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Television watching continues to evolve and we are starting to see a movement towards it becoming more social than ever before. Apps are being used as what are called “second screens”, where people can interact about a show on their iPad while they are watching it on their tv. I truly believe that over the next couple of years we will start to continue to see an even bigger change in the television set itself as well as the way we watch shows and movies on it. With the advent of the Apple TV and Airplay, you can already start to see how the TV is becoming more than just a place where we sit to watch our favorite show or play video games.
To continue some of the nostalgia of it all, how many of you are old enough to remember what the paper version of the TV Guide used to be? I remember as a kid searching that thing weekly to see when my shows were going to be on for the week. Now, it is a relic and has been replaced in a variety of ways. One of them is a web app that I am going to be reviewing today called Next Guide. It takes parts of the old and mixes it with the new and tosses in some social features.
Design, of course, is a hugely important part of a website. As a population, online visitors are extremely fickle, and the smallest mistake in usability will have them clicking elsewhere.
What about after the design phase, though? Yes, design is obviously important, but just as important is the admin area of your site. Choose the wrong system, and you’re stuck with a frustrating, time-consuming mess to deal with every time you want to make even the most minor of alterations to your site.
Barley is a new, hosted CMS which is trying to cut out that kind of pain from post-design website management. At $18 per month, Barley sounds pricey in comparison with other simple-to-use hosted website editors like Weebly and Moonfruit. The suggestion made by Plain, Barley‘s developer, however, is that its creation (still in private beta) is a whole new level of simple, featuring a purely inline, click-and-edit methodology, when it comes to content manipulation.
But is less hassle worth a greater investment? Time to edit a website or two…
A well-liked web clipping application known as “Clipboard” was acquired a couple of weeks back which resulted in the discontinuation of the service on 30th June, 2013. It is a common phenomenon that users start panicking when an online service is bought as they start apprehending the fact that it will be closed by the new possessors. The users start to backup all the stuff and hunt for other worthy alternatives to switch to. It’s because of all the past experiences with the most popular being the Posterous acquisition.
Since the announcement of the demise of Clipboard, a new Hamburg-based startup, Keeeb, has become the center of attraction for all the Clipboard users as they have started working to make the most out of Clipboard’s imminent closure. If you are a former Clipboard user looking for a replacement, Keeeb might be just what you need. (more…)
One of the largest barriers facing small business and freelancers is keeping track of invoicing, receipts, payroll and general accounting. This can be a problem because of the expense of the software and/or accounting firm. If you’re just getting started, you won’t want to invest in an expensive (and often outdated-looking) accounting suite, and Excel for data and Word for invoices will only go so far.
Now, along comes a service called Wave Apps – well, really it is just called Wave, but it is a collection of apps. The five services are designed to make life easier for the small business owner or freelancer. (more…)
Document collaboration is an area that many are trying to innovate in. For general usage, Google has been at the forefront of increasing collaboration with Google Drive but the options become significantly limited when you want to specialise in a specific genre.
Authorea is all about writing educational and research papers in your browser in a convinent and intuitive manner while easing the process of collaborating with others. (more…)
Anyone that’s created or maintained a website will know that it’s crucial to know as much about your users as possible to ensure a website’s success. Tools like Google Analytics are perfect for this sort of task but there always comes a time where perhaps you need a little bit more control.
I came across this little gem a few years ago when I wasn’t even looking for an alternative and found it to be quite useful. I recently revisited it and was pleasantly surprised at how far the project has progressed.
Enter Piwik. With a rich feature set similar to the top website analytics apps that gracefully line the web, Piwik is also free and open source, which means you can install the latest stable version on any server. Read on to find out more!
One of the recent trends in blogging has been the implementation of flat file blogging systems that take your Markdown files and render them as blog posts in beautiful website form. However, a lot of these are self-hosted and for those who may not have the technical knowledge to get one of these set up, or perhaps just want to get on with blogging, they’ll be pleased to know there’s a pretty good solution that aims to get bloggers up and running in mere minutes.
That solution is Scriptogr.am.
Scriptogr.am is both a frontend and a backend for your blog, taking the Markdown files from its designated folder in your Dropbox and collating them into a fully-featured and working blog. Also, did I mention it’s free? Find out more after the fold! (more…)
You’ve made a design, and need some quick feedback on it. So, you upload it to CloudApp, share the link on Twitter, and wait for the @replies to come in. At best, you’ll get 140 character replies, letting you know what needs fixed. But good luck figuring out exactly what they’re talking about, since they can’t point to the spot on the design they’re talking about to show you.
There’s dozens of apps for feedback on designs, but most at least require you to make an account and at worst require those giving you feedback to make an account. How about something radically simpler?
That’s what Red Pen is. You upload a file, get pointed feedback, and go. That’s it. (more…)
With the news of Tumblr being bought just this past week, there is renewed attention to other blogging platforms. Of course WordPress and Tumblr are two of the most recognized ones out there. But there are others that you may not have heard of or that are just not as popular.
For the past few days, I have gotten to play with a blogging platform that is a little different than some of the other options that are out there. If you are an Evernote user, like I am, then you are going to be intrigued by Postach.io. It harnesses the power of Evernote and lets you use it to create your blog posts. I thought it was a brilliant idea, and after taking it for a spin for a bit, I came away impressed. Let’s take a closer look at it.
If you’re a designer — or an aspiring designer, or perhaps just someone who loves seeing beautiful pixel art — you’ve surely heard of Dribbble. The “Twitter for designers”, of a sort, Dribbble is the place to showcase shots of your latest design creations. It’s hardly a new site, and we actually reviewed it originally 3 years ago.
I’ve been playing around as designer for the past few months, especially after I was drafted on Dribbble. Then I wondered about going Pro, because, you know, the badge fits my color palette and I thought: “What if our readers ponder the same thing?”. So we’ll be looking through the pros and cons of going Pro on Dribble and by the end of the article I’ll be drafting one of our readers. That’s today’s game.
