Currently Browsing
Reviews
There’s plenty of plain text writing apps on the web. If you need a place to bang out some text, there’s plenty of options. There’s even starting to be a selection of collaborative writing apps, and blog engines that are focused on plain text. It’s a nice time to be a plain text geek on the web.
But what if you want to do more with your text? Perhaps, make outlines, collapse sections, display markdown as you’re writing, and move lines of text around? Then you’ve got to check out Oak Outliner.
(more…)
Tracking your expenses properly is really important for a business to sustain, even for individuals who want to find out how much money is going out of their pocket. Since I started working, one of the most difficult things for me was to keep track of how much money I spend every month. As I prefer to manage all my expenses and incomes myself, I also on a lookout for best apps that can help me make this task easier and less hectic.
I’ve tried many apps, but none ever hit the spot for me until I came across CashBase.
When it comes to the RSS feed app wars, at this point if you are going to win people over, you have to be willing to do something different. Not radically different, but something that will make you stand out. Whenever I come across a new Google Reader app, I ask myself, “What does this app do that I cannot already do in Google Reader?”
In the case of Nextly, they definitely present you with a different experience all together. Unlike other RSS reader apps, they take a slightly different route that is somewhat interesting and could actually catch on. One feature that they do to stand out from the others is that they incorporate the use of the keyboard into the reading experience. Sound intriguing? Let’s explore more of this app and see what it has in store for us.
If you’re looking for a great markdown-powered plain-text writing app, there’s dozens of apps out there — native apps for your device, or web apps that’ll run anywhere. There’s awesomely minimalist writing apps like Typewriter, or newer apps like Draft that make it easy to track your document’s revisions and get others to check your work.
But even if you love web apps, and need something that’ll work on any platform, sometimes apps that run online aren’t the best option. And native apps … well, chances are they won’t run on all the computers you use.
How about something that combines the best of both worlds? That’s exactly what Textdown — an offline Markdown writing app for Chrome — is. Spoiler: it’s really great, too.
As much as we all were sent in shock and general frustration/unhappiness with Google when they decided to let us know they were pulling the plug on Reader, there definitely has been some good to come out of it. It has shed light on other apps that are out there for RSS and better yet, it has given developers the opportunity to create something different and better than what Reader was. It has given people the ability to take a step back, think about what was good about Reader, and then create something that builds on that legacy.
MultiPlx is one of those apps. It is taking things that were good about Google Reader and then adding another layer to – hopefully – make it better. Currently, it is in beta, but there are doing some good things to make me believe that my RSS feeds won’t just go away when Google kills reader this summer. Let’s take a more in depth look at MultiPlx and what it has to offer.
Competition is always a good thing, right? At least I think so, and this “finding a replacement for Google Reader” scenario presents us with this opportunity. It is good to have choices, to find what we like and don’t like and settle on something that works for us. I bet you can get ten different tech nerds in a room and they would all have their own opinions as to why they like their favorite RSS reader. It’s the nature of the beast and that is okay, it pushes developers to make quality products and apps.
Bloglovin is one that is just a little different than some of the others that I have reviewed. For one, their focus is on reading blogs, but don’t let that turn you away from this web app. It is more than just reading blogs and it takes a fresh approach to the RSS feed reading situation that some may actually like. Let’s take a look at it more to see what it is all about.
When Google announced that they planned to close Reader on July 1, the online community’s reaction varied from surprised approval, to shocked horror. Google’s decision was based on the flagging number of users who still use feeds in preference to social media.
But as any self-respecting RSS aficionado will know, flicking through your tweets, or browsing your Facebook timeline, isn’t the best way of finding interesting content. Until now, though, there have been very few services providing a halfway house between feeds and social media.
Rockmelt, which was once a socially-orientated web browser, has been reinvented as a social media-based, feed-reading network. But is Rockmelt‘s new course bound for being accepted as a great new way to read the news, or is it heading more in the direction of the doomed FriendFeed? Let’s see.
The internet can be frustratingly slow at times. This could be because of the time of day, a problem with your connection, the popularity of the site you’re visiting, or badly written pages. It could also be because of the sheer volume of advertisement, page analytics and other elements packed into a site.
Disconnect is a free extension for Chrome that can be used to help not only speed up you online experience but also to make it more secure and private. These are pretty bold claims, so we thought we’d better take a look to see how it stands up.
It’d be hard to be a fan of web apps and not have heard of Wunderlist. The nearly ubiquitous to-do list app has gone from a fresh contender at its launch in late 2010 to one of the most well-known to-do list apps on the planet. It’s free, fun to use with customizable backgrounds, and has web, desktop, and mobile apps that all work exactly the same. In fact, we used to use it internally at AppStorm before switching to the new Basecamp. It works great, and looks nice: a rather killer combo.
And now, it’s better than ever. Wunderlist 2 already improved the service, but it’s lately gotten a ton of extra goodness, along with paid Pro accounts that add unlimited subtasks, task delegation, and of all things, extra backgrounds. The first two make it a serious contender for professional task management, while the latter keeps Wunderlist’s fun attitude front and center. (more…)
Great web design requires every bit as much imagination and creativity as graphic design. But while graphic designers get a (relatively) easy ride with the drag-and-drop tools of Photoshop, web designers, essentially, still have to do it the hard way with from-scratch coding. Hard to believe, I know, given that it’s now 2013, but this archaic method of design still reigns supreme.
Code, for the time being, at least, is still a necessity when designing a website. Wouldn’t it make things easier, though, if code-based styling were a little more intuitive.
That is the aim of bluePen, a live CSS editor, which has simple styling controls for each element on your site. But does this site add-on really save time, or is it yet another failed attempt to streamline web design?
