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Connor Leigh-Smith’s technology blog on web design; making money online; help, tips & hacking for iPods, iPhones & other gadgets… and much more!

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Tutorial – How to make a Userbar for signatures in Adobe Fireworks

[ No Comments ] Posted on 08.21.08 under Tutorials, comedy

I already made a tutorial on making user bars in Photoshop, but now here’s one for those people that prefer using Fireworks. Fireworks is a lot simpler than Photoshop, and I prefer it for doing easy tasks like this.

As I mentioned before, I’m using the CS3 (Creative Suite 3) on a Mac, so using the program might be a little different for you, but it will mostly be the same, and it’ll still be easy to follow.

Here we go…

Alright, first of all, open a new file in Fireworks (you should know how to do this )
Draw a rectangle using the Rectangle Tool, that measures 350 pixels by 20 pixels, like this:

Change it to whatever colour you want. I’ll use a gradient, so the rectangle fades from blue to green:

Here is the rectangle now

You need to apply an effect that puts faint diagonal lines across the rectangle. This makes it look more ‘glassy’, and is very easy to do.
Simply select the rectangle, and in the toolbar at the bottom, find the ‘Texture’ option, and change it to ‘Line-Diag 1′:

Now your rectangle will look a little bit more 3D:

To make it look glossy, you have to put a white oval with a gradient over the rectangle.
Make a circle the same size as the rectangle (350×20px), and fill it white (with no outline). Move it up, so that the bottom half of the oval covers the top half of the rectangle:

Now, change the gradient of the oval. Give it a linear gradient, and use the settings below:
Both ends need to be white, but one end is just more transparent than the other.

The part shown in red needs to have to Opacity changed to 10.

By now, your userbar should look something like this:

Using the Text tool, you can put some text into the user bar, and you can also add a small image if you like. It also looks better with an outline, which is added by making another rectangle the same size as the original, with no fill and a black outline.

Thanks for reading, and if you need any help, feel free to leave a comment

How to jailbreak an iPod Touch/iPhone with 2.0 Firmware

[ 10 Comments ] Posted on 08.03.08 under Tutorials

Ok, there are already a lot of articles online which tell you how to unlock your iPhone and jailbreak your iPhone/iPhone 3g/iPod Touch…
I have an iPod Touch and yesterday decided to upgrade it to 2.0 and try and jailbreak it. It was pretty easy, although a little bit more complicated than jailbreaking 1.1.4. Anyway, I decided to write my own article on jailbreaking it…

What you need:
An iPod Touch (or iPhone),
iTunes version 7.7.0 or later,
Pwnage Tool or WinPwn*,
The iPod Touch/iPhone 2.0 Firmware**

* If you have a Mac, you’ll need to download Pwnage Tool to jailbreak or unlock your iPod/iPhone.
You can download Pwnage Tool here.

If you’re using Windows, you need WinPwn instead: linky

** You need to download the original iPod/iPhone 2.0 Firmware, which the program will use to create a custom, jailbraked firmware file. This file will then be put onto your iPod in iTunes.
Download the iPod Touch Firmware here
And the iPhone firmware here

To jailbreak:

Ok, once you’ve downloaded the application you need, open it up, and you should have a window like this: (I’m using a Mac, so these screenshots will be from Pwnage Tool)

Choose iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPhone 3G

Now click on the Next button:

When you click on Next, the program will look for the firmware file you downloaded. It ill either find it itself, or a message will appear like this:

Click on ‘No’, and a message will appear at the top, telling you to change to Expert mode to locate the file yourself. Click on the ‘Expert mode’ button, and then on ‘Browse for IPSW…’:

Now, browse to the file you downloaded, and press ‘Open’
The application will load for a few seconds, and then will change to this:
You can change some settings if you want, but I just clicked on ‘Build’ to carry on with the jailbreak normally.

Click on 'Build' if you don't want to change any settings.

Once you’ve clicked on Build, a window will open, asking you to choose where to save your custom .ipsw file.
Choose a suitable path, and then press Save.

The application will spend quite a while making your custom file. Go and get a coffee or play some games on Kongregate or something while it loads
Halfway through, it will ask for your password, so just type that in, and it will carry on.

Once it had finished, you’ll have a window that looks like this:

Note: Make sure that form now on your iPod/iPhone is plugged in via USB to your computer!
If you haven’t jailbroken your iPod before with Pwnage Tool, click on ‘No’, and the application will either put your iPod/iPhone into restore mode itself, or will give you instructions on doing that yourself.
In my case, the restore didn’t work properly, so I did it myself. You can find instructions on entering restor mode here.

Once you have done this, you will be asked to close Pwnage Tool and open iTunes to restore your iPod with the custom file that was made.
Do as asked, and once in iTunes, go to your iPod menu and custom restore your iPod.
If you are using Windows, hold Shift and press the ‘Restore’ button.
If you’re using a Mac computer, hold down the ‘Alt’ key and press the ‘Restore’ button.

Hold down Shift or Alt and press 'Restore'

Browse to the custom-made .ipsw file, which will have a filename that ends in ‘Custom_Restore.ipsw’ and will be wherever you chose to save it in Pwnage Tool.

It will take quite a while for the iPod/iPhone to be restored, but iTunes will show you each process that is
going on, and at the end it will tell you when the restore process has been done.

Important!!: At the end, iTunes will ask you if you want to set up your iPod or iPhone as a new iPod, or keep the settings from before.
Make sure you choose to “Set up as a new iPhone”, or else the Mail app in your iPod won’t work properly!
After setting it up as a new iPod, just sync all your music and media back to it, and it will be the same as before anyway.

Once you have done all of this, you will have an app on your iPod/iPhone called Cydia
This is like the old Installer app, so you can use this to get new cool apps and stuff. However, there aren’t as many apps on Cydia yet, because the 2.0 firmware is still relatively new and the old apps haven’t been ported yet. Soon there will be more apps and stuff available.

You can get most of the apps you will want for free from th iTunes store now anyway – that is the beauty of having 2.0
Next I should be writing a tutorial on how to get the apps that cost money onto iTunes for free. But this requires the use of SSH and is a little more complicated.

Thanks for reading, and if you have any questions or have problems and need help, feel free to leave a comment. I had a few problems of my own while doing this, but in the end figured them out, so I might be able to help.

Note: I take no blame and am not responsible if anything happens to your iPod. If it becomes unusable, put it into restore mode and start again, or use iTunes to restore it. Please don’t complain if you do it wrong and are something happens. It won’t if you follow the guide correctly, and as I said, a restore will put things back to normal. Thanks.

Tutorial – How to make a Userbar for signatures in Photoshop

[ 8 Comments ] Posted on 07.31.08 under Tutorials

I’m sure you’ve seen these user bars in people’s signatures on some forums before, and you can download programs to make them easily.But this tutorial shows you how to make them from scratch, in Photoshop. I will also write a tutorial for making them in Adobe Fireworks soon.

I used Adobe Photoshop CS3 on a Mac for this tutorial, but each step will be pretty much the same in any version of Photoshop.

First, open a new file that measures 6×6 pixels, and has a transparent background. Then, using the pencil tool, zoom in so you can see what you’re doing, and draw this:
Each square is 1 pixel in size, and the image makes up a pattern that you will use for the Userbar.

Once you’ve drawn it, go to ‘Edit>Define pattern…‘ and choose a name for your pattern. Call it ‘diagonal lines’ or something that you’ll be able to remember it by.

Now, open a new file (you can close the other one if you want) that measures about 350×20 pixels.

Make a background in one layer, it can be any colour/colours you want. You should get something like this

After you’ve got a background you like, you need to apply the diagonal texture to it. Make a new layer, and select Pattern Stamp Tool. At the toolbar on the top of the page, where it says Pattern, select the pattern you made yourself (’diagonal lines’), and then ‘paint’ your image with it. you should get something like this:

Now, to make the ‘glassy’ effect, select the Ellipse tool, and make a white oval shape that fills the whole bar, like this:

Then move it up so that you can only see the bottom half of it, like this:

Now, go to the layers box, and select the layer that contains your oval. Go to ‘Opacity’ at the top and change the opacity to 30%.

Then, make some text on the right of the userbar. I used the font Visitor, at a size of 3pt, and white. You can use any font you want though.
To get the black outline around the text, double click on the layer the text is in, and go to ‘Stroke’ at the bottom, and change the settings to be like those below.