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buttons posts

Filed under: Design, Utilities, web 2.0

Make shiny buttons at Da Button Factory


If you need a button the web in a pinch, Da Button Factory has you covered. It's a quick and easy "shiny" button generator with lots of custom options that are easy to control. You can change colors, fonts, shadow effects and borders with a few clicks, and there's a gallery of decent-looking example buttons to get you started.

The main problem with Da Button Factory is the limited font selection. You can match every other element up with the design of your site reasonably well, but with only a handful of typefaces to choose from, it's hard to get the font you want. However, Da Button Factory scores points for ease of use and the ability to export as a CSS background.

Filed under: Design, Apple

What's Steve Jobs got against buttons?

The buttonless iPhone, and the sleek styling of other apple products, has taken the Wall Street Journal to musing, "What's Steve's Beef about buttons."

According to the article, Jobs' blood-lust for buttons goes back further than you might imagine. "Mr. Jobs was adamant that the keyboard for the original Macintosh not include "up," "down," "right" and "left" keys that allow users to move the cursor around their computer screens, giving it a sleeker appearance," at the cost of utility.

But, in a world where multi-touch technology is allowing buttons to disappear, it looks like real Steve is getting his wish.

Filed under: Internet, Social Software

TwitThis website button and bookmarklet debuts

If there was a category we could apply to things that spread faster than wildfire, the craziness that is Twitter would likely be the first example you could use for just such a category. One only needs to check our Twitter tag to find hacks like automatically twittering your blog posts, mapping out tweets and even putting Twitter on autopilot for you. But why stop there? New TwitThis buttons and bookmarklets are likely to take the web by an even bigger storm. As you might imagine, the button is ideal for placing on your website or blog, allowing readers to easily tweet (hopefully in a good way) about whatever you wrote. Fortunately, a full-on WordPress plugin is provided along with the raw code.

The bookmarklet, on the other hand, should make things a lot easier for the avid Twitter user who can't wait for website owners to adopt the button. Both tools make use of TinyURL (though in our opinion, urlTea has some cooler things going on) to ensure the link you're tweeting stays intact.
All of this is provided for free, as we can't find any donation links, and TwitThis even surprsingly offers a support email in case you have questions or ideas.

Filed under: Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, E-mail, Mozilla, Browser Tips

Buttons: Thunderbird add-on of the day


Migrating to Thunderbird and want to customize it to the way you like? One thing that lots of people really like about Outlook is the option to close the original message window when you hit reply or forward. It helped keep the amount of windows open to a minimum, the same way that Firefox does with tabbed browsing. Thunderbird, however, does not have a similar option.

All this can be fixed with Buttons. With "Buttons!" you have a handful of new buttons to add to your toolbars. Three that you Outlook fiends might immediately want to add were "Reply!", "Reply All!" and "Forward!" to the message composition window. The exclamation points are to help you decipher between the add-on's buttons and the default Thunderbird buttons. The version of Buttons we've tried is on Thunderbird 2.0 Beta build 2; Far superior to 1.5. The interface is so much better and really close to the latest version of Firefox. This version of Buttons also has some great options as well as an archiving feature.

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Web services, Google, Mozilla, Browser Tips

Google Toobar 3 Beta

google toolbar 3 betaGoogle officially announced the beta version of the Firefox Toolbar 3 Beta on Tuesday, jam packed with yummy new features. New additions in Toolbar 3 include accessing bookmarks from any computer, adding custom buttons, and sharing web pages using Blogger, Gmail and SMS. The ultimate feature that Google has integrated into the new Firefox Toolbar is the ability to view Documents and Spreadsheets right in the browser window. When you come across a .doc, .rtf, .odt, .sxw, .xls, .ods, aor .csv document in your web travels, you no longer have to download them to view them. You can simply setup the Toolbar 3 Beta to open them automatically in your browser window. Some handy little features here from Google; it's totally worth the download.

[Thanks Abdul Aziz]

Filed under: Developer, Internet, Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Productivity, Web services, Google, Freeware

Google Toolbar officially taken out of beta, custom button feature added

Google Toolbar out of betaGoogle's been busy lately. First they give gTalk a much-needed update, and then they quietly announced that the Google Toolbar has been taken out of beta by introducing a new 'roll your own buttons' feature. Users can now right-click in the search field of any site and chose 'Generate Custom Search' to add it to their Toolbar. Even more advanced features can be had by checking out Google's guide here, while a 600+ button gallery is here.

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So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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