.

We have talked a lot about how bands and artists have started to look at iPhone apps as replacements of traditional albums. Hopefully, more music labels will now also follow Magnatune's lead and release their own apps. With built-in purchasing and music discovery, this is a logical extension of the app-as-album trend - but then, the major music labels aren't exactly known for being logical.

Discuss

Lessons in Manliness: Jimmy Stewart

Brett & Kate McKay — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:03:28 PST

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“His type is as normally average as the hot dog and pop at Coney Island. He is good looking without being handsome, quiet without being a bore, ambitious without taking either himself or his job too seriously and unassuming without being dull. Stewart’s growing appeal has sometimes been difficult to peg. He’s no Gable and certainly has none of the qualities of a Valentino. A sixteen-year-old fan seems to have hit it when she wrote to him, ‘I like you because you’re like the boy next door.”-1938 MGM biography of James Stewart

James “Jimmy” Stewart was an unlikely candidate for silver screen fame. Lacking the suave handsomeness and virility of a Cary Grant, the tough masculinity of a John Wayne, and the dark grit of a Humphrey Bogart, he was unlike anything else to come out of Hollywood at the time. Beanpole thin, with a famously slow drawl and awkward mannerisms, studios initially couldn’t imagine him as a leading man. Everyone could sense that Stewart was enormously talented, but few had a clue on how to use him. It would take directors like Frank Capra and Alfred Hitchcock to recognize his strengths-openness, emotional complexity, intelligence, and authenticity-and coax out some of cinema’s most unforgettable performances.

If Stewart broke the mold of the typical leading man, his behavior off the set was equally antithetical to the rest of Hollywood. Never one to be flashy, married only once, courteous to everyone he met, disciplined and professional, his life provided little grist for the town’s gossip columns. There were no shortage of people who agreed with President Truman when he said, “If Bess and I had a son, we’d want him to be just like Jimmy Stewart.”

While often remembered for his wholesome turns in movies like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Stewart was an actor of tremendous emotional range, equally adept at delving into the dark corners of the human condition. Over the course of his brilliant and wide-ranging 55 year career, Stewart appeared in 80 films, several of which have become true American classics.

In following his own course on screen and in life, Stewart left behind many lessons in manliness. Here are just a few.

Forge Your Own Path and Follow Your Passion

“My earliest memories are of hardware smells. The dry aroma of coiled rope. The sweet smell of linseed oil and baseball gloves. The acid tang of open nail kegs. When I open my nose, they all come back to me.” -Jimmy Stewart

James Stewart did not come from a family with connections to Hollywood. Raised in Indiana, Pennsylvania, his father was the proud owner of the town’s hardware store. His father worked tirelessly to make the store a success, and believed that one day his son Jimmy would take over the business that had been in the family for three generations. Starting at age 10, he expected young Jimmy to come to the store after school to help out and learn the ropes.

Alexander Stewart was an Ivy League educated man who had served in both the Spanish-American War and World War I and presided over his family with manly bearing. Stewart idolized his father and wanted to fulfill his expectations and make him proud. Thus, though Jimmy wished to be a pilot and attend the Naval Academy, he acquiesced to his father’s desire that he follow in his footsteps and attend Princeton.

Upon graduation, Stewart planned to continue his education by getting a masters degree in architecture. He would then be expected to come home to Indiana, take over the hardware store, and perhaps expand into the home building business.

But after matriculating from Princeton, Stewart joined an acting company for what started as a summer stint. When Stewart made the decision to keep on acting instead of returning to school in the fall, his father was not at all pleased with the change in plans. Remembered Stewart:

“Dad was upset. My father didn’t like it at all-till the day he died he didn’t like it…he kept shaking his head, saying, ‘No Stewart has ever gone into show business!’”

Indeed, the elder Stewart never completely warmed up to the idea of his son being an actor. Even after the huge success of Jimmy’s first breakout film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Alexander called him and told him to quit the movie nonsense and come back home to get married, start a family, and help run the store. It was a plea Jimmy would hear for pretty much the rest of his life.

But Stewart didn’t go all Dead Poets Society and kill himself over this rift; he respected his father but he was his own man with his own dreams and his own life to lead. Although he was tempted to return to the quiet life of Pennsylvania throughout his whole life, his passion for acting kept him making movies into his old age.

Be Dignified with the Ladies

While we often think of the stars of yesteryear as more upright than the current crop of tabloid fodder, the Hollywood of the past was much like it is today; studios just worked harder to cover up their actors’ misbehavior and the media kept a respectful distance. While Jimmy Stewart was assuredly no saint, next to fellow actors who juggled multiple women at a time, had affairs with married women while they were single and liaisons with single women when they were married, Stewart was considered downright prudish.

Stewart had relationships with some of the most beautiful and alluring women of the time-Ginger Rogers, Olivia de Havilland, Dinah Shore, and Marlene Dietrich to name a few. But he preferred to keep his relationships out of the public eye and was notoriously circumspect about the women in his life when probed by reporters.

While other stars burned through multiple marriages (Clark Gable and Cary Grant both married 5 times), Stewart held out to find the right woman to settle down with. She was hard to find in Hollywood; women threw themselves at Stewart in hopes of hitching their star to his, but he found these brash, sexually aggressive women off-putting and quickly tired of the vapid ladies he met in Tinseltown. Seeing many of the women he knew cheat on their husbands, he became extremely cautious about tying the knot. As his fortieth birthday approached, he began to despair of being a bachelor forever.

But then he met Gloria Hatrick. Athletic, smart, and funny, she was an elegant and beautiful woman who shared his love of fishing, golfing, and sailing. Stewart said:

“I could tell right off that she was a thoroughbred. For me it had been love at first sight. She was the kind of a girl I had always dreamed of. The kind you associate with open country, cooking stew and not fainting because it was made of cut-up squirrels. She’d look at home on a sailboat or a raft; in a graceful swing from a tree branch into the swimming pool.”

Stewart and Hatrick were married in 1949 and stayed married for 45 happy years. If Stewart had been something of a playboy in his single years, after his trip down the altar he became a devoted husband. Gloria remembered:

“Jimmy was working with some of the most glamorous women in the world. My constant fear I suppose was that he would find them more attractive than me and have an affair with one of them. A lot of men in Hollywood became involved with their leading ladies. Jimmy was a red-blooded American male so naturally I thought it could happen to him, too. I was convinced it was only a matter of time before the telephone would ring and it would be James telling me that he had to work late at the studio or that he would be out playing poker with the boys. Well, no such call ever came. And I can honestly say that in all the years of our marriage Jimmy never once gave me cause for anxiety or jealously. The more glamorous the leading lady he was starring opposite, the more attentive he’d be to me.”

Do Your Duty

All the generations of Jacksons on Stewart’s mother’s side of the family had served honorably in the military, going all the way back to the Revolutionary War. So when it was Jimmy’s turn to serve, he was ready to fulfill his duty. Although he had numerous opportunities to get out of service, Stewart-unlike a certain cowboy actor who usually gets many more manliness points-did everything he could to serve.

In 1940 Stewart was drafted into the military. But when he took his physical, the army rejected him; at 6′3 and 130 pounds, he was deemed too skinny for service. He could have bowed out honorably but instead he appealed the rejection and set up a second physical. He spent the next 3 months constantly gobbling up milkshakes and fried chicken wings in attempt to put on 10 pounds. When the second physical came around, he was still underweight, but he convinced the doctor to look the other way and approve him.

And so a week after winning an Oscar for The Philadelphia Story, Stewart became the first major American actor to don a uniform. He humbly transitioned from acting to peeling potatoes and gracefully accepted the drastic change in his pay-from $3,000 to $21 a week.

Stewart had a lifelong fascination with flying that started with building model airplanes as a child and progressed into getting his private and commercial pilot licenses as an adult. As an avid flyer, he decided to transfer to the Air Corps. While eager to just be one of the boys and start flying missions, Stewart grew increasingly exasperated as the other men were shipped overseas while he was left to train other pilots, make recruitment films, and be trotted out in uniform for various publicity events.

The Army, afraid that losing Stewart in combat would be a heavy blow to American morale, was intent on keeping Stewart from shipping out. But Stewart continually and persistently implored his commanding officers to put him on active duty.

Thus when Colonel Robert Terrill, Commanding Officer of the 445th Bombardment Group needed a man who would be able to lead his men into combat and get them home safely, the Army, knowing there was no more capable or qualified man for the job, finally relented.

When Stewart joined the 445th in Sioux City, he so impressed Terrill that in a matter of weeks the Colonel put him in command of the 703rd Bomb Squadron division, consisting of a dozen B-24 bombers and 350 soldiers and flyers. Once in Britain, Stewart flew missions as dangerous and harrowing as any other Airman, leading squadrons on bombing runs into Germany and occupied France. Besieged on each mission from the Luftwaffe, Stewart escape many narrow misses. Many of his fellow men were not so lucky, and Stewart watched with sickness as they fell from the sky.

For his service, Stewart received the Air Medal for flying 10 successful missions over Germany, the Distinguished Flying Cross for leading an air raid on Brunswick, and the prestigious Croix de Guerre from the French Air Force.

Stewart remained in the Air Force Reserves until forced into retirement and left the Force with the rank of Brigadier General.

Be Humble

Stewart’s dignified manner with women extended to his treatment of everyone he met and worked with. He refused to let fame give him an inflated sense of sense-worth nor deter him from his values. Although his money would have allowed him to, he never lived in an ostentatious way. While the car of choice in Hollywood was a Mercedes, when he finally hit it big he went out and bought a Volvo. He drove it for many years, and then replaced it…with another Volvo. During the energy crisis of the 1970’s, when he was in his 70’s, he refused to heat his pool for his daily dips, seeing it as an extravagance.

Stewart always sought to make his co-stars shine and respected his fellow actors immensely. Known as a consummate professional, he never had an ill word to say about a co-star, even when their antics on set had been anything but respectable. And he was always rooting for the success of others. When Stewart was up for the Best Actor Oscar in 1960 for Anatomy of a Murder, he wanted very much to win as his star had dimmed a bit after the poor reviews and box office performance of 1958’s Vertigo. Walking into the Academy Awards ceremony, he bumped into another nominee in the Best Actor category, Charlton Heston, and the two posed for pictures together. Heston recalled, ”As the flashbulbs finally petered out and we turned to go to our seats. Jimmy took my arm and said, ‘I hope you win, Chuck, I really mean that.’ I don’t know another actor alive who would’ve said such a thing. He’s an extraordinary man.”

Stewart’s humility extended to his military record as well. The public was enamored with the idea of this movie star turned Airman, and when he returned home, he could have easily used his service record as a way to garner attention for himself and promote his films. It would have certainly been tempting, as his postwar transition back into movies did not go smoothly, and industry insiders were beginning to doubt his ability to make a comeback.

But Stewart had long insisted that he was just one of the boys, no more important than any other serviceman. To this end he refused to talk to reporters about his war experiences or appear in any kind of publicity event that capitalized on his service. He also refused to act in movies that depicted combat, leading him to turn down lucrative roles in big movies like Midway and The Longest Day. As Stewart explained, “They’re just hardly ever the way it really is.”

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Funny Dodge Viper logo is an upside-down Daffy Duck.

Scott Johnson — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:12:25 PST

This is too great. Love that kind of thing.

U.S./International Copyright Treaty Leaked, Trouble Ahead for ISPs & Users

Jolie O'Dell — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:12:55 PST

According to once-secret, now-leaked sections of the new, plurilateral Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, global Internet users and ISPs might be in for a world of hurt in the near future.

A U.S.-drafted chapter on Internet use would require ISPs to police user-generated content, to cut off Internet access for copyright violators, and to remove content that is accused of copyright violation without any proof of actual violation. The chapter also completely prohibits DRM workarounds, even for archiving or retrieving one's own work. Read on for details and implications.

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The U.S. drafted this chapter under the strictest measures to ensure secrecy. Only 42 specific persons - such as representatives of Google, Intel, Verizon, Time Warner, Sony, News Corp, eBay, the MPAA and the RIAA - were given access to the document under nondisclosure agreements: a corporate cabal hand-selected to help review the text of the final agreement. The politicians involved in creating the document are also heavily funded by entertainment, media, and IP corporations such as Sony, Time Warner, News Corp, and Disney.

As with other sections of the treaty, portions of this element have been leaked online. As it stands, the leaks suggest Internet users around the world are headed for a new regime of IP enforcement - a culture of invasive searches, minimal privacy, guilt until innocence is proven and measures that would kill our normative behaviors of file-sharing, free software, media downloading, creative remixing and even certain civil liberties.

Allegedly modeled on sections of the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement, the treaty would require ISPs to police user activity for possible copyright violation, and ISPs would be held responsible for any infringing content being uploaded or downloaded. This all spells a huge boon to the established entertainment industry and a huge burden for ISPs.

"In order for ISPs to qualify for a safe harbor," writes Michael Geist, who has published the substance of the leaked material, "they would be required establish policies to deter unauthorized storage and transmission of IP infringing content. Provisions... include policies to terminate subscribers in appropriate circumstances." That means a three-strikes rule would apply to anyone who was accused of violating copyright in any way; ISPs would be required to terminate the user's account after three complaints from the content owner. For something as culturally accepted as downloading music, a user's entire household could be cut off from the Internet and access to information, communication, personal account management, et cetera.

Geist continues, "Notice-and-takedown, which is not currently the law in Canada nor a requirement under WIPO, would also be an ACTA requirement." In other words, whether or not a piece of content or media violates copyright would be arbitrary; the content would be removed by the ISP as soon as a takedown notice was issued. The takedown would be enforced regardless of considerations such as fair use. This policy, which mirrors the DMCA, would be enforced for all nations participating in the treaty.

Finally, the treaty includes a ban on circumventing DRM and other copyright-protecting measures in hardware and software, as well as a ban on the manufacture, import and distribution of circumvention tools. Again, this ban is irrespective of circumstance or content ownership and is inflexible.

Our friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, arbiters of freer use of copyrighted material, have this to say:

U.S. negotiators are seeking policies that will harm the U.S. technology industry and citizens across the globe. Three Strikes/ Graduated Response is the top priority of the entertainment industry... The ACTA text appears to leave the door open for major changes to the existing national Internet intermediary liability regimes that have been the global status quo since the mid 1990s, and which have underpinned both tremendous Internet innovation, and citizens' online freedom of expression and the rich world of user generated content that we take for granted today.
European citizens should also be concerned and indignant. As reported, the ACTA Internet provisions would also appear to be inconsistent with the EU eCommerce Directive and existing national law...

Are international treaties governing Internet content and intellectual property even necessary? Insofar as they fly in the face of normative cultural practices and contradict or tighten existing national laws, we find these suggested measures inflexible and unrealistic. But whether they become reality and shape the landscape of the Internet-to-come remains to be seen.

Discuss

Flickr Sprouts App Garden: Five Cool Apps We Discovered

Jolie O'Dell — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 01:28:05 PST

Flickr, the ever-more-popular photo-sharing service, has a five-year history of apps built on its API. From the interesting to the useful to the pretty to the downright silly, these applications make up a colorful and varied ecosystem around the service itself.

Flickr has organized these third-party apps into a "garden," complete with user favorites, tags, descriptions and screenshots. The App Garden represents a significant evolution from the former "services" section on the user side, and the revamp includes new features for developers, who can now use the Garden as a tool to help users discover their products. Read on for details and a few spotlighted Flickr apps we thought were fun.

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As Flickr software engineer Mikhail Pachenko wrote on the Flickr developer blog, "We've tried to make things as simple and straight-forward as possible" for developers. On a new Apps By Me page, devs will find their apps are kept private until the creator decides to go public with the product.

"When you click on one of your apps," Pachenko continued, "you will be taken to the owner view of your app page. This page is where you tell the world about your app - provide a description, link to a website, set screenshots, and add tags. When you're ready, change the privacy setting to public. That will make your app visible to other users and allow it to show up in searches."

Now, for end users, here are a few apps we picked from the Garden that we think you might like.

Bubblr Makes Comics

Make comic strips from your or others' Flickr photos with this fun, simple application from Barcelona-based shop Pimpampum. The app allows users to search for photos by user or by tag, string the pics into strips, and add captions, thought bubbles and speech bubbles. Creations can be shared via a user's blog, Delicious or email.

Flickr For Busy People Speeds Up Skimming

This delightful time-saver shows a compact grid of photos uploaded from a user's contacts during given time periods between 30 minutes and 8 hours prior to the current time. Below each user's avatar is the number of photos uploaded, and the avatars can be clicked to display (or hide) an array of thumbnails to quick digestion of the day's pics.

Suggestify Geotags Photos

This app lets users geotag other users' Flickr photos by suggesting a location to the photo's owner. That geotag information is stored with Suggestify until the photo owner approves or rejects the suggestion. If approved, the photo is geotagged and the user who suggested the geotag is credited with a special tag on the photo.

Flogr Turns Flickr Pics Into Photo Blogs

Flogr is a PHP/MySQL-powered photoblog interface that displays a main photo page with EXIF data and Flickr comments, a customizable thumbnails page of a user's recent pictures, a slideshow component, a tag cloud and an about page showing the Flickr user's profile. Users can also determine which photos are displayed by telling Flogr to only include images with certain tags.

Flickriver Surfaces Interesting Photos

This app is focused on delivering a seamless, quick viewing experience with minimal visual distraction. Users can choose to check out interesting photos filtered by user or by group. They can search for photos or simply browse to discover the most interesting photos on a given day. Flickriver also includes a keyboard-operated slideshow mode. Better still, Flickriver offers a dynamic badge for bloggers to showcase their images.

Discuss

Summer of 2009: The Top 5 YouTube Videos

Frederic Lardinois — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:01:00 PST

Wedding dances, dancing babies, Kanye West, broken guitars and a crowdsourced music video. These are the top 5 most embedded and linked to videos of this summer. Social media analytics and tracking firm Sysomos just posted an extensive report about how bloggers use videos on their sites. One part of this report looked at the most popular videos that were embedded or linked to from blogs between July and September 2009.

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We should note that these are the top 5 most embedded videos. While there is a clear correlation between how often a video was embedded and how many views it got over the last few months, it's important to remember that this list isn't organized by total views over the last three months but by blog embeds and links.

5. United Break Guitars

Uploaded on July 6, 2009

5,914,000 views

4. MTV VMA's Remix: Kanye West Interrupts Obama's Speech

Uploaded on September 13, 2009

4,200,000 views

3. SOUR '日々の音色 (Hibi no neiro)

Uploaded July 1, 2009

1,600,000 views

2. Evian Roller Babies International Version

Uploaded: July 1, 2009

12,436,000 views

1. JK Wedding Entrance Dance

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Timeline of the Most Popular Toys of the Last 50 Years

Ken Denmead — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 04:30:31 PST

Image via Permuto

A little birdie pointed our attention to a great graphic showing off the most popular toys of the last 50 years, including geek favorites like the Etch-a-Sketch and Mr. Stay-Puft. Check out the whole list at the Permuto blog, and leave your own favorites in the comments.

From April Fool’s to Holiday Fact: Tauntaun Sleeping Bag Unboxing!

Ken Denmead — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 05:00:36 PST

Photo by Ken Denmead

It’s the stuff of online myth: a fake product, created as part of an elaborate April Fool’s Day joke, gets such an overwhelming response from the store’s fans that they realize there’s only one thing to do - actually make the product. This is just what has transpired over the last seven months for the folks from ThinkGeek:

Only through your enthusiasm and support was ThinkGeek able to make this product a reality. We bow to your superhuman Star Wars Fanboy/Girl abilities. We hope it helps you stay alive after a deadly Wampa attach and encourages you to educate other about the best Star Wars movie ever, The Empire Strikes Back.

And now, in time for the holidays, they’re arriving. The kind folks at ThinkGeek sent us a review bag, and we couldn’t help but treat it like any other super-exciting geek toy, and take video of the unboxing.

The best thing about it… well other than how awesome the idea is overall, is that it’s a really good indoor sleeping bag. The build quality it far higher than most of the entertainment-branded bags you’ll pick up at your local stores (though admittedly the proposed $99 pricetag means it’s not a casual purchase). And having the pillow built in to the head (isn’t Mr. Tauntaun cute?!?!) is really handy.

At this time, it’s not yet on sale at the ThinkGeek store, but you can get on the waiting list, and as soon as it is, we’ll let you know!

Flickr Opens an App Garden Full of Photo Tools [Photos]

Kevin Purdy — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 05:30:00 PST

There are a whole lot of mobile, desktop, and helper apps tied to Flickr. The team at the photo sharing service decided to make those apps easier to find and install by opening a free "App Garden" to everyone.

Like you might expect, the App Garden is an uncluttered, keen-looking showcase for the efforts of Flickr-happy developers and companies that have made it easy to download and upload photos to the service from many platforms. Apps are tagged by developers, making it fairly easy to find, say, a desktop Mac uploader or Android-based tool.

To help users stumble across great apps, Flickr has also started tagging photos with the tools they were uploaded with, with a link back to that app in the Garden. Share some of your favorite Flickr app finds in the comments, and read up on Flickr's API if you're interested in developing an app yourself.

The App Garden [Flickr via Flickr Blog]

Secret Copyright Treaty Leaks. It's Bad. Very Bad.

CmdrTaco — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 06:31:00 PST

Jamie found a Boing Boing story that will probably get your blood to at least a simmer. It says "The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to 'national security' concerns, has leaked. It's bad." You can read the original leaked document or the summary. If passed, the internet will never be the same. Thank goodness it's hidden from public scrutiny for National Security.

Just How Many Balloons Does It Take to Go “Up, Up, and Away?”

Corrina Lawson — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 06:00:16 PST

With the recent furor around the balloon boy hoax fresh in the minds of the public, tonight the Discovery Channel is dusting off a classic episode of Mythbusters which tested how many helium-filled balloons it would take to lift a four-year-old child.

It’s not impossible. A lawn chair balloonist did it in 2007. And before that, in 1982, there was Lawn Chair Larry.

But the Mythbusters approached it in their own, unique way.

The episode airs tonight, at 10 p.m., immediately following a new Mythbusters at 9 p.m.

CalDAV On iPhone

systemsboy — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 09:18:44 PST

One of the exciting new features in the iPhone 3 OS is the ability to access calendars via plain old, standard, vanilla CalDAV. This allows you to finally keep an updated version of all your calenders without syncing your phone to your computer. Just subscribe to your calendars on your iPhone, just like you do in iCal on your Mac, and you’ll always be up to date because you’ll always be accessing the centrally-located, server-side calendar. This is right and proper and as it should be. But CalDAV over iPhone does have some quirks and limitations.

Subscribing to a Single Calendar
The first thing that’s not readily obvious is how to connect to your CalDAV calendars. It is possible to subscribe to multiple Google calendars, for instance, but doing so is neither straightforward nor apparent. Still, once it’s done it’s done, and it’s mostly better than the alternative.

Subscribing to a single Google calendar — your main Google calendar, if you only have one — is really what the iPhone is interface is designed for. Where to do this is also not necessarily obvious:

Open the Settings app.
Press Mail, Contacts, Calendars.
Press Add Account…
Press Other.
Under the Calendars heading, press Add CalDAV Account
Enter your CalDAV server URL (for Google it’s just “google.com”), username, password and a short description, then hit the Next button.
The iPhone will verify your information and then, if all goes well, your CalDAV calendar will appear in the Calendar app with the description you provided with the word CalDAV next to it in parentheses.
Now wait. It can take a few minutes for the iPhone to suck down the CalDAV data. I’m not sure why. But it should appear after a few minutes or so.

Navigating to this calendar will cause the iPhone to read the calendar data right from the server. If you have write access you will also be able to add, delete and modify events right on your iPhone and have the changes propagate to the server.

Multiple Calendar Subscriptions
UPDATE: See the end of the article for a better way to sync multiple Google calendars over CalDAV.

In addition to connecting to your main Google calendar it is also quite possible to connect to other CalDAV calendars to which you might want to be subscribed, though the process is hardly as automatic as the one above. Connecting to a single CalDAV calendar is easy for both you and the iPhone because the URL is simple and easy to predict, so the phone just does it for you. If, however, you want to connect to a shared calendar, the URL that you’ll need to supply to the iPhone is long and complicated and, unfortunately, must be manually entered.

To do so, you’ll probably want to start by getting that URL into the iPhone’s clipboard. There are lots of ways to do this. You can get it right from the Google calendar site (if it’s a Google calendar) using Mobile Safari. You could also send it to yourself in an email. The way I handle this is that I actually keep a spreadsheet on Google Docs that contains all my shared CalDAV URLs, that way I always have copy/paste access to them from the iPhone or from a computer. But however you do it, just get that URL into your clipboard, because you don’t want to type it by hand. Trust me.

The process for adding additional calendars follows the above steps almost exactly. The one exception is that for the Server entry in step 6 you must pass the long URL you just got into your clipboard. Just paste it right there into the field. After switching fields, it will present the Server text as just “google.com” again, but it should have the full URL stored away in its memory. Continue with the process and you should see the new calendar in the Calendar application as before.

Advanced Options
If a problem occurs during subscription an Advanced Settings button will appear.

This button also becomes available after the calendar has been set up. There are three options to set here:

Use SSL
This allows you to configure your iPhone to connect via SSL, which is required by some servers. Google allows this option and may or may not require it. Generally it’s best to have this on if possible. Or at least more secure. If you’re having troubles, though, you can try toggling this setting.
Port
This allows you to set the SSL port, in case your server uses something other than the default of 443.
Account URL
This is the actual URL to your calendar. The one you pasted into the Server field. If something went wrong during that step you can check and fix it here.

In Practice
There are some advantages and disadvantages to this system. And while I really believe this is how any serious calendaring system should work — all your computers are clients that simply get the calendar data from the cloud — the implementation on the iPhone is not exactly mature.

For one, CalDAV calendars other than your main Google one are a major pain to add to the phone. Google provides an app for doing this on you desktop system, but for the iPhone it must all be done by hand. If you have many calendars it is a long and tedious process.

For two, receiving CalDAV data on your iPhone is, in my experience, very slow. Any changes made on the server will not be immediately seen by the iPhone. It can be several minutes after opening the Calendar app before you see the changes and there’s no indication that the sync is even taking place. This can be frustrating and misleading and requires you to always remember that there might be a change that’s coming that your iPhone just hasn’t seen yet.

Also, from time to time, though very rarely, calendars fail to load. I can’t blame this entirely on the iPhone, though. This happens to me even in the browser on my desktop system. It seems to be a problem with Google’s implementation and large numbers of calendars. Apparently Apple’s not the only one whose CalDAV implementation is immature.

Still, for me this system has worked pretty well thus far. I have a buttload of calendars to which I must stay subscribed, and which I must keep current. And I just don’t sync with my computer that often — plus, calendar changes are made at work — so that system was equally dodgy. My calendars don’t change that often either, so waiting for data to sync is less of an issue for me, though when there are major changes, getting everything re-synced really blows.

Overall, now that it’s in place, I’m very happy with CalDAV on my iPhone, though there is certainly room for improvement. I suspect it will only get better with time.

UPDATE: It looks like it did just get better. I’ve just discovered a better way to subscribe to multiple Google Calendars that I’m pretty sure wasn’t there when I set all this up a few months ago. It’s much easier and doesn’t require signing in to each calendar. Just subscribe to your main calendar as described in the above outlined steps, and then, on your iPhone, go to this page:
https://www.google.com/calendar/iphoneselect

Here you can select the calendars that will sync over your main Google account.

This is for Google accounts only. If you just have regular old CalDAV accounts that you want to sync with, manual entry will still be required.

UPDATE 2: This method seems to speed calendar syncing as well. I think the old method required the iPhone to log into each individual calendar, whereas this new method logs in once and syncs all the calendars with the one account. Much less work for the iPhone than before. Nice!

Actual 10-year cost of Pelosi Plan: $1.8 trillion

(author unknown) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:46:55 PST

Shared by ZaMoose
Ouch, very ouch, baby.

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