Used to be desktop applications were essential to getting the job done, whatever the job may have been, large or small. Now, with all the nimble web apps to choose from, the idea of firing up a huge application for a small task seems almost, well, unproductive and wasteful.
Yeah, sure, no one is suggesting you do away with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Illustrator, Photoshop, Quickbooks and other heavy hitters. However, there are excellent tools on the web where less, in many ways, is actually more. Here are 10 of my favorites.
1. ScribeFire - essential Firefox add-on for bloggers. Allows you to to easily drag and drop formatted text from the Web into your blog(s), post entries, take notes, and optimize ad inventory, directly through the Firefox browser.
2. Firefox - great web browser whose charm lies in all those irresistible add ons that make the whole interwebs experience that much sweeter. Once you pimp out your Firefox, it seriously is difficult to function on anything else. Yes, there are the crashes and other peccadillos, but they're easy enough to overlook especially if you are truly in love.
3. Skitch - this is the best, quick image editor and photo sharing web app that is dead simple to use. For quick screenshots and sharing photos, you cannot beat it. For Mac only though. Sorry.
4. Gmail - I've done away with Outlook and Mail and rely on Gmail for several reasons: free, 7090 MB capacity, integration with Google calendar, Gtalk, great search functionality, and the portability is sweet.
5. Google Reader - free, powerful feed reader which allows you to share items with your friends and slog through all your news feeds as fast as your bleary eyes will let you. Bonus - I'm playing with Feedly (Firefox extension) which provides a magazine like start page of your feeds with complete Google Reader integration and Twitter and FriendFeed and more. So far I like, but Google Reader is still number one for now.
Image sharing site Flickr has allowed users to view attractive slideshows of search results or image sets for a while now. But for some reason, up until now you had to rely on a third party service if you wanted to embed that slideshow on your own web page. Or you could create an iFrame and figure out how to create the code yourself. But who wants to go through the trouble?
This week, Flickr finally added the ability to share a slideshow with other users. Just click the Share link when viewing any slideshow on Flickr. You get two options: a URL that links to the slideshow you're viewing or HTML code that will let you embed a smaller version on your web page.
The slideshow embedded at the top of this post shows search results for the word "compiz."
If you use iPhoto, and you have a Flickr account, but you don't have a way of getting your pictures from one to the other, you might want to give FFXporter a look. It's a free iPhoto plugin that -- just as the name would indicate -- exports files from your iPhoto library to Flickr. Although there are other ways of getting this done, I have yet to find another free one that works as well.
FFXporter preserves a lot of the data that iPhoto and Flickr can both use, like keywords (tags on Flickr) and EXIF info. Since it's a plugin, you won't have to open another app to get the job done, you can upload pictures right from iPhoto. Probably the most useful feature is set support, so you can batch upload a bunch of photos at once, and add them all to the same set on Flickr.
At some point you've probably used evite, either by receiving or sending an invitation. In the past the online application was great for sending invitations but it was a one shot deal - create and send an evite and when the event is over, the evite is dead.
Last year evite went mobile in an effort to keep up with all of us and on Friday, evite went 2.0. Users can now integrate photos from Flickr, videos from YouTube and playlists from Imeem. The changes should make it easier to integrate content you already have on the web into your evite options instead of requiring separate uploads of information.
The redesign also attempts to make evite easier to navigate, introducing more tabs for organizing different sections of the site. Developers have also added some custom options for the way hosts and attendees can interact with each other.
Flickr has hundreds of millions of photos, and extensive search functions to help you get to the ones you want. But Flickr users, being acreative, discerning bunch, need even more search types. Searching by color is particularly useful for designers, and Multicolr Search Lab, from Idée Inc., delivers it elegantly.
Multicolr searches over 3 million of Flickr's "interesting" images, delivering results that match the colors you specify. It's fast, returning results almost instantly when we tested it out. It's also powerful, able to match up to 10 colors at once. Multicolr is already a designer's dream. Just add a Creative-Commons-only checkbox, and it would be practically perfect.
While it's nice to think that anyone can create an awesome web page or desktop application just by typing a few lines of code into a computer, the truth is good design is good design, whether it's sketched out on a computer or on a piece of paper. Deeplinking has put together a pictorial showing some of the paper sketches that led to popular applications like Twitter, Vimeo's profile pages, Flickr's Places feature, and the AbiWord word processor port for the XO Laptop.
There are a few other paper prototypes to check out as well. In some cases the paper sketches look strikingly like the finished product. In other cases, they just look like a blur of lines and arrows.
Most of the images were found via Flickr. Odds are if you spend some time searching, you can find a few other gems. Let us know if you find anything good in the comments!
Social web browsing plugin Yoono has emerged from private beta. The new version still wears a beta label, but it's available to the public. Yoono is basically a utility that hangs out in the Firefox sidebar and gives you quick access to instant messenging services, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, FriendFeed, and Piczo.
The public beta adds support for Firefox. It also packs a few new features:
Filter your friends activity by network, group, or names
Add FriendFeed and Flickr comments
Send Twitter direct messages and replies
Upload pictures to Facebook or poke friends
Browse Digg video
Yoono will also be adding Google Talk and MySpace soon. There does appear to be a bug that prevents Yoono from working properly on Firefox 3 in some cases. The problem seems to show up if you've installed some other browser plugins. Yoono is expected to release an updated version addressing this problem within the next few days.
Timelines are a great way to provide an overview of events. But what's even better is a timeline that generates content automatically based on information you probably already have.
Dipity takes automated timeline creation to a new level. If you have (and quite frankly who doesn't) a Blogger, Flickr, WordPress, YouTube, Twitter or any of the other supported social networking site just enter in your user name, URL or an RSS feed and dipity will do the rest.
You can view your timeline in years, months, weeks or even one day. Dipity also let's you rate your events so that those with higher ratings are displayed more prominently than others with lower ratings.
You're free to embed your timeline on your own site or list them on dipity's searchable directory.
If you ever wanted to see your online life sprawled out in front of you, dipity is one way to go about it.
If you're no Photoshop guru, but you have fun applying different novelty filters to your pictures, you might like Dumpr. It's web-based, very simple to use, and has a pretty decent library of effects: sketch, Lomo, reflection and jigsaw puzzle, to name a few. You can upload photos from your own hard drive, or paste in URLs from some of the major photo hosting services, including Flickr and MySpace.
Dumpr isn't really meant for advanced users, although buying a Pro account will get you access to a few more effects. Despite the ... interesting ... choice of name, Dumpr is pretty fun to play with, and it's great for quickly doing things to photos that would take a while for a novice to learn in Photoshop. It also has a few Flickr-specific features, like searching for pictures similar to your favorites, and rating Flickr photos. We're still not sure about telling our friends we're going to Dumpr some photos of them, though.
Despite the ominous name, DestroyFlickr isn't an application that deletes your Flickr account and removes all of your photos. Rather, it's a desktop client for Flickr that uses Adobe AIR and the Flickr API to enhance the Flickr experience.
First up, the browser has a dark background which makes it easier to focus on images rather than the white space surrounding them. You can view your stored Flickr images, browse your contacts' photos, or view interesting photos uploaded by other Flickr users. You can also upload and download photos.
But like any good Adobe AIR application, what makes DestroyFlickr a little bit cooler than the web site it's based on are a series of nifty animations. When you navigate from one view to another, the images slide off the screen. And when you click the Workspaces button to View All, the whole screen zooms out to show what you've been up to. In other words, if you were browsing a friend's photostream, looking at interesting photos, and leaving comments on one individual picture, you can see each view and zoom in on the one you want to return to. The effect is actually quite similar to the way the concept UI for Firefox Mobile manages tabbed browsing.
Noticeably absent is any sort of search function. You search Flickr for users or photos, but in order to conduct a search you have to first click on the photos or contacts tab and then click on canvas to bring up the search option. It's a bit more awkward than a dedicated search button, but it gets the job done.
DeskLickr sounds like that kid we knew in first grade who would take any dare, but it's actually a neat little app with an unfortunately silly name. DeskLickr grabs desktop pictures from Flickr, making sure your wallpaper is never stale. It can change your desktop manually or automatically, and give you a little "about this photo" info, so you know whose picture it is and where to find it on Flickr.
There are plenty of options to make sure you get only the pictures you want. You can tell DeskLickr to grab from all of Flickr, from a group of your choice, just from Flickr's "interesting" selection, or from your own photos or favorites. If you don't like a picture, you can tell DeskLickr not to show it again.
Regular Download Squad readers will note that app is similar in function and effect to another one we recently reviewed, Desktoptopia. To compare: Desktoptopia uses its own image feeds, which are consistently full of great desktops, while DeskLickr offers a broader range with a little more hit-and-miss involved. Also: Desktoptopia is available for both Mac and PC, so if you're running Windows, you may want to scope out our earlier post.
Does your Blackberry do enough for you? RIM thinks it could do just a little more, so it released an official mobile Flickr uploader for Blackberry handsets. The program allows Flickr-Blackberry hybrid addicts to snap pics, tag/geo-tag pics, place pics in albums, and adjust pic sizes. When you're all set and ready, posting the photo is a matter of a few button presses.
We recommend Flickr users with Blackberry handsets at least try it since it's free, and we can imagine the service being useful in a wide variety of situations including blogging, of course. It's probably more useful as a toy than a tool -- an easy way to share vacation photos on-the-go, great concert moments, fun party events, etc.
This is quite different from RIM's usual behavior, which is centered around productivity and business rather than recreation. The program's existence is likely a response to the recent surge of unique services accompanying successful, fun-based handsets (Sidekick, Helio Ocean, LG Voyager, iPhone, etc). Though it's not the most amazing thing to come from RIM, at least it's better than a useless MySpace app or another YouTube uploader... been there, done that, not impressed.
There are plenty of attractive visualizations for Flickr images. But Tag Galaxy is certainly the spaciest. Enter a keyword and Tag Galaxy will search Flickr for related images. You can either click the big ball of gas at the center of your screen to see some of the images, or you can check out one of the little related-tag planets orbiting the center of your tag galaxy (or solar system, really).
The picture doesn't really do Tag Galaxy justice. Each planet is in motion, and you can navigate by dragging and dropping various parts of the screen. When you actually click on a tag to view the images, you can spin the ball around to find more images, and click an image to enlarge it.
Be forewarned, Tag Galaxy can make your web browser go Supernova if you're not careful. Firefox froze up on us a couple of times while we were playing with the web page. We also had a bunch of other tabs open, but Tag Galaxy certainly seemed to take a toll on our CPU and RAM usage.
How do you do decide which photosharing site to go with? If free is your criteria, there are certainly many options to choose from. Most free photo sharing sites are ad supported and come with a certain GB capacity limit. If you upgrade to a pro account, which can run anywhere from $20-$25 per year, there are typically no limits and no advertisements.
We took a look at the most popular photosharing sites' features and did a comparison to help you decide which photo site is best suited for your needs. We compared Flickr, Photobucket and Zooomr and then test drove each of the sites to see how well they did. Check out our unscientific findings after the jump.
The Photoshop Express public beta launched about six weeks ago and other than some early concerns about the ToS, we continue to be impressed with the service. Today, Adobe has added a number of new features to the service, including support for Flickr.
At the conference call in March, we asked Adobe about their plans for integrating Photoshop Express with other web services and they assured us Flickr support was on the way. It's available now and we think it adds a lot of value to both services. Now you can download your Flickr photos directly into Photoshop Express for cropping, color correction, digital effects, etc. Photos edited with Photoshop Express can be immediately re-exported/uploaded to Flickr all in one seamless step.
Additionally, Adobe has added a new "Save As" feature so that you can save multiple versions of a photo in addition to the original image. Adobe has also introduced a new embeddable media player for photo slideshows that can be used with Facebook, MySpace and other social media sites.
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