Making a point-by-point comparison chart is a pain in the butt. It requires fiddling with spreadsheets, formatting lots of individuals cells and hoping the results are easy to read. Tablefy takes all the mess out of comparing things. Just put in your data and it'll do the rest. You can even embed pictures and YouTube videos with little fuss.
The example charts look sharp and professional, and there are some neat little auto-formatting quirks that save you time. If you're doing a comparison that uses a lot of "yes" and "no" -- a feature comparison between two apps, for example -- Tablefy will automatically color the yes and no cells for you, making them easier to distinguish. Although the charts are made to be embedded on your own site, there are lots of examples to browse and vote on at the Tablefy site.
Monday Google unveiled yet another beta site. Google Reader is now formatted for the iPhone. iPhone users tired of pinching and stretching and tapping text only links in the normal version of Reader or dealing with the plain Classic mobile version of Reader can head over to http://www.google.com/reader/i/ to check out the new beta site.
With the iPhone-enabled web-app, Google joins Ask.com in the web-based RSS reader marketplace. Ask.com's Bloglines has had an iPhone version available to users since July 19, 2007. iBloglines was created with less than a 1000 lines of code on a lark by an internal developer who bought an iPhone and wanted better access to the site.
Looking for more web sites like Download Squad? While we think you'd be hard pressed to find a site written by bloggers as talented, well-rounded, and good looking as us, there might be a few other sites that you'd find interesting. And WhoisLike.it will help you find them.
The WhoisLike.it homepage is so sparse that it makes Google's home page look crowded. But it couldn't be easier to use. Just type in the URL of a web site you like, and WhoisLike.it will analyze the content and spit out a list of sites that seem to have similar content. Each site features a screen shot to boot.
It's not quite clear how WhoisLike.it determines which sites are similar. It could be checking for incoming and outbound links, or the service could be looking for keywords and comparing a site with other pages in its database. But it does appear to work pretty well. While you certainly won't find every similar page on the web this way, WhoisLike.it will probably turn you on to a few interesting sites you may not have seen before.
Microsoft released an updated version of Windows Search, its free desktop search client the other day. And while there are dozens of excellent desktop search clients, including a few good free ones, it seems inevitable that people are going to compare Windows Search to Google Desktop. Because you know, any time either company releases something kind of cool someones assumes that it's just a ripoff of a product offered by the other. Or Apple.
Anyway, we've been using Windows Search for the past few days and we thought we'd let you know how it stacks up against Google Desktop. Read on for the results.
You may already know that you'll probably save money by ordering prints of your digital photos online or at the local drug store than by printing them yourself. They don't call printer ink black gold for nothing. But all online photo printing services are not created equal.
PrintRates lets you find the best deals meeting your criteria. You can select what size prints you're looking for, how many prints you need, and how quickly you'd like them shipped. The site compares rates for more than 50 different services in the US and UK. There are also user-submitted reviews which can come in handy when making your decision if the cheapest site is one you've never heard of before.
With everyone and their cousin busy idea farming for the next monster Web 2.0 social media community site, there are going to be some oddities. And Product Clash, despite the "sounds good on paper" concept, is shaping up to be one of them.
The idea is this: you have a bunch of products like game consoles, cameras, or mp3 players and match them up against a similar product in a 1-on-1 "clash." After registering for a Product Clash account, you can then vote for your favorite item of consumer merchandise by clicking on a link called "clash this!" You can also leave behind comments and blog about the clashes or click an affiliate link to order the item.
Right. But there are some obvious problems. For one, if the site is attempting to break into the comparison shopping niche by disguising itself as a social media site it's in trouble because it isn't any good at either. Besides a rundown of technical data, it has very little information on the products. That, and outlets for fanboys/girls of virtually any product are countless.
The Internet already saturated with resouces on consumer electronics, the future of Product Clash looks like a long uphill battle if not outright grim. Even though it is still in beta, a large problem remains: "clashing" products just isn't very much, well, fun. And a glossy Web 2.0 interface is not going to help.
As the lines between the traditional TV world slowly get blurred, and we start phasing out the need for printed materials, where can we turn to in order to get our beloved television listings?
There are many great services out there that offer show times, channels, and content breakdowns, but how do we know which one is the best to turn to? ReadWriteWeb has published a comparison of the top 10 online television guides. They rank them all compared on Design, Content, Extras, and sum each one up with a nice conclusion and screenshot.
The services ReadWriteWeb compares are:
AOL Television
Couchville
IMDb TV
MeeVee
TitanTV
TV.com
TV Guide
TVplanner
Yahoo! TV
Zap2It
AOL's Television service ranked out on top from the comparision. What service do DLS readers prefer?
YouTube is the de facto standard for video sharing on the web, but there are a lot of other options out there. But other features aside, which one offers the best video quality? While Life Goggles doesn't actually answer that question for you, it does gives you side-by-side comparisons of eight major video sharing sites' embedded players so you can judge for yourself. I've been squinting at them for five minutes and can't decide on a clear winner myself, but I will say that Vimeo's scrubber (i.e. seek bar) is by far the best. If you want to put your videos online and quality is an issue, you should definitely check it out. Life Goggles also has a couple handyguides on putting your videos online.
sizeasy is one of those simple things that seem kind of obvious but which I probably never would have thought of myself. It's a web service that does one thing: Helps you visualize the size of things when shopping online. You can enter the dimensions of any number objects and then pick a familiar object to compare them to, like a pack of playing cards, a wine bottle, or a standard sheet of paper. It will show a representation of all of the objects alongside eachother in 3D as well as top, side, and front views. The concept is probably best demonstrated on sizeasy's "featured comparisons" page, which compares the sizes of an iPod, iPod nano, Microsoft Zune, and a deck of cards (at right--the orange one is the Zune). sizeasy lets you enter dimensions in a variety of scales (feet, millimeters, etc.), and though I do wish it had some bigger objects to compare things to, it's definitely hand and is going straight into my bookmarks.
OSNews writer Adam Scheinberg has written a review of two popular photo sharing services, Flickr and Picasa Web Albums, on his blog. Apparently, enough of the OSNews readers liked the review so much that they pressured him into posting it to OSNews, which made me think there just might be something to it.
To be honest, I think he does a good job of reviewing both services objectively, so I don't want to ruin his conclusion. I personally am an iPhoto and Flickr user since I'm on Mac OS X, but I've heard great things about Google's Picasa, and I've poked around with Web Albums since Google released an uploader app and iPhoto plugin for Mac OS X.
Check out Adam's review of the two big-hitters and see what you think. You might even learn something new about these services.
Yesterday at the WWDC Apple had a bit of fun with Microsoft just before showing off Mac OS 10.5 "Leopard," pointing out a few features in Windows Vista that look more than a little similar to current features in Mac OS X. But how do Leopard's and Vista's new features really compare? Lifehacker attempts to answer that question with this side-by-side comparison of the two. The article isn't exhaustive, but goes over a few key areas. Backup? "Leopard's looks prettier, but are they basically the same thing? Probably." Apple's "Spaces"? "They're just virtual desktops, which have been around on Linux since, well, forever." Search? "Available in Google Desktop search for Windows right now, FYI." Calendar and Mail? "Leopard wins." Overall, it's a surprisingly mixed bag from the usually Mac-happy (not that there's anything wrong with that) Lifehacker crew.
A lot flew beneath my radar last week, including, unfortunately, a great
post by TechCrunch's Frank Gruber called Comparing the Mapping Services, in
which he compares, with some nice screenshots and tables, the big five online map services: Ask.com, Google, Yahoo!,
Windows Live, and MapQuest. Gruber praises all of the services, but in the end he says (spoiler alert!), "Overall,
Yahoo Maps was by far the best application tested. Its fast Flash interface, multipoint directions, live traffic
information, and easy send-to-mobile feature make it the hands down winner. It also features the most robust API
options." What's the best online map service for your money?
It's not exhaustive, but
informative. Joshua Drake has been using Linux professionally for over 10 years, and he shares his opinions and
comparisons in an admittedly subjective but thorough comparison
of the five major Linux distros for "non geeks." The comparisons are between Red Hat ES, Novell SLES,
Fedora FC4, OpenSuSE 10, and Ubuntu Breezy Badger. Notice Linspire isn't in there? Again, this isn't exhaustive, but
it's a quick read, especially if you know someone considering Linux, but they don't know which "Linux" to
pick. I've been playing with Ubuntu myself lately, and will post some thoughts on it soon.
Josiah Cole at Oomny, a very odd
little gem of a blog, has posted an interesting
comparison of the memory usage of Firefox 2.0 Alpha 1 ("Bon Echo") and Internet Explorer 7 beta 2, both
of which were released this week? The results are a little surprising. Firefox consistently outperforms IE, using
slightly more than half the memory for single pages. Cole notes, however, that IE's memory use drops significantly when
the browser is in the background or minimized, wheras Firefox's stays constant. Cole also does some tests using multiple
tabs in which Firefox again performs well, but these results are offset by the fact that he's using an about:config tweak that makes his
experience atypical. Still, though both browsers are early in their development cycles, it's interesting to see how
Mozilla's alpha browser compares to Microsoft's beta.
So we've seen a thousand screenshots and feature summaries of Windows Vista, and Microsoft is calling it
"largest upgrade since Windows 95," but how does it really compare to XP? BentUser has a cool article that compares Windows XP with Vista Build 5270 side by side, in
particular the Start menu, the task switcher, My Computer, the Control Panel, and the bundled apps. Whether or not
Vista will be a success is anybody's guess (though if they can make it fast and stable—a big if—I suspect
it will), but regardless Redmond seem to be up to some interesting stuff.
Making a point-by-point comparison chart is a pain in the butt. It requires fiddling with spreadsheets, formatting lots of individuals cells and hoping the results are easy to read. Tablefy takes all the mess out of comparing things. Just put in your data and it'll do the rest. You can even embed pictures and YouTube videos with little fuss.
sizeasy
It's not exhaustive, but
informative. Joshua Drake has been using Linux professionally for over 10 years, and he shares his opinions and
comparisons in an admittedly subjective but thorough 
