Change UI Accent Color Of iPhone Apps With Emphasize

Change UI Accent Color Of iPhone Apps With Emphasize:

I know a lot of people who aren’t really into Winterboard themes despite having a jailbroken iDevice. While theming can give your device a completely new look, it does come with a few drawbacks. For one thing, your device’s battery life might be negatively affected if the theme is a bit too flashy, and you also end up losing all the finesse that defines iOS. So, if you don’t have any serious issues with the way things appear in iOS by default, Emphasize might still manage to win you over. The tweak lets you change the color of basic UI elements in iOS. In iOS 6, the status bar changes color to match the current app’s theme. There have also been tweaks like WeatherBar in the past, which are aimed at making your iPhone’s screen appear more interesting and colorful. Emphasize goes one step further, and lets you choose the basic UI color of a third-party or system app.
  

Emphasize does not make any changes to the iOS UI automatically after its installation, as users have to configure the tweak through the menu it adds to the stock Settings app. The main page of the menu lists all the apps installed on your device, but the top option says ‘Default’. The default color saves you from the hassle of having to assign a separate color to each app. If you assign a particular color to an app via Emphasize, the default setting is overridden every time the said app is launched.

Apart from selecting ordinary colors like blue, pink, yellow, orange, etc., the tweak also enables users to apply the default iOS colors to apps that don’t ordinarily have it. The same color options show up when you tap the entry of any app within the Emphasize menu.
Emphasize won’t change the default colors in all sections of third-party apps, as it has been designed to replace only stock iOS colors. If an app uses those APIs though, the tweak makes the changes. Emphasize also kicks the status bar color-change into action, and the overall result is pretty neat.
Accentify is a paid tweak that has been released pretty recently as well, and serves roughly the same purpose. However, Emphasize is available for free and has been developed by the famous Ryan Petrich. The colors in Emphasize look pretty natural in iOS, and we highly recommend it to anyone who wants to spice up things without the help of Winterboard. To download Emphasize, look in the following repo of the Cydia store.
http://rpetri.ch/repo/
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MP3 Cover Finder Is A Complete Music Album Art Search Tool For Windows

MP3 Cover Finder Is A Complete Music Album Art Search Tool For Windows:

Having album cover art for your music library has many advantages. Besides the obvious aesthetic appeal, album covers that show up as thumbnail icons make is easier to find the right songs at the right time. If you are looking for a desktop application that lets you find free album covers of your favorite songs online, try Ashampoo MP3 Cover Finder. The application can instantly search and add covers to your songs from sources like Amazon, Google and iTunes. Speaking of iTunes, it also allows you to browse your iTunes library and insert missing covers with just a single click. The application sports a really gorgeous, minimal interface. Details to follow.


Ashampoo MP3 Cover Finder is in Beta, meaning the developers might still have to iron out some bugs before releasing the final version. You will need to activate the app via the beta code that you can get for free at the developer’s page. To get started, download the application using the link at the end of the post, click here and then enter your email in the proceeding webpage for requesting your license code.

After receiving the verification email in your inbox, click the activation link to receive the license code. Copy the code from here.

Now run the setup file, paste the code in the appropriate field when asked and click ‘Activate now’. That’s it – your beta is now all active and running as it should.

The app itself sports a fairly straightforward interface that presents everything in a simple fashion, making it easily understandable for most users. When launched, it shows a semi-opaque dashboard that enables you to load your songs in five distinct ways: a single song file, all song files in any folder, all songs in your ‘my music’ folder, via drag and drop, or songs from iTunes library. Being an avid iTunes user, I naturally found the iTunes integration extremely useful. The drag and drop feature is also great for quickly selecting songs you want to update cover art for. All you have to do is open the folder where your music is stored, and then drag and drop the required file(s) over the app.

The application automatically analyzes the tracks and searches for matched results from a multitude of sources. For instance, during testing I noticed it presented results from Amazon, Google, Discogs and iTunes. In addition, the application also enables you to choose between single and album covers for songs released as both singles and parts of albums. Once everything is set according to your preferences, click ‘Find Covers’ to start adding cover art to the songs you selected.

To sum it up, Ashampoo MP3 Cover Finder is one of the best Windows apps for downloading album covers art for your music collection conveniently. It works on Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8.
Download Ashampoo MP3 Cover Finder
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Easily Create & Conduct Dot Voting Polls Online With dotvoting.org

Easily Create & Conduct Dot Voting Polls Online With dotvoting.org:

We have all come across scenarios where we were asked to vote for or select our favorite item from a list, and we couldn’t decide which to choose because of having multiple favorites there. What if – in contrast to normal voting – each participant is given a fixed number of votes, and is able to freely assign them to to emphasize favor for one or more items according to their priority level? Dot Voting, of ‘dotmocracy’ fame, is a method used to do just that, by letting voters identify things of interest out of a set of topics. This concept now has a web service of its own that lets anyone conduct an online dot voting poll for free in a few easy steps. Participants don’t need to register for the service in order to cast their votes, and you can view and visualize the results any time during or after the poll.


The website has an appealing spartan layout, with distraction-free, to-the-point functionality. It is, in other words, the online version of a standard ballot box augmented with the concept of dot voting. You can set up your poll in a few simple steps, with no registration required!

The three ways you can interact with a Dot Voting is to start a new one, take part in one that’s already underway, or else view the results as voting progresses. Let’s first take a look at creating your own poll. Click ‘Set up or manage dot voting’. Here you can choose between beginning a new Dot Vote, or managing one or more Dot Votes you previously created by entering its code.

You’ll need to go through a few steps when creating your Dot Voting, specifying what type of poll you want. It can be an open poll where you broadly distribute an access code and participation is open for anyone, or a restricted one where you predetermine which individuals can participate. You also get to decide whether the results will be public for anyone with the access code to see, or restricted and visible only to you till you decide to publish them.

Before you’re ready to launch your poll, you need to fill in some basic information about yourself and the poll, and how long you want it to run. Next, enter at least two topics along with their brief descriptions, and define the number of dots (votes) available per participant. If you chose a restricted Dot Voting, you’ll need to enter a list of participants’ email addresses (up to 50). And…you’re done!
You’ll promptly receive a confirmation e-mail containing a link that you will need to click in order to activate this Dot Voting. This link is for you, the organizer, and it’s important to not share it with any participant. Once your Dot Voting has been activated, you’ll get a second e-mail with the public access token that can be forwarded to participants. If you selected a restricted vote, the web app will instead send individual e-mails with unique tokens to the participants automatically.
The participants will simply need to visit the Dot Voting website, click ‘Participate in a running dot voting’, enter the code, and get voting! In case of private polls, all they need to do is click the link they received in their mailbox to start voting.

After voting by assigning your available dots to the poll options any way you see fit, just click the green tick-mark that appears in order to save your results, which are then automatically submitted to the server. To view the results, the participants will need another access code, unless you’ve already restricted the results from being seen till you publish them first. You can also share the results over social media using the buttons available at the bottom.

The idea of dot voting is definitely a novel concept and can be useful to get more accurate poll results by letting participants weigh in on all the available options, rather than having to select just one. Also, comments on all Dot Votes are anonymous, providing a further insight on the feedback from the participants. Moreover, it’s not possible for an organizer to see which participant voted for what. So the next time you need to conduct a poll, give Dot Voting a shot by heading to the link provided below.
Visit Dot Voting
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