MindFlash let us create in the easiest way online training and courses just selecting any existing documents we already have, like Word files, presentations, PDF, or even videos.
In the training we can include also quiz questions for the “students”, and MindFlash will also automate the process of creating the quiz, saving the answers and generating reports about the results. Here’s a short demo about how to use it:
The free version can invite up to 10 users, and for certain there kind of educational tools can simplify a lot of work and still provide some interesting ways to teach and share knowledge.
Phras.in is one effective web app which will help us deciding on which words to use when we are not certain on the right term. Just typing both, will automatically retrieve which of those is the most used.
“Tell me, how many times did you come up with two ways to say the same thing, and couldn’t decide which one was the best fit?” A rare question but for a common scenario in the writers life; finding a right word can be tricky but Phras.in searches around the web and provide us the result for the most usual term.
And includes also the option “Contextualize ’em” for retrieving also the sentences where each of the words are appearing.
Connecting our websites with social networks is one of the easiest ways to increase our popularity. ShareSideBar can help us in a great way, completely free and in one step we can create a sidebar for our site with all the common social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Delicio.us, Digg, Buzz, Reddit and Stumbleupon.
The most common use of providing visitors an easy way to share our website is adding links in our home page to all of the networks; certainly a more effective is using a sidebar in our website with a permanent and visible links. ShareSideBar creates for us the necessary code ready to be added in our website.
We can choose if we want the sidebar on the right or left side of the page, and the social networks we would like to use in the sidebar. This web app is completely free and does not require any registration.
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software is not all that common and applications rarely include this service included, FreeOCR is a free web app which will allow us to easily extract text from images and even PDF files.
Not only free, FreeOCR is really simple to use: Access the site, click browse for selecting the image you would like to extract the text and just wait for a few seconds. No registration required.
FreeOCR has some limitations about the service: We can upload files up to 2MB, only 10 images per hour, and for PDF files, the text extracted will be only for the first page.
Wallaby is the tool which can end much of the supremacy defined by Adobe Flash. It will allow developers to re-use most of the elements from their projects and transforming those easily in HTML5. Here’s a demo.
Wallaby exports from an Adobe Flash project some key elements like graphics, masks and animations into a HTML file:
This tool won’t export all of the elements, but it will for sure automate a lot of the process developers can perform to achieve their animations to work with, for example, iPhones and iPads.
The interesting about this, is that Adobe posted this information in their blog. Cheers to that.
Koobface Trojan is back, and now it comes with a few surprises for some friends: Infecting Mac OS X and Linux OS. Intego, the Mac Security Blog, informed that this virus is spreading through social networks and does affect Mac computers as well as Linux.
Koobface appears in social networks like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace and now they will not infect only Windows computers. One of the common messages we should receive indicating the presence of Koobface: “Is this you in this video?” once we click on the link it will try to run an applet from Java which will install a malware in the OS.
As for Windows, Koobface will run a local web server and an IRC Server, acting as a Botnet and as a DNS changer; and of course will try to reproduce to other computers.
Intego assures that the Intego VirusBarrier X6 and X5 detect and eradicate this malware, but we must avoid running any unknown Java applet in our computer, and if so, we should detect an installation is running and quickly cancel it.
How do we design our website is the key factor to achieve popularity, there’s no point on having a lot of great content if we are designing a complex site which it is extremely expensive to maintain it. W3tableless is a simple web app which will show us if the website design follows some of the best practices.
Even though there’s no golden rule about how to correctly design your website, there are several best practices that should not be avoid. One of them is “tableless”: A design technique for dividing the architecture of our site separating content and design. Therefore the maintenance costs of the website are reduced.
W3tableless will show you with just one click and completely free if your website is using this best practices. Just enter the URL and click on “CHECK”.
We will receive also a complete report about the website: Number of DIV tags, TABLE tags, Encoding, XML Prolog, etc.
MP32Tube it’s another YouTube web app which we can use to upload MP3, WAV or M4V files to YouTube using the images we select to create a video.
Most applications we can use related to YouTube are mostly for downloading videos, downloading only the audio file, etc.; but just a few are focused on the uploading process. MP32Tube fits perfectly for users who want to share music or some audio files using the YouTube engine.
Using this application is also very simple: Upload images (jpg, jpeg, gif and png supported); upload the audio file; edit the video info and create the video.
MP32Tube also offers a secure method for using your YouTube account: All the connections to the account are done through Google’s AuthSub API. Meaning they never have access to your password.
Typing Speed Monitor it’s a Google Chrome extension which records your typing speed. This extension also includes some interesting data about your typing.
If you are always looking for a way to improve your typing speed and want to know some of the facts about your daily work with the keyboard, the Typing Speed Monitor should fit perfectly: How long you’ve spent typing, what characters you’ve typed most, and provides you with a keyboard visualization that tells you statistics about each of the keys you’ve typed.
I think this tool to be more useful could include some other data about your typing, for example: words we usually mistype, average speed / average mistyping, or even some exercises about how to improve your speed or accuracy.
DroidDraw it’s a free web app where we can design and build graphical user interfaces for an Android phone. DroidDraw also includes a standalone executable available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.
The Google OS for mobile devices is the most used operating system in smart phones… yes, even more than iPhone OS. And the market share estimated for the next few years says that this tendency won’t change; so if you were thinking about mobile apps design you better start with Android.
DroidDraw also offers free tutorials to understand this free tool and some nice guidelines and tips.
Most applications we can use related to YouTube are mostly for downloading videos, downloading only the audio file, etc.; but just a few are focused on the uploading process. 
