There has been much said about Google’s decision to shut down Google Reader, and while for many people it is just another closure of a little used service, for lots of others it means losing a valuable source of news.
If you had come to rely on Google’s news reader to keep up to date with the latest news and posts from your favorite websites – including Web.AppStorm! – you could turn to Twitter to plug the gap. Here we’ll take a look at Twitter lists and show how they can be used as a viable alternative to RSS feeds.
The internet can be frustratingly slow at times. This could be because of the time of day, a problem with your connection, the popularity of the site you’re visiting, or badly written pages. It could also be because of the sheer volume of advertisement, page analytics and other elements packed into a site.
Disconnect is a free extension for Chrome that can be used to help not only speed up you online experience but also to make it more secure and private. These are pretty bold claims, so we thought we’d better take a look to see how it stands up.
There comes a time when we all must shuffle off this mortal coil. The people you leave behind will have a great deal to cope with, including dealing with vast amounts of paper work. But what about your digital footprint? Unless you have revealed your Google password to people close to you, no one will ever be able to access all of the data you have stored online.
The launch of Google’s Inactive Account Manager changes all that. It’s a little morbid to think about, but it enables you to decide what happen to your Google data when you’re no longer around to access. We thought we’d take a look.
How many photos do you have littered across various devices and services? The ease with which we can now snap photos means that most of us now have thousands of images dotted across numerous online services.
Sick of having to jump from one site to another just to find the image you’re looking for? Trovebox is here to help. Consolidation is the order of the day as this is a service that enables you to pull all of your images into one place for ease of access.
Apps that enable you to send contact information and files from one device to another have been available for years now, but when it comes to sharing websites, email is often the best bet. Yup: if you want to open the page you’re looking at on your computer in your phone’s browser, often the easiest way to move the link around is emailing yourself. That just doesn’t seem right.
While many web browsers now offer the option of syncing open tab sessions between computers, the way synchronization has been implemented is not always ideal since they only work with other versions of the same browser. What if you use Chrome on your computer and Safari on your mobile devices?
This is where SendTab can help, making it possible to push tabs from one browser to another, on any device. Let’s see if it holds up to its promise.
As anyone working in the record industry will attest, virtually all music is now consumed digitally. There is a massive market for digital downloads, but there is also a huge number of music fans who get their fix through streaming sources.
Songdrop is a free service that can be used to access music from all of your favorie streaming sites in one place – no more jumping from site to site. Let’s take a look and see how it can simplify listening to the music you love online.
Anyone working with two or more computers, a phone and a tablet will know just how useful Google syncing can be. By signing into your account you can access the same information – emails, contacts, tasks and more – on multiple devices.
But what about if you have more than one Gmail account and want to share contacts between them? Forget manually copying and pasting, or re-typing out scores of names and address. Soocial is a service that can do the hard work for you.
These days, there seems to be countless services that can be used to host and share files. The likes of Dropbox, Box and Google Drive are understandably popular, but they all have limitations of one form or another. There’s hosts of smaller, less popular apps, but then you risk whether or not they’ll be around forever.
If you need a more flexible solution, ownCloud could be just what you’re looking for, giving you the chance to easily host and access your files from other computers. You can run it on your own server, or host it on a number of hosting services easily. It just might be the Dropbox alternate you’ve been needing.
Imagine that you were kidnapped by persons unknown. Imagine you were dropped off somewhere completely alien to you – you could be anywhere in the world. You don’t know who captured you, and you don’t know where you are, but you know you’re being followed. This is the basic premise for Pursued, an ambitious online game that makes use of Google Maps as a game world rather than a tool for working out directions.
We’re big fans of conundrums here at Web.AppStorm, so we thought we’d take a look at this intriguing puzzler.
Anyone who has to write at any length at their computer will know that it’s all too easy to get distracted. Using many modern word processors is akin to working in a cartoon with endless brightly colors buttons vying for attention, and when you add in the risk of being drawn to browsing the web in the name of “research”, it’s a wonder any words ever get written.
Writer is a distraction-free online word processor that has been designed to make it easier to focus on what you need to get down on the page. It’s like an online version of the popular Mac app WriteRoom, and might be just what you need to help you stay focused when writing online.
