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One of the things I have the hardest time with is that my immediate family is so spread out. My wife and I live in Washington State, my parents and grandparents live in Hawaii and my sister lives in California. It is so hard to get to see each other on a consistent basis, and we are hardly ever all together in the same place. This makes staying in touch so much more important, but with busy lives sometimes, we always can’t stay in touch as much as we would like to.
Kincast is one of those apps that can hopefully bridge that gap of communication just a little bit more. As much as I try to talk to my parents at least once a week so that they can see our son, they still wish they could stay in touch more. The same goes for my sister and I, and so I decided to try out Kincast to see how it could help us out.
If you run or are part of a business that entertains clients by appointment only, such as a clinic, salon or consultancy, you know how difficult it is to keep staff and visitors on track — you not only have to schedule appointments, but also avoid clashes, remind clients to show up and stay sane enough to make your sessions worthwhile. A secretary could surely make light work of this, but what’s a professional to do if he/she can’t afford to pay another employee’s full salary?
For starters, you might want to try Ubooq, a new service that lets your clients see when you’re available, book appointments and receive reminders via text message — all from your website or standalone booking page. Meanwhile, you’ll get notified of new bookings and stay on top of things, allowing you to deliver the best possible service your customers have ever experienced. Sounds too good to be true? Let’s see if Ubooq is really up to the task.
Blogging. It’s taken over the web and with its rise in popularity, several blogging platforms have emerged that have taken this incredibly popular media by storm. You might have heard of WordPress (it’s hard not to). Over 62 million websites across the globe use the software and this is probably down to its incredibly user-friendly interface, its ease of setting-up and its general communal adoption.
However, there are times when WordPress can be a little too bloated and it’s often been noted that it’s almost shifted its focus towards being a framework as opposed to a tool to encourage and enable blogging. In short, WordPress can sometimes feel too big for small sites.
If only there was a new, simpler tool, ready to change the face of blogging. Enter Anchor. It’s beautifully-designed, a pleasure to use and the theming system is so simple, you can mock up a theme from HTML/CSS in less than an hour. I did.
Let’s take a closer look.
When you think of the classics of videogaming – those games which have survived every format and console that time has thrown at them – what springs to mind? Tetris. Metroid. Mario. And then there’s Bomberman. This brilliantly addictive strategic bomb-’em-up has been around since the days of coin-op arcades, and has been released in dozens of iterations. Sadly, however, Konami (owner of the franchise) has somewhat let Bomberman slide into obscurity.
In response, some Bomberman fans have developed their own free, online version, and they have called it Bombermine. But rather than make a simple clone, the folks behind Bombermine have gone the extra mile, and created a MMO built in HTML5. There are already thousands of happy fans getting stuck in to this relatively new browser-based game, but does it capture the fun of Bomberman’s arcade glory days?
By now you likely know that Google has made its popular Reader app an upcoming victim in the company’s infamous Spring Cleaning massacre of services. The news spread around the internet like wildfire and generated quite a bit of bad publicity and hard feelings against the search giant.
It also generated a ton of new traffic that suddenly began swamping alternative apps such as Feedly, which had to add ten-times the bandwidth and additional servers to keep up with its new-found popularity.
Another service, The Old Reader, has also been under heavy pressure since the Google announcement. In fact, as of this writing, there is a wait time of almost one week to import your OPML file into the service. In fact, when I first signed up, I received the following message on my screen:
I finally got a in, though, so let’s take a look at it together and see what The Old Reader brings to the RSS reader market. (more…)
After Microsoft’s IE6 held the web back for so long, hardly any web developers find time to praise Microsoft. It’s not that Microsoft’s the scary giant these days, so much, but that they’ve made so many mistakes over the years that few want to give them the time of day. Even Microsoft fans are calling out the company over decisions they’ve made in Windows 8. The company has made its share of blunders in recent years, missing out entirely on the smartphone and tablet market growth since 2007, and they’re beginning to lose ground in the PC market as well. Bing has taken tons of cash to develop and market, and it still is a distant second to Google’s namesake search engine.
Yet, there’s some things that Microsoft’s doing right, and many of them are on the web. For developers, Microsoft’s Azure provides an alternate to Amazon’s cloud computing, and for the rest of us, Skydrive offers a decently priced online storage competitor. It’d be forgettable if that’s all it offered, but it has one extra thing that makes it much more interesting: Office Web Apps.
Let’s take a look and see why, perhaps, you should be using Office Web Apps instead of Google Docs, or at least why you should keep them in mind in case you ever need them.
Well look at that! Just after announcing it would discontinue Reader, Google has decided to release a simple note-taking service, one with the name Keep. When I first heard about it, I thought the service was aiming to compete with Pocket and Instapaper to be an official Google project that allowed you to save anything for viewing later. Something like this would have been fantastic after seeing Reader leave, but that wasn’t Google’s aim for this basic notes service.
When I say basic, I mean it, but there might be more to this little Web and Android app than meets the eye, and the mere icon invites creativity. I investigate after the break. (more…)
Dominder is a very specific app that does one thing: manage your domains. Website owners often own more than one domain, and some of us own or have to keep track of twenty or more. While domain registrars will notify you of renewal time, they don’t check for downtime or make sure your domain hasn’t been blacklisted.
That is where Dominder comes in. Let’s see if Dominder is the “all-in-one solution to manage websites” it claims to be.
Nowadays, it doesn’t take much to make your own website. You could probably go right now, get a site up say on WordPress.com, and have it running in about 5-10 minutes without even need to know anything about writing code. That’s made a basic site not enough. If you are like me, you not only want to create a website, but you want it to look good and to work well, but also not cost an arm and a leg. But still, you’ll likely want to create sites for all of your projects.
I’ve recently been trying out a new web app called Strikingly, which carves out its own niche for creating sites. It is not quite as powerful as WordPress, but still has some outstanding features. Let’s take a look at Strikingly in depth.
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.
