centreforelearning

Google Latitude has allowed its 10 million users to see on a map approximately where their friends are. But until now, it provided no way for a user to pinpoint his own location with a check-in, a la Foursquare and others. Now users will be able not only to broadcast their exact location to their friends on Latitude but also to publicly share their check-ins through their Google Profile. They’ll also be able to garner “VIP” and “Guru” status based on the number of their check-ins. This is rather ho-hum news, considering so many other check-in services do much the same thing. But where things get interesting is that Google will allow users to automatically check themselves in to specific locations, without having to whip out their phone.

Here’s how to avoid that—and how to ensure your About page makes your blog, rather than breaks it.

Find friends to practice, as study partners and for language exchange. Post articles in your blog and get feedback from others. Browse members by language and location:

The iPad has a bigger screen, and so it has a bigger resolution. With the iPhone 4, however, Apple did something different: they increased the resolution without changing the physical size of the screen. This makes for a higher pixel density, pixels are smaller and more tightly packed. In one square inch of the iPhone 4’s screen there are around 106 thousand pixels (at 326 PPI, or Pixels per Inch), while the older models have only about 26 thousand (at 163 PPI) in an inch – 4 times less! This makes graphics on the screen seem like continuous lines, because your eye can’t see the individual pixels. Apple calls this technology the “Retina Display” because they claim the human eye (the retina) can’t physically see the pixels at this resolution.

Using Two Images The official way of adding high-resolution support to your application is by having two versions of each image, one in “regular” resolution and one in double resolution. Whenever your application is viewed on the Retina Display, the larger image will be loaded automatically. This method allows for full and precise control of how your application will look in each case, and is very easy to apply to your existing applications. The full size image file should be named however you want, such as “Button.png”. Use this image name in your code and Interface Builder wherever you want to reference the image. The double-size image should be twice the size of its matching smaller image and named exactly the same with “@2x” appended to the name. In our example, we would name it “Button@2x.png”. Unfortunately, this technique will not work on the iPad; a pixel-doubled application will not load the higher resolution resource. This will probably be addressed in the future iOS 4 update which is scheduled to come to iPad this fall.

App Store Icon 512x512 (scaled down to 175x175 for display in the store)

Application Icon 114x114 (iPhone 4) 57x57 (older iPhones) 72x72 (iPad)

Spotlight Search Results and Settings Icon 58x58 (iPhone 4) 50x50 (Spotlight results for iPad) 29x29 (settings for iPad and older iPhones)

The problem is amplified when saving for Retina, where there’s twice as many images, and the 1× images must match the 2× images precisely. The best solution I’ve come up with so far is: Build your design at 1×. Use copy merged to save all the 1× images. Duplicate the entire folder containing the 1× images. Use Automator to add @2x to all the filenames. Open each @2x image and run the Scale by 200% Photoshop action. This gives you a file with the correct filename and size, but upscaled content. Scale your main Photoshop design document by 200%. Use copy merged to paste the higher quality elements into each @2x document, turn off the lower quality layer, then save for web, overwriting the file.

Google and Twitter have launched a service to allow people in Egypt to send Twitter messages by leaving a voicemail on a specific number after the last internet service provider in the country saw its access cut off late on Monday

Video Editing and Presentation Tools

A new tool called Brickify from the team at Carsonified allows you to upload images or photos and turn them into plans for building bricks, great for people who want to transform their logos or are simply just fans of Lego.

note that many apps will take between four and eight weeks to build, with the average being six weeks. With a full-time developer (40 hours per week) and a part-time designer (20 hours per week), the average man-hours per week is around 60. Six weeks multiplied by 60 hours per week equals 360 hours. Solid designers and developers will charge around $100 per hour, with top talent peaking at around $150 per hour and lower-end U.S.-based contractors charging around $65 per hour. Using the $100-per-hour rate yields a total of $36,000 (360 hours × $100 per hour). That number can quickly fluctuate: if your app took four weeks to build (240 hours) and the average was instead $75 per hour, the total would be $18,000 (240 hours × $75 per hour).

Note: For games, the number of total hours is much higher, and ranges between 700 and 2,000 hours. This equates to three to six months of work, depending on the number of developers working on the game simultaneously.