After taking a look through tons of great Facebook fan pages we compiled 35 of our favorite and most inspiring. Have a look and share yours!

Note: Many of these fan pages are longer than the screenshots show so be sure to take a peek at their full pages.

Skittles

Skittles

Porsche

Porsche

Victoria’s Secret

Victoria's Secret

Sony

Sony

Red Bull

RedBull

Twilight

Twilight

Verizon Wireless

Verizon Wireless

Adidas Originals

Adidas Originals

Harley-Davidson

Harley-Davidson

McDonald’s

McDonalds

REI

REI

Cheetos

Cheetos

iTunes

iTunes

Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola

Starbucks

Starbucks

Chase Community Giving

Chase Community Giving

Zappos

Zappos

YouTube

YouTube

The Game – Team A

The Game - Team A

Threadless

Threadless

BlackBerry

BlackBerry

Cranium

Cranium

Revision Eyewear

Revision Eyewear

VW

VW

Jeff Dunham

Jeff Dunham

Livescribe

Livescribe

Burt’s Bees

Burt's Bees

Vizio

Vizio

Jones Soda

Jones Soda

Honda

Honda

NFL

NFL

On Your Own Adventures

On Your Own Adventures

Dell

Dell

Oxelo

Oxelo

The Hangover

The Hangover

Share Yours!

Know of a great Facebook fan page? We’d love to see it so let us know about it via comment below. Thanks!

Don’t Forget, Subscribe and Follow

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Though Safari has a very limited selection of extensions available, a decent starting gallery launched with the release of Safari 5.0.1. Here are the top 15 new Safari 5 extensions.

Getting Started

First thing’s first; you’ll need to upgrade to Safari 5.0.1 to begin installing extensions. Unfortunately it required a full system restart (I hate that!) but installing extensions is a snap and doesn’t require a browser restart to begin using them.

Safari Extensions Gallery

Once you’ve decided on an extension you want to install, just hit the Install Now button in Apple’s Safari 5 extension gallery (follow the links via extensions below) and you’ll be ready to go in a second or two, no browser restart required.

Install Extensions

After an extension has been installed, you may have to do a little additional setup in Safari’s preferences pane, though it’s quick and simple.

Extension Preferences

Note: To install Safari extensions you’ll have to visit http://extensions.apple.com. We unfortunately aren’t able to link directly to them.

The Weather Channel

1-Click – The Weather Channel

Although I check the weather via my iPhone and OS X dashboard quite frequently, I still find myself visiting Weather.com all the time for more details. I’m very glad to see a snappy way to jump straight there with a quick button click. The button also includes a bit of today’s current weather info., which is nice to see while I’m browsing the web.

NYTimes

Breaking News: The New York Times

I’m a sucker for staying up to date on news so this one is appreciated. It adds a bar to the top of the page, though it doesn’t seem to do so except for on NYTimes.com. I have yet to see a breaking news update as I’m browsing other sites, as I assume it will.

Better Facebook

Better Facebook

If you haven’t already, give your vote on a full review of Better Facebook, which is also an available extension for other browsers. It provides an improved Facebook experience with lots of great options to customize it.

Facebook Photo Zoom

Facebook Photo Zoom

I really love this one! It’s great being able to browse through my Facebook news feed and easily hover over posted images to see the larger version.

Procrastinate Toolbar

Procrastinate

If you’re a user of bookmarking sites such as Instapaper, Read it Later, Pinboard, or Delicious, Procrastinate provides an easy toolbar to integrate these services with Safari.

Twitter

Twitter for Safari

The official Twitter extension for Safari brings the fun and power of Twitter to your browser with real-time trends and other tools you’d expect from a Twitter browser extension. There’s also extensions for Echofon and Nambu if one of those are what you’re looking for.

True New

TrueNew Count for Gmail and Google Apps

TrueNew takes a different approach to message counters and shows you the number of new emails you have since the last time you checked your inbox. With this I can leave messages unread that I intend on getting to later and see the number of new emails I’ve received since then. TrueNew is also available for Chrome.

Rapportive

Rapportive

I’ve been using the Rapportive extension for Chrome for awhile now and really love it. It’s a great way to get a little more insight on the person at the other end of an email. You can see info. such as a photo, occupation, social networks and more.

Amazon

Add to Amazon Wish List

As an Amazon.com shopper, I’m frequently adding things to wish list(s) and this extension makes it super easy (perhaps too easy?) as I’m browsing the web. There are also extensions for eBay if that’s more your style though.

Woot

Woot Checker

If you follow Woot! deals then you’ll like the Woot Checker, which gives you nearly instant updating during a Woot-off and helps you keep an eye on the deal of the day.

YouTube

A Cleaner YouTube

I didn’t mind YouTube’s interface to begin with but I tried this extension anyway and was very happy I did. I love how much clutter it gets rid of, especially when viewing videos.

YouTube Widescreen

YouTube Wide

When watching YouTube videos I prefer HD and widescreen. This is a simple extension but one I appreciate none-the-less, making videos widescreen by default. This works nicely in combination with the above extension.

Exposer

Exposer

Exposer is a fun extension to easily view a preview of your open tabs and switch between them. Unfortunately the extension didn’t work as well as I’d hoped for and seemed too slow. I hope an update will correct those issues though.

Coda Notes

Coda Notes

From Panic Inc. comes Coda Notes, a nifty little extension to add notes to a web page and quickly send them via email. It needs a better selection of tools and a few improvements but it’s a great start for an extension.

Validator

Validator

As a web developer I work with HTML and CSS validation all the time so I was very happy to see the Validator extension, which makes it a snap to validate HTML, CSS or RSS feeds using W3C. The extension automatically validates pages as you visit them too, showing the number of validation errors on the buttons.

Your Favorites?

There’s many other extensions you may find useful in Apple’s Safari extension gallery so be sure to check them out and let us know what your favorites are!

Floorplanner gives us the tools to make our properties stand above the rest of the crowd. With Floorplanner, in addition to creating plans, we can export great images for printing brochures or code to embed the plan in our website or blog.

Overview

The idea behind Floorplanner is to be the easiest way to create and share building floor plans as awesome looking and interactive as possible. With its simple drag and drop tools Floorplanner makes it easy for just about anyone to come up with floor plans that are accurate and on scale in all places.

Overview

Floorplanner has my kinda sign up page – just three fields and no email activations. After signing we have the option to choose the premium plan of our choice.

Sign Up

Skipping this page will still ensure you access to the free personal account. Please note that you can create only one floor plan with this free account.

Pricing

While the pricing page at Floorplanner offers just subscriptions for both personal and professional use, they don’t mention the prices of the plans.

Pricing

The personal plan is free and you will have to pay if you want extra features like high quality image import, generate leads etc.

Now, once you sign up, you are shown a page to upgrade the account. Only here we get to see the pricing details.

Subscription Plans

If you are an individual home-owner you can pay an one time fee of $29 to get ads removed and to make upto 5 complete plans. Large real estate companies can opt for a monthly subscription of $29.

Dashboard

The dashboard of Floorplanner is minimal with a squeaky clean layout. There is not even an unwanted pixel in the screen. Good job UI design team.

Dashboard

On top of listing all the floor plan projects currently associated with the account, the dashboard also shows a feed from the official blog which intimates users about the new additions to the app like orange trees, daisies, beds, windows etc.in the respective categories.

Creating a floor plan

Now it’s time to swap the writer’s hat with a yellow hardhat. I slept through most of the civil engineering & engineering design classes in my UG and I know jack about building design to begin with. With that disclaimer, let us go design the ultimate geek bachelor pad ever designed.

So what is the most important part of a house that a geek cannot live without? Anyone, anyone?
A basement! I could not find a specific layer for basement and hence going to use the entire ground floor as one.

New floorplan

All you have to do is drag the mouse around the canvas to draw a structural layout or to add interior design elements.

Adding a Window

Let us just add a tiny window to the basement by choosing Doors & Windows from the drop down. Select the type of window you like and drag & drop it to wherever you want in the floor plan.

Adding a wall & comments

Walls and surfaces can also be created in a few mouse clicks. You can also add comments to any section of the floor plan for the reference of your collaborators.

Editing dimensions

Erasing & correcting on paper no more!  I do remember the painful process of correcting my mangled engineering design sheets. Any layout dimension can be altered by clicking on it and entering the new measurements.

New Floors can be created in tabs by using the Settings icon on the top left corner.

Adding Interior Decorations

Floorplanner has a great collection of interior design elements in various categories that are common when building something. For example, if you select Bedroom from the drop down, we have a wide range of beds, pillows, night stands, dressers, and for those who have not come out yet, closets to add to the plan.

Fully furnished design

It is just amazing to see how detailed of a floor plan we can create with this amazing web app. A fabulous three dimensional view of the plan can be generated instantaneously by toggling to the 3D option.

3D View

Sharing the Plan

Sharing the Plan

From the dashboard, you can get the embed codes to share the plan on your website or you can email a copy of it directly to collaborators. The plan can also be allowed to be viewed by everyone publicly or just in a gallery. With  a free plan, you cannot keep the plan completely private.

Final Thoughts

I found Floorplanner to be so easy to work with in all levels right from creating an account to creating floor plans. Despite the complex looking demo examples, I was able to create my very first floor plan in no time.

During evaluation, I did not notice any lags and the app did not hog system resources even with multiple layers in the design. Floorplanner has all the qualities to be a go to app for professional architects and aspiring house owners alike.

Quick Look posts are paid submissions offering only a brief overview of an app. Vote in the polls below if you think this app is worth an in-depth AppStorm review!

In this Quick Look, we’re highlighting Nicereply. Here’s how the developer has described Nicereply.

It’s a service enabling companies to get feedback on email replies to customers. It aims to help companies improve their email communication with clients by offering a solution that’s both powerful and simple to use.

It generates a unique link for every employee to paste into their email signatures. Customers following this link are presented with a rating page and an ability to comment on email.

Read on for more information and screenshots!

Screenshots

Homepage

Ratings

About the App

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

• Instant feedback on company email communication
• Insight on performance of Support staff
• Employees can see how they rank among others
• Easy integration with any ticketing/helpdesk system
• 30-day free trial with no payment/card info required

Price: $19
Requirements: Any browser
URL: Nicereply
Developer: Websupport

historious is a bookmarking replacement solution for the modern web “explorer”. Google showed us the power and utility of search and historious has now applied it to bookmarking. Read on to see how you can ditch your pile of bookmarks with historious.

Overview

historious‘ concept is quite simple really; instead of bookmarking sites you want to read later, “historify!” them and go back to them later via your personal content search engine. We generally only remember a few key words about sites we’ve bookmarked, which works out well with historious. Pop in the few key words you remember and your relevant “bookmarks” (historified sites) are your “search results”.

historious

In addition to getting rid of your bookmark clutter, historious makes it easier to share your historified sites or even allow other people to browse your personal historious.

Using historious

Install the historious bookmarklet or Chrome extension and you’re ready to go. When you come across a site you’d generally bookmark, simply use the bookmarklet or Chrome extension to historify! it.

iPhone 4 Video Historify

In a split second, historious will crawl the page and store a Google Search-like listing in your account for easy access to later on.

Searching

When you decide you want to go back and view a particular historified site, just enter a few key words related to the site you remember and you’ll be given related results just as you would when using Google — excluding all the extra crap you don’t want.

historious Search

Though I’ve only been using historious for about a week, I already love using it. I “bookmark” (read: historify) about ten times as many sites as before because I’m no longer worried about cluttering up my bookmarks menu or having to go through later and organize them.

Listing Options – Cached, Publish, Delete and Edit

You’ll notice in the screenshot above that each listing has options to view a cached version of the site, publish the listing to your public historious account for others to see or delete the listing entirely.

Additionally, you can hover over a listing’s title to see its [edit] link and customize the title as you see fit. This is a nice touch, and something you’d expect if you wanted similar capabilities as regular bookmarking.

Edit Title

You can also choose to enable auto-tweeting of your historified sites as an easy way to share interesting sites with your followers. I really like this idea but I haven’t tried it yet so I’m not sure if you can selectively tweet sites you historify, which is what I’d prefer.

Importing Bookmarks and Exporting historious Sites

I don’t see an option, yet, to You can import your current bookmarks! but I do hope that’s a feature in development. To import a list of URLs or bookmarks file, you can visit http://YOURUSERNAME.historio.us/add/. Should you decide historious isn’t your cup of tea, you can visit http://YOURUSERNAME.historio.us/export/ to see a full list of your historified URLs.

Edit: Thanks for the import clarification Stavros!

Import

Final Thoughts

historious is a great, and fresh, solution to an aging workflow (bookmarks). I am certainly enjoying it so far and don’t plan on moving back to regular bookmarking. It’s especially great that I can access all my historified sites anywhere I have an internet connection, on any computer with a browser — something not so easily done with bookmarks.

Though I think historious is great, I also think there are improvements to be made, but I’m certain the developer(s) are already hard at work on them. A quick peek at the historious blog and you’ll see they’re making regular improvements. I can, however, certainly see bookmarking power users not so easily swayed.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on historious and your preference between it and bookmarking (or another solution).

Desktop programs are great and all, but they don’t provide the same benefits as web apps that make use of cloud computing. With most web apps, you only need a browser and an internet connection to access all your data online. That beats having to install annoying programs any day. To give you a better sense of how useful web apps have become, I’ve compiled a list of web tools and apps that can very well replace some desktop programs. I hope you take the time to try them all out. You’ll be surprised how well they work.

Without further ado, here are some great web alternatives to the popular desktop programs we all love.

Sliderocket

Replaces: Microsoft PowerPoint

SlideRocket

Sliderocket is a fully functional presentation web app that allows you to create, manage, edit, and share presentations on the fly. It offers many of the same features present in PowerPoint and then some. Sliderocket is an awesome tool and if you want to read more about it, take a look at our in-depth review of Sliderocket.

Acrobat.com

Replaces: Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat

Acrobat

Acrobat.com is a suite of web applications by Adobe that replaces your office suite. The online suite includes services like Buzzword, Tables, and Presentation which replace Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint respectively. Acrobat.com also offers other features, allowing users to convert files into PDFs, hold online meetings, and collaborate with one another. All of its services are free (with some limitations), but users can subscribe to different plans for more features. Check out the pricing section for more details.

Aviary

Replaces: Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Soundbooth

Aviary

We have already covered a list of online image editors, and of that list, my favorite would have to be Aviary. The Aviary web suite offers powerful tools that allow you to edit images, vectors, and even audio! Take a look at the huge list of the tools included in their suite:

• Phoenix: Image Editor
• Toucan: Color Editor
• Myna: Audio Editor
• Peacock: Effects Editor
• Raven: Vector Editor
• Falcon: Image Markup
• Roc: Music Creator. Check out our in-depth review of Roc.

Mint

Replaces: Quicken

Mint

If you’re still using Quicken to manage your money, it’s time to toss it out and move on to the better solution: Mint.com. Mint is a very popular personal-finance tool that allows you to keep track your credit card transactions, balance your budget, and create charts or graphs to help you visualize your spending. Mint is the free and secure way to manage your money online. In fact, Mint has been so successful that the makers of Quicken and TurboTax purchased it in 2009. What are you waiting for? Hurry up and sign up!

Kongregate

Replaces: Desktop Gaming

Kongregate

Forget about your desktop gaming – why waste space when you can play awesome games online? Kongregate is an online gaming community with a library of over 30,000 flash games. Not only do you have access to a variety of games, but you can also gain points, chat, and unlock achievements for the games you play. Developers can upload their own games and even make money off ad revenue for their games! If you’re looking for more online games to replace desktop games, take a look at our game roundups.

JayCut

Replaces: Video Editing Software

JayCut

JayCut is a very easy to use and powerful online video editor. With Jaycut, you can create videos with the same tools used in desktop programs. Add clips, transitions, audio, effects, and more with their simple UI. When you finish editing a video, you can choose to download it or export it directly to YouTube. Export up to 20 videos a month with 2GB of storage under a free plan, or pay monthly for a better plan.

WobZip

Replaces: Unzipping Software

WobZip

Have you ever tried to open a compressed file only to find out you don’t have the right unzipping software to do the job? In comes WobZip, an online tool that helps you uncompress your files. It supports a variety of compression formats, including the popular ZIP, RAR, and 7z formats. You can upload a zipped file from your computer or direct WobZip to a URL. The best part? WobZip will scan the files using BitDefender to make sure there isn’t a nasty virus lurking around.

Zamzar

Replaces: File Conversion Software

Zamzar

Instead of downloading dozens of different programs to convert a file, you can always use the Zamzar, the free online file conversion tool. Can’t open a crucial .docx or .pptx file and your boss is screaming in your ear? No problem, just upload and convert your files using Zamzar. Zamzar supports dozens of image, document, video, and music formats and is the only tool you will ever need to convert files.

Hulu

Replaces: TV Tuner Software

Hulu

I’m a cheap guy who spends all his time on the computer. How could I watch my favorite TV shows without leaving my computer? Well, I could purchase a TV tuner and install their lame software or I could head to Hulu.com and watch my favorite shows for free. Hulu is a website that offers streaming video of popular TV shows and movies in the US. It is ad supported, but allows you to watch your favorite shows from the comfort of your computer. Although Hulu is a U.S. only website, there are ways to access Hulu from outside the U.S.

Meebo

Replaces: Desktop Chat Clients

Meebo

With Meebo, you can chat with your friends from anywhere as long as you have a browser and an internet connection. Meebo is an online tool that allows you to login to any major IM network, including AIM, MSN, GTalk, and Facebook. You don’t even need to create an account, just input your IM information and you’re ready to go. If you take the 20 seconds to set up a Meebo account, you can login to multiple accounts at once. This sure beats downloading and managing three IM programs at once, doesn’t it?

TokBox

Replaces: Video Chat

TokBox

TokBox is an online video chatting app that enables you to chat with up to 20 people for free. There are no downloads required, just sign up and start a video chat! Invite your friends via social networks or IM and set up a chat in just minutes. TokBox is free to use, but if you’d like more options, you can sign up for monthly plans. TokBox may be free, but you’re going to need your own microphone and webcam.

Moof

Replaces: iTunes

Moof

You may have a huge iTunes library, but what happens when you go out and forget to bring your iPod along? Moof is the solution. Moof is another web app that streams music online, but I think of it as an iTunes alternative. You can export your entire iTunes library as an .xml file and upload that to Moof, so you can have a full backup of your music online. Where does Moof get all its music from? Youtube. Yeah, I know, it’s a little disappointing, but the quality isn’t that bad. Don’t like Moof? Check out our roundup of the top apps for music streaming.

ESET Online Virus Scanner

Replaces: Anti-Virus Software

ESET

While the ESET Online Virus scanner is a great alternative to Anti-Virus programs, you shouldn’t literally replace your Anti-Virus program. Think of this tool as a backup tool, in case your Anti-Virus software malfunctions. Made by the folks that brought you NOD32, the ESET online scanner uses the same threat signatures as NOD32 and allows you to scan your computer from your browser. It may take a while, but after the scan, suspicious files will be quarantined for you to restore or permanently delete. A great tool for your security toolbox.

Bitlet

Replaces: BitTorrent Client

BitLet

When you don’t have access to a BitTorrent client on your computer, you can use the BitLet app to download your torrents. BitLet is a Java based file sharing protocol that allows you to download torrent files from your browser. Just upload a .torrent file from your computer or direct BitLet to the torrent URL and it’ll do the rest for you.

iCloud

Replaces: Operating System

iCloud

We’ve already covered dozens of web alternatives to desktop software, but why not go a bit further and include a web app that replaces your entire operating system? Meet iCloud, the future of operating systems. iCloud is a very slick web operating system that gives you access to hundreds of built in applications, including an office suite, a media player, a chat client, nifty games, and much more. You have 3 GB of free storage and can opt to buy more if needed. You can get everything you need in this web OS. For those of you interested in Web OSes, be sure to read our article about other operating systems that utilize cloud computing.

Conclusion

As the world turns to cloud computing, we’re only going to see more and more web apps that function like their desktop counterparts. I’ve only listed a few of the web alternatives to desktop software, and I’m sure there are many more out there. As these web applications become more powerful and appeal to the masses in terms of functionality, we may soon see a decline in desktop programs as we all move towards the web and the cloud. Is this the end of desktop software? Who knows, we’ll have to wait and see.

Do you use any web apps in place of desktop programs? What do you think is going to be the future for desktop programs? Share your comments below!

Like the intro. image? Get the high resolution vector at GraphicRiver.net by author iqbalbaskara.

Concept Feedback Review

If you missed our review of Concept Feedback, be sure to check that out. I was pleasantly surprised by the app and I think it’s something that could be tremendously beneficial to many of our readers.

Concept Feedback Home

Concept Feedback currently has over 7,000 community members covering everything from web design and development to usability and marketing experts.

Winners

Here are our six, randomly selected, lucky winners.

3 Mainstream Private Feedback subscriptions

• Benjamin Charity
• Clint
• Maximilian

3 Mainstream Premium Concepts

• Tom Walters
• tonyc
• Trevor Harmon

Thanks for participating everyone and a huge thanks to the Concept Feedback team for sponsoring this giveaway.

We cannot save pictures & videos and upload as email attachments. Size limitations and the
lack of dynamic interactions is a huge problem with email attachments. Snipi solves the problem with a web app that brings full duplex sharing & collaboration when it comes to images & videos online.

Overview

With Snipi it is easy for just about anyone to collect, organize, share and collaborate on their interests by grabbing content from across the web. Snipi let us capture products, photos and videos off of any webpage, Organize our online finds and then share & collaborate on the collects with friends & family.

Overview

Sign up page has a couple of issues. First being the mandatory requirement for a ZIP code, which I am not sure how useful its going to be for a bookmarking service. Second, the CAPTCHA images do not load perfectly and often you will have use the Refresh link to force the system to show a new image. Snipi is a free to use service.

Setting Up

After the sign up that does not require email verification, we are taken to a page that offers us tools that can help us start collecting our online interests.

Get Tools Page

We can start using Snipi in two ways – either by using a Firefox toolbar or a bookmarklet that works on all popular web browsers. I chose to go with the Firefox toolbar for this review.

Snipi Tools

The toolbar is a tad bit large but does look good and blends well with the browser window.

Firefox Toolbar

Collecting Snippets

Putting Snipi to use extremely simple. Once you find a product, photo or video that interest you, all you have to do is drag and drop it into the toolbar. It’s that simple.

Sniping an Image

Sniping a video

You can a add title, description and tags to the item you just snipped for indexing. Items snipped can be organized under various lists to keep things relevant. These lists can be made private or can be shared publicly.

From the web dashboard you can discover poplar videos, pictures and products that have been shared publicly by other users. While lists can be created from the toolbar, streams can be created from the dashboard.

Collaborating with Streams

A Snipi stream is a collection of the products, photos &  videos that you capture from any web page. Streams can be about any topic and anyone can create one from the dashboard. It looks like a threaded conversation in a forum.

Streams

Once a Stream is created, others can contribute their snips that are relevant to the conversation. With Snipi’s Streams, it just is so easy for a group of people to collaborate on any topic, dragging & dropping content from across the globe.

Web Dashboard

Snipi lets you to be in total control of a stream.  You can choose to allow who can follow and contribute to the conversation.

Final Thoughts

Snipi is a neat little app to help you solve the problem of collecting, organizing, sharing and collaborating multimedia content online. The web app is useful for everyone and for students in particular this could be an online scrapbook for a team assignment.

Snipi does what it is intended to do and except for installing a toolbar, I could not find any issues with the web app. And therein lies the compliment.

Quick Look posts are paid submissions offering only a brief overview of an app. Vote in the polls below if you think this app is worth an in-depth AppStorm review!

In this Quick Look, we’re highlighting Better Facebook. Here’s how the developer has described Better Facebook.

Better Facebook is a browser extension for Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or Opera that enhances your FB experience by fixing annoyances, adding lots of great features and functionality, improving navigation, and putting everything you want to access right where it’s convenient.

Create news feed tabs, send posts to tabs, hide them, or highlight them using the powerful feed filter, and more!

Read on for more information and screenshots!

Screenshots

Tabs

Filters

About the App

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

• Tabbed News Feed: Group posts into tabs
• Advanced Feed Filters: Filter by app, story type, user, etc
• Hide Posts You’ve Already Read: Only view news that is new to you!
• Friend Tracker: Get notified if someone un-friends you
• Enhanced Navigation: Quick links to your pages, groups, events, and more

Price: Free
Requirements: Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or Opera web browser
URL: http://BetterFacebook.net
Developer: Matt Kruse

Finding the right tool for the entire team to be onboard was a huge task in itself. Desktop apps like Microsoft Project were cumbersome and needed a steep learning curve. Had we come across a project management app like Teamwork Project Manager, things would have been different.

Overview

Teamwork Project Manager is an easy-to-use online teamwork & project management web application that helps managers, staff and clients work together more productively. With Teamwork Project Manager no matter how big or small a project is, you are always in control. Teamwork Project Manager helps you create task lists, schedule milestones, track time, communicate with the team and other nitty gritty details involved in executing a project.

http://www.teamworkpm.net

Teamwork Project Manager has a multi phased sign up process. In the first phase, we begin by entering the company name and the timezone, which is automatically selected based on your IP address. I love it when services allow me to be extra lazy!

Sign Up Phase 1

The second phase is all about entering the email address, username & password creation mumbo jumbo.

Sign Up Phase 2

In the third phase, we can select the sub domain for accessing the Teamwork Project Manager web app. The company name is prefilled if it is available, but you can name it any way you please. To my surprise and first among a non email providing service I have encountered, you can choose from the list of domains from where your sub domain can be hosted.

Sign Up Phase 3

The fourth phase has just one field for referral code. Annoyed much? Me too. But we are not there yet fellas!

By now I have lost count of what phase of the sign up process we are in, and the present page asks us to agree to Terms & Conditions, so that they can create a free Teamwork Project Manager account. Puh-lease, it’s about time.

Pricing

Like the many tiered sign up process, we have multi tiered subscription plans. Prices appear to be reasonable and there is a plan that will fit everyone’s budget.

Pricing

Teamwork Project Manager offers a free plan that does not support secured login access, custom branding, custom domain etc. for its users. Rest of the core features, including unlimited clients and users, are available in the free plan too. Now that gets the Teamwork Project Manager team a pat in their shoulder.

At the end of my sign up marathon, I was subscribed to the Business 1 plan for 30 day evaluation. You can choose your payment cycle – monthly or annually – while subscribing.

Dashboard

Finally after the completion of the sign up process that rivals that of a day time soap opera, we are taken to a page from where we can invite users to join the team. This step can be skipped as we can invite users from the dashboard later too.

Dashboard

Once we are through with the invitations page, we  get to see the elusive dashboard. Like most other project management web apps, the dashboard is pretty much empty when we begin.

Creating a New Project

Creating a new Project

Create a new project window incorporates the sections for the project name, description, client and features.

Creating a new Client

A new project can either be for a new/existing client or for internal use. A new client can be added from this page and this is one simple yet important feature some project management apps lack.

Controlling Features

Features like notes, milestones, tasks, time measurement etc. can be turned on or off for projects on a case by case basis.

Adding Tasks

Now that a project has been created, let us go ahead and create some tasks to it. A tasklist has to be created to kick start the task creation process. If there is an existing milestone, the new tasklist can be linked to it.

Creating a Tasklist

Newly created task can be assigned to multiple persons with a deadline and they can be notified of the same via email.

Creating a Task

Tasks can be made visible to only those who are working on it from the Privacy section

Creating a Milestone

A new milestone can be created with only one person as incharge and a deadline can be set to it.

Creating a new Milestone

You can add tasks to a milestone or you can just link an existing list of tasks like the ones we have created before.

Tasks linked to Milestone

Features

Being the Project Manager, you can communicate key decisions and pointers to your team communicate with messages. All the messages can be grouped in specific categories for easy access in the future.

Posting a new message

With Teamwork Project Manager you can easily track time spent by your team on both internal ops and billable time on your projects as well.

Tracking Time

Multiple files can be uploaded into various categories to ensure that the team has access to a centralized file repository to get things done.

Uploading Files

The project overview page is simply awesome. With a calender to show the upcoming milestones, tasks and a list of tasks with a bunch of meta data, the project overview page shows a bird’s eye view of the project’s progress.

Project Overview

Final Thoughts

Teamwork Project Manager is a solid and dependable project management app which is extremely simple & very intuitive. I am pretty sure it will be just be minutes before you can start managing the project after signing up. However, sign up is a different story altogether.

While signing up for Teamwork Project Manager, I understood Ice Cube’s plight from the movie “Are we there yet?”. There absolutely isn’t any justification for so many stages as the details you enter in one page does not determine what fields are shown in the next. With a lengthy sign up page, Teamwork Project Manager’s first impression takes a beating and fixing that would make the app a worthy contender in the project management niche.

Personally, I consider this to be the golden era of hilarity online. Created by amateurs & professionals alike there is no dearth of funny content in every possible niche. After the jump we are featuring a wild mix of hilarious sites that are worth a visit.

Funny or Die

Funny or Die

With Hollywood veterans like Will Ferrell and Judd Apatow, Funny or Die is a dynamite source for hilarious videos. Slapstick, Wise cracks, spoof whatever the genre that makes you laugh, you have got it here. A lot of the videos of Funny or Die exclusives and some of them tend to be NSFW (Hey! Aren’t you supposed to work at the workplace?). A laundry list of celebrities from Ben Stiller to Zac Efron contribute regularly to the ever growing collection of funny videos. I suggest you start with the breakout video “The Landlord” that made Funny or Die a roaring success overnight.

College Humor

College Humor

In the mood to roll on the floor laughing? Hop on to College Humor. Just like a real life college where everyone is mercilessly pranked and made fun of, the videos at College Humor mock the crap out of everything & everyone under the sun. Primarily known for their spot on spoof videos, College Humor gives Hollywood a run for its money with the freshness of the original videos. You gotta watch them ripping apart the original Double Rainbow video. Ingenious!

Break

Break

Focused just on making the visitors laugh, Break is an online video community. Funny videos are chosen from various sources and shared by the editors. There is an absolutely funny and unbelievable “Not a Morning Dog” video. Reminded me of getting up on a workday!

People of Walmart

People of WalMart

Ok. This is one is funny but kinda offensive if you lack the funny bone. This site is simply a satirical social commentary of the extraordinary & colorful sights found at America’s favorite store. In a lot of cases, the pictures themselves are outrageously funny but the descriptions are definitely a delicious icing on the top. My personal favorite is “Toy Story 4”

theOnion

The Onion

This one is a world favorite. Within a short span of time, the Onion News Network (ONN) has become the face of satire on the Internet. They have got news, pictures, videos and every other media to poke fun at politics and daily news in general. When it comes to videos, the news readers keep a poker face and they are not the ones to shy away from sensitive & burning topics.

Late Night Mistakes

Late Night Mistakes

We all make mistakes. And for those brave souls that are not easily humiliated, Late Night Mistakes is the junction to show them off and be proud. From the same network that brings us the People of Walmart comes a blog with a daily dose of inebriated disasters and mistakes from last night showcased for the entire world see.It’s hilarious as long as we are not the ones featured there. I highly recommend you to check out all the blogs in the Three Rings Blog Network for some more niche fun.

Comedy Central

Comedy Central

The mother ship of all funny things on TV is now online. Comedy Central is home to best of the best programming from their TV catalogue in full length, topped up by stand up comedies The production values of the videos are as awesome as they are hilarious.

I Can Has Cheezburger?

I can has Cheezburger

Heard of the phrase “Looking like a million bucks?”, this blog is a standing epitome for that. Who would have thought a misspelt domain name with bad grammar, posting pictures of adorable cats & funny one liners be worth two million dollars?  Never thought watching cats is so much fun.

Geek & Poke

Geek And Poke

Oliver Widder is a genius. He takes everyday Geek news and information and makes a rib tickling cartoon out of it. The cartoons are simply hilarious for laymen and intensely subtle for nerds.

Not Invented Here

Not Invented Here

Not Invented Here is one of the best illustrated and colored web comics online today. The irony, style and humor is enjoyable by everyone but people who work in IT & companies in general will find this one to be a real treat.

All the above mentioned sites are funny and extremely addictive. The fact that it took me almost an hour to move from one website to another mentioned in the list drives home the point.

Do you know of any hilarious websites? Do tell and spread the joy in the comments section.

Like the smilie icon from today’s post? You can get the full pack of 16 at GraphicRiver! (by Brave)

1. Lionways

Lionways

Though the form itself isn’t anything special, its surrounding design elements really make it pop and combine new age mail with a visual sense of old age mail.

2. Guillaume Pacheco

Guillaume Pacheco

Though you can’t see the containing area for the message input, this form has a fun sandy beach theme going. It’s also enhanced with form validation, which displays if there’s a problem.

3. Brian Handley

Brian Handley

Forms are an element of web design and as such shouldn’t be ignored so regularly. Brian Handley has done a great job of designing his contact form to match the rest of his theme, as a quality designer would.

4. Falko Seidel

Falko Seidel

This is a great example of a quick “drop me a note” type contact form that integrates well into the overall theme of the site.

5. Berkshire

Berkshire

The added handwriting elements and butterfly add a nice touch to spice up a simplistic form design. Small details such as these set apart good from great design.

6. Todd Adams

Todd Adams

Todd Adams going the extra mile by customizing his form elements to match his theme.

7. Christian Sparrow

Christian Sparrow

Although it appears simple, it’s the details that make Christian Sparrow’s contact form stand out as top notch. His whole site is fun and clever too!

8. Marcol Art

Marcol Art

Another great example of a fully designed contact form that matches the whole website’s theme.

9. Yodaa

Yodaa

10. Salinas

Salinas

11. Alexey Chenishov

Alexey Chenishov

12. Dragon Interactive

Dragon Interactive

13. ilovecolors

ilovecolors

14. Bitter Kiss

Bitter Kiss

15. Design Disease

Design Disease

16. InfectedFX

InfectedFX

17. Grooveshark

Grooveshark

18. Tony Johnson

Tony Johnson

19. Try Triangle

Try Triangle

20. Vincent Mazza

Vincent Mazza

21. Alexarts

Alexarts

22. CreativeSwitch

CreativeSwitch

23. IndoFolio

IndoFolio

24. Red Bull Soapbox Racer

Red Bull

25. Daniel Hellier

Daniel Hellier

Thoughts on Forms

Many of these forms are designed to match the themes they’re used within, which is what sets them apart from so many other standard and bland forms. Many of them use additional enhancements for instant validation, AJAX submission, field selection highlighting, etc., which shows that the designer and/or developer took the time to pay attention to all the details of the site.

There’s tons of great forms out there so if you have any favorites, please share a link to it with us via comment. Thanks!

Overview

Vanilla Forums is a hosted online forum app that allows anyone to get their online up and running within minutes. With various paid plans available to support the very different needs of each community, they provide a cost-effective solution to suit each type – whether big or small.

Overview

It’s easy to find yourself stuck looking for a decent online community app but I believe that Vanilla brings a lot of really interesting features to the table that some of the more tacky ones lack.

Pricing

The pricing for Vanilla varies depending on the size of the communities and the added inclusion of certain features. They offer a free plan which comes with everything you need to run a small community if you’re brand new to this type of thing. With only basic themes and no storage for attachments and the like, the free plan is not for those who want full control over most aspects of their community but is more geared towards those who just want an out of the box app to set up a community fast.

Pricing

Employing the “freemium” model, their premium upgrades allow for features such as file storage and custom domains, logo and HTML.

User-Interface

The user-interface found throughout the app is clean and simple; allowing any possible task to be performed without much (if any) complication. There is a consistent blue colour scheme that runs through the administration panel and the forum itself that is easy on the eye and provides a nice, quaint little environment that your users will quickly become accustomed to.

UI

Everything is clearly placed where you, and the user, can find it quickly without hesitation to seek a certain function. Though the main navigation can seem a little squashed together in the default theme, there are various other themes that can be applied that provide a very different – but still quite native – look to the app.

Getting Started

It is a quick and easy process to set up your Vanilla Forums account. With their one-page registration, it’s simply a case of entering your chosen account details, choosing a custom subdomain for your forum and you’re away. The custom subdomain is the address at which your forum can be accessed. Though these are defaulted to the Vanilla Forums domain, upgrades can be purchased where it is possible to use your own domain to mask this address.

Registration

Without the need for any additional account activation, you are immediately taken to the dashboard from where you can manage your community.

Customization

Certain aspects of the forum can be customized to suit the community in question and these options are provided easily within the administration panel. With integrated support for the addition of a logo in all premium plans, the branding of your forum is never an issue and you can easily ensure your visitors know exactly where they are with the presence of your logo. The higher paid plans come with the ability to edit the HTML layout of the themes and are great for those who want to really have full control over their forum’s design.

Custom Themes for your Forum

The free plans only come with the option to change the website’s name in the header of the logo. Though this is not great, it encourages more people to sign up for the premium plans for control.

Forum Management

The actual management of the specific categories is quite easy and you’re even given the option as to whether or not you want to use categories to separate content. This can be useful if your forum is more geared towards one specific topic and you don’t see the need to create additional categories.

The Category Management Page

If you do need to split your discussions, the categories feature allows you to choose custom permissions so you can decide which user groups should have access to these categories and how much access they have. The categories feature is extremely simple to use and you can even choose your own custom URL from which users can access those specific discussions.

Adding a New Category

User Management

Much like the categories feature, it is equally easy to manage all of the users who have registered on your forum. With the handy search feature, you can find a specific user in a matter of seconds and begin to edit their details.

Managing and Searching for Users

All users have their own profile which can be accessed by other users (and guests) and from which they can add to their “activity” stream. This microblogging-type feature allows users to update their activity so the experience becomes that extra bit more personal.

User Activity Stream

Open-Source Self-Hosting

Another great feature of Vanilla is the fact that the software it runs is also developed as an open-source solution and can be installed for free on your own web server. There is also an array of extensions available which can add some really useful features to your installation such as user signatures, emoticons and quotes. Because this version is hosted by yourself on your own web server, limitations set by your current plan on the Vanilla Forums hosting app are removed and you have entire control.

VanillaForums.org

Conclusion

Vanilla Forums, seems quite overpriced considering the software it runs upon is indeed released by them as an open-source solution. It appears that at times the functionality provided may not quite live up to the high price tag on the premium plans. Nonetheless, it does exactly what it says on the box and does it quite well.

A fault I have found, that also may be a strength, is its simplicity. At times, the app can seem to be a little bit too simple – especially when you want extra access over certain things like user permissions and profile information.

Overall, the app is a simplified take on the online forum concept we’ve seen so many times before and with various other solutions available (though they don’t live up to the standard of Vanilla), it is important for this app to take and secure control in this field – something I believe it does quite well.

The Concept Feedback team was generous enough to offer our readers 3 Mainstream Premium Concepts and 3 Mainstream Private Feedback subscriptions, each of which boast some pretty great features. Entry is simple and this app is most definitely worth trying, so read on for more details.

Concept Feedback Review

If you missed our review of Concept Feedback yesterday, be sure to check that out. I was pleasantly surprised by the app and I think it’s something that could be tremendously beneficial to many of our readers.

Overview

Concept Feedback is simple; upload your work, get professional feedback and improve your work to get better results. The main difference between Concept Feedback and Dribbble is that the former has taken a more professional approach, rather than such a “playful” one.

Concept Feedback Home

Concept Feedback currently has over 7,000 community members covering everything from web design and development to usability and marketing experts.

Pricing

One of the biggest differences between Dribbble and Concept Feedback is its pricing. Concept Feedback will come at a price if you want guaranteed reviews and other additional features. They still, however, offer a Free option “for the starving artist”.

Pricing

The pricing page shown above can be viewed after sign up (quick and free) or viewing their help page.

Starting at $10 per posted concept (concept = your work), you’ll receive additional traffic to your concept and it will be posted immediately. A step up guarantees that your concept will receive 5 reviews and several other very desirable benefits. So, is $10+ per posted concept worth it? I think so. If you’re a serious designer, you’ll be serious about seeking quality feedback and $25 can be a microscopic fraction of a total design’s value, yet can be the difference between a satisfied or unhappy client. According to their statistics, the benefits outweigh the costs.

Statistics

Giveaway Details

Concept Feedback has generously offered six fantastic prizes to give away to six of our lucky readers.

• 3 Mainstream Premium Concepts (each a $25 value)
• 3 Mainstream Private Feedback subscriptions (each a $300 value)

Entry

Though we clearly like Concept Feedback, we’d like to hear your thoughts on the app. To enter, simply leave a comment stating what you like most about the app or how a give away prize would benefit you or your team. Winners will be chosen randomly and announced Friday, July 23rd.

Please Note: Envato staff or people who have written more than two articles for Web.AppStorm.net are ineligible to enter.

Dribbble, which we recently reviewed, is one great outlet to seek design feedback. Concept Feedback is another contender in this niche market, which takes a different approach, potentially offering quality feedback you might not find via other sites.

We’ll take a look at Concept Feedback and offer our thoughts on what this service has to offer.

Overview

Concept Feedback is simple; upload your work, get professional feedback and improve your work to get better results. The main difference between Concept Feedback and Dribbble is that one has taken a more professional approach, rather than such a “playful” one.

Concept Feedback Home

Concept Feedback currently has over 7,000 community members covering everything from web design and development to usability and marketing experts.

Pricing

One of the biggest differences between Dribbble and Concept Feedback is its pricing. Concept Feedback will come at a price if you want guaranteed reviews and other additional features. They still, however, offer a Free option “for the starving artist”.

Pricing

The pricing page shown above can be viewed after sign up (quick and free) or viewing their help page.

Starting at $10 per posted concept (concept = your work), you’ll receive additional traffic to your concept and it will be posted immediately. A step up guarantees that your concept will receive 5 reviews and several other very desirable benefits. So, is $10+ per posted concept worth it? I think so. If you’re a serious designer, you’ll be serious about seeking quality feedback and $25 can be a microscopic fraction of a total design’s value, yet can be the difference between a satisfied or unhappy client. According to their statistics, the benefits outweigh the costs.

Statistics

On the other hand, if you’re already a successful designer then you likely already have a network of fellow designers you already go to for design reviews, possibly for free. So, this will depend on your perspective and your needs as to whether or not the additional cost is worth the benefits.

Team Pricing

If you work in a team, you might be looking for a team-based collaboration service specifically for design feedback, etc. Concept Feedback also offers team subscription plans starting at $10 per month for 5 concepts and 5 users.

Team Pricing

Posting a Concept

If you’d like to post a concept for free, you’ll first have to provide five reviews on other people’s concepts. I like this idea as it forces more of a community and takes a stance against “leachers”. Once you’ve either paid for a concept or reviewed five other concepts, you can move forward with posting your own concept.

Concept Feedback utilizes a system that rewards quality actionable reviews, guaranteeing you get quality reviews you can use. See their review guidelines for more info.

I’ve chosen the basic concept package here. In the next step you’ll choose the number of credits to purchase and enter your payment details. Note that payment with Paypal is an option, a seemingly overlooked option by many web apps.

Credit Payment

Once you’ve completed your payment (or published five reviews), you’ll be able to post your concept. Posting your concept consists of entering its title, applicable categories, uploading concept media (images, videos or flash), entering concept details such as the website’s URL, target market and objective, and lastly entering a concept description.

Post Concept

Instead of taking screenshots of your website yourself, just enter the URL(s) when posting your concept and they’ll take them for you!

When entering concept categories the form is enhanced with suggestions as you type. This is an all too often overlooked enhancement that can really add usability to web apps.

Concept Categories Suggestions

Overall, the process of posting your concept is very straight forward and simple. You can manage your concepts by visiting the My Concepts page (click My Concepts at the top right of the page).

Viewing Concepts and Posting Reviews

If you’d like to provide feedback on other people’s concepts, you can browse through specific categories or view recently posted concepts, best of the week, all time best, etc. Hover over concepts to see the number of reviews, votes, views and favorites.

Browse Concepts

When viewing concepts you’ll see the detailed information about it and its uploaded artwork. Concept Feedback has also implemented great community oriented features such as adding concepts to your favorites, following the concept, tweeting it and “liking” it.

Below the concept you’ll find its reviews from other members and you’ll have the ability to vote on the reviews as a sort of ranking system to help ensure quality reviews.

Concept Reviews

Of course, these reviews aren’t just “closed book” reviews. Other members can comment on reviews which opens the option for full discussions between members, not limited to the reviewer and concept owner. This is exactly the kind of feedback structuring designers need, unlike what you get in many forums.

Concept Review Discussion

Helpful reviews that receive votes are rewarded with additional credits, so make your reviews count! This is a great way to encourage the community to post high quality and helpful reviews.

Posting Reviews

Once you’ve decided to provide feedback for a concept, you’ll start by rating four different categories; design, purpose, originality and engagement. You’ll then offer a simple “bottom line” statement followed by a detailed review and optionally upload a file with your review.

Post Review

Posting a review is sweet and simple, but they take it a step further by making it a snap to add visual notes too! Click the Add Notes button and you’ll see a large version of the concept artwork in which you click a specific area to add more direct visual notes. Fantastic!

Visual Notes

Final Thoughts

Concept Feedback is a superb resource for quality community oriented project (concept) feedback. Although I like Dribbble, I think I like Concept Feedback, and the way they approach the situation, more. The community is setup in such a way that members are encouraged and rewarded with helpful and detailed reviews, enabling members to reach their ultimate goal — improve their work and achieve better results.

Concept Feedback’s entire site seemed to function flawlessly and they even seek feedback from their own fantastic community to improve the site itself, which I think is a pretty big statement. Though I liked the system and the site looks good and functions great, I do think the site’s overall design could be further improved. I have no doubt, however, that that will happen as the Concept Feedback team is already in the process of seeking feedback from users and adding great new features along the way.

Pricing may be an issue for some people, but I certainly have no qualms with it. I think it has a solid pricing structure setup and offers very valuable benefits for the price(s).

Kudos to the Concept Feedback team for developing such a fantastic and helpful community and application! Although we’ve given Concept Feedback a 9/10, I fully anticipate it will reach a 10/10 rating as it matures and continues to grow and develop.

Overview

SlideRocket is a subscription based online presentation web app running in Flash. Although it isn’t free, the price appears to indicate a much higher level of features and capabilities than other online competitors. SlideRocket is clearly marketed towards business professionals, though if you need a higher level presentation app in the first place then you likely fit somewhere in that category.

SlideRocket Home

If you’re a Google Apps user you can add SlideRocket integration via the Google Apps Marketplace.

Pricing

Starting at $12 per month for individuals, SlideRocket’s pricing isn’t bad if you’re a frequent presentation user. The real question, however, is whether or not the features offered will justify the monthly price in comparison to a one-time purchase desktop app.

Pricing

For $12 per month [starting], I would expect a little more storage than 1GB, especially considering what other web apps are offering these days.

SlideRocket offers a Free plan, though limited to 250 MB/user and 15 MB file size limit. To see this, view the lower right corner of the pricing table.

Interface Design and Usability

After signing up and signing in, the main Flash application will open and play a nice little introductory video. Once that’s completed you’ll be able to get started with tutorials or just get straight to work.

Get Started

The overall interface design is quite minimal, leaving heavy graphics out which seems to let you focus more on your presentation and its graphics than a distractingly sexy app interface. The interface actually reminds me of a few Adobe web-based applications and it has a very nice professional appeal to it.

Interface

Aside from the app’s interface design, it’s very easy to use and incredibly responsive, an absolute must for web apps competing with desktop apps.

Creating Themes

One of the most disappointing aspects I’ve found in using other online presentation apps is the lack of ability to create new themes with custom backgrounds or other features. SlideRocket, thankfully, supports this capability via selecting an image from your asset library, purchasing via integrated marketplace, searching Flickr’s database (including creative commons-licensed images only) and even using the URL of a YouTube video.

Assets

This is perhaps the most options I’ve seen in any online presentation app for theme creation and asset management. Of course, you’re also able to choose a solid color fill or gradient for backgrounds. Background options for images even include several scaling and tiling choices.

Creating & Editing Slides

I found SlideRocket’s slide creation and editing features to be superb. The SlideRocket team has paid great attention to detailed features, including guide alignment for quick and easy element placement.

Guides

Although the font selection didn’t offer the number of fonts you’d find on your desktop system, they do offer the ability to upload custom fonts for use in your presentations. Every other font styling option you’d expect from a desktop presentation app is available, even including custom bullet styles.

Fonts

SlideRocket gives you the ability to add nearly any media type to your slides, including audio, video, shapes and much more. There are tons of elements you can add and even further customize those element’s opacity, fill color, stoke, font, effects, etc.

Add Media

And, of course, there are several slide transition effects to choose from, accompanied by more settings to customize the effect duration, trigger effect on event, etc.

Transition Effects

System Resource Usage

One of the faulting aspects of Flash-run apps as feature rich and powerful as SlideRocket is they tend to consume disturbing amounts of system resources and generally slow after a period of time. However, I found SlideRocket to use no more resources than a regular desktop app would have. In fact, I’d have to say it likely uses less system resources than other desktop presentation apps.

So its system resource usage is in check but what about its responsiveness over time? I tried my best to use the app for a relatively extended period of time and found that it didn’t seem to slow at all except when adding heavy assets, which was only temporary while positioning the assets. This app runs as smooth as butter and won’t kill your computer!

Final Thoughts

Though I couldn’t cover too many aspects of the app in this review, I did take the time to explore as many as I could and I am very impressed. SlideRocket is truly an online presentation app with capabilities on par with (or greater than) competing desktop apps, not to mention it’s in the cloud and accessible anywhere you have an internet connection.

The interface design is clean and very professional and it’s incredibly user friendly. I wasn’t too keen on the $12 per month starting pricing point but after giving the app a run, I have to say that if I were a frequent presentation user then I’d have absolutely no qualms with paying that price and perhaps more. They also do have a free plan for those of you who don’t present too often.

SlideRocket is an app I’ll most certainly be recommending to people in need of a quality presentation app and especially to those who need a fantastic demonstration of cloud computing capabilities.

Keep in mind that I didn’t cover any of the major features offered to business and enterprise level plans, which really make this app even more outstanding than it already is for free and basic plan users. If you’re in the market for a presentation app, you should definitely give SlideRocket’s 30 day free trial a go.

Fever° is a self-hosted RSS solution for better management of your RSS feeds, helping you get to the hot topics and filter through your feeds to get to the important stuff. We’ll walk through the installation process and some of the great features of this outstanding RSS reader.

Overview

Fever° is a clever take on RSS feed reading, developed by Shaun Inman. Perhaps best described straight from Fever’s website, “Fever takes the temperature of your slice of the web and shows you what’s hot.”

Fever Home

I’ve always been wary of self-hosted RSS reader apps but this is one that’s competitive with other top readers. Aside from the great set of features and sexy interface design, the concept behind Fever is what really sets it apart.

Pricing

Fever is priced like desktop software, at $30 per license, and you can’t try a demo before purchasing. This is a potential problem for some, but be sure to watch the video demo of Fever to get a good idea as to whether this is the reader for you.

I was hesitant myself to purchase Fever, even after the video demo, simply because there are already so many great free RSS readers available. However, I took the jump anyway and so far I’m very happy with it. $30 seems a little expensive for an RSS reader, especially a self-hosted one, but the price point didn’t bother me one bit after using it for a short time.

Fever° Installation

As noted before, Fever is a self-hosted RSS reader; as such, you’ll need to ensure your host is capable of running it. You’ll first head over to http://feedafever.com and sign up for an account.

An account is required to manage your licenses, download the software to check your host compatibility and install the Fever reader.

Create Account

Compatibility Check

Once you’ve signed up and logged in, you’ll follow the directions in the Download column to check your server for compatibility. It’s a simple matter of downloading the files, uploading to your web host, change the fever directory permissions to 777 and navigating to the boot.php file.

Compatibility Check

You’ll have to setup a database on your host and enter its corresponding settings to complete the last step in the compatibility check. If you’re unsure how to do this on your host, contact your hosting provider.

Purchase, Activate and Install

Now that you know Fever works on your hosting provider, you can purchase and complete its setup. Click the “Feed it Fever!” link shown in the screenshot above, which will take you back to the Fever website and enter the Domain Name and Compatibility Confirmation details needed to complete the license purchase.

Once you complete the Paypal payment and checkout process, you’ll be given an activation key, accessible via your account on Fever’s website. Head back to your Fever installation and refresh the page to complete activation, entering your activation code.

Activation

Once activation is complete, you’ll just need to enter your email address and desired password to complete the installation. You’ll also be able to set your temperature preference at this point, though you can change this later via Fever’s settings panel.

Installation

Import Feeds & Install Feedlet

You’re now ready to get started using Fever! If you’ve been using another RSS reader, you can import an OPML file exported from the other app. Now would also be the time to install the Feedlet bookmarklet by dragging it into your browser’s bookmarks bar.

Get Started

Once you click Continue Fever will process your OPML file and import your feeds and folders.

Processing Feeds

Using Fever°

I won’t go through all the details and usage of Fever but I will skim over the basics. Once your feeds have been processed, you’ll be viewing your Hot feeds by default. As described by Fever, “Links from all your feeds are weighted by frequency and disposition of the linking feed, then ordered by temperature using the normal body temperature of 98.6° as a base“.

Hot Feeds

Viewing your Kindling feed category shows all of your “must-read” feeds, of which I clearly need to organize!

Kindling Feeds

Viewing your Sparks feed category shows all of your non-essential feeds, which are also the feeds used to increase the temperature of links in the Hot view.

Other Features

Fever will automatically update and refresh your feeds list, updating your Hot view and other feed categories. Fever is also built with drag & drop capabilities, enabling you to quickly move feeds into other categories.

Drag and Drop

Of course there are many other features such as search, display settings, update settings, etc. These days a feed reader wouldn’t be complete without a mobile counterpart, which Fever doesn’t leave out and includes a quite sexy interface.

iPhone Interface

When Fever is saved as an app on your iPhone it will display as frameless.

Final Thoughts

Fever° seems to be the app that will revive feed reading for me. I love it’s interface design, usability, iPhone optimized interface and overall concept of “Hot” feeds. I’ve been a long time user of Google Reader and haven’t quite found another web app enticing enough to permanently make the switch, until now.

For some people a self-hosted feed reader won’t really be an option, but I particularly like the fact that it’s self hosted because I have even greater control over it and who might be peering over my shoulder (ie. Google). Other’s might find the $30 price point, especially for an app you have to install yourself (not that it’s difficult), too high. After getting into the app, I can certainly say for myself that I am happy with the price point for what I get in return, though I can see that for many people a lower price point will be favorable. Overall, Fever° is a killer web-based feed reader that I’ll be recommending frequently.

I’d love to hear your thoughts or questions on Fever°, so leave us a comment below. Thanks!

Hence, we at Web.AppStorm always insist on great content packaged in a fabulous wrapper. To help you select an fitting identity to your blog, we have rounded up thirty beautiful themes for two of the greatest blogging platforms – Wordpress & Tumblr.

Wordpress Themes

Locus One Page

Locus One Page

In the recent times, Locus One Page is one of the best designed WP themes I have come across. All the pages created are appended to a lengthy homepage and those pages can be accessed by some slick javascript sliders.

Premium Magazine

Premium Magazine

Premium Magazine is a clean, two column magazine theme with built in advertisement blocks.

iWorld

iWorld

iWorld is a Wordpress theme excluively designed to support mobile browsing, especially iPod Touch and iPhone.

Mactastic

Mactastic

Mactastic is a portfolio theme that is as simple and clean as a Mac. The theme supports 2 post types and 5 widgets.

Oxide

Oxide

Oxide is a two column theme with an obscure but elegant and unique design with a dark color shade.

Podium

Podium

With 7 different skins, Podium is an elegant business Wordpress theme ideal for business, corporate, portfolio and blogging purposes.

Aurora

Aurora

10 color themes and a crisp design make Aurora a great business theme.

GamePress 3

GamePress 3

Looking forward to start a blog on gaming? GamePress 3 is the one you are looking for!

Sofa Memento

Sofa Memento

Sofa Memento is a Wordpress 3.0 only theme that is widget and advertising ready.

DesignerWannabe

DesignerWannabe

DesignerWannabe is a brilliantly designed premium Wordpress theme that is ideal for portfolio and business sites.

Answers

Answers

Answers is a Premium WordPress Theme by Templatic that was inspired based on “Yahoo Answers” and “WPQuestions” and as the theme suggests it turns your WP installation into a question and answer website where users can quickly and easily ask and answer questions.

Cadca

Cadca

Setting up a your personal portfolio or business website is now easy with the impressive Cadca premium theme.

The Morning After

The Morning After

Eventhough it has a funny name, The Morning After is a free magazine theme with built in SEO options.

Inspire

Inspire

With a larger than normal jQuery slider, Inspire is a gorgeous theme for portfolio and business websites.

Apz

Apz

If you are an iPhone app developer, Apz is the right fit for you with all the things we have come to expect from a iPhone app developer website. There is a bit too much scrolling needed though.

Retreat

Retreat

A floating menu bar equipped with a badass javascript scrolling effect, large fonts and fabulous design elements, Retreat is a theme that makes your Wordpress blog look like a Tumblr blog.

Classifieds

Classifieds

With the Classifieds theme, you can turn your Wordpress theme into a full functional money making classified website that lets users to post free and paid ad posts.

GTD

GTD

GTD is a modded Wordpress P2 theme that is aimed to enhance productivity of teams via private collaborating.

LiveTwit

LiveTwit

Want to start a blog with a live stream of tweets? Go for LiveTwit Wordpress theme.

Folium

Folium

Folium is a simple, colorful and widgetized portfolio theme that could very well be used as a business theme.

Tumblr Themes

SlimBlolio

SlimBlolio

SlimBlolio is a lean and mean portfolio theme for Tumblr enthusiasts.

Stitch Up

Stitch Up

A full featured side bar and a pretty rad denim stitch design makes Stitch Up a unique Tumblr theme.

Postage

Postage

As the name suggests, Postage theme is a fabulous Tumblr theme designed like that of a post complete with a stamp.

DarkPaper

DarkPaper

Designed with a dark color scheme with a texture that resembles paper, this is one stylish Tumblr theme.

For.Screen

For.Screen

For.Screen is a Tumblr theme for people who love extra large icons and dark color shades.

Kalalalani

Kalalalani

Kalalalani is a simple and unpretentious theme for those of us who like dark backgrounds.

Organ

Organ

Looking for a quirky theme? Organ Tumblr theme will blow your mind away.

Office

Office

Office is a beautiful Tumblr theme with a white background and brilliantly designed designs for all the different Tumble post types.

Pro Media

Pro Media

Pro Media is a portfolio theme that is designed to be in the eye level at all the time with a horizontal navigation.

Drifter

Drifter

Drifter is a minimalistic and retro theme best fit for all types of Tumblr posts.

If you would like to see more blogging theme goodness, you can checkout our earlier roundups The Top Twelve Tumblr Themes, The Best Premium Tumblr Themes, 22 Brilliant Tumblr Themes and Dress Up Your Site with 15 Top Wordpress Themes.

If you know of any other great themes that we have missed, share them with us in the comments below. Thanks!

But it is an absoulte hassle if a friend of yours wants to keep of your social network activities. He/she will have to login to multiple apps to view the things you have shared and know what you are up to. Enter Flavors.me.

Flavors.me empowers the user to create a centralized one stop online destination for all the personal content distributed across multiple social networks.

Overview

Flavors.me allows us to create an elegant and dynamic website by using our own personal content from social networks around the web. Be it photos, videos, music or blog posts uploaded to a popular social network, Flavors.me helps you to put everything together at a single website.

Overview

With Flavors.me, you can pull content from more than 20 popular social networks into an extremely customizable web page of your own. The sign up process is an absolute breeze with all my personal favorites – just three fields, no password confirmation field and no email activation.

Sign Up

The minimalist design of the sign up page is gorgeous to say the least.

Pricing

Flavors.me has one of the reasonable and simple pricing plans among the web apps I have seen. There is a single annual plan that costs only $20 to host your personal digital hub.

Pricing

Flavors.me offers a free account for users to test the waters with all the features turned on. The only limitation is that with a free account you can export content from a maximum of 4 social network sites.

Dashboard

The minimalism we raved about in the sign up page is reflected in the dashboard design too. Against a blank white canvas floats a menu with just four items. Talk about creating a great first impression!

Dashboard

I started to add my profile information in the About section. When you start typing the name and profile information, the white canvas is populated instantaneously with the same. With a large font and real time saving, the experience is bind blowing.

Profile Information

But for some reason, the title got truncated after a few letters and was unable to change that even after moving the floating menu the extreme right of the screen, to make way for more letters. Let us see if this can be fixed in later customizations.

Truncated Content

Options to format the text information and allowing users to promote your website are available in this section.

Adding a Service

Selecting on a social network reveals the mode of connectivity towards the fag end of this section. With Twitter, Google & Facebook the respective authorization options show up.

Adding Facebook

In case of other services the username field shows up and once you add it, a link to the service appears on the canvas.

Adding Tumblr

Designing the Site

You can customize the layout, colors, background and fonts of the site being designed.  Free users are limited to three layout designs. The title truncation issue is fixed when a layout is chosen.

Layout Design

You can upload an image and set it as the background. Multiple images can be uploaded and can be switched in a single click when you get bored of the current design. The image can be aligned in a number ways using the preset alignment option.

Background Image

Flavors.me provides embed codes and API integration with a number of social media networks to promote the website. Search engine submissions and Google Adwords campaign to promote your website can also be launched from the Promote section.

Promoting the Site

The final look of the Flavors.me website is simple, uncluttered and beautiful. Clicking on the + sign expands the respective social network content stream.

Final Look

Final Thoughts

Extensive traffic statistics & analysis and custom domain are available to paid subscribers. $20 a year for Flavors.me is pretty cheap but they need to add some more features to make users pay without flinching.

Flavors.me is a dynamite of a service that underplays itself a bit too much. Of course the idea is to be a single stop social hub but the app has immense potential. With a powerful and intuitive backend administration control, Flavors.me could start allowing users to add pages, forms, comment section etc. making it an all-in-one aggregation and delivery platform. We rate Flavors.me a 9/10 for executing a simple idea wrapped in pure candy.

Greasemonkey is a free Firefox extension that lets you insert bits of Javascript into the website you’re looking at and has made my browsing experience a whole lot better. It’s extremely customizable and can be made site-specific. If you know how to code you can create your own script, but if you don’t, you can head over to Userscripts.org and find a huge repository of Greasemonkey scripts. Greasemonkey scripts can be used for all occasions, and I’d like to share a few of my favorites. Each of these scripts has improved my browsing experience in some fashion so I hope they can do the same for you. Enjoy!

Note: To install a script, just click the install button and follow the prompt. Refresh the page and your script should be working. You don’t even have to restart Firefox!

Auto Form Filler

Auto Form Filler

Tired of filling out forms all day? If you’re like me and sign up for new websites every day, then this script is definitely for you. You can avoid all those tedious online forms and have them filled in automatically with a click of a button. This tool will also check the “Agree to Rules” boxes and uncheck the newsletter/spam boxes. Customize your information by going to Tools > Greasemonkey > User Scripts Commands > Auto-Fill Options, and use the AutoComplete command to fill in all those annoying forms!

AutoPagerize

AutoPagerize

I’m sure you’ve heard of “infinite scrolling” but if you haven’t, it’s the concept of preloading and appending content on a website as you scroll to the bottom. The result is that you can keep on scrolling down, fetching more content, until you run out of content. AutoPagerize is a script that enables infinite scrolling on tons of websites so you don’t have to keep clicking the ‘Next’ button. It works for the most popular websites like Google, Digg, Flickr, but t it doesn’t work with all websites so if you’d like a similar tool that you can customize, check out the Auto Pager Firefox addon.

Comment Pre-Fill

Comment Pre-Fill

The comment pre-fill is for all you people out there who love to read and comment on blogs. It’s like the Auto Form Filler on a diet. Use this script to automatically fill in those comment boxes at the end an article. Fill in your name, website, and e-mail, and set a hotkey. Then go to any post and press the hotkey to start commenting right away. Try it out right now on this post!

FFixer

FFixer

FFixer is the ultimate Facebook tweaker. You can choose what to display on your home page, hide those annoying Farmville notices, download videos, view large pictures, use keyboard shortcuts, and lots more. You may be forced to use Facebook to keep in touch, but it doesn’t mean you can’t tweak it to your liking. Install the script and configure it under the Account tab in Facebook.

Google Image Ripper

Google Image Ripper

The Google Image Ripper enhances your image browsing experience, though it only works on Google. Instead of having to browse through hordes of thumbnails, this script allows you to see the larger original images after an image search.

Google Multiple Account Login

Google Multiple Account Login

The Google Multiple Account Login script makes managing multiple Google accounts a piece of cake. It replaces the traditional Google “sign off” button with a drop down menu where you can add and manage all your user accounts. The script allows you to switch accounts with ease without having to mess around with usernames and passwords. Easy and automatic.

Google RSS Subscribers Count

Google Subscriber Count

This script serves a simple but useful purpose: it shows you the number of Google Reader subscribers a website has. The only downside is that you have to be logged into a Google account for the script to work, since it requests data from Google Reader. The script is not 100% accurate, but will give you a general idea of how many subscribers a website has. Great for all you stat obsessed blogger.

Greased Lightbox

Greased Lightbox

Similar to the Google Image Ripper, the Greased Lightbox script also enhances your image browsing experience, though it functions on a wider variety of websites. When you use an image search site like Google, Facebook, Flickr, or DeviantArt and click on an image, it displays the image in a beautiful lightbox. Use the left/right arrow, ‘+’, ‘-’, ’0′, ‘x’, and ‘Esc’ keys to navigate.

Invisibility Cloak

Invisibility Cloak

Created by Gina Trapani of Lifehacker, the Invisibility Cloak is a tool that makes you more productive by blocking certain websites until a specific time (say 6PM). Add websites you want to block in the Manage User Scripts tool (Tools>Greasemonkey>Manage User Scripts). Browse to the Invisibility Cloak and add the website to the Included Pages. You have to edit the code a little to change the set time, but Gina makes it easy (Tools>Greasemonkey>Manage User Scripts>Invisibility Cloak>Edit). A simple and effective productivity booster.

Linkify Ting

Linkify Ting

This is another simple script that takes plain text that is obviously the address of a website and turns that text into the website link. Simple, but saves you a lot of copy-pasting time. For example, web.appstorm.net is not a clickable link. With this script installed, that link will turn into something like web.appstorm.net. Try it out right now!

LookItUp

LookItUp

Ever want to find out more information on a word you don’t understand but can’t muster up the strength to open a new tab and do some research? LookItUp is a useful little script that can help you quickly look something up on Wikipedia, a dictionary, Google, or a custom site. Just highlight the word you want to know more about and press the “#” key to customize the script. To look up the word on a website, just press the set trigger key when some text is highlighted.

RSS/Atom Feed Generator

RSS/Atom Feed Generator

Tired of looking all around a website trying to find that darn feed? The RSS/Atom Feed Generator will save you the trouble and automatically find the feeds for you and place them at the top of your screen so you can easily subscribe.

Textarea Backup

Textarea Backup

One of the things I hate most in the world is having to type up something all over again because Firefox crashed. If this has ever happened to you, you know what I’m talking about. Now that I’ve installed the Textarea Backup script, I don’t have to worry about it ever again. This script stores text you enter into text input area, saving every second and after each keystroke, and restores the text if Firefox crashes or if you accidentally close the tab.

Textarea Drag Resize

Textarea Drag Resize

You may not be as dorky as I am, but I love making long comments on blogs so I hate having to scroll back and forth in that itty bitty text box. With this neat script, I can change the size of the text box just by dragging the corners and can finally enjoy the luxury of having a large text box. Remember boys, size does matter.

TinyURL Decoder

TinyURL Decoder

While all these URL-shortening websites are useful in their own respect, they also pose a slight threat. Who knows, maybe that bit.ly link leads to a nasty picture of your boss without his shirt on. To combat this, you can use the TinyURL Decoder which translates shortened URLs to their original form. Despite the script name, it supports dozens of URL shortening services. Be sure to add the websites you want it to work on in the Manage User Scripts tool. If you want to enable it on all websites, add “*” as a website. See it in action below. Install the script and add “http://web.appstorm.net/*” as an included page. Refresh your browser to see the following links magically change to web.appstorm.net!

• http://bit.ly/9UDKVy
• http://tinyurl.com/ya93f5f
• http://snurl.com/z4t2w

Conclusion

If you’ve managed to read this far and still don’t have Greasemonkey installed, I’m really disappointed in you. For the rest of you, I hope you all discovered a script or two you didn’t know about before. Greasemonkey is so customizable that I could only list a handful of the useful scripts, so be sure to check other scripts out at Userscripts.org and go customize your online experience!

I know I missed a lot of awesome Greasemonkey scripts, so let me know about your favorite scripts in the comments and, as always, don’t forget to subscribe for more delicious content!