The death of stock photos A woman being accosted by floating hamburgers, a man with an eyepatch holding an abacus, and an astronaut feeding a horse in a harem costume may seem like scenes out of a dystopian sci-fi novel, but they are not. They are examples of the bizarre world of stock photos, where images are as ridiculous as they are useless. While these may be extreme examples, the fact remains that stock photos do not depict reality. A report by Boston Consulting Group found that Millennials — which are the largest generation in U.S. history and about to lead the country in spending power — engage with brands “far more extensively and personally than older generations.” Today’s consumer is blasted by marketing on all fronts and most of that marketing is easy to ignore, delete, fast forward and swipe past. Content needs to be authentic for marketing campaigns to succeed, which is why user-generated content has emerged as a priceless resource. Free People This campaign succeeded on a number of levels. Apple
Top 5 solid-state drives: It's upgrade time - CNET CNET editor Dong Ngo picks the best solid-state drives (SSDs) currently on the market. Officially, solid-state drives (SSDs) are no longer too expensive. They are not quite "affordable" yet, but with the top 1TB capacity going for somewhere between $350 and $450, they are much more accessible and totally worth the investment. This is especially true if you still use a regular hard drive inside your computer. Replacing that hard drive with an SSD will be the most satisfying upgrade, and it will boost your rig's performance so significantly that you'll ask yourself why you didn't do it sooner. When it comes to getting an SSD, the larger the capacity is always better. There are a lot of SSDs on the market, with different brands and models. Transcend SSD370S With its two largest capacity drives (512GB and 1TB) costing just $175 and $360, respectively, the Transcend SSD370S has set a new low in SSD pricing: about 34 cents per gigabyte. Crucial MX200 Samsung SSD 850 Evo
How I Grew My Facebook Traffic by 200% in 60 Days Andrianes Pinantoan heads growth marketing at Canva, an online design tool that helps you and your team create stunning visual marketing assets faster and easier than ever. Have you noticed it? Recently, more and more companies have started complaining about the declining amount of traffic Facebook drives to their website. Some have gone so far as to delete their page altogether, declaring that Facebook is dead as a free customer acquisition channel. The mindset: “An email marketing campaign gets upward of a 50 percent open rate while less than 5 percent of my fans see my Facebook updates – why would I bother?” Now don’t get me wrong, email marketing is great, but avoiding Facebook is definitely a mistake. Firstly, Facebook is the single biggest driver of traffic among all social media platforms. To restore your faith in how Facebook can be an awesome driver of traffic for your brand, I’m going to show you how we did it. How Canva Grew Facebook Traffic By 205.71% Want to know how we did it?
Ad tech is killing the online experience | Media There’s something so wonderfully easy about reading this column in a physical newspaper. You turned the page, and here it is, with few annoyances or distractions, in an ultra-high-definition typeface which was custom-designed with pleasurable reading in mind. Or – wait – are you reading this on a phone? Did you follow a link from Twitter, or Facebook? Or maybe you’re on a train, or a plane, or you’re trying to use your laptop on your cousin’s crappy Wi-Fi connection out in the countryside somewhere. Web-based articles, these days, are increasingly an exercise in pain and frustration. When it comes to the economics of online publishing, the first thing to remember is that job No 1 isn’t to get the news to you. That ecosystem raises important questions about privacy and just general creepiness – the way that the minute you look at a pair of shoes online, for instance, they then start following you around every other website you visit for weeks. This is the tragedy of the commons.
martin-thoburn.com » Install the Apple ProRES codec without Final Cut or ProApps Thanks to the very old forum discussion over at Creative Cow. I was able to install the Apple ProRES codec for quicktime without installing Final Cut X or Final Cut Studio. I’m sorry apple, but I abandoned Final Cut years ago. However my new capture card the Black Magic Intensity Extreme can only capture in Uncompressed or PDX. To use ProRES requires that you have a ProApp like Final Cut X, Final Cut Pro or Motion installed. Install Instructions: There is a workaround however. Move the following files to: /Mackintosh HD/Library/Quicktime/ and some more files to /Mackintosh HD/Library/Video/Professional Video Workflow Plug-Ins After that the Codecs will show up in any app the uses the Quicktime Codec library and can be used in programs like Media Express. Codec Download :You can download the extracted codecs here form my website for easy access.
Enable “Save As” in OS X Mountain Lion & OS X Mavericks Mac users with OS X Mavericks, Yosemite, and Mountain Lion finally have the option to bring back the much-loved “Save As” feature that was removed from Lion. It’s slightly hidden though, and there’s a few quirks with it, but we’ll show you how to access “Save As” and even better, how to have it always be visible by enabling a reasonable keyboard shortcut to use the feature again with a simple keystroke. This will work on all Macs with OS X Yosemite, OS X Mavericks, and OS X Mountain Lion, leaving Lion to be the odd version out, as versions of Mac OS X prior to that retained Save As from the earliest days of the Mac operating system. On with using Save As in modern OS X! How to Use “Save As” in OS X Mavericks, Yosemite, & Mountain Lion For a one-off “Save As” of the current file in a supported application, just do the following: Pull down the “File” menu and hold down the “Option” key to turn Duplicate into ‘Save As…’ Yes, this works the same in all modern versions of OS X.
The ultimate guide to doing anything in Slack Slack, the team messaging app that’s the hot thing of the moment among startups, has seen explosive growth in the last year with over one million people now using the service every day. What is Slack? It’s chat room for your whole company. If you’ve heard of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) before, it’s fairly similar in function. Your team’s Slack will be divided up into smaller ‘channels’ for group discussion, made up of teams, interests or whatever you desire. Slack is often positioned as an ’email killer’ but it’s more like a way to lessen your internal email. What can you use it for? Want to set up a room of people to talk about tech news? For work, Slack reduces the friction to working together as a team. Getting set up Sign up on Slack’s website. First, messaging restrictions. Another important setting is channel and private group management. Once your settings are how you like them, it’s time to open the gates and invite your team in. Commands you need to know /openOpens a new channel. Code
OS X 10.9.5 Gatekeeper Codesign issues | Jonathan's Best Mac Tips Gatekeeper 10.9.5 being a tight-arse? Yep… This issue won’t affect most people, but it has affected some. If you have applications you run that are codesigned (code signed) on a computer running a version of OS X earlier than 10.9.x you may find they no longer open. This article on TAUW explains the issue in detail. The standard work around is to go into the Gatekeeper settings and set it to allow opening of applications downloaded from anywhere. Another option is to right-click (two-finger click) the application, and click “Open” in the context menu. But apparently there are cases when this may not work. I can’t say it’s a message the makes much sense to me. Fixing the “This patch seems to be corrupted” issue The following link will give you a 10.9.4 version of the Codesign file that was replaced in 10.9.5. Download this file, and make the following changes to your system. 2) Locate the file called codesign 3) Rename it to codesign.1094 (just tack .1094 on the end of the file name)
Practical Tips for Web and Mobile Usability Tests Jerry Cao is a content strategist at UXPin — a wireframing and prototyping app with built-in usability testing — where he develops in-app and online content for the wireframing and prototyping platform. To learn how to conduct 20 different types of usability tests, check out The Guide to Usability Testing. While most usability testing methods described in The Guide to Usability Testing apply to Web and mobile, we want to describe some of the nuances specific to each medium. Actually, most usability testing methods can be run any product from cloud payment systems to next-generation gaming consoles. You might also like: Bevy Wants to Gather All Family Photos In One Place In this piece, we want to narrow our focus a little so you can best understand how the fundamental differences between how Web and mobile are used require different tactics. Website usability testing User tests are mandatory for website success since Murphy’s Laws of Technology always seem to strike at the worst times. 1.
300+ Awesome Free Internet Resources You Should Know Ali Mese is a freelancer, wanderer, and contributor to few startup projects. Say hi on Facebook or Twitter. This post originally appeared on his Medium blog. I’ve prepared a list of 300 web resources that are not only awesome, but free to use. Please let me know if I am missing any other useful resource! Business + Marketing HTML5 UP: Responsive HTML5 and CSS3 site templates.Bootswatch: Free themes for Bootstrap.Templated: A collection of 845 free CSS & HTML5 site templates.WordPress.org | WordPress.com: Create your new website for free.Strikingly.com Domain: Free website resources for strikingly.com domains.Withoomph: Beautiful logos designed instantly.Hipster Logo Generator: It’s Hip, It’s Current, It’s Stylish, It’s Hipster.Squarespace Free Logo: You can download free low-res version for free.Hive: First free unlimited cloud service in the world.Invoice to me: Free Invoice Generator.Free Invoice Generator: Alternative free invoice generator.Slimvoice: Insanely simple invoices.
Online Image Resizer & Optimizer - Crop, Resize and Compress JPEG|PNG|GIF Images for FREE The Always Up-to-Date Guide to Building a Hackintosh (OS X 10.10)