Backup Box: Move cloud hosted files directly between providers and servers

Backup Box: Move cloud hosted files directly between providers and servers:
Sometimes you may want to move files hosted somewhere on the Internet to another server or provider. While you could download the files to your local computer – if you do not have a local backup available – to upload them again to the new server or provider, you sometimes however may prefer to transfer files directly between servers.
A core benefit of this procedure is speed. Your home computer’s upload and download speed is usually fairly limited in comparison to the speed of Internet servers, so that it should take less time to move the files. You may however run into issues as well, with trust being one of the most important ones. If you want server to server communication, you need to trust those servers with data so that they communicate with each other.

Backup Box

And it is the same when you look at the Backup Box service. The service’s core feature are direct server to server transfers between cloud storage providers such as Box, Google Drive, SkyDrive, SugarSync or Dropbox, as well as custom servers that can be accessed via ftp or sftp. You configure Backup Box to transfer files from one server or provider to another. Why would you want to do that?

• To migrate your files to another cloud hosting provider
• To backup your websites regularly
• To backup databases
• To safe time transferring files

You do need to authorize at least two services or servers before you can start using the service. As far as cloud hosting services go, you do not have to enter your username and password on the Backup Box site. You instead authorize the site on the cloud providers website so that it can access your data, and you can naturally revoke that authorization at any time as well. Only ftp, sftp and MySQL servers need to be authorized directly by adding an authorized user account to Backup Box.
Once you have added at least two services you can configure transfers between them. You have got the option to transfer all files, or only select files or folders to the new server or service.

And instead of transferring files directly, you can alternatively schedule transfers so that they are run regularly by the application. You could for instance backup your website on a weekly basis, or transfer the files from your Dropbox account to SkyDrive once a month.
Another interesting option is the archive and timestamp feature which zips the selected files during the transfer. That’s useful if you need to make room on a server or an account.
Free account users  are limited to transferring 1 Gigabyte of data per month using a maximum of 10 transfers in that time. Pro, premium and enterprise accounts are available that raise limits and make available additional features such as incremental transfers.

It usually takes minutes before the first files start to appear on the selected server or cloud hosting account you are transferring the files to.
As far as security goes, Backup Box states that it is using 256-bit SSL encryption whenever supported to transfer files, that it wont retain files on their servers, and that Amazon S3 is used with a AES 256-bit encryption for temporary storage.
One Gigabyte per month won’t take you far, especially if you are thinking about scheduling regular backups of your websites or data that you host online.

Put.io: downloads torrents for you, lets you stream or download afterwards

Put.io: downloads torrents for you, lets you stream or download afterwards:
If you can’t run a Bittorrent application on your local computer system, either because you are not allowed to install any software on it, or maybe because your Internet Service Provider is limiting bandwidth for P2P file transfers which would make the downloading less enjoyable and slow, you may be interested in an online service that does the downloading for you.
Put.io offers to download torrent files using their servers. All you need to do is supply the service with the torrents you are interested in, wait until the files have been downloaded, to either download the files to your computer or stream media files directly.
A free account is good for 1 Gigabyte of storage space and unlimited bandwidth. If you need more, you can upgrade to pro or premium accounts that increase your storage to 50 or 100 Gigabytes for $9.90 or $19.90 per month respectively. You can refer other users to the service to get an additional 350 Megabytes of storage space up to 3 Gigabytes in total. The system works similar to Dropbox, and you can invite by email, social media or with direct links.
The whole process of adding and download or streaming files is surprisingly easy. To start, you click on add new files on your user home page, and either paste torrent file links directly into a form on the page, or upload torrents from your computer instead.

The service checks the torrent file and its storage requirements on the next page and gives you either the green light to start the transfer, or the red light if downloading the files would exceed your storage space. What’s missing is an option to select individual files that you want to download from a torrent. This is especially true for archive.org torrents which often come with multiple versions of the same file.
Put.io checks if the torrent has already been downloaded by another user of its service, and if that is the case, makes the file available to you directly after a few seconds. If the file has not been downloaded yet, you are redirected to the transfers page where you will see connection and progress information.
Once the service has downloaded files for you, you can access them from the your files menu. Options available here include zipping and downloading files to the local computer, extracting zipped files, sharing files with friends, or deleting files. When you click on a media file, you are automatically taken to a streaming video page so that you can watch the video online without downloading.

Options to stream using a local player and to download the file are present here as well. The subtitle search feature is a nice addition as well.
The operators of the site and dedicated users have created tools that improve the service’s accessibility. You find plugins and apps for XBMC, Plex and Boxee here, as well as Chrome extensions, options to map the storage to a local drive letter or instructions on how to use the mobile version of the platform for use with smartphones and other mobile devices.
Another interesting feature is that the service supports RSS subscriptions. All new torrents that get released will be automatically updated once you have added a subscription to your account, provided you have enough free storage space available for that.
Put.io works pretty well and has a lot to offer. Especially the easy to use interface, the third party tools and the option to stream media right from your account need to be mentioned in this regard.

CSS3Ps – Free Photoshop Plugin For Converting Shapes Into CSS

CSS3Ps – Free Photoshop Plugin For Converting Shapes Into CSS:


CSS3Ps is a free Photoshop plugin that allows us to convert shapes in a PSD file into CSS3-powered elements.
It has support for Photoshop versions starting from CS3 and works by re-directing any conversion requests to the website of the plugin.
The CSS3 rules for the shapes are created within seconds and presented with the output.
It works well with objects in any shape and there is support for gradients.

Ten ‘Chrome Experiments’ in WebGL that you MUST see

Ten ‘Chrome Experiments’ in WebGL that you MUST see:


What are Google Experiments? Simply put, they are interesting bits of coding that use some of the latest open technologies (e.g. HTML5, Canvas, SVG, and especially WebGL) in a browser setting (not necessarily Chrome). The Google Chrome connection comes from the fact that Google have set up a website to showcase these coding ‘experiments’.
This post will feature 10 Chrome Experiments that we loved here at Freewaregenius. Check them out and consider that you may  be looking at the art form of the next century.
Note on WebGL: it is a web based graphics language that utilizes JavaScript to implement 3D graphics in the browser. The experiments below all have a significant 3D graphics component, and some will require a capable graphics card to run.
Here’s the list:

1. The WebGL Globes

Animated globes for data visualization. Two globes are offered by default, although you could make your own

Google Search Volume by Language

Displays search volumes in each language as bars on an interactive globe. If you’ve ever wondered what three cities generate the most Google English searches, or whether more Spanish language searches are generated in Madrid vs. Mexico city. Actually, its more of a toy than anything else, but is very cool.

Google Population Globe

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2. WebGL Bookcase

For those who miss the days when you went to an actual, physical bookstore to browse books, a ‘virtual bookcase’ in 3D, that will, incidentally, link you to Google books for the book itself, or if not available there to Amazon or Google Play.

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3. Google Gravity

You can think of this as a  glimpse of what the Google search page would look like in Krypton (Superman’s home planet), where gravity is much stronger

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4. Cube

We mentioned this one previously on this site (see here). Cube is an game that creates playable levels out of Google Maps data. Check it out!

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5. Ctrl Paper

This site will let you ‘populate’ its 3D environment with your personal 3D character that you create, and that you could subsequently print to PDF to transform into an actual paper model.
If you have kids you (and they) will enjoy this one.

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6. The Wilderness Downtown

This is an interactive music video for The Arcade Fire’s “We Used to Wait” (reminiscent of another interactive music video previously mentioned on this site), and it’s totally awesome.  It integrates with your desktop and will ask for the address of the house where you grew up, and will then integrate Google Maps images of your neighborhood into the video. Is this is a glimpse of the future of the music videos as a genre?

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7. WebGL Aquarium

It must be something in the human psyche, that we cannot resist looking at fish doing their thing, which is why I am adding this one to the list. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, but a great way to showcase WebGL 3D graphics in the browser.

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8. 3 Dreams of Black

Another interactive music video style experiment. This one combines modeled 3D environments with 2D animation and video (hence the 3 dreams), and lets you have some degree of control over the vantage point throughout. Most of what you see is being rendered, and is not video. Overall very cool.

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9. Streetview Sterographic

A dual Google Map view with a slightly different approach: the ‘streetview’ images are strung together in a 360-degree bird’s eye view, which despite being somewhat odd is strangely appealing.

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10. Toki Toki digital clock

This one makes it on the list for originality alone. Such a simple concept.

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• Check out the Chrome Experiments site for more amazing code.

Up Close With Biodigital’s 3D Human Simulator [TCTV]

Up Close With Biodigital’s 3D Human Simulator [TCTV]:
If you missed the Bodies exhibition at your local science center, you may be in luck. Rather than see some hapless Chinese prisoners dissected and put on display, you can now view the human body in 3D using any browser. You can see almost all the systems, nerves, and organs as well as simulate the effects of various diseases including cancer and heart trouble. Ain’t the future wonderful?
The product, created by imaging company Biodigital, launched three weeks ago and we sat down with Frank Sculli and John Qualter to get a tour. You can check out the digital human here.
The product is free to use and replaces the dusty old anatomy books and charts that physicians and therapists have been using for centuries. For example, a masseuse can use the product to show which muscles he is about to attack and doctors can demonstrate techniques and pinpoint problems while patients watch. Folks who want to create custom content will pay to upgrade.
The next step, said the founders, will be to add custom body data to the images, creating images that merge MRI data and 3D rendering. For example, a cancer patient’s progress can be rendered on the body, allowing the patient and the doctor to understand the problem more clearly.
Frank and John gave us a brief demo but you can try it yourself. Who knows? You just might learn what the uvula does.
Project Page

Map SkyDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive To Drive Letters In Windows

Map SkyDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive To Drive Letters In Windows:
If you look around in the cloud file hosting and synchronization, you will notice that things are heating up with new contenders like Cubby or Google Drive joining the market, and existing services like SkyDrive or Dropbox adding new features. Services share features, like a synchronization software that users can run on their computer systems to sync their files with the cloud, or Gigabytes of free storage that users get when they sign up.
But services differ a lot beyond this point. This includes compatibility with operating systems and mobile devices, as well as functionality of those clients and web services.This includes the free amount of storage that users get when they sign up, upgrade costs or features that the clients and web services offer to their users.
Most cloud hosting and synchronization services use a root folder on the system that is automatically synchronized with the cloud. Some, like Cubby, offer more flexibility in this regard, as they allow users to pick any folder on the system for syncing with the cloud, or direct synchronization with another computer or device.
Windows users who’d like to improve the accessibility of those folders on their system can assign drive letters to folders to do just that. This basically maps the root folder of the file hosting service with a drive letter on the system, which reduces the file path and makes the files more accessible as a result.
Mapping folders to drives
One of the most comfortable options to map folders to drive letters is a program like Visual Subst (see our previous Visual Subst review here). While you can use the subst command for that as well, you’d have to run the command every time you’d want the folder to become available as a drive letter. You could write your own batch file for that and run it automatically on system startup, or use Visual Subst which provides you with that option and an easier to use graphical user interface.
You see an interface that looks similar to the one below. All you need to do now is to select a drive letter from the pulldown menu in the lower half of the screen, and click on the folder icon above the close button to select a local folder that you want to map to it.

A click on the plus icon adds the selection to the program window, listing the virtual drive letter and the selected folder that is mapped to it. Open Windows Explorer to test the new setup right away. If you have made an error, delete the mapping again and start anew until you get it right. You can map multiple folders to drive letters, which can be useful if you are using more than one synchronization service, or want specific folders accessible as separate drive letters.
Check the apply virtual drives on Windows startup option if you want to make the option permanent.
Alternatives to Visual Subst are Virtual Driver and XSubst

Free and Useful Adobe Illustrator Scripts with Scriptographer

Free and Useful Adobe Illustrator Scripts with Scriptographer: Some scripts may initially appear to be toy-like, but I recommend
taking a closer look at them as they might help you to create your own
unique style. Let’s take a look at, in my opinion, the most interesting and useful ones.

Textualizer is a lightweight (4kb minified) jQuery plugin for creating good looking effects on text.

The plugin accepts any number of sentences (or words) and can rotate them smartly and beautifully.



Once a sentence is about to rotate with the other one, the letters that will be re-used are kept and move to their new locations with several effects to choose from (fadeIn, slideLeft, slideTop).

It is possible to define the duration that each item will be displayed and also the duration of the transitions. Also, functions exist to stop or pause the rotation.

WebPutty Hosts and Maintains CSS For Your Site [Video]:

Need to maintain CSS from anywhere? Signup for a (currently) free WebPutty beta account to host and serve your site's Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). The in-browser CSS editor offers a side-by-side preview pane with instant updating and is compatible with CSS extention Sass (SCSS) and Compass, an open-source CSS authoring framework.. More »

Minus Is a Simple Drag-and-Drop File Sharing Service for the Web, Your Desktop, and Phone [File Sharing]:

You'll find no shortage of simple file-sharing services on the web (see previously mentioned ge.tt), but file-sharing app Minus sets itself apart with dedicated apps for nearly every platform (in addition to the browser-accessible webapp). More »

WebPutty Hosts and Maintains CSS For Your Site [Video]:

Need to maintain CSS from anywhere? Signup for a (currently) free WebPutty beta account to host and serve your site's Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). The in-browser CSS editor offers a side-by-side preview pane with instant updating and is compatible with CSS extention Sass (SCSS) and Compass, an open-source CSS authoring framework.. More »

CSS Lint – A Deeper Analysis For CSS Files: "
CSS Lint is an exciting open source project which helps finding the problems and inefficiencies in the CSS code.

As expected, it displays any parsing errors like mis-typed characters which may end-up in non-rendered rules.



Other than that, CSS Lint checks for the common best CSS coding practices and warns you about the:

• adjoining classes (which are problematic in IE7 and IE6)
• empty rules which are inefficient
• correct use of display (as some rules will be ignored if used together)
• usage of too many floats, web-fonts and font-size declarations
• heading styles to be declared once
• and more..

The rules are pluggable, new ones can easily be added (the web interface is mentioned to be improved soon for making some checks optional).

As the website states "it will hurt your feelings but help coding better" : ).

Generate CSS For Sprite Images – Sprite Cow: "
With their increasing popularity, we are seeing more and more CSS sprite generators everyday.

Sprite Cow is another one which is open source and works very effective by auto-recognizing the different elements inside a single image.

So, you design the sprite image in your favorite imaged editing application, upload it to Sprite Cow and simply click (or click + drag) on each element to get their width, height and background-position as a CSS rule.

The application can select items in any size and also gives you the option of changing the background color.

Fractal: HTML-CSS Validation For E-mails: "
E-mail code validation is a painful job considering many e-mail clients/applications have a low-level HTML-CSS rendering support and many others have their own standards. Actually, it is worse than designing for the browser.

Fractal is a free-to-use web application for validating HTML-CSS code across 24 most-popular e-mail clients.

It simply works by pasting the code to the application and finding out if each line is validated, if not, why and in which e-mail clients.



Best of all, Fractal doesn't come with only the bad news but also suggests fixes.

P.S. Besides the desktop and web-based e-mail applications, it also checks the code for the mobile as well.

CSS Color Spectrum Inspector – CSS Prism

CSS Color Spectrum Inspector – CSS Prism: "

While inspecting and editing a CSS file, it is not easy to understand which HEX value represents which color.

CSS Prism is a web-based CSS color spectrum inspector that loads the colors used in a CSS file as a grid and shows us in which rules they exist.

The application also enables us to edit the colors with a color-picker and download the edited CSS file.

CSS Prism is very useful for easily viewing the color palette and making sure it is consistent.

Besides inserting the URLs of CSS files manually, a bookmarklet is provided that eases this process.

Customize The CSS Of Any Web Page & Share With Others Easily – CSS Pivot

Customize The CSS Of Any Web Page & Share With Others Easily – CSS Pivot: "

Sometimes, for any website -whether it is built by us or others-, we may want to quickly apply new CSS rules and see how the output will look like.

CSS Pivot is a free web application which enables us to accomplish this by loading the desired URL inside an iframe, apply new CSS rules and, best of all, share the result with everyone via an unique link.

The interface is simple-yet-functional; it seperates the original and custom CSS used so anyone can see the new rules. Also, with a click, you can toggle between the original and customized web page.

It is very functional when a friend asks for a CSS-related help, you are showing a customer how small updates can change their website or finding out "how your CSS version of a popular website will look like : )".

Online Font Converter Converts Your Fonts to Practically Any Format for Free [Webapp]

Online Font Converter Converts Your Fonts to Practically Any Format for Free [Webapp]: "

Online Font Converter is a straightforward webapp that converts fonts in virtually any format to pretty much any other format. Generally this is an operation that requires costly software, but Online Font Converter handles it all for free. More »

lorempixum: Placeholder images for every case

lorempixum: Placeholder images for every case: "

lorempixum is a cool placeholder image service for html wireframers and prototypers. Set dimensions for a placeholder image, and optionally select a category and color or black and white, and the URL will provided will serve a random image for your html page.

8 Free Placeholder Image Services For Instant Dummy Images

8 Free Placeholder Image Services For Instant Dummy Images: "

When designing websites, images-to-be-used usually doesn't exist at first as it is the layout that matters the most.

However, the sizes for the images are usually pre-set and inserting some placeholder images help us better seeing/analyzing the layout.

Rather than creating these placeholder images manually, there are free to use services which can automate the process and save us time.

Here is a list of 8 free placeholder image services for instant dummy images:

Flickholdr

As the name tells it, Flickrholdr fetches images from the huge database of Flickr.

Besides the size of the images, it is possible to mention tags in the URL which is great for using related images in each spot.

Placehold.it

The service is full-featured with the ability to mention sizes, image format (.gif, .jpg, .png) and can also display text.

The size of the images generated are displayed on them as well.

{placekitten}

Placekitten is thematic placeholder service that can display any size of kitten images.

There is also a jQuery plugin for dynamically changing any or all of your images to placeholder kittens with just a single line of code.

Dynamic Dummy Image Generator

DummyImage.com is a placeholder generator with a huge set of customization options including size, colors, text, multiple file types and preset sizes.

And, it is an open source script.

nosrc.net

A simple generator where you can only define the width and height. Also, the source of the script is shared as well.

FPOImg.com

Again a simple service where you can mention a text to be displayed besides the sizes.

IpsumImage

IpsumImage is a Google App Engine hosted, open source placeholder service (built with Python).

It is possible to customize the sizes, background-foreground colors and text to be displayed.

lowersrc

The service follows a different approach than others and requires a JavaScript to be installed and works without defining "image sources" but simply adding a specific class to each.

Other than sizes, colors and text, you can also set whether the image will be rectangle or a circle.

Microsoft asks for your help to remove IE6 from the Internet

Microsoft asks for your help to remove IE6 from the Internet: "

Once the most popular browser anywhere Internet Explorer 6 refuses to die holding back the entire Internet. Firefox, Chrome and independent groups including creativebits have been fighting IE6 for years with little success. IE6 is still very strong in some countries and has a 12% market share globally. That means serious businesses can't stop supporting IE6 just yet.

Getting rid of IE6 will mean we can start using web technologies that are only supported by modern browsers and not need to worry about backward compatibility. It would save a lot of time and nerves to developers. It would consequently save money to clients. And most importantly will help internet users enjoy a better web overall.

Microsoft now wants to help too. They launched a new site called IE6 Countdown that monitors the drop of IE6 usage. The goal: go below 1%, so everyone can just disregard IE6 for good. I think many designers will open a bottle of champagne that day.

You can help the cause too. Put the code MS provides that will suggest visitors to upgrade. And you can also share this post to let your friends know about this initiative.

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