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.
Poll Authority is an easy poll-creation service that generates nice tidy multiple-choice polls you can paste into your website or blog. A lot of blogging services and social networks have their own polling systems, but as far as the platform-neutral free poll generators go, Poll Authority looks pretty decent.
With the free version, you get unlimited polls and a bit of customization in terms of appearance. Upgrading to the $5 or $8 monthly plans doesn't actually seem to do much, other than adding a bit of professionalism by replacing the Poll Authority link on each poll with a customized one. The Gold plan gets you a breakdown of your results by geographic area. Bottom line: if you're looking for a fast, easy way to make a poll, and you don't want it to cost you anything, Poll Authority is a good bet.
Geeks aren't always the best artists, but there are plenty of ways to use technology to get around that and create some stylish graphics. One of the easiest of these is Viscosity, winner of the Best Art award at this year's SXSW. We would have posted this sooner, but we were having too much fun playing with this satisfyingly simple little app.
Your Viscosity image starts out as 9 shaded horizontal stripes, but a few clicks will make it bloom into a multi-colored, semi-transparent, almost sculptural piece of transcendent web-stuff. We put together this attractive blob in Download Squad's color scheme in a matter of minutes. We're sure you can do better than we can, too.
Viscosity has just a few controls. You can slide your brushes from mushy to angular, and change sizes, colors and opacities, but that's about it. It's a basic interface that produces unexpectedly complex results.
Yvoschaap.com is a simple, easy-as-a-web-form way to generate your own color-coded wordpress theme, complete with standard options for sidebar placement and width, site name, logo URL, body width, color scheme, text scheme, the ability to add a third column to your theme and even insert-able Creative Commons and generic copyright text in the footer.
What used to take a fair bit of time -- tweaking and prodding a Wordpress theme to get everything just right -- now requires much less brain-power. Generated themes are handed to you on a sexy zip-file platter and are WordPress 2.1, WP widget and Yahoo UI compatible, not to mention it should work on any "A-grade" browser, sweet!
Creating a new secure password for websites you visit everyday and having to remember them is such a pain, but it doesn't have to be. Do you use the same password for every website you visit? Thats not a very secure thing to do, a unique password for each site you visit is the most reliable way to keep yourself safe. SuperGenPass is a browser bookmarklet that will use your master password to create secure passwords for each different website you use throughout the day, and you don't even have to remember them.
SuperGenPass is a snippet of JavaScript code that is stored in your browser as a bookmark, no install necessary. How does it work? When you are signing up for a new service, enter your master password into the password field on the website. Select the SuperGenPass bookmarklet and follow the instructions to show or populate the new secure password generated from the JavaScript code. The process is simple, but is it secure? The code isn't sitting on any website, it's in your browser as a JavaScript string.Trusting this code is another issue, what happens if for some odd reason the bookmarklet becomes corrupt? Bye Bye secure password. It does come up with secure looking alphanumeric passwords based on what I typed in for my password, so as far as that goes its secur-ish. I would prefer to write it down, for that extra precaution.
The Filter boasts quite a lot. Its tagline is "creates perfect playlists from your iTunes library," and its web site says it's "better than your shuffle button!" What The Filter is is a plugin for iTunes (Windows version only for now, Mac coming soon) that generates playlists when you select a few songs and click on the big black "F" button. Like many programs, The Filter claims to excel at building playlists based on your mood. I gave The Filter a try and found that it's actually not too shabby. I selected a few songs that I thought would go well together in a playlist and it filled out the rest of the playlist with songs that fit in pretty well. While not every one was one that I would have picked myself, none of them seemed out of place, and after all, The Filter touts its ability to help you rediscover music that you'd all but forgotten you had. Like Pandora and other services, The Filter learns from your listening habits and tweaks your playlist based on which tracks you skip and which ones you listen to all the way through. I've tried a number of products that claim to do what The Filter does, but most of them either didn't work very well or were far too complex. The Filter is the first one that really seems both smart enough and simple enough to really give a shot.
Intrepid hacker Harper Reed, who works for Threadless company skinnyCorp by day (and whom I had the pleasure of going to college with), has released a cool YouTube badge maker. It's a simple web-based tool that will generate a badge for your web site, blog, or MySpace page that shows thumbnails for your six most recent YouTube videos. Since the badge it generates is just a PNG image rather than, say, a Flash or Ajax widget, you can use it just about anywhere. All you do is enter your YouTube username and paste the generated HTML snippet into your web site and you're ready to go. Reed has some other useful tools and toys at flashandburn.net, including a similarly handy Flickr badge generator.
The other day Chris Gilmer reported that it's now possible to embed Google gadgets intended for Google Personalized Home on any web page. A company called Mesa Dynamics has capitalized on this ability with a free utility called Amnesty Generator, which lets you use any Google web gadget on Apple's Dashboard. All you have to do is copy the gadget's HTML code from Google and paste it into the program, and a brand new widget is created for you. Hooray for wrappers. Mesa also makes a couple other free Dashboard-related apps that let you run Dashboard widgets as stand-alone apps or a screen saver.
Opera Software has launched Widgetize, a web-based wizard that will help you create a widget for Opera 9 in three simple steps. Currently Widgetize only allows you to make RSS feed widgets, but offers some customization. You can choose between "Advanced" and "Classic" widgets, and there's many attractive themes to work with. Once you've created your widget, Widgetize gives you a link as well as various code for sharing your widget on your web site or forums.
Here is yet another Flickr toy to add to your arsenal, hailing from flagrantdisregard.com's extensive Flickr Toys section: the Flickr Profile Widget banner generator. You have a nice array of options to specify, such as which of your photos to show (most recent, most interesting, random recent, random interesting), and you can chose whether to show the photo count I have pictured here. As expected, you can also specify the background's color, as well as the username text color. It all comes together to generate a slick banner image that measures 500 x 100 (I had to downsize mine per Download Squad formatting specifications), complete with just a touch of drop shadow. Nice.
If you're asking, "WTF is .htaccess," this might not be the post for you, but I'll tell you anyway: .htaccess are little configuration files for the Apache web server that let you apply simple or very complex rules to the way requests are handled. Now, I know people who can write .htaccess files blindfolded, but for me it's always a big headache. Enter .htaccess Generator, that does what it sounds like: it writes .htaccess files for you. It's a simple, though long, web form that helps you do everything from password protect a directory to specify rewrite rules. Of course, it doesn't do everything, but for basic tasks it seems like it could be a lifesaver.
Amaze your friends! Confuse your family! Fun for all ages over 13, it's the Web Economy Bulls*** Generator. Have you got a great idea about how to drive next-generation supply-chains? What about a way to integrate synergistic content? I think its high time we synthesize rich portals, don't you? Yes, thanks to the Web Economy BS Generator, you too can sound like a desperate startup begging for VC money. Kids, get your parents' permission before entering. No refunds!
Here's a fun little web widget: With the Newspaper Snippet Generator you can make quasi-realistic-looking newspaper clippings. You just enter a the name of your fictitious newspaper, a date, a funny headline, and some article text, and it will generate a matching newspaper image. Of limited utility, sure, but moderately entertaining.
I used
MoodLogic for awhile to create playlists tailored to my moods, and it performed pretty well, but I wasn't really
satisfied with the limitations of the free version. MusicIP
Mixer is a free Windows app in the same vein. You choose a song from your collection and it will generate a
playlist of songs that it deems similar. While you can start generating playlists as soon as it's installed, the
initial algorithm, though fast, seemed wanting to me, and the subsequent (and presumably more accurate) algorithm takes
a long time to analyze your songs. It does have some nice features, though, like integration with other players so you
send generated playlists to Winamp or iTunes, and compatability with portable devices. It also has a built-in
music-recommender that will query the web for new music you might like. Though I haven't been using it long enough to
really judge the quality of its algorithms, MusicIP Mixer has a nice polished feel and is worth checking out if you're
sick of assembling playlists by hand.
Fellow
blogger Victor has dabbled in computerized hypnotism, but I'll
have to ask him if he's tried BrainWave Generator. It's a Windows
shareware app (30 day trial after which you pay $40) that plays specific sound frequencies to each of your ears, which
will "take you to the state of mind you want." At least, that's what the BrainWave Generator web site says.
Among the laundry list of possible uses claimed by the BrainWave Generator are:
Relaxation and
meditation by entraining your brain into desired states
Enhancement of learning capabilities (super
learning)
Sleep induction (for treating insomnia or just for falling asleep quicker)
Focusing
attention and enhancing awareness
Alleviation of headaches and migraines, as well as other pain
Preparation for stressful situations
Self hypnosis and/or subliminal programming
You can
also save the audio output from the BrainWave Generator and take it with you on your iPod, for really zoning
out at work.
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.
Amaze your friends! Confuse your family! Fun for all ages over 13, it's the 
