Emails are no longer merely a tool for communication between people. I don’t know about you, but my inbox is full of emails, both automated and purposefully typed, from a ton of different contacts, websites and even a few junk senders. From the company that brought you Priority Inbox, a feature that detects which emails are important and presents them upfront, comes a “new inbox that puts you back in control”.
Several weeks back, Google unveiled their new tabbed Gmail inbox. It frames itself as an easy way of separate different types of emails into multiple tabs. Let’s take a look at what it’s all about. (more…)
The online education field is rapidly expanding. There are old warhorses like Khan Academy, new educators like Coursera, and universities getting into the game, like MIT’s OpenCourseWare and CalTech’s many online courses. Indeed, you can actually consider getting a full education on the web, maybe even for free.
But while the “classroom” is going online, the tools we use to study often aren’t reflecting the changes. As a student, you are watching a video on a screen, and that makes it difficult to take notes and share them with your classmates — unless you want to go back to writing your notes on paper.
That’s where VideoNot.es comes in. It’s an online notepad designed to make it simple to take notes from your online lectures. It’s one of the few apps designed specifically for distance learners, and if you’re taking a course online, you should be sure to check it out.
As the old saying goes, a good start is half the work done. Which is precisely why developers have saturated the web with full of project management apps. Sadly, most of them are merely copycats of the industry giants and leaving the users frustrated. Moreover, these applications are built with larger teams in mind and a single user is often left stranded.
Solo is an artistic project management app that is specially crafted with freelancers in mind. It uses a drastically different approach and the interface is unique. We’ve covered its first version already, but now its second version is now in beta. Here’s what’s new.
Two years ago, we asked you what was your favorite social network. You split the vote almost exactly in thirds between Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, that is if you don’t include the 11% that said they can’t stand social networking.
It’s a different world today in many ways, but the tides really don’t seem to have changed that much in social networking. Google+, if anything, has continued to be less popular than Facebook and Twitter, despite its continued improvements. Facebook has continued to change its settings and design on a regular basis, but we all keep coming back to it since everyone else is there. And Twitter, despite shutting down most 3rd party apps, has continued to grow and dominate the public online conversation.
There’s other networks, of course. App.net was started to make a Twitter alternate that’s more developer friendly, and has turned into quite the nice network of its own. And blog platform Tumblr was bought out by Yahoo! not just because it’s a great place to start a blog, but also because it’s actually a social network of a sort. And that’s not all. Mobile messaging apps like Line have taken the world — or Asia at least — by storm, and are building up their own in-app social networks.
My personal loyalties lie divided between Twitter and App.net, and I only seldom use Facebook and nearly never use Google+. How about you? We’d love to hear what social networks you prefer in 2013.
I’ve tried archival services for Twitter in the past, and they can be terribly handy when you need to find a link you shared in the past or some old conversation you had months back. Journalists, especially, are likely to end up finding the services very useful. But now that I’ve been using App.net a lot more, I’ve started searching for apps that would help me search through my ADN account.
I ended up stumbling upon a web service called Watermark.io, provided by Riverfold Software (the same developer behind the fantastic Tweet Library archive service). Watermark.io supports not only my ADN archive, but also my Twitter archive, which makes it great no matter which social network you prefer — and especially great if you use both services a lot.
I love Instapaper. I’ve used the bookmarklet web app before I had an iOS device to read from, even when the web interface was — admittedly — rather ugly. But it still made reading longform articles much nicer than reading on most websites, especially back in 2009.
I tried the original Read it Later, and then gave Readability a shot. Pocket came along, and I dismissively tried it and left it behind, returning each time to the familiarity of Instapaper. I liked the service, Marco’s stand on how he ran his businesses, and — most of all — I loved discovering new articles in Instapaper from The Feature and Instapaper’s deceptively simple built-in social network.
All the while, Pocket kept adding features and improving its service, while Instapaper stayed the same — good, but not moving forward. The more I heard about it, the more I knew I had to give it a more serious try. With Instapaper being sold to Betaworks, it seemed like the perfect time to give its chief competitor a shot.
So I jumped over the fence to see if the grass was truly greener on the other side. (more…)
You’ve likely already heard of App.net, the new paid social network that’s similar to Twitter, yet more developer friendly. App.net is something that I was cautious about trying. After all, a subscription is $36 a year. I wrestle with giving up any money on a monthly or annual basis, especially for a service that I don’t know will continue to be around.
That being said, I’m past my worrying. ADN is going to be here for a while, and I think there’s never been a better time to join (perhaps with the free accounts we’re giving away below). Here’s why.
If you’ve ever wanted a way to make sure your music, videos, photos, and more are accessible wherever you are, but you didn’t want to use yet another cloud service, you’ve likely heard of Tonido. It’s an app that turns your computer into your own private cloud, one that we’ve looked at in the past here at AppStorm. It’s grown up since then, with a much cleaner design, and in the mean time an increasing number of companies have launched cloud services to let users store their media online.
We’ve had the chance recently to talk with Madhan Kanagavel, Tonido’s founder, about his company’s apps, devices, and the future of digital media. He brings an interesting perspective to the discussion on the future of the cloud, so this is one article you might want to save to your Instapaper queue to pore over later.
Tablets are being used in all industries for a variety of well-deserved reasons, including in consumer-facing businesses which can utilise the interactivity that a tablet could provide to present information to customers. However, the expense of time, money and resources has always been set fairly high, perhaps high enough to push businesses away from the idea or to simply block them off from being able to even think about doing so.
That’s where Showcase Workshop comes in, a web app all about creating interactive presentations and then distributing them amongst your organisation. Let’s take a look. (more…)
The world is getting more data-driven every single day. Everyone wants to make more informed decisions based on data and not on gut feeling, and as such, dashboards are becoming ever more important. They convert tons of data into easily identifiable trends and patterns using charts that make sense to the naked eye.
This holds particularly true for web apps. Designing great reports and dashboards that help users make informed business decisions in quick time is increasingly becoming an aspect that can differentiate your web app from your competitor’s.
Here are 2 web apps that you could seek inspiration and learn best practices from when you are developing your web apps’ dashboard.
LinkedIn needs no introduction. The world’s largest professional network has reports for a bunch of its tools, including its Group Statistics.
This is one of the cleanest dashboards you will ever see. It splits the metrics into 4 tabs to break the info into digestible chunks, and mentions the top performers explicitly to give you a quick summary. They then add further detail and context to data using tooltips to display more information about a particular dataset.
ClickTale
ClickTale is a Web Analytics tool that that provides businesses with insights into their customers’ online behavior.
Their dashboard shows the most critical components upfront — Heatmaps, Search Recordings, Visitor Recordings, Conversion Funnel and Visitor Geolocations — and then you can drill-down into any of them for a closer look.
Want these reports for yourself?
While creating the right dashboard is a detailed process, it can be a lot simpler if you pick the right charting components. That is where FusionCharts, our sponsor this week, comes in. It is the charting partner for LinkedIn and ClickTale, and calls itself JavaScript charting for the grown-ups.
FusionCharts’ charts render seamlessly on all devices (PCs, Macs, iPads, iPhones, and Android devices) and browsers (including IE 6, 7 and 8). It takes just 15 minutes to create a chart and just a couple of hours to set up advanced reporting features like clickable legends, drill-down, export to PNG/JPEG/PDF, tooltips, visual data editing and more. The suite comes with 90+ chart types and 950+ maps, extensive documentation and plug-and-play dashboard demos. They also have a jQuery charting plugin.
All in all, it is used by 21,000 organizations and 450,000 developers, including some of the web’s most popular apps and a majority of Fortune 500 companies. It’s even being used at the Stanford Research Institute to design their workstation of the future. So why not use it to power the charts in your own app? Download a copy and try it out today.
