If you work with Adobe (or any major) software a lot, you definitely want to know shortcuts for tools that you use often. Shortcuts make your work exponentially faster.

Wells & Drew commissioned the Adobe InDesign info-graphic cheat sheet below. Using these shortcuts will allow you InDesign users to become power users simply by memorizing your most frequently used shortcuts.

Courtesy of Business Stationery

Filed under: Miscellaneous by Keith
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Gmail’s Canned Responses feature is a very helpful tool for email users. Canned Responses allow you to save emails that you send over and over so that instead of typing out repetitive emails you can use a pre-formed template.

Benefits

Gmail’s Canned Responses have many advantages:

• Save yourself time while managing emails. Some people may get and send hundreds of emails a day. Canned Responses will shorten the time you spend emailing.
• Prevent typographical and grammatical errors. If you’re like me, even after you are done typing out an email you still spend some time proof-reading emails before pressing that send button. With Canned Responses you only need to proofread once.
• You can have as many saved responses as you want. For example, I have canned responses saved for different questionnaires that I send to clients depending on different needs. All I need to do is select the response that I need for the occasion and click the send button.
• Use them as templates so you can edit Canned Responses before you send them out. For some of my canned responses I gave some areas a red background so that I have a pre-formed email and all I need to do is go through it, find the text with a red background and change it.

Setting up Canned Responses

Getting started with Canned Responses is a breeze.

1. Go to Gmail labs. You can do this by going to “Settings” and then going to “Labs”, or clicking the settings icon in the top right of Gmail and then clicking on “Labs.

   

2. Find Canned Responses in the list of labs and enable it.

   

3. You will now see a Canned Responses button under the subject line when you write an email.

   

4. To set up a new response, write an email like you normally would, then click the “Canned Responses” button and click “New Canned Response”.
5. Now, when you click the button you will see a list of options. If you have a response saved you will see its name. At this point you have three options. You can Insert a saved response, Save or Edit a response, or Delete a previously made response.

   

6. Just insert a response, make any changes that you need to, and send that email!

Filed under: Email by Keith
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Your styling of HTML forms is important in order to have creative and good-looking web forms. Applying styles with CSS to all input forms is pretty simple, but sometimes you may need to style specific input fields and not others.

Styling input forms

You may know how to style all input fields using css. For example, the demo code below adds a border to all input fields in a form:

input{
   border: 1px solid #f00;
}

This will add a 1pixel red border on all input fields in a form, but what happens when you want to style specific inputs based on the type?

Styling specific input forms based on type

This is easier to do than you may think. To style an input type, just use the following code:

input[type = "text"]{
	border: 1px solid #f00;
}

This will add a red border on only text input fields. You can replace “text” with the name of any input field such as “radio”, “button”, “password”,  or “checkbox”.

Conclusion

This simple trick is very easy to execute and will help keep your HTML and CSS clean and easy to manage. You can use this technique on any type of form, whether it be a contact form, login form, or a super advanced custom form.

Filed under: Code, Web Development by Keith
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Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Ruben Corbo of broadbandexpert.com.

Internet pirates all across the US were ticked off in early July by the news that several major Internet providers (ISP’s) had entered an agreement with both the film and music industries to take action against copyright infringement. The agreement, dubbed the “Copyright Alert System,” requires internet providers to warn users that they are suspected of illegal filesharing up to six times. Warnings may come in the form of emails, click-through pop-up messages, landing pages, or mailed letters. If, after five warnings have been issued, the illegal activity persists, the service provider can implement mitigation strategies at their discretion.

Companies are of course unwilling to alienate paying customers. To that end, they have refused to disclose any personally identifying information to any third party without a court order to do so. And as far as terminating anyone’s access to the Internet, that’s not happening either – although they may limit your speed or keep redirecting you to a landing page until you contact them. By doing this, internet providers are absolved of all legal responsibility should real issues emerge: they’ve done their part to stop the illegal downloading and are not liable for their users’ activities.

(Courtesy of Flickr User: ShardsOfBlue)

Given the widespread popularity of P2P filesharing, though, you have to wonder just how effective this is really going to be at combating copyright infringement. When you consider the sheer number of Americans who make use of such less-than-legal means to obtain music and movies, big media companies’ efforts to thwart piracy might begin to seem like a bit of a joke. For years, the RIAA crusaded to stamp out piracy by filing lawsuits against anyone and everyone – literally thousands of users who had downloaded music illegitimately – all the while, the popularity of filesharing continued to grow exponentially. Today, over sixty million Americans could be considered “pirates,” a great many of whom find it difficult to take measures like the Copyright Alert System seriously. “They can’t get us all” seems to be a prevalent mentality. But can they? Could this agreement truly be the beginning of the end of illegal downloading?

In finding answers to those questions, a good place to start is to ask just what kind of result this Copyright Alert System has produced thus far. It’s been a little over a month since the announcements were made, and after combing through discussions on various tech-related forums, it appears that quite a large number of users have since received warning letters from their respective internet providers. But, there is virtually no mention of any further action having been taken by either the internet provider or the copyright owner. So what’s the deal here – could it be that ISP’s are not cracking down as severely as some expected they would? Or are they dealing primarily with those who upload and share huge amounts of data, and simply issuing warnings to the rest? It may be too early to tell how much of an impact this policy will have; whether things are about to change for the music and film bandits of the internet or if this is just another feeble attempt to curb rampant copyright infringement is anyone’s guess.

This is a guest article by Ruben Corbo, a writer for the website Broadband Expert where you can find internet providers in your area and compare prices on different deals for your mobile broadband packages.

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