Author: Blancer

Time and time again we’ve said computing is increasingly moving towards a cloud-oriented platform. Web apps continue to evolving into alternatives to their desktop counterparts, and in some cases they’re more powerful. However, the concern for the security and privacy of your data will always remain. It’s one aspect of desktop data storage that’s certainly more attractive.

With all the benefits cloud storage has to offer, it’s hard to argue that it shouldn’t be used, especially when used in combination with desktop storage. On the flip side, the web has proven to be a highly insecure space for the storage of sensitive data, even with all the security advancements that’ve been made over the years.

When you take into consideration the privacy concerns apps like Facebook has presented users with, I often wonder if I should ever trust storing any of my data anywhere in the cloud except on my own controlled server. Even knowing those issues exist, I continue to maintain full backups of all my data in the cloud, even in multiple locations. This, of course, is in an effort not to lose any of my data, under any circumstance — ever.

Though I do store my data in the cloud, I’ve never fully trusted those who maintain the storage facilities it resides in. I don’t know that I ever will; though I don’t have anything to hide so it’s not much of a concern for me either. Do you trust storing your data in the cloud? Do you trust those who manage your data?

Do you think cloud technologies will ever reach a point where we can trust our data in the hands of others?

Like the intro. graphic? Get Security Lock at GraphicRiver.net by RubyFOX.

For most of us, we spend more on gas over time than we do on many other individual things. With soaring gas prices and an increasing focus on environmentally friendliness today, it’s a good idea to keep tabs on how many miles your car is getting per gallon and what you’re spending on gas. We often just fill up and forget about it, but with more info you’d be better informed about what your car is really costing you.

Fillrr is a freemium webapp that helps take the pain out of keeping up with your gas mileage and price. Depending on your account, you can keep up with your gas usage from your browser or via text message. Then you’ll get to see your average MPG over time and compare your results with others. Let’s take a look and see if this app can make it easier to keep up with your car’s gas usage.

Using Fillrr

Fillrr is designed to quickly let you keep up with your gas usage and MPG on all of your cars. When you sign up, you can choose from a free plan with one vehicle, a $3/month plan for up to 5 vehicles, or a $5/month plan for unlimited vehicles. The $5/month plan also lets you add your pitstop info via SMS message, which could be useful if you want to keep up with gas usage on the go and don’t have a smartphone with internet connection.

Creating a new account isn’t quite as easy as it is on most webapps. Once you’ve added your info and selected a plan, you’ll need to activate your account from a link in an email, and then still sign in to the service. Finally, you’ll be ready to add your vehicle information to Fillrr.

Add Your Vehicle

To add your vehicle to Fillrr, you’ll need to select a model year, then a make and model. Fillrr only includes cars manufactured since 1998 with the exception of one 1991 model, so if you have an older vehicle you won’t be able to select your exact car. You can then optionally enter your car’s current odometer reading, VIN number, and a picture of it if you wish.

Add Pit Stops

Now that your vehicle is added, you can start recording your gas usage and price. Click on the Pit Stop link on the top to add your most recent fill-up. You’ll need to enter the number of gallons you purchased, the price you paid per gallon, and the number of miles driven. By default, Fillrr will automatically select today’s date for the fill-up date, but you can record previous fill-ups and change the date if you wish.

As you add more Pit Stops, you’ll see an increasingly accurate view of your average Miles Per Gallon, price of gas, and number of gallons used between fill-ups from your car’s profile. The virtual odometer will update to keep up with the mileage you’ve added as well.

Get More Info About Your Gas Usage

The dashboard only shows your car’s usage averages, but Fillrr keeps more info ready for use. From the bottom of the Pit Stop page, you’ll find links to see your last pit stops and graphs of your average usage. The recent pit stops page shows the info you’ve most recently added to Fillrr in individual boxes. This is an easy way to quickly glance at the data, but we really would have liked to see an option to view the data in table form and download it as a spreadsheet.

The graph page shows a nice graph of your average gas usage and MPGs over time. It also includes a comparison to the manufacturer’s average MPGs for your car, as well as the average Fillrr user’s average with that same vehicle. Surprisingly, the graphs aren’t Flash powered, so you should be able to view them fine in any browser of device. This was definitely a nice touch, and it’d be nicer if this graph was actually shown directly on your account dashboard.

Features and Design

Unfortunately, Fillrr is, overall, a very basic app that isn’t as well designed as many apps we review. The included directions were confusing at times, and you have to click through several screens just to see a graph of your gas usage. It also didn’t let us track as much data as we wished, and didn’t have any way to export the data you’ve added. It’d be great to use Fillrr to count your car’s total lifetime cost, and with all of your gas data, it wouldn’t be too much to add. Hopefully the developers will add more features over time and make Fillrr a better way to keep up with your vehicle’s vital info.

Conclusion

If you’d like to keep up with the vitals about your car’s gas usage and mileage, Fillrr makes it fairly simple to stay on top of and see your averages quickly. We wish the app integrated with local gas price search, and it would also be nice if you could keep up with other car maintenance expenses in the app to see your total vehicle expenditure over time. As is, it’s a basic app to keep up with your average Miles per Gallon and price of gas, and it does a decent job at that.

How do you usually keep up with your car and expenses? Do you do it at all? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

Try Out Fillrr Today!

If you’d like to try out Fillrr, the Fillrr team has generously offered to upgrade Fast Lane signups to Commuter Lane accounts for as long as they’re with Fillrr. If you sign up for a Fast Lane account, let us know in the comments below. Thanks!

After announcing the site a couple of months ago with our huge roundup of 100+ Absolutely Essential Android Apps & Tips, I’m incredibly excited to let you know that we’re officially launching Android.AppStorm today!

Get ready for fantastic daily updates covering the latest Android apps, news, how-tos, and roundups of the latest and greatest Android software. It’s a wonderful, open platform, and many web app developers are getting on board to provide versions of their software for Android.

We have some absolutely fantastic posts lined up over the coming week, and we’d hate for you to miss out… There are a few different ways to subscribe to Android.AppStorm – hopefully one of the following options will work for you!

• Subscribe to our RSS feed
• Follow @droidappstorm on Twitter
• Sign up for Email Updates
• Stay up-to-date on Facebook

We’d love to hear any of your thoughts, comments, or post suggestions for the new site, so please feel free to drop us a comment below. We’re really excited about the future of Android.AppStorm – I hope you enjoy everything we have lined up for you. Thanks for reading!

The newspaper industry is dying, but that doesn’t mean that our love for newspapers has die as well. Our mental connection with the form and feel of a newspaper is hard to erase. It’s the inherent disability of reading news that happened a day before, instead of knowing it as and when it happens, that hurts newspapers.

paper.li is a web app that can make any Twitter feed or Facebook stream look like a newspaper, complete with headlines, articles and images. Let’s see if paper.li can redefine the way we consume news online.

Overview

paper.li pulls all tweets from your Twitter stream or status updates from your Facebook page and wraps them nicely in a layout that mimics a newspaper. Not only can you create customized daily newspapers to feed your diverse interests, but also allow others to read them as well. paper.li is in open alpha and is free for everyone to use. To create a paper.li, you will have to sign up using either your Twitter or Facebook account.

Creating a Newspaper

I loved how the app has detailed descriptions for each field, letting the user know what is about to happen. However, people could use information as to what credits are and why it’s shown that there are only 10 credits left.

paper.li covers all bases when it comes to accumulating content for your newspaper. First a newspaper can be created using all the links (articles) shared in the past 24 hours by yourself (editor in chief) AND the people you follow (contributors).

Second is the most interesting and useful feature to create a newspaper that includes messages with certain hash tags that will appear in your newspaper. We all know that hash tags are like categories or tags and are used to associate tweets to a topic. With the help of hash tags, you can have news from a variety of different topics, just like in a printed newspaper. Good one paper.li.

The final source of information for your paper is the twitter list. Twitter lists are a great way to create a directory of interesting people or accounts and you can follow a list to follow them all, instead of finding and following them one after another.

However, I would have (am am sure lot us would have) liked to have all the three options collated into a single newspaper. Well there is always the beta version!

A nicely designed status page with a rolling press animation is a fantastic touch. Eventhough their disclaimer states that it might take several minutes generate your newspaper, it appeared in under a minute for me. And boy was it beautiful!

The Newspaper

Now I am the proud owner of The Justin Daily. It hasn’t been my wildest dream to be a newspaper publisher, but am happy see my name in the masthead. I’ll bookmark this page now as it will be the permanent link to this newspaper. It will be updated automatically every 24 hours. Also make sure you get all new editions by clicking the Subscribe button.

Dissecting the Paper

Now that I’ve basked in the glory of being a newspaper publisher, it’s time to put the paper under the magnifying glass. Before I begin looking for flaws, I have to note that the paper.li team has done a splendid job of recreating an authentic newspaper-like layout on the web. True, we’ve seen a lot of WordPress themes claiming to be newspaper or magazine themed, but paper.li’s layout is really life like (or considering that newspapers aren’t living beings, is it un-life like?).

The option to add an Editor’s note is another notable feature. Consider this to be a replacement of a website description and about page. That’s paper.li 2 – Cynic zero.

If you scroll down you will see your Twitter stream and a dedicated media section which showcases the videos in the tweets. The slider will be really useful for people who have subscribed to a lot media heavy accounts.

Each article is accompanied by a tiny Avatar of the person who tweeted it, and if you hover it you’ll see the original tweet. This is shown because paper.li analyzes the URLs and short URLs posted and posts the firts paragraph in the newspaper.

It would be neat to have the entire article in the paper, but unfortunately that goes beyond fair use and is a copyright violation. So if you want to read the entire artcile, click on it and you will be taken to the link of the original post. The tweet window includes links to reply, retweet, follow or unfollow the user.

Sharing Your Paper

paper.li offers loads of options to share and promote the readership of your newspaper. You can broadcast the information over Twitter or Facebook everyday as and when the paper is published. They also offer embed code to showcase your paper on your website or blog. And then, just like conventional blogs, there are options to subscribe to the paper via RSS and email.

If you’re tired of reading your own paper, you can browse through the hundreds of papers created by others right from the homepage. It’s great to see the number of subscribers a paper has and the number of views it has received so far; it helps to pick the popular editions.

Final Thoughts

paper.li lets people have the best of of both worlds. The web app is a bridge for those who love the real-time stream of information but miss the look and style of old school newspapers. What put me off, is that there are a bit too may ads in the newspaper. I get that developers have to make money but at the least they should stick with image or banner ads and not Google Adwords blocks.

Adwords blocks spoil the sexiness of the app and they look totally out of place. So paper.li, just go ahead and cut some exclusive deals from big name brands — you are totally worth it!

Share Your Thoughts!

Are apps like paper.li, the online version of a nicotine patch for newspaper addicts? Would you read paper.li everyday?

We have a lot of apps to upload and manage images on the web. Web apps like Picasa, Flickr, Smugmug etc. offer free plans to upload images and share them with others but they aren’t without their limitations. Free accounts are always associated with a maximum file size limit, low quality of converted images and a feeling that your private moments reside in a third party server.

Got a webserver and some bandwidth to burn? Read on to learn how to set up and manage Coppermine Gallery, a self-hosted image management solution.

Overview

Coppermine Gallery is a multi-purpose fully featured and integrated web picture gallery script written in PHP using GD or ImageMagick as image library with a MySQL backend. Coppermine Gallery is free and open source with a very active development cycle and a vibrant community. Coppermine Gallery isn’t a run of the mill gallery app but is indeed a powerful image management system. Support for multiple languages, a comprehensive user management system and custom templates are some of the major attractions of Coppermine Gallery.

Requirements

Coppermine Photo Gallery is robust and is known to run on legacy systems as well as bleeding edge server configurations. For example Coppermine Gallery has been tested to work well on IIS, Apache 1.x onwards to the latest Apache 2. As for operating systems Linux, UNIX, OSX, and Win32 systems are all good. The following settings are required:

• A Webserver (Apache recommended);
• PHP (4.2.0 or better);
• MySQL (3.23.23 or better; 4.x recommended);
• either GD or ImageMagick (any version);

Getting Started

Installation

Even though there are ten steps to go through, Coppermine Gallery allows for painless installation with a simple point and click installation wizard. Extract the files to the domain root from where the script is supposed to run and point your browser to the installer eg. http://appstorm.net/install.php

Agree to the License terms and select a language of your choice. There’s hardly any input required from you in the second and third steps as they are for the script to check if the server settings are alright and the folders are writable. If you see an error message, use the FTP to change the folder permission to 777. In the fourth step choose between GD and ImageMagick (whichever is installed in the server). Coppermine Gallery will check if the one you selected work properly in the next step.

Sixth is the step that needs your undivided attention. Enter the database connection information and check if the connection is established before proceeding further. You can pretty much ignore the seventh step (which asks if you want to create and use a new database) if step six was successful.

The database is automatically populated with tables in the eighth step and in the pen ultimate step, create an admin account for you.

Creating Albums

After the ten steps, you will be taken to the Coppermine Gallery home page. It would be totally empty and let us go ahead and start adding some pictures. You will have to login to do anything useful with the app. Images cannot be uploaded without an album. So head over to the Album Manager to create one.

You can either create a standalone album or associate it with a category. Each album can have its own set of properties. There are three major features in Coppermine Gallery Album Properties. First is the Album Keyword. An Album Keyword is used to link images from other album into another. Using this method, files/images can be displayed in various albums while the file itself need only exists in one album on your webserver. You simply upload a file to one album as you would normally do, then assign one or more keywords to the file.

The next two features are user management and control related. You can password protect the album and allow only users from a only particular group (more on user groups later) to access the album.

Uploading Images

You can select multiple images in one go using the Ctrl button in the keyboard. All selected images will show up in the Upload Queue. Once the images are uploaded, they will show up as thumbnails at the bottom of the page.

Hit Continue to manipulate the Image Properties. Common actions like adding name, description and tags to the images can be done here.

Since all the images from the upload queue are displayed, there will be a lot of fields & check boxes and hence ensure that you update the details of the right image.

Creating & Managing Users

Coppermine Gallery has a user management system that rivals that of a full blown CMS. You can create multiple users and put them into multiple groups each with varying levels of access.

Creating a User Group is extremely simple as all the options involve toggling radio buttons. You can allot each user group an upload limit beyond which they can’t add anymore images. Alternatively, there are options to bar a usergroup from uploading or viewing images at all. You can allow users to create their own personal albums that won’t be visible in public. You have the ability to revoke user access to Rating, Comments and sending ecards.

Final Thoughts

I could go on singing the praises of Coppermine Gallery. It is the fruit of years of hardwork from a dedicated team of developers. I have personally used the app from time to time and am totally happy to see how far things have come in the past few years. While the features are added at the pace of a rocket, user interface refinements seems to have taken a bullock cart.

Yes, there is a significant improvement from what we had in the previous versions, but the interface still looks Web 1.25 ish. And a ten step installer, though simple, could intimidate a newbie. A lot of steps can be merged giving way for a leaner installer.

Share Your Thoughts!

How much do you like Coppermine Gallery? Will you be willing to forgo Flickr or Picasa for a self hosted solution?