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Amazon makes it easy to share the Alexa skills you create
In April, Amazon introduced Alexa Skill Blueprints, a way for anyone to customize certain Alexa skills without having to code. Now, the company has made it easier to share those skills with others. The growing list of templates include blueprints for trivia, dad jokes, flashcards and info for your babysitter or pet sitter. Just fill in the templates with the information you want to include and the new skill will be available on every Alexa-enabled device on your account.
Apple will allow apps built from templates
Apple has revised its App Store guidelines to allow apps built using templates and other app-generation services. The decision -- a one-eighty on its previous policy that banned such apps in the name of preserving quality -- is supposed to make it easier for small businesses and non-profits to offer their own apps without the expense or expertise of building their own. But it's Apple, so there are of course some caveats.
Adobe's new iPad app helps with presentations, newsletters and more
Squarespace offers folks who are less web savvy the ability to create a decent-looking website in minutes. Adobe is looking to do something similar for reports, newsletters and other web content with Slate. The new iPad app offers preset layouts with a library of fonts, colors and animations that allow students, teachers and business folks the tools needed to easily develop a polished presentation. As you might expect, you're able to pull in images to complete the project, overlaying titles and captions as needed. The pre-built themes are designed to look good on the desktop and mobile devices, with buttons that'll let eager readers do things like donate or register. Published work ends up as a sharable web link, text message, email or embedded on a blog or website.
Landmark Live showcases tool and template upgrades, offers sneak peek of water
As announced in the latest livestream, Landmark's weekly beta update was pushed out until Thursday in order to get new systems ready to deploy into the game. (Sadly, none of them includes water, although players did get a sneak peak of it!) Today, players will be able to utilize the new tool upgrading system, the new detailed template interface, and the claim gallery. The tool upgrade system adds a level of depth to crafting, allowing players to increase the stats of all tools made after the update launches. Unlike the initial craft that has elements of RNG dictating the final product, the upgrade system shows players exactly how the tool will be altered. The template interface provides many more details, including which and how many materials are needed for each build and which props are involved, and even it provides a screenshot for ease of reference. Also utilizing the screenshot feature is the new gallery section of the showcase; in or out of game, players will be able to search and view claims by tag or owner name, see where they are located, and upvote them. If you missed the special sneak peek of the first phase of water (oceans) or you want to hear even more details about the impending update or other tidbits (like upcoming changes to the EQ Worlds app, including Landmark-themed games and exclusive Jeremy Soule music), you can watch the entire livestream below.
Google Docs adds 450 fonts and 60 templates, sadly includes Comic Sans
Google Docs has lagged behind offline apps in the number of fonts and pre-made layouts to choose from, but that's just changed with a much larger catalog for both. More than 60 new templates and 450 fonts are now on tap to use in your presentations and reports. This comes on top of a handful of other recent improvements, such as Google Drive support, searching the Life Photo archive and boosts to accessibility and spreadsheet layouts. Apps Script gets both a Google Drive tie-in and new publishing control, too. Be forewarned: Comic Sans is one of the new font options, and it's clearly not an April Fools' gag.
iPhone 4 Photoshop file available for app development
Developers -- are you in need of a really high resolution mockup of the iPhone 4/4S Retina display GUI elements to help the design of your app? Geoff Teehan and his team created a Photoshop file (.PSD) to help you mock up those apps. According to Teehan, "The file is huge, both in file size (62.7MB) and dimension (4074 x 2986). You'll need to work at 25% – 50% even on the largest screens to roughly grab elements before zooming into 100% for the actual work." Teehan mentions that as they were developing the template, they noticed that Apple had expended a lot of effort on determining how each UI element would be translated to the 640 x 960 pixel native resolution of the iPhone Retina display. "What were single pixel elements are now two or three pixels thick and effects are exaggerated to become visible," says Teehan. The file is free for the download, but Teehan asks for anyone using the file to "Pay Whatcha Like." That seems to be a fair and useful pricing scheme. [Via Macgasm]
Adorable Valentine's Day card templates from PaperRockScisorz
Despite previous indications to the contrary, the Joystiq Qrew is actually pretty keen on Valentine's Day. We're all hopeless romantics, but you don't need to be as in love with being in love as we are to recognize how precious, touching and clever these gaming themed Valentine's Day card templates are.Made by Etsy user PaperRockScisorz and available at her shop, these print-your-own card templates feature Pokemon, Dr. Mario, Sonic, Zelda and Portal motifs with cutesy sayings and pixel hearts at $2.75 a pop. It's an easy and inexpensive way to show your significant other that you care, assuming you're lucky enough to share your life with a person that loves games as much as you do. If you're not that lucky, well, maybe get them a gift card or something. Single people are advised to dress up like a member of their preferred gender and have a romantic candle-lit dinner with themselves in a mirror. Ain't love grand?
New program makes it easier to turn your computer into a conversational chatterbox
We've already seen how awkward computers can be when they try to speak like humans, but researchers from North Carolina State and Georgia Tech have now developed a program that could make it easier to show them how it's done. Their approach, outlined in a recently published paper, would allow developers to create natural language generation (NLG) systems twice as fast as currently possible. NLG technology is used in a wide array of applications (including video games and customer service centers), but producing these systems has traditionally required developers to enter massive amounts of data, vocabulary and templates -- rules that computers use to develop coherent sentences. Lead author Karthik Narayan and his team, however, have created a program capable of learning how to use these templates on its own, thereby requiring developers to input only basic information about any given topic of conversation. As it learns how to speak, the software can also make automatic suggestions about which information should be added to its database, based on the conversation at hand. Narayan and his colleagues will present their study at this year's Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment conference in October, but you can dig through it for yourself, at the link below.
Apple iAds Producer helps you produce iAds for iOS devices
We know how it is, you want to be a hotshot developer, but all that coding sounds like daunting work. Never mind, Apple's got your back with its new iAds producer, which automates all the HTML5 and CSS3 stuff into the background and leaves you to focus on the crucial task of picking out templates and components for your perfect iAd. To be fair to this new dev tool, it does more than merely dumb down the design process. It also includes "sophisticated" JavaScript editing and debugging, a built-in simulator for testing your creation, and a project validator that checks your code for common errors. Hit the source link to give it a try.
New Bento templates aimed at students
It may seem like odd timing; with the US about to head into the unofficial pre-summer period with the imminent Memorial Day long weekend, the last thing on most students' minds is getting organized for next year. Nevertheless, today Filemaker is setting the Bento 3 Student Survival Kit loose upon the world. The linked set of free Bento templates includes layouts for organizing lecture notes, courses, group projects, special events and job searches (that last one seems timely, now that I think about it). The Survival Kit is part of the Bento Template Exchange, which offers scores of specialized layouts like the Family Organizer pack and the Mail Management tool. Bento's clean integration with the Mac OS X personal information apps means that students won't have to enter contact information twice, and they can track deadlines and test schedules in iCal with ease. The templates also allow for synchronization with the iPhone and iPad versions of Bento. Downloading the Student Survival Kit does no good, of course, without a copy of the Bento 3 database app; Filemaker is offering a 30-day trial copy to test out the kit, and the software retails for US$49 after that, or $99 for a family pack. It requires Mac OS X 10.6 or 10.5.7 and runs on both PPC and Intel machines.
Papercraft NES and Dreamcast cost less, play just as many cutting edge games
Finally, your lovingly prepared SNES model is getting some well-heeled new friends to hang out with. Cubeecraft is a website wholly dedicated to the paper-based recreation of cultural icons, and it's prepared a pair of exquisitely detailed clones of the NES and Dreamcast. While some such projects might require patience and finesse, putting together the above templates doesn't even ask for any glue or tape. So what are you waiting for, grab your scissors and run to the links below for full 150dpi printouts -- just be sure to make the time for some imaginary Contra action afterwards.[Via Technabob]Read - NES cutoutRead - DC cutout
All the World's a Stage: How to be a death knight
When you decide to roleplay, a whole new world of imagination opens up to you -- soon you realize that all the World of Warcraft is a stage, and all the orcs and humans merely players.Last week, we took a look at how roleplaying a death knight will be different from roleplaying other classes, because death knights come pre-packaged with elements of a backstory for you to flesh out: they have, for whatever reason, at one time joined forces with the Lich King, learned from him how to be a death knight, and now are breaking free of his influence and striking out against him.As Medeni pointed out in her comments, however, this can potentially lead to a kind of unlikable "celebrity in rehab" type of personality. Imagine, if you will, the death knight known as Marisoo: formerly a paladin of the Light, she sought to destroy the Scourge that plagued her homeland of Lordaeron, but eventually, as she was consumed with vengeance and hatred, she joined the Lich King instead of destroying him. Having learned to turn corpses into slavering ghouls and call forth armies of the undead, she eventually thought better of the whole "wickedly destroy all life" thing and decided to destroy the Lich King after all, only this time she would use his own power against him! Muahaha.As you can see, there are some pretty obvious flaws in this idea. First of all, the first half of it is almost a direct copy of Arthas' own tale, and, while I can certainly appreciate the power of that story, and the possibility that other paladins could have gone through something similar, roleplayers who want to play a death knight character must realize that it's going to get old fast. Just as death knights aren't just human paladins, we can't all go around copying Arthas, brooding on how moody and wicked we've become. We have to come up with new ideas that fit the death knight mould.
TUAW Tip: Stationery Pad option makes a template of any file
The Finder's Get Info window (View > Get Info or cmd-i) is one of those unsung heroes of Mac OS X computing. It houses a lot of great options, and Stationery Pad is one of them. If you have any kind of workflow where you need to repeatedly modify some sort of a file template, checking this option in any file's Get Info window will tell its parent application to open a copy of it by default, ensuring that the original file remains unedited. While some applications that manage files for you can offer similar functionality, this is a great option for anyone who, for example, use Word docs as contract templates, or begins with a basic pre-built file for various Photoshop or hand-coding CSS/PHP freelance work. You can simply build the file any way you like, save it and check this box in Get Info to tell any app you open it with to open a copy instead of the original. Easy breezy file templates, with no AppleScripts or plugins required.
