Author: Blancer

Raise your hand if you’ve tried to collaborate with others using a wiki. Most people just don’t get it, do they? Wikis, for the most part, are confusing and slow to edit, and are simply too much hassle for small projects. Wikipedia is the biggest wiki success story, but they’re not the panacea for normal business and educational collaborative writing. The market hasn’t been too rewarding to wiki products, either. PBwiki, a business built around hosted wikis, has been rebranded as PBworks and deemphasizes the wiki part of their product, focusing instead on their project manager and intranet social tools. Even the much hyped Google Wave quickly hit the deadpile after consumers found it too confusing.

After trying to use wikis for one too many group project that fizzled out because of poor tools, I set out to find something easier to use than email, copying a Word file back and forth, or the dreaded wiki that no one could figure out. Enter Writeboard. This simple online text editor takes the pain out of collaborative writing, and is as simple to use as Notepad or TextEdit. It’s a solution that almost anyone can instantly understand and start using without any learning curve. Keep reading to see why Writeboard might be the perfect solution when wikis fail.

Writeboard</h2

Just Start Writing

Writeboard is a completely free webapp from 37signals that gives you a clean slate to write text documents and colaborate easily with others. Right from the front page, you can create a new Writeboard and get to work. Enter a name, password, and your email address, and you’re ready to go. Then, to share the Writeboard with others, just give them your Writeboard’s unique URL you’ll see when you sign-in, along with the password you created. No creating user accounts or complicated invite systems, just links and simple passwords and you’ve got a space for your team to write.

Signup for a new Writeboard right on its homepage

You can start writing as soon as your Writeboard is created, no login required. Just type in anything you want, whether a couple sentences or half of a book, into the main text box, and click Save. If you’d like to collaborate with others on the Writeboard, enter your name on the bottom so you’ll know who changed what. Otherwise, you don’t even have to enter anything other than the text you’re writing.

Your new Writeboard: a blank slate for creativity

Writeboard is not limited to plain text, however. Writeboard supports John Gruber’s brilliant Markdown formatting, which lets you add formatting to your document without fancy controls or confusing XML markup. Add asterix around a word to make it bold, use the # sign to create a numbered list, insert an image from a link with exclamation points, and more. You’ll find a short formatting guide right inside the Writeboard editor for quick reference. While editing, you’ll just see the raw text and symbols, but once the document is saved, all of your formatting will look just like you want.

Format your data quickly with Markdown formatting

Don’t Write in a Vacuum

Writeboard really shines when you use it to bring your team together. As mentioned before, anyone with link and password can edit the Writeboard, and you can invite others directly from the app as well. Each revision is saved, dated, and marked with the author’s name. When you’ve made a significant change, think the document is finished, or needs extra attention, click Flag this version to mark this revision. Alternately, you can switch back to any older version of the document and compare changes made.

Compare changes between versions of a document

When you’re comparing revisions, any text removed in the later revision will be struck out, while new text added will be highlighted in green and text that is the same between versions will be left the same. This is a great way to see what was changed between revisions quickly. Additionally, beside each revision, you’ll see a small dot that indicates how much was changed in each version. Small dots show small changes, while larger dots show more extensive editing. Best of all, you can always switch back to an older version if something gets messed up, so you’ll never lose crucial text.

See exactly what's been edited

If you need to use your document in another app or print it out to share, click the Export button on the top to download your Writeboard’s content in HTML or TXT format. You could even upload the HTML file directly to your website for a quick way to create a new page, or copy the content into your CMS in seconds.

Export your file in TXT or HTML format

Find All of Your Writeboards

There’s no limit to the number of Writeboards you can create; make as many as you want for free and use them for anything from your grocery list to lecture notes to your important business copywriting. The only problem is, it can be easy to lose track of all of your Writeboards since there’s not an account with a dashboard listing all of your files. If you do forget your writeboard’s address or passsword, just go to the Find your Writeboard page. Enter your email, and you’ll receive an email listing all of the Writeboards you’ve created along with their passwords. Now, you can file that email as a quick reference so you won’t forget them later!

Find all of the Writeboards you've created

Integrate Writeboard in Basecamp & Backpack

If you use Basecamp or Backpack, 37signals’ project manager and intranet collaboration solution, you can use Writeboards right in your normal collaboration environment. Basecamp lets you add Writeboards to individual projects, while Backpack lets you add them to pages. Either way, you can add existing Writeboards as links or create new ones directly in the app. If you’d like, you can try this out with the free versions of Basecamp and Backpack, too, if you’re not already using them.

Adding a new Writeboard in 37signals Backpack

These Writeboards are even easier to use. Anyone that has access to your Basecamp or Backpack account can simply click the link to open and edit the document. Since you’re already logged into a 37signals product, you won’t have to enter your name, either, as it’ll be automatically added from your 37signals account. Best of all, you can still share the Writeboard with others that aren’t members of your Basecamp or Backpack account. Just click the Share link and enter anyone’s email you want to join in, and they’ll be sent a link with a unique password so they can join in too.

Go back and forth between Writeboard and Backpack seamlessly

Conclusion

Sometimes, throwing more tech at a problem doesn’t solve it. Simple tools can honestly be the best solution sometimes, as our own Justin Stravarius recently explored in his great article on simple apps. For me, 37signals hit the perfect spot between features and simplicity with Writeboard, and whenever I need to do a collaborative writing project, it’s always my first choice. Writeboard isn’t a new app, and has actually been around since 2005. Its simplicity and reliability, though, makes it still a valuable tool even today. Best of all, it works great with 37signals’ professional apps, Basecamp and Backpack, helping this simple app fit into the wider ecosystem and remain a supported tool even though its free.

Next time you need to collaborate with others on a writing project, or just want to write your own documents with versioning and online backup, give Writeboard a try. You just might find a new simple tool that becomes a regural part of your webapp toolkit!

Envato’s community and member base is made up of a diverse bunch of people: writers, designers, developers, video makers, editors, etc. The majority of us have projects which entail many jobs, normally organized by some sort of to-do list or checklist

Launchlist is a solution aimed at website designers and developers who have predetermined goals in a project. In Launchlist, you can create a project and set a list of tasks which can be checked off as time goes on. These tasks are mainly oriented around pre-launch (as the name suggests) website testing, although the app can be adapted to most needs.

Launchlist

Pricing

Launchlist is available in the aforementioned lite version but also in a handful of paid plans. Launchlist Pro is available on Astronaut, Rocketship and Planetoid plans from $5-30 a month. As the plans go up, the abilities to create more active checklists, create more active templates and add more users are available.

Each pro plan comes with a free 30-day trial but you need to setup a billing subscription via PayPal first. This was the option I took to commence this review and the process to cancel it was very easy. You can change plans at any time and cancel at any point.

Functionality

Inside the Launchpad dashboard you can create a list based upon a template of your choice, these are based upon one of the templates setup in the Templates tab.

After you’ve pressed the Let’s Go button, you’ll be brought to your checklist. Depending on what template you choose, there’ll already be a bunch of goals and tasks setup. Adding a new field is a breeze, and possible simply by clicking Add a New Field at the end of the page. From here, it’s pretty simple to set up your pre-launch checklist.

Setting up a new checklist is pretty simple.

So, now you’re ready to launch your website and run your pre-launch checks. For each field, you have the option to set it as not applicable or push the switch to “Yes” (indicating it’s completion). You can also add comments to each field if it is needed.

At the bottom is a fixed bar indicating the number of tasks left to check off. Depending on the number of checks, Launchlist will also indicate whether it’s advisable to launch or not. Once you’ve checked off all you want to, and wrote all the comments you need to, hit save to head back to the dashboard.

On the dashboard, your project now appears with a bar filled with the percentage of goals ticked off. Everything’s fairly simple and easy-to-use with the aim of the app being very simple, being able to launch a website in confidence.

You can add comments to any field.

Not only can you setup checklists for yourself, but you can share them with a test group with email reports being sent to and from each other.

Design

The web app is streamlined and useful from a usability perspective, but it’s housed inside a beautiful design. Everything works like an app with some really nice effects employed. The rocker switches are also a really nice way of checking off tasks.

The web design is also visually appearing and the usage of charts (such as the percentage-filled bars indicating progress) is a nice way of expressing statistics.

If you have multiple users, email reports are a great way of sharing pre-launch progress.

Launchlist Lite

Launchlist also has a “Lite” version available for those that don’t want to pay or enlist in a free 30-day trial. The lite version is actually favourable over the paid version from a single-project, single-user perspective as everything such as project editing and the checklist being contained on a single page.

However, if you have multiple projects or a need for real user managment, the pro version is a better alternative.

Final Thoughts

As I said before, I cancelled my plan but only because I’m not currently actively developing websites. If I were, this app is certainly helpful and a must-have if working in a group of multiple users. Great functionality is matched with a lovely design. However, I wasn’t too favorable of the pricing. For a month, it’s acceptable but generally there’s not that much need for more than a month of “pre-launch testing” on most websites.

It does what it says on the tin and that’s all you could want. Have a Launchlist subscription? Used it in a live project? Tell us about it in the comments!

Running a business is tough. With multiple parameters to take care of and multiple variables to control, it takes multiple talents and multi-tasking to run the business smoothly. When it comes to the online presence of your business, there are many solutions out there to help you out.

However, it’s not always rosy; either there are to many standalone solutions or too much maintenance for in-house system resources. Wouldn’t it be nice to have an integrated business management solution in the cloud that doesn’t require an army of developers and system admins? Well, there is one such miracle app and it’s Adobe Business Catalyst. Business Catalyst replaces more than five standalone solutions and after the jump we’ll learn how it can help jumpstart your business.

Overview

Business Catalyst is a hosted web application for building and managing online businesses. The USP of Business Catalyst is its unified platform that combines multiple web apps required to run a business into a single core. The idea behind Business Catalyst is to “Go Live” with your business as quickly as possible.

There’s absolutely no need for any coding knowledge to build a great online business with Business Catalyst, however developers can use HTML and CSS to customize the web pages in any manner they please. It may be a portfolio site, a lead generation site or perhaps an online store; it’s extremely simple to build everything quickly with Business Catalyst.

Overview

You can create a free Business Catalyst partner account to check out its features before making up your mind. The sign up form is simple and doesn’t require you to submit credit card information.

Sign Up

Once your free account is created, a unique sub-domain is created. Your partner account in entirety can be controlled from the dashboard available at this domain.

Pricing

Direct Customer Pricing Plans

Business Catalyst has two levels of pricing, one for direct customers and the other for partners. Direct Customer Pricing Plans are for people who just want to run their own websites and businesses at Business Catalyst. The prices are very reasonable given the exhaustive set of features and reliable up-time.

Partner Pricing Plans

Now, if you’re a developer and you want create and run websites for your clients on Business Catalyst servers, you will have to go with the partner plans. There’s a free Partner Pricing Plan that does not give you a commission from the monthly payments your customers make. If you avail Partner Pricing Plans with a one time set up fee, you’re granted access to perks like a handsome 20% commission, full access to Business Catalyst partner resources & training programs, unlimited customer support tickets and much more.

Dashboard

Dashboard

We’re presented with a partner terms agreement page immediately after login. Once you agree to the terms, the rather simple looking dashboard, sporting a nice color scheme is unveiled. In addition to the getting started section, the dashboard shows vital stats of your partner account like commission earned, paid and trial sites, the login rates, etc.

Creating a Website

Creating a site offers you a list of choices. I chose to create a Business website instead of Starter websites or Pro options. Once you select the type of website you want, there are four design options in front of you:

• Use an Online Business Template (recommended)
• Start from scratch
• Import your current website
• Replicate one of your existing sites

Replicating the existing site is an option for developers to reuse existing code to save lot of time and energy.

Creating a Site

Let’s go ahead with the recommended option of using the Business Catalyst business templates. I was surprised at the variety and collection of professional, colorful and gorgeous templates. Once a template is selected, we are presented with a number of color schemes for the website. We also have an option to choose a home page image from among the displayed bunch. Nice touch BC!

Pick a Style & Color

After selecting the theme, colors and image for the site, we are then asked to fill out a short form about the business details. A sub-domain is created for your website and you can always use your own domain URL later from the dashboard. Business Catalyst blew me away with the option to select the data center from where the site will be hosted. This brilliant feature can let your target audience from a particular geographical region access the site without any lag.

Business Information

Once the site has been created, you can check it out from the URL in the dashboard. The login credentials of the site are emailed to you for further customization and adding content.

Editing a Website

Admin Dashboard

Editing of content on your created websites happens at their respective admin dashboards. The URL, FTP and login details are mailed to the registered email address every time a new website is created. The admin dashboard shows site analytics, system resource usage, etc. in a single glance.

Adding Webpages

Adding pages to an existing site is a walk in the park with a simple, yet intuitive WYSIWYG editor. Pages can be inserted at the right places using the navigation drop down menu. Business Catalyst has an excellent selection of modules to add to a page and they can be accessed from the side bar to the right.

Secure Zone

Blogs, dynamic menus, forums, etc. can also be created with the same ease from under the website menu. One of the most unique features of Business Catalyst is its ability to allow us to create secure, subscription based members only area in just a few steps. Creating a pay wall for your content is a huge pain and it’s unbelievable how easy it is to create one with Business Catalyst.

Opening an Online Store

Integrating an online store begins with creating a catalog from under ecommerce in the menu bar. A template style can be inherited or an entirely new one can be assigned to the catalog you created.

Creating a Catalog

Adding a product page has enough features and fields that can give a dedicated ecommerce solution a run for its money. On top of the standard set of features like product dimensions, inventory control, shipping info, etc., Business Catalyst allows you to mark a product on sale for discounted promotional offers. If the product you’re selling is digital and doesn’t come in a physical format, there’s an option to mark it prominently as well.

Adding a Product

BC Keeps the entire content editing experience uniform throughout the app and product descriptions can be updated from the same full featured WYSIWYG editor. You can create affiliate programs, add discount codes, create gift vouchers on the fly.

Payment Gateway Integration

Payment Gateway Integration is another major feature that’s simplified into a point and click process at Business Catalyst. All you have to do is choose the country, the payment gateway you like from the drop down and relevant transaction IDs from the gateway. That’s it! You can start counting the money as it comes in.

Customer Relationship Management

CRM & Web Form Builder

Business Catalyst has a fabulous “catch all” CRM built right into the web app. Unlike other CRM solutions, hosted or otherwise, Business Catalyst CRM captures customer information from anywhere on the website. Customer information is recorded in the CRM from the Contact Us form, shopping carts, Inquiry forms, forum posts, blog comments, membership access pages and the like. A bird’s eye view of customer’s activity at very sections of the website is always available at your finger tips with Business Catalyst.

Customer Information

Like a traditional CRM, Business Catalyst allows you to create workflows, centrally manage cases, orders etc. without much effort on your part.

Web Forms

Web forms can be created from the Modules section and they act as the primary modes of generating leads and handling cases. Creating a web form is such a great experience. Just point and click on the field name you want to incorporate in the form and voila! the field gets added to the form. Form creation couldn’t get any easier than this!

Email Marketing

There’s no better mode of reaching out to customers efficiently and economically than email marketing. With built in email marketing support, Business Catalyst eliminates the need for another standalone service to send marketing emails. Armed with the huge database of customers in the CRM, you can kick start the email campaign almost immediately. The beauty is, with so much customer data to mine, you can pick and target customers using custom filters.

Email Marketing Campaign

For example, you can choose to send out promotional mails to everyone in the list or only to people who have purchased in the online store more than once. It’s also possible to filter customers based on the amount they have spent in your online store.

Reporting & Analytics

Without the need for any coding or customizations, Business Catalyst provides excellent reporting and analytics functionality to all the sites. Right from the dashboard you can get a digest of how the online business is performing. With the help of the live feed you can track customer activity on the site precisely.

Reports

You can view the exhaustive web traffic analysis of the website from Under Reports. Exact details and sources of traffic can be drilled down using the filters to the right.

Analytics

In addition to all this, Business Catalyst allows you to pull admin usage reports, customer reports and, in case you have something particular in mind, there’s always custom reports.

Final Thoughts

Business Catalyst is a hotbed of endless possibilities for newbies and developers alike. The Business Catalyst extension for Dreamweaver also empowers developers to customize the HTML and CSS design of the web sites, leveraging the power of the leading desktop based web design solution. Developers can manage all the sites with a single sign on and all the changes made can be tested immediately with live previews.

On top of the monthly commissions, partners can earn more with the lucrative Business Catalyst referral program. As for clients, Business Catalyst is a fit it and forget it solution. With no databases, email or web servers to maintain, all your productive hours can be put into building the business. Your sites will run from snappy servers with great up-time and backed by a credible brand like Adobe; Business Catalyst is a compelling solution that can make your life easy.

In this Quick Look, we’re highlighting LiveChat. The developer describes Live Chat as software that helps eCommerce grow sales to the sky! Easy-to-use yet powerful solution for your instant contact between your salesforce and website visitors that allows you to guide customers through order process and increase online conversion.

Read on for more information and screenshots!

Screenshots

LiveChat

LiveChat

About the App

Here are the top five features you can expect to see in the latest version:

1. Multiple device access – PC/Mac/iPhone/Android – all can be accessed at the same time
2. Intelligent triggers for website visitors engagement
3. Sales/ROI funnels – measure conversion from chat invitations -> chat sessions -> goals (orders/leads/signups/etc)
4. Advanced visitor tracking
5. Statistics and reports

Requirements: Windows / Mac / iOS / Android
Price: $36+ per month
Developer: LIVECHAT Software

It’s about time when most students have returned to their schools, colleges or other places of education. Whilst there’s many desktop apps available to help in the education field, it’s sometimes hard to find viable online alternatives.

Online alternatives to popular desktop apps offer a way of working entirely online and therefore being able to access your work from anywhere without the need to be emailing or upload files every time you make an edit. This is becoming increasingly important, with new laptops and operating systems such as the Macbook Air and Chrome OS, that have reduced storage and a more cloud-based storage going mainstream. (Well, maybe not Chrome OS, but the Macbook Air is certainly getting positive reviews).

In this roundup, we’ll be looking at web apps that you can use in lieu of your common desktop apps.

Instapaper

Instapaper is a bookmarklet and web companion that allows you to save webpages for viewing later. You can then come back to reading these later on from the Instapaper website/app, Kindle or iOS device.

iOS app Reeder also features Instapaper integration so if you subscribe to blogs, these can be easily read later on any of the aforementioned platforms.

Price: Free
Developer: Marco Arment

Smartsheet

Smartsheet is an online alternative to any kind of calendar app that is used for managing projects. In Smartsheet, you can create projects with subtasks in. Each of these subtasks can be set a status like “In Progress” and be assigned to members of your team or group.

You can also view your project timescale in the Gantt, calendar-style view.

Price: From $9.95/month (free trial available)
Developer: Smartsheet

MobileMe

MobileMe is Apple’s set of web apps built especially for syncing iOS devices. Included in the package is a powerful email web app, calendar app and gallery.

The Mail app is especially important as it offers an experience similar to that of Mail.app on Mac OS X and Outlook on Windows. And it can sync with both those on your desktop and your mobile devices.

You can also use Find my iPhone (a free feature outside of the subscription) to track your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch and communicate it by sending messages, playing a sound, remotely locking it or wiping it.

Price: $99/year
Developer: Apple, Inc.

Meebo

It’s important to stay in touch with friends as life is not all work. Meebo is an online web alternative to your favorite desktop IM client. Meebo allows you to visit their website and chat to your AIM, Yahoo!, Google, Windows Live, Facebook, etc. friends.

The Meebo Minibar extension also allows you to check in and share your favorite websites.

Price: Free
Developer: Meebo

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a popular desktop and mobile app that started out serving up only Twitter feeds. Now it has not only Twitter integration, but also Facebook, Foursquare and Google Buzz, so you can stay in touch on all your favorite social networks.

As we said before, it’s important to stay connected with friends, Twitter is also a great source for sharing and receiving links to interesting pieces on the web.

Price: Free
Requires: Google Chrome
Developer: TweetDeck

Google Notebook

We’ve already covered Google Docs but if you simply want to take fast notes from a lecture, Google also provides a little-known Google Notebook web app. Here you can create notebooks and add notes that group together in those notebooks.

You can export these notebooks into Google Docs, as HTML or just print them.

Price: Free
Developer: Google

Stupeflix Studio

Stupeflix is an on-the-fly video editor that offers basic video production features, mainly suited for creating image slideshows. There’s a handful of pretty great themes that your projects can be built from.

You can affix text and soundtracks to grouped images and videos before exporting your video. You can share and embed the videos for free and pay for increased quality.

Price: Free (paid plans available from $29/year)
Developer: Stupeflix

Bonus: FarmVille

Sure, it’s important to be productive at school or college, but you should also have a bit of fun. FarmVille is a web game… well, you probably know what it is.

FarmVille is a Facebook phenomenon with over 62 million active users and over 24.6 million fans.

Price: Free
Requires: Facebook Account
Developer: Zynga

What Else?

Are you a student? Do you regularly use a web app in your education in lieu of a full, desktop app? Be sure to let us know in the comments!

Be sure to check out iPhone.AppStorm’s “100 iPhone Apps to Learn Anything & Everything“!

No matter how large your business is, a standard address book likely won’t cut your contact management needs. Even freelancers and small businesses need to keep up with customers, suppliers, industry contacts, and all of the individual information about them. Depending on your business, you may need to keep up with potential deals and proposals, current issues, outstanding bills or issues, and more. What you need is a customer relationship manager (CRM) to help you keep track of everything.

The only problem is, there are so many CRM systems avilable, it’s hard to know which one to choose. Plus, most are expensive and difficult to use. 37signals Highrise is one of the more popular CRM webapps, and while it’s not necessarily the cheapest option, it’s easily one of the simplest to use while covering the features your business needs. Let’s take a look at what Highrise has to offer.

Getting Started

37signals, the company behind Basecamp and Ruby on Rails, is one of the stronger influences in webapps today. Their iconic products have change the way people think about webapps, and tons of competing project management and productivity apps closely follow 37signals’ design. Highrise, their contact and customer manager, was initially launched in 2007, but was recently the first of their apps to receive an all new 2011 facelift.

37signals Highrise Homepage featuring a beautiful new redesign

Highrise lets you manage your company’s contacts, business proposals, and tasks all from a web-based interface. A variety of plans for companies of all sizes are available, with varying amounts of users, contacts, and storage. Additionally, there’s a free lite plan on the bottom under the main plans; it lets you have 2 users and up to 250 contacts for free. This is a great option for freelancers or if you’re wanting to evaluate Highrise without committing financially.

Highrise has a number of plans, including a nearly hidden free option

Starting your account only takes seconds. Previously, you could integrate an OpenID with your Highrise account, but that has now been replaced by the 37signals ID. If you already have one from another of their apps, you can just enter your username and password and signup without entering more data. Then, all of your 37signals webapps will be linked together to make it easy to work across the tools you’ve subscribed to. Additionally, each Highrise account has a unique yourname.highrisehq.com address, so employees can sign in there as well.

Create a new account or add it to your 37signals ID

Keep Track of Your Contacts

It’s fairly easy to get started managing your contacts with Highrise. Right from the front dashboard, you can see a quick overview of everything you can manage with Highrise: contacts, tasks, cases, deals, and notes. You’ll see contacts and deals you’ve recently opened or edited on the bottom left, and can jump straight to specific info from the top search box.

Get started quickly with Highrise

First off, you’ll want to start adding your contacts. Just enter the data you want about a customer, business contact, supplier, or anyone else you need to keep up with. Highrise will automatically import your contact’s picture from their email or Twitter account entered, and also lets you enter multiple addresses, phone numbers, emails and more to any contact. Rather than entering each contact individually, you could also import contacts from vCard files, spreadsheets, Outlook, or a CSV export file from Gmail or other email apps.

Add any info you need to a contact

Stay Productive With Highrise

Each of your contact pages will contain much more info than the average address book allows. You can tag contacts to categorize them easily, view their recent Tweets on the sidebar, and even download a vCard of the contact’s data to add to your other apps. Underneath, you can add comments about the contact so you’ll remember why you’re working with them. Next time someone in your firm talks to this person, they can pull up their page in Highrise to get a quick glance of their interaction with the company. Additionally, if you have an ongoing project or problem with a customer, you can add them to a case so you can keep everything that’s going on together.

Add cases to contacts directly from their page

Beyond contacts, deals are Highrise’s second major focus. This is where you can add information about proposals for jobs your company is bidding for, and obviously works best for firms that do individual jobs for clients. Highrise lets you enter the bid value, add tasks related to the project. This is a great way to keep track of who’s involved with a project with Highrise’s great contact management. Even if you’ve won a bid, you can still use your deal page to keep track of the ongoing project. Whenever you receive emails about the project, you can forward them to your unique email addresses generated by Highrise for each project, and they’ll be automatically added as a note.

There's more action on one page than you'll usually see in a webapp!

The quick access buttons on the top are the most handy. The search box auto-searches contacts, cases, tags, and more, so you’ll usually find what you’re looking for in only a couple keystrokes. Add a new customer right from the top button, or enter a task without even leaving the page! The new task pane opens right in the page, and lets you enter new tasks, schedule and categorize them, and more, then just get on with your work. For once, a webapp doesn’t take a dozen clicks to accomplish anything!

As you can see on the Task page, the Highrise task manager isn’t nearly as robust as a full project manager. However, since you can add tasks to individual deals or to generic categorizes and then schedule them to any date you want, it’s nearly as powerful as a basic to-do list app like Things. If your business doesn’t need advanced project management, you may find Highrise enough to keep your tasks on schedule.

Highrise works great with tasks, too

Customize Highrise

Highrise’s new design gives you an elegant way to work online, but you can customize it further to fit your needs. Add a log that’ll appear on your Highrise landing page, and choose a color scheme that looks great with your branding. You can also tweak your time zone, email or SMS reminder settings, and unique addresses to add data via email. This lets you make Highrise work like you want while maintaining its trademark simplicity.

Tweak Highrise to match your company's branding

Integrate With Other Apps?

As mentioned previously, your 37signals account can be linked to all of your Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, and Campfire accounts to let you seemlessly use all of the apps as a suite. Just sign into your account at 37s.me and jump right to the part of the app you need. If your business needs to use all of 37signals apps, you may benefit from their new $99/month 37signals Suite which offers the medium plans of each of their apps.

37s.me gives you a central dashboard for all of your 37signals apps

Additionally, Highrise works with many webapps you likely already use. You can import your contacts into Mailchimp, add invoices from FreshBooks, automatically enter data with Wufoo forms, and more. Check out the Highrise Extras & Add-ons page for more info.

Dozens of other web and mobile apps integrate with Highrise

Conclusion

Highrise’s new design makes it easier than ever to manage customer information, deals, tasks, and more in a streamlined interface. While Highrise may not be the absolute cheapest CRM webapp, it is cheaper than major competators like Salesforce. Also, its deep integration with so many other apps can make it even more valuable than other solutions. If you’ve ever thought that you’d like a better solution for managing your customer info, definately give Highrise a try. You could even use the free version to keep up with your own personal contacts better!

Have you used Highrise, or do you currently use another app from 37signals? How do you manage your contacts and customer info? I’m personally a fan of 37signals and use several of their webapps often, and would love to see if any of our readers here manage their freelance or business work with their tools.

Should you start your new blog on Posterous, WordPress.com, or on your own hosting account with a self-hosted WordPress install? Should you use Typekit or Google Fonts to add fancy new fonts to your site, or should you get a web font from Font Squirrel and host it on your server? These are the decisions webapp users have to make daily. The cloud has given us a multitude of ways to access apps from anywhere, and it seems like there’s a new Software as a Service coming out every day.

To host or not to host. That is the question. Let’s dive in and see if we can answer it for ourselves: is it better to self-host your own webapps or use hosted webapps as a service?

What’s the Big Difference?

First, what are we talking about? What’s the big difference between hosted webapps and self-hosted webapps. Here, we’ll define hosted webapps as:

Webapps that are Software as a Service where you use the app while hosted on the company’s own hosting and cannot tweak the basic core parts of the app.

On the other hand, self-hosted webapps are:

Webapps that you run on your own server or hosting account and can tweak the core app to your liking, but you are the one responsible to make sure the app stays running.

With these definitions, Gmail is a hosted webapp. It’s Software as a Service from Google, and while you can change your theme and settings, you cannot change the basic way Gmail works or run it on your own server. On the other hand, Exchange Web Access is usually a self-hosted webapp for many companies. They run it on their own server, can change the basic way the app runs, but are also responsible to keep it online.

Hosted Webapps: Taking the Easy Road

Hosted webapps let you outsource running programs to companies that are dedicated to running your apps smoothly. Google has massive server farm that run Google Search, Google Apps, and many more services we’ve all grown to rely on. Most web developers have used Google Analytics, Google Webmaster tools, and Google Fonts to improve their websites, and our editor and I discussed this very post via Gmail and Google Docs. Hosted webapps are the mainstay of Web 2.0, and most of us rely on many of them daily.

While Google’s apps are free, not all hosted apps are free. 37signals charges for their apps, and Typekit costs if your site has significant traffic. So why do most of us choose hosted services? Because hosted apps are much more convenient. You don’t have to worry about installing the latest updates on Basecamp. If Twitter’s down, it’s up to the Twitter team to get it back up; you don’t have to go scramble and see why the site isn’t working.

Google Apps: The hosted webapps most of us use daily

Self-Hosted Webapps: Tweaker’s Paradise

On the other side of the spectrum are self-hosted webapps. Most CMS apps are self-hosed: WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and more. With self-hosted webapps, you’re installing them on your own server and managing them yourself. This is great for power users, as you can tweak the apps to work like you want. If you have a blog on the hosted WordPress.com service, you’re pinned in and can only use the tools provided by Automattic. If you host your own WordPress blog with the self-hosted WordPress.org app, you can change anything you want, add themes that entirely change your site, or write a new plugin to turn WordPress into anything you want.

The downside is, you’re responsible for all of your self-hosted apps’ maintenance. You have to install updates, backup your data, make sure they’re secure, and more. It’s a risk many of us are willing to take to get more control of our webapps, but you must consider the extra time and resources it can take to maintain self-hosted apps. The good thing is, many self-hosted webapps are free, and the for-pay ones usually only cost a one-time fee unlike hosted webapps. Plus, you own your own data, so the service can’t just shut down without you knowing.

WordPress offers the best of both hosted and self-hosted services

Taking the Middle Road

Now, is it really self-hosting your apps if you’re running them on a managed server? After all, isn’t hosting from DreamHost or Amazon S3 a service, essentially a hosted webapp? To a certain degree, it is. By using a hosting service, you’re outsourcing the maintenance of the main server itself; you don’t have to dust out the server’s fans, or install the latest version of Apache. It gives you the middle road: the most critical stuff is maintained for you, while the stuff you enjoy tweaking is left for you to handle. In the end, it’s a matter of choice. You can use hosted services for everything, host all of your own stuff, or host your own apps on managed hosting.

Are webapps on a hosting account still self-hosted?

Localhost Webapps?

You can even take this even farther and host your own webapps on your PC. Microsoft’s made it easy to install many popular webapps, including WordPress, MediaWiki, and more, in only a couple quick steps. Even by hand on a Mac or Linux computer, though, it only takes minutes to get MySQL, PHP, Ruby on Rails, and more running on your computer so you can run all of the “cloud” services you want on your local machine. While this takes the “cloud” part out of webapps, it’s a great way to use webapps just like a normal program that works whether or not your ISP is doing their job.

Plus, you can even deploy local apps after testing, or sync them to other computers. This works especially good with simple webapps like TiddlyWiki; just put it in Dropbox and you’ve got a personal wiki ready to use wherever you need. Who said you need Evernote to keep your notes with you?

The Windows Web Platform Installer makes installing webapps locally simple

Conclusion

So, is there just one system you should choose and stick to? Should you use hosted services for everything, or host everything yourself? No! The greatest thing about webapps is how flexible web technologies are. You can run them locally on your computer, host them on a dedicated server, VPS, or share hosting account, or just pay a fee to another firm to keep up with everything for you. Plus, there are some apps that are self-hosted only, such as Mint Analytics, while others are only hosted services, like Gmail.

Instead of being tied in with one type of webapp, there’s room for all to flourish. I personally enjoy the ability to tweak my own site, so I have it self-hosted on my Dreamhost shared hosting account. But, I don’t want to deal with my email on my own, so I use Google Apps for all of my email, calendar, and contacts needs. With other webapps I use, I take a similar approach. If I want more power or want to customize more, then self-hosted works better; otherwise, hosted services are often much simpler.

There’s no perfect answer, and you’re always best to choose what’s best for yourself or your business. So, what type of webapps do you prefer? Do you try to always use roll-your-own solution, or would you rather have someone else manage your services so you don’t have to worry about it? We’d love to hear your insight in the comments!

Social media is turning out to be an awesome resource for finding news and information. Thanks to hundreds of thousands of professional and amateur sources, there is no dearth of content on any given topic. But the volume of information passing through the social streams is quiet heavy and is becoming increasingly tedious for consuming them straight up.

Some sort of curation and an edible wrapper would help a lot of folks. Storify lets you consume social media in a brand new way – by creating stories using social media. Interested in knowing how its done? Read on.

Overview

Storify turns what people post on social media into compelling stories. With this web app you can now collect the best photos, video, tweets and more to publish them as simple, beautiful stories that can be embedded anywhere.

Overview

Storify is in private beta. You will have to submit your email address and wait for an invite to arrive. My first invite came within a few days and it expired almost immediately. They sent me a new invite (and to all others in that batch) and that too expired within a few days. So, if you come across an invite, use it ASAP. The app is free as of now.

Getting Started

Adding Email Address

As with all modern web apps involving social media, Storify allows you to sign in using your existing Twitter account. Sign in happens via OAuth and hence no need to submit login credentials to Storify. Immediately after the authorization, Storify requires you to submit your email address.

Story Creation

As soon as you are done submitting an email id, the Story Creation page shows up. Hitting Create Your First Story Now will take you to the dashboard.

Dashboard

The Dashboard looks great with modern design elements and a near zero clutter. You have the social stream on the left and a compose window to the right. The compose window to the right is where you give a title and few words of description about the story. So how do you get to tell a story using the words & voices of others? By dragging and dropping tweets and updates from the stream.

Creating a Story

Since we have started by adding the Twitter account, the tweet stream is the default source of information to start with. Storify brings the entire Twitter environment to you complete with a timeline, favorite tweets, a search box and the list of users you subscribe to. Its pretty cool that the app acts as a third party Twitter app for the most part (except that you can send Tweets or retweet from here).

Compose Window

Give the story a title and explain what it is about to your readers. Use the arrow keys to navigate through the images available. Now comes the art of adding content. Find the tweets that you want to be in your story. Then just drag and drop to the right side column. It’s as simple as that.

Drag and Drop

Just drag and drop content one after another in the rightful order you want them to be. Think you need some commentary in between what others have said about the subject? You can do that too! Hit the T icon immediately below or above the Tweets you have just added to bring up the new compose window.

Story in Progress

You can continue to do the same as and when required and I have to admit that this works pretty seamlessly.

Discovering Social Media

Inserting Commentary

The beauty of Storify is that it does not stop with Tweets. You can add Facebook updates, YouTube videos, Flickr images, RSS feeds, Google Search results and links to websites to your story. Navigate to the appropriate icon to access the respective service and make use of the search box to find the relevant content. As you soon as you find them, drag and drop them as before and your will story will now be more interesting with data from multiple sources and outlets.

Flickr Seacrh

I tried a Flickr search for images of a Peacock. The results were very accurate and to my surprise, the image I dragged and dropped wasn’t a tiny thumbnail as displayed in the search results section. A neatly resized image of the original Flicr post that fits in nicely with the original layout of the story was the end result. Great job Storify!

Embedded Image

It doesn’t stop with just images. Videos get the same embeddable treatment too. Once you are satisfied with the way the story has shaped up, hit Publish and the story will go live.

YouTube Embeds

All stories get published in Storify and you have embed codes to post them at your own website too. Alternatively, you can save the stories as Drafts for editing and updating them at a later time.

Public Story Page

Traffic Stats

All publishes stories are available for anyone to see. If you want to take a look at the stories created by others, check out the featured and new stories sections in the Storify homepage. Interesting traffic analysis of each story is available for everyone to see how popular the story is.

Auto Publishing

Auto Publishing Options

If you don’t want to copy and paste the embed code everytime you create story, try the Auto Publish options in the Settings page. Storify supports five major platforms – WordPress, Posterous, Tumblr, Twitter and MailChimp – and once you submit the URL of the website and the login information, your stories will be cross posted automatically.

Final Thoughts

Storify is an impressive new way to consume social media in a sane way. However, I would really love to see a WYSIWYG editor for the compose window in a future update. A way to upload images directly from the desktop wouldn’t hurt either. Even in the beta stage, the web app looks promising and am very much looking forward to newer additions.

Share Your Thoughts!

Like what Storify offers? Is this how we will consume news and information in the future ?

Love it or hate it, no one can ignore Microsoft Office. One way or the other it manages to pop up in our lives. Even if a lot of people have found cooler alternatives in the cloud like Google Docs, a lot of businesses and most Government Offices continue to use Microsoft Office to create and edit documents.

So it’s only appropriate to use the lemons to make lemonade. Even if we can’t ditch Microsoft Office for good, we can leverage the cloud to collaborate on them. Agilewords is one such app that helps users to edit and review documents in the cloud.

Overview

Overview

Agilewords provides a simple way to share, review and approve documents with teams or clients. With Agilewords you now have a document review platform in the cloud with structured collaboration. Agilewords comes with real-time collaboration from inside the document. So you can always see what others see all the time.

Pricing

Pricing

Unlike other web apps that beat around the bush with their premium and freemium plans, Agilewords opts for a different approach. Off the bat, we are notified that the app free for a limited time. Unlimited access to Agilewords along with SSL encryption is free for now and not for long. While this is a great way to set expectations to customers (or potential ones), a clear timeline would be really helpful.

Ease of Use

Beginning the Review

When it comes to ease of use, Agilewords is just awesome. You don’t have to sign up or login to actually use the web app. The sign up page has two options, a standard sign up form and an option to upload a Microsoft Word document and start reviewing it right away. For the purpose of this review let us try the unregistered version first and the registered version next.

Unregistered Version

Sample Documents

Some of you might know that I don’t use Microsoft Office for writing and editing documents and Google Docs is the staple app for all my productivity needs. So after searching for a Word document to upload in vain, I downloaded one of mine from Google Docs in MS Word format. But, Agilewords doesn’t give evaluators a hard time in finding documents to upload. There are sample documents of various kinds to readily evaluate the app. Again, even though I had a MS Word document in hand, I chose to use a sample document, a non-disclosure agreement, for evaluation.

Error!

Oh, shoot! I think I just gave Agilewords too much credit for user friendliness. Or,did they create an illusion of being an app that can be used without going through the hassles of sign up and stuff? Well, it looks like they kinda gave an illusion. The big fat icon that says “Start Review”? is kinda misleading. There clearly is a disconnect between what they intended to say and the expectations set.  Removing that button would clear the ambiguity instantly.

Reviewing the Document

While going through the sign up process, I understood one thing – you just can’t enroll to the service without uploading a document or choosing a sample document. Rest of the sign up process is simple but requires email activation. I am not sure if the problem was with Hotmail (or is it Windows Live Hotmail?) or the Agilewords mail delivery system, I didn’t receive an activation email — not even in the junk mail. But thankfully I was able to proceed with the document review at Agilewords and I would give them the benefit of doubt at this stage.

Immediately after signing up, Agilewords takes you to the review module. Now that all documents are stored in the cloud for one significant reason — collaboration — its only natural to look for the same from Agilewords. The web app is well prepared in that front. You can invite as many people as you want to securely review and author a document.

Inviting Collaborators

You can choose the permission level of the invited collaborator. Just select the name of the invitee and choose if he/she can edit a document alongside you or just view them. As soon as the invitees accept your invitation, they will show up on the right side pane. Depending upon the permissions you have set, they can author the document or sit as idle spectators just offering feedback using the comments and message system.

Editing & Commenting

Editing the Document

Editing the document is very simple. Hover over the section of the document that needs updation and hit Edit. Insert the changes you have in mind and save the changes. There aren’t a lot of options to format the text though! If the changes warrant a comment, add your thoughts in the comments window that shows up to the right.

Comments

Once you add a comment, it is recorded in the right pane for everyone to see. In the document, comments are beautifully and very clearly tagged and numbered.

Review Schedule

From the Manage section, you can set the deadline before which the document has to be reviewed. After the deadline, invitees can’t work on the document.

Final Thoughts

Using Agilewords to review Word documents can save countless hours of back and forth emails and follow-ups. However, during the course of the review, unfortunately my computer went through a reboot. Since I didn’t receive an activation email, I was not able to login or reset the password. A lot of apps have the option to resend the activation email and such a feature would be a welcome addition.

I had to register a new account to continue with the review and this time I used a Gmail account. Curiously, I didn’t receive the activation email here either for a good hour and fifteen minutes. Despite being a decent app, Agilewords lost a couple points for the sign up and activation snafu.

Share Your Thoughts!

Like what Agilewords has to offer? Are we closer to ditch Microsoft Office for cloud based tools?

Long ago, when writing material was scarce and Gutenberg was perfecting his printing press, one could easily complain that there was not enough content to read. Books where cherished and even newspapers were stored to be read and reread months later. In today’s gadget crazed world, where nearly 500 tweets are sent each second and 500,000 new posts are published on WordPress.com each day, there’s way more material written in just one day now than we’ll ever read in our whole lifetime. No longer can it be said that there’s nothing to read!

With this torrent of content rushing past us each day, how in the world can you keep yourself productive? Your friend emails you an interesting article, then you see a tweet about a company that just raised $100 zillion in funding, and then you remember to check Google News for the latest headlines. Before you know it, you’ve wasted your whole day clicking and reading links. There’s got to be a better solution, and that’s where Instapaper and similar apps come in.

Say Goodbye to Website Clutter

Today, there are tons of apps designed to let you save articles to read later. Your browser’s bookmark bar, Delicious, Pinboard, and similar services work good for keeping up with links you come across. Instapaper, Read it Later, Readability, and more take this further, letting you save the actual text of articles to read whenever you have a chance.

Most of these apps started out with bookmarklets that stripped away all of the junk in websites, leaving just the text and important images in a clean, readable format. One of the most popular was Readability, which Apple incorporated into Safari 5 as Safari Reader. Even today, if you want to read an article now in your browser but want to make it easier to concentrate on the content, these are still great tools.

Safari Reader cleaning up a Techcrunch post

Don’t Do It Now

The latest iterations of Instapaper, Readability, Read it Later, and more are even more helpful, since they let you time-shift your reading. You simply have to sign up for the service, then add the bookmarklets to your browser bookmark bar. Many even have browser extensions if you’d rather not deal with bookmarklets. Now, whenever you come across an article you want to read, just click your Read Later button, and close the tab when it’s saved.

Later, when you have more time to read, you can come back and read without interrupting your work. If you use a smartphone often, many mobile apps include Instapaper and Read it Later integration, so you can save article to read later anytime, anywhere.

Tools of a delayer's trade

Restoring Concentration

Once you’ve added posts you’d like to read, the next time you have a quiet time with nothing to do, just sit down and read. Don’t check Twitter or play yet another round of Angry Birds; instead, focus on the quality writing you’ve already discovered. You’ll be amazed at how much more solid reading you can get done when you’ve got a curated list of articles. Over time, your reading list can end up being like a magazine that you can sit and read in one sitting rather than wasting 15 minutes over and over again throughout your week.

If you would like more reading, many of these apps include lists of long-form online writing you can enjoy directly. Instapaper lets you subscribe to a variety of Editor’s choice articles, while Read it Later’s new Digest can suggest articles based on your interests. Other great sites for finding long-form reading you’ll actually learn from include Longform.org and Longreads.

My reading queue in Instapaper

Giving Back

Not only can apps like Instapaper help you save time and improve your own reading experience, some can even help support those that took the time to write the article you enjoyed. The new Readability service, which starts at $5/month, lets you designate 70% of your subscription fee to go to the writers of the articles you read or favorited throughout the month.

If you are using Instapaper’s mobile or webapps, you can choose to send your favorite articles to Readability right from Instapaper to contribute as well. While this won’t give much per article if you read a lot, it is something that could add up, especially for smaller publishers. As writers struggle to find a good way to monetize their online content, and the New York Times turns on their paywall, it’s interesting to see the new strategies like this that can make writing better for writers and readers alike.

Readability's new service to support writers you enjoy

Conclusion

In our attention deficit world, a moment of silence is a rare thing. Even among the hype and buzz so often found in online media, there are plenty of thoughtful pieces produced daily that deserve a thorough reading. The mirage of apps today that can simplify articles and let you read them on your own time can help restore balance, letting you keep up with the latest articles, on your own time. Who would have ever thought we’d need a TiVo for the internet?

Also, we’re curious: do you use any of these apps? How do you save articles you want to read later? Your bookmarks bar, Instapaper, Read it Later, Pinboard, Readability, or something else? Or do you still print out articles on paper to read later? Let us know in the comments!