Archive for the ‘Web Apps’ Category
There is something true about open-source developing projects, it’s really hard to find some developer platforms that are user friendly, that could actually motivate young developers to start working with these environments. But there’s always an exception: SUSE Studio was launched recently, bringing dev guys a fresh new interface where they can build their open source applications.
Of course that the building platform will be mainly for SUSE Linux Enterprise or openSUSE, but has several features and possibilities available:
- Includes applications templates, including: JeOS, minimal X11, KDE and GNOME (the last one is the preferred for SUSE platforms).
- You don’t need to install anything in particular, you just need a web browser to start working with SUSE Studio.
- You can generate ISO CDs for you appliances or even LiveCDs.
- You can add third party repositories that you can include to your applications.
- Written in Ruby on Rails. Never heard of it? Here’s a list of the most common web apps built in this platform: Ruby in Rails applications.
You can find more resources about this platform, like reviews or even screencasts.
Right, those of you who read my twitter will know that I’ve decided it’s time to get into shape. I’m by no means obese. However I would like to be able to jog for five minutes without needing to stop ten times for ten-minute breaks.
I put some good play lists on my Mp3, dug the tracky bottoms out of the wardrobe (oh, the shame) and put on the stopwatch. Then it dawned on me – I don’t know the first thing about getting fit. Therefore, I did what anyone in their right mind would do – I Googled.
After sifting through dozens of brutal websites, I came across a few military style sites when it clicked – surely, armies across the world must have SOMETHING! This article is a list of the top three Army websites of real world militaries about getting fit. These cool web apps and videos will hopefully have me in ship shape in no time.
1. The Royal Commandos: This section of their website is dedicated to getting you fit in a short space of time in order to gain entry to them. There are tons of videos showing you how to do the exercises properly, what you should eat and what makes a good schedule. Because it’s from one of the world best fighting forces where physical fitness is of top priority during training, you know you’re not getting the wimpy approach. Easy to use and tones of information on there.
2. 62nd Infantry .com – This is an unofficial website run by the 62nd Infantry Battalion of the Irish Reserve Defense Forces. It focuses less on interactive features and more on the training side of things, which I liked. There are charts to figure out your BMI, motivation techniques, goals and targets. Although this is aimed at meeting fitness levels to gain entry for training, it can be used by the average Joe to shed the pounds.
3. Canadian Army. This site doesn’t go into to much detail like the previous two sites, but it does give you some good step-by-step instructions and some goals for joining which you can use as personal targets.
Now, I’m off for a jog.
There are plenty of web sites where you can easily create nice chat rooms and share them with friends, there are no big news on that. But here’s one site that is taking this a little bit ahead: Babelwith.me creates chat rooms where chat room members can automatically receive and send translated messages to other participants.
The service is quite simple and does not require for any registration to use, just access Babelwith.me site and with one click you’ll get access a new chat room where you can invite people by giving the chat room URL, sending emails, Facebook or sharing it on twitter.
This web app supports over 45 languages for the chat rooms, the languages are usually detected automatically. But still we have to say that this isn’t the final version, right now is in a alpha stage.
I’ve been testing it a little bit, still needs a lot of work, but I’m sure you can find it very useful.
I wanted to share with you, specially with those webmasters, devs and designers, a cool site that I found. In MegaSWF you can keep, store and backup your flash files.
I’m sure this site will help you a lot when your site uses this type of files, publishing some of the animations, applications and even games; and you would know that having support and enough resources for flash files can give you a small headache. MegaSWF is completely free and you can upload SWF files up to 10mbs each.
But if you are looking for more resources and a few more functionalities, you can take the pro account ($5 per month) that will have these characteristics:
Pro Features:
- Unmetered bandwidth usage and 20gB disk space
- Hotlink from anywhere
- No advertisements of any kind
- Script access and networking functions allowed
|
Unregistered |
Registered User |
MEGAswf Pro |
| Hotlinking: |
No |
No |
Yes |
| Can add description: |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
| Flash networking: |
No |
No |
Yes |
| Ads on display page: |
1 |
1 |
None |
| Max. file size: |
10 megabytes |
10 megabytes |
30 megabytes |
And the pro account comes with a guarantee: for every time that you cannot access some of your SWF files, you will have one month of complimentary services.
At this point I think that saying that Google released a new and very ambitious project as open source should not surprise anyone. Google officially announced that one of their recent projects, Google Wave, and the protocol involved, will be open source and they expect a lot of contribution from the entire community (I’m sure they will get it).
Google Wave will be oriented to concurrent messaging in a collaborative environment, multiple users can be manipulating the same content at the same time and user activity is immediately visible to other participants. As any collaborative environment and architecture, most of the operations will converge when the server receives the concurrent requests; but the real challenge appears making all that an “invisible transparency” to the user without resigning the usability, functionality and performance.
Will be something like this:
Google says: “To kickoff Federation Day, we open sourced two components: 1) the Operational Transform (OT) code and the underlying wave model, and 2) a basic client/server prototype that uses the wave protocol. The OT code is the heart and soul of the collaborative experience in Google Wave and we plan that code will evolve into the production-quality reference implementation”.
You can even take a peak to the source code of this protocol. And you can check also a nice overview.
If you live in a hole and you havent already heard, Twitter have relaunched their home page. Twitter is one of the fastest growing websites in the world at the moment and their user base has been both positive and negative on the new home page design.
Most people use Twitter for social networks and not for search, however when designing the new home page the Twitter team has put an obvious emphasis on the search aspect of the business. I know that most people already signed up to Twitter even see the home page much at all, because they can manage their accounts from a huge list of Twitter applications available, so they never even have to visit the site. The new home page design seems to be focused on a basic design with the ability to show new users what Twitter is all about, and thats conversations.
I think the new design itself is very aesthetically appealing and they have done a great job incorporating the search aspect into the home page itself. If I was a new users I could easily see what people are talking about and see that there is a huge community already on Twitter, which provides me with more of an incentive of joining. What do you think?
Other peoples thoughts on the Twitter home page design: Mashable, Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, BoomTown, Venturebeat and NY Times.
I love my twitter account. It’s fast, easy and the best service I’ve come accross in ages. Obviously, Twitter is not just another social networking site, which are mainly funded by advertising and partnerships. Twitter is an excellent micro-blogging platform. However, because it’s a micro blogging platform it doesn’t attract long visits to profile pages and as such it’s difficult to make money from advertising. For that reason, they have to think in the long term and a little outside the box.
“The key takeaway there is that we’re thinking big and we’re in it for the long haul,”
Speaking at a conference recently, the services co-founder Biz Stone said that they have big plans for twitter including pitching the service to companies to help gain new customers and keep existing ones and also as a way of making the company more interactive with their customers.
He also mentioned that Twitter will improve their security such as adding authentication codes to help prevent identity theft and may also use data from user records for their own needs.
Again he stressed that Twitter could not be treated as though it were a Social network like Facebook or Bebo.
“We started out by creating this very simple status updating system. And that’s not what Twitter is. It evolved into something else,” he said.
Michael Yavonditte who was previously an executive at IAC, AltaVista, Ziff Davis, Juno and the CEO of Quigo when AOL bought it for $340M, has launched a new site called RakedIn. RakedIn is a wiki like that provides stock related information on companies and individuals from all over the world.
RakedIn is very similar to WikInvest but has a much cleaner design. RakedIn already have over 5 million pages of statistical data and they are hoping to have 20 million by the end of the year. RakedIn provides information about people, public companies and even private companies. RakedIn aggregates new sources from all over the web, up to the minute stock quotes, financial performance, SEC filings, top executives and even latest trades.
I think this product has a lot of legs but they are competing with any people trying to gain market share in this environment.
Spotify has received a lot of press in the last few days cause they are planning to move their European only service into the US market. The story was broken over at Forbes and I think this could be a very big move for the music industry as a whole. Spotify is a free ad supported music streaming service which allows users to listen to anything in their catalogue as often as they want. Spotify offers a free service which is advertising supports, a day of free advertising and then also a full unlimited service. Users can also build and store playlists; so that if you turn on shuffle, after awhile it feels like a Pandora 
station with only your favorites or the iTunes collection you wish you could afford.
Ive used Spotify since private launch and it is so addictive and one of the best services I have ever used. Their currently library has over 5 million tracks with thousands more uploaded on a daily basis. Spotify has attracted more than 2 million users in the UK and another 4 million across Europe. The company also wants to let you take you playlists with you anywhere you want. An Android app is in beta and an iPhone app is being tested.
Key issues when entering the US market is:
- Can they afford the crippling royalty rates that all the majors will want in the US? These rates already killed Spiral Frog and other services.
- Microsoft UK executive already leaked that they are readying a launch of a competitive product that will be tied in with the Zune. However, it is Microsoft and they always seem to get new products wrong recently.
- The economy needs to turn around because Spotify is 95% ad-supported. “If you look at the market today, who knows where it’s going to be in the next two, three years?”. Spotify founder Daniel Ek told Forbes. “We are doubling our revenues month-on-month–that’s a very good sign.”
There has been a lot of news from Skype lately, Skype new headset, Skype Windows and iPhone improvements, and Skype 4.0 release. Just to jump on the bandwagon Skype has now released their 2.8 version for the Mac. This new version brings two totally new and unique features namely Screen sharing and Skype Access.
Screen Sharing is a key new feature in Skype client for the Mac which allows one easily to see/share all or a portion of their desktop with another Skype user during a call. And for those on the move, Skype Access allows them to pay for Wi-Fi hotspots using their credit.
More new features include:
- Improved chat management
- Quick Add
- Mood message chat
- Larger profile pictures
- Hidden avatars in incoming contact requests
- Add notes to contacts
To download this new version of Skype, simply head over to the Skype website.
Yahoo has confirmed that is has purchased a small start-up located in San Francisco in order to add better photo functionality to their Web Mail. The company which has been bought out is called Xoopit and is an emerging contender in the photo sharing world. The service allows users to share photos easily on a host of different sites such as Flickr and Facebook by taking them from their e-mail inboxes.
On the company blog, Bryan Lamkin, the senior vice-president said:
“ Why is this such a big deal? Yahoo! Mail is actually home to one of the largest online photo repositories in the world. And every day, millions of you use Yahoo! Mail as your primary way to share the photos of important moments in your lives. While social networks and community sites are great for sharing photos with everyone you know, we realize it’s not for everyone or every occasion. For many, email is still best for sharing photos among a more select group of friends or family. And now we’re making it all that much easier for you.”
Xoopit seems over the moon with the new deal. They have updated their homepage screaming Yahoo! everywhere. On their company blog they said that “the Xoopit team today sees this acquisition as an exceptional path for us in achieving our vision. Over the last few months, we have left every conversation with the Yahoo! team thinking that together we can wow the world”
The specific financial deal has not been revealed but it is estimated to be in the region of $20 million. That amount of money is no chump change for a new group of start-up creators who will hopefully go on to create even better websites and services in the future.
Windows sidebar in Windows Vista has its limitations. The size and functionality are basic as with most windows standard programs. You have your sticky notes, weather RSS feeds and downloadable extras. None the less, it’s all very basic. You can’t get the greatest of extras and the news feeds can really get annoying as they all seem to come from Wall Street. Numerous companies have introduced alternatives however few have succeeded to the extent that Sobees have.
The company based in Switzerland has launched a new desktop program that allows you view just about everything that you can think of in the form of handy little desktop widgets. One of the best things I noticed about Sobees is the Sync feature. You sign in when you first launch the program on you PC and then it stays open for good until you close it. But, if you go on another PC that has Sobees and sign in it will sync all of your feeds, widgets and sticky notes to that PC until you sign out. This is great if you’re away from the office but need your news feeds, e-mails and widgets in one place. It’s also a feature the other companies have overlooked completely.
Another thing that I liked was how customizable it all was. As you can see from the screenshot it’s very attractive to the eye and you can shift and shape things to suite your needs. The colours and the themes are great. However, if you go extreme on this front it will slow down considerably.
The widgets are extensive in number. I enjoyed reading news whilst twittering about it without ever opening a browser. There are tons for download but many of these are very specific so don’t expect a library of useful widgets.
In total, it’s much better than Windows Sidebar and the other alternatives out there.
