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We’ve just closed our giveaway, and congrats to our winners: Jordan, Connor, and Jussie!
Need a slick new way to track your time working, create work estimates, and send out invoices to your clients? Ballpark, the invoicing tool from the Metalab team, is one of the nicest online invoicing apps you could find.
It’s beautifully designed, much like Metalab’s Flow task management app. It’s simple to use, and works great wherever you work: on the web, or on your iPhone. Best of all, you can let your clients pay their invoices directly with PayPal or Stripe.
Ballpark usually costs $12.99/month for a solo account with unlimited invoices and estimates, but we’ve got three 1-year accounts for our readers. All you’ll need to do leave a comment below letting us know what you’re currently using for time tracking and invoicing (or why you need to start using time tracking), and you’ll be entered in our giveaway. Want an extra entry? Share the giveaway publicly on Facebook, Twitter, or App.net, and share a link to your post in a separate comment, and you’ll get extra entries in our giveaway for each network you share on.
Hurry and get your entry in; our contest will close on March 6th, 2012!
Envato staff or people who have written more than two articles or tutorials for AppStorm, or existing users of Ballpark, however, are ineligible to enter.
Last week on Web.Appstorm we looked at Typeform, an app for creating forms. Forms are key to great user communication about everything from how your site should be structured to where you should be focusing your work. Typeform has completely reinvented the way online forms work, making the process of filling in forms fun.
David Okuniev is the product leader at Typeform, and has kindly given his time to talk to us. In this interview, David discusses the origins of Typeform as well as looking at what the future may hold for their team. Read on to see our conversation and learn how Typeform really came to be what it is today. Also, we’ve got some Typeform invites, so if you’d like to get one, keep reading to see how you can be one of the first to try it out.
Looking for a new hosted email solution for your team? Atmail Cloud, our sponsor this week, is the service you should check into. It’s the new cloud-based version of the great Atmail software, letting you use one of the best webmail interfaces on your own domain without having to deal with running your own email servers. We found it to be a great hosted email solution in our recent review of Atmail Cloud, one that has both great web apps and also works great with native email apps.
With Atmail, you can easily manage your teams’ email accounts from the Atmail Webadmin console, even if you have more than one domain name you use for email. Each of your user accounts will come with 10Gb of storage, so you can keep your emails archived easily, and still have room to share files.
Atmail Cloud includes everything you’ll need to keep in touch and stay productive. With rich webmail, calendar, and contacts apps – on the desktop and on your smartphone – as well as support for IMAP, CalDAV, CardDAV, and Exchange ActiveSync, you’ll get all of your data synced easily. You’ll have no ads in your email app, and no servers to maintain. And you won’t break the bank, either.
Get Atmail Cloud for Your Team!
Email’s one of the most crucial services for any team, so you’ll want to make sure you’re choosing the best service for your needs. You can try out Atmail Cloud for up to 20 users for free for 14 days, then when you’re ready to make the leap, you can signup your whole team for just $2/user/month (with a minimum of 5 users). That’s less than half the price of Google Apps for Business, with more features like Exchange ActiveSync support to keep your team working everywhere.
Yesterday, Google unveiled the latest addition to its Chromebook family: the Chromebook Pixel. Grabbing headlines with a starting sticker price of $1299, the device features a MacBook Pro-like high-resolution display and a price tag to match.
In this article, we’re going take a look at the Chromebook Pixel, how it stacks up to similar devices, and question why exactly the crew in Mountain View even bothered sending it to retail.
Google.
For many people, Google is the internet. It is one of a handful of companies that have become part of everyday language of the young and old. I’ve grown up with Google, and recently realized just how many of the company’s tools I use on a daily basis. I’m not a fanboy, but I’m living in a Google world, and loving it.
It could be argued that Google has gained something of a monopoly, but even still, Google is a company that has earned a place in many people’s hearts. It is generally looked on rather affectionately, rather than with the suspicion that is reserved for Microsoft. That may be changing, but for me – and many others – it’d be hard to imagine life without many of the tools the company has produced.
When you think of web apps to use instead of Microsoft Office, odds are Google Docs is the first thing to pop into your mind. You might even think of Microsoft’s own Office web apps. But one of the largest suites of productivity apps online comes from Zoho.
Zoho’s online suite of office apps started in 2005, and has continued to mature and grow since then. Today, Zoho boasts over 7 million users around the world. And it’s no wonder why: Zoho has full-featured word processing, spreadsheet, presentations, database, project management, CRM, email, file sharing apps, and more. You can use them for free, or get business accounts cheaper than you could with Google or Microsoft. There’s so much Zoho offers, it’d actually be hard for anyone to use all of their apps. You can use Zoho tools to make a website, get stats on your site, invoice and track time, recruit new employees, collaborate with your team … or just write up a Word document.
That’s why we’re wondering how many of our readers use Zoho apps. We’d love to hear what Zoho app you use the most in the comments below!
You’re a Web.AppStorm reader, so odds are you already are a fan of web apps, and love finding the best deals on services you’ll use yourself or with your team. Or, perhaps, you’re a web app developer, and you’d love to find the perfect way to let people find out about your app and get excited about trying it.
Cloudswave, our sponsor this week, might be just what you’re looking for. It’s a site dedicated to deals for web apps, with generous discounts on subscriptions to some of the most popular web apps. It also has bundles of web apps, letting you get a ton of new premium web apps for a great price.
There’s deals on web apps you’ll really use, apps that are favorites here at Web.AppStorm. You’ll find discounts on subscriptions for Grooveshark Anywhere, Help Scout, Quote Roller, and more. You can even purchase a discounted subscription as a gift for a friend, right from Cloudswave.
Go Try it For Yourself!
Head over to the Cloudswave site to try it for yourself and see what deals you can find on your favorite web apps. With new deals and featured bundles of great apps all the time, you’ll be sure to find something interesting. Or, you can signup for their email newsletter so you’ll be one of the first to know when new deals are added.
Ever seen a device advertised as coming with extra “cloud” storage? Depending on what device you buy, you’ll get 5-50Gb of free storage in iCloud, Skydrive, Box.net, Dropbox, Google Drive, or any number of other online storage services. Gmail amazed us all when it offered 1Gb inboxes when it first came out, but today, it seems that everyone is offering tens of gigs of storage for free, and ever-larger amounts for basic paid accounts.
And yet, when the Microsoft Surface Pro came out, everyone was dumbfounded to find it had so little local storage space free. It was advertised as coming with 10Gb of free online storage, so shouldn’t that help?
As anyone who’s use online storage enough knows, free online storage won’t help anything. (more…)
Twitter continues to be the rising star in social networking, as businesses have latched onto it for its marketing power as an open network. Open, that is, as in public, not as in easy to develop for. 3rd party developers have continued to have trouble with Twitter, which has added user limits and other restrictions to their apps, making it rather obvious that Twitter wants its own apps to be the only full Twitter apps out there. There’s still plenty of apps that work with Twitter, but they’re mostly only for quick sharing to Twitter, and the development of full 3rd party Twitter apps has dropped dramatically.
What has increased are the 3rd party alternatives to Twitter, and the development of apps for them. Most notable has been App.net, the paid social network that’s strikingly similar to Twitter, only with a 256 character limit on posts and no ads. I joined during its initial funding stage last year, wrote about it here, and have continued to use it since daily at @maguay. It works great, though is still very similar to Twitter and continues to be interesting because of the people that are using it more than anything. It’s a friendly, helpful, techie community, though that’s because of the people on it, not the underlying tech.
I was wondering if any of the rest of you are using App.net. Have you tried it, and if so, what are your thoughts on the network?
Want a web app that’s flexible enough to work with the needs your business’ data needs? Then you might want to try out TeamDesk, our sponsor this week. TeamDesk is web-based database software that enables teams to easily design web-based database applications or use predefined solutions to gather, share and manage business information.
If your business has been using spreadsheets to manage data, and need something a bit more robust that everyone can access and work on together, then TeamDesk is a great solution. It’s a versatile database app that lets you use its premade apps or put together your own online app to work with your data. It’s almost like building a custom Access app for your business, except this time, it’s online and everyone can use it together.
TeamDesk has a number of premade apps that you can check out to get ideas on how to put it to use for your business. For anything from real estate records to accounting, phone number location lookup to issue tracking, the ways you can put TeamDesk to work for your business are limitless. You can build anything you want with TeamDesk’s database software without any programming.
Go Get It!
Ready to give TeamDesk a try? You can signup for a free 14 day trial without entering any payment info. Then, if it works for your business, you can use it starting at $49/month per app with up to 5 users.
