Download: Brushes for the iPhone ($4.99) | Brushes for the iPad ($7.99)

Davidkassan.com – A quick Apple ipad live fingerpainting demo that I streamed live from my Brooklyn studio on Monday June 21st. 2010, The model sat for 3 hours as I painted and answered questions on how I use the iPad and the Brushes app. Just thinking of creative uses for the iPad. (YouTube)

• Combining Photos and Vectors in Photoshop
  Thursday, July 8, 2010 at 10 PT
  Audience: Designers
  Learn how to easily combine illustrations with photography in this super creative session. Glean the secret to importing vectors into your document so you can experiment with them as backgrounds, artful embellishments, ornamental photo frames, and more — all without losing an ounce of quality. You’ll also learn how to use Photoshop’s vector Shape tools to create resizable and featherable masks in no time flat!
• Five Ways the iPad Can Entertain You
  Friday, July 9, 2010 at 10 PT
  Audience: iPad owners or potential iPad owners
  In this live, one-hour webcast, bestselling author J.D. Biersdorfer will guide us through the most entertaining apps on the iPad.
• 5 jQuery mistakes you’re probably making in your project
  Tuesday, July 13, 2010 at 10 PT
  Audience: Developers
  The ease and simplicity of jQuery’s API can be attributed to its success and shortcomings as new developers tackle larger and more complex tasks. Join us for this session as we walk through The Top 5 Mistakes jQuery Developers Can Make. We’ll look at lower level syntax issues up through architectural decisions with jQuery. This session will discuss selector performance, iterating with jQuery, event binding strategies, Ajax handling techniques and jQuery on public CDN’s for applications large and small. Gain a greater understanding of these core concepts and where developers can go wrong.
• TechTrends: ALA Annual 2010
  Tuesday, July 13, 11:30am PT
  Audience: Librarians
  Features an expert panel who’ll provide a look back at ALA Annual Conference from a library technology perspective. Our panel will analyze and discuss what they learned and what trends stood out at the conference.
• UCCSC 2010: No Limits!
  July 19 – 20
  Audience: People in IT, usually in the UC System
  This year, UCLA presents a unique hybrid of a live conference and a virtual conference. You can attend from anywhere, even your own office on your own campus, if you wish. There’s no registration limit. And you can attend as much or as little of the conference as you want. Those features brought us to the theme of No Limits.

If you find more, feel free to add them in the comments and I’ll update the post!

This will (1) speed up page loads because text loads faster than images and (2) make the page more accessible (screen readers won’t need to piece together alt tags of images; instead, it’ll just read the text directly off the page. (3) The more text you have on a page, the more SEO-friendly it is.

Lucky for us, adding Google fonts to our webpage is quite easy. All you need is to know a bit of CSS and HTML, and how to copy and paste!

Step 1: Select Font

Go to the Google font directory and choose a font you would like to use. In the sample below, I picked the “Lobster” font.

Step 2: Get the Code

If you like the font, tab over to “Get the Code.” From there, you will get a sample code like this:

<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Lobster' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'></link>

To include the code into your page, simply copy and paste this code into the header of your HTML page.

If you prefer to include the font it into your CSS stylesheet instead of your HTML header, you can use a code like this instead:

@import url("http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Lobster");

Step 3: Add some style!

Now that you have your font embedded onto your page, it’s time to give it some style. Create a CSS class and add in your font.

In this sample, I created a class called “prettyFont” and made it use the “Lobster” font to display, in huge red font. The alternative “arial and serif” font were added as a backup in case Google Font API was down; these web-safe fonts will display instead of Lobster in that case.

.prettyFont { font-family: 'Lobster', arial, serif; font-size: 3em; color:red; }

That’s pretty much it! Adding Google Fonts to your page is as simple as 1-2-3! You can also go even more wild and add shadows, shading, and anything else you can do with HTML + CSS.

For more information, see the Google Font API documentation. For more sample codes, check out Getting Started with Google Font API. And if you want to dive in deeper and add in italic, bold, and bold italic fonts, see their further reading section.

Another Google I/O has come and gone, and I had a fabulous and geeky time there. The great thing about Google I/O is that it’s geared toward developers, so the sessions are usually code-based or overviews of new APIs and developments over in Google HQ.

Of all the things I learned about this year at the conference, the most exciting was learning what direction HTML 5 is heading in. Last year, I learned about the new <video> and <canvas> tags, but there’s so much more now.

This year’s conference was much bigger than the previous years. The conference sold out quickly with 5000 attendees. There were sessions going on in every room on the second floor of Moscone West Hall. I was most impressed with the bigger Developer’s Sandbox. It was 4 or 5 times bigger than last year’s. It was great talking to companies and developers who are already implementing Google products into their products.

Although I was drained from attending all the sessions, I didn’t want to miss the Google After Party. It’s actually a very geeky event with food and robots! The MakerFaire was in town and they had some amazing displays, robots, and man-powered machines all over the party.. definitely something you don’t want to miss while at the conference.

There was a lot of fun and excitement at this year’s Google I/O. There were many amazing announcements as well, including the Web-M project (standard video codec), new features in Android Froyo including support of Flash, Google TV, and our fabulous gifts for attending — the Sprint HTC Evo 4g — a gorgeous smartphone running Android!

Below is a summary of all the sessions I attended. For more information on each session, please follow the links to the Google Waves. The official YouTube videos will be coming soon. For more information about the conference, see the official Google I/O 2010 website.

• Bringing Google to your Site
• Beyond Design: Creating positive User Experiences
• Developing with HTML 5
• Ignite Google I/O
• Google Analytics APIs: End to end
• Surf the Steam: Google Buzz, Location, and Social Gaming
• SEO Site Advice from the Experts
• Optimize every bit of your site serving and web pages with Page Speed
• HTML 5 Status Update

Summary of each Session

Bringing Google to your Site – In this session, we got many different examples on how we can add Google to our websites. Some examples were using custom searches (now with auto-completion), Google Feed API, Adsense with AJAX (new), SideWiki, Buzz API and Google Font API.

Beyond Design: Creating positive User Experiences – In this session, I learned that there are 7 principles for creating positive user experiences: 1) Be fast 2) Be yourself 3) Engage in conversations 4) Be willing to give up control 5) Be polite 6) Be prepared for failure 7) Be reliable. Examples of these principles were also talked about.

Developing with HTML 5 – This session was great since the presentation itself was written in all HTML 5 tags and coding. If you flip through the presentation, you can try out the bleeding edge features available for browsers in the near future. Some new HTML 5-specific tags and features are offline data storage, JS APIs, <head>, <hgroup>, <nav>, <section>, <article>, <aside>, <footer>, new form field types, <audio>, <video>, <canvas>, new CSS selectors and font support, transitions, and so much more. Run the presentation in a Chrome browser to see what lies ahead.

Ignite Google I/O – This session was a lot of fun. Ignite sessions capture geek cultures in a series of 5-minute speedy presentations. Each speaker gets 20 slides that auto-advances after 15 seconds. Topics were of various topics, from surviving the North Atlantic ocean and breaking world records, to our habits of searching on the internet, to playing battleships in a pond. It was very entertaining and super geeky.. and is best if you see the videos once they’re up.

Google Analytics APIs: End to end – This session was given by a UCR Alumni, Nick Mihailovski! This session demonstrated advance techniques of tracking statistics on your website using the Google Analytics API. For more information, see “What is Google Analytics”

Surf the Steam: Google Buzz, Location, and Social Gaming was not my favorite session since they spent a few minutes talking about the new Buzz Api, and then started stepping through code on how to implement the BuzzBingo game. The one thing I learned from this session was that there’s a new Buzz API — great if you want to create a social game!

SEO Site Advice from the Experts was an excellent session. It was a panel of SEO experts who went through a list of submitted sites and let us know what the site is doing right and wrong about SEO. They talked about how important it was to use text on your webpages, how meta keywords aren’t indexed by Google because people inflate them, branding techniques starting with the domain name, content needing to be above the fold, page ranks, 301 redirects, and much more.

Optimize every bit of your site serving and web pages with Page Speed – In this session, I learned about a new project called Page Speed. It’s an open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on. Developers can use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them. Showslow.com is a demo website that shows the speed of websites. For more information, see Page Speed.

HTML 5 Status Update – In this session, the Chrome team went over new features in HTML 5 we should keep an eye out for. Their demo of the new Gmail was fun and quite intuitive. Drag and drop attachments as if it was a desktop app. New areas in HTML 5 include Offline storage, Media, Networking, CSS3, and Platform Integration (drag and drop, notifications, geolocation).

Here are a few steps to get your iPad camera up and running!

1. On the iPad, download and install the “Camera-A” app. (99 cents)
2. On the iPhone, download and install the “Camera-B” app. It’s available for free.
3. Once you have them installed, turn bluetooth on both devices. (Do this by going into Settings-> General-> Bluetooth -> On)
4. Instead of Step 3, you can connect to the same wifi network also. (Do this by going into Settings -> Wi-Fi -> On -> Choose a network.)
5. Now launch Camera-A and Camera-B on the iPad and iPhone, respectively.
6. Camera-A on the iPad will show you whatever image Camera-B on the iPhone is pointing at.
7. When you’re happy with an image, click on the shutter button in the middle on the iPad and that image will be saved to both devices.

Camera-A and Camera-B are two very simple to use apps. The hardest part is remembering to turn on the bluetooth! Camera-A on the iPad also have options to zoom in on an object as well as a toggle to turn off saving to the iPhone.

Since the camera is on the iPhone, it’s much easier to maneuver it to point to the subject you want. Also keep in mind, the image will only be as good as the iPhone camera, so it may appear noisy on the iPad due to the higher resolution. There is also no auto-focus in the Camera-B (iPhone) app, so you can’t tap and focus on an area like with the default camera app.

Overall, if you want to quickly capture live photos onto your iPad, these two apps are great for that. They can’t be more simple! Camera-A and Camera-B are both available in the iTunes App store.

I can’t wait to attend WordCamp SF this weekend! If you love WordPress, you should be there! There’s an amazing line up of speakers and awesome WordPress schwag! It’s going to be a lot of geeky fun! I hope to see you there. Be sure to say hi if you run into me. :)

For more information, be sure to check out the official WordCamp SF 2010 website.

The Power of Green by Con Edison Here’s a beautifully made app that has great tips on how to save money in your home and office while going green! Tips include Weatherization, Heating, Cooling, Water Heating, Lighting, and Appliances. Included are 101 flashcard tips, 6 videos, and a checklist for you to keep your updates.

21st Office This app tests if you’re working in the 20th or 21st century! It asks you a series of questions in topics of Commuting, Business Meetings, and Reading. Then it examines your working habits and gives you a summary on what currently do, and how you can improve. There’s also a lot of great tips added by the community.

GoodGuide is an app that helps you find safe, healthy, and sustainable products while you shop. How does it work? Simply scan the barcode of the item with your phone and the product’s details will display. These details include ratings for health, environment, and their social responsibility.

The Lorax – Dr. Seuss is a wonderful ebook that’s perfect for Earth Day! It’s about a character who cuts down all the trees in the forest to make clothes. The Lorax warns him that his actions are hurting everyone, but he doesn’t listen. There’s a great moral to the story that will certainly engage young minds to help Mother Nature more. It’s a great story with beautiful animations and a narrator who reads to you!

iRecycle an excellent app to find your nearest recycling centers and green events. Simply type in the item you want to recycle and it will find the nearest location that would accept it. Links to green tips and articles from Earth911.com can also be reached within the app.

Attend this day symposium and learn about the latest trends, solutions and what customers want today in web development. You will gain valuable knowledge on how to manage projects, developing new ideas, the latest hardware and software tools and what’s new in delivery for the web. Whether you’ll be creating marketing, education, presentations, e-learning, e- mail campaigns, asset and content management applications you won’t want to miss this session! Whether you are new to web development, a graphic artist wanting to learn more, a marketing manager, production coordinator or an instructor, this is the symposium to see the latest in web technology.