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If you listen to music enough, eventually the music you have in your library gets old. Luckily, there are tons of apps out there to help you find new music. You can try unlimited streaming with Spotify or discover new artists with custom stations on Pandora. These services are great, and widely used. Unfortunately, services like these don’t really benefit independent artists.
Thesixtyone is a web app that turns indie music discovery into a game. Users listen to full songs from up and coming artists and have the opportunity to interact with the song and artist in various ways. On top of these interactions, users can complete quests and earn points just for listening to songs and accomplishing various tasks. It’s quite an interesting idea for music discovery, so stick with me after the jump to learn more about how thesixtyone works and if it’s worth checking out.
Let’s face it: most amateur and small business posters and fliers are terrible — mismatched fonts, bad alignment, garish color schemes, and that’s just getting started. They are made in a hurry by people who don’t know what they’re doing. Then they get posted on a local bulletin board, and who looks at those?
Tackk makes it easy to quickly create fliers, posters, announcements, web pages, and other simple fire-and-forget notes, and share them on the web. It has a beautiful, clean design, and plenty of room for customization. It has its own virtual bulletin board to share your filer, in addition to social network sharing options, and you can print your creations out to stick on a real bulletin board if you wish. Let’s take a closer look to see if it holds up to scrutiny. (more…)
I have a huge amount of respect for people who are video editors, as they spend countless hours sitting at the computer staring at the same set of videos over and over. I know I don’t have the patience or the desire to spend that much time on it. But, with all of the video that I take of my son and with proud grandparents that want to show off their grandchild, I have been doing my fair share of sitting in front of the computer doing this very process.
As much as I love using iMovie, I can definitely appreciate when an app practically does the video editing for you. That is Magisto in its simplest form: a web app that can take the videos you have and edit them for you to create a pretty cool looking movie. It honestly is like magic and it makes my job a breeze, and not only that, it makes me look like I actually know what I am doing when it comes to video editing. Let me show you around the app a little more to give you an idea of what it does.
Qvivo is a name already known for their beautifully designed desktop app. The Mac/Windows app has been out for a while and allows users to compile all of their media into impeccably designed libraries. The app makes for simple and attractive media consumption. Qvivo has capitalized on the success of their desktop software over the past year, releasing a web app, iOS apps and a cloud syncing service.
In this article I’ll take a much closer look at the features of their web app. I’ll also investigate their cloud service and try out their other apps to see how well they all integrate. It seems like a pretty interesting app/service so stick with me after the jump to learn more about Qvivo and how well it works.
One of the things that I absolutely love about the web is that it’s a place where people can start to collaborate on projects and other things. As the web improves so does creating projects and collaborating on them, which opens up more possibilities for great things to happen. What is so great is that web apps are starting to replace desktop apps and are actually on par with them as far as features, and throw in social features and they’re even better than desktop apps could be.
Take for example a web app called Mural.ly, which gives the user a plain canvas on the web that they can use to their liking and then share it with others to collaborate on. What makes this so attractive is the fact that you can use Mural.ly for a wide variety of tasks and it can be used by just about anyone that needs a space to share things and get feedback. Not only that, but the developers of the app have made it very user friendly and have given you the ability to use many different formats to create your project. Let’s take a look.
Ever since our son was born about a year and a half ago, I have been making and preserving memories as best as I can. I take way too many pictures and videos, write down all of his milestones, and share them on Facebook and Twitter. Trust me, if you follow me on either network, you know exactly what I am talking about. But one thing that I am not the best at is being able to take all of these memories and put them in one place where family and friends can go to stay up to date on our son.
Last week I came across Irrive, an app that takes your social networks and turns them into scrapbooks to help you preserve your memories. After getting to play with Irrive for a little bit, I got really excited for the potential of this app and how easy it was to use to create a scrapbook of all my favorite memories, using the apps that I already use to document my life. It is kind of like a digital version of scrapbooking, but less time consuming than the actual version, which for someone like me is a win my book. Lets take a look around this app and how it works. (more…)
As a writer for the App Storm network as well as a tech fanatic, I am constantly keeping up on all the tech news around the world. For the longest time, Google Reader was one of the easiest and best ways to consume news on the net. But as time has gone on, there have been other apps out there that have gained traction on it and have also incorporated Google Reader into their own app. One of the that comes to mind is Flipboard, who has added their own twist to consuming news while incorporating Google Reader feeds into their app as well, instead of trying to fight Google’s dominance directly.
Then, another major trend is that Facebook and Twitter have become popular ways to consume tech news. There are some developers out there that have recognized this and have come out with some great apps. One of them, called Prismatic, has done this well, enough that I took it for a test drive for a few days and came away impressed. Can it replace your Google Reader feed? Well, I guess you are just going to have to read on and find out.
I’m sure we’ve all heard of a site called iFixit, the site which provides easy repair guides for a wide range of products, including Apple devices, games consoles, digital cameras and so on but I’d hazard a guess at the fact that not as many people have heard of Dozuki, which is the fantastic system that actually powers the website and makes creating and running a “how-to” guide on the Internet a piece of cake.
Read on after the break for my full review!
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With the advent of the tablet, specifically the iPad, book and magazine publishing has gotten a lot more attention than they thought they would ever get. Gone are the days of just publishing your book for print and selling millions of hard back copies to make the New York Times bestseller list. You have to also think about publishing for ebooks and for some, targeting devices like the iPad or another tablet. The same goes for magazines, more and more I am seeing them being tailored to the tablet or the web because frankly, that is where the audience is at or heading toward.
The same can be said for content creation as well, it is moving toward creating for not only a hard back, but also for the web and other devices. But, what is also pretty cool is that content creation is becoming easier for the average Joe to get his/her hands on and come up with something pretty decent. Zeen, is one of those services that make this possible for people like you and I to create something beautiful on the web, and then be able to share it out with the world in a way that looks presentable. It is one of those apps that if you are willing to be a little creative, it has a lot of potential to be a useful tool.
The past few years have seen a number of new solutions emerge to allow individuals and businesses get into the ecommerce game quickly and easily. From full-fledged web-based storefronts (like Shopify and Etsy) to exclusive online-only offers (like Gumroad), there’s a way to sell pretty much anything you can think of. But what if you’re looking for a way to sell stuff from your own site, without creating a separate web property?
If you have a digital product (music, video, photos, graphics, code or anything else that can be downloaded) and your own site/web property, you can sell it with FetchApp. It works with a variety of shopping carts and payment gateways and allows you to start getting paid with minimal fuss and for a reasonable price. And given that it’s used by folks like Beck and A Book Apart, you can rest assured that it gets the job done. But is it right for you? Let’s take a closer look and find out. (more…)
