This tutorial will write a Perl script which removes a user from all open reviews – this might be useful if a reviewer is no longer available, and is holding up the completed status of all their reviews.

Dropbox client applets allow only basic functionality for interacting with the file storage service. To get the full breadth of capabilities, you'll need to use their SDK and write your own code
The advent of high-speed networks and affordable high-capacity storage breathed new life into that once fickle online service — file hosting. Unlike the old BBS and FTP services, today's file hosting employs Web 2.0 standards to display an intuitive interface. It can handle a wide range of file formats, and it has become consistently reliable.

In this article, I examine one of the most popular such services: Dropbox. I'll look at what this service offers and how it interacts with its users. And after going over its SDK, I'll explain how to use it to build a custom service client. In the process, I'll demonstrate how to log into a user's account, how to move files to and from that account, how to do a query, and how to manage the account.

For reasons of length, all sample code is written with Cocoa and Objective-C in mind.

Creating a grid is typically one of the very first things you do when starting a design comp. After all, it provides the basic structure on which the rest of your design will lie. In this article, we’ll provide two different methods for efficiently establishing a grid. These methods enable you to quickly and smartly form a grid so that you can spend more time designing.

Creating WordPress tutorials is a fantastic way to help build the WordPress community and to increase your Web traffic. That’s no secret. Just Google “wordpress tutorial” and you’ll see hundreds of results. The complete novice will find scores of well-written tutorials clearly demonstrating the basics of the WordPress dashboard and of activating the default template, in simple jargon-free language.

InDesign is a powerful design program with so many tools and features it can a bit tricky to find a topic to begin with. With this in mind, we’ve put together a collection of beginner guides on various InDesign topics like the best way to create a new document, how to import text and images and even useful advice on what to do when a document is corrupted and how to make comments and track changes. Work your way through the guides and you will be well on your way to mastering InDesign.

In this tutorial we will show you how to create a custom stitched text effect for an iPad Wallpaper.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is one of the top choices for photo editing software among amateur and professional photographers. In addition to editing photos, Lightroom also helps with organizing and managing your photos. You can also create slideshows and galleries to present your images.

In this post we’ll showcase 30 tutorials and articles from a variety of different sources that will help you to learn more about Lightroom.

It was about one year ago that we switched to Git. Previously, we used Subversion, through the Mac app Versions, which (rightly) holds an Apple Design Award.

So you’ve heard about all of the excitement going on about MacRuby? Great! Want to learn how to start developing with MacRuby and create your first application? Wonderful, let’s get started.

The Ruby DBI module provides a database-independent interface for Ruby scripts similar to that of the Perl DBI module. This document describes how to write Ruby DBI-based scripts. It is an adjunct to and not a substitute for the Ruby DBI specification documents. See the "Resources" section for a pointer to the specifications and also for information about downloading the example scripts used here.

The design of an advertisement can have a huge impact on the level of success of the ad campaign. Being able to design attractive and effective advertisements will lead to better results for you and your clients.

In this post we’ll showcase 15 tutorials that will lead you through the process of designing an ad in Photoshop. Most of the tutorials are for designing poster/flyer type ads.

We frequently publish posts on this blog that feature  tutorials for learning how to do various things with Photoshop, but we have rarely focused on just the basics. This post is intended for designers or aspiring designers who either want to get started with Photoshop or have limited experience and are looking to improve.

While there are plenty of great learning resources available online, it’s often difficult for beginners to know where to get started because everything seems to be scattered. With this post you’ll find links to plenty of resources to teach you all the basics and fundamentals of Photoshop.

Most of the resources and tutorials listed in this post will focus on teaching one particular aspect of Photoshop, such as how to use a specific tool. Everything is broken down into sections so you can find exactly what you are looking for.

A few weeks ago we published a post, Learn Photoshop, that included links to well over 100 resources for mastering the basics of Photoshop and the use of the various tools. In response to reader request, we’re publishing this post to help designers who want to get started with Adobe Illustrator, or maybe just sharpen their existing skills.

Illustrator is a powerful program, but it can be overwhelming or confusing at times, simply because of everything that is possible. If you’re new to Illustrator, taking the time to understand the basics and how to use the specific tools will go a long way towards setting you up for success. In this post we’ve categorized more than 100 resources that will teach you everything you need to learn.

Vogue is a great idea for a little Node.js app that removes one of the friction points in rapid web design with CSS: saving changes in an editor, then reloading the page in each of the browsers that you have to support. Vogue can monitor your CSS files and communicate with all open browsers via Socket.IO and tell them to re-load that CSS file, making updates happen almost immediately and always passively.

Want to try out ScraperWiki, or learn to screen scrape from scratch?

Choose from a wide selection of screen scraping tutorials and examples, from introductory to very specialized. Simply click on a link below, follow the instructions in the comments, and start hacking.

If you're interested in learning to make concept art—or simply taking your recreational painting into the digital sphere—concept artist Matt Kohr spent a week teaching us the basics. Here's the complete 101 course for your edification.

In the previous article in this series, you learned about the canvas element, and the basics for drawing on it. In this article, I’m going to demonstrate some of the more advanced drawing functionality.

This is the first article in a series that will bring you up to speed with HTML5 canvas, the plugin-less drawing functionality built into modern browsers. In this introductory article, I’ll show you how to access the canvas element, draw shapes, change colours, and erase things. It’s a whistle-stop tour of the basics of this amazing new Web technology.

When it comes to designing in Photoshop, there is a myriad of ways one could use to achieve a certain result, especially when it comes to photo retouching. Designers use technique they are most confident as well as comfortable with, which is great because it’s always useful to peek into the workflow of our colleagues and learn new design approaches. We have had articles on cloning, compositing, masks and obscure Photoshop time-savers in the past. This article is different.

I’ll be covering some of the useful techniques and tricks which I’ve learned from my experience. You may know some of them, but hopefully not all of them. All images used in this article were purchased and are used according to their licenses. The second part of this post will be published in 2 weeks.

JavaScript interpreters are FAST, and they’re in every browser out there. You can run a rich application in the browser using only open technologies and built in browser-functionality, today.

Backbone.js can help build it. It’s a light-weight MVC for the browser – only ~1000 lines of code, and it’s clean.

There’s no magic. It’s mostly just a structure for the code you write – not a bulky collection of widgets and doodads. It’s fast to learn, and lets you work with whatever technologies you’re already comfortable with.

JavaScript interpreters are FAST, and they’re in every browser out there. You can run a rich application in the browser using only open technologies and built in browser-functionality, today.

Backbone.js can help build it. It’s a light-weight MVC for the browser – only ~1000 lines of code, and it’s clean.

There’s no magic. It’s mostly just a structure for the code you write – not a bulky collection of widgets and doodads. It’s fast to learn, and lets you work with whatever technologies you’re already comfortable with.

JavaScript interpreters are FAST, and they’re in every browser out there. You can run a rich application in the browser using only open technologies and built in browser-functionality, today.

Backbone.js can help build it. It’s a light-weight MVC for the browser – only ~1000 lines of code, and it’s clean.

There’s no magic. It’s mostly just a structure for the code you write – not a bulky collection of widgets and doodads. It’s fast to learn, and lets you work with whatever technologies you’re already comfortable with.

I’ve started buying .net magazine again recently. I don’t normally but I was hoping it might help in my search for a super-awesome new agency. I was flicking through this month’s edition when I happened upon a Create a wraparound ribbon tutorial. I thought I’d give it a read as I really love little design conundrums and how other people solve them. I was a little surprised to see it had been done in five elements. I challenged myself to do it in one…

For such a humble ingredient, beans can be kind of polarizing. There are Soakers and there are Non-Soakers. [Full disclosure: I am a Soaker, always will be.] There are people who swear by the speed of their pressure cookers (and tell tales of near explosions) and others who stick with the safe, gentle bubbling of slow cookers. Some prefer the stove, others keep them in the oven, and then there are those who believe canned beans are just fine.
Beyond saying that the mushiness and dullness of canned beans don't come close to the texture and flavor you get from cooking dried beans, I'm not here to convert anyone.
The point is, the best beans are flavorful, evenly cooked and tender, but not mushy or falling apart. This slideshow will demonstrate how—in the most secular way possible—to achieve this.

Recently, Tim Anglade culminated his NOSQL World Tour with the release of the NOSQL Tapes, a collection of live interviews collected globally. Not only do I find that site aesthetically pleasing (courtesy of our own Steadicat), but there is a tremendous amount of solid content, from technical discussions to opinions and conjectures from many of the young leaders in the field. I was fortunate to get a bit of Tim’s time when he stopped in Seattle and we recorded a longish video on MapReduce in my lab at UW. While I love the old school feel of a chalk-talk, I must admit I’m pretty embarrassed at how rambling and fragmented my explanations are, not to mention my shoddy use of available board space. Therefore the Physics Professor in me feels obligated to try again, albeit offline this time.

Git Immersion is a guided tour that walks through the fundamentals of Git, inspired by the premise that to know a thing is to do it.

This is a tutorial for using REXML, a pure Ruby XML processor.

When using multiple systems the indispensable tool is, as we all know, ssh. Using ssh you can login to other (remote) systems and work with them as if you were sitting in front of them. Even if some of your systems exist behind firewalls you can still get to them with ssh, but getting there can end up requiring a number of command line options and the more systems you have the more difficult it gets to remember them. However, you don't have to remember them, at least not more than once: you can just enter them into ssh's config file and be done with it.

Photoshop lets you add horizontal and vertical text easily to your images. One of the most exciting ways to use type is to wrap it around a path. You can add the type to an open or closed path you’ve drawn with the Pen tool or to a shape such as the rectangle, ellipse or polygon and the Custom Shape tool offers literally hundreds of vector shapes to play with. When you attach text to a path, both the
text and the path remain editable, so you can reshape the path and resize or recolor the text as you want. Here’s how to do it.

Give me an hour of your time, and I’ll take you on a fly by of the Ruby on Rails framework. We’ll create controllers, models, views, add admin logins, and deploy using Heroku’s service in under an hour! In this article we’ll create a simple bookshelf application where you can add books and write thoughts about them. Then we’ll deploy the application in just a few minutes. So buckle up because this article moves fast!
This article assumes that you may know what Ruby on Rails is, but not exactly how it works. This article doesn’t describe in-depth how each step works, but it does describe what we need to do, then the code to do that.

This tutorial will introduce Haml and Sinatra. Haml is a markup language that produces clean, well-structured HTML. Sinatra is a simple but powerful Ruby framework for creating websites or web services. The two work very well together and provide a powerful tool for quick and simple web development. I find them ideal for prototyping.
By the end of this tutorial, you will have created a website with two pages using Sinatra and Haml. Along the way, you’ll learn how Sinatra applications are structured, and will be introduced to Haml. You will also learn how to use a layout file to reduce the amount of duplicated code and give consistency between the pages.

While tools like the Magic Eraser can sometimes remove your backgrounds, the fact is you’re going to have to get your hands dirty with the eraser if you have images with complex backgrounds that need removing. While this can be time consuming, you can save yourself a lot of time with a little Photoshop wizardry.

Exposure may be the most common problem in photography. Whether your image is underexposed (too dark), overexposed (too bright), or just washed out in a hazy low-contrast fog, improper exposure can ruin an otherwise good shot.
Even though many basic photo-editing programs provide “Brightness” and “Contrast” controls for tweaking exposure, I prefer to use Photoshop’s Levels tool, because it provides more precise fine-tuning, and it gives you separate control over the shadows, highlights, and midtones in your photo.

Arduino is a fascinating and very easy way to make the world of electronics fun and interesting. Scroll down to read what we’re up to!

We regularly publish collections of the best Photoshop tutorials for specific purposes in order to help our readers in their pursuit to be better designers, and specifically to help those who want to learn Photoshop. If you’re interested in learning more about Photoshop, check out some of the posts below and consider subscribing to our feed.

New Photoshop Tutorials for beginners to advanced users of Adobe Photoshop. All of our tutorials are free, and come with full illustrations, video demonstrations, and many of the lessons include PSDs.

In this beginning-level design tutorial, I’ll show you how to apply a beautiful and super-easy text treatment in Photoshop: the inset text effect. It’s also often called the letterpress effect because it looks similar to text created by a Letterpress printer.

Creating amazing text effects in Photoshop can help to take your work to the next level. Fortunately, there are a lot of great tutorials out there that show a wide variety of techniques for working with text in Photoshop. In this post we’ll feature 35 Photoshop text effect tutorials. You may also be interested in a post from a few years ago, 50 Essential Photoshop Text Effect Tutorials. We also have a post that is great for anyone just getting started with Photoshop, Learn Photoshop: All the Basics for Beginners.

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