WeVideo is a very handy online video editor that makes editing videos a very simple task. You can upload videos from your computer or import them from cloud storage services and select the editing mode depending on your experience. Once done, all you have to do is edit the video by adding titles, themes and other effects, and you are done. The service also has a dedicated Android app that can help you edit videos on the go.

Getting Started

To start editing your videos, you’ll need to visit the  WeVideo home pageand sign up for an account. If you want, you can even use your Facebook, Google or Yahoo credentials to access the service. Then, you’ll be directed to the WeVideo dashboard from where you can upload, create and invite people to collaborate on videos.

You can upload videos from your desktop, import them from Facebook or other cloud services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, Facebook, Picasa, Instagram and Flickr. Select any service where you have the video file on and authorize WeVideo to access that account. Once done, it will show you all the files that are saved on your cloud storage service. Just select the file you want to upload and it will appear under Media tab. The time it takes to upload the video depends on its size. Just make sure it’s not too large, as the service only gives you 5Gb storage in the free plan.

Working with WeVideo Editor

Click on Create Video button from your dashboard and you will be redirected to WeVideo editor. When you launch the application for the first time, you will be asked to select the editing mode which includes Storyboard, Timeline and Advanced Timeline. Storyboard mode is for absolute beginners who have no idea about video editing. On the other hand, Timeline is for users with a little experience and lastly, Advanced Timeline is for video editing professionals.

The uploaded videos will also appear in the editor under Video section. In the left side bar, it will show you all the effects and media files you can use in your videos such as audio files, images, transition effects, texts, etc. Note that you will not be able to see the transition effects and graphics in the Storyboard mode.

To get started, select the Timeline mode and click on the Video tab. It will show you the uploaded video files, simply drag and drop it anywhere in the first timeline. The reason we selected Timeline mode is to show you all the features it offers. You can split the videos using the scissor tool located under the preview window. Just move the red line, make your selection and click on the scissor icon.

Click on the Transitions tab to check the effects offered by the service. To use them, just select the effect you want to use and drag it in the second timeline.

Click on the Graphics tab and it will show you all the graphic effects you can use in your videos. Drag and drop the selected graphics on the timeline where you want it to appear and add the text.

You can even invite other people to collaborate on your projects from your dashboard, if you wish. After you are done with the editing, you can easily publish and save your videos online. If you want, you can easily upload the videos to cloud storage accounts as well as publish it to the video sharing websites including YouTube and Vimeo.

Pricing

WeVideo also offers users with paid plans starting from $4.99 per month. The paid plans offer users with more features and storage space as well as a higher resolution video. In the paid plans, there are no watermarks on the videos as well.

Wrapping it up

Overall, WeVideo is one of the most simple and easy-to-use video editor I have used. This is the second time in my life that I used a video editor and it was so simple even in the timeline view. The best thing about the service is that you can easily import/export videos to Dropbox and other cloud storage services. You can even use WeVideo to create professional presentations as well.

However, there is only one drawback, all the videos that you publish under the free account comes with a WeVideo watermark. To remove the watermarks, you can sign up for a paid plan which comes at a nominal rate of $4.99 per month especially if you use video editors on a regular basis.

Feel free to share your thoughts if you tried WeVideo.

My wife and I have found the web to be very helpful for a lot of answers to our questions that we have about our son, when it comes to simple issues like when to potty train, to more complex ones like “Why is our son not eating?” But, as we have found, we can spend hours on the web finding the answers to our questions and we can get many different opinions from people. That is great, but I would love to be able to condense that into one site — where hopefully the answers are all high quality.

As I was looking for answers to a question a few weeks ago, I stumbled upon Quib.ly, which is a question and answer site, similar to Quora and the like, but puts its focus on parenting and technology. Those are two areas where I can offer help and learn a great deal from so I thought I would give it a spin to see how beneficial it could be for me.

Asking Questions

There are two main features in Quib.ly: you can ask a question or you can answer them. There are a couple of ways to do this. First, you can search for the topic that you are looking for and if it isn’t already being asked, then you can create a question for the community to answer. You can categorize it as well as request what kind of answers you are looking for, whether you want someone with experience, their opinion, or facts.

Asking a question on Quib.ly

Secondly, you can search through topics to see if you can find more information about something that you are curious about. When you find a topic or a question that you want to continue to see what people answer or ask, you can follow them and any time someone answers the question, you will get an email letting you know. This is a nice feature in that you don’t always have to go back to the site to see responses from others. The downside is that if the question is popular, your inbox can get flooded pretty quickly, but you can always unfollow it if it gets too overwhelming for you.

Contributing to Questions

Of course, sites like this only survive if there are people that are willing to answer questions that are being asked. It is very easy to answer a question if you feel like you can contribute to the community. On the homepage you will see featured as well as trending questions that you can answer and you can also go to a specific topic and browse what others are asking. When answering a question, you are given a few editing tools to have at your disposal. You can also answer it anonymously if you don’t want to let people know that you are answering.

Quib.ly homepage

There are also some social features that are built in when answering questions. You can up vote someone’s answer if you feel it is a good one. You can also share other’s contributions to Twitter and Facebook. Lastly, you can comment on the answers that others give, which is a good way to interact with people, especially if you are asking the question and you want clarification on someone’s answer.

Answering a question

Can It Work?

Question and answer sites have been around for a little while now, and there are a few that stand out, so the question is, “Can Quib.ly?” make it? I personally think they can because what they have done is that they have carved out a nice little niche for themselves. With their focus on parenting and technology, they will attract people who may not want to use other sites like Quora, but would use this. Although Quib.ly does have a focus of technology, it doesn’t feel like it is too nerdy to use or that your average web user can’t feel like they can benefit from it.

In my experience with using the site, I found that when I asked a question I got thoughtful answers from those who had experience or had a wealth of knowledge on the topic. I really felt like I was getting quality answers to what I was asking. I also felt that when I answered a question, I got great feedback from the person asking the question or others who were answering as well. I felt like we all could be a part of the conversation and it didn’t stop when I answered the question. People would ask followup questions to continue conversing with you. It seemed like people were genuinely interested in knowing what others had to say.

Final Thoughts

Quib.ly is currently in beta and you can sign up using your Facebook account or your email to get instant access. The site itself worked well and I found it very helpful in finding out answers to my parenting questions. I think they have done a good job with the site and I like that they are focusing on two topics that a lot of people can relate to and they haven’t just made it another question and answer site. Quib.ly is free to use at the moment and is really handy. So, if you are looking for parenting and/or technology advice, I would highly suggest you head over to Quib.ly to check it out and if you are an expert on these topics, I would love to get your wisdom as well.

What one needs to stay productive is a solution that’s a combination of the three. From what I hear, Onehub comes close to what I am looking for. I immediately jumped on the opportunity to take it for a test drive. Care to know about results? Read on!

My Workflow and Expectations

So, this is how I utilize my cloud services. I use Google Drive to compose content and I am heavy user of Google Docs, creating multiple files a day. Dropbox helps me sync my mission critical files that don’t exceed a total of 1 GB. This self imposed limit is to ensure quick sync when I am setting up new devices.

All my useful, but non essential files that I don’t access on a daily basis are stored in Box. Thanks to their generous 50 GB free space promotion for iPhone users and an intuitive interface, I am a big fan of the service. Though not a cumbersome process, it would be fabulous if I could get rid of atleast one app to simplify the workflow. Let’s see if Onehub can help me achieve that.

Getting Started

Onehub has a rather costly pricing structure. Plans start at $29 a month for 5GB of space, which is costlier than many well known cloud storage alternatives. However, given the gamut of offerings promised, I’ll reserve judgment till I evaluate the app.

Pricing Structure

Submitting your credit card information is mandatory to sign up for an account. You won’t be charged until the 14 day free trial expires, but asking for the credit card information is not a standard practice anymore. Why scare away potential customers?

Uploading and Organizing Files

Onehub sports a clean layout. They have opted for labels instead of a bunch of buttons and this design choice is refreshing. There isn’t much to speak about the workflow. If you have used a cloud storage app in the past, you should get used to Onehub in no time at all. If in doubt, the walkthrough wizard is always there at your disposal.

Organizing Files and Folders

After creating a workspace, start uploading the files. When creating a folder, you have the option to keep it hidden. It’s a great feature when you are sharing the workspace with others.

Uploading Files

Onehub supports uploading multiple files and all you need is to drag and drop files to the browser window. Yes, the uploads were fast and the app was successfully able to utilize my maximum upload bandwidth. Unfortunately, there weren’t any options to cancel uploads mid way. The only way to do that is by forcefully navigating to another page. Definitely not an ideal solution.

Working with Files

Predictably, previewing is limited to a few file formats. PDF files, the most common of the lot, can be consumed in their full glory. The online reader is feature rich and allows you to perform many file level actions that includes adding comments, creating associated tasks and many more.

Reading a PDF File

While you are at it, try the fullscreen mode as well. It’s just great! In my opinion, the USP of Onehub is the Google Docs integration. And, the integration comes to effect in just two clicks! After the integration, when you create a document or a spreadsheet from Onehub, an embedded Google Docs window will show up.

Google Docs Integration

It’s the good old Google Drive, and you can create, edit and format documents like you always do. All changes are saved to your Google Drive as usual. Additionally, you can save the same file to your Onehub account for quick access. In that case, you’ll have a copy of the document available in your Google Drive account and the Onehub account.

To start editing or downloading the document, use the respective buttons in the Onehub app. This saves you a trip to the Google Drive folders.

Final Thoughts

The cloud version of Onehub doesn’t come with a desktop app like Dropbox. You’ll have to use the web app for uploading, managing and accessing your files. This is not a big deal considering the desktop apps of all competing solutions are lacking one or another. However, the steep pricing warrants as many perks as possible for a customer.

It’s clear that Onehub is not a cloud storage solution like Box. The app is highly useful to those who use Google Docs heavily and collaborate a lot with their team to create documents. The interface and ease of organization for sure puts Onehub ahead of Google Drive in many respects.

So, if you are in the league that’s looking for a cleaner version of Google Drive, Onehub is the solution you’re looking for!

But Google’s also successful, wildly so. It’s a rare day when any internet connect human doesn’t touch at least one Google products. Not because we’re forced to, but because we want to. Google Search just works, and its popularity got us to try the rest of their apps. And you know what? Google Maps, Gmail, Docs, Chrome and more all work so good, most of us choose them because they work great. They may be spartan, but they sure do the job.

That’s not enough. The new Google, one increasingly infused with Google+ DNA since its launch 2 years ago, is focusing harder than ever on design. And features. And glasses, and driverless cars, and beating Dropbox, and more. It’s a busy — and shiny — new search giant, and that’s on showcase more than ever at this year’s Google I/O developer conference.

Web Apps Don’t Have to Be Dull

If there’s one quick takeaway from the first day of Google I/O, it’s that web apps have grown up. Google’s paved the way to a cleaner web with its own spartan web apps, which dropped the flashy banners and gradients for plain white, treys, and scientifically tested blues. Google+’s launch started a new, more stylish trend for Google, one we’ve seen take over everything they offer over the past years, but even that looks quaint compared to the latest changes.

Take the new Google Maps, the star of what Google’s unveiled at I/O. The soon-to-be-released version of Google Maps is beautifully animated in Chrome, powered by WebGL, with all the features you’d expect from Google Earth right in your browser. It’s smarter, too, with location reviews and smart maps that show you points of interest along the way to the place you’re going. With prettier images, a more fluid experience, and the directions you already trust, it’s an update you’ll want to sign up for (yup, you’ll have to sign up to get early access).

But it doesn’t stop there. The poster child for Google’s new designer future, Google+, has gotten a ton of beautiful updates. It’s been almost fully redesigned, while yet recognizable as Google+, with a new 3-column plus side menu design that feels like a Googly, super-sized Pinterest. A beautiful one, though, one that’s more animated than ever.

Remember the animation in Google+ when adding new people to your circles? The new post box animation when you start to write something is even more dramatic, in a nice way you’ll have to try out to see how it works. It’s nice, but I’m not sure it’d be that fun to see animate every time you want to post something online.

Just, wow.

Now, remember when we said we use Google’s apps because we want to? Google+ never managed to hit that level for most people, except for three things: keeping your web profile up-to-date for search purposes (useful, needed even, but not fun), Hangouts (group video chats that are useful and fun), and photo sharing (thanks to generous storage limits and Android integration). Google’s now made those last two even better.

There’s brand new Hangout apps for iOS, and it’s built into Gmail — it’s Google’s new central messaging service, and we must admit it’s a good one. Then, for photos, you can still store unlimited standard sized photos for free, with auto-backup from your phone if you want. There’s also new Auto Enhance, Auto Highlight, and Auto Awesome (really) features to help you get the most out of your pictures. Here’s more on those:

Bringing Everything Together

If there’s one thing Google hasn’t always gotten perfect, it’s pulling all of their diverse apps and services together in a way that makes sense. They’re doing far better now. First off, rather than having separate storage in Google Drive, Gmail, and more, every Google account has 15Gb of free Google Drive storage, shared between all of the services – even Gmail. You can then upgrade for more storage starting at $4.99/month for 100Gb, which is half the price of Dropbox Pro for those keeping track.

Next up, Gmail now is integrated with Google Wallet, so you can send money right inside Gmail just like another attachment to your emails. It makes Google Wallet a closer competitor to PayPal, and it gives most of us a way we could actually make use of Wallet today. As soon as it launches, that is.

Sending money through the mail, reinvented

Then, voice is the new big Google tech that’s already in Chrome but will soon be the killer Google feature, at least if we can all get used to talking to our laptops. The new Google Voice Search will be much more like it is on Android devices, letting you start a conversation by saying “OK Google,” and then both search by voice and get followup queries by continuing the conversation. It’s like Siri, super-powered, in your browser. If the web ever gets Google Now, you’ll have your full digital assistant in Google.com, from anywhere.

Ok Google…

And Google’s doing everything to make sure you’ll both start your day at Google, and keep using it throughout the day. There’s search and Drive and Gmail to keep you working, but there’s also the brand-new Google Play All Access, a $9.99/month streaming music solution that lets you stream millions of songs that are ready for purchase in Google Play. If you sign up before the end of June, it’ll just cost $7.99. The streaming music playing field just got a bit more competitive.

Streaming music, Google Style

Google’s the new Software Giant

It’s fashionable to refer to Microsoft as the “Software Giant”, but the name more aptly applies to Google these days, what with its myriad array of integrated services and apps that nearly everyone uses day in, day out. There’s all the web apps, the Chrome browser, and Android … not to mention ambitious new projects like Google Glass and self-driving cars.

Google’s one company who’s future is hard to predict, but one thing’s for sure: the future at Google will look pretty. Each of their new apps looks shinier than the last, and Google’s not about to let Apple or anyone else beat them in the design department. And they’re far more likely to work together — or be deeply tied together — than ever before.

You can watch the whole Google I/O 2013 Keynote on YouTube, if you’d like.

Even still, on the desktop you’ll often find that you need to use Flash. That’s why our writer Nathan Snelgrove just wrote an article on our sister site Mac.AppStorm on the best ways to avoid using Flash on your Mac.

It’s aimed mainly at Safari users, and even recommends using Chrome for Flash since it’s built-into Chrome. But, if you’re an IE or Firefox user on a Windows or Linux PC who’d rather get around using Flash, it’s got enough tips that you might find some of them helpful.

Continue Reading at Mac.AppStorm…

You’ve likely got a notes app built-into your OS of choice, too. And another in your email client. Even Dropbox itself makes a pretty compelling choice, as you can store plain text files in it and edit them as notes anywhere.

And yet, Evernote remains the crowd favorite. It lets you take notes about anything, throw in files, pictures, web clips, and more, and search through it all effortlessly. It lives in the web, but also has native apps for practically ever OS out there. It’s even in a Samsung fridge. It seems cluttered, with everything in one place, formatted text mixed with plain text and PDFs and everything else. And yet, it works – and is beloved by millions.

So, for those of you who swear by Evernote, what is it about the service that you love the most? We’d love to hear your thoughts — or your dissenting views if you hate Evernote — in the comments below.

Take for example, the app that I am reviewing today called Feeder Ninja, which does something so simple in nature, but yet can come in very handy when you are creating your own site. Feeder Ninja takes your social media feeds and creates an embedable  window that you can insert into your website. Again, simple in nature, but they make it so easy to do and it looks very professional.

Creating Your Own Feed

When you first get started with Feeder Ninja, you can select what kind of feed you want to create. You can select between Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and an RSS feed to use. Once you select the one you want you then have some settings to tweak to make it your own.

Selecting a feed to create

You can change a variety of things of the look and feel of your feed so that it matches how you want it to look. The width and height can be manipulated to ones that will fit your site. You can also change the feed style, where there are two free choices to choose from, and a few other premium ones, which I will talk about more later.

Editing your feed’s appearance

There are also a variety of colors that you can choose from to make your feed stand out. Again, if you stick to the free plan, you can either choose between black or gray and if you upgrade to a paid plan you get a lot more to choose from. You can also create your own custom color if you so desire. Lastly, you also have the option to insert some kind of background for your feed. You can insert an image url or use the paid plan to upload your own picture.

Choosing your color and background image

Using your Feed

Once you are finished designing what your feed is going to look like you are now ready to insert it into your website. Feeder Ninja gives you some code that you need to insert into your website in order for it to show up. This is where, if anything, you need to know a little bit about where to put this so it will show up properly on your site. Lastly, once your feed is inserted into your site, Feeder Ninja gives you stats on how many people viewed your feed.

Meets a Need

When I first started to peruse through Feeder Ninja, I felt that this is great for those people that want a simple and easy way to insert their social or RSS feeds into their site. I know that there are plugins you can use through WordPress that do the similar, if not the same thing, that Feeder Ninja has to offer. But, in my opinion this app is for those that may not use WordPress or those that just want an easy way to create something like this.

In my experience, sometimes WordPress plugins can be frustrating to use, especially if you are not one that has the patience to find what will work for you or tinker with the code to make it your own. With Feeder Ninja, it literally took me less than 5 minutes to create a good looking feed for my social networks and it just works, which is something that I can appreciate.

Conclusion

Feeder Ninja is a great web app to use to create good looking social feeds for your website. I would love to see them add more social sites in the future like Instagram, Flickr, Google+, etc. If you want to unlock more features, they offer a paid plan which is $4/month or you can also pay for the year or for life if you choose to.

For what it is worth, if you are a WordPress user, you could probably save some money by searching for a plugin that does the same thing as you could possibly get more bang for your buck. But, if you don’t want to fool around with plugins or you are using a different platform, then go and check out Feeder Ninja for yourself and see if it will work for you.

Syndifeed is a very handy online RSS client that takes the simplicity of The Old Reader and feeling of Feedly. With Syndifeed, you can subscribe to all your favourite blogs and read them from where ever you are. Let’s take a look.

Getting Started

To get started, you must sign up for an account on Syndifeed which hardly takes a minute. Just go to Syndifeed homepage and enter the required details. After the registration is complete, you will be redirected to your dashboard showing you some of the latest news from the web.

Personally, I like the interface of the app as it’s really clean and simple. The list of feeds are shown in the right side bar with all the posts on the dashboard as shown below.

Adding Feeds

One of the first things any user who is planning to switch from Google Reader to any other RSS client is whether he can import his subscriptions from Google Reader or not. The process of adding every feed one by one can be a time consuming task. Luckily, the process of importing subscriptions to Syndifeed takes less than a minute, unlike The Old Reader where I had to wait for almost 10 days to get my feeds transferred from Google Reader.

Just click on My Account and go to Feeds from the sidebar. From there you will be able to add new feeds to the list. Just enter the name and URL of the website you want to follow and click on Add. All the websites you are subscribed to will appear under Edit Feeds section. If you want, you can manually delete any specific website from there.

To import feeds from Google Reader, you need to first create a backup of your Google Reader subscriptions. If you don’t have your Google Reader backup, we have covered a guide to help you create a backup of your Google Reader feeds. Now, scroll down the same Feeds page and browse the location of your subscriptions.xml file. As I said earlier, the transfer process was simple took hardly 10 seconds.

Some Useful Features

The service offers its users with some nice features. When you click on any article, it will open the article in the same window as a popup where you will be able to read your feeds in a clean and ad free user interface. Apart from reading yours Newsfeed, you can also save the article for later reading on Syndifeed or save it on Instapaper if you use it. If you want, you can even share the articles from Syndifeed to different social networks including Google+, Twitter and Facebook.

Some websites have enabled excerpt view on their posts, in that case, you have to open the complete post in a new tab by clicking on View External option.

All the articles that you save using Syndifeed can be found in the Saved tab on the taskbar. The articles saved in Syndifeed are sorted according to the date they were saved and shows the most recent saved article first. This feature is already available in some RSS clients like Feedly.

You can even create new folders and organize them according to our own preferences as well. There is an option to create and edit folders in the sidebar.

The service also has a mobile friendly interface meaning you can open Syndifeed on your mobile device and view your RSS feeds in a mobile friendly interface. You can select your feeds from the list view them on your device, clutter-free.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that Syndifeed is a very useful RSS client that may be considered as a worthy Google Reader alternative. However, the app has some flaws as well. When I was trying to add folders from settings, I had to try a couple of times before it added the folders. Despite of a mobile friendly interface, I would love if the service has a dedicated mobile app to check the feeds.

But I don’t think these flaws matter that much as the main functionality is importing and reading RSS feeds in a clutter free interface. The developers have said that they have some cool new features which will be released soon. So let’s wait and hope for some feature that is not present in any other RSS client.

Often services that offer image display turn out as design showcases, regardless of their viability of comments. Hunie comes to change the game, as a place to host your designs and get honest feedback for a tiny price: your own critiques to other users sketches. It’s a pay it forward model that just might work.

Introduction

“What if someone just babbles on about my design?” I know this question is tingling in your head, but before going to second base, allow me to show you around on Hunie. Similar to Dribbble, you must request an invitation to the service, registering your basic information and linking to your portfolio. But, relax: as long as you have some stuff out there, the folks at Hunie will get in touch soon, so this seems more like an anti-spam feature than an evaluation process. You can also ask for an invitation if you have an insider friend. All in all, it’s far more open than Dribbble has ever been.

See that portfolio field? Add your link and right next to it include “(appstorm)” to jump to the front line.

As soon as you get in, you’ll be introduced to the gallery of recently sent drafts, where everything is up for critique. You can narrow down the displayed items with the categories offered by Hunie: Interfaces, Graphics, Identity, Mobile and Icons. You can also check what is trending and who you follow (probably nobody at the moment).

Every 10 designs on the stream, you have a section for the Fearless Experts, where Hunie recognizes their most active and competent designers according to Karma, which is the measure of reputation in Hunie. There are also Points and these you need to exchange for submitting designs. How do you get more points? Writing critiques on other people’s designs (and getting up-voted).

Social Feedback

Find a design that you have something to add and open it. This will bring a whole different panel, which from now on I’ll call the Critique panel. Going from left to right, you can find some context written by the designer on the piece. Then comes the menu, where you can collapse the first panel and take a look at the other reviews, the Hunie Board – which ranks those who gained points from their critiques in the piece you’re checking out, and all the viewers.

If the design is inside a project, you can check its siblings from the navigation bar, there you can also zoom or toggle commentaries off. On the bottom, the most important resource is the quick access to other drafts from the same design. Let’s talk about the design we’re reviewing, shall we? If there is any critique there already, you’ll find the circle with the reviewer’s profile pic, now look for something to bash, click and boom! A little text bubble pops up so you can write a suggestion for that segment.

You can even navigate between the reviews using the arrows atop the critique bubble.

People can up-vote your critique if they find it interesting or mark as useful, you earn 1 point every time any of these happen. People can also reply to your comment and start a discussion. You may also write a general comment, without pointing out anything in the design, still it turns out a bit loose and doesn’t allow replies.

Uploading your designs

Unless you’re the next good samaritan, you joined Hunie because you were helpless looking for feedback to your sketches. Just click that cloud icon and the “Submit Design” panel comes up. There you can give a title, choose a topic, add it to a project and write about your objective with that design. There’s no size or resolution limit to your preview. According to Hunie’s guidelines, avoid “shots” and skewed images. Post something people can criticize you for having a line 1 pixel out of level.

There are only two differences which were not covered previously that you can do with your own designs. The first one is updating it with a new draft. You have a limit of three drafts per project, so use them wisely, though they’re point-free. You may also add more screens for your project, yet these will cost you as a submission. Still better to keep your project in detail, willing for feedback in a concise and well-organized place. There’s no excuse not to organize everything.

Include more screens and update your drafts to give your reviewers the best view of your project.

Now your design is going straight to the main showcase and everyone who logs in will visualize a thumbnail of your project. You’re up for feedback. Also, don’t expect your sketches to disappear under the stream, Hunie is still a small community and you’ll rarely see more than 10 drafts being submitted daily and you can also abuse the extra visibility offered by the specific categories.

Closing lines

With your first design posted, the critiques will come shortly. Meanwhile, instead of refreshing and checking your notifications every couple of minutes, why not review a few more designs and accumulating points? That’s the goal here: the time you spend on Hunie, evaluating the received critiques, is also time you could check other projects and keep the community objective.

Also remember: you’re the best judge for the feedback you receive. Not everything will be helpful; still, everyone is trying to help, since they rely on the interpretation of their critiques by other users to acquire points. Expect feedback, at any stages, be it in form of a suggestion or a compliment, as every social network, the user base is the sole responsible for the growth and leverage of Hunie as a place amateurs and experienced designers can break their creative blocks.

Oh, I almost forgot: If you’re interested in Hunie, go to the Request an Invite page and beside the link to your portfolio, add “appstorm” between brackets and you’ll get fast tracked for an invitation. In my case it would be like this: http://philgr.com (appstorm). Jumping to the front line, how cool is that?

Finally I found what I was looking for, in the form of Kloudless for Google Chrome.

What is Kloudless?

Kloudless is a very useful Google Chrome extension that allows users to integrate multiple cloud storage services in Gmail and move files from Gmail to cloud storage services and vice versa. You can even create rules that allow users to upload email attachments to Dropbox or any other selected cloud storage service automatically.

Let’s take a look at how you can setup Kloudless and integrate it with your Gmail account.

Setting Up Kloudless

Using Kloudless is really simple and straightforward. Just go to the Chrome Web Store and install the Kloudless extension for Google Chrome. Click on Add to Chrome button and authorize the extension to access your browsing, google accounts and cloud services data. They need access so that they can easily move files from one service to another.

Once installed, it will automatically open Gmail and you will notice a new option appearing in your Gmail interface, right next to your name. Click on it and it will ask you to setup Kloudless which is really simple and straightforward.

After you click on Get Started, it will ask you to authorize the application to access your Gmail account.

It will open a new window with Kloudless settings where you will be shown three different tabs: Account, Apps and Add-ons. The account tab will show you the Gmail account from where you want to transfer your files. After authorizing your Gmail account, click on Apps tab. In the Apps tab, the app will show you all the services they support. Currently, Kloudless works with Dropbox, Box and Google Drive. Just select your desired service and authorize it as well.

Here is the most interesting part: you can set up rules to automatically move or copy your attachments from your emails to different cloud storage services. Click on Add New Rule and select the type of attachments you want to move to your cloud storage account. You can select attachments from specific people, have specific keywords, etc.

After customizing the type of attachments, just select the folder where you want to copy the attachments.

Another useful feature of this extension is that it adds a new option to your attachments as well. When you open any email with an attachment, you will see a Copy/Move option that will allow you to transfer that specific attachment to Dropbox or any other cloud storage service.

Adding Files As Attachments from Cloud Storage

If you want to email any file that is saved on your cloud storage service, you can attach it to any email in Gmail. The extension adds Kloudless icon right next to the attach files option that allows users to attach files from Dropbox or any other supported cloud storage service.

When the recipient receives the email that contains the files you attached using Kloudless, they can view them without downloading the file right in their browser.

Conclusion

Kloudless is a very handy extension especially when you want to create backups of your attachments automatically. It can help users save time as it automatically uploads the files to your selected service. However, there are some minor problems with the extension. One problem I noticed is that you have to login and authorize your accounts twice before the option shows you the cloud storage service from Gmail compose window. But this should not stop you from using Kloudless as it is still in beta stages and sending feedback to the developer about known issues will help them improve the extension. Apart from that, I didn’t come across any issue with the extension.

The folks over at Kloudless will also release the same extension for Outlook as well. That will be very useful for all those people who use Microsoft Outlook as their default email client.

Clickberry lets you add those extras to your videos, and share them online with your audience. You can share the very best pieces of video – whether it’s top highlights, tagged friends, interesting things worth buying, or memorable moments. Curating and archiving the best video from around the web has never been easier.

Clickberry is a delightful, new way to share the moments that move you. Highlight dramatic moments, interesting things & friends and quickly bring stories to the world’s attention. It’s fun, simple, and free!

Go Get It!

Ready to start adding annotations and more to your videos? Then go download the Clickberry Tagger extension for Chrome or Firefox so you can add annotations to videos already online in YouTube. You can also download Clickberry app for your Mac or PC to create interactive videos and upload them to share. Or, you can download the free Clickberry Tagger app for your iPhone to take videos on the go, add the tags you want, then upload and share the videos with your friends.

In a sales process, it is very common for businesses to haggle over the price and in turn, a quote ends up edited and updated multiple times. There will be customer specific charges and fees as well. So, it’s imperative that the quote creation app is flexible enough to accommodate all the crazy changes.

That’s exactly what I’m going to look for in Sparkling. Join me!

Before Jumping In..

Usually I comment on whether the user interface of an app is simplistic or not. For a change, the simplistic homepage design of Sparkling grabbed my attention. SaaS apps tend to have flamboyant homepage designs and there often will be information overflow.

Sparkling’s design is simple, neat and there is no information overflow. But, there is way too little information to convince a visitor to explore the app further. Lifting a couple of key points from the tour page will make for a more convincing argument.

The app offers only one subscription plan that costs $29 which includes unlimited quotes, clients and team members.

Getting Started

I signed up for a 14 day free trial and was pleasantly surprised when I saw the dashboard. The user interface is built on top of Twitter Bootstrap and as a fan of this amazing open source framework, I got a warm, fuzzy feeling!

Bootstrap User Interface

Sure, if you are tech savvy and in particular someone with an eye for design, the use of a stock UI elements from Bootstrap might put you off a bit. But, in my opinion, Sparkling is one app that has brought the best out of Bootstrap in a web app.

Workflow

If you are trying to keep an eye on what everyone in your team is up to, you’ll love the activity feed in the dashboard.

Item Types

For those in a hurry, a prominently placed Add Proposal button is hard to miss. And, before you ask, the workflow is extremely simple as well. It all starts with a brief description of the proposal and the client information. Interestingly three types of items are available to select at start – text, video and budget.

Follow that with a few lines of charges and taxes, and you’re done. The process was simple, but I got totally confused with the Amount and Price per Unit fields.

Adding Charges to a Proposal

I ran into huge numbers when I entered my charge in the amount field followed by the price per month fields. Apparently, amount refers to the quantity of units and not the actual amount. Renaming the amount field to quantity or something similar will definitely avoid this confusion.

A Quote before applying a theme

The quote I generated looked decent enough, but was rather bland. I tried to make it look gorgeous by applying a theme.

Themes

Theme Editor

You can do so much with the theme editor. The downside is you’ll have to be someone that understands code and have an eye for design. Options to edit the HTML and CSS should make a designer very happy when it comes to customizing the theme. Sparkling team also offers free custom theme consultation as well. Grab it if you are not so into tinkering with code!

Templates

Saving time at every possible turn is vital to close a deal. The text and product templates help you do just that. Quickly insert content created earlier and get the job done. The search box at the top right corner makes the process of finding the right templates painless.

Keeping an Eye on Status

You can send a proposal right away, bypassing the hassle of downloading and attaching a PDF file. And, I just love how these quote management apps allow tracking what happens with a proposal.

Tracking Proposals

Sparkling alerts you with an email when a proposal is opened. Multiple proposals can be easily monitored from the Proposals dashboard. Being able to see who viewed the proposal is awesome, additional perk!

Final Thoughts

Sparkling scored perfectly on the flexibility part of the equation. Affordable pricing and a simple workflow work in favor of the app. Lack of easy to use templates is a major downside. In addition to a variety of color themes, pre built templates for common quote types will make Sparkling’s offerings more competitive.

A lot of new quote generation apps have come up in the past few months. While one excels in creating gorgeous proposals, others focus on analytics, niche targeting etc. Sparkling’s strong suite is its simplicity. But, if you are looking for something more, do check out our coverage of the competition. And, don’t forget to tell us about your pick!

The latest feed reader on the block is Feed Wrangler, a project that’d already been in the works for several months prior to Google’s announcement and that’s now ready for use. It’s simpler to use than many feed readers, though also more geeky with ways to make your own dynamic feeds from the sites you’re subscribed to. Let’s take a look.

Feed Wrangler

Feed Wrangler isn’t designed as a new way to read your news, or surface the best links from your feeds. It’s not shiny and eye-catching, but rather sports a spartan gray+text UI that’s reminiscent of the bookmarking service Pinboard. And it’s not free, but rather costs $19/year (which works out to around $1.50/month, which is hardly a princely sum).

Feed Wrangler is instead designed to be the best way to subscribe to all of your feeds, with a lightening fast interface and clean fonts that make it easy to browse through the day’s headlines or read articles in full. It’s got deep Read Later integration so you can save the best articles to read later, and full text search through all of your feeds and their article content to find exactly what you’re looking for. Most interesting, it’s got a unique Smart Streams feature that lets you make your own custom feeds based on queries you’ve setup. Plus, it’s got a sustainable business model, so you can bank on the fact that Feed Wrangler will be there when you need it, and won’t meet an untimely death like Google Reader.

Feed Wrangler isn’t a simple clone of Google Reader. Instead it is an alternative take on aggregating RSS that I think makes it much easier to manage.

~David Smith, Feed Wrangler Developer

So far, so good. In fact, it just might be what you’ve been looking for in a feed reader, if you really wanted to replace Google Reader with something that was similar, but then also pushed the bar with unique tools that make feeds more powerful.

Moving’s Easy

Moving over from Google Reader

If you’re a Google Reader refugee, you couldn’t have it easier with Feed Wrangler. It has a prominent Google Reader import tool that, after a quick authentication with your Google account, will pull all of your feeds and favorites over in seconds. It imported my full Google Reader account and had my latest unread feeds ready to read about 20 seconds after I completed my Google Reader import.

Of course, if you used another RSS reader app, or are just getting started with RSS, Feed Wrangler works great too. You can import your OPML file or add individual feeds directly. Then, going forward, you can use the bookmarklet to subscribe to RSS feeds from sites you visit.

No favorite left behind.

The best thing is, Feed Wrangler brings over everything from Google Reader, including your starred items, something that few Google Reader alternates do. It’ll even bring over articles you starred that aren’t currently in your feed list, so nothing is lost. If you’re moving from Google Reader to Feed Wrangler, you won’t need to worry about importing starred items into Pinboard or something else; there’ll all here in one app.

Time to Settle In

Feed Inception.

If you wanted a straight-out feed reader, Feed Wrangler has you covered, no questions asked. But it has some features that go beyond that. Most obviously, there’s built-in search that searches the full contents of your feeds, which is very nice but often overlooked. Then, there’s very nice Read Later app support, which will both let you quickly send articles to your favorite service and will also check Instapaper to see if articles are already in your Reading Later list.

Best of all, there’s support for Smart Streams — your own feeds made dynamically from articles in your feeds. You can enter search filters to surface articles with the keywords you want in their text, then set what feeds you want it to include in the Smart Stream. Save it, and you’ll instantly have a set of all articles with those keywords. It’s a simple way to keep up on what’s most important to you in all of your feeds, and will be interesting to see what more you can do with it in the future once the API is released.

Beyond that, Feed Wrangler works much as you’d expect. You can browse through a list of your feeds in order, or just see the unread items. Click on an item to read it in full in the app, or click the read-it-later icon to save it to your reading app of choice. My only frustration was with the lack of keyboard shortcuts, something I hope will be added in the future to make reading sans-mouse easier.

Designed for Apps

Feed Wrangler, looking great on iOS

There’s more than just the web app, too. Feed Wrangler’s already got its own iOS app for free, that if anything is more polished than the web app. There’s also a promised full-featured Mac app, as well as a complementary iOS Podcasts app, presumably using Feed Wrangler as a way to subscribe to podcasts and listen to them on the go.

But that’s not all. Feed Wrangler is designed with a full 3rd party API, so 3rd party feed reader apps can plug into Feed Wrangler just like they did with Google Reader. The Android app Press has already announced Feed Wrangler support, and hopefully more apps will be coming soon.

Conclusion

When David Smith set out to build Feed Wrangler, he didn’t want to simply clone Google Reader. Instead, he wanted to build a sustainable service that builds on the very idea of feeds, in a way that users would love.

On that goal, Feed Wrangler’s already a great accomplishment. It’s smart feeds go where no other feed readers I’ve ever used have gone, and the lightening-fast app makes checking the news simpler than ever. When more native apps are available, Feed Wrangler will definitely be one of the most attractive options for switching away from Google Reader. If the web app just had keyboard shortcuts, it’d have everything you’d be used to in Google Reader, and more.

Feed Wrangler is a great choice to try out if you haven’t found the perfect feed reader for your needs yet, and it’ll be exciting to see how it improves and takes feeds further going forward.

Since then, though, Adobe’s refocused on native web coding — and seems to be distancing itself more and more from Flash. They’ve bought out Typekit but kept its free plan, and even made their own free web font library for unlimited use on any site. They also have a number of useful web apps, for everything from basic photo editing to a surprisingly robust screenwriting web app (which we can’t figure out why they made as a web app after killing their office web apps).

We just rounded up a dozen free apps and tools from Adobe over at Mac.AppStorm, and you should take a minute to check it out. There’s a number of web apps in the list, as well as native Mac and Windows apps (and even one for Linux) for everything from photo syncing to web coding.

Checkout our full Roundup of free apps from Adobe at Mac.AppStorm…

One reason why I prefer online tools to create invoices is that you can easily manage and view all the invoices in few simple clicks and you can connect your PayPal or any other supported payment method with the service. This helps users find out how many invoices have been paid and so on.

At Web.AppStorm, we have shared some very useful invoicing apps, free and paid, that can help users create invoices. Today, we present to you another handy invoicing app that does not only allows users to create invoices and estimated but also allow them to manage their expenses from the same dashboard. The app is known as Scoreboard.

Introduction

Scoreboard is a very useful online tool that allows users to create professional invoices online. With Scoreboard, you can not only create invoices but you can even manage and track your expenses. You can add clients, add your company information, create product catalogues and prices, add team members and track estimates. You can even add your clients to track the progress of the estimates and projects you are working on.

The complete information about the invoices paid, expenses and estimates are displayed on your dashboard as well. You can see how many invoices have been paid, tracked estimates and more.

The service offers users with a 30 day trial period after which you must update to a pro plan starting from $15 per month.

Adding Clients and Team Members

After registration, you will be redirected to Scoreboard dashboard. Click on Clients from the taskbar and start adding clients. You will be asked to add details about your clients such as the name, contact information, address and company logo. Under the trial period, you can add as many clients as you want. These companies also include firms you have to pay as well.

To add team members and contributors to your projects, go to the People tab and add your colleagues.

Tracking Expenses and Hours Worked

You can view recent expenses from your Scoreboard dashboard. You an either add your expenses from the dashboard as well as from the expense tab. Just click on Tracking tab and select Expenses from the dashboard. Just select date, description, client you are going to pay and add the amount. From the same page, you can keep track of all the invoices and hours worked.

Creating Invoices and Getting Paid

Click on the Invoices tab and select Add invoice. It will ask you to enter the Name and the client you want to send an invoice to. It will then redirect you to the invoice page where you can add the invoice details such as price, quantity, total amount, etc. After adding the required information, just click on the “+” icon that will appear right next to price field when you will move your cursor there. This will add the item to the invoice and you can then email it to your client or download it to your computer.

To check all your created invoices, open the invoice tab and it will show you all the paid and unpaid invoices. You can also categorize them by their status as well.

After creating the project, you can invite your clients to view and pay their invoices via Paypal or simply email them the invoice in PDF format. The service allows you to integrate PayPal with their Scoreboard account so that you can get paid without any issue.

Creating Product Catalogues

With Scoreboard, you can add items and products you sell or buy. You can add the name of the items, price per unit or add any extra notes.  You can add as many items you want to your catalogue so that you don’t have to add them again and again to your invoices.

Pricing

The service is paid and offers users with a 30 day free trial. If it suits your needs, you can sign up for a paid plan that starts from $15 per month that allows up to 2 contributors, add unlimited clients and invoices. If you have a large team of contributors, you can sign up for a higher plan.

Conclusion

There are many online invoicing solutions available on the internet right now. One of the few things that I like about the service is that you can track how much you have charged and spent for different services and track how many hours you have worked on any project.. Apart from that, you can add sales tax and other taxes to your invoices as well.

This is an app that combines the power of a good invoicing tool with proper expense management. If you want to add expenses on the go, Scoreboard has a mobile optimized website that allows users to add expenses from their mobile devices as well.

Did you try Scoreboard? We’d love to hear about your views in the comments below.

It might sound too good to be true, but Chrome now has speech recognition built-in, and there’s a new app from Digital Inspiration — Dictation — that makes it easy to put it to use. You might never have to type in your notes again online!

Just Say It!

Speech recognition is nothing new — it’s been built into computers since the turn of the century, though without buying a program like Dragon Dictate, it’s never been that useful. That’s changed recently, with high-quality voice recognition coming in Siri that was later added to OS X, as well as Google’s voice recognition in Android and its mobile apps. And now, Google’s brought that to the web. In Chrome, web apps can listen to you talking and send the data to Google to get transcribed and sent back as text almost instantly — for free.

Digital Inspiration’s Dictation takes Google’s speech recognition, and combines it with a notebook that stores what you’ve written in your browser’s offline cache, giving you a way to put the speech recognition to productive use. Just visit the Dictation app, then click the Start Dictation button on the bottom left. You’ll need to allow the app to use your microphone — something you’ll need to do every time you want to use the Dictation app — and then just start talking. It’ll start transcribing what you say, sometimes going back to fix something after the context becomes clear.

Dictation is supposed to accept commands like new sentence and new paragraph, but they didn’t work at all in my tests. That’s not too big of problem, though it’d be nice to see them working. What does work for now is text editing the traditional way; you can edit any text in Dictation, or type in manually.

Then, once you’ve said your fill, you can copy the text out and paste it into a text box in another web app or save it in any app on your computer. Or, you can click the Export button to save your text to Dropbox or Google Drive, or download it as a .txt file.

Edit and save your dictated text

The most annoying part of using Dictation is that you have to allow the microphone every singe time you use it. You can get around that, though, by installing the Dictation Chrome App from the Chrome Web Store. It’ll run offline, so it opens instantly — though you’ll still need to be connected to the internet for the app to transcribe what you say. It’s almost the same as the online version, just a tad faster to get started with, and you won’t have to approve it to use your mic each time.

Going native…

Talking Everyone Online

It’s a rare day when you see a speech icon in a web app, but that might be less rare in the future than you’d think, thanks to the Web Speech API. It’s part of HTML5, and when other browsers add it in the future (Safari’s already working on it), any web app that supports speech in Chrome today will automatically work with speech in them. If you’re a web developer, you can go ahead and add speech support to your web app today, if you’d like.

Google doesn’t even support speech in all of its apps yet, but there are two ways you can use it directly from Google right now. First off, just visit the Google Search page, click the microphone, and search by voice. It’s simple and easy … and oddly, doesn’t even have to ask your permission every time to listen to your speech (of course, Chrome is built by Google, so…). Then, there’s also the original web speech demo from Google, which transcribes your text into a box and lets you easily email it. It also lets you pick the language, which is one nice little touch.

Google.com’s got speech recognition, too.

Now, without any partisan bias, I must say that Google’s speech recognition is far from perfect. It’s good, great even, but still missed more stuff that I expected it to. Additionally, in a side-by-side test with OS X’s built-in dictation — that’s powered by the same smarts as the iPhone’s Siri — I found that Google’s Chrome dictation messed up more of what I said than OS X dictation. That could be because I’ve used it more, but still, there’s some work for Google to do here.

But that’s to be expected. This is the early days of online speech recognition, and it should keep improving, especially if Google’s tying into the same database that powers its voice search on Android and in its iOS apps. Plus, it’ll be exciting to see if other browsers do it better — perhaps with local speech recognition — in the future.

Conclusion

I don’t know about you, but I personally use Siri’s dictation feature on my iPhone almost daily to send messages to my wife, friends, and coworkers. It works — of course, not perfectly, but is still terribly useful. While I’ve never used it to write a full article, I have used OS X’s built-in dictation occasionally, and it’s a simple way to jot down some thoughts without having to reach for your keyboard.

It might not be life-changing, but having dictation in Chrome on any computer you use should surely come in handy sometimes. I know I’ll be putting it to use more, especially if I’m missing OS X dictation when I’m working on a PC.

Google has tried so hard to get into the social networking game, but its first attempts were little more than failures. Let us count the ways:

• Google Wave, which promised to reinvent how we collaborate. Dead.
• Google Buzz, a social network inside Gmail. Dead.
• Orkut, an outright social network. Practically unknown outside of Brazil.

So then, Google practically had to redesign their entire company around their final social offering: Google+. It launched with fanfare, and even had some nice features, but ultimately wasn’t enough different to drag most of us away from Twitter and Facebook. Just about the only standout feature was Hangouts, group video chats inside Google+.

But Google has forged it deeply into Google search, making a Google+ profile rather necessary if you want your site’s search results to show off your author info. Plus, if you buy into Google’s other products like the brand-new Glass, you’ll get the best built-in sharing experience with Google+.

So, are you still using Google+? Or has your account languished without any recent updates?

Of course, if you do use Google+, be sure to follow us on Google+!

But what if you want to do more with your text? Perhaps, make outlines, collapse sections, display markdown as you’re writing, and move lines of text around? Then you’ve got to check out Oak Outliner.

Folding Text, Reinvented for the Web

If you’re a Mac user that loves trying out writing apps, then you’ve likely heard of FoldingText. It’s an insanely powerful writing app that, at its core, is just a plain text app that supports Markdown formatting. But it does so much more than that: it lets you quickly create outlines, then collapse and reopen them easily to help you organize your thoughts (thus, FoldingText). And, it lets you keep track of todos in plain text. Oh, and you can make timers, again in plain text. And so much more. It’s one of those deceptively simple yet powerful apps that you have to try yourself to see how useful it is beyond just writing your thoughts down.

Oak Outliner is the first hint of a text editor that powerful on the web, bought to you by the very same team that made FoldingText. It doesn’t do all of that, not yet anyhow, but it’s got the folding part down perfectly. And the markdown part down half-way. At the very least, it’s one of the nicest ways to write up a document online.

It’s also perhaps the simplest web app to get started using. Just go to oakoutliner.com, select all of the welcome text and delete it, then start typing. Close the tap, and then visit Oak Outliner again, and everything you typed will be there as it’s automatically stored in your browser’s local storage. No accounts needed, and you don’t even need to be online to keep writing. It’s in your browser, but saved on your local computer.

It just works.

But if you’re just writing without using Oak Outliner’s special features, you’d be missing out. All you need to do is hit tab to indent a new line and start writing. Hit enter, and the new line is indented as well. You can add number, dashes, asterisk … or just write in plain lines of text without anything special specifying your outline. You can even press tab again to indent further, adding subpoints or notes to your outline.

Now, it’s time for the magic. Press CMD+, or CTRL+, to fold your outline, condensing it to just your outline heading. Press it again – or the small … icon – to reveal everything again. Want to move stuff around? Press CMD+U to move a line of text up in your outline, or CMD+D to move it down. Press CMD+R to indent a line further, or CMD+L to un-indent a line.

There’s even more. You can include Markdown formatting for bold and italics, or add links that’ll automatically turn into hyperlinks. You can select parts of your outline using Option+CMD+up or down. And when you’re done writing, a quick copy/paste will get your text into the app you need.

…elegantly, too.

There’s an awful lot of nice little touches as well. There’s the built-in right-click menu for quick access to Oak Outliner tools, as shown above. There’s also formatting marks that’ll show up when you select text, but will be invisible normally, just like in the new Ulysses III for Mac. And then, even if you have text hidden (or should we say folded), it’ll still be copied if you select the folded area when you copy from Oak Outliner to another writing app.

The Future

The fun thing is, this is just what’s ready for us to use today. Oak Outliner technically isn’t even fully released to the public yet, even though it’s already open for you to go try out today (and you absolutely should). According to the FAQ, there’s a paid version with extra features coming in the future. And that’s not all.

Oak is one part of our bigger goal.

The most interesting thing about Oak Outliner is the team behind it: the same team that made the legendary WriteRoom full-screen writing app for the Mac, that’s perhaps the biggest reason minimalistic writing apps took off in the first place for any platform. Led by developer Jesse Grosjean, Hog Bay Software is easily one of the most innovative teams for plain text writing apps. Their stable of apps includes the aforementioned WriteRoom, as well as TaskPaper (a plain text todo list app), QuickCursor (to let you edit text in in app with your favorite text editor on your Mac), and most recently, FoldingText (a writing and outlining powerhouse app that also includes todos, a timer, and so much more).

That’s the legacy behind Oak Outliner, which itself is only the beginning of Hog Bay’s web presence. They’re planning a “group of productivity apps that work together and all use simple plain text formats”, along with a major update to FoldingText — and Oak Outliner is the place where they’re testing their ideas.

With new apps like Draft and Editorially, and now Hog Bay’s new push for web writing apps, it’s an exciting time for those of us who love to write in our browsers.

I’ve tried many apps, but none ever hit the spot for me until I came across CashBase.

What Is CashBase?

CashBase is an app to keep track of all your expenses and incomes from a single and easy to use dashboard. You can manage all your expenses sorted by categories such as food, transportation, miscellaneous expenses, and more. You can also enter the amount of money you earn during the month and generate reports at the end of the month to find out how much you have saved during the month after all the expenses.

The service has dedicated iPhone and Android apps to help you track expenses on the go. The app requires you to login with your credentials so that the data you enter can be accessed from anywhere by logging in to your account from the web as well.

The service offers a free plan with limited features, but if you are satisfied with the service, you can sign up for a pro account as well that allows users to create budgets and cash flows for better cash management.

Tracking Income and Expenses

To get started, you must sign up for an account on CashBase which hardly takes a minute. After registration, you will be redirected to CashBase dashboard from where you can add expenses, incomes and manage reports. To add expenses, just click on the Expenses button from the main dashboard, enter the amount and category to which it belongs. If you want, you can add categories manually as well either from CashBase dashboard.  After you add the income, you will also be shown the amount of money you have left. If you want, you can also add recurring expenses every month so that you don’t have to do it yourself every time.

Add expenses and incomes from simple and easy to use dashboard.

You can add as many wallets you want such as Cash wallet, debit cards, saving accounts, and more. To add any wallet, just click on the wheel icon and go to Wallets. From there you can add and manage as many accounts as you want, just make sure you compare it with your bank statements to be sure CashBase and your bank they reconcile with each other.

Transfer Money from One Wallet to Another

As they say, an image is worth a thousand words. If you want, you can view the breakup of all your expenses in the form of a pie chart as well. It will tell you how much money you have spent on different things. The service even allows you to print the chart or save it as an image file on your computer as well.

CashBase displaying all the expenses in a form of chart sorted by categories

The service also allows its users to generate custom reports as well. Just select the dates from the main dashboard and it will display all the incurred expenses and incomes from that time period.

Generating custom reports

Import/Export Data for Offline Use

One of the most important feature is the ability to export all your data in a CSV or ODS (open document format). Just click on export button and it will save the monthly report in your selected format. If you want, you can even import your bank statements as well as manage them automatically.

Import / Export CashBase data for offline use

Mobile Apps and Expense Management

The service has dedicated mobile apps for Android and iPhone as well which are available free of cost. You can just login and start adding your incomes and expenses from your device which will be synced with the online service. The mobile app also shows you the stats as well in a form of a chart, showing you the expenses and incomes separately.

CashBase iPhone dashboard

Cash Flow Projections and Budget Management

One of the best ways to make sure you save enough money each month is to create strict budgets. But you cannot manage them properly if you don’t know how much money you have earned/spent during the month. With CashBase, you can create budgets and make sure you don’t go over it. Apart from that, it also gives users 12 month cash flow projections to find out how much cash they have generated over the past one year. However, these two features are not present in the free version.

Wrapping it Up

There are a lot of expense tracking apps available on the internet, but majority of them aren’t free and the ones which are free may not have that much to offer to its users. Other than that, apps like Mint.com are not available in every part of the world, so people like me have to look for alternatives which are useful and easy to operate.

For me, CashBase is that app. It is a simple and easy to use expense tracking tool. The tool offers users with some very attractive features in order to efficiently manage their accounts, expenses and savings.

One feature that I think that should be in the app is to select multiple currencies. By default, the app does not show any currency sign after you start adding transactions, which is not a big issue, but is one thing I’d like to see changed going forward.

Which expense tracking app do you use and why? Did you try CashBase? We’d love to hear about your thoughts in the comments below!

In the case of Nextly, they definitely present you with a different experience all together. Unlike other RSS reader apps, they take a slightly different route that is somewhat interesting and could actually catch on. One  feature that they do to stand out from the others is that they incorporate the use of the keyboard into the reading experience. Sound intriguing? Let’s explore more of this app and see what it has in store for us.

Setting It Up

When you first start to use Nextly, you have to be able to sign in with either a Twitter or Facebook account. At this point there is no option to just sign up for the service, which hopefully that changes in the future. As far as adding content to read, you basically search for it through their site. They have a wide selection of topics to choose from where you can find feeds that you are interested in reading. You can also search for a specific site that you want to read and then add it to Nextly.

Finding streams through topic search

When you find sites that you are interested in keeping on the app, you can click on the star and it will add it to your favorite streams on the site. I was able to find every news site that I have in my Google Reader feed on Nextly so I had no problem there. At the moment there is not import feature where I can pull in all of my feeds from Reader. You can also get your Twitter and Facebook feeds imported into the app to read there.

Adding streams to Nextly

Reading Your News

When you click on a stream, as it is called in Nextly, you will be presented with all of the news headlines on the top and the actual article filling up most of the rest of the page. You can move from one article to the next just by using your arrow keys on your keyboard. This is a nice feature to have because it is faster to be able to go through articles if I just want to glance at them. There are other keyboard shortcuts that you can use for your social networks if you decide to read them there.

Reading an article within Nextly

Articles that you read can be shared to your Twitter and Facebook feeds as well as emailed to someone. You can also save articles for later by using Nextly’s bookmarking feature. Items can be tagged so that they can easily be found later by using the bookmark search function.

Sharing an article

Different, But Not Convinced

As with most RSS feed reader apps that I try out, I try to use them for a few days to make sure that I can get the proper feel and understanding of their features. After using Nextly now for the last 72 hours, I still cannot make up my mind on whether I like their layout and concept, or if I prefer something more “traditional” like Google Reader’s layout. On the one hand, I do like that I can navigate through my feeds with just a keyboard, that is nice to have and I actually wish this was done more with other apps.

On the other hand, I am not sure if I like the layout of Nextly. For one, I wish there was a unified stream where I could get all of my news feeds into one stream so I can go through them all at once. Secondly, I am not the hugest fan of getting the actual website view of an article because so many sites now days have so much clutter that it takes away from the reading experience. Part of the reason why I use a RSS feed reader app is so that I don’t have to see all the clutter that surrounds an article, I just get to read it and move on.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I don’t know if Nextly is for me, but at the same time, that is not to say that it won’t appeal to other people who want something like this. I do have to say that it is super fast at loading web page content and I could easily move from one article to the next and not feel any lag time. I wish there was a bookmarking feature so that only the items that I haven’t read are uploaded to the stream so it stays current.

As much as this is not for me, I do like the features that they do have and I have to give them kudos for giving us a fast, easy to use web app. I definitely think that Nextly is for the casual news reader who wants to keep up with their news and their social feeds. For you die hard Google Reader, tech nerds, this one may not be for you. That is not to say that it is a knock against Nextly, they just may be targeting a different market, and in the end, that isn’t a bad thing.