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How-To
Have you ever taken a trip to see friends or family and during the trip you’re called several times being asked, “Hey, where are you at? Are you close?” Or maybe you’re taking a solo trip and you would like people to know your last recorded location in the event the unthinkable happens. The potential uses for real-time phone GPS tracking is plentiful but the solutions, unfortunately, aren’t.
With InstaMapper you can track a GPS enabled device, such as iPhone, Android or BlackBerry in real-time, integrated with Google Maps, for Free. Then share or embed your device tracking map and information with friends, family or maybe even your boss to keep everyone updated on your location.
In this how-to I’ll show you how to setup InstaMapper and even embed your tracking map in a custom page.
When your visitors or customers have questions, they typically contact you directly or ask their question(s) in your site forum—assuming you have one. In most situations, a forum isn’t available either.
Qhub provides a fast way to setup a customizable Q&A website in a matter of minutes. With Qhub you can eliminate repetitive questions, save your inbox and make it easier for your visitors or customers to get the answers they’re looking for. Here’s a quick how-to covering this already popular web app.
While visiting my apartment leasing office, I was randomly asked if I knew anything about computers. This question is always an interesting one as it tends to go in so many different directions. The issue at hand involved sending a ~90MB video to the corporate office of the leasing agent. While this may seem simple to many of us, it’s a more complicated task for many others.
I took the opportunity to give drop.io a quick real-world test and attempt to answer the leasing reps completely unexpected question. The result was flawless and the leasing office employees were incredibly thankful.
Today’s how-to shows how drop.io takes the complexity out of file sharing and collaboration for people at any skill level to use, along with many other collaboration tasks.
Generally web developers are supposed to create a print friendly stylesheet for their website(s) in case visitors actually want or need to print something out. Unfortunately, this is often skipped by developers leaving a large majority of websites in a very sad state when printed. Of course, the content of a website may determine the importance of a print stylesheet.
PrintWhatYouLike.com makes it super easy to clean up websites for better printing so they not only look better but save on ink and paper. Today I’ll walk through a quick how-to on using PrintWhatYouLike and their browser bookmarklet.
Your favorite song right now most likely won’t be the same a year from now. After listening to the same music for awhile, you probably start craving something fresh and new. The great thing about the music industry is there’s never a shortage of new music to discover, but discovering it might be a little harder.
Among the many methods of discovering music, TuneGlue is a fun little application that seems to do quite well. TuneGlue is an interactive music mapping web app for discovering new artists related to a starting artist searched for. Let’s take a quick look at using TuneGlue to find new artists.
Taking pictures of every moment in life is the norm these days, now that we have cameras in our phones, laptops and other mobile devices—not to mention ever smaller dedicated point and shoot cameras. You share all those photos on Facebook, Picasa, Flickr and similar sites, but what about doing something more creative with them?
With Pixable, you can use photos uploaded to sites like Flickr, Facebook or stored locally on your computer to create photo books, calendars and mosaics. Once you’ve created your photo masterpiece, you can even order high quality prints. Let’s take a quick look at the creative mosaic feature.
If you’re into photography, specifically landscape photography, you’ll probably know it’s important to plan your shots according to the sun or the moon depending on the shot you want to get. Keeping track of sunrise or sunset times, the sun’s azimuth or maybe the moon’s current phase can be a difficult task. Fortunately, there’s an Adobe AIR app for that — The Photographer’s Ephemeris (TPE).
The Photographer’s Ephemeris calculates just about everything you need to know to get the right shots anywhere in the world with Google Maps integration. We’ll take a look at how you can use the app to plan your landscape photography to get those great shots.
Now that Twitter has reached an age of maturity, it’s being used for more than just micro-blogging. More recently, Twitter is being used for more unconventional tasks such as task management. todoTweet takes the micro-blogging platform a step further to accomplish this so you can accomplish your day-to-day tasks.
Among the many ways to share and store photos, Picasa is one of my favorites. Along with great desktop software for management, Picasa’s web interface has a great selection of features and options. If you’re looking for a smart, simple and easy way to share and store your photos with the ability to expand, in both storage and flexibility, as your photo albums do — Picasa is a great choice.
One of the wonderful side effects of the internet is enhanced connectivity over ever increasing distances. A great example of this is the newly setup wireless connection for NASA astronauts. One thing you’ll notice with the web is the constant push for information — now. Twitter was a big step forward in this area, as was live video streaming with sites like Ustream.tv.
Although it’s been around for awhile, over the last year or two live blogging is being used much more frequently. Live blogging is closely related to Twitter, except a small step further. We won’t get into the technology behind it but if you want to start live blogging, here’s how to do just that.
