Xposed Framework enables all kinds of customization allowing Android users to enhance the look or add features to their device, without touching the original system files or APKs. It uses modules that run on memory. Therefore, any changes made can be removed easily by simply disabling the modules and rebooting. No more flashing ROMs just to get a new feature to work.

(Image Source: Guilherme Dourad )

There are plenty of these modules floating around on the Web and in this post, we will be showing you 20 popular and must-have Xposed Modules you can try out. For the best experience, make sure to run all of the mods in this article on your stock rooted Android.

Recommended Reading: Easy Android ROMs Customization Through Xposed Framework

Xposed Additions. Comes with a configuration option to allow remapping of hardware button, reset the duration of long-press action, set device awake/sleep state when USB is plugged in/out.

GravityBox. Targeted for Android version 4.1+, this is an all-in-one module that provides a large range of mods.

Wanam Kit. Customize your Android 4.4 with features for status bars, sound, lock screen, system, phone, security and more.

BootManager. Choose the app you want to prevent running upon system startup using BootManager. This will help to reduce slow booting times.

XuiMod. Compilations of features ported from other ROMs packed into one mod.

Phab7 No-Reboot UI Switcher. Switch Android UI into Phone mode, Phablet mode or Tablet mode without rebooting. Also include screen-setting option to display in phone or tablet format.

DynamicNotifications. Light up Android device screen discreetly to show notifications without unlocking the lock screen.

Keepchat. Automatically save Snapchat image the moment it is opened, in Snapchat.

XPrivacy. Restrict access to certain app permissions to prevent leaking of privacy sensitive data.

Android Phone Vibrator. This will allow your Android phone to vibrate whenever a call is connected or disconnected upon calling.

XBlast Tools. Xblast Tools has a huge range of features for you to customize your Android device in any way that you want. The packed user interface lets users apply changes quickly.

Tinted Status Bar. Change status bar color to match the current active app. Can be edited manually too.

App Settings. This module allows you to change per-app generic settings such as DPI, rotation, app behavior, full-screen etc.

Maximize Widgets on Lockscreen. Expand lockscreen widgets when device unlocked for quick viewing of notifications.

MultiZone Clock. Display 2 clocks with different timezones right in the status bar.

Vine Downloader. Add a download option to download Vine videos using Vine official app.

Instagram Downloader. Add download features to the official Instagram app (to download Instagram photos and videos).

Youtube AdAway. Remove YouTube ads from the official Android YouTube app.

Network Speed indicator. Display download speeds in the status bar whenever the device is fetching data.

All Notification Expanded. Automatically expand all notifications for Android device running 4.1 and above.

It’s a designer’s worst nightmare. The perfect working relationship between you and and an awesome client suddenly turns sour. All their former praise and encouragement dries up, and they may even be threatening legal action.

What happened? Where did the relationship go so wrong, and what can you do to fix it? Today, we’re going to find out how designers can turn these types of situations around, and prevent them from happening in the first place.

Recommended Reading: Freelancers: How To Work Better With Your Clients

It’s Probably Your Fault

Even if you don’t think so, there’s an excellent chance that the relationship between you and this client could have been saved had you – not they – done something differently. This doesn’t mean you did it on purpose – no one goes into any working relationship expecting to treat the other person badly.

Your client came to you because they had a problem they genuinely wanted you to solve. And you took on the job because you genuinely believed you could help them. Accepting the blame at the outset can go a long way in keeping clients from getting defensive and resentful.

Damage Control

If you want to save the relationship with this client, you’re going to have to do some serious backtracking to figure out exactly what went wrong, and what you can do immediately to make it better. A sincere apology can work wonders, especially if the falling out was due to a simple misunderstanding or miscommunication. Even if you believe the client is at fault, it does you no good to become accusatory.

Arguing is never the best way to go about repairing a relationship. This goes for one’s personal as well as professional life. In most cases, even if you’re completely in the right, it’s far more effective to be heard than it is to be “right”.

Focusing on getting through to your client in a calm, reasonable manner is the key to getting them to actually listen to you. Getting argumentative will only make them more defensive, and they will close their ears to whatever you’re trying to communicate to them.

Read Also: Freelancers: Handle These 9 Client Types Like A Pro

Always Make Your Clients Look Good

If your client’s business looks bad as a result of your design, then you’ve failed as a designer. Even if the design itself is beautiful – if it conveys the wrong message to your client’s users, they won’t care about your design. They may even infer that there is something wrong with the product or service your client is providing, which can have devastating consequences both to your client and your own professional reputation.

If your client feels you’ve misrepresented them somehow, this can result in a very serious rift between you and them which will be difficult to repair completely. This is because the client has lost trust in you. Trust, as everyone knows, is one of the most vital keys to any relationship. It may be the most important, in fact.

If your client no longer trusts you, it can have serious repercussions on your ability to attract future clients, which will in turn threaten your entire livelihood as a freelance designer.

Read Also: How To Become A High-Demand Designer (And Get The Good Clients)

Liar, Liar, Pants On Fire

But what if you encounter a malicious client who, for whatever reason, is purposely spreading poisonous information about you to other potential clients? Perhaps they carry some kind of grudge against you, or they feel you mistreated them somehow. This can happen in the form of a poor review of your services, or a series of frantic warnings to their peers to avoid you at all costs.

If you encounter this kind of situation, it’s important again to keep your cool before proceeding. Relationships with clients of this type probably can never be repaired, and, if you’re truly innocent of the charges they level at you, it’s probably pointless to try.

There’s no telling why a client might develop a problem with you if you’ve done nothing wrong. However, just to be on the safe side, it’s probably a good idea to have another designer friend review your correspondence with this client. A fresh perspective can often point out areas you’ve missed, and can provide the key insight you need to set the record straight with your client.

Read Also: 5 Ways To Tame Difficult And Problematic Clients

What Do You Think?

Over to you. How do you handle client relationships that go awry? Are there specific techniques or methods you use to de-escalate a perilous situation, and repair potentially career-wrecking disagreements? Let us know in the comments.

In using many aspects of web design, some designers prefer using the same style or technique while others like to revamp their website design to reflect the latest new trend. Sometimes though, a site design uses a technique that is just right; no other method could give a similar or better result or impact.

We will be showcasing 15 site designs that utilized scrolling to keep their visitors engaged and stay on the page. Some of them tell wonderful stories, most of them are highly interactive but all of them give you great reason to keep scrolling. The screenshots here do not do the sites justice; be sure to click on the relevant links to view the beautiful animations/presentations in action on the respective websites.

Recommended Reading: Showcase Of Beautiful Movie Website Designs

NASA Prospect. Brought to you by a team of students designers at the University of South Dakota, NASA Prospect is an interactive story of two prospectors from Earth, Nicolas and Ema, who are trying to find remnants of human music contained in the golden recorders. The site’s catchy music changes as you scroll down.

Browser Awareness Day. Designed for both techies and average Internet users, Browser Awareness Day is a creative attempt to promote the importance of upgrading outdated browser versions for all Internet users.

Tinké. An interactive presentation for Tinké, a revolutionary gadget that allows you to easily monitor your fitness levels with your phone. All you need to know about Tinké can be found on this website.

MutantLabs. A website with design elements befitting a creative studio that dabbles with innovative games on multiple platforms.

Activate Drinks. A great parallax scrolling website with vivid colors and cool 3D visual effects. All that combine to produce an experience that transcends that of an ordinary product commercial.

Cascade Brewing Co. Another example of a website that makes good use of creative design elements to promote its products. Its products are laid out nicely with easy navigation options.

Inception Explained. Confused with what happened in Inception? If you still want to know, this website breaks down the movie plot in easily digestable chunks, going down level by level all the way to limbo. Yes, the colorful and attractive design elements and great use of scrolling really helps the storyline.

Bellroy: Slim Your Wallet. Bellroy, a wallet manufacturer, has a special page on their website called "Slim Your Wallet". It's full of quick tips on how to help your wallet "lose the bulge".

Carnation Group. A highly interactive website with cool flat designs befitting a company with more than 15 years’ worth of experience in providing digital creative solutions.

Captain Dash. Meet Captain Dash, a superhero who lives in the new world of intelligent marketing. Captain Dash has the superpowers to help his clients with an array of innovative marketing tools.

Smart USA. A cool website for one of the most eco-friendly line of cars on the market today.

Atlassian. A meaningful infographic on how people usually waste their time at work. Full of fun facts you probably don’t know and a funny timer that says how long you have wasted reading the infographic when you should be doing work.

These are Things. A lighthearted website with lots of cartoon illustrations, created by Jen Adrion and Omar Noory. Follow the cartoon girl (Jen) and cartoon boy (Omar) as they walk you through the different website sections and history behind their creative studio.

Distance to Mars. This cool website will give you a sense of how far Mars is from our planet. By imagining that Earth is 100 pixels wide, the website will take you through the Solar System at a speed of 7,000 pixels per second until you finally reach Mars, 428,000 pixels away.

World's Highest Website. This is more of a fun experiment, 19 kilometers long. It’s a CSS experiment designed to keep you scrolling down all day long (or just take the elevator).

Which of these websites do you like best and why? Feel free to let us know in the comments!

CSS is a very powerful stylesheet language that lets you take control of the look and feel of a site. It provides efficiency in design and updates. But coding from scratch is always tough. Thankfully, you can find many little helpers which usually cover a few features to make coding CSS easier.

Today, I want to introduce you to CSSMatic, a complete service which can automate the creation of some CSS3 features.

Developed by Alejandro Sánchez Blanes (founder of Freepik) and Joaquín Cuenca (Panoramio and Thumbr.it) CSSMatic allows you to generate complex and complicated code that are usually written manually. We will look at the four things CSSMatic can help automate for us: Gradients, Border Radius, Noise Texture and Box Shadow.

Recommended Reading: 5 Reasons Why CSS Could Be The Hardest Language Of All

1. Gradient Generator

Gradient Generator is the most complex, most complete and probably the most used tool in CSSMatic. It is used to generate multiple color gradients, from several available presets or completely from scratch, speaking of which, you might be interested in the following tutorials on how to:

• Create Linear Gradients With CSS3
• Create Circular And Elliptical Gradients With CSS3
• Create Repeating Gradients With CSS3

Customizing Your Gradient

For input option, there are 26 ready-to-use presets for you. When you click any of those presets, it will automatically load in the color slider and preview. Your custom gradient is stored as a new preset once you save.

Underneath the presets you can find a color slider with several control stops. Click any of those points to activate a slider to change the opacity. Click on any free top border to create a new stop point. The black stop points, up top, manipulate opacity and gradient location. The bottom points are used to alter gradient color and location.

(Note that there are also static sliders for you to change opacity and location under the slider.)

Clicking at any of the stop points will show a dialog box. Here, you can change the first or secondary color using these points or even add another color or two. To add a color, click on the bottom border and a new stop point will emerge.

On the color slider, you can see a reverse colors button, which can be used to exchange the first and secondary color of the gradient.

Gradient direction comes in various preferences as well: left to right, top to bottom, diagonally upward, diagonally downward and circular direction.

There are also settings to change hue, saturation or lightness via the slider or inputting the exact value. A reset button allows you to start from scratch. Once you are done customizing the gradient the way you want it, you can save it as a preset.

Gradient Output

With CSSMatic, you can choose how the gradient will be generated in code: either in CSS or SASS. There are several color formats you can change for your generated code, such as: hex, hsl, hsla, rgb and rgba. hsla and rgba make use of the alpha channel.

If you toggle the Comments option, it will add some comments to the code indicating which browser supports the gradient.

To make the gradient work well in IE9, an instruction is available to toggle for IE9 Support option. The instruction will have you add the “gradient” class to all your relevant elements and the following will override your HTML rule.

 <!--[if gte IE 9] <style type="text/css"> .gradient { filter: none; } </style> <![endif]--> 

2. Border Radius

The second features is the Border Radius which lets you manipulate the corners of a shape easily. You can use the slider or input a value. The value of 0px denotes a square. The higher the px the more circular your corners get. The corners can be altered all at once (All Corners) or one corner at a time.

If you want to add border, simply define border width or drag the bar. The border comes in various styles including: Solid, Dotted, Dashed, Double, Groove, Ridge, Inset, Outset, Inherit, Hidden or None. Border and background color can also be changed with ease.

3. Noise Texture

Noise Texture helps you create a noise pattern to your web layouts. You can control noise opacity, density as well as background and noise color. Toggling the "Export noise transparent" option will make the noise background transparent.

If you want to download the noise as an image, hit the Download Noise Texture button. You can also specify the image size you desire before downloading it.

4. Box Shadow

The last tool is the Box Shadow. To change the direction of the blur to horizontal or vertical, you can use the sliders on the left sidebar. The density and size of the blur are controlled by Blur and Spread Radius tools. You can choose the color of the box and its shadow.

To change the transparency or alpha channel of the shadow easily, use Color slider. And if you want to make the shadow inset or outline, just toggle the lowermost tool.

Read Also: 10 Creative Techniques Using CSS3 Box Shadow

For Border Radius, Noise Texture and Box Shadow, once you have created the final result that you want, copy the code out for your use.

Final Thought

CSSMatic is a good time-saver app and it makes your work a bit easier when it comes to coding in CSS. It is also a tool that works well for you, whether you are new to CSS or familiar with it. Thus far, CSSMatic lacks of documentation and instructions, especially the Gradient Generator. The first time you stumble upon it, you may need to play with the tools to figure them out. Let us know if you like it.