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Google Reader is essentially a walking skeleton now, with its July 1st death looming in the horizon. I used to use Google Reader daily to check up on the news for the world of Mac and Web apps, but finally switched away to Fever after the announcement that Google is killing Reader.
We’ve been looking at tons of different RSS readers here at Web.AppStorm lately, trying to help you find the best app for your news reading needs. But, I was wondering how many of you actually used Google Reader to start with. Our stats show that most of you subscribe to our RSS feed in Google Reader, but do you actually use it normally? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!
Have you ever assigned a task to someone and then forgotten to follow up with them? Or have you ever given an important job to someone, only to find that when it should be done, they either forgot or had not even started? With this week’s sponsor, Bitrix24, that can be a thing of the past.
Bitrix24 gives you all the tools you need to push your team to excel, inside one app. It’s your own customized social intranet, complete with everything you could need: project management, document collaboration, a full-featured CRM, time management, and work reports. You can even use Bitrix24 on the go with its mobile apps, sync files to your desktop, design reports that include just what you need, and manage time with Gantt charts. And more. So much more. Check out the video below to see what Bitrix24 can bring to the table for your team.
We found it to be a great tool in our recent review of Bitrix24, and are sure you’re bound to love it as well.
Get Started With Bitrix24
The best thing is, you can get started with Bitrix24 for free with up to 12 users! Then, when you need more features and want to get your whole team using Bitrix24, you can upgrade starting at $99/month. That’ll give you the extra space you need for more employees, and the features to handle working with a larger team.
We’ve just closed our giveaway, and for once, everyone that entered won! Congrats! 
Need a great way to record your screen and share the videos with others? The new web app Screenbird just might be what you’ve been needing.
Screenbird lets you record anything you see on your screen — your whole screen or just part of it — right from your browser, on Windows, OS X, or Linux. You can then share your videos online through Screenbird or your YouTube account. Screenboard even lets you capture audio, pause and redo parts of your recording, and more. It’s a great solution for recording your screen and sharing it with the world, and should be a handy tool for, say, creating training courses or presentations, or just showing off your Minecraft world.
Screenbird is free to get started, but if you want to record longer videos, keep your videos indefinitely, or collaborate with others on your videos, you’ll need a pro account starting at $9/month. Except… we’ve got 10 one-year pro accounts for free to giveaway to our readers! Just leave a comment below, letting us know how you plan to put your Screenbird account to use to enter our giveaway. Then, you can share the giveaway on your favorite social network, and add an extra comment here with a link to your post about our giveaway for an extra entry.
Hurry and get your entries in; we’ll be closing our giveaway on April 3rd, 2013!
Envato staff or those who have written more than two articles or tutorials for AppStorm are ineligible to enter.
There’s the Windows Store in Windows 8 and Windows Phone, the App Store in OS X and iOS, and Google Play on Android. Everyone knows where to install apps these days, and it usually doesn’t entail browsing the internet to find an installer. You check the app store on your platform, find what you want, and install. Easy.
On the web, it’s not quite so easy … unless you use the Chrome Web Store. The app store of sorts built into Google’s browser, the Chrome Web Store gives you an easy place to find web apps that’ll work on any computer from your browser. Of course, they’ll only be “installable” in Chrome, but usually they’re real web apps that you could use in any browser, so it gives you a great place to find web apps no matter what browser you prefer to use.
Do you use the Chrome Web Store to find new web apps? Or do you just rely on reviews and recommendations from our site and others for new web apps to try out? We’d love to hear your thoughts about the Chrome Web Store in the comments below!
It’s pretty clear that we’re moving to become a hyper-connected society. It’s no longer just activities like email and online gaming that are enhanced, or obstructed, by your connection. Instead, we’re increasing our reliance on apps and services for video, banking and even reading a book.
But what happens when the web breaks? When you have that power outage or, worse, when the server farm thousands of miles away does? Outages are a big obstruction to becoming a completely online society and it’s something we’re going to take a look at today. (more…)
Looking for a better way to schedule appointments online? Acuity Scheduling, our sponsor this week, is a great tool for that. It’s a online appointment scheduling software to help you grow your business and eliminate no-shows.
Acuity lets your business accept appointments online 24/7. You can create custom intake forms for clients to complete in advance of appointments and have clients pay by credit card online, saving time and letting you focus on your business. It also works great for managing global businesses, with automatic time zone conversion and support for many currencies.
It’ll help you do the work you do best, without having to worry about getting your appointments scheduled or paid for.
Go Get It!
Ready to get started taking the hassle out of appointments? You can get started with Acuity Scheduling for free with one schedule, then get more features, schedules, and more starting at $10/month.
Have you ever wanted to integrate Twitter in real-time in your presentations, or perhaps on a team monitor screen in your office? There’s so many ways you can put the live data from Twitter to use for your events and more, if only you have a simple and elegant way to display it. That’s what LiveTweetApp, our sponsor this week, brings to the table.
LiveTweetApp helps you search, moderate and display tweets on a big screen during an event. Tweets get directly displayed as a Twitter Wall either one a time, or as a poster, where tweets sit next to each other. Your live tweet display fits into each event with the customization of colors and logo.
However, we think automatic Twitter Walls aren’t suitable for every context. That’s where moderation comes in. LiveTweetApp includes this important feature so you can easily go through each aggregated tweet and select the ones you want to approve or reject. Or, you can create automated walls that show new tweets automatically, unmoderated. It’s your choice, so your LiveTweetApp tweet wall will work the way you want.
Track Live Tweets Yourself!
Ready to create your own Live Tweet wall? You can create a LiveTweetApp account for free and start grabbing tweets from many hashtags, mentions and users as you like and can display up 30 at the same time. Then, you can upgrade your account for 72 hours at a time starting at 19€ so you’ll just pay for premium features when you’re doing an event, or you can get a monthly account.
Best of all, if you’ve tried out LiveTweetApp and want to get a pro pack, you can get 50% off the pro pack by entering the coupon code APPSTORM this week. And hurry: the deal is only good for the first 500 users.
I woke up this morning, grabbed my iPhone to check the news in Reeder — which is powered by my Google Reader account — only to find at the very top that Google is shutting down Google Reader, for good, on July 1, 2013. They said it’s because too few people use it, which is rather ironic since most of us heard the news via articles synced in Google Reader.
Of course, it’s been a rumor for some time that Google Reader might be the next Google service to hit the chopping block, but it’s not just a rumor this time. Rather, is the first thing the Google Reader team has posted on their blog since 2011. That should, in itself, tell part of the story. And rather than beating around the bush about it being shut down, Google Reader will now warn you itself, rather starkly, that it’s going away. It’s really, really real this time.
That’s terrible news, since most RSS apps for desktops and phones are powered by Google Reader, and Google’s service was so popular that it practically pushed all alternatives out of the market. FeedDemon has already announced that it’s being killed as well, since it’s powered by Google Reader sync, even though years back it had its own sync engine. Google pushed most other RSS readers out of the market, and is now killing their own RSS reader app. It’s not a good day for RSS, a service that’s already been tough enough to convince people to use, and Google+ isn’t a good alternate unlike what Google apparently thinks according to a former Google Reader product manager.
So what do you do? Quit subscribing to RSS feeds? Nope. I sure won’t, and we sure hope all of our RSS subscribers here won’t, either. The good news is, there’s a ton of other great RSS services out there today, ones that have come online in the past few years or held on even though Google Reader remained dominant.Here’s all the info you’ll need to find a new service and get your feeds moved to it, pronto, before your Google Reader subscriptions are lost.
When I first heard of App.net, the idea didn’t appeal to me. I’m not the kind of person who pays for a social network because I’m not that serious about chatting with people online. Sometimes Twitter is very useful, though. I use it to chat with a few people each day and even though I’ve taken breaks from it time to time, I always end up going back because I like the simplicity. That’s what App.net promised, along with a third-party API, so why wouldn’t I like it?
Since I didn’t want to pay for the service, I simply dismissed the thought of trying it out. Then a way to get free access was officially added. You have to be asked to the network by a current member, and there are limitations to storage and following counts. All in all, it sounded like a fair way for me to get a taste of this fresh site.
I was invited to this free tier by Andrew Kunesh, one of our other writers here at AppStorm. I’ve been using the service since the day its “freemium” version was announced, but I actually don’t use it every day. I’m going to explain what I like about App.net, followed by what’s holding me back from visiting the site every day. (more…)
It’s a new year, and paid digital magazines and newspapers are still the talk of the town online. Traditional media has been hurt by the internet, with subscriber numbers falling and advertising dollars moving online (or disappearing entirely). But then, there’s a growing number of publications with paywalls around their content (like the New York Times), and tablets have given a new boost to digital magazines.
The most interesting thing, though, is the new players. There’s totally new digital magazines, such as The Magazine, launched by Marco Arment of Instapaper fame. It launched on the iPhone, but recently got a web-focused makeover that lets you subscribe online and read articles in your browser or download them in eBook formats. There’s also new long-form journalism efforts such as MATTER, a great new digital publication that brings one long-form article per month, which you can get via a subscription or directly through Kindle.
Last year, we asked if you subscribe to any digital magazines, and over 30% of you said that you did at that time. With all the new choices available now, though, we’re wondering if more of you are subscribing to paid digital publications. Or, have you found that digital editions of magazines didn’t live up to your expectations, and canceled your subscriptions?
If you are subscribing to digital magazines, we’d love to hear which ones you love in the comments below!
