Category: Tutorials

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We’d like to say a big thank you to this month’s Web.AppStorm sponsors, and the great software they create! If you’re interested in advertising, you can order a slot through BuySellAds.

You might also consider a Quick Look submission, an easy way to showcase your app to all our readers.

FusionCharts – Animated & Interactive Flash Charts, Graphs and Maps for web applications. Offers 75 chart types and 530 maps that can be used with any script and database. A complete reporting experience with drill-down, AJAX-enabled charts and one-click chart export.

Zoho Creator – Zoho makes a wide variety of web apps that help you keep up with your business online. They’ve now made a new tool to help you create your own custom apps in the cloud … no coding required!

GetApp.com – Review, Compare and Evaluate business applications. In Getapp.com you will find enterprise software, SaaS and Cloud Computing solutions with user reviews.

Skylight – Skylight puts powerful, user-friendly business management tools into your team’s hands, both in the office and on the road. Concentrate on your company’s core business while we worry about keeping your project information, contacts, resources, accounts and files in a single, safe place online.

dashboard – dashboard is a simple web based tool to help you convert leads into deals. Get reports on sales leads, schedule follow ups, and keep up with your team all from a simple and powerful web app.

cronsync – a web based, transparent, inexpensive and easy to use time tracking solution. It simplifies and professionalizes billing and invoicing processes and shows you at a glance how profitable clients and projects are.

SEscout – SEscout is a new kind of SERP tracker that keeps you up-to-date on your rankings in real time.

Dealy – Dealy lets website owners create and distribute their deals of the days across the internet, facebook, twitter, SMS text, email and their websites.

Brix – Agile Project Management made easy Brix is a flexible and adaptable online solution to manage your agile projects Team collaboration.

Alertful – Alertful reminds you of important events by email.

JotForm – First Web Based WYSIWYG Form Builder. Create and publish web forms using your browser. Get responses via E-mail.

Media Temple – Media Temple hosts websites. Big and Small. For years they’ve taken complex technology and simplified it for the everyday website owner. Their products are designed to be powerful, affordable and relevant.

smartQ – smartQ is an agile project management app built around a visual task board. It allows you to easily distribute work, track its progress and collaborate with your team online.

cSupport – cSupport lets you support your customers and more with live chat that’s easy to integrate with your site and web apps.

Last week at Apple’s annual WWDC, Steve Jobs took the stage during the keynote address to unveil Apple’s latest product: iCloud. The successor of .Mac and MobileMe, iCloud was pitched as the unifier between Apple’s disparate computing devices: iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, and Macs. With it, your data would be accessible anytime, no matter which of your devices you’re using.

After giving an initial description of the service, Jobs went on to describe the his views on files and the cloud around 82 minutes into the keynote:

Now some people think the cloud is just a hard disk in the sky, right? And you take a bunch of stuff, and you put it in your Dropbox or your iDisk or whatever, and it transfers it up to the cloud and stores it. Then you drag whatever you want back out and store it on your devices.

We think it’s way more than that, and we call it iCloud.

~ Steve Jobs, June 6, 2011

A Dream From the ’90′s, Fulfilled

Interestingly, iCloud is Jobs’ response to a dream he realized over 2 decades ago. During a speech at the ’97 WWDC, shortly after his return to Apple, Jobs described how he worked. All of his files and more were stored on a server, and could be accessed from any of his computers over high speed (for that time, anyhow) network. Whether he was at home, or in his office at NeXT, Apple, or Pixar, he could log in and all of his files and settings would be there. And this wasn’t something brand new, either: he’d already been doing it for 8 years!

The Brave New World of Computing

The world of computing has been rapidly changing over the past few years. In the past, most of us would have only used one PC during the day, unlike Steve Jobs. Our files lived on individual computers, floppies, and CDs, and that was fine back when our computer never went 3 feet away from our desks.

Today, however, it’s not uncommon at all to use a computer at your office, a laptop at lunch with a client, a smartphone on the way home, and a tablet or Internet-connected game console or TV at home in the evening. We expect to be able to check our email, grab that important spreadsheet, update our blog, or share photos to our Facebook friends just the same, no matter what device we happen to be using.

Many of us have solved the problem over the years. IMAP, iCal, Exchange, and more have let us get our mail, contacts, and calendars synced between any devices we want. For the most part, you don’t need to think about it: it just works. Then, Dropbox has solved the file end of our problem, and we can now easily sync documents, pictures, music, and more between our computers, phones, and the cloud. So many mobile apps have added Dropbox support, it’s become the de facto standard way to keep your digital life synchronized.

It’s Not Just Apple

Still, though, that’s not the simplest solution. Sure, most of us can figure out how to save our various types of files in Dropbox, and can add an IMAP account to our phones. But what about new computer users? Why should they have to figure out what a .xlsx file is, or why they need to save their files in a certain folder?

Apple’s iCloud tries to remove the idea of files, relying instead on syncing the actual things you’re working on: documents, pictures, presentations, whatever. Sure, at the end of the day, it’s the same thing. But iCloud extracts the technical parts, and just syncs what you’re working on with the correct applications. Anyone can understand that.

Google approaches data in the exact same way. Steven Levy’s new book about Google, In the Plex, reveals that Google did, at one point, plan to release a Dropbox-like Gdrive. Sundar Pichai, currently senior vice president of Chrome at Google, decided that traditional files were dated, and were simply part of the old style of computing.

“Think about it,” said Pichai. “You just want to get information into the cloud. When people use our Google Docs, there are no more files. You just start editing in the cloud, and there’s never a file.”

This was an entirely new concept to their team, but the simplicity won the team over. Today, we all store lots of data in Google’s cloud, but seldom have to think about the actual files behind it. For users, with cloud computing, traditional files may well be a thing of the past, at least if Google and Apple have anything to do with it.

Web Apps, Native Apps, or Both?

Between Apple and Google, the biggest difference is not in how they think about data. With iCloud and Google Apps, both Apple and Google treat the cloud as your data’s true home. They both also try to take away the concepts of files and saving. Instead, your data is in documents, pictures, or whatever you’re creating, and the apps used to create and edit automatically save their changes.

The difference is in how they think you should access and create it. Apple thinks you should access this data through rich native applications, such as the iWork apps in iOS and iPhoto on Macs. Google, on the other hand, feels that you should primarily use and create documents and more directly in their web apps. Apple locks you into their operating systems, but offers beautiful and advanced applications that work anywhere, even if you’re offline and can’t access the cloud. Google let’s you use their services from any browser, but for the most part, your data’s inaccessible if you’re offline.

That’s My Data!

Truth be told, though, Google Docs and Gmail are only applications in your browser that can access your data in Google’s cloud. There’s no reason Google couldn’t make an offline, installable Google Docs app that worked like iWork, and there’s no reason Apple couldn’t make an iWork web app (except it might be tough to replicate all of it’s features in HTML5). The difference is their respective philosophy on how apps should run, and that will be the defining difference in all major cloud products.

Storing data in the cloud is and should be separate from the individual apps used with the data, to make your own data more moveable between services. Web apps should, theoretically, be able to open your data from any cloud service, and desktop or mobile apps should be able to do the same. If our main “computer”, the true home of our data, is to be the cloud, then the cloud services we use to store our data should be able to work with any app. In an ideal world, you should be able to add your iCloud credentials into Google Docs, and use that app to edit your files just the same.

Will this ever happen? Or will the cloud continue to be a fractured mess of competing companies siloing our data off into more and more services? That is one of the major questions the leaders of cloud computing need to address.

After all, if it’s my data, I should be able to store it where I want and use it as I want. Files or no files, our data should be ours, free to use as we wish.

I’m always looking for simple ways to keep a log certain activities- my workouts, my side project progress, my lesson plans, or whatever else I may want to reference later. So far the most trustworthy has been my handy-dandy notebook (cue Doug- “Dear Journal…”), but I don’t always have that with me and well, my notebook is really, “a bunch of notebooks.” What I really want is an easily accessible, singular place to keep journal entries. Since reading the Quick Look we published here a while back, I’ve though 280daily might be just that.

From their website:

280daily is quite possibly the future of consistent journaling and the easiest way to create a searchable archive of your life.

Secure, completely private, encrypted and safe.

Unlike other blogging platforms, 280daily is private and secure, and forces you to keep it pithy. At most, you can have 280 characters, 1 photo, and 1 interesting link. You also only have 1 category, and your entry either is, or is not, in it. Let’s take a closer look.

Using 280daily

Signing up for 280daily, much like the entire 280daily user experience (UX), is dead simple. Give them an email address (which serves as your username), password, and timezone, and you’re done. Verify your email address and start writing!

I was surprised by how customizable the dashboard (or account overview) is. You can drag and drop each box to position them the way you’d like, and you can choose to show or hide boxes from the settings area. We’ll take a look at that in a bit, but first, and most importantly, how do we go about writing an entry?

Writing an Entry

Writing an entry is incredibly simple- just click “New 280 Entry” at the top and start writing. There is no title or rich text editor; just a textarea, single checkbox, and submit button. You’re entries are titled by date.

After you create an entry, you then have the option to add a photo to it. It seems the flash uploader they have doesn’t work in Chrome for Macs, but you can switch to a basic uploader to get the job done. While I would like to upload the photo at the same time I publish the entry, I appreciate the simplicity of creating a new entry. You’ll also see the reason they left it out likely has to do with mobile support.

If you want to add a link to your post, you can turn that option on in Settings->New Entry.

My favorite part about creating entries is how easy it is to go back and create one retroactively. Where with something like WordPress, you need to change the publish date, with 280daily, you can add “Yesterday’s” or “Last Week’s” right from the Overview page, and you can choose a specific date from the New 280 Entry page.

Viewing Entries

280daily also nicely allows you to view previous entries. As you can see from the screenshot below, not only can you view a list of your entries, you can sort them in several different ways, including longest to shortest and vise-versa. You can also choose to view your entries in a free form grid instead of a list.

Entries that you check off as “Day of note” (or whatever you change it to) will show up in a different color from normal, uncategorized entries.

When I say free form, I mean the boxes aren’t a set size. They grow with the content. This makes for an interesting looking grid!

Once the number of entries starts to grow, it would be pretty tough to quickly find what you’re looking for by traversing through a list. That’s where 280daily’s Search comes in.

Not only can you do a quick search from the Overview page, but you can go to the Search page for a more refined search; limit by words in or not in an entry, by date, by number of characters, and if you want to include entries you’ve only checked off (I’ve changed “Day of note” to “Worked Out” to show which days I actually made myself go to the gym). The results page looks like just the previous entries page, the only different being the list  of search criteria at the top.

Settings and Other Features

I really love the 280daily Settings panel. Instead of presenting you with a settings page, they present you with a list of things you might want to change and how to access them. Then, on the right hand side they have all of the settings. I think this is a really nice way to save the user some time they’d burn searching through the settings, and make use of the default Settings page. You also have pretty fine grain control of how the app works for you.

From settings you can:

• Change when you get reminders to write an entry (or turn them off completely)
• Choose where you want to be taken when you log in
• Change the font size, header style, and other design elements
• Enable new entry options (link, photo, etc)
• Change the checkbox from “Day of note” to whatever you want
• Change the Account Overview boxes

…and a lot more! It pretty obvious just how much effort and thought the developers put into the smaller details of this app. And on top of these settings, you also have the ability to export your entries.

There are currently three ways to export your entries, with a fourth on the way. You can choose from PDF, printing straight out (as opposed to a PDF), and exporting your posts as a CSV. It’s worth noting that with a PDF export, you’re presenting with a whole list of advanced options where you can choose the heading titles, which posts to includes, if you want to include photos, order of the posts, and more. The fourth option, coming soon, is as a book of your entries that’s mailed to you. This is incredibly interesting to me- I can’t wait to see how they implement it.

I would have expected another way to export that’s more import friendly- XML. There is no XML, Atom, or RSS feed to grab your posts. While I do understand that this is a private journal where subscription isn’t needed, it would be convenient for the user if he ever decides to make the posts public on a different platform, or a whole host of other reasons you might use an RSS feed.

The final feature of note is great mobile support. Go to 280daily.com on any smart phone or tablet and the app works perfectly. This is in part due to the flexible design. It might look a little janky to some (especially in grid view), but it makes for absolutely flawless multi-device support. Great job by the 280daily team.

Conclusion

280daily is a power-packed web app with a minimalist feel. In a world where everyone shares everything, it’s refreshing to see an app that’s geared towards being secure and private. Plus, the app uses https for everything, so your encrypted and safe right from the get-go. Aside from the some design aspects that people may not like (I happen to like the design a lot), the only hiccups I saw were the flash uploader and a missing feature in RSS export. With it’s mobile web support, 280daily is a true web app- accessible anywhere, on any platform. Great work to the 280daily team!

Gmail is one web app that gets better constantly. Despite being the third largest email service provider, Gmail holds the top spot in pampering its users with cool new features at regular intervals. The past few days have witnessed a couple of interesting additions and one in particular – Gmail People Widget – adds a social twist to your inbox.

The people widget showcases content from friends, family and colleagues who are in touch with you constantly, but are buried somewhere in the contact list. Add to it the all new Importance Markers, there is a very good chance your productivity might go up!

Overview

The Gmail People Widget has not been rolled out to everyone yet, but as soon it is made available, next to every email message you can see contextual information about the people in that conversation. In addition to that, a list of recent emails you received from them, relevant Buzz posts (who is using it by the way?), shared documents and calendar events are listed as well.

The feature not only helps you stay on top of the past updates but to connect with them in a bunch of ways too. Quick access to a variety of ways to communicate with individuals – start a group chat or schedule a meeting with groups of people are readily available in the form of icons at the top.

How Useful and Original is it?

Depending on what type of work your are doing and how many people you interact with, the usefulness of the Gmail People Widget might vary. Right now, the feature looks more like Gtalk on steroids, but is a great start though. Another thing I couldn’t help but notice is the striking similarity with some other apps that provide similar functionality in Gmail.

A couple of plugins/apps offer such people and conversation centric communication widget and the one I have been watching for a while is Rapportive. I could not remember any instances of Google blatantly ripping of User Interface or features from a third party app, but in this case, it looks like they have slipped. Even if I ignore how many features of Gmail People Widget and Rapportive are strikingly similar, its the UI that looks like a digital clone that plays the spoilsport.

Social isn’t Google’s forte but the People Widget is well designed and is extremely user friendly. It isn’t intrusive and seems to only help in locating attached files and conversations. One thing that bodes well for Gmail People Widget is that you don’t have to install a plugin to get all these features unlike the competitors.

Importance Markers

Gmail also got another tiny new addition (it wasn’t even mentioned in the official Gmail blog) named Importance Markers. May be because they don’t do much! The markers works just like the Star feature, just open a mail and tap on the marker to let Gmail know it’s important communication. The same way, you can mark certain mails unimportant too. Later when mails from the marked sources arrive, Gmail automatically moves the ones that are important to the top.

Feel that it sounds just like a stripped down version of the Gmail Priority Inbox? Looks like it is actually meant to be that way. If you want to turn off the feature, you will have to head over to the Priority Inbox tab under Settings to make the changes. Do note that this feature is turned on by default even if you have the Priority Inbox disabled.

Share Your Thoughts!

What’s your take on Gmail People Widget and the importance markers? Are they going to help boost your current productivity levels or going to be an additional source of distraction from work?

For years, experts have been telling us to customize our resumes and cover letters so that each one is unique to the employer, but that usually means we just rejigger our bullet points and change our opening paragraphs.

But in an economy mired with double-digit unemployment, candidates need to do more than revise their career objectives if they want to stand apart from the competition. Job seekers need to present themselves in a way that demonstrates creativity while also exhibiting a sense of professionalism.

Those with the technological skills to do so have long argued in favor of creating a personal webpage for each employer you’re looking to impress, something that would combine your LinkedIn profile page with the specific messaging and branding to catch the employer’s attention. Unfortunately, not everyone knows how to build a website, nor do they have enough design sense to ensure that the website they do build presents them in a good light.

HelloThere aims to solve that problem.

Overview

Co-founder and serial entrepreneur, Shane Mac, created HelloThere to make it easy for job seekers to create “a web page that is all about the company or person you’re going to apply to.” With just a few clicks and the help of your webcam, you can develop a single webpage that contains a short, 140-character note to the person you’re applying to, a video where you pitch yourself for the opportunity, links to whatever you want (including documents that you can upload), and a few paragraphs to go into more detail.

While writing this review, I created a HelloThere page, so if you’re interested in seeing an example, click here.

Creating a Page

HelloThere has a lot going for it, but its biggest strength is the developers’ commitment to user-friendly design. They make creating a personalized webpage dead-simple to do.

To create a page, you go to the HelloThere website, click on the “Try It Now” button, and you’re brought to a template page that breaks down the creation process into a series of form-fields, each of which has a little bit of text explaining what the field is for.

First, you put in the name of the person or company you’re applying to and then write a short introductory note with 140-character limit.

Second, you either upload a video you’ve already made or use your webcam to record a new video right on the site (the recording process uses Flash to commandeer your camera, so iOS users need not apply).

Third, you add your phone number and email address.

On smaller screens (1024 x 768), once you complete the first three fields, HelloThere breaks up the design with a bar that asks you to save the page, give them your email address, and choose a password (the bar is actually locked in the footer of the page, so when you scroll, it stays where it is). This is a brilliant idea, because it allows the user to start creating their content without having to go through a sign-up form, and at the same time, it says to the user, “Hey, all that work you just did to complete steps 1 through 3? If you don’t want it to go to waste, you better take a moment to create an account .”

There are two more, optional steps to creating the page. The first is adding additional paragraphs that will sit “below the fold” of your webpage. This is where you might list some specific skills that are relevant to the job you’re applying for or go into more detail about why you want to work for this particular employer.

You’re limited to plain text for these paragraphs. You can’t use bold or italic formatting, can’t choose your font, can’t add subheaders, can’t do bulleted or number lists, etc. You can, however, add as many paragraphs as you want.

The final step to creating the page is adding any links or documents. Job seekers would probably want to connect this page to their LinkedIn page or maybe an online portfolio. They can also upload their resume or maybe some PDFs of that portfolio. You can even link to your blog if you want. Whatever you think might help.

And that’s it. Save the page and you’re good to go.

The End Result

Again, I created a page in the process of writing this review, so if you want to take a look at the end-result, just click here. I think you’ll agree that the page is classy looking, and that it uses an attractive type-driven design that is easy on the eyes.

One of the more interesting elements of HelloThere is the URL structure for the page that you create. The URL I linked to above is appstorm.sayhellothere.to/hellothere, which means that the URL itself is like a little message to whoever it is you’re applying to. For example, if you were applying to Google, you might use, johndoe.sayhellothere.to/google.

Tracking Your Visitors

Along with making it easy for people to create one-off pages that will set them apart from the competition, the folks behind HelloThere wanted their app to solve another problem for the job seeking audience: knowing where you are in the process.

HelloThere includes built in stat-tracking for your webpage, but the stats aren’t your usual web metrics (bounce rate, time on page, etc.). Instead, HelloThere gives you a plain-language explanation of who visited your site and what they did while they were there.

Using HelloThere, you’ll be able to tell when the HR person visited your site, whether they opened your resume or looked at your portfolio, and whether they came back again.

Pricing

HelloThere is free for a single page, but chances are, if you’re looking for a job, you’ll want to create a page for each employer you apply to. And that’s where HelloThere gets you.

For $14, you can create five individual pages, but for $39/month, you can upgrade to an unlimited number of pages. For most of us, the $14 option would probably do the trick (especially if you hear back in the negative from one employer, which means you can delete that page and create a new one for the next one).

Coming Soon

The developers are very close to releasing version 2.0 of SayHelloThere, which will allow anyone who isn’t comfortable with video to upload a photo or slide deck instead. They’re also improving the tracking feature, adding email alerts and more detailed information on what your visitors did while they were there.

Final Thoughts

HelloThere has several things going for it.

First, it’s a great concept, especially in today’s employment climate where everyone and their uncle is looking for a job. Second, it’s well executed; the developers worked hard to create a user-focused web app, and they achieved their goal. HelloThere makes it simple for anyone to create professional-looking personalized webpages. Third, its tracking feature gives job seekers useful insight into the black hole that is an the application process. And finally, it’s priced right; even if you’re unemployed, there’s a good chance you can throw down $15 to improve your chance of success.

In short, HelloThere hits the sweet spot. It does exactly what it says it can do, and it does so with style.