Paper is an awesome new app that allows you to create multiple moleskine notebooks and they draw or write on the page. By default, it comes with a pen and a eraser, but you can purchase other tools and even test them in a unique popup. The drawing in this is by far the best I’ve seen, it smooths out your strokes and is very responsive. It is free (one pen), so I highly recommend you give it a try.
Snackr is a new app for the iPhone that I’ve been using the past two days. It’s one of my morning apps that I launch to catch up on current news. The app takes your chosen news sources and reads them to you. The apps voice calls itself Alfred, which is a great choice, because I’m Batman, lol. The app can will also pull in the weather and information from Facebook and keep you posted on friends birthdays and what not. I also have it setup to update me on NFL scores, but that obviously isn’t working during this time of year, I wish they had the NHL added. I would be definitely taking advantage of that.
Bit.ly is a service that I’m sure a majority internet peeps are familiar with. It allows for users to take webpage URLs and get a usually shorter and trackable URL to use. It is really a great tool for marketing. It comes in very handy for tracking URLs on third party sites, like Twitter and Facebook, where you don’t have access to the web analytics.
Scriptogr.am is a new application I stumbled across that takes advantage of your Dropbox account. It’s a web app that allows you to store Markdown files within Dropbox and have them converted into posts for a blog. It’s very straight forward and simple, which might make it the perfect solution. It allows you to customize the CSS for the page (I’ve noticed a few bugs with this) and use a custom domain. The project is still in beta, but I look forward to seeing where the project goes.
Summify is a tool that I recently heard about that helps you find the solid content from all your feeds. Feeds come from many places, such as, your favorite sites, blogs and even social media. It makes it easy to filter that content down to what is most relevant to you based on what is getting shared the most.
Currently, it supports, Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader. It limits the amount of content that it sends you. The most you can receive is 10 pieces of content 4 times a day. That’s very minimal compared to what I would see by trying to keep up with my feeds. So, this helps me get back to the important work that I have to do or to what ever other method I use to kill time.
Delicious is back! Well, it never really left, but I did. I was using Delicious for a while, but I started to look from something that would work across browsers and machines. I know Delicious can accomplish this through it’s extensions, but I was just not a fan of how it was working. So, I turned to Xmarks and tried that for a bit, but it really didn’t work any better for me. Next up was Google Chrome’s native bookmarks. The Chrome syncing made it so easy for me to have my bookmarks on all the machines I work on, plus all the other syncing capabilities are very convenient. I then heard Delicious would be going away and I made the decision to just use Chrome’s bookmarks. So, yes, I deleted my account and that was a mistake, but now I’m back and loving it.
Delicious is great because it doesn’t only bookmark your sites, but it gives you the capability to tag and provide descriptions for them. It allows me to track the when, why, where, how and even the who, if not myself; Which is very helpful for when your are searching or just don’t remember why you bookmarked it in the first place. Plus, you can share your links or make them private.
Since they’re back (not going away), they released a new feature with the server switch. They call this feature a “stack”, which is a great tool for grouping your share-able links that relate to a certain topic. I have one for CodeIgniter, which just has a bunch of links for helping people get started using the amazing PHP framework.
If you looking for a great social bookmarking tool, check out Delicious.
Stylebot is a Google Chrome extension that allows you to create your very own css markup for a webpage. Awesome, right? I know.
Here are two examples of css I use to make my web experience a little more pleasant.
Reddit is a great site, but the look of the content is a very…meh for me. The main problem I have with it is the white space. So, I added my own.
.thing {padding-bottom: 10px;}
I even use one for tumblr that makes it a little easier for me to write my posts.
#post_two_ifr {height: 600px;}
LastPass is a life saver. Ok, not really, but I do depend on this tool daily. Lastpass is used to give users the capability to have their passwords tracked. Doing this means that a user would only have to remember one password to access all their passwords.
A lot of people, even I at first, would shy away from this. Just do to the fact of how simple it makes it to gain access to all your website passwords. All they would have to do is figure out that one and they can access all. Kinda scary, right? The answer is “Yes” if you use a weak password, but if you take the time to create an easy to remember, strong as hell password that will take a super computer many life times to crack, then you should be safe.
So, do I trust all my passwords with LastPass? No, I don’t. Sites where I have extremely sensitive data, I create a separate password. There aren’t too many sites that I go to on a daily basis that contain sensitive data, so I still use LastPass very heavily.
I am always on the look out for the next big web app or service and I really don’t want to have to remember what username and password I used to sign up. LastPass comes in handy for these sites and it can even generate passwords to use. The generated passwords can be very complicated and hard to remember, but don’t bother trying, let LastPast remember for you.
So, with all that said, LastPass is remembering hundreds of my passwords and I only have to remember a handful. Why not give it a try, you might like it.
