5 Ways to Improve Your Creative Process

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1. Set goals that make sense to you

We often look to what’s come before us when we set our goals. Instead, ask yourself “What do I want to achieve?” By setting goals that reflect who you are, you’ll be able to stop comparing your progress and start simply creating. Don’t feel like to succeed there is a right or a wrong way to do something. Art, writing and other forms of creativity are highly personal. When you’re truly interested in your goal, reaching it will be easier and more enjoyable.

2. Consider changing your setting

When you imagined yourself working effortlessly on a project earlier, did you see yourself in a quiet library, or a private office? Consider the space you work in, but be open minded – This paper published in the Journal of Consumer Research showed that exposing subjects to “a moderate…level of ambient noise enhances performance on creative tasks” when compared to a quiet environment. You don’t have to leave the house, but try adjusting your environment when you’re sitting down to be creative. Light a candle or two, put on some music or let your favorite movie play in the background.

3. Use tools that suit you

If you loved to paint with a roller, why would you use a brush? If you wanted to enjoy yourself, you would choose the tool you liked and being efficient wouldn’t be a factor.

An effortless creative process is unique to you, so try a few things and stick with what feels the most natural. You’ll work better and faster if you allow yourself to feel confident, not uncomfortable.

4. Dedicate your time to being creative

If you don’t start, you won’t ever finish. Even if you’re not a planning person, you’ll find that defining how you use the time allotted to you each day makes getting into a “groove” much easier. You don’t have to rush either. Remember, an hour of creativity could be one sitting or 4 short bursts of 15 minutes each. What matters is that you dedicate the time to being creative.

5. Gather your resources in advance

Having everything you anticipate needing on hand before you begin will reduce friction and make creativity easier. If you’ll need books or articles, gather them up before you start. If you’re planning on using images, gather them up and put them in one place. Save all your links in one text document. If all you’ll use is your imagination, gather up the tools ahead of time, whether it’s a pencil and paper or just a cup of tea.

Source: by 

iOS 7 GUI PSD Now Available

Design studio Teehan+Lax has released an updated version of its iPhone PSD template for app designers that reflects the new look and feel of iOS 7, this template will help you to visualize newest features designed specially for iOS 7. Designers looking to mock up new versions of their apps with Apple’s new visual language should take a look.

With these files you are able to visualize your own custom desktop icons and apps. This kit is also irreplaceable for adaptation of iPhone 5 design for newest version of iOS 7.

The package includes all of the major UI elements including buttons, stock icons and more drawn as individual vectors, making for easy scaling and tweaking. It’s well organized into groups in Photoshop and should make for a handy update for those looking to quickly get apps looking great on iOS 7.

- iPhone 5 (white and black)
- Retina elements
- Lots of sample screens
- Everything

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Apple’s New Mac Pro: “This is a revolution”

New Mac Pro specifications

This is where things get impressive. Let’s take a look at the Mac Pro’s components:

NEW MAC PRO: PROCESSORS

The new Mac Pro is built around new generation Intel Xeon E5 Ivy Bridge processors. This Intel chip boasts up to 12 cores. It offers double the CPU performance of the current generation of Xeon processors, according to Intel.

NEW MAC PRO: GRAPHICS

New Mac ProYou’ll also get third-generation PCI Express architecture, but the graphics cards you use require a unique design to fit in the system and properly marry its components to the triangular unified thermal core at the centre of the new Mac Pro. So GPU upgradability is in Apple’s hands. Those graphics boards will be dual AMD FirePro workstation-class GPUs, able to run up to three 4K displays at once.

NEW MAC PRO: MEMORY

That lack of ability to upgrade is not replicated in the case of RAM. The Mac Pro will use fast RAM - 1.866MHz ECC DDR3 RAM to be exact - and it is upgradable. Apple has stuck with the traditional RAM slots, and provides four slots for adding more RAM modules to the system. OS X Mavericks supports addressing up to 128GB of RAM, so in principle at least you could add up to that much RAM. The likelihood is that space issues will preclude this, of course.

NEW MAC PRO: STORAGE

The Mac Pro eschews HDDs in favour of SSDs. Apple is outfitting the new Mac Pro with PCIe-based flash memory. There’s no mention yet of what storage options will be offered, and expect the drives used to be bespoke Apple storage devices, again limiting your potential to upgrade. Finally, don’t expect an optical drive in the Mac Pro.

NEW MAC PRO: PORTS

The new Mac Pro will four USB 3.0 ports, six Thunderbolt 2 ports, two Gigabit Ethernet ports and HDMI out. But expect a relative lack of expansion slots - the previous Mac Pro had a pair of 16-lane PCI Express 2.0 slots and two 4-lane PCI Express 2.0 slots. But Apple is expecting Mac Pro users to daisychain expansion devices via Thunderbolt.

New Mac Pro design

Mac Pro designThis we can tell you all about. The new Mac Pro is a stunning looking device, differing dramatically from the now discontinued Mac Pro’s aluminium tower design (a design that is, after all, 10 years old). The new Mac Pro has a black, cylindrical design. It looks like a sleek tube, to be frank. A sleek, tiny tube: at just over 25cm tall it is around one eighth of the size of the previous Mac Pro.

The cylindrical design is not just for show, however. Apple says that it represents a ‘unified thermal core’ that will help with cooling. Critical on a power PC. And the smaller size and included carrying handle means the new Mac Pro is relatively easy to carry around. This could prove to be a key differentiator in a world in which some form of portability is increasingly important.

The Mac Pro also has a motion sensor - when you turn it around the I/O panel on the back lights up.

Read more: http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/buying-advice/desktop-pc/3452029/mac-pro-release-date-specs-price/#ixzz2VvWEG2MO

A look at iOS 7, the biggest change to iOS since the introduction of the iPhone #WWDC

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Control Center

New in iOS 7 is a Control Center. It’s an area that can be activated from within any app that brings control to Wi-Fi, brightness and other frequently accessed settings.

From Control Center you can access a flashlight, start a song, toggle AirPlay and more.

Multitasking

iOS 7 will bring better multitasking and background processing to all apps. It will monitor which apps you use frequently to help determine which ones need more full-functioning multitasking. When apps send push notifications, for instance, the phone will know to start to give that app background processing so that it will work more quickly and intuitively.

Apple has taken a major cue from webOS (RIP) and added full-previews of running apps for multitasking. No more tiny icons!

Safari

Safari for iOS 7 has a new look and feel — more similar to Chrome on iOS, we must say — including a new tabbed view. It also integrates with iCloud Keychain for password management.

The unified search menu, which was removed with iOS 3.0, is back. There is also access to shared links and the reading list improvements shown off with OS X Mavericks.

Tabs are now 3D and fully integrated with iCloud tabs. Users are no longer limited to eight tabs (hooray) and tabs can be reordered or removed with a swipe.

AirDrop

Apple is bringing OS X’s AirDrop to iOS. AirDrop will let users share photos or files peer-to-peer with other iOS users who are nearby. “No bumping required.”

AirDrop will only work on iOS devices running the latest wireless chipsets, meaning the iPhone 5, fourth generation iPad, iPad mini, and the latest iPod touch.

Photos and Camera

The Camera and Photo apps received a major overhaul. Not only is it easier to manage large numbers of photographs, users can now create Shared Photostreams — think group albums — into which other users can post photos as well as share with others.

Users can also share video with iCloud Photostreams in iOS 7.

Visually, the app looks similar to the latest Flickr redesign, is less focused on 4 x 4 grids of thumbnails, and offers users a better look at their photographs.

Siri

Siri has a new look and a new voice. Users can choose between male and female voices for Siri. Siri is also getting smarter: It will now pull in data from Twitter, Wikipedia and Bing.

iOS in the Car

Apple is going to bring iOS to the dashboard of your car. Support for iOS in the car will be coming to Honda, Mercedes, Nissan, Chevy, Kia, Volvo, Acura and others.

New App Store

The App Store has a new design and will show apps that are popular nearby, as well as apps popular with your friends. The best part? Your apps now update automatically.

Music and iTunes Radio

The Music app gets the same visual overhaul as the rest of the system but the big feature with music and iOS 7 is iTunes Radio. Think of it as a hybrid between Pandora and Songza, built into iOS.

Users can listen to theme-centric playlists or stations (“Songs for summer”) or listen to artist-centric stations. And, like Last.fm, iTunes Radio keeps track of all the stuff you listen to across iTunes, Apple TV and on iOS 7.

It’s free with ads, though iTunes Match subscribers get it free without ads.

More

  • Notification Sync

  • Audio-only Facetime

  • Weibo Integration in China

  • Per-app VPN for Enterprise

Plus more than 1500 APIs, support for third-party game controllers, new multitasking APIs.

Apple is also introducing a feature called Activation Lock, which will prevent a thieves from activating your iPhone on another network unless they know your iCloud password.

Coming This Fall

Developers will have access to iOS 7 on Monday and it will hit iOS devices this fall.