Archive for: new
So, after what seemed like an endless few weeks or fights, press releases, rumours and delays the Facebook 3.0 app is now officially released for the iPhone. I think a celebration is in order.
So, what are our first impressions here at Crenk? Well there good. Very good in fact. When I first started up the app I noticed a few things almost instantaneously that had changed from the previous app. For example, up the top left hand corner there is a button which when pressed it will give you a search bar and down the bottom the alerts feature which tells you what your friends are up to and if you need to respond to anything will pop up.
It is also more in touch with the actual web based Facebook. For example, you can RSVP to invitations rather than just being informed of their existence and you can also chat easier with friends.
Of course there are the new features that literally work with the iPhone. You can now call and send texts to your Facebook friends without having to leave the app. I think this is a cool feature and one that Facebook will not regret making as that’s what smart phones are all about – integration.
Finally, there is the web browser. At first I though this was a little unnecessary but then it became clear why they put it there. How many of your Facebook friends send you links or how many times do you decide to follow up a news story you heard from friends? Now you don’t have to exit the whole app and start up Safari just to follow a link!
Android devices seem to be the next big thing and are hotting up the market pretty quick with Google being the main warrior. However recently, there have been rumours that the old Finnish mobile giant Nokia were planning to jump into the Android platform and abandon its Symbian platform which the company actually owns.
The company bigwigs decided enough was enough and flat out denied any rumors that they would be releasing an Android phone onto the market at the Nokia World event in Germany this coming September. A report stating these predictions in The Guardian has been responded to by Nokia. “There is no truth to this story whatsoever. It is a well known fact that Symbian is our platform of choice for smartphones”, said Nokia in a statement to TechRadar.
For a company to make such bold statements about its own future in the mass media it’s almost a sure thing that Nokia won’t be using the Android platform anytime in the near (or distant) future, preferring to stick to its own developments. As for the meantime, Nokia are continuing in their development of a new platform of their own called Maemo OS for their internet tablets. Outsourcing is not one of Nokia’s favourite habits.
Ten years ago, who would have thought that most of our work would depend on the internet? The internet allows us to have easy access to our files, anywhere, anytime. We chat face to face with friends, meet clients virtually, process payments in a flash and much more. The internet is huge and you can’t get enough of it. It has no end.
While on the topic of the internet, you can call the current scenario, the Web 2.0 revolution, the next dot com boom. Web apps are torrenting the internet with their numbers and new ones pop-up everyday.
Today, I will talk about the latest additions to the pool, of course; the ones you probably don’t know about.
So, without further ado…
With TinyChat you can create your own chatroom and invite people through one simple link. Chat rooms are disposable and can be created within seconds.
With KeepHD, you can download the high defintion version of youtube videos and also fetch the FLVs and 3GPs for your mobiles.
With the help of Prezi you can create maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings and present in a nonlinear way. Move beyond the slide, it only takes 5 minutes to learn how to use Prezi.
With Wix, you can create stunning flash websites for free, all from your internet browser! It offers you a simple powerful online platform to make flash websites, MySpace layouts and more. No downloads or programming needed.
NiceTranslator is a fast, easy to use online translator designed with simplicity and functionality in mind. It is ajax powered, so you get the translations on the fly!
A to-do list with a twist. It streamlines tasks in an elegant calendar view
Pizap is a fun free photo editor that lets people easily create wacky images with their digital pictures. You get a very easy to use photo editor that lets you add photo effects, custom text or speech bubbles and much more.
Need to receive a message by email, but can’t (or don’t want to) give out your email address? whspr! gives you a URL to share instead.
WobZip is an online tool which lets you uncompress compressed files online. It supports many formats including the major ones as Zip, RAR, 7Z, Gzip, TAR, ISO etc…
Create an invitation in seconds, add entries from mobile, twitter, email, iCal, gCal or Outlooks. And of course, send them with ease from withing the app.
Fliggo is an out-of-the-box, all-in-one, solution for creating your own video website. It can be a video blog, a YouTube-like community or a private site for your company or family.
Yidio combines over 200 million videos and offers one of the largest video search engines on the Web.
SlideRocket is an online, flash based tool for creating slides and presentations. It brings together a complete package of online slide making with features such as an intuitive interface, themes, flickr integration and much more
Ziddu is a new free file hosting solution with features such as unlimited storage space, fast uploads and downloads, file management, a sharing community a referral program and the ability to earn money with your downloads.
Mufin is your music discovery engine, that will let you easily discover new music among millions of tracks. With the sound that you dig!
YoutubeReloaded creates an embeddable playlist of YouTube videos that can be added to any website. Simply choose a playlist type to create your free youtube playlist.
FriendPaste is a an online tool where you can paste code snippets of many different languages to share with friends. It sports and intuitive interface with support for syntax highlighting.
Survs is a collaborative tool that allows you to build, deploy and analyze online surveys. With a great user interface, Survs is currently in private beta, though a single request fetched us an invitation.
With SendPhotos Mobile, Web and PC you can upload photos, edit them, create photos albums and share them online with whoever you want. Also available for Android, iPhone and BlackBerry.
BackupURL creates instant cached copies of web pages. The content of a web page stays the same while you share the link provided. The cached page can also be used for referencing or even mirroring data. The cached page will always be online (html,css,images) no matter whether the original site is up or down.
Rapidstack is a realtime Rapidshare link searcher. It scans the links before they are displayed as results and only working links are displayed.
CC Betty organizes your message and its contents – photos, addresses, documents, links – and create a mailspace where everyone can track replies, view and add content. You just CC your messages to her!
Make your emails pop with signatures that reflect your personality and change with every email you send! Create signatures with your twitter status, flickr photos, blog entries, youtube stream and much more, all realtime.
Create your own RSS feed by combiningRSS feeds from your favorite websites, and use filters to choose what you want in it!
Twe2 is a service which sends you your twitter replies, direct messages and custom searches that you specify free to your mobile as SMS. Available in more than 230 countries.
Markkit is a web2.0 text highlighter. Drag’n’Drop the markkit yellow pen into your browser toolbar. Whenever you want to highlight text in a web page, click on the markkit bookmarklet.
So which ones are your favorites? Discuss in the comments, and dont forget to give it a digg 
(By) An avid freelance writer and technology enthusiast, Keshav Khera is young geek from India. Fanatic about the web, he also writes a blog and makes unsuccessful efforts to avoid twitter.
There aren’t very many social media applications yet on the iPhones that are based around social news or social bookmarking. Digg has a an unofficial app which is much improved than the last unofficial app that was in the iTunes App Store which is no longer available. Delicious has quite a few apps that are decent but lack a few important features. Disappointingly, StumbleUpon doesn’t have any applications and neither does Mixx or Yahoo! Buzz.
Reddit is currently leading with three apps to make the mobile experience much more enjoyable. One of theirs is an official app from the Reddit creators themselves. Will Digg be releasing an official app soon?
I’ve taken the liberty to do a review of the three Reddit apps and Digg app that are in the iTune App Store. I am in no way associated with any of these apps, know any of the owners, or am promoting any of them in any fashion. This is merely a review from an avid Reddit and Digg user with a love for social news and social media.
Shovel – Digg App
Author: Scott Fitzhugh
Price: Free
Ratings: 147 Reviews – 
(at the time of writing)
iTunes Download Link: http://tinyurl.com/d5yqhu
iTunes Description:
Shovel is an app that provides top stories from the social news website Digg.com in a native application. Browse the front page stories, or delve deeper into an array of topics and subtopics of interest.
Personal Review:
Shovel is a great application for viewing Digg.com content easily on the iPhone. Overall, the design and interface is pretty clean and simple. It gives you a variety of topics and listings to select to view so you can access all of the content on Digg.com. You can view:
- Popular Stories
- Top Stories
- Movers & Shakers
- Brand New Stories
All listings are applicable to any category or sub-category in Digg.com. If you select a Digg story you can then scroll down the commentary to see what people are saying, who’s replied, how many votes each comment has received, etc. After that, you can click further to view the story live on the Web. Which is nice about it is that it doesn’t load Safari as a separate app to view the content so there’s no back-and-forth between the apps.
Unfortunately, what you cannot participate in digging, burying, or commenting through this application. The developer disclaims, “Now we’ve gotten the message loud and clear that the one thing that would turn this 3.5 star app (currently 3 stars) into a 5 star one is the interactivity of the original Digg site. You guys (and gals) want to be able to Digg, comment, and bury, and who can blame you? Right now, however, there is no way to do this using the legitimate Digg APIs, and quite frankly, it makes us sad. I’ve been trying to court the help of Digg in making this app all that it can be, and if you want to help that along, you should drop them a line yourselves requesting the same!”
Another drawback is that you cannot personalize this application because there is no way to login. Therefore you can’t weed out content you don’t want to see, view your account profile, see your friend’s submissions, etc.
In doing some research the Shovel app used to be named “Diggerific”. Apparently, they have changed the name of it and redid the UI just a bit as you can tell from the video review of Diggerific below:
Overview
Pros
- Easy to use
- Clean interface
- Ability to access all Digg content
Cons
- Free of charge
- Can’t Digg, comment, or bury content
- No Digg account profile/community features or functionality
iReddit
Author: CondeNet
Price: $1.99
Ratings: 41 Reviews 
(at the time of writing)
Feedback Contact: http://getsatisfaction.com/reddit/products/reddit_ireddit
iTunes Download Link: http://tinyurl.com/ce6tt2
iTunes Description:
The official Reddit iPhone app. Never be bored again. With this app, you’ll only be a tap (or shake) away from the most interesting stuff on the web.
All of your favorite Reddit functionality is here: view the hottest, newest, top, and most controversial stories of the moment, explore, individual subreddits, vote, comment, share, and save links for later. The entire commenting system has been optimized for the iPhone app so you won’t have any trouble contributing to an epic pun thread.
Save time by never having to reload the Reddit homepage. You can even use handy next/previous navigation to move between websites without going back to the main list. And those sites work in portrait and widescreen modes too.
It’s never been easier to be entertained. Just shake your iPhone to enter “serendipity mode” where you’ll be served a random, interesting site. Pro-tip: Turn on “play sound on shake” for a special treat with every jostle — the iPhone is an elegant phone for a more sophisticated age.
And if you’re feeling the economic downturn (what are you doing with an iPhone?) there’s a tree, ad-supported version to come.
Personal Review:
The Official Reddit application is pretty cool. You can input your username and password so that you can vote and comment on stories. Initially, you come to the Reddit homepage. Along the top you can choose between “Hot”, “New”, “Top”, and “Controversial” stories. When selecting a story, there is an overlay on the footer that allows you to upvote/downvote the story, go to the comments section of the story, save the story, and email the link.
Three subreddits will fit on the bottom bar overlay that you can quickly navigate to. You can edit the subreddits with the ones you want to use the most, but you only have a small selection of subreddit’s to swap out with. Those subreddits are:
- Programming
- Funny
- Science
- Tech
- World News
- Entertainment
- Business
- Comics
- Gaming
- Best Of
- Economics
- Cappuccino
It is the most expensive application but I feel it’s the cleanest and easiest to use. Unfortunately, you can’t browse all subreddits and there’s no search function. Nor is there a function to view your account’s saves, karma points, submissions, comments, etc.
I would recommend this app to anyone looking to quickly and easily view Reddit news, vote, and participate in the more popular subreddits. The free Reddit app doesn’t allow for this.
Overview
Pros
- Easily vote on stories from the actual story page
- Save links to view/read later
- Comment participation
- Customization of footer subreddits
Cons
- Most expensive Reddit app
- Not a wide-range of subreddits to customize on your footer
- Can’t browse all subreddits
- No search functionality
- No personal account status functionality
Open Source Reddit
Author: Joseph Pintozzi
Price: Free
Ratings: 10 Reviews (at the time of writing)
Feedback Contact: reddit@pintozzi.com
iTunes Download Link: http://tinyurl.com/cpjzvj
iTunes Description:
The Reddit application allows users to view the stories from www.reddit.com without having to deal with loading massive webpages. It displays the stories in a nice table view, providing details about each submission, and allows the user to easily view the submitted content. The ability to vote on a submission is currently being added.
Personal Review:
This app is very bare bones with very limited functionality. If you’re looking to vote on stories or participate in the comments this app isn’t for you. If you’re just looking to read “Hot” news from a select few subreddits then this is a good app for the cost of nothing. The included subreddits to choose from are:
- reddit.com
- bacon
- politics
- pics
- WTF
- funny
- technology
- programming
The nice thing about it is that it’s open source and the developer leaves it open for people to add on what they want to it. Hopefully, in the future, this will be a great application for Reddit.
Overview
Pros
Cons
- No commenting
- No voting
- Can’t browse all subreddits
- No search functionality
- No personal account status functionality
Satellite Reddit
Author: 3Cube Technologies
Price: $0.99
Ratings: 8 Reviews – (at the time of writing)
Feedback Contact: satellite@3cubetechnologies.com or http://twitter.com/3cube
iTunes Download Link: http://tinyurl.com/cx8eec
iTunes Description:
Satellite 2.0 is now available and brings a host of improvement to the mobile Reddit experience.
Change in this version includes:
- Greatly improved performance
- New, Controversial, and Top views are available for all subreddits
- An overlay displaying the full article title and comments count shows while loading an article
- The subreddit list is reorderable
- A beautiful new icon and splash screen have been added
- New lower pricing.
Satellite is a full-featured client for Reddit.com, a social link aggregation site. With Satellite, you can browse links appearing on the front page or drill down into the Subreddits you are subscribed to. When viewing an article you can vote the link up or down, save it to your Reddit account, or share the link with others. With the click of a button, you can shift into commenting mode to browse comments or post your own back to the Reddit page about the link. The interface provides a substantially more streamlined experience over the mobile Reddit site and incorprates the unique capabilities of the iPhone to make your day to day Reddit’ing much more fun.
Additional Satellite features include:
- Shake the app at any time to explore random content from Reddit
- Next/previous buttons are available at the screen edges to move through content without returning to list view
- Full portrait/landscape modes, including upside down. Great for handing the phone across the dinner table to share your discoveries!
- Returns to the content you were browsing at start-up. Pick up right where you left off when that call came in.
- Highly addictive content discovery available anywhere, at any time!
Personal Review:
This app is definitely worth the 99 cents. After entering in your login information you can view ALL of your subscribed subreddits. It also gives you an option to edit your subreddits for your account. After selecting a subreddit you can choose between “Hot”, “New”, “Controversial”, and “Top” categories in the footer bar. Once selecting a story, it takes you to the story and overlays the story title, submitter, and point count. At the bottom footer you can choose to vote, go to comments, save the link, or email the link. Again though, there’s no search feature with this app either.
This app is a lot like the official iReddit app except it’s more personalized. You can also view your saved Reddits on your account to follow up on how your saves and submissions are doing.
Overview
Pros
- Personalized
- Nice User-Interface
- Good functionality for voting and commenting
- All Reddit content accessible through this app
Cons
- Isn’t free
- Can’t see your karma points
- No search functionality
HAPPY BROWSING WITH THESE SOCIAL MEDIA APPS!
Social networking is turning into a bit of a bramble patch. Whilst making loads of new contacts and keeping in touch with old ones, we’ve somehow lost the part of the networking that is the social – the sharing of information. Be it photos, music or words of wisdom, it’s not quite as easy to let those who’d like to, know.
A solution, however, is afoot. Zentact, brought to us by among others, Eric Marcoullier of MyBlogLog fame, aims to collate your contacts into one place and allow you to share bits and pieces as you browse.
After signing up and adding in a few personal details, you can simply import your contacts from Hotmail, LinkedIn, Gmail and Outlook via a CSV address book and after a few seconds, they are on your system.
Next, and I highly recommend this, download the Firefox extension, all will be revealed shortly.
Now, the genius part. Each contact is taggable with their likes and dislikes and when a web page which has tags that match your contacts, if you installed the extension, a smart little box will flash up in the top right hand corner of your screen with the list of contacts who’s interests are relevant to the site. You can then send them a link and be merrily on your way. Remember, social.
Now the one down side to this is that if you have hundreds of contacts, it takes ages to go through them all tagging away. I’d recommend doing it bit by bit, adding tags as you go – this will take longer but does two things:
It lets you see who you will really be sharing with – there’s no point in having 300 contacts if you only ever talk to six of them regularly anyway, which means you can quickly identify those defunct e-mail addresses you’ve not used in years or people who don’t share common interests.
Secondly, it makes the whole process a lot smoother – you may like a tag binge, but frankly I’d rather be spending my time actually looking at what I came to see rather than typing in long lists of keywords, especially ones that are tricky to spell.
Now, it will take a while for you and Zentact to get to know each other, but the more contacts you tag and the more sites sites you send, the better Zentact becomes at recommending what is suitable for whom. This is a great service and especially suitable for anyone who is on a lot of social networks but can’t quite keep up with what is going on with who. Now you can build your relationships easily and stay in touch better.
We are lucky enough to have a handful of guest invites so you can try the private beta version of this site and tell all your friends about, which you can get by clicking here. Incidentally, you can tell your friends about it via Zentact and you can then invite them to join in this most social of networks.
