Blancer.com Tutorials and projects

I know that the summer, a time in particular where people take time to read, is just about done, but that doesn’t mean you have to stop reading! Heck, when Hurricane Irene hit my neck of the woods and power was out, just about all I could do was read. Plus, winter is right around the corner, and what better thing to do to pass the time than read (when you’re not shoveling snow)? With all of that in mind, I’ve put together a list of 12+ websites and eBook stores to help you find whatever book it is you’re looking to read.

Amazon’s Kindle Store

Kicking off the list is my personal favorite, the Amazon Kindle Store. With the ability to read Kindle books on your Kindle, Android device, iOS, device, or even on the web itself, chances are if you get a hold of a Kindle book, you’ll be able to read it. On top of nearly a million books, newspapers, and blogs it has to offer, Amazon also runs a daily book deal for the Kindle, where you can grab a new book everyday on the cheap (like 80% off!). They also regularly feature a number of free eBooks as well. Finally, there is also Kindle.Amazon.com, where you can see other people’s reading lists, read reviews, see what books are trending, and more. The Amazon Kindle Store is perfect for the avid book reader.

Google ebookstore

Another eBook store that’s not tethered to any particular device is the Google ebookstore. Purchasing a book from here will allow you to read the book on the web, or on any device that has the Google Books app, which includes Android and iOS, as well as the iriver Story, the first eReader integrating Google eBooks. The Google ebookstore also integrates directly into the Android market, so you can purchase and download ebooks right from your Android device, and manage your book purchases in the same place as your apps.

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is an awesome website that offers over 36,000 eBooks for free (!) in several formats including: ePub (works on iOS and Android), Kindle, text, and HTML. The reason they can offer so many books for free is because the copyright has run out for the books they offer, making them public domain. The site is totally free to use and is able to do what it does because of an open source-like community that makes donations, digitizes books, records audio eBooks, and more. Some of the books you’ll find totally free from Project Gutenberg include: War and Peace, Ben Franklin’s Autobiography, Frankenstein, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Pride and Prejudice and much more. You can see the most popular ones here. My only complaint about Project Gutenberg is the website’s design, which could use some work.

ManyBooks.net

ManyBooks.net is a lot like Project Gutenberg, and even includes most of Project Gutenberg’s current catalog in its own. Boasting over 29,000 free eBooks to choose from (and a nicer design), you can find books by author, title, genre, and language. While Project Gutenberg’s search functionality is a bit better, ManyBooks.net offers a lot more formats. You can download each book in all of the formats Project Gutenberg has to offer, as well as .zip, PDF, Plucker, Rocketbook, and more. They also have a New area and a Recommended area in case you need some help deciding what to read.

Byliner

Byliner is a cool little indy publishing company and social network that allows you to read, discover, and share books. It will publish excerpts (organized by title or author) from books and short stories, and then link to the site where you can read or purchase the full text. You can also follow authors, as well as read exclusive content, which they call Byliner Originals.

Scribd Store

Social reading site and publishing company Scribd allows any user to upload documents for the world to read. Their store allows people to purchase chosen documents to read on Scribd, download, print, or send to a mobile device. The site is pretty ambiguous about the available formats, but from what I gathered you can definitely get PDF, text, and whatever format the book was uploaded in.

Lulu

Lulu is a great self-publishing site for individuals looking to get their book on the proverbial shelves. While their store offer books primarily in print, authors also have the option of offering an eBook for users to buy, all of which are located in this section of the site. It looks like the eBooks are available in PDF only.

O’Reilly OFPS

As a web developer and programmer I love the O’Reilly books; they’ve taught me so much! With the O’Reilly Open Feedback Publishing System (OFPS) for short, you’re privy to the latest O’Reilly manuscripts before they hit the shelves. These are works-in-progress and the purpose of the project is to garner feedback from readers before they send the book to print. You can also purchase early releases of certain books as eBooks (PDF).

Safari Books Online

Safari is a publisher that brings us books from Addison Wesley, O’Reilly, New Riders, and more. With Safari Books Online, you can pay for a monthly subscription (either $27.99 or $42.99 USD) to access all of their books online, read drafts of upcoming books, download up to 5 eBooks a month (as PDFs), and get discounts on printed copies.

A Book Apart

As the publishing arm of esteemed web development outlet Happy Cog, A Book Apart offers “brief books for people who make websites.” Since they are relatively, new they have a catalog of 5 [original] books, which they offer in print and as eBooks. The eBook are all offered in ePub, MOBI, and PDF. You can also buy a print and eBook package as at discounted rate, which I think is something more book sellers should do.

Read Individual Books Online Only

A lot of publishers are taking advantage of the fact that the web is available almost anywhere on almost any device (seriously, I get it on my TV) by making their books available as websites. This is especially fantastic for people who have tablets. Below is a short list of some tech and business online eBooks:

Online doesn’t necessarily mean online only. A quick Google search will tell you how to access websites while offline.

• Dive into HTML5
• Mobile Design and Development
• Designing for the Web
• Learn to Program
• Getting Real
• The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web
• Stackoverflow’s list of freely available programming books

Make sure to leave your favorites in the comments!

Book Discovery

On top of buying and downloading eBooks, there are a ton of sites out there to aid in book discovery. I’ve decided to highlight two of the best sites here.

GoodReads

GoodReads is a free website for book lovers that allows you to read and write book reviews, create your own bookshelf of books you’ve read, are reading, or plan to read, and view other people’s bookshelves. On top of that, you can join discussion boards, start a book club, and more. This site is great for people looking to discover new books to read, electronic or otherwise.

Readernaut

Readernaut is a social network for readers I covered here back in May. The site allows you to add your own books, follow friends to see what they are reading, and post quotes, excerpts, reviews, and your progress on what you’re currently reading. This site really works well if you have more friends on it, as you can start book discussions, make recommendations to each other, and more.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are tons of ways to find new eBooks to read in whatever format you prefer. With the Kindle Store, Google ebookstore, Project Gutenberg, and the rest, you should be able to keep pretty busy as far as your reading list goes. Of course, I didn’t cover everything, so be sure to post your favorite eBook stores (or eBooks) in the comments!

It’s kinda crazy to think, but our little internet startup, Envato, has been on the air now for five years. We started back in 2006 as four very enthusiastic and totally green entrepreneurs with a shoestring budget and a love of the web. Fast forward five years and while we’re hopefully a little less green, we’re still incredibly passionate about Education, Marketplaces and the web! It’s been an amazing time and we’d like to share a look inside our Melbourne HQ offices, some stats about Envato and a big thank you to the community.

Behind the Scenes

With such a big milestone, we thought it might be good to give an inside glimpse into our Melbourne HQ offices and some of the people that work here. So we invited a Melbourne film crew called Compulsive to come in and shoot a 3 minute video about Envato. I hope you enjoy it!

As you may know, we also have a large remote team working around the globe on our sites. Next year we’re hoping to gather all of Envato and as much of the community as possible for an epic meetup, but in the meantime if you’re curious to see who’s who, you can check out this little video from our remote staff meetup last year in Chicago.

Some Stats

Looking back at five years of exciting and sometimes exhausting Envato work, I put together some stats about Envato from our time online so far. In five years we have:

• Published over 10,000 tutorials and articles helping people learn everything from Photoshop to Freelancing
• Hosted over 300,000 items for sale on our marketplaces from WordPress themes to Stock Photos
• Showcased over 12,000 items of inspirational design, photography and a host of other creative mediums on Creattica
• Listed over 8,000 jobs on our freelance job board
• Reviewed and rounded up over 3,000 apps on our AppStorm network
• Launched 9 marketplaces, 11 tutorial sites, 9 blogs, 18 books, 7 bundles, 4 Regular Podcasts, and more social media accounts than you can poke a stick at
• Accumulated close to 1 million RSS subscribers and twitter followers
• Signed up almost 1 million marketplace members, 90,000 Creattica members, 50,000 FreelanceSwitch members, and 40,000 Tuts+ Premium subscribers
• Served up well over 1.5 billion pageviews across all our sites since inception

Holy toledo batman!!

Thank You

I can’t say thank you enough to all of you for supporting Envato all these years. Whether you are long-time user of the Marketplaces, Tuts+, AppStorm, FreelanceSwitch or Creattica, or just a casual visitor, we’re really proud that you stop in and use our sites. If you’re one of the thousands of contributors, authors, writers, and subscribers, we’re honored and humbled that you have helped us build this company and filled these sites with such amazing content. And regardless of who you are, we hope that we can continue to provide value and service to you for many more years to come!

On behalf of the whole team, thank you all!
Collis
CEO, Chief Tea Drinker and Web Designer Who Doesn’t Get to Design Anymore
Envato

P.S. If you’re not all video’d out, you can check out this video of one of our early Envato staff

Formatted text. It’s either the best thing to ever happen to the world of computing, or the worst, depending on who you ask. Plain text is the simplest; you can read it on any computer or app, and it looks the exact same. Throw in some markup, whether something simple like Markdown or more complex like HTML or XML, and it’s a bit harder to write and a lot harder to read, but still, very useful if you’re any bit techie.

Rich text is somewhat of a mess, though. As we all know, one of the biggest problems with switching to web apps for Office files is that Microsoft Office formatting doesn’t always carry over correctly. Even basic rich formatting in comment boxes and simpler apps like Evernote often doesn’t copy/paste between apps very nicely.

I’m a plain text fan myself, and that’s one of the big reasons I’ve switched to Simplenote for all of my notes needs. Whenever I need a bit more formatting, I’ll throw in Markdown formatting, convert it HTML for publishing online, and I’m ready to go. I find it very nice to have all of my notes in an accessible format that works everywhere, and can be useful even if Simplenote disappeared tomorrow.

So, we’d like to know: what’s your favorite way to write text? Do you prefer to just write in plain text, or do you want to add a bit of extra style with Markdown or Textile? Or would you rather have a full featured rich text editor? Why? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

Even before the social media revolution, we have always linked to popular things things we find online, usually the latest trends and things that popular people are using. I like Will Smith and might be willing to check out the gadgets or apps he is using. However, not everyone likes Will Smith (outrageous, I know). But we all like our friends (at least we hope so!).

Usually, there is a very good reason we’re friends with the people we are – we have a lot in common. So, if they liked something, there is a very good chance you might like it too. Strawberryj.am, wants to show you what is popular, right now. The web app does this by analyzing what links your friends are sharing the most. Let’s take it for a spin to find out more about this social app.

Overview

The main objective behind Strawberryj.am is to find what is most popular amongst your friends and display that content in a smart, unique, and well designed form. The reason behind this idea is if your friends share it, you will probably listen/respond to it. And if a bunch of your friends are sharing and talking about a particular item, there is little doubt that you will pay even more attention to that particular item.

The app is currently in closed beta. I got my invite after about a week of submitting my email address at the homepage. Strawberryj.am currently is focused on theTwitter stream and also lets you sign up with your existing Twitter account.

User Interface

Instantly after signing in, the app starts analyzing your Twitter stream. Usually, I am accustomed to a certain wait time or empty dashboards while the apps index the social stream. Thankfully that’s not the case with Strawberryj.am. The app starts showing results instantaneously and a cute progress indicator at the top right corner keeps you informed of the progress of the indexing process.

As for the user interface, the app is designed to perfection. A neat array of icons to the left is accompanied by a steam of tweets. And that’s all about it. Oh, some might consider the flashy background image distracting, but it fits nicely into the design.

Ease of Use

By default, the preview is turned on and this means that all popular tweets with URLs have a brief description about what the link is all about. If you find it to be consuming a lot of screen real estate in your stream, you can always toggle it off. In addition to the badge that indicates the number of mentions the tweet has got from your circle, tiny profile icons are associated with each tweet for you to see for yourself which one of your friends have retweeted. To retweet it yourself, just hover over any of the profile pic and just hit retweet. Don’t think this is an apporiate moment to send out a tweet? Add it to your Buffer app queue to be tweeted at a scheduled time (you will need a separate Buffer app account).

Consuming News

It’s the small things that make Strawberryj.am such an awesome app. For instance, let us consider the number of ways one can read the news (the URLs). First you can hit the read more link and open it in a new tab or window to read it in full glory. Alternatively, if you plan to read it later, just hover over a tweet and you will find a link to add it to your Instapaper account.

If you are feeling too lazy to actually do either of those things, use the read now button and the content of the article is displayed in full – sans the design, advertisement elements of the original webpage – embedded right into the app.

For those who want to be in the know, there is the real time section which, well, shows popular tweets instantly. There is no preview for the real time stream though. However, if you happen to be a laid back honcho like me, tweets can be filtered based on eight hour intervals instead.

Search and Summary

You can search for keywords and hashtags and if you search frequently, save them all for future use. All saved searches can be quickly accessed from the drop down menu at the top.

Automated email summary is another feather in the cap of team Strawberryj.am. At this moment, only daily summaries are supported, but the ability to include four different trends in a summary is a neat little addition.

Final Thoughts

Strawberryj.am is the newest among the crop of apps trying to capitalize on the social media gold rush. And it does a great job in making trends more visible than ever. I am not sure if they are genuinely not ready for public consumption or just trying to build hype by restricting sign ups, but the app does make you take notice.

What makes Strawberryj.am increasingly unique is that instead of showing you the latest news about what is mainstream popular, they show only what is popular “to you.” The app makes your friends as natural filters for all things you like and dislike. Since we only tend to follow people we like, stuff they tweet about is worthy of our attention too. Hope they open the doors sooner for everyone to get the taste of the sweet social jam!

Share Your Thoughts!

What’s your social media stream like? Think Strawberryj.am will make your social experience more engaging?

Oh hey! Look! It’s ANOTHER task/project-management application! Hold on for a second while I minimize the two other task-management apps on my computer, both of which are currently clamoring for my attention. Okay, now I’m…dang it, I gotta turn off my iPad; you don’t want me distracted by the to-do apps I’ve got synced on there. Oh, and while I’m thinking about it, give me one more second to hide my email app, otherwise my concentration will get diverted by the reminder emails coming in from the various task-managament apps that my coworkers use. Okay, now I’m ready. Whatcha got?

Action Method, huh? What’s so great about that? “A radically different approach to productivity,” you say. Well, as a frequent reader of the AppStorm network, I have to tell ya, virtually every task-management app on the market claims to do something “radically different.” But okay, I’ll bite. Let’s give it a whirl and see if Action Method lives up to its marketing.

Overview

The team at Behance sat down with hundreds of productive individuals and teams to interview them on their productivity habits. They concentrated on “creative” people, most of whom (by default) have a difficult time turning their ideas into reality. The result of all those interviews became the Action Method and all the products derived from it (i.e., web app, iPad app, iPhone app, notebooks, notepads, etc.).

But what is the Action Method? In a nutshell, it’s the process of emphasizing not the noun of each of your tasks (the end product), but the verb (the action that produces the product). Instead of having a task that says, “Logo,” you have a task that says, “Design logo.”

How’s that for radically different?

Putting Email in Its Place

Okay, so maybe I’m being a little too sarcastic with Action Method. The folks at Behance obviously put a lot of time and effort into developing the Action Method, and they deserve credit for taking on the ginormous project of helping some of the most unorganized people in the world get their creative tasks in order.

One aspect of their methodology that I buy into completely is their recognition that the email inbox is a place designed for communication, not project management, which is why they’ve designed Action Method to stay out of your inbox.

That doesn’t mean they don’t send you emails when someone delegates a task to you or starts a discussion with you or shares a link or file with you, but it does mean that they’ve built in features so that the actions you take on those tasks, discussions, and references live inside the app. The idea is “to keep all revelevant information all in one place.”

And once Action Method emails you about the original task, reference, or discussion, it doesn’t send you another email whenever people update it; the discussion stays entirely within the app. This could be dangerous, of course, but if everyone gets into the habit of using Action Method, it helps that you don’t have to deal with the same information through both your inbox and the app.

Don’t do anything you don’t want

Another aspect of the methodology I agree with is the requirement that individuals accept the tasks you delegate to them, as well as the discussions you start with them. You can’t just assign tasks to people willy-nilly. Once they’re notified of your delegation, they decide whether they will accept your assignment. If they reject it, they can optionally provide you with a reason, or just reject it out-of-hand.

When someone rejects your delegated task (or does anything else related to a shared project), the message appears in the notifications window at the bottom-left of the screen.

Nag, Message, or Appreciate

Look at the image above. You see that little chat bubble with the “a” in it? That’s not a button to bring up a chat window. It’s something much cooler.

It’s a little feature that lets you “nag, message, or appreciate” someone on your team. You’ll get 125 characters to say whatever you need to say, and then a little radio button to determine whether it’s a nag, a message, or a note of appreciation. When the nag gets to your recipient, it shows up in a little red box on your coworker’s screen; when you appreciate them, it shows up in a blue box.

The Other Stuff

There’s more to Action Method, of course. There’s the option of viewing everything in your project at once (action steps, references, discussions), as well as the opportunity to color-code your actions and projects to make them easy to filter. There’s also the events feature, which lets you set milestones and meeting reminders. And there’s also the cool “Backburners” section, which is where you store actions and projects that would be great to accomplish someday, but don’t have priority right now.

But is it radically different?

Radically different? No. Not at all. Well designed, yes. Great for collaboration, sure. But radically different? With so many apps on the market, we’re learning that there’s only so many ways to conceptualize getting things done. You can create lists of projects. You can develop areas or workflows to help you focus on what’s possible. And you can add some kind of delegation and/or messaging system. If you’re lucky, you can even add some storage space for files and features for collaborative writing (in real time or asynchronous).

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what “radically different” would look like in this space (if I could envision such a thing, maybe I’d be a millionaire), but I’ll you one thing: putting verbs in the front of your tasks is not it.

Final Thoughts

As with all task/project-management apps, you should go with the one that works best for you. Personally, I use Things for Mac and iPad, with a little bit of Basecamp for projects that require collaboration with other people. But that’s me. That’s what I use. If you’re happy with what you’ve got, stick with it.

But if you’re in the market for a new app in this category, or if you’re looking for something to help with collaboration, give Action Method a spin. It might not live up to its overinflated marketing, but it’s well-designed and richly featured nonetheless.

Editor’s note: Plus, for a free task management app, it’s actually an incredibly nice app. Perhaps not worth switching from you existing app, but if you’re looking for something new, you sure can’t beat the price!

Steve Jobs is perhaps best known for the groundbreaking, market-leading products he has introduced under his reign as Apple CEO. He and his team created products that have literally revolutionised industries, or even nearly created new markets for tablets and media players, and that’s what the general public recognise his work for. However, his time at Apple also contributed heavily to the development of the web, including some of the very web apps we used every day.

If you read this blog, you’re likely to have heard of Steve Jobs’ war on Flash and his notorious exclusion of the software on Apple’s mobile devices. Apple’s popularity has allowed them to have a massive influence on what technologies we use on the web, and if your an iPad or iPhone user, you won’t be using Flash because Jobs said no.

The Great War on Flash

Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.

One of Steve Jobs’ most notorious decisions in the software world has been his exclusion of Flash on mobile devices. iOS plus Flash just doesn’t exist, killing one of the web’s biggest technologies. Steve even wrote an open letter, publicly condemning Flash for a number of reasons.

This post is not about this war, but rather Steve Jobs’ contributions to the web, but I’ll still visit a few of those points that Jobs publicised. Firstly, he pushed HTML 5 as an alternative because it’s open, unlike Adobe’s proprietary Flash, meaning that it’s much less expensive to push out an HTML webpage than it is to author the same thing in Flash. That’s a fair point. He also touched on the reliability and security on Flash, and the fact that running a Flash plugin can shorten the battery life of a device as well.

However, the biggest point that I can vouch for is performance. Flash makes Macs crash, or at least run so loud and hot that it’s uncomfortable. Watching Flash video on my MacBook Air always makes the fans rev up to a sound that nearly equals that of the video, and it becomes extremely hot near the top.

Editor’s note: Flash isn’t much better on a PC. On my Windows 7-powered netbook, you can hardly play back a standard quality YouTube video in Flash without stuttering and the fans kicking into overdrive. In Ubuntu, Flash works even worse. Meanwhile, 720p h.264 video plays back just fine without overtaxing the machine.

HTML5 for Interactivity

Where Steve Jobs really contributed to web apps was in his push for HTML 5 to replace Flash for interactivity. Apple demonstrated this with a technical demo page, showing how HTML5 could be used to manipulate typography, image transitions, 360-degree images and virtual reality.

A few years ago, any depth of interactivity on the web pretty much meant Flash, because it was the nearest comparison to native software. However, we’ve come to see some pretty awesome stuff being created with HTML5 and CSS3. Not only is it better because it’s better performance-wise and doesn’t require a battery-hogging, fan-inducing plugin, but it’s still advancing and should get better with each release.

Web Video

Not only did Steve Jobs exclude Flash use on iOS, but he started to try and push Flash usage away from entire markets. A lot of the web’s video is now powered by H.264 video, running without a Flash container, meaning it doesn’t require a plugin if you’re using a modern browser. If a website (including YouTube, BBC iPlayer, CNET TV and the like) primarily uses Flash, many now at least offer up a H.264 version when browsing on an iOS device.

Bringing the Web to Mobile

Aside from his push for new web technologies, Steve Jobs must be credited for bringing the real web to mobile. I remember his introduction (well not literally, I watched it a few years late) of the original iPhone, showing that Safari could display the “full” web, unlike rival smartphones. In 2008, mobile web usage was around 0.6% of total browsing, but July’s was over 7%.

Even if you don’t credit this rise to the iPhone and iPad, Apple and Steve Jobs contributed to the development of WebKit, which powers most other mobile browsers including the browser on Android.

Final Thought

Steve Jobs has made a massive contribution to technology. Love him or hate him, just step back from your computer – Mac, PC, iOS, Android, Chrome OS, whatever – and just imagine a world without him. He effected so many changes on technology because he took a stand for the tech he wanted to see, and the industry responded. Technology and the web would be very different.

For more coverage on Steve Job’s influence on web apps, check our our editor’s post What Web App Developers Can Learn From Steve Jobs.