NedF23's Apps

Amazon Cloud Player is the app I’ve been waiting for. I was using Spotify and paying for the premium feature so I could have some music on my iPhone. I told myself I would use this until Google or Amazon released one of their cloud player apps for the iPhone. Well, that has finally happened thanks to Amazon and the app is pretty freaking sweet. It does an excellent job between the offline and streaming side of things. I’ve only noticed one issue and that is when you go to download a playlist, it downloads the songs, but it doesn’t add the playlist itself to the device. This is a pretty big annoyance to me and I do hope it is fixed shortly. Other than that, it’s amazing and definitely worth checking out.

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.

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.

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.

Instapaper describes itself as a “Read Later” bookmark, which is just the tip of the iceberg. It is very helpful because applications take advantage of it’s API and allow you to create these “Read Later” bookmarks. There are plenty of other bookmarking/read later type of tools out there and I do use a few of them personally.

To give a brief description of how I use bookmarks, I’ll first have to mention the tools. Obviously Instapaper is one of them, followed by Evernote and Delicious. I was bouncing back and forth between delicious and Google Chrome’s native bookmarks, but have finally decided to use Delicious.

I come across tons of different pages on the web, whether its coming from RSS feeds, links from friends or me just surfing. Instapaper is used when I really don’t have then time to read or take action on what a page has to offer. By “take action” I mean that the site has a tutorial of some kind or tools that I would like to further investigate. If I find the information to be useful enough then I will want to keep it as a reference, so it then become qualified to be a more permanent bookmark on Evernote or Delicious. If the content is something that seems like it will maybe go away, I take a static clip of it in Evernote and if it’s something I may want to have the latest of, it goes to Delicious. I highly recommend tagging for both to make searching easy.

Another key reason to use Instapaper is shown in the image below. It has its own clean view that allows you to see the content without the distraction of ads and crazy design.

The tools I prefer to use are of course for Google Chrome and they are the Chromapaper app which gives you offline sync and ChromeToPaper extension which lets you bookmark your current page. There is a iPhone app, but it cost $4.99, so I use the Safari browser and just have a button on my home screen. If your not using anything, try it out.

Buffer is a very useful web app that allows you to queue up a bunch of tweets and have them automatically post based on a set custom schedule.

I’m sure everyone has come across someone on Twitter who has, what I refer to as, twitarrhea. Which means they post way to frequently and appear to be the only ones appearing in your stream. It’s people like that who need to take advantage of a tool like buffer.

I am not one of those people who have twitarrhea, but I use Buffer because I like the user experience and it is easy to use. I’m using the free account, which uses a short URL that allows you to track how many clicks a link is getting after you post. They have recently opened bit.ly tracking to the free accounts, so if you are using bit.ly elsewhere, you can use that and just add this to it. You can check the stats on the Buffer site with the number of clicks, the amount of people who were following you at the point of time and also the count of retweets.

What really makes it easy for me to use Buffer is the Google Chrome extension, which takes the current page you are on and creates a tweet. By default, it uses the title of the page and the URL, but the tweet can be customized and changed to whatever you would like. I strongly recommend you give the free account a try and if you need it, there are paid accounts with more features.