I already have most of the indicator coded, it just needs correction and refinement.
It needs to simply draw a horizontal trendline for the latest H1 and H4 candle. The indicator just needs some correction.
Freelance Projects, Design and Programming Tutorials
I need 5 articles.4 geared toward reviewing 5 online money making products. I will provide 20 different products with links but you will choose from your own research which ones you feel APPEAR to be the best and why. I would like the following general format for all 4 articles:
(Intro paragraph)
(Supporting and Opinion paragraphs)
(1st through 5th choices in paragraph form to include links in bullet style)
(Conclusion)
Approx. 300-400 words.
The 5th is a general article providing advice on choosing an online marketing product.
I would like the exclusive rights to ownership of the articles to include editing them.
Bidding on this project will imply that you agree with the above statements so please set the price of your bid accordingly.
A new year always brings the chance to start fresh with a new approach to staying organized, so we’re going to take a look today at PersonalBrain, a sophisticated knowledge management solution I’ve come to think of as a GPS system for my information.
PersonalBrain is unlike any other application I’ve come across for managing information. Superficially it looks somewhat like a mind mapper, and it has the ability to create networks of links among your notes like a personal wiki. But PersonalBrain is more than the sum of those parts. It always indicates what neighborhood of your information you are currently prowling.
Is it the right solution for you? Let’s take a look.
PersonalBrain shows you where you are in your information database.
First thing to know about PersonalBrain is that it is a Java application. This means two things: 1. It is cross-platform, so you can use it on Mac, PC or Linux operating systems; and 2. It is not particularly Mac-like. It is produced by TheBrain Technologies.
Its inventor, Harlan Hugh, began working on its development over 15 years ago, and the software has been evolving ever since. You can download a free 30-day trial, which is fully functional. Installation is fairly standard, but you’ll need to have Java installed on your system — Java is standard on OS X systems, so this should not be an issue.
There are three editions: Pro, Core and Free. This review covers the Pro edition.
As with a mind mapper, you create a map of your various topics in PersonalBrain. Dogs is a subset of Pets, while Golden Retriever and Border Collie are subsets of Dogs, and Fido is a subset of Golden Retriever. While a mind mapper can handle that hierarchy very well, drilling down from broad categories to more and more detail, PersonalBrain can do a lot more with this same information.
In PersonalBrain Fido can be be both a child of Golden Retriever AND the parent item to Pets. Moby the Goldfish can also be a parent to Pets. This cross-relational linking, multi-parent capability is what gives PB its wiki-like flair.
Thoughts in PersonalBrain can have multiple parents.
There are two major differences between the links in a wiki and links in PersonalBrain. In PersonalBrain, the links are visual connectors, not hyperlinks. And, the links in PersonalBrain convey meaning. In a wiki there is no such thing as a parent or child note. In PersonalBrain, however, a note can be a child or parent; there are also jump links that connect related information, and are not hierarchical in nature.
The power, then, in PersonalBrain comes from being able to create these inter-connected links among your data. It allows you to quickly map out a project, adding necessary information as you go. Your information is never static in PersonalBrain. The networks you build are organic and constantly changing as you add information and redefine the links.
Before we continue, I should make some definitions so we are speaking the same PersonalBrain language. In PersonalBrain, a database is known as a “brain.” The items that make up a brain are called “thoughts” and these thoughts are displayed in the “plex.” The thought with focus is the “active thought.”
The plex, of course, is the feature of PersonalBrain that is most distinctive. It’s really a substitute, animated Finder for your information, and it has its own geography that denotes the relationship among that information. The screenshot below demonstrates this geography.
How thoughts line up in PersonalBrain defines their relationships.
In this example, the active thought is “Plex Geography.” Below the active thought are its child thoughts. Above the active thought is the parent thought (or parent thoughts, because thoughts can have multiple parents). To the right are sibling thoughts — that is, thoughts that share at least one parent with the active thought. And directly to the left are jump thoughts, items related to the active thought, but unconnected by hierarchy.
This is the GPS aspect I alluded to. You always know where you are among your thoughts, because you always see what neighborhood it belongs to. You can see immediately just from this one example how PersonalBrain differs from a mind mapper, which displays hierarchy in one direction. Let’s see this in a more powerful example:
You can learn a lot about the active thought simply from the relationships displayed in the plex.
In the screenshot above, the active thought is the book The Big Burn. You can see that it was written by Timothy Egan, who also wrote The Worst Hard Time, and that it is a non-fiction work. The Big Burn is about the U.S. Forest Service, Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot. It is related to Idaho, where much of the action takes place.
The plex is also flexible. The plex geography I’ve outlined above is for the plex in normal mode. But you can optionally choose to view your information in outline mode, or expanded and shifted around to your satisfaction. The next two screenshots demonstrate this:
PersonalBrain can arrange thoughts in outline mode.
Or you can expand the view and shift thoughts around at will.
So far I’ve focused on the plex area of the PersonalBrain interface. Now we’ll look at how you can access several tools through the six tabs displayed in the tools window. In most Mac applications, the tools window would be called the Inspector.
You can move the location of the tools window to suit your need. It can be displayed horizontally along the bottom of the screen, or in a more vertical format to the right or left. You can disengage tabs to view them side by side simultaneously. And a simple double-click on the plex can open and close the tools window should you need the full screen to adequately view your brain’s plex.
You can move the tools window to suit your needs.
Through the tools window you can control additional information related to the active thought, adding notes, assigning tags, giving it a thought type and more. You access and control the attached files and links. You can also view the results of advanced searches, and create reports. Finally, you can view PersonalBrain’s built in calendar.
It’s no secret what the notes tool is for. Type or paste formatted text for future reference. You can include lists, check boxes, and tables too — although I must confess that some of these features don’t always work as expected on my MacBook. There is even a spell-checker.
Nevertheless, I find the notes function one of the weaker aspects of PersonalBrain, as it is built on an HTML editor (which may account for the erratic behavior) that does not provide a fluid, word-processing feeling. For me it is not a comfortable environment for composing longer text documents. It is perfectly adequate for jotting notes, and pasting text from other sources, which is really all I need it to do.
The notes window in PersonalBrain.
A nice feature is that you can optionally open the notes window even when the tool window is closed. In fact, you can open multiple floating notes if you need to reference the notes of several thoughts simultaneously.
There is a small search box located in the lower left side of the plex. As you type the word or phrase you are looking for, a list of hits appears allowing you to instantly activate the thought you’re looking for. If you don’t find what you’re looking for from this list, click the “search” button and a longer list appears beneath the search tab
The found items are broken down into categories starting with matches in thought titles, and continuing with thought content, local attachments (files that are attached to thoughts and stored internally), and then Spotlight search results for Mail, iCal and Address Book. The search below was for the string “movies.”
Search results are displayed in the Search tab.
You can also access controls for an advanced search from the search tab.
The calendar tool is probably not going to replace your daily calendar, but it is handy for adding dated events to your brain, especially as each event is associated with a thought. So, if you’re planning an advertising schedule, say, you can create various milestones connected to that project. I’ll provide an example a little further along in this review.
Building your brain is fun and very easy. Just select New Brain from the File menu, give the brain a name, and that name is automatically set as the home thought.
I’m creating a brain to keep information about an American Revolutionary War historic site in Vermont where I volunteer. The screenshot below focuses in on the central thought, which, in this case, is the home thought and only thought.
A PersonalBrain "thought"
Notice the three small, blue circles. Those are called gates. The one just beneath “ep” is the child gate. The one on top is the parent gate, and the one to the left is the jump thought gate. To create a child thought, I click on the child gate and drag a line. A little dialog box pops up, where I can add the title of the new thought.
As I type, I will get a list of other thoughts from this brain with matching text. In this way, if I so choose, I can select an existing thought to link to, instead of creating a new one.
As you might imagine, information networks in PersonalBrain can get very large, very quickly. The developers have provided a few handy methods for ensuring that you can navigate your data efficiently. First of all, there is the home button, which will always take you back to the home thought (any thought in your brain can be designated the home thought; by default it is the first thought created when you build a new brain).
You can also “pin” any thoughts, which will then appear along the top of the plex. It is useful to pin frequently accessed thoughts, so you can navigate directly to them from anywhere in your brain. In the “Big Burn” screenshot from earlier in this review, you can see the pinned thoughts are “Interesting Words,” “Arts & Entertainment” and “History.”
The thought names displayed along the bottom of the plex are of recently viewed thoughts. This row often comes in handy when connecting thoughts, because you can draw links between any thoughts in the plex and thoughts in the history row.
All thoughts can be classified with one or more tags. Create tags for urgent thoughts or thoughts that need follow-up, or which pertain to certain colleagues. Whatever works best for you. Then click on the tag, and a virtual thought is displayed with all the thoughts with that tag.
For my brain about the historic site, I’ve created a list of historic characters associated with the site. I tagged each of these with their affiliation — either American or Britain. The screenshot below shows the virtual thought for the tag American, and lists those characters who fought on the American side.
Selecting a tag creates a virtual thought with tagged thoughts as children.
You can also give each thought a type. Types differ from tags in a couple of ways. You can assign multiple tags to a thought but give it only one type. Types can have hierarchy. That is, you can have a super type source, and sub-types of primary, secondary and tertiary, for example. Types can also have pre-defined characteristics, such as a common icon and color.
Links can be typed, the way thoughts can be to further define relationships.
So far I’ve given you the nuts and bolts of how PersonalBrain functions. Now I want to spend some time discussing how all this functionality comes together to make PersonalBrain different from other knowledge management solutions.
Most information managers are receptacles for notes of some kind or another. For example, when you create a new item in DEVONthink, you are generally creating a rich text or plain text note. You might also be dragging in a PDF or a web page. You can add an attachment or link, but essentially the content of the item is what matters.
When you add a new thought to a brain in PersonalBrain, you are not necessarily creating a note at all. Rather, you are creating a nucleus around which several different pieces of information revolve. This is best demonstrated with an example.
Say I’m planning a trip to Nova Scotia. Under my Travel thought I create a new thought called “Nova Scotia Vacation.” I then use the search the web function in PersonalBrain, which leads me to the Nova Scotia Department of Tourism site. I copy the URL and paste it into my Nova Scotia Vacation thought.
Press the F4 key to instantly access a web search dialog for the active thought.
After continuing my research, I add thoughts for attractions in Nova Scotia that I’d like to visit. Among these is the Fortress of Louisbourg, a national historic site on Cape Breton Island. I decide Louisbourg is going to be a major stop on the vacation, so I begin gathering more information, including a list of books to read.
Also, I learn that there is going to be a lecture about Louisbourg at my local library in April. I make a calendar listing. With “Fortress of Louisbourg” set as the active thought, my brain looks like this:
Thoughts in PersonalBrain become a nucleus for additional information.
As my plans start to gel, I can add thoughts for accommodations and places to visit, such as museums and historic sites.
PersonalBrain for planning a vacation.
You could certainly organize a vacation with any number of applications, and possibly even as efficiently or more so. PersonalBrain, however, seems to aid the thought process, organically growing with your plans, and even catalyzing them.
Sharing the information in a brain is pretty easy to do. You can export it as a “site brain,” which retains the plex-style navigation of the information, or as a simple html page. You can also upload your brain to webBrain, a web-hosting service provided by TheBrain Technologies.
Simple brains without attachments currently are hosted for free. If you want to post more complex brains with attachments, you will need to pay a fee — about $75 a year. This also allows you to keep brains synchronized across more than one computer, which I’ve found works well and is quite convenient.
I don’t believe PersonalBrain is a substitute for a data catch-all like Yojimbo or DevonThink. It has no inbox for dumping information until you’re ready to deal with it. When you grab information you want to put into PersonalBrain you’ve got to know where you want it to reside in your brain.
PersonalBrain does not take advantage of Services, so you can’t save something to a brain through that method, nor can you print a PDF to a brain, as you can with most Mac information managers.
I’d also like to see saved searches that can be added to the plex, essentially mimicking how tagged items can be grouped beneath a virtual tag-thought.
And, while the company makes an effort to emphasize their support for Mac OS, it sometimes feels as if this platform is a second sister to the Windows version. For example, the Windows version has a nice auto-hide feature lacking in the Mac version.
For the most part, however, these issues are all minor and easy to overlook.
As mentioned above, you can select from three editions:
Pro Edition ($249.95): The version I’ve reviewed here.
Core Edition ($149.95): Limits you to one attachment per thought. No export to folders, HTML or XML. No import of folders. No capture of thought icons. No calendar. One-computer license.
Free Edition: Though highly limited in features, this version retains the basic plex functions with notes and web links. It is a reasonable alternative to a mind mapper, and would make a convenient bookmark manager.
PersonalBrain is a deep application, and I have not covered all its many features. The developer’s web site is full of informative tutorials and how-to videos that provide a richer understanding of the power of this product.
PersonalBrain is a unique personal knowledge manager, but it isn’t for everyone. If you prefer an information warehouse that you can access when necessary, but otherwise isn’t much on your radar, then you won’t go for PersonalBrain. If you prefer your applications behave Mac-like, you won’t go for PersonalBrain.
But if you like tinkering with your information, and enjoy the process of growing your knowledge base, PersonalBrain might be just what you’re looking for to get 2011 off to a well-organized start. Just like a GPS system that helps you navigate the wilds, PersonalBrain can help you find your way in the jungle of the information that comes your way.
I’d like to take a moment to say a big thank you to this week’s sponsor, Jumsoft. In particular, their latest release of Pages Templates 6.0. These are a great way to spruce up your collection of pre-built Pages designs, and some of the new graphical layouts are really gorgeous.
Jumsoft has created a handy mini-site where you can quickly view all the included templates, which gives you a good feel for what to expect.
Pages Templates 6.0 includes 100 different templates, each containing up to 12 sections designed for the type of document. Use single-page templates such as invoice, letter, and poster for basic documents, or choose one of the several multi-layout templates for brochures, newsletters, and other publications.
Most layouts include placeholders for your photos or pictures – simply drag and drop the selected image – and you’ll be able to benefit from all the other fantastic page layout features built into Pages itself. Although the stock designs included in Pages Templates 6.0 look great, they are also very easy to customise. You can choose your own font, change graphics, and easily combine multiple designs into a single document.
If you’d like to find out more, be sure to visit the official Pages Templates 6.0 site, and take a look at what’s on offer. The full collection of 100 templates is available to buy now for $39. Definitely worth considering if you’re a regular Pages user!
For a quick game of Hold ’em on the iPhone, it’s been perfect for me. The full iPhone app is available for US 99 cents, but if you’re not sold, there is a free version with some annoying interstitial ads. And unfortunately, the app’s not universal — the iPad version will set you back $4.99. Still, that’s pretty cheap compared to what I’d have ended up losing at the tables in Vegas anyway.
TUAW’s Daily App: World Series of Poker Hold ’em Legend originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 11 Jan 2011 08:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The mic works best hooked up to an official app called Vocalive, which you can see on the iPad’s screen in the pic above. In addition to recording and playing back audio tracks, the app can also throw in some vocal effects, from reverb to frequency modulation, and a metronome for getting your timing just right. The iRig Mic will be available for just US$59 in the first week of March. IK Multimedia told us that they’d be at Macworld later this month, so we’ll be sure to get them on video there.
In case you’re wondering, that iPad is being held onto the mic stand by an IK product called the iKlip, which became available last December; for $40, it will clip your iPad onto a mic stand for use during a show. That way, iPad bands can keep both hands free for jamming.
iRig Mic brings a vocal microphone to the iPhone and iPad originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 11 Jan 2011 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Last year, I caught a top 10 list somewhere that listed the top movies ever with twist endings. All but one of them I’d already seen, that one being the critically acclaimed Korean film Oldboy, directed by Chan-wook Park. Seeing as it was available for streaming on Netflix, I pulled it up that night. Suffice to say, it has one hell of a twist ending, and I’ll warn you now that it’s… uncomfortable.
Oldboy isn’t the only movie on Park’s resume, though it’s arguably his most recognized. The director is adding yet another film to his IMDb page, and this one has a different sort of twist involved: it was filmed entirely on an iPhone 4. The film, titled Paranmanjang (“life full of ups and downs” in Korean) clocks in at about 30 minutes and was made on a budget of only US$133,000. Park says he took advantage of the iPhone 4’s small size and low price (relative to the project) to easily utilize multiple iPhones for many different camera angles.
I wonder what iPhone apps Park made use of in the recording of his film, other than the native Camera app. Would there be any reason he’d want to not shoot natively and do the full post-processing later on larger gear?
Paranmanjang is set to hit theaters on January 27 in South Korea.
Oldboy director Chan-wook Park shoots new movie on iPhone 4 originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 11 Jan 2011 06:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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This intriguing (and shiny!) M.C. Escher case was seen in the CES booth of one Lux Mobile last week. The custom case was made with over 18,000 Swarovski crystals and was apparently made in the good old US of A, “one crystal at a time.” Pretty snazzy, no? Lux Mobile does carry this case in a standard non-crystal form (and we’re told it’s a popular model), but that’s not nearly as fun.
One more note here: the custom-made crystal case on display above costs a whopping $3000 — just about six times the value of the iPad it’s actually supposed to hold. Check out a few more of Lux’s blinged-out iDevice cases after the break, including a pink Ed Hardy monstrosity that would keep Jonathan Ive up at night.
Continue reading Seen at CES: Blinged-out iPhone and iPad cases
Seen at CES: Blinged-out iPhone and iPad cases originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 11 Jan 2011 04:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Kindle for Mac was one of the apps we’d hoped to see when the Mac App Store launched, and it looks like we didn’t have to wait long. Amazon’s Kindle for Mac software has landed on the Mac App Store and currently sits at the fourth-most downloaded free app.
Kindle for Mac has been available for a while, and it’s always been a free download. The significance of it showing up on the Mac App Store — and so soon — is it signals that major players are taking the Mac App Store seriously. Of course, being a free app, it costs Amazon virtually nothing to distribute it through the Mac App Store. And given that the Mac App Store will ship on all future Macs, it’s practically a no-brainer for Amazon to make the choice to put their Kindle app — and the nearly one million Kindle e-books — right in front of Mac users.
What remains to be seen is if other major developers like Microsoft and Adobe will also add their apps to the Mac App Store. If they do, they’ll be giving Apple a 30 percent cut of their profits. That is, unless Apple cuts a better deal with them to get their major apps on the store. What is even more intriguing to consider — and this is pure speculation on my part — is now that Kindle for Mac is so easily available to Mac users, might Apple see the Kindle app on the Mac App Store as a threat to iBooks on iOS? After all, the Kindle software beats iBooks if only because it allows you to read books across all your Apple devices; Apple’s iBooks currently excludes the Mac. Then again, I can’t image that a lot of people read e-books right on their computer screens anymore now that tablets offer a superior reading experience. Still, I’m sure there are some Apple laptop owners that would like to see Apple fill this last iBooks software void.
Kindle for Mac lands on the Mac App Store originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 11 Jan 2011 00:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The other day, I was innocently about to update a couple of apps on my iPhone when a message interrupted me asking — well, forcing me — to read an updated agreement for the iTunes store. No problem, I think to myself, until I scroll down and see that the agreement is 56, count ’em, 56 iPhone screens long.
Now I’m a pretty careful guy about reading the fine print, but I was mobile, and I either had to accept the agreement, or not get my updates.
Apple had another great idea. It would email me the agreement.
Huh? What’s the advantage? It will take just as long to read as an email as it does on the App Store page.
Apple is proud of making things easy for users. This Kafkaesque approach to getting users information about an updated agreement would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. Why not give the reader a chance to read a summary of the changes? After all, the only reason for the new agreement is that some changes were made.
Continue reading Got time to spare? Read the iTunes store agreement
Got time to spare? Read the iTunes store agreement originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 10 Jan 2011 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Like the idea of having your iPhone with you in your car but looking for an alternative to a Bluetooth transmitter or cabled hook-ups? You may want to check out the Oxygen Audio O Car stereo deck, which basically turns your iPhone itself into your car stereo. Brought to our attention by Gizmodo, the O Car deck allows users to control all the regular car stereo functions like volume and tuning along with their iTunes library, internet radio station apps, GPS navigation, Google maps — and anything else one uses their iPhone for. By clicking the iPhone into the dock/charger (for both landscape and portrait use), it becomes a slick part of your car’s dashboard. Sure beats the look of your regular old standard car stereo deck, that’s for sure.
Priced at US$349, the O Car has pre-amp outputs, FM/AM preset station options, puts out 4 X 55 watts of power (max) and supports the iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, and iPhone 4. While it is seemingly a little pricey, it’s a neat implementation for in-car iPhone use. I have been using my iPhone to listen to Pandora streaming in the car via a wired connection, but my phone always ends up somewhere on the passenger-side floor when I take a corner too fast. Having the ability to click it in place right on the dash would be a welcome addition to my car. Of course, I could just install an in-dash iPad for even more features, but my Mini Cooper doesn’t really have that kind of space.
[via Gizmodo]
Oxygen Audio’s O Car deck turns your iPhone into a car stereo originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 10 Jan 2011 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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On our way around last week’s CES ShowStoppers event (where we met up with none other than T-Pain), I was surprised to see that Real Media had a booth. They were big time back in the days when RealPlayer ruled Internet streaming, but these days, I haven’t seen much of them around. Turns out they’re still kicking, though — in addition to the streaming services, the company has been running an acquired arcade site called GameHouse (basically the successor to the old RealArcade), and that division has been releasing games on one of our favorite platforms: the iOS App Store.
Sure enough, the popular Sally’s Salon game is a GameHouse title, and Tiki Towers is another popular title from the company. We were shown two new iPad games from GameHouse — the first was called Bad Air Day, and it has a pretty nauseous premise. You play as a cartoon elevator bellhop in a hotel with a farting problem, and as your little guy cuts the cheese, it’s the player’s job to swipe the touchscreen and direct the green gas around. Aside from the bathroom premise, the game has some interesting almost physics-based gameplay, as you need to clear the gas past the customers and into a ceiling fan, or onto a fart fairy who actually likes the smell.
The other game we saw was Table Twister, a word game with rotating letter tiles on a table, that requires up to four players to drag the tiles off and create words as quickly as possible. Both were simple, but fun, and pretty polished — GameHouse seems to know what its doing after quite a bit of iOS experience.
“Games is a core business” for the company, the representative told us. As I said, I was surprised to see the old familiar Real logo (and those of us who counted on web streaming years ago can still see it spinning in our dreams and/or nightmares) at the show, but it’s interesting to know that the company is growing well on the iOS platform.
Real Media’s GameHouse division finds a home on the App Store originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 10 Jan 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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