Creative Community Bulletin 25 April 2011 Through 20 May 2011

These are the arti­cles, blogs, and resources I found inter­est­ing and wor­thy of shar­ing for 25 April 2011 through 20 May 2011:

  • Bring Browser-Style Tabs to Microsoft Office with the Office Tabs Plugin – By now most peo­ple have become accus­tomed to using brows­er tabs when surf­ing the inter­net. Tabs have become so stan­dard­ized that many pro­grams, mobile apps, and web­site all incor­po­rate them as well. If you are one of those peo­ple who loves tabs, I have some great news for you! Detong Technology offers a groovy plug-in for the Windows ver­sion of Microsoft Office that brings tabs to Word, Excel, and Powerpoint; it’s called Office Tabs.
  • How to Automatically BCC in Outlook 2010 – Perhaps it was due to one too many pas­sive aggres­sive intra-office stealth BCCs (Blind Carbon Copy), but for some rea­son, Microsoft decid­ed to seri­ous­ly roll back access to BCCs in Office 2010. For one, the new mes­sage dia­log doesn’t even have a BCC field. But you also can’t set up Outlook 2010 rules to auto­mat­i­cal­ly BCC some­one (although you can set up a rule to auto­mat­i­cal­ly CC a mes­sage). For my pur­pos­es, this is kind of a pain. I am a Gmail/Outlook hybrid user (I have about three dif­fer­ent email address­es, each for a dif­fer­ent pur­pose) and I like to keep all of my mes­sages archived in my main Gmail account for easy ref­er­ence. So, what I want­ed was a way to for­ward all of my sent mes­sages to my Gmail account (I already have all incom­ing mes­sages for­ward­ed there by a sever-side rule). Easier said than done but I think I’ve fig­ured out the eas­i­est way.

    It turns out that there are three things that need to be done to unlock the full poten­tial of BCC in Outlook 2010:

  • Verizon: Say So Long to Unlimited Data | PCWorld – Got a smart­phone on Verizon Wireless? Get ready to wave good­bye to the days of unlim­it­ed data.

    Verizon will axe its unlim­it­ed smart­phone data plan this sum­mer, accord­ing to remarks made by the car­ri­er’s chief finan­cial offi­cer. Speaking at the Reuters Global Technology Summit on Thursday, Verizon CFO Fran Shammo (no rela­tion to the ShamWow guy) said the com­pa­ny will soon roll out new tiered pric­ing plans and elim­i­nate the cur­rent $30-a-month unlim­it­ed option.

    According to Reuters, which report­ed the news, the move is designed to “force heavy data users to pay more for mobile data.” Ouch.

    Hang on, though: For most of us, it may not be near­ly as painful as it sounds.

  • Tips On Business Card Typeface | DesignBeep – Typeface is a term we gen­er­al­ly think of for a set of fonts—a com­bi­na­tion of the type, style, and size for pro­fes­sion­al com­put­er­ized let­ter­ing. When con­sid­er­ing a type­face for your cus­tom or busi­ness card tem­plate design at busi­ness­cards, it is impor­tant to under­stand some com­mon attrib­ut­es asso­ci­at­ed with type and some com­mon cat­e­gories of type.
  • Soluto – Anti-Frustration Software – Frustrated by your slug­gish and unre­spon­sive PC?

    Soluto is bring­ing an end to PC user frus­tra­tion with trans­paren­cy, killer tech­nol­o­gy, and your help.

  • Google Calls Facial Recognition Database “Creepy” | The Daily Feed | Minyanville​.com – You got­ta hand it to Google. Mapping human facial struc­ture and stor­ing them in a data­base com­plete with a name, address, and email is where Mountain View draws the line.
  • Angry Birds for Windows – Angry Birds
  • Photoshop Automator Actions v5.0.1 : Complete Digital Photography – If you rou­tine­ly find your­self slog­ging through tedious, repetitve chores in Photoshop, then you should try using Automator to stream­line your batch pro­cess­ing chores. Built-in to Mac OS X 10.4 and lat­er, Automator makes it sim­ple to cre­ate sophis­ti­cat­ed, com­plex automa­tions. Out-of-the-box, Automator can’t con­trol Adobe Photoshop, but with the addi­tion of this Photoshop Automator Actions col­lec­tion, you get every­thing nec­es­sary to dri­ve Photoshop using Automator.
  • Strong Password Generator – Use this strong pass­word gen­er­a­tor to gen­er­ate secure, ran­dom pass­words. It’s free.
  • The Funniest Photoshop Fails Of All Time (PHOTOS) – It’s no secret that all mag­a­zines, adver­tise­ments, and cat­a­logs are giv­en the Photoshop treat­ment before being shown to the world. Legs are length­ened, tum­mies flat­tened, and some­times pho­tos are changed com­plete­ly, but a good graph­ic design­er hides all traces of his or her manip­u­la­tion. Fortunately, sites like Photoshop Disasters have been catch­ing the worst Photoshop mis­takes for a few years now, so we just had to put togeth­er our favorite ones for you. Rogue hands, miss­ing legs, ter­ri­ble cut and paste jobs: you name it and chances are it’s here. Vote for the biggest fail, and if you’ve seen any worse Photoshop jobs around the web, sub­mit them below!
  • Free For All: Spring into Photoshop Freebies | CreativePro​.com – This install­ment of your favorite free­bies fea­ture is all about Photoshop. I’ll point you toward resources that opti­mize the app and add a grid tool. Then I’ll give you a huge assort­ment of tex­tures and some use­ful image-editing actions.