In this Quick Look, we’re highlighting BuildChatter. The developer describes Buildchatter as a tool that provides easy to use, function rich, brandable, custom, marketing and engagement apps for Facebook pages. Even those with limited design skills can design and publish their customized branded app to their Facebook page in just minutes.

The applications provided include interactive contests, custom gifts, boutiques, quizzes and so much more.

Read on for more information and screenshots!

Screenshots

Get step-by-step guides for setting up Facebook giveaways

Get your Facebook page looking just like you want

About the App

Here are the top five features you can expect to see in BuildChatter:

1. Easy to Use
2. Function Rich
3. Brandable and Customizable
4. Customized Share Message
5. Like Gateways

Requirements: Any recent web browser
Price: Starting at $39/month
Developer: Buildchatter

This is where a tool like Scrible comes in very handy. It is a toolbar that gives you a variety of options to edit webpages, save them, and then send them off. Scrible opens up a lot of possibilities for the web and it gives us the chance to give instant feedback.

Marking Up The Web

Currently, Scrible offers a small group of tools that you can use to edit webpages. At the moment all of the tools center around editing text in a webpage. One of the tools that Scrible offers is a highlighting pen, where you can pick a variety of colors to make the text stand out. This is a great tool if you are reading an article online and you want to highlight text that is important.

Highlighting Text

Secondly, you can change the color and the style of the text within a webpage. These are great tools to use if you are editing text of a website. For example, I was asked to critique a blog post and these were great tools to have to help edit it. I could bold, underline, italicize, and strikethrough text, as well as change the color of it.

Changing color and formatting text

Lastly, none of these tools are powerful if you cannot communicate to the person why you highlighted or bolded a word. This is where the notes feature comes in very handy in Scrible. If someone is asking for your feedback, you want to be able to let them know why you think a certain word or group of words shouldn’t be there, or if they need to add more. Or if we need to take notes on something that we are reading online, this is a great way to do this. Notes can be placed anywhere on a webpage and in a variety of colors.

Making notes

Sharing and Saving

Now, what good is it if you markup a website or highlight important text and cannot save or share it with others? Scrible provides you with these options to share and save your edited web pages, which really makes this tool even more useful.

When you are done editing a page, Scrible provides you with a permalink that you can either share on social networks or to email to someone to show them your feedback. Scrible also provides you with an email feature so that you can email someone your edits straight from the toolbar and not have to copy and paste the link into an email. The nice thing is that if you send the edit to someone else who uses Scrible, they can also make changes to the page and add their feedback and then send it back to you. This opens up more possibilities for this app as a great collaboration tool.

Emailing a Scrible

In order to save your edited web pages, you first need to create an account with Scrible, then they can be saved. On scrible.com, you have your own page where you can see all of your pages that you have edited and saved, as well as other pages that maybe others have sent to you.

Scrible Account

The iPad Version

Since I started using Scrible last year, I had always thought this would be great to use on the iPad. But I was wondering how they were going to make that happen, and to my surprise as I was getting ready to write this article, they had just came out with an HTML 5 version of the toolbar that you can use on Safari on the iPad. It works as a bookmarklet, so you can run it in the iPad’s browser even though you can’t install extensions.

Editing with Scrible on iPad

As I was testing it out, I found that I could utilize a lot of the same functionality that I found on the web on my computer. I could highlight, bold text, and even make notes as well. The toolbar for the most part seemed to work really well, and I found that I could do just about everything with Scrible on the iPad as I could on the web. Best of all, you can do it directly with your finger on a touchscreen, which is a great way to quickly markup a site.

Overall Impression

Scrible has been in beta for quite a while now and they are definitely taking their time developing the application. I like the functionality of the toolbar, but I would love to see more tools added. For one, it would be nice if there were shapes and arrows, as well as a blur tool. I think by adding these tools, the app would appeal to a wider margin of people.

For the most part, the toolbar works well and I like what it does. Right now accounts are free since Scrible is in beta and it’s uncertain if they will be offering paid accounts in the future. One thing’s for sure: as we rely on the web more for collaboration and work daily, tools like this will be an increasingly valuable part of our toolkit.

What if email could instead be a tool that could keep you focused on what you need to do, when you need to do it? Perhaps it could bring you messages right when you want to deal with them, and let you write emails when you’re thinking about them but send them when they actually need to arrive in your colleagues’ inboxes. Maybe it could even automatically send those emails you have to send every so often, freeing up your time a bit.

That’s what Boomerang is. It’s a tool that turns Gmail into a productivity tool that makes email run on your own schedule.

There’s more to Gmail than Gmail Labs

Actually, I was a bit unfair to Gmail before. Gmail is one of the most productivity centric email apps, with a rich set of keyboard shortcuts and a tagging and search system that combined make it much easier to find the messages you need. Plus, there’s a ton of extra features you can enable in Gmail labs that let you take Gmail even further. None of it offers quite what Boomerang does, though. Boomerang is a browser addon for all major browsers that integrates with your Gmail account to let you send messages on your own schedule. Then, it also lets you get emails sent back to your inbox, so you can clear them out of your way until you actually need to deal with them.

Boomerang's a browser extension that integrates perfectly with Gmail

Getting started with Boomerang is easy. Just download and install it in you favorite browser, then login to Gmail as normal. When you first visit Gmail, you’ll see a splash screen from Boomerang that explains its features, and then you can go ahead and start using it. The first time you use Boomerang inside Gmail, you’ll have to validate it with your Google account, but that’s all you’ll need to do to signup.

Boomerang will automatically set you up with a free month trial, which works on both Google Apps and standard Gmail accounts. After the trial, you can continue to use basic features with up to 10 messages per month for free, or you can get a $4.99 personal account for free or a professional account for Google Apps addresses for $14.99/month.

Authenticate it with your Gmail account ... or a customized Google Apps account

Hey Gmail, could you remind me…

Ready to start putting Boomerang to work? The first Boomerang feature you’ll likely notice is the Boomerang button when you’re reading new emails. Click it to choose to bring the message back into your inbox  after a certain amount of time or on a specific date. Now, why in the world would you want to do that? Most of us want to keep our inboxes as clear as we can, but the unfortunate fact is that you have to deal with most of the email you have come in. But what if it’s a message that you need to deal with later, perhaps next week?

That’s where Boomerang comes in. It can archive the message until that date, and have it come back into your inbox right when you need it. It does this by resending it to you from your own account, so you’ll see a tiny message letting you know Boomerang brought the message back, and all of the other messages in the thread as before. Best of all, if you usually use Gmail in a native app on your smartphone or tablet on the go, it’ll still work, since the message just comes into your normal Gmail. Brilliant.

Need reminded about an email later? Get Boomerang to send it back.

Send messages on your own schedule

Then, we’ve all surely at one time or another want to schedule emails in Gmail, which is the next major thing that Boomerang can do. Whether you’re writing a business proposal and want to make sure it shows up in your client’s inbox right at 8AM when they’re likely to actually read it, or want to write a special email to your girlfriend and make sure it gets there right on that special day instead of at 2AM when you wrote it, scheduling emails can sometimes come in handy.

Schedule emails to leave at exactly the right time

Another great thing you can do is have Boomerang put the message you’re sending in your inbox after a certain amount of time, either if you don’t hear back from the person you emailed or if you did hear back but still want reminded. It might sound a bit crazy to get the message you sent in your inbox, but it’s a great way to track responses to emails without having to remember to check back and see if the reader really got your message. And again, this works using Gmail’s threaded messages. It just replies from Boomerang, which makes the thread with the message you sent show back up in your inbox.

Get messages you've sent back in your inbox to remind you to followup

And even if you’re not really wanting to schedule emails or make your emails arrive on your own schedule, you might still want to schedule recurring emails in Gmail. With a Boomerang Pro account, you can do exactly that. Just click the Boomerang button when writing a new message, and click the Schedule Recurring Message link on the bottom of the menu. This will open a dialog where you can choose a variety of settings for your recurring message. Whether you need to email reminders to your team every week, or want to nag your own self about things you need to do, this is a great way to do it without having to set reminders in calendars or remember to email your team.

Need to remind yourself or others of something all the time? Now you can.

Get those emails back, pronto

Have you ever hit send on an email, and immediately wished you hadn’t? Perhaps you mistyped something, or sounded too harsh, or accidentally pasted the email you were writing to your girlfriend into your team’s update email that all of your company’s executive staff will be reading. Either way, you’ve wished you could snatch back your email from thin air.

Well, now you can if you’ve scheduled your email to send via Boomerang instead of sending out directly. Just open your Boomerang account, and you can cancel emails you decided you don’t want to send, or you can go ahead and immediately send them right now if the email’s fine and you just want to go ahead and send it. Or, if the schedule needs changed, you can tweak that, too, before your message is sent. It’s a great way to manage your emails, and might give you a reason to schedule those emails you type late at night instead of sending them immediately.

Save yourself from embarrassing mistakes and get your messages back

Conclusion

If you rely on email for planning your day, coordinating with your team, and staying productive, Boomerang just might be the extension for Gmail you need. Before trying it out, I actually told a colleague that I thought I wouldn’t be using it much, but would give it a try anyhow. A couple days later, and I’ve decided I’ll keep it around. Sending emails back when you need to actually do something about them is brilliant; you could use it to push work off until Monday when it comes in over the weekend, or to remind yourself of a great sale before it ends. Even if you don’t use it all the time, keeping the free plan to schedule emails several times a month could come in really handy, especially with a certain special day coming up in a few days…

Tabjuice.com offers a Facebook integrated application to create a simple, free and well-designed Facebook store. Using this application, you can create a store, design the look of the store, add products, link it to a fan-page and have the store up and running in a very short period of time. You can leverage your network to get your products sold, without your fans ever having to leave Facebook. Read on to find out more about using Tabjuice to create your very own Facebook store.

Creating a Store

The first step in creating a Tabjuice store is, of course, to sign-up. Tabjuice.com offers the initial sign-up options. After entering your first/last name and email address, the app takes you directly to Facebook where you use your Facebook account and a Facebook application to create the actual store. The landing page on Facebook is the user “dashboard” where you’re provided with an overview of the store, as well as the status of the storefront and any active promotions.

Dashboard

After checking out the dashboard, it’s time to get into the nitty-gritty details of setting up a store. The first step is to utilize the store designer. This is where things like the color scheme, store heading and descriptions are chosen. All colors can be customized, and a custom logo or header can be uploaded. The background can be a solid color, or a custom image can be uploaded for tiling or scaling.

Store Designer

After selecting the overall look of the store, you should take a look at all of the settings. Tabjuice does a great job of explaining what most of the settings mean and helps you to choose. The first settings menu is the general options. This is the menu that allows you to add a name and description, set time zone and choose a store type, among many other options.

General Options

The Payment Gateways menu allows you to choose from PayPal, PayPal Pro or Authorize.net in order to receive payments. PayPal Pro and Authorize.net do charge a fee, but allow users to make purchases without ever leaving the Facebook fan page. Shipping & Handling is self-explanatory as well. The first step is to add where shipping will originate from, in order for Tabjuice to calculate shipping costs. This is also where any additional handling costs are added, per the administrators disgression. Tabjuice offers just about every shipping option that you can think of to make available, so choose whatever is most convenient for your location and needs.

Shipping & Handling

Tabjuice offers a number of options to customize usage of the store and store analysis. The multi-admin option allows you to add other store admins at three different levels. NEXUS states does ask you to choose the state the store is located in for all tax purposes. Under the API option, a unique API key can be generated for the store. The 3rd party integration allows the store administrator to integrate Google analytics or Magento for further external analysis of all visits and other statistics.

Adding Products

Once the settings have all been worked out, it’s time to start adding products to the store. As with all of the other options in this app, adding products is simple and straight-forward. Clicking on the “products” link takes you to the product dashboard. Here, you can see an overview of all listed products, including the main image, quantity, price and product status.

Product Dashboard

Of course, our product page is sadly empty. Navigate via the panel on the left to the option to add a product. The basic “add product” page offers more than enough options to satisfy any basic customer:

• Add up to 5 images
• Add an item name and description
• Place the product in as many categories as desired
• Link the product to an external webpage for purchasing the product directly on your personal website.
• And more …

Adding a Product

Of course, sometimes these basic options aren’t enough. For example, I was adding prints to my personal store. I wanted to be able to sell each image in different sizes. The custom options section allows you to add multiple variations to the product: for example, I could sell one print at 9×12 on archival paper and a much larger image that is sold on a canvas. Theses variations allow for the sale of just about any product within the store.

Custom Options for Adding a Product

If you find that your products aren’t selling quite as well as you’d like, Tabjuice offers easy options for setting up promos. These promos come with a code which can be given out to potential customers to draw them into the store. As always, Tabjuice provides a variety of options for the promo, including options to apply promos to only specific categories or products and allowing promos for flat rates, percentage off, no tax or free shipping. The promo can be for a limited time, or indefinite.

Promos

There is, of course, an orders section to track all completed purchases and returns. This section is straight-forward and simply organized, providing item and order numbers, billing and shipping information, pricing and product information.

Activating a Store

Once the products have been added and the options have been set, all that’s really left to do is get the store activated. Stores cannot be activated without being linked to a fan page, so that’s always the first step.

Attaching to a Fan Page

After attaching the store, head on over to the “activate a storefront” option under the settings menu. As long as everything is good to go, the store can be activated and you’re on your way. If there are any problems or incomplete sections, Tabjuice tells you and links you to the location to fix the problem. The process is about as painless as can be, with simple directions to fix any and all problems. Once the store is activated check it out, pat yourself on the back and don’t forget to utilize the engagement menu. This section provides general data about store visits, top products by visits and top products by revenues. This information can be checked by date and gives you a simple way to check up on the status of your store and all products.

Engagement

Final Thoughts

This application is so straight-forward and simple to use that I almost couldn’t believe it. The app was easy to navigate, and I was definitely happy with my final product. It bugged out a few times when I was uploading images, but it was never a big deal. The help section is great, so any questions I had were quickly answered.

As a basic user who has never set up a Facebook store before and doesn’t need a spectacle of a store, Tabjuice is incredible. I was never lost, and as a basic user everything I needed was more than covered. As I delved into the application and tested out some potentially more advanced uses, every need was always met. Setting up a free Facebook store is definitely easy to do with Tabjuice, and I highly recommend the application.

Wolfram|Alpha is built on the power of Mathemetica, a popular mathematics and computational tool used in education and research alike. It can solve advanced math, but can also take that same power to help you do research into population, finance, health, and more. It’s even the power behind much of the iPhone 4S’ Siri, helping dig up facts for users in seconds.

The Wolfram|Alpha team has constantly released updates to the service to help it handle increasingly advanced queries, and today, they’ve launched the biggest change to the service yet with the new Pro offering. Now you can put it to work on your own data, not just public data they’ve amassed, and you can download data to continue your research elsewhere.

It's the same old Wolfram|Alpha, with a ton of new Pro features

It’s More Than Search, it’s a Platform

Wolfram|Alpha is one of the best ways to find the most detailed results about the things you’ve always wondered about. From converting measurements, even non-similar ones like, say, a cup of butter in grams, to finding detailed info about the world’s statistics, to figuring out step-by-step how to solve a calculus problem, Wolfram|Alpha is one of the best tools around. It won’t be able to answer everything you throw at it, but it can definitely be pretty amazing.

It’s been obvious from the start that it could be useful for far more than just a basic search tool. Using their API, Microsoft has built Wolfram|Alpha into Bing, and developers have put it into website widgets and iOS apps. Now, Wolfram has taken their own app to the next level, making it into much more of a platform in itself. They’ve added user accounts, free for anyone, that let you save your search history (very useful if you’re using it for research), mark favorite queries, and tweak your settings.

But the best stuff has been saved for Pro accounts. With a pro account, which costs $4.99/month or $2.99/month if you’re a student, you’ll have new ways to enter data into Wolfram|Alpha, including your own files for analysis, and a ton of new ways to save your findings to read later or use in other applications. You can signup for a free 2 week trial, or you can testdrive the new features from some sample queries on the front page.

Signing up for an account, even a free one, has a number of benefits

Getting More Data Into Wolfram|Alpha

The pro features are all about helping you get more data into and out of Wolfram|Alpha. Everyone, free and paid users alike, gets to use the same computing power (though pro users can do longer computations, as they’re allotted more computing time per query). But, you might get better results just because you can use more data in a Pro account. You’ll get a new on-screen keyboard to make it easier to enter special characters, similar to the keyboards contained in Wolfram|Alpha’s mobile apps. It’s a nice feature, but not necessary as you could enter these characters manually if you can find them on your computer.

The new extended on-screen keyboard

What really takes it to the next level, though, is that you can now upload files for Wolfram|Alpha to analyze with a Pro account. You can upload dozens of filetypes, from spreadsheets to documents to advanced data files from scientific research apps. You can also upload raw data in tabular form to analyze directly without uploading a file.

You can find some quite interesting things with your files, especially if they contain a lot of structured data. It showed the character and word counts, estimated reading time, most common words, and more from a plain text eBook file. However, a plain text chat log revealed much less data, only showing the total number of words and characters. It analyzed some PDFs great, while it seemed to think another PDF file I tried was a binary file.

Even while it’s much better at finding patterns and interesting info from organized data such as spreadsheets, my bank’s CSV export file proved to have too  much extraneous info for it to make much sense of. That’s why the free trial’s great: you can see if it can handle the data you want before you pay for it. When it does do good with files, though, it can be very great. Some of their example spreadsheets on the site show auto-generated graphs, averages, and more, just by uploading the file.

Analyzing data from files is a bit hit-and-miss

Interestingly, you can also upload images, and Wolfram|Alpha will generate a wide variety of info about the pictures automatically. I tried uploading just a standard picture from a Cannon digital camera, but Wolfram|Alpha rejected it, saying it could only take pictures that were 1Mb or smaller. Instead, I tried out a 1.2 megapixel shot from my phone, which came under their size limit. Moments later, I got to see the most common hexadecimal colors in the picture, a histogram, as well as a variety of adjustments and tweaks on the picture. Nothing that you couldn’t find with Photoshop, but still neat, especially the hexadecimal colors.

You can find some interesting info from your pictures

Taking Your Wolfram|Alpha Answers Further

Analyzing your own data could prove to be one of Wolfram|Alpha Pro’s best features over time, but it’ll be of more niche use for those who need to analyze tons of data. For most users, the new ways to use the data Wolfram|Alpha gives you might be the best uses of a Pro account. You can now download the data that Wolfram|Alpha found for your query  in a variety of formats, so you can open it in your favorite spreadsheet app, save it as an image, download it in json format to integrate into your website, or save it as a Mathematica file to open in a desktop version of Wolfram|Alpha’s big brother.

Download the real data behind your WolframAlpha answers

Then, if you’re getting info that includes a graph or diagram, you can zoom in and see a higher quality larger copy of the graph. You can also customize the graph with different color schemes, and download it to your computer in a variety of formats. For each download, whether a raw data export or an image, Wolfram|Alpha will use credits to restrict how many downloads you can have.

Pro accounts will come with 500 credits per month, and then image downloads will use 75 credits each while data downloads use 100 credits. You can purchase more, or just wait until the next month to download more. It’d be nice to see more credits given per month, as only a few downloads would use up that much credit rather quickly. The good thing is, you can always redownload any image or data file you’ve saved in Wolfram|Alpha from your account, which is great for doing research projects over time. Another good thing is that you can download a PDF file of the full Wolfram|Alpha search results in one page for free, without using any credits.

Download graphs and images in a variety of formats and designs

Conclusion

All in all, Wolfram|Alpha Pro represents a huge step forward for the service, making it an online computing engine for almost any data you can throw at it. It’s still an amazing service for free, and if you need to use it to analyze your own data or want to take the data it gives you further, the Pro accounts are a great option. They’re reasonably priced, and include features that can be useful to everyone from students to researchers to everyday businessmen just looking to find extra info from their spreadsheets.

If you’ve never given Wolfram|Alpha a try, or haven’t used it lately, be sure to check it out. It’s amazingly great for anything math related, and contains answers for a wide variety of other topics, too. Now, with file support, it’s an even more versatile way to make the loads of data we see every day make more sense.

For any fans of The Office, you might remember WUPHF.com, a service the character Ryan Howard setup based around the concept of an aggregated notifications service which handles all of a user’s alerts and sends them out to each one of their platforms. If was presented in a comedic way in the show, but I think there’s a strong case for a service like that.

The Current State of Notifications

Most of my notifications throughout the day come from my email and Twitter, but I also encounter alerts from a lot of the native apps I run on my devices. However, I also use a lot of web apps but, unfortunately, their alerts are exclusive to their site so I have to actually visit the service before I’m notified of anything important (if an accompanying native app is not being run).

I’ve identified two core problems with the state of notifications in software as a whole: we don’t have a very good system for web apps and the systems covering alerts are generally exclusive to a specific platform, or even app. The former might be closer to being solved, but the latter still remains a big issue.

Mozilla Bring Notifications to the Web

Mozilla is looking to close the gap between web and native apps when it comes to push notifications. The company, perhaps best known for the browser Firefox, has outlined a system that will allow websites to alert users on their desktops or mobile devices.

Chrome has had a quasi-notification system across some extensions. Image courtesy of Lifehacker.

Mozilla developer Jeff Balogh explained how the system works on his blog.

1. The website gets a URL where it can send notifications to the user. The URL points to the Notification Service, and is a secret between the user and the website.
2. The site sends a notification to the Notification Service.
3. The Notification Service delivers the message to Firefox on the desktop, on Android, on Boot to Gecko, or on iOS through Firefox Home; we’ll find the right place to deliver the message.

As Matthew Guay pointed out to me, similar services exist, although in much more exclusive terms than Mozilla’s offering. For example, Google’s Chrome has played host to many notification systems, primarily through extensions, that integrate with the Google web apps like GMail.

Where’s the Central Notification Centre?

Apple fans will recognise the name Notification Centre, but virtually every platform has a unique system for aggregating notifications from different apps. However, even on devices in the same platform, the contents of said system are unique to the native apps running on that platform. There’s no universal connection, but that’s what we need.

Personally, i’d love to see some sort of web-powered centre for all notifications across all apps on all devices, much like the comedic WUPHF concept. Mozilla is somewhat doing this through their introduction of a notification system that does not require the webpage to be open, but it’s still unique to their platform and likely won’t be integrated across the wealth of consumer electronics.

Notification Centre provides an aggregated notifications view within iOS 5.

In an age where we’re increasingly mobile, the ecosystem is becoming ever so important. Living inside Apple’s gives me the opportunity to have all my music, all my video, all my emails and pretty much everything else with me, whatever device I’m browsing on, but I still have to check every web app and every device in order to get all my alerts. It could be so much easier.
Would you like to live in a world where you could browse all your notifications, regardless of origin, in one place? I know I would. Or, it could just mean we’re all more bombarded with notifications than ever…

Digitals from Chris Crutchfield on Vimeo.

In this Quick Look, we’re highlighting Cool Mojito. The developer describes Cool Mojito as a web app that lets you create a professionally designed Facebook page within a few minutes, for free. It’s as easy as dragging a widget with our drag and drop widget-based interface.

Read on for more information and screenshots!

Screenshots

Cool Mojito's website

Customize premade themes with drag and drop ease

About the App

Here are the top five features you can expect to see in Cool Mojito:

1. Store
2. Campaigns
3. Video
4. White label
5. Html-css editors

Requirements: A Facebook Fan page
Price: Free
Developer: Cool Mojito

For such a simple motto – slogan, really – Google seems to have been having difficulties with this lately. Has the omnipresent company grown from its don’t be evil roots, or are they as good-hearted as they’ve ever been?

Evil Act Number One: Messing with Search

Google is all about search. That’s how they make their money, which means it’s their core product. While they offer other services, like Google Analytics and Google Docs, their primary revenue stream comes from advertisements that they show in their search engine. To that end, they need to keep the advertisers happy; to keep the advertisers happy, they need to gather as much data on you as possible. What better way to do this than through a social network?

Absolutely nothin'.

Google+ is one of those social networks that seems promising at first. Sure, I’ll sign up; it looks like a nice enough service. Then a week later you realize that you haven’t used it at all. A month later you try to remember why you ever thought you’d use it. Now Google is trying to throw their social network in your face, with Search Plus Your World.

Now, instead of showing items based on a relevancy factor, Google will show you what your friends think or have said…so long as it’s on Google+. Google won’t show you anything from Twitter or Facebook in SPYW, opting instead to draw you in to Google+.

Fishy at best, anti-competitive and illegal at worst, Search Plus Your World is the beginning of the end for relevant, unbiased results in your Google search results.

Evil Act Number Two: Stalking You

Google isn’t the only internet powerhouse monitoring your activity across the web, but it’s certainly the one gathering the most information. Even if you choose to go with a different search engine, chances are that Google is monitoring your activity. It can do this through a variety of ways, like digging through the services that you use Google products for (like, you know, email) or leaving a cookie in your browser, monitoring the sites you visit and things you say.

Beyond that, Google has a powerful tool in their information-gathering arsenal: Google Analytics. A useful tool for bloggers and website managers, Analytics allows someone operating a site to get detailed information on their visitors, right down to what operating system and browser they’re using, their (general) location, and what they viewed on the site. You know who else has that information? Google.

I don’t know about you, but I would prefer if someone didn’t set me up for tracking that I didn’t know was going on. Sure, given Google’s large presence on the Web, I don’t think any single site running Analytics will hurt in the long run, but every single contribution counts. I’m not a big fan of the service, but I see its usefulness.

Evil Act Number Three: Being ‘Yucky’ with Advertisements

I get that Google is offering (a ton of) free services. They make some good tools, from Gmail and Google Docs to Google Search and Chrome. I’m used to seeing advertisements in Google Search results, as that’s how they make money. Cool.

What I don’t like is seeing advertisements based on an email that I’m reading. Sure, I doubt there’s an actual person viewing my email, but it still puts me on edge. It’s much the same when I launch Google Chrome. The first time I saw an advertisement in that Start Page (granted, it was for a Chromebook) I began using Safari as often as possible.

This probably sounds whiny. I could pay for some other email service, or use another search engine, there’s something horrible going on with my mother; feel free to leave those out of the comments section. Why? Because I’m looking into the first one, I’m using DuckDuckGo for search, and you don’t even know my mother. I think.

Evil Act Number Four: Buying a Weapon for the Patent Wars

Everyone has been doing this lately, but it doesn’t make it any less appalling. The patent wars continue, with multiple lawsuits being brought up in multiple countries in an effort to gain a leg-up on the competition through backhanded, broad patents for technology instead of trying to compete by creating excellent products.

Not really, but you get the point.

Not only is Google preparing to participate in this ridiculous ‘war’, they’ve also wasted twelve billion dollars in order to do so. You don’t pay that kind of money for a company that has been practically screaming for bankruptcy unless you’ve got something underhanded going on.

One could argue that Google is simply trying to play on the same level as other companies, and they’d be right. Unfortunately, I don’t think those same people ever paid attention when they were told that two wrongs don’t make a right.

Evil Act Number Five: On Verizon and Net Neutrality

Oh, Google. Supporter of the ‘open web’, bringer of light to the dark halls of proprietary formats and closed systems, how have you fallen? Some time around a billion years ago (it’s not an exact science) Google saw that they needed Verizon to sell Android phones, and Verizon needed Google’s backing behind their own internet agendas, which included proposing a variety of principles to the FCC in regards to net neutrality. Thus began the don’t be evil company’s courtship with one of America’s biggest telcos around a decidedly evil agenda.

Essentially, what all this means is that Google and Verizon wanted to make the wired web completely neutral, barring companies providing non-mobile internet access from messing with data or website speeds. What they didn’t do was use solid language or mention the mobile web anywhere…except to say that the rules should be different.

What’s that? The nation’s largest cellular service provider and the company that makes the operating systems on their (one-time) most popular phones wants to stop the FCC from bringing net neutrality to wireless companies? That makes perfect, non-evil sense. Maybe. Not really.

This move was a classic smile-in-the-front, dagger-in-the-back maneuver. By creating standards for wired service providers while trying to retain control of mobile internet, Google and Verizon made it difficult to argue.

Okay, but All Companies are Evil

Well, maybe. Sure, I guess. Even if these other companies are evil, the important thing going on here is the sheer size of the company we’re dealing with. So many people I know don’t know how to enter an internet address that isn’t for Facebook or Google. For them, Google Search is the Web. This makes Google an immensely powerful company in this space, and puts them in a position to do some real harm to the Web as a whole.

If this were a no-name company being creepy the easy answer would be ‘okay, but they’ll obviously die soon, you can’t get away with being creepy’. Unfortunately, Google isn’t a small company. They have money. They have talent. They have dedicated employees that genuinely believe they are helping change the Web (which, to be fair, they are). Google, as an entity, will probably be around long enough to deal some real damage.

I don’t expect Google to change. They’re a for-profit company, and I get that their ultimate goal is to pay stockholders. That’s cool. What I would like to see is the end of such lies like “Don’t be evil”. If you’re going to invade my privacy, mess with how I see the Web, and show me advertisements on every turn, don’t pretend you’re a nice guy.

One of my earliest memories of the internet is going to the bank with my parents in, oh, the mid ‘90s, when our bank was handing out packets with a floppy to help you get started using internet banking. The floppy included a browser (Netscape, perhaps, but I’m not sure), and a tutorial about how to get on the “world wide web” and magically manage your bank account from the comfort of your home. The Jetsons’ era had arrived.

Over a decade and a half later, there are still many people who are scared of managing their finances online. Some fear irrationally that someone could hack their computer and somehow download all of their money from their bank account, while others more rationally fear the privacy concerns surrounding financial web apps. Most banks let you at least manage some of your banking online, and apps like Quicken and iBank can download your statements to make it easier to manage. We’ve gotten used to that, and it doesn’t seem frightening now, but many are still scared to let apps like Mint.com bring in all of their financial info.

Or, then, you have the other extreme: people who do all of their banking online. I personally have an online bank account with ING Direct, a bank that has no physical bank locations, and love it. Then, new banking options like Simple are trying to reinvent banking online, with beautiful interfaces and new services. I, for one, can’t wait to give it a try.

Most of what I wrote above holds good for face to face, off the cuff conversations. However, if you were to look for people to give their opinions on the record, even anonymously, the numbers won’t be flattering. From the mighty Polldaddy to the innovative new comer Eval.me, there is no dearth of free and paid apps to create online polls. The problem is getting people to give you their opinion in a structured poll rather than just in a random ranting tweet. How does GoPollGo stand out from the rest?

Overview

GoPollGo is a real-time polling service with the most advanced discussion and analytics available on the web. The web app is a great to not only create and manage your own polls, but also to keep tabs on the pulse of people from across the globe. Yes, even without creating an account, you can see in vivid detail how people think on a variety of hot button issues.

Overview

GoPollGo is free to use. If you are a geek (like me), be sure to check out the Tech section of the About Us page. Every single framework and library used to build the web app is listed there.

Ease of Use

First, it is heartening to see GoPollGo to be one of those nice apps that implement a true, one click sign up policy. Use either your existing Twitter or Facebook account, if you aren’t in the mood to sign up from the standard form.

A Public Poll

Just like the homepage, you will be redirected again to a page that carries a live poll. Option to create your own poll is right at the top. But, the manner in which the app is designed and the data is presented makes one to stand to take a look and participate. Before jumping into creating a poll, let us go ahead and check out how well an existing poll and the resulting data are presented.

Participating in a Poll

You have the option to vote or if you don’t want to respond, you can skip straight to the results. The beauty is that you won’t be restricted from the proceedings and the results of the poll even if you aren’t voting. To top it, as others vote, you’ll see the results change in real-time without refreshing the page.

Results and Charts

Regionwise Results

GoPollGo automatically locates every vote. Click on any region in the map to see how different countries, states and counties are voting. All the numbers are updated in real time. Realtime data is more than welcome. But at times it might get heady when a lot of votes come in and a pause button will make a killer addition in such scenarios.

Demographic Data

For most polling and survey apps, detailed reports including demographic data won’t be made available unless you pay a premium. GoPollGo, however, leaves all the reports open. Votes are automatically classified by a variety of demographics.

Comments and Replies

What good is a poll when you don’t let you speak what’s on your mind about the question in hand? You can comment and reply on all polls and as people join the poll page, their pictures will show up along with the total number of people on the page right now.

To get email updates about a poll you are interested in, use the Like button. By liking a poll, you’ll receive email updates about it. Updates can be stopped by clicking on the Unlike button.

Creating a Poll

Creating a Poll

Use the Ask a Question button to create a poll of your own. What I saw was probably the simplest poll creation interface by far. If you don’t count the optional Description field, all you need is a question and some choices for the group to choose. Now, how simple is that? Not all polls have to be public, so just uncheck the box to keep the poll locked to a close circle.

Final Thoughts

GoPollGo is the simplest way to get feedback from your friends, followers and users. I particularly liked the idea of taking a sneak peek at what other people think on a variety of issues, even when I don’t have a question in mind for myself. Comprehensive analytics makes for another splendid feature.

The development team has smartly taken care of getting people to answer questions as and when possible. For instance, to see reports dealing with gender and age, you will have to specify your gender and age. Since few other charts are already revealed, it only makes sense for the user to submit the required info see relevant and additional data. Brilliant!

So, do you have a favorite polling app? What do you usually use to create polls? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

Well, there is a solution to this problem. BookingBug is a time management and scheduling tool that puts your clients in control of your work day. Read on for the full review.

What’s the Idea?

The objective of BookingBug is to help make time-allocation with customers or people you work with easier. Rather than building your timetable of appointments each day, your customers can build it for you. They do this by interacting with a widget or other plug-in on your website, this then adds their appointment to your BookingBug calendar. You then look at your customer-built calendar and interact with them at their chosen time. This whole process saves lots of emails and phone calls going back and forth when trying to organise time with people. You specify when you are available to work on your Calendar, and then clients can stamp their name on a time that suits them.

Once a customer has taken a slot, other interested customers see that time period marked as ‘busy’, so you won’t ever get double booked. This eliminates the issue I mentioned in my introduction, where you find yourself trying to accomplish three tasks at once. Without the risk of double bookings, your work day becomes a calm and softly-paced session of transitions between your clients.

Since BookingBug is a web service, it operates 24/7. Perhaps you are an American Web Developer who deals with clients the world over. Well, whilst you are sleeping in the US, your European clients can be arranging your work day for you. This means no more Skype calls or delayed emails across the world. You wake up and get on with your already organised day.

The calendar and booking system is configurable to pretty much any business type. For example if you don’t take appointments but instead offer classes and events, this can be reflected in your calendar settings.

BookingBug In Action

BookingBug has two interfaces. The first is the calendar which allows you to see when people want your time, and where you can announce to all your clients at once that a certain pocket of time is already unavailable. The second is the widget or other web interface your clients see that allows them to make bookings.

I knocked together a quick HTML file and dumped in the default widget code BookingBug offers. Here is the default Widget in it’s plainest possible state after I have clicked on a time slot. The reason the three entries for Tuesday morning are grayed out is that I took this screenshot at just after 11am on Tuesday, and people can’t book my time in the past.

I set my ‘working day’ from 9 to 5 in bookable chunks of one hour, but you can set up whichever hours you like.

This is the default embeddable widget, but you could always use a colourful Facebook widget or WordPress plugin (see below).

If someone decides they want to book whatever service I am offering (e.g Psychiatry) at 3pm, they can click on the 1 hour appointment and pull up this window shown below. This is the booking window that the administrator can customise to their needs, such as adding fields, and writing messages or announcements relevant to their service.

This is the default form, it is highly customisable to your own needs.

If I went through with the booking, I (the client) get a confirmation email of the time and date, which is exportable to your own calendar. Below is the calendar window the host will see. If multiple clients use BookingBug, imagine this calendar littered with appointments of varying sizes.

Oh and remember the widget screenshot above? Later clients who come along to that widget would now see the Wednesday 3pm slot as greyed out because it has been taken. No details on identity are revealed, only that another slot must be used.

A successful business would see this calendar covered in bookings from multiple clients.

Where Could I Use This Service?

The Calendar page of BookingBug's Android Application

Of course having only HTML embodiment of a Widget would be a bit restrictive. So BookingBug offers a variety of ways you can integrate your calendar with websites. These include integration with Facebook, WordPress, Drupal, and Brownbook. This means that regardless of how you or your company uses the internet to acquire customers, there will be something to suit your needs.

If you don’t want to display an entire Widget on your website, perhaps you would prefer a solo ‘Book Now’ button which leads to your calendar?  This is available too and may be better for some websites, especially if the BookingBug widget doesn’t fit in with your existing design.

If you have a smartphone, then you could also view your workday through either the Android or iOS Applications BookingBug offers for Free.

Can’t I Use Google Calendar?

Sort of, it doesn’t have quite the same management system. Google Calendar offers you HTML code you can use to embed your calendar into websites (if you make the calendar public). People can see when you are free, but I don’t think total strangers or unregistered people can add in their own appointments. They can invite you to their own events, and if you have the ‘Automatically include invites’ option enabled, it would show up on your own calendar. However this means that all of your clients need to use Google Calendar, which isn’t very practical.

Pricing

BookingBug offers four service packages. The first is £14.95 per month for Personal use, i.e Individuals and Personal Businesses, the second is for small businesses at £24.95 per month, the biggest package is £49.95 and aimed towards moderately sized businesses.

The fourth package? That’s free! One or two features are held back from you, such as the ability to embed widgets in certain websites, but otherwise everything you need is there. If you decide that BookingBug meets your needs, I’m sure you would upgrade to a fully-featured package anyway. If you fancy trying the free version of BookingBug, click on the ‘Pricing’ option at the top of the screen, and then look underneath the ‘Concierge Set-Up’ row on that page. It’s hidden away, but it’s there.

Final Thoughts

Overall BookingBug seems to be a highly dynamic, robust and customisable scheduler. Explicitly focused on making the arranging of appointments with clients as fast and as hassle free as possible. If you dislike taking calls from clients and then going back and forwards about which days are good for you, then here is your solution.

For the Appstorm rating I’m giving Bookingbug 8/10. It meets a real need, and is an easy-to-use solution you can use on any website.

In this article, I hope to inform you of a few ways to be more productive with the time you spend on the Internet and hopefully aid you in the fight to stay off those evil social networks during work or any other time when you shouldn’t be on them …

The Facts

According to a new study performed by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, the highest rate of “self-control failures” were linked to online social networking. This study actually shows that Facebook and Twitter are more addicting than alcohol or tobacco! However, I’m not going to go too in-depth on this because that’s not what this article is about — though the two do have a connection, so I’d advise reading more about this study here.

Starting Fresh in the Morning

I don’t know about you, but when I sit down at my desk in the morning I’m usually refreshed and ready to start writing or perform any other tasks that need to be completed. I feel as if I could write on and on all day about anything. Sadly, all of this dies after about an hour or two. Why? Maybe I’m just not someone who tolerates long sitting sessions or something, but as far as I’ve heard, no one is. One great way to balance your life is to get a Jawbone UP and program it to vibrate, reminding you that it’s time to go walk around the complex or do something a bit more physically active.

All these things work great for the situation described above, but what if you’re really busy with some work and it just can’t be finished later? I personally think that you should just give it a break. Taking a walk outside will enhance your productivity much more than continuing the project will. Go take a thirty-minute break and come back refreshed. It sounds stupid, but it really does help. Creating a balance is what you need to continue a productive day.

Now you’re probably wondering by now what happened to social networks. Well, I decided to throw them aside for a few minutes while I talked about something that still relates to the subject in a way. Now, on to social networks …

Don’t Visit Facebook, Twitter or Even Check Your Email at First Light

That’s right, leave them alone — they can wait. Starting your morning with social networking is preparing your day for disaster. There’s no reason to wake up and immediately check to see if someone had posted on your Facebook wall or mentioned you on Twitter while you were asleep. Now I’m not saying that this stuff isn’t important, but it does have its time and place and its time is not right when you wake up in the morning. If you just start using a social network immediately after waking up, then your day is practically ruined. Try starting fresh and avoiding all online communication just as your day begins to get underway.

Make use of apps like Concentrate for Mac

Rocket (aka “Made by Rocket”) has developed a beautiful Mac app titled Concentrate. Concentrate is designed to assist you in avoiding distractions by automatically quitting certain apps like Safari, Google Chrome, Twitter, Mail, Sparrow, etc. It also has other abilities, such as automatically opening apps that are required for your current task, running custom scripts, setting your iChat or Skype status to “away”, automatically opening documents, playing messages and sounds, and so on. You can learn more about Concentrate here. There is also a nice Windows app named RescueTime available for users of the alternative platform. It’s not as great as Concentrate, but it does its best to offer assistance to a distracted person.

Turn off text message alerts from Facebook and Twitter

Both Facebook and Twitter offer text message alerting services that will let you know if you have new messages, wall posts, mentions, comments, etc. with just multiple annoying texts. These are great if you desperately need to know what your friends are saying about you and your status, but there’s absolutely no reason to have it enabled if you’re trying to stay on task. So, head over to Facebook and Twitter and disable those notification settings right before starting your day — or even permanently.

Also avoid Hacker News, Reddit and forums

If you get distracted easily, then it would be best to not visit news blogs or forums like Gizmodo, Reddit, or even Yahoo! Answers discussions. In addition, I would recommend staying off YouTube because it’s literally the next generation of your television — which, to me, isn’t distracting at all, but I know a lot of people who have issues working and watching TV at the same time.

Writing? Use a distraction-free app and turn off WiFi

If you’re a writer or blogger then I’d highly suggest not writing in WordPress and instead turning off WiFi completely and using something like iA Writer or Byword for Mac. If you don’t have a Mac, then check out Ommwriter — it’s a beautiful Windows alternative. Or, try out Typerighter, a great online distraction-free writing app we recently reviewed. In addition to this, you may even want to turn off your mobile phone.

Wrapping It Up

I really hope that I helped you with your daily struggles, but if not, then please tell us how you manage avoiding social networks during your daily work!

Thanks for reading AppStorm, and I hope you enjoy looking over some of our favourite posts from last month!

Best of Android.AppStorm

Best of iPad.AppStorm

Best of Windows.AppStorm

Best of iPhone.AppStorm

Best of Web.AppStorm

Best of Mac.AppStorm

Share Your Ideas

Is there something in particular you’d like to see on the site next month? We’d absolutely love to hear your suggestions for articles, topics and giveaways. Just let us know in the comments. Thanks for reading AppStorm!

In this Quick Look, we’re highlighting Get Dealy. The developer describes Get Dealy as site offering sales on tech products. Deals on Mac software, web applications, and resources for creatives and developers. We’ve got over 120,000 members and are growing every day!.

Read on for more information and screenshots!

Screenshots

Get Dealy's site

A personalized email with deals from Get Dealy

About the App

Here are the top features you can expect to see in Get Dealy:

1. Sales between 50% and 70% off.
2. Specifically targeted toward technology.
3. Between 1 and 5 new (exclusive) sales each day.
4. Maximum of one email a day, containing only the deals you’re interested in.

Requirements: Any recent web browser
Price: Free
Developer: Get Dealy

I’m referring to the availability of free, open and affordable ecommerce platforms that gets you going from day one. Whenever there is a new software platform is launched, developers first think how best they can convert it to an online shop. SaaS providers like Shopify have made the need for custom code totally unnecessary.

Made Freshly competes with Shopify trying to help users sell online quickly and efficiently. Is the web app capable enough to go head on with a giant like Shopify? Let’s go check out!

Overview

Overview

Made freshly works hard on your behalf to simplify creating a virtual store. Simply add product details and images to your store in just a few simple steps. Boost your sales with the help of our professional store designs and functional tools. To make your store unique, select a store theme and customize the design to your taste. Without the need for any knowledge in ecommerce, you can start managing your store in no time at all.

Getting Started

Getting Started

I spent a few minutes trying to locate the pricing plans page. To my surprise, I couldn’t actually find one. So, I clicked on the sign up page thinking some choices would be displayed there atleast. But, even in the sign up page there was no mention of a subscription and by default a free account is created.

Adding PayPal Address

After email verification and logging in , you will be greeted by an overlay requesting for the PayPal address you want to integrate with your store. Usually, in an online shop running on any platform, you get started by adding a bunch of products you deal in. Likewise, Made Freshly starts there too.

Adding and Updating Products

Adding Product Information

Adding products to your online store is a no brainer. Fill up the product creation form like you do any other web form and you will have the product listed in no time. Most of the fields are self explanatory and as far as I can see, all required information about a product that the customer would like to know is collected beforehand. This should help keeping inquires to a minimum and increase the chance of conversions.

Images and Options

You can add multiple images to a product and each product can have multiple options (varieties, colors etc.). The order of images and product options can be realigned by dragging and dropping them around.

Shipping Groups and Rates

By default the free shipping option is selected. But Made Freshly has a dynamite shipping groups and rates feature. You can have multiple shipping policies for each product based on your terms. For instance, you can have a shipping charge for US and one for Europe.

Customization and Pricing

Theme Selections

Once the products are all added, they will be automatically displayed in the storefront subdomain. If you aren’t satisfied with the default design, there a few cool themes to choose from the Design section of the app. The available theme choices are very limited but they are unique nevertheless. Since more than half of the themes are available only when a plan is upgraded, there definitely should be more themes for premium users.

A Sample Store

Themes are meant to alter the layout of the store. For those looking forward to tinker every single aspect of the store, options to edit the colors, design, font and pages of the store are available in the same Design section too.

Pricing Plans

Finally, I found the subscriptions plans under the Settings page. There are only two paid plans and surprisingly none of them come with support for unlimited listings. Plans are mostly differentiated based on the number of listed products, themes, images per product and product pages. Custom domain integration and discount codes are supported in both free and paid plans as well.

Final Thoughts

I never once thought that Made Freshly would be completely free despite the dev team trying hard to create such an illusion. It’s a great idea to promote a free account left, right and center for customer acquisition. But beyond a point, if there are premium plans, it is the duty of the developers to ensure that users are aware of them before they’re too committed and feel tricked.

Made Freshly’s plans are affordable when compared to Shopify and in my opinion the web app makes for a very competent eCommerce platform. So, it’s in their best interest to disclose the pricing upfront in the homepage rather than hiding it in the Settings page. That said, Made Freshly has got everything to help even a novice run an online shop without any fuss.

Share Your Thoughts!

Do you own an eCommerce shop? Do you prefer custom code or pay as you go options like Made Freshly and Shopify?

Calaméo is a digital publishing platform that allows you to publish documents not only for viewing on the web, but also for viewing on any iOS device. They offer native viewing platforms for iPhone, iPad, and the web. The only problem is, you’ll have to stick with their platform rather than selling your creations on any eBook store. Does it have enough to make an author that committed to their platform? Let’s take a look and see.

Getting Started

The first step in getting started with Calaméo, as with most sites, is to create an account. You can register directly with the website, or you can sign up with Facebook. Once you’ve created an account, you’ll be taken to your account page. You can do a few things directly from this page: you can view your publications/their comments, edit your account settings and check out the featured publications.

Account Page

Perhaps the most important thing that you can do from your main account page, however, is to create a publication. This is the heart of the application. Click on any of the buttons that say Create a publication to get started. You’ll first have to write your document in another application, perhaps a native app like Word or your favorite web app for writing. You can then save the file and upload it in a variety of formats to Calaméo.

Uploading Options

Once the file has been created and uploaded, it’s time to format the document. This is the point where you title the publication, and choose how it will be categorized. Every publication must be given a document format type (e.g. brochure or magazine) and a category (e.g. news or science).

Formatting the Document

You can also tweak your document from the extra options on the bottom. Under More options, you can enter a description, content rating, date of publication, and more. Sharing options allows you to change the options on things like comment publication, document printing and copyright information. Finally, you can change skins/themes, add background images and turn sounds on and off from the Personalize your publication settings. Once you’re finished, you can hit Upload and send your file to Calaméo with all the settings tweaked just as you want.

Personalize Your Document

Browse Publications and View Your Own

While your document is uploading, why not take the time to browse some of the other publications on the site? The browse tab offers you a way to check out publications beyond the featured ones. On the browse tab, you have the option to either look through all of the publications that have ever been uploaded, or you can sort by a few different categories. The first is to search by category, so you can select from options like sports or arts & design. You can also browse by format, so looking for only books or only newspapers, for example. Finally, you can browse by publication language. The most common languages are listed, but you can choose any language from the drop-down menu.

Browsing

While you’ve been browsing, your publication was uploading. Check on it, and once it’s done you’ll be able to check out your publication. The page “Your Publications” presents a list of all the publications you have created and uploaded successfully. This is also the location for all editing, table of contents and general publication management.

Your Publications

Clicking on the publication takes you to the page that the public sees when first viewing the publication. This is the page where, depending upon the options selected when publishing the document, the reader can read, download, share, send or favorite the publication. If you allow printing, that is also an option on this page. As the document owner, this is where you can again make some edits to the document. You can change viewing options, edit links and add a table of contents to the document. Readers can communicate about the publication via comments on this page.

View Your Document

Perhaps the most important part of a document is the actual reading of the publication. Reading mode is where readers get to truly enjoy the content of the publication, whether it is static words and images, or a media-rich publication. Calaméo’s reading experience is very nice, and easily makes up for some of the things that were lacking in the rest of the site. It gives you an elegant place to showcase your magazines and books in full-color, looking much more like a real print copy than a simple Word document.

Reading the Publication

After publishing, you need to get your reader base up. Calaméo offers a handy list of links and ways to share. They provide links to go the overview of the publication, or to go directly to reading it. There is also a way to embed provided code on your website to create a “mini-calaméo.” This is a miniature version of the document that can be viewed directly from the page. Once you share these links and get your readership up, you should check out the statistics page. This is where you can see how many views and reads you’ve gotten.

Statistics - No Views For Me Yet

Social Interactions – Groups and Communities

Once you’ve gotten into viewing and reading some publications, or want to get more traffic to your publication, you should check out the various groups and communities that Calaméo has to offer. There are many groups available to join, and you can create a new group about the books that interest you. This is a great way to build a community around your books and interests, with group discussion boards and more.

A Popular Group About Photos

Premium and Platinum Upgrades

Calaméo also offers premium accounts for more publishing features. Starting at 12 €/month, these accounts let you upload longer ebooks, customize your logo and viewer, remove advertising, and get more advanced insight on your audience. When you’re just getting started, the basic account has plenty of features to get your writings shared with the world, but if you’re planning on publishing a lot of content with Calaméo, you may find the upgrades worthwhile.

Basic, Premium and Platinum Accounts

My Thoughts

All in all, Calaméo is a fine product. It’s not anything especially great, however. It did a decent job of what I asked of it. It uploaded the document, made it viewable and let me read and share it. However, it wouldn’t be my top choice for a publishing site. The advertisements were overwhelming and invasive. Rather than having limited ads tucked away at the bottom and sides, Calaméo often had ads that I would mistakenly click on trying to do an edit. Additionally, I don’t entirely care for the user interface. The site can be a bit difficult to navigate and it’s not often that great to look at.

That being said, I really enjoyed reading the publication on the site. The viewer is very nice except for the excessive advertisements. The fact that they have a great platform for viewing documents on iOS devices is also a benefit for them. This isn’t always present with sites created to publish documents on. In the grand scheme of things, it’s a fine site to use for free, but I don’t know if I would ever pay for a membership at their prices.

There’s a lot of options for publishing eBooks, and while Calaméo seems to be a fine fit for free publishing, they may not be the best choice for professional publishers. We hope to continue to see it improved over time, and for now, if you’re needing an easy way to publish those PDFs you have laying around, it just might be the tool you need.

The guys over at Gentlemint felt my pain and realized that there was some untapped potential here, so they came out with their version of Pintrest, but this one is strictly for men, at least that is the target audience. What a genius idea, contrary to what others may say, us men love to share cool, manly things that we find on the net with others as well.

How It Works

When you first head over to Gentlemint, if you are familiar with Pinterest, you will notice that it looks somewhat similar to it. The first thing you are going to want to do is to set up an account so that you can start contributing to the manliness that is Gentlemint. Once you do this, you are now on your way to showing off all of the cool things that you can find around the web.

Homepage of Gentlemint

When you want to add something to Gentlemint, there are a couple of ways to do this. You can click on the “Add to the Mint” button and then you can put in the link that you want to share with others. Your other option is to install the “Mint It” bookmarklet on your web browser of choice and then when you come across something that you want to share, you can “Mint It” into Gentlemint.

Adding a link to Gentlemint

Once the site gets the link, it pulls in images from the page and then you select the image that you want people to see. From there you can add a description of the item and then you are done.

Selecting an image for your post

Getting Social

Of course no site like this is complete without the opportunity to share your thoughts and comment on other people’s awesome posts. You can comment on each post as well as tweet it, Like it, or +1 the post. Gentlemint also has its own version of liking a post by clicking on a mustache to indicate that you like the post.

Social features of Gentlemint

Categorizing and Search

I would love to see some kind of categorizing structure added to the site; maybe have the ability to categorize your post or tag them in a way so that they can be sorted. To go along with this, it would be nice to see a search function. As the site gets bigger and grows, I am noticing I no longer want to just look at the posts that are on the front page, I want to start searching for specific things to see if people posted on them.

Final Thoughts

When I first started to use Gentlemint, I got really excited because this was exactly what I was hoping for when I signed up for Pinterest. It is a great place to share the amazing things that you come across as well as browse all the other things that people find as well. But, there is more to be desired in this site and I believe that it has great potential if it is able to make the right moves going forward.

The site will grow, there is no doubt about that. It is evident as I was one of the very early adopters to the site and each and every day I am seeing more and more people put up great posts. So far, the guys that run Gentlemint have been able to keep up with the demand and have made some great subtle tweaks to the site to make it better. The big question is, will they do enough to keep the site relevant? Right now, like Pinterest, Gentlemint is invite only. So, if you are interested in using the site, hopefully you know someone who is willing to give you an invite or you can possibly contact the Gentlemint guys and they could let you in.

All you need is a simple way to send a newsletter and let people subscribe. Nothing fancy. Perhaps a picture or some formatted text, but nothing more than that, right? Sounds like TinyLetter is what you need. Let’s take a look at this simple newsletter service and see how simple it is to start the newsletter you’ve always wanted.

Newsletters don’t have to be hard

TinyLetter is a fairly new service you’ve likely not heard of, but it’s already made enough waves to get acquired by one of the biggest names in email newsletters: MailChimp. Now, MailChimp already has a free tier, so you can get started making beautiful email newsletters without spending a dime with their service. Why would you want to use TinyLetter?

One word: simplicity. MailChimp is great; it’s easily one of the top 10 apps we’d recommend for business users, and we even use it for our own AppFanatix newsletter here at AppStorm! But it’s way too complicated if all you want to do is write a nice newsletter and send it out. Whether you’re a writer and want to share your thoughts, or are running a business and just want to cut the complexity and get your newsletters sent, TinyLetter is likely the best tool for the job.

Right from the start at the front page, TinyLetter lets you get the ball rolling on your new newsletter. Just enter a unique username, perhaps your Twitter @name, to start making your TinyLetter account. Your readers and friends and customers can then sign up for your newsletter at tinyletter.com/yourname.

Get started right from TinyLetter's front page

You’ve still got to create a normal account, but it’ll only take a minute. You can enter your real name, an optional description for your newsletter, as well as your own email address and a password. And that’s it. Boom. You’re finished. You can go ahead and start sharing your tinyletter.com/yourname link with anyone to start getting subscribers for your newsletter.

Just the basics are needed to start your newsletter

Ladies and Gentlemen: Your tiny account

Wait, you’re saying. Aren’t email newsletters supposed to have tons of settings and features and things to tweak? Perhaps most do, but you won’t need to worry about them here. All you need to worry about is writing the best group emails you can, and TinyLetter takes care of the rest. Your account contains the basic features you’d expect: a link to write a newsletter, read replies your newsletter received, view stats and past newsletters, view and add subscribers, and some settings.

Just the settings you need, and nothing else

The settings page has some interesting options you can tweak if you have the time and want to personalize your newsletter signup process a bit more. You can tweak all of the copy on your signup page, from what people see when they’re signing up to the message they’ll get after they’ve confirmed their email. You can also add a background image to your signup form, and choose a background for the email field on that form.

Interestingly enough, you can even set a price and charge for your newsletter! For-pay newsletters are a trend among writers and others who want to monetize their information, and could be a great option if you’ve got a lot of excited fans that really want to read what you write. You can choose any price you want, and let TinyLetter collect the payments or have them sent straight to your Paypal.

Tweak your signup page ... and even charge for your newsletter

Once you’ve done all of your tweaking, you can visit your own signup page and see how it turned out. You really can’t mess it up, and you can go back and change anything you need. Or, if you have your own site, you can embed the signup form on your own blog or website.

A signup page with extra styling

Write. And TinyLetter will take care of the rest.

Now you’ve got the hardest job of all: writing your newsletter. It’s easy to get caught up in tweaking your tools, but what’s most important is what you do with them. TinyLetter has a nice rich text editor that lets you write your newsletter just the way you want. You could just write plain text, or you could choose from standard web fonts and tweak it the way you want. You can even include HTML code in your email.

The only problem we hit was with adding images; TinyLetter uses ImageShack by default, and it wouldn’t display the images correctly. Instead, you could upload your images to CloudApp, Droplr, or another simple file sharing tool, and then insert the picture as a link from the 2nd image button. You could also use a tool like that to share other files, like a document or eBook, with your newsletter, and just paste the link into your message.

Write your email newsletter with formatting and images

Once you’re finished writing, you can preview the email, which emails a copy to your own personal email account so you’ll see how it looks once its sent. If everything looks find, hit send, and TinyLetter will cue your email newsletter up to get sent to your entire list. Whether you’re writing to 18 or 800 people, they’ll all get the email soon thereafter. Hopefully they’ll love your emails, but if not, they can easily unsubscribe from the link at the bottom of the message. They can also easily reply to your newsletter by just replying to that email itself.

You'll get a basic newsletter with just what you included

TinyLetter will keep all the replies you get in your dashboard, so you can review them before you send another newsletter. It’ll also email you when you get replies, so you won’t have to login to TinyLetter if you don’t want. You can always review your old newsletters to see how many times they were opened as well. It’s just about everything you can expect from a basic newsletter service. Come to think of it, it’s just about like Gmail designed just for bulk emails.

Get replies to your newsletter right in TinyLetter

Conclusion

So, are you ready now to go start a new email newsletter? Or have you already been using TinyLetter? We’d love to hear your thoughts about the service, and why you’d love to write an email newsletter. Or, if you’ve got another email service you like better, we’d love to know what’s better about your favorite service. Sound off in the comments, and we’ll be here listening!

Moonfruit is another competitor in this market. It looks stylish, promises to be simple, and … you do want to create a new site, right? So what does it have to offer, and what are it’s pros and cons? Lets take a look…

Making Creativity Easy

Moonfruit is designed for people with absolutely no web design experience. It attempts to give small business owners and individuals easy access to web management and creative tools. So without further ado, lets take a look at the site itself.

Choosing a template to work with.

The first step in creating a site is choosing one of hundreds of themes as a starting point. From there it’s a case of altering and tweaking pretty much everything you see into a website that you would use to represent yourself.

The tools in the editor are very simple and easy to use, which is great because that’s exactly what people need. The elements, contents and formatting can be added and removed in a way that resembles Word or Publisher, so most people will feel comfortable using it. Moonfruit effectively turns a website into a page-by-page online document, where everything you see is configurable and can be adjusted as required.

The Editor window - More tools are made visible by selecting the categories at the top.

The content of the site has been intelligently and automatically mobile optimized.

A very useful feature Moonfruit has is automatic optimization of your site for mobile viewers. You don’t even have to configure or enable this, it’s there from the word go, no plugins, or code to meddle with. It didn’t show the Gallery image you can in these screenshots, however I am sure that this is solvable. Mobile-Optimization is important these days, as with the growth of smartphone and tablet computer popularity, more and more views may come from such devices.

Another factor that would definitely make Moonfruit appealing to people who want a hassle-free experience is that the hosting and domain settings are handled for you. No FTP client is required, and there are no HTML or CSS files to manage. The web interface handles it all. On the subject of domains, you can link one you own to Moonfruit in a matter of minutes. They guide you through the process of changing address records with the company you purchased the domain from and so forth. You can also use Moonfruit to register a new domain if you so wished.

The social aspect of a websites? They are included too, with Twitter integration, RSS feeds, Comment boxes, Forum backends, and chat widgets.

Costs?

Free website? Why thank you, yes.

They start you out on a 15 Day Free trial with 20MB of storage space. For any more space than this you have to crack open your wallet.

I chose the trial at first, and was expecting to have a really restricted interface and being prompted to pay for extra features. However when I signed in a popup box asked if I wanted to continue my 15 day trial, or keep a site for free. I clicked free, and the only condition is that I have to sign in every six months to keep the site ‘active’. Seemed like a good deal to me.

Obviously if you want a site for small businesses and enterprises you are going to have to break the 20MB limit, but for individuals or small groups it seems you can have a website on Moonfruit for nothing.

Bolt-Ons

There are several pieces of functionality you can add into your website if so required, such as a blog, or even a shop.

Blogs

The blog interface is very simplistic, offering only minimal functionality. What you see in this screenshot is all that you get. However for those of you familiar with feature-rich WordPress, remember that this entire service is geared towards people looking for straightforward and simplicity. Whilst it may look pretty bare, this is all that a blogger really needs. Three design modes are offered, Text, Image, and Article, so it definitely won’t be replacing WordPress any time soon.

The Blog publishing window

Shops

Granted this feature is in Beta, but it’s still incredibly minimalistic if you wanted to create a shop within Moonfruit. Perhaps they still haven’t gotten the full service opened up to their customers yet. However if you signed into Facebook through Moonfruit, they give you a neat interface for managing a Facebook shop. Since social media is everything when it comes to businesses these days, this may be for the best.

People

The ‘People’ feature is where the Moonfruit Bolt-Ons regain a lot of pride. This membership management system lets you analyse and control your sites ‘Members’, that is if you chose to enable a sign up system. Within this tool you can send messages, alter group permissions and access to pages, or ban them if they’ve been misbehaving.

The ‘Send Message’ pane of People is a great social network broadcaster. If you sign into Facebook and authorise Twitter you’ve got a great distribution method for news and updates. Equally impressive is that you can email all the people who ‘signed up’ to your site at the click of a button.

Services

A useful feature Moonfruit slips in is the ‘Services’ page. This page has links to Google Analytics setup, Adsense, and Webmaster tools. Underneath are some promotional services for small businesses. Bookingbug for enquiry and reservation, MOO Printing for logo’s and images printed on pretty much anything, then Widgetbox to add some customization and interactivity to your website.

All of these tools would be invaluable to a small business.

Final Thoughts

Moonfruit seems to be a good tool to use when creating a simple website, especially for individuals or small businesses. It’s packed with abilities that you can jumble together to make a fully functional community, business, or personal website.

For a rating I’m giving Moonfruit 8/10. One mark is lost for the extreme simplicity of some of the interfaces, since they left me wanting a little more. The other mark is lost for the lack of more features. I think a lot more could be done in them way of social network integration. File transfers and hosting through FTP would be welcome too. Otherwise, if you fancy complete creative control and easy management of a website, Moonfruit may be for you.

In this Quick Look, we’re highlighting WebEngage. The developer describes WebEngage as an in-site feedback and targeted survey tool for websites. It lets you create targeted polls for your site’s visitors and engage your audience directly. You can easily set up and integrate it with your site, and then use its power to improve your lead generation and customer support right on your site.

Read on for more information and screenshots!

Screenshots

Create surveys easily

Easily see your feedback all together

About the App

Here are the top five features you can expect to see in WebEngage:

Feedback:
1. Automatic screenshots of the page for users submitting the feedback on.
2. Ability to add custom fields and categories to the feedback form for a website.

Survey:

3. Ability to “target” the survey only a specific audience on the website. E.g. “show this survey ONLY to visitors coming from Google search and spending at least 30 seconds on my site’s pricing page”.
4. Powerful reporting and real time analytics per survey.

General:

5. One time integration on a website. No more code changes ever. Complete control and customization from a powerful dashboard.

Requirements: Administrative access to your website, any modern browser
Price: Starting at $15/month; free basic account available
Developer: http://webengage.com/about-us