Author: coutinho

By Melanie Pinola, Lifehacker – March 12, 2013 at 02:00PM

Finding parking or hailing taxis, looking for food, and finding baggage claim are just some of the hassles air travelers have to deal with. TravelNerd is a comprehensive site and an iOS app with all the information you need for getting to or from the airport and around inside it.

Select your airports and TravelNerd will show you detailed terminal maps, as well as restaurants, shops, airport lounges, and amenities such as Wi-Fi availability, family bathrooms, and ADA info for people with disabilities. If you need help with transportation, TravelNerd also provides a list of shuttle options and taxis with phone numbers, as well as public transportation information and nearby parking options.

The level of detail is great: You can filter restaurants by those that serve alcohol or are child-friendly, for example, get airport lounge hours, and access coupons for some companies (e.g., parking discounts).

TravelNerd is similar to the popular GateGuru Android and iOS app, but is a bit different, with the to/from transportation information and highlights for special travel needs. It also works on any mobile device or on your desktop. (GateGuru’s latest update also seems to have disappointed quite a few users.)

TravelNerd | via Tooz

By Whitson Gordon, Lifehacker – March 12, 2013 at 11:00AM

For years, I kept hearing how awesome Evernote was: how it could store everything you possibly needed, make it available everywhere, and how scores of people couldn’t live without it. I tried it multiple times, and never saw the appeal until now. Here’s what I was missing.

Any time we talk about Evernote, a good number of you say the same thing: you’ve tried it time and time again, but you could never really “get into it.” I was in the same camp, but after reading the other side’s experiences in this article and its comments, I decided to give it another shot. If you’re like I was and haven’t yet experienced the greatness of Evernote, here are some things you should try.

The More You Add, the More Useful Evernote Becomes

Let’s start with the most important trick: In order to see why everyone likes Evernote, it’s important to take advantage of everything it has to offer (rather than use it as just another note taker). Reader ppdd says it best:

The key to Evernote is to commit to it and jump in with both feet. It’s pretty rotten if you’re just using it for a few isolated tasks, because absolutely, it doesn’t do any one thing perfectly and it’s not as fast as other apps.

It really starts to show its brilliance once you start using it as your default bookmark/webclip app, notetaker, recipe box, repository of all your reference material, and so on. It’s great to have ALL the information you need indexed and searchable across every single platform you have. I love opening it up in a meeting and recording the meeting audio right along with my typed notes on my iPad. If I miss something (entirely possible while pecking things out on a glass screen) I can always return to it after the meeting.

So, if you want to give Evernote another shot, try putting everything in it that you want to hang onto. The more you add, the more useful Evernote becomes. Here are a few examples of what you could do.

Use the Web Clipper

I always thought Evernote’s web clipper extension was pointless. If I needed to reference articles for later, I’d just save them in my browser’s bookmarks folder or drag them to my desktop. However, that didn’t allow me to make notes on an article, or save it with other related notes on that project. Evernote solved that problem perfectly.

Test Case: Buying a New Grill

I just moved into a new apartment, and I need to buy a new grill. After a bit of searching, I found a few I liked but wasn’t ready to buy. I used the Web Clipper to throw its product page into a note under a new notebook, entitled “Wish List.” Now when I come into some extra money, I can open up Evernote and see my top picks at the top of my “Wish List” notebook.

Bonus tip: Evernote’s Web Clipper also integrates with Google. For example, let’s say I’m not quite done with my grill research, and I head back to Google later on to search for “gas grills.” When I do, any related Evernote clippings will show up in the right side of my search results to remind me which grills I already liked and saved. To turn on this feature, just open up Evernote’s options and check the box next to “Related Results.”

Don’t Be Afraid to Create Lots of Notes and Notebooks

I always tried to keep my notes to a minimum, so I didn’t get buried under an endless amount of notes that I could never filter through. Evernote is better than this, though: it manages a multitude of notes easily thanks to notebooks, tags, and note links (see below). I found that most of my “notes” should have, in fact, been “notebooks,” allowing me to store larger volumes of information with better organization.

Test Case: Troubleshooting a Finicky PC

I have a home server that I love, but always seems to give me problems, so it’s a “work in progress.” Back in the day, I used to keep track of this project in one note, jotting down lines from log files, troubleshooting commands I wanted to run, links to research I wanted to do, and more, all jumbled together in one big block of text. Even with some subheadings and formatting, it was still very difficult to navigate.

Now, I have an entire notebook dedicated to my home server. Right now, it has three notes:

1. Some sections of my server’s log, containing all the information I need to troubleshoot my most recent problem
2. A web clipping from an article on the best VPN providers, since I’m installing a VPN on my home server
3. A web clipping on how to install OpenVPN on my home server, since I don’t remember how to do it by heart
4. A web clipping on setting file permissions, since I need to give my girlfriend access to my server’s files

Because I saved each article with the Web Clipper, I have the entire text of the article and the source link right there, plus any highlights and notes I’ve made in each. This is light years better for me than just pasting the links to each article, or trying to write everything down myself into one giant note. Plus, by creating an entire notebook, each note functions as an item in a to-do list, which makes finishing the project much easier.

The bottom line: Don’t be afraid to create a ton of different notebooks and a ton of different notes. Evernote equips you with the ability to easily handle thousands of notes, and what seems overwhelming will soon feel like the best organizational scheme you’ve ever had.

Bonus Tip: Create a notebook called _INBOX, right-click on it, and make it your default notebook. That way, any new notes you send to Evernote show up in this inbox, at the top of your list of notebooks, ready for you to funnel into one of your other notebooks.

Sift Through Notes with Saved Searches and Tags

Using tags always felt like a waste of time to me: tagging every note seemed like a chore, and serves the same purpose that filing notes into notebooks does. However, tags can be useful if you have notes that you think could fit into multiple notebooks—or are on the same subject—without getting overwhelming. You don’t need to tag every note you have, and you only need a few really important ones. It basically makes your archive easier to search through with Evernote’s advanced search operators. You can even then save those searches by clicking the little arrow next to the search bar, and pressing the magnifying glass.

Test Case: Filter Out Family Members

Our own Walter Glenn uses tags, albeit sparingly, to keep track of things across multiple notebooks. Both he and weblog Nerd Gap, for example, recommend creating a tag for each member of your family. That way, if you have notes across different notebooks that apply to someone besides you, it’s easy to find them through a simple search. Nerd Gap explains:

I have tags for both of my kids and my wife. When I look up my son’s tag, I get everything from pictures he’s drawn for me to the results of his last check-up with the doctor.

You could also create tags for work (if your work likely spans multiple notebooks, and you want to filter out work-related notes after 5pm), to do items (since your to dos will span different notebooks), and so on. You can then save more complex searches related to those tags—say, tag:todo created:week-1 for to do items created in the last week—and access them with one click in your sidebar.

Again, don’t go overboard—Walter notes that tags are only really useful if you have a few that you really remember and use—but they can be a godsend once you start amassing thousands of notes. Check out Nerd Gap’s introduction to tags and search for more ideas on how to use these features.

Use Note Links to Jump Between Related Stuff

Once you have more notes and notebooks than you know what to do with, Evernote can linking everything together so you don’t have to search high and low for contextual information.

Right-click on one of your notes and choose “Copy Note Link.” Then, paste that link into another note for quick access later.

Test Case: Researching This Article

When I write a long article (like this one), I create a notebook for that article. Then, I create a text note with a basic outline of how I want the article to look, with all its subheadings. As I research, I clip all relevant web articles to that notebook, highlighting all the important parts and cutting out the irrelevant stuff. Then, I’ll copy each note’s individual link, paste it in the article outline, and I’ll have a general skeleton of what that article’s going to look like, using just the stuff I’ve saved in Evernote.

Walter notes that often, if he has a ton of notes in a notebook, he’ll just create a “Table of Contents” note at the top, where he can dump links to all the notes in that notebook, organized however he sees fit. This can be particularly helpful if Evernote’s sorting options don’t really fit your needs.

Bonus Tip: You can also drag any note to Evernote’s toolbar to quickly access the ones you use every day. That way, your most used notes are always one click away. For example, I have a note entitled “Post Ideas” that I access throughout the day, so I’ve added a button to my toolbar so no matter where I am inside Evernote, I can get to it right away.

Other Things You Can Put In Evernote

We’ve talked a little bit about what you can store in Evernote, and I’ve given some examples above. But again: the more you put in, the more useful it becomes. Anything you need to save, put it in Evernote and see how it works. For example, you could use it to store:

• Business cards (which become searchable with Evernote’s optical character recognition)
• Recipes and restaurant recommendations (see also: Evernote Food)
• Code snippets or other reference material
• Receipts and serial numbers for your big purchases
• Archive whiteboard notes from your meetings or brainstorming sessions (again, all of which become searchable through Evernote)
• iOS or Android “themes” that you like, if you’re a home screen customization fanatic

…and of course, anything else you can possibly think of.

Is this approach for everyone? Of course not. In fact, our own former Editor Adam Pash found the “everything bucket” model too limiting for him (and he he advocates Simplenote instead). Like most things, it depends on the kind of work you do and how your brain wants to organize that information. Sometimes, you just need a simple app with a bunch of text notes. Evernote can do that if you want—that’s part of its beauty—but it isn’t what makes Evernote special. If you’ve tried it over and over again and can’t understand what the fuss is all about, focus its more specific features like notebooks, note links, and the web clipper. You might finally find the organizational nirvana you’ve been looking for.

By Dudley Storey, Smashing Magazine Feed – March 08, 2013 at 07:14AM

Print continues to be treated somewhat cursorily by most Web designers, who tend to be obsessed with pixels rather than printers. In the real world, a significant portion of people rely on pages printed from websites for reference: there’s still something about having a physical sheet of paper in one’s hands, even in this age of digital saturation.

Web developers can take several steps to bridge the gap between the worlds of printers and LCD screens:

• Treat print as an equal partner in adaptive and responsive design.
• Print background images and colors, where appropriate.
• Add visible URLs or scannable links for easy reference from the printed page.
• Use CSS filters to improve the result of printed graphics.

Design For Print, Not Screen

First, let’s cover the basics. Modern print style sheets are typically placed within a media query:

@media print {

}

Recreating the entire CSS for your website is not necessary because the default styles will, on the whole, be inherited by the print query; only the differences need to be defined. Most browsers will automatically reverse colors when printing in order to save toner, but this won’t have the same degree of quality as a handcrafted solution. For best results, make color changes explicit. At the very least, a basic print media query should consist of the following:

@media print {
   body {
      color: #000;
      background: #fff;
   }
}

While display: none has rightly been derided in responsive design, it is entirely appropriate for print style sheets: in most cases, our goal is not to recreate a screenshot of an entire page, but to provide a concise, well-designed print version of it. As a second step, eliminate page elements that are simply irrelevant in print, including navigation bars and background images.

/* Default styles */

h1 {
   color: #fff;
   background: url(banner.jpg);
}

@media print {
   h1 {
      color: #000;
      background: none;
   }

   nav, aside {
      display: none;
   }
}

Writing a print style sheet is one of the few times when you’ll ever use centimeters or inches in CSS. Largely irrelevant to screens, real-world measuring systems become very useful in print. To ensure that you are using the printed page effectively, write CSS to display your content edge to edge, negating any margins or padding that may be present, and balance this with an @page rule:

@media print {
   h1 {
      color: #000;
      background: none;
   }

   nav, aside {
      display: none;
   }

   body, article {
      width: 100%;
      margin: 0;
      padding: 0;
   }

   @page {
      margin: 2cm;
   }
}

For content to which users can be expected to add handwritten notes on the page, such as educational material, you might consider increasing the print margin.

We also need to ensure that content is not broken across pages when printed. One obvious step is to prevent headings from being printed at the bottom of the page:

h2, h3 {
   page-break-after: avoid;
}

Another rule will prevent images from bleeding over the edge of the printed page:

img {
   max-width: 100% !important;
}

A third will ensure that articles always start on a fresh page:

article {
   page-break-before: always;
}

Finally, we can prevent large elements, such as unordered lists and images, from being split across multiple pages.

ul, img {
   page-break-inside: avoid;
}

While these declarations are not exhaustive, they’re a good start.

Force Background Images And Colors

On some websites, such as portfolios, background images and colors are an important visual component. If the user is printing from a WebKit browser (Google’s Chrome or Apple’s Safari), we can force the printer to render the colors as seen on screen (i.e. force any background images and colors to appear on the printed page). Generally speaking, we would do this for color printers, which we can test for in a separate media query:

@media print and (color) {
   * {
      -webkit-print-color-adjust: exact;
      print-color-adjust: exact;
   }
}

Sadly, there is (as yet) no immediate equivalent in Firefox, Opera or Internet Explorer.

Expand External Links For Print

We can’t (yet) directly interface with a printed page to explore links, so link URLs should be visible on the printed version of the Web page. To keep the page relatively clean, I prefer to expand only outbound links in articles, and suppress internal ones. If you’ve used relative URLs on your website for local links, you can easily do this through an attribute selector and :after pseudo=classes, thus preventing internal links and links around images from being printed:

@media print {
   article a {
      font-weight: bolder;
      text-decoration: none;
   }

   article a[href^=http]:after {
      content:" <" attr(href) "> ";
   }
}

Take the following HTML code and content:

<p>You’ve explored this <a href="/blog">website</a>; now it’s time to <a href="https://www.webplatform.org/">read other Web development documentation</a>.</p>

Here is the printed result:

One issue is that anchor links and links around images will also be expanded on the printed page. We can fix the anchor links fairly readily with a countermanding CSS rule:

article a[href^="#"]:after {
   content: "";
}

Links around images are rather more difficult, because CSS does not currently allow for the selection of an element based on its children. Ideally, links around images would have a class that we could target via CSS. Longer term, CSS4 features a parent selector that will do the job:

$a:after > img {
   content: "";
}

CSS4 will also make expanding external links easier:

a:not(:local-link):after {
   content:" <" attr(href) "> ";
}

All of these approaches assume that users will continue to type in URLs by hand. A better solution is to make the digital version of the page easier to access by providing a matching QR code.

Print QR Codes For Easy URL References

Often regarded as an advertising eyesore, QR codes have their place in certain circumstances. One obvious example is providing an easily-scanned sigil on a printed Web page that enables the user to return to the live version without having to type the URL.

Web page printed with a self-referential QR code. Larger view.

To create the matching QR code, we’ll use Google’s Chart API, which has four required components:

• The kind of chart information we want Google to deliver (qr, in our case);
• The rendered size of the QR sigil, in pixels;
• The URL to encode;
• The form of character encoding to use.

We’d typically associate the URL with a heading element at the top of the page:

<header>
<h1>Lizabeth’s Salon</h1>
<h2>Providing Intellectual Stimulation Online Since 2001</h1>
</header>

To create the printed result, we’ll provide a margin on the right side of the h1 that is large enough for the heading, and then position a QR code in that area:

header h1 {
   margin-right: 200px;
   margin-bottom: 2rem;
   line-height: 1.5;
}

Because the QR code will be unique to each page, this would be added as an embedded style sheet:

@media print {
   header h1:after {
      content: url(https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=150x150&chl=https://yourdomain.com&choe=UTF-8);
      position: absolute;
      right: 0;
      top: 0;
   }
}

This approach has the downside of forcing the developer to enter a URL individually for each page into the API code. If your Web host is running PHP, you can provide the URL of the current page automatically:

@media print {
   h1:after {
      content: url(https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=150x150
&chl=https://<?=$_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];?>
&choe=UTF-8);
      position: absolute;
      right: 0;
      top: 0;
   }
}

For WordPress:

@media print {
   h1:after {
      content: url(https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=150x150
&chl=https://<?phpthe_permalink();?>&choe=UTF-8);
      position: absolute;
      right: 0;
      top: 0;
   }
}

Obviously, both of the solutions above will only work on PHP and WordPress pages.

Use CSS3 Filters To Improve Print Quality

Browsers often have issues with printing out banner images, especially if the banners are white against a dark background:

Logo as a solid image	Printed result
Logo as an alpha-masked PNG	Printed result

In theory, you could use a CSS sprite to switch between different versions of the logo for print, but that would mean doubling the file size for potentially little benefit. Instead, I recommend using CSS filters (and their SVG equivalent, for Firefox) to invert the image just before it hits the printed page:

@media print {
   header {
      background: none;
      color: #000;
   }

   header img {
      filter: url(inverse.svg#negative);
      -webkit-filter: invert(100%);
      filter: invert(100%);
   }
}

CSS3 filters do what you’d expect — invert the colors in header images, turning black to white and vice versa — but they only work in Chrome and Safari. To cover Firefox, we need a different approach — the equivalent filter written as a separate SVG file:

<svg xmlns="https://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
<filter id="negative">
<feColorMatrix values="-1 0 0 0 1
0 -1 0 0 1
0 0 -1 0 1
0 0 0 1 0" />
</filter>
</svg>

The workings of the feColorMatrix SVG filter are a little complex to cover here. Much more information can be found in the article “Applying Color Tints to Web Pages With SVG Filters and JavaScript on Dev.Opera.

The result of printing either form of logo (i.e. alpha-masked PNG or solid-black background) is now this:

Conclusion

Due in part to the fact that printer use is not tracked by website analytics software and, thus, lacks strong metrics (although achieving this is possible, too, which we may discuss in a future article), print tends to be broadly ignored by Web developers. This is somewhat understandable, because most of the time we only read and browse pages online. As a result, developers tend to develop websites for the screens and devices in front of them, rather than for the printer at the other end of the office.

On the other hand, even if people only occasionally need to print something from the Web, it would be ideal if the page design adapted to the printer, just as modern websites adapt to various screen sizes and devices. Print should be considered another aspect of adaptive design, usability and accessibility, and an equally important part of Web development.

By treating print as another aspect of adaptive design, we fulfill the needs of more website users — and at the same time, save ink, paper and other resources, all of which are important aspects of sustainable design.

More Resources

A List Apart has a long and laudable history of supporting print style sheets through its articles and tutorials. While some of the following resources are now fairly old, they remain relevant to anyone who wishes to explore print as an equal partner in Web design.

• CSS Design: Going to Print, Eric Meyer (10 May 2002)
• Improving Link Design for Print, Aaron Gustafson (19 September 2005)
• Building Books With CSS3, Nellie McKesson (12 June 2012)
• How To Set Up A Print Style Sheet, Christian Krammer (24 November 2011)

Source of image on front page: Bottlerocket Creative.

(al)

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© Dudley Storey for Smashing Magazine, 2013.