Mac OS X, well know for their simplicity and performance.

If you’re a web developer using a Mac you may have used many applications. Finding the best Apps for Freelance Web Designers is one challenging task. So in this post I have listed best Mac Apps designed for code editing, file and data transfer, database management, image editing etc. Some of them are free and most of them are relatively inexpensive.

1.VirtualHostX – VirtualHostX is the best way to host multiple websites on your Mac. It lets you easily create Apache virtual hosts on Mac OS X.

2. MAMP – MAMP is a quick and painless way to set up Macintosh, Apache, MySQL and PHP in the same environment. Instantly you’ve got a fully-functional web testing environment for your PHP applications.

3. phpMyAdmin – phpMyAdmin is the kindly old grandfather of database management scripts. Not necessarily hip to an attractive user interface, phpMyAdmin still has the skills to pay the bills.

4. Yummy FTP – Yummy FTP is an FTP and SFTP client application for the Apple Macintosh, built as native Mac OS X software from the ground up, with the goal of providing a reliable, powerful, yet easy to use file transfer utility.

5. Transmit - It offers almost all of the same functionality as Cyberduck, but adds a little more robustness for advanced user. For example, you can edit any remote file (even a picture or graphic) in any software using Transmit.

6. Coda – It is a complete web development solutions that fulfills all your coding needs, you will love to use its code editor that has support for various programming languages like HTML, XHTML, CSS, PHP, ASP, Ruby, Java and XML etc.

7. CSSEdit - cssedit is a CSS editor with a fantastic user interface. It has the look and feel of a Mac application, which makes the experience of editing CSS much more enjoyable.

8. Changes – Changes is a nifty application that lets you visually browse changes to your code base. Instead of having to use a subversion to manage your code base (though Changes works with svn and other repository software), you can use Changes.

9. TextExpander - TextExpander saves you countless keystrokes with customized abbreviations for your frequently-used text strings, code snippets and images.

10. TextMate - A popular text-editing tool for Apple Mac OS. It offers number of useful features, like search and replaces text, clipboard history, file tabs when working with projects.

404 Notifier

This plugin from Alex King will help notify you of any 404 errors coming up on your site. It’s a very useful plugin to use if you’re changing your permalink structure or otherwise moving things around and are worried you may have missed some things and don’t want to risk broken URLs.

Smart 404

The Smart 404 plugin helps eliminate 404 pages automatically. If a visitor reaches a page that will return a 404 error, this plugin searches the requested URL to see if there’s some other post that likely matches. If there’s more than one potential match, it can return a list of possible links. It goes a long way to help remedy a high bounce rate caused by 404 errors.

Google 404

This widget makes it easy to embed a Google search box on your custom 404 page.

Useful 404s

A plugin that creates more useful 404 pages.

The Free 404 Plugin

This plugin creates a customized 404 page that includes related posts to whatever keywords appear in the requested URL.

JH 404 Logger

This plugin adds a dashboard widget that displays recent 404 errors. It’s a great, unintrusive way to see if your site is returning errors.

WP 404 Images Fix

This plugin lets you replace images returning a 404 error with a default image of your choosing. You also have the option to add a class to the img tag or hide the image entirely if it’s missing.

Dunstan-style Error Page

This plugin can be used to create a custom error page similar to the one used on Dunstan Orchard’s 1976design.com/blog. The custom page it creates is immensely useful to users, displaying the last five blog posts, a search box, and the option to report the error, among other options.

Permalinks Moved Permanently

This plugin is helpful if you change the permalink structure of your blog and don’t want to lose out on incoming links going to your old pages. In addition to redirecting the visitor to the new link, it also generates a “301 Moved Permanently” error so that visitors are automatically redirected in the future (along with search engine spiders).

Redirection

This plugin monitors 404 errors and lets you map them to 301 redirects. It also allows you to set a custom redirection that lets you pass a URL through to a different page, file or website. And it creates a full log of all redirections. It can be used to redirect both nonexistent pages and ones that exist and it can be set to redirect based on login status or other parameters.

And sometimes figuring out how to handle such errors when using a CMS such as WordPress can be even more challenging. WordPress has default settings for handling 404 errors, but they leave a lot to be desired.

What Causes Error 404 Pages in WordPress?

404 pages in WordPress are most often caused because of a change in the permalink structure of the site. If a site owner changes the permalink structure of their WP blog, they’re likely going to end up with incoming links pointing to pages that are no longer located at a particular address. This means those incoming visitors will be given a 404 page instead of the content they were looking for.

Other causes of 404 pages may be in the code of your index.php or search.php files. If there’s an error in the code in either file, it may return results with invalid addresses (or it may not return results at all). If you’ve made customizations to your index.php or search.php files, it’s a good idea to check and make sure they’re not serving up invalid addresses and that all of your pages are still working. Always save a backup of the previous version of each file before making changes in case you need to roll back to an earlier version.

Potential Damages of Error 404 Pages

The most obvious damage caused by getting a 404 page has to do with the bounce rate on your site. If a visitor follows a link to your site and they get a 404 page rather than the content they were looking for, it’s unlikely they’ll search your site to find it. They may assume that it no longer exists on your site at all, and simply look elsewhere.

How to Prevent Error 404 Pages

The best way to prevent 404 pages is to be proactive. First of all, set up your permalinks properly from the start. If you take the time when you first launch a blog to set up well-structured permalinks, you’ll be unlikely to need to change them in the future.

Be proactive about incoming links that aren’t correct. Send a quick note to the person who runs the site with the link and ask them to change it to the correct link. Most site owners will be more than happy to do so.

Don’t take down old content. If you have to take something down, rather than deleting it entirely, create a custom page at that address that provides some information on what used to be there, or links to other posts and pages that might be of interest to the visitor.

There are a variety of plugins out there that can help you prevent and manage 404 pages, too.

What do you want your website to do? Is it going to be primarily a static website, like an online brochure? Or is it going to be a fully-functioning ecommerce site? Or maybe it’s going to be really media-heavy with tons of videos, photos, and audio files. Or is a blog going to be the primary focus?

Whatever your site’s primary function is going to be, you need to define it and then find a CMS that does that particular thing really, really well. If blogging is the main focus of the site, then use a blog platform. If images and video are the main focus, then you need to find a CMS that either has great support for media built-in or has great plugins for enabling those functions. If your site is going to focus on an online store, then the platform you choose needs to be able to seamlessly integrate that online store without a ton of extra work.

2. A CMS needs to work intuitively.

When you average user opens up the backend of the site, they should be able to figure out how to do basic functions without too much instruction. Different elements of the site should be clearly labeled. The basics of posting a new page, editing a page, and even changing themes or sidebar elements should all be relatively simple to figure out for the average computer user.

3. The backend needs to be standardized.

Things should all work basically the same way in the backend of the site. A good CMS should have a standardized format for each section of the backend. If one section uses a drop-down menu for selecting something, then all of the other sections should use the same type of menu for similar options—not radio buttons or some other selector.

The same goes for the way things are named or otherwise referred to. If something is called a “page” in one place and a “post” in another, that’s going to get confusing (plus, most people consider those two different things). If it’s a “sidebar” in one place and a “second column” somewhere else, that’s going to confuse your average user.

4. The backend needs to be logical and well-organized.

Things should be laid out logically in the backend. This means that all of the functions related to editing, or sidebars, or themes, or creating new content, should be grouped somehow or otherwise function the same. Alternatively, some CMSs put all of the things related to pages in one place, sidebars in another, plugins in another, etc. Either way, they’re laid out logically and once you know the basic architecture, it’s easy enough to figure out where things are supposed to be.

5. The right CMS shouldn’t have a ton of extra functionality you’ll never use.

This is a completely personal choice. Some sites will make use of tons of advanced functionality. Other sites won’t. If you’re never going to have an online store, why do you need a CMS that focuses on ecommerce? If you never plan to do anything beyond posting photos to your site, why have a CMS that does that plus a hundred other things? Instead, find a CMS that does the one thing you want to do really well and forget about the other features.

6. The right CMS should be easy for non-geeks to use.

Web designers and developers are very good at using web-based applications and pretty much anything else computer-related. A lot of their clients, on the other hand, probably aren’t. While most of the end-users of any CMS are going to have at least basic computer knowledge, they’re probably not super tech savvy. While you might love a particular CMS and think it’s the best thing since solid-state hard drives, your clients might find it confusing, hard to use, and overly complicated.

The question I always ask myself when considering this is, “Could my mother use this?” My mother is your typical business computer user. She can do spreadsheets, word processing, and email, but she’s definitely not a techy. If I’m confident that I could easily explain a CMS to her and she’d then be able to use it with a minimum of later support, then I know it’s going to be appropriate for 90% of other likely users.

7. It needs to include a WYSIWYG editor.

WYSIWYG editors make life easier for your clients. Most clients don’t know HTML and don’t care to learn. But they want to be able to use bold or italic text or use header tags to create sections within their pages. A WYSIWYG editor makes that all possible for non-tech-savvy users.

8. The pages it creates should be fast-loading and have simple code.

One of the major advantages of a CMS is that it simplifies the updating and management of a website. So the pages it produces should also be simple. There shouldn’t be a lot of extra code or provisions for unused functionality in the final page code. All that serves to do is slow the load times for the page and increase the likelihood that something will render wrong or throw an error.

9. The template engine should allow you complete creative control.

Some CMSs have very set ideas about what a website should look like. There needs to be a sidebar for navigation. You shouldn’t use navigation dropdowns. The content has to be arranged in nice, neat columns. Who’s the designer here? Whatever CMS you choose should let you design pages the way you want and should work around your needs.

10. The right CMS should have adequate support and documentation.

In all likelihood, you’re going to run into some sort of problems with any CMS you choose. Whether this is caused by add-ons or in the course of customizing some bit of code, or whether the CMs is doing something unexpected, having somewhere you can turn to to get advice on how to fix the problem is invaluable.

This doesn’t necessarily have to be some expensive tech support phone number or other paid support. Sometimes you can get quicker and better responses from a user community. Does the CMS you’re considering have support forums frequented both by other users and by those involved in the project? Are there other, off-site forums dedicated to that particular CMS? The people who visit these forums can be a wealth of information for doing just about anything with your CMS of choice.

Thorough documentation for the CMS is also valuable. It should provide information on everything from basic use of the CMS to customizations and advanced functionality.

Article Source

Version 3.0, is the 13th major release of the software, and contains over 2,700 changes—including 1,217 bug fixes—that were provided by 218 volunteers.

With this release, “WordPress is now becoming one of the most capable blogging platforms out there,” said Adriaan Bloem, an analyst for the Real Story Group, a research and consulting firm specializing in content management software.

Feature-wise, perhaps the most-discussed addition is the new ability of the software to run multiple blogs. Previously, each blog on a site had to be run on a separate copy of WordPress. Administrators could run multiple blogs from the same instance only by using another version of WordPress customized for this task, called WordPress MU.

That MU has been integrated into the main version of WordPress ensures that it should be easier to deploy, Bloem noted.

“WordPress MU … wasn’t the easiest to get working right. Also, there was a much smaller community using MU, so when users had trouble getting say, a plug-in to work for MU, it would also be hard to find kindred spirits working on the same problem,” Bloem said.

Also, the multi-blog capability erases “the final edge” that competing blog platform Movable Type had over WordPress. Movable Type has long offered the ability to run multiple blogs, though bloggers have shown a preference for WordPress, largely due to its interface, as well as to the fact that WordPress runs on PHP, which can be easier to understand than the Perl language that MovableType relies upon, Bloem said.
Another major feature is the ability to build custom post types. Instead of every page being tagged as a blog post, it can be defined in terms that the user specifies. So each page could represent a product, for instance, and have specific fields relating to that category, such as price and model.

Custom post types will further help establish WordPress as a good candidate for managing an entire Web site’s content, in addition to just the blogs.

“WP is starting to cross over into web content management system territory,” Bloem said.”It’s already used to power many non-blog Web sites, but as a system, it’s now starting to look more like Drupal.”
Other new features include the ability to update multiple plug-ins at once, and a new default theme and redesigned user interface.

With 3.0 behind them, the lead developers will not immediately jump into working on version 3.1 of the software, but rather will skip a release cycle to work on some of the external issues that have arisen from the growing popularity of the software, according to the announcement, which was posted by WordPress co-developer Matt Mullenweg These chores might include improving the mailing lists, the theme and plug-in directories as well as the application programming interfaces.

New users can download the software and existing users can update from within their administration dashboards. The largest hosted provider of WordPress-based blogs, Automatic, has already updated all the blogs on WordPress.com to version 3.0, according to a company spokesperson.

Source: http://www.macworld.com

Sports, one of the exciting part for the entertainment. No matter you play or just watch it LIVE on Televisions or view scores and commentary in your PCs/Cell phones this will makes you crazy. While browsing it from normal cell phone you need to refresh the mobile browser time and again. iPhone, the amazing product from Apple give you the best option to get the detailed information of all games without directly using the browsers. ‘Applications for iPhone’ made it possible. In all categories (Games, Education, Sports etc.) of application era iPhone is in very high position in compare to other phones like Google’s Android & Blackberry.
Football the craziest sports, whether it’s a club level or between nation level people do not want to miss a single match. So, here I am reviewing a best application for Football, which is especially developed for FIFA World cup 2010. This application is developed by ESPN and copyrighted to them, the leading sports channel.

ESPN 2010 FIFA WORLDCUP – SOUTHAFRICA
It’s amazing to think about how following sports has changed for the iPhone fans. When the last World Cup was contested four years ago, the iPhone didn’t exist. When this year’s tournament ready to kick off from next month, you’ll be able to watch all action in your iPhone.

In few days, 32 countries from around the globe will compete for the world’s most prestigious trophy – the FIFA World Cup. For the first time ever the Cup will be lifted in Africa and ESPN is one of the official broadcaster which will be there to bring exclusive coverage of this historic event to your iPhone with this application.

Since the global event doesn’t kick off until June 11, launching the app at this point brings up a large countdown timer at the top of the screen. The entire look of the app mirrors the bright color scheme adopted by the South African host nation and the tournament organizers.

Below the countdown, you can select from a menu of Teams, News, Fixtures/Schedule, and Tournament History. You can also select favorite teams in the settings panel, so a link directly to that team’s page shows up at the top of the menu for quick access to news, rosters, and more. Along the very bottom of the screen is the familiar ESPN headline scroll, featuring only World Cup-related headlines. You can tap any of these to be taken directly to the ESPN story in the in-app browser.

Feature of this Application:
* Exclusive global news and analysis from ESPN and ESPN Soccernet.
* Extensive profiles of all 32 teams and the world’s top footballers
* Full tournament schedule
* Group news and profiles
* Personalization – select your teams and show your support!
* World Cup tournament history dating back to 1930
* Profiles of all 10 host venues
* Fantasy Bracket Predictor – put your knowledge to the test and choose next World Cup champion
* Soccer Power Index – exclusive ESPN rankings of the top 100 FIFA teams.

This application is rated 4+ out of 5 by the iPhone application users and Free of Cost. This application is compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad and requires iPhone OS 3.0 or later.

Download: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/espn-2010-fifa-world-cup/id342370555?mt=8

Many of the numbers that are supposed to show Google’s power are outdated. For example, the number of Google servers was estimated to 450,000 in 2006. ComScore estimated that Google attracted more than 2 billion searches a day in July 2009.

Hungry Beast claims that Google “wants to own your phone, your email, your computer and your entire digital life”. Using the verb “own” is inappropriate, since Google simply hosts your email and offers software for your phone and your computer.

Another claim is that “Google wants to own the cables that deliver the Internet and the electricity to power them”, when Google’s goal is to “help make Internet access better and faster for everyone” by showing that it’s possible to “deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access”. Like Gmail, which offered for the first time 1 GB of storage for free, or Google’s bid in the FCC spectrum auction, which helped consumers because Google convinced FCC to add some new rules: the winner of the auction has to “give its customers the right to download any application they want on their mobile device, and the right to use any device they want on the network”.

The video concludes that Google’s ultimate goal is to gather data about everyone in the world and to show great targeted ads. Actually, Google’s mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Google’s disrupting business model pushes the boundaries of technology by democratizing knowledge. Ads are only the fuel that helps Google accomplish its mission.

[Via Harvey Sanchez | Source : Awardspace Blog.]

A web developer must care those common problems and make the page look good.

Let’s look at five easy fixes:

1. Format your text using CSS.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are the way to go – use one style sheet and control how text looks on your entire site. Make a change to the style sheet and your whole site is updated. It makes life a lot simpler.

2. Make the font size big enough to read.
Consider your target audience. Even if they are a group of teenage girls looking for new shoes, it’s never a good idea to use tiny type. It doesn’t have to be enormous, but up to a point, larger type is better. 12-pt Verdana is better than 8-pt Verdana.

3. Make the text contrast with its background.
The more contrast, the better. Black-on-white or white-on-black are examples of the highest contrast you can get. Use colors if you like, but if you squint at the page and your text basically vanishes, there’s not enough contrast.

4. Give the lines room to breathe.
Don’t stack lines on top of each other. Use the line-spacing directive in CSS and give it some space; I’ll often set line-spacing to 140% of the height of a typical line.

5. Break text up into chunks.
No matter how good a writer you are, people don’t want to read endless pages of text. Break it up by using headlines that reflect the subject of the paragraph(s) to follow so people can scan down to the parts that really interest them, or use lists with bullet to change the pace of the writing and slow down the scanning.

And finally check spellings of the content. Nothing irritates a visitor more on a web page than spelling errors – it simply makes you look like you don’t care enough to get it right. You can also use spell checkers to your contents.

Features

* Unique and automated colors palette script
* 3 color schemes which can be tweaked from the backend (Default, Grey and Brown/Orange)
* Featured Post integration
* JQuery Slider for featured Post
* 5 custom widgets (Feedburner/Twitter Count, Featured Post, About me, Tabs widget & Advertising)
* 2 Post display schemes (2 columns and 1 column)
* A Complete Ads Management System with Kadom Ads Management
* 2 columns layout
* Widgets ready sidebar
* Thumbnail on post with automated resizing
* Built-in gravatars and threaded comments
* Google Adsense or BuySellAds ready
* Google analytics or other statistics script ready
* Google Feedburner ready
* Clean & valid codes – XHTML 1.0 Strict + CSS
* Cross browser compatible: Firefox 2+, IE 7+, Opera, Safari, Chrome

Price:
Single: $35
Developer: $70

Demo Page | Purchase & Download

Let’s look at some of the probabilities for which a website may not be indexed.

Index Time: It often requires one to eight weeks for a site to be indexed. So enough time is to be given to let a site get indexed by the major search engines. You might come across the amount of time required to index your website from the search engine’s submission page.

Limits for Submission: Many of the search engines maintain a limit for submission for a domain. You have to be aware of that particular limit of submitting pages and make sure you have not exceeded that limit. Many are of the opinion that not more than a page should be submitted per day for a site.

Deep Links: If only the home page of a site is submitted to the search engine, then there is a chance that the crawlers will visit only one or two links from the submitted page. There is a high possibility that the bots will not go deeper to the site. That is why it is better to submit the pages individually or you have to create more number of direct links from the site.

Missing Page: Often a common mistake takes place while submitting the site to the search engines. It is often seen that the pages are not uploaded to a site before submission. It is utmost important to check that all the pages exists before the site is submitted.

Placing External Links: Some search engines like HotBot and Google do not index a site that does not have links to any other sites. The search engines might index only the home page of such sites and there is high probability that the other pages of the site would not be indexed.

Link from Homepage: Sometimes search engines refuse to index those internal pages of a site that are not linked from the home page of that site. And the search engines tend to drop those pages. If the crawlers do not find a roadway to reach your internal pages from the index page then they might consider them to be less important.

Frames: It is better to create non-framed versions of your sites. If you put content inside frames, then problem may arise with their submissions to the search engines. For framed pages, search engine may read the main content but not the surrounding menu frame. In that case only a part of the content would be visible to the readers.

IP Address: At times a site can be ignored from not being indexed as that particular website seems to share the same IP address with other sites. So it is advisable to use unique IP for each sites and prevent them from being banned through repetitive uses.

Dynamic Pages: Many of the search engines avoid indexing the dynamic web pages with special characters like an ampersand(&) and question mark(?). The search engines tend to leave the portion with Java Script and index the rest of the page. So a static version for each of the pages you want to be indexed, should be created in this case.

Technical Error: Random errors can take place in the search engines due to bugs and technical problems. Search engines run database of innumerable pages and error can take place during submission of web pages. Many prefer re submitting their pages every month so that none of the pages are missed out.

Spam: If a site is full of spam content then a search engine would not prefer to index its pages. Excessive use of keywords or attempts to spamming can prevent a site from being indexed.

Hosts: For submitting the sites, the web host needs to be very reliable. If a host remains down for most of the time then it would affect indexing of your sites. A site might be even removed from the database of the search engine. It is very important for your host to respond timely when the spiders crawl the pages.