In this Quick Look, we’re highlighting ActiveCampaign. The developer describes ActiveCampaign as email marketing software leading web based email marketing software for creating, managing, and extending your email marketing & auto responder campaigns.

Offered as both a hosted version (traditional service based software) and a downloaded version (that installs on your own server).

Read on for more information and screenshots!

Screenshots

ActiveCampaign Email Marketing

ActiveCampaign Email Marketing

About the App

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

1. Automation and subscriber triggers
2. Auto responders
3. Detailed reporting
4. Integration & API
5. Ability to rebrand and resell

Requirements: Nothing for hosted service. PHP & MySQL for downloaded.
Price: $9+ per month
Developer: ActiveCampaign

Would you like a better way to edit documents and collaborate on ideas? Emailing notes back and forth is a mess and wikis can be complicated to use. Plus, neither of these let you see your team’s document changes in real time. Google Docs now allows collaborative editing, but it makes it hard to get a sense of what was added and when.

For a time, Etherpad was the king of online collaborative writing. No matter where you and your coworkers were, you could log in to the same Etherpad, edit together in realtime, then playback the document revisions to see how the document progressed over time. Then, a couple months after Google Wave was announced, the Etherpad team was bought out by Google. Their code was opensourced, but their original site was shut down and, before long, Google Wave was canceled and opensourced as well.

Today, if you’d like to keep using Etherpad, you could obviously install and run the opensource Etherpad code directly on your own servers for your company or personal use. However, running it directly can be difficult, and if you just want to get started writing collaboratively, you’ll want something easier to manage. There are then a number of sites that let you use the original Etherpad code on their own servers. Some of these services simply use the original Etherpad, while others have taken it and expanded its feature set.

Sync.in is a great service from Cynapse that has taken the original Etherpad and given it a fresh theme, a desktop launcher to access your pads easily, social network sharing, and more. Let’s take a look at the service and see if collaborative writing has been given a fresh start with Sync.in.

Writing in Sync.In

Sync.in is a freemium Etherpad-based collaborative writing system. You can create unlimited free collaboration documents that will be saved publicly on Sync.in’s servers. To get started, just head to their homepage and click Create a new Public note.

Get started writing collaboratively in one click

That’s it! Once you have a free public pad, you can just start writing like you would in any rich text editor. There aren’t tons of text options, but the standard formatting options are available such as bold and bulleted lists. You can copy your text from Sync.in to use it elsewhere, or export it later in text or HTML format. Alternately, you can just bookmark your Sync.in pad to come back and edit it anytime.

If you've ever used any rich text editor, you'll be ready to use Sync.in

All free Sync.in pads are fully public, so anyone can join in and help proof or write your document. You can just share the URL of your note from your address bar, or press the Share button on the right sidebar to share your pad on a variety of social networks. This is a great way to get feedback before you post an article on your blog, or get everyone to help you make a list of important things to cover in an upcoming meeting.

Take Sync.in social and share your writing with your networks

As people start to join in and help edit a post, it’ll become a rainbow of colors with each editor automatically assigned a different highlight color for their text. The highlighting helps you see where changes have made and what’s going on. The most amazing thing is how fast all Etherpad implementations keep text synced; we were able to see changes in almost real-time from two different computers editing the same pad.

Your text will become a rainbow reflecting who editing what

Go Back in Time

One of the best features is that you can see how your work progressed over time. Every keystroke is recorded and saved as you type, so you’ll never have to worry about it losing your data. Then, as you’re writing your document, you can save revision points when you make major changes. If you decide to go back to the way you had your document before, your old version is just one click away. This makes it almost like a revision control service for your writing.

Save revision points so you can jump back to previous versions of your document quickly

Alternately, if you’d like to see how your document progressed over time, click the Playback button. This lets you playback a recording that shows every keystroke and edit you’ve made to the document over time. If you’ve been wanting to learn more about your own personal writing process, this is a great way to critique and see where you’re making the most changes!

Starring: Your Writing!

Taking Sync.in Premium

There are only two problems with the default Sync.in pads: everything you write is publically accessible, and the only way to keep up with all of your pads is to bookmark them or write their note ID down. If you’d like a secure way to collaboratively write or just want to use Sync.in as a repository for all your team’s writing, you can get a Pro account for $2 per user per month with a minimum of 5 users. From the front page, you can quickly signup for a free 30 day trial to see if pro accounts are perfect for your team.

Choose a unique URL for your team, then select the free trial to testdrive Sync.in Pro

Your team will now have a unique domain with a dashboard where you add your team and collaborate privately. All of the great Sync.in features are included in pads, except now, you can make a pad only visible to those on your team. You can also download a zip file containing an HTML copy of all of your pads, which can be a great time-saver for archiving your documents. This is much better if you’re writing internal corporate documents or other private info in Sync.in.

Your Sync.in Dashboard turns pads into an internal productivity tool

The pad editor looks mostly the same in the pro version, but with a few changes. First, you can change the name of a pad to make it easy to find later; free pads only have their unique pad ID number. Then, you can change your privacy settings, sharing your pad with your team, the general public, or locking it down with a private password.

With a Pro account, you can name your notes and set privacy levels

Sync.in From Your Desktop

We don’t usually discuss desktop applications very much at Web.AppStorm, but sometimes little things that can integrate a webapp with the standard desktop user experience can be the thing that makes people adopt it better. If your clients feel more at ease using a standard application than a webapp, then anything that bridges the gap can help.

Sync.in includes an Adobe Air powered app that lets you quickly create new pads and open existing ones from your Windows, Mac, or Linux computer. If you’re using the standard, free Sync.in service, you can use the app to create a new pad in one qlick or open existing pads from their note ID (the code in the pad’s URL after the initial http://sync.in/). Or, if you have a pro account, you can login to unlock more advanced features.

Create new notes, or add your Pro account to unlock more features

Once you’ve added your account, Pro Sync.in users can access any pad in their own custom domain from their much shorter note ID. You’ll also be able to search and find any pad that you or others on your account have created, and can then open the note directly or copy the note URL to share with a coworker. While many will find it just as easy to use Sync.in from their browser without the Air app, it’s definitely a nice addition for those who want a quick, 1-click way to start writing collaboratively with their team.

Find any notes on your Pro account from the desktop app

Conclusion

Whether you’re a student working with a class team on a group paper or a company wanting to get the engineering team’s input on your marketing script, there’s millions of reasons many of us need to write collaboratively. Plus, sometimes it can be nice to go back and see how your piece came together while you were writing it. Sync.in works great for this, and while its core tech is not unique to their site, they have done a great job implementing it with their own style and adding premium features that make the service more useful.

Do you regularly use an Etherpad-type service? Let us know if you’ve used Sync.in, run Etherpad on your own servers, or have found a solution you think is even better.

Social media touches many lives and monitoring it closely is useful for a wide variety of purposes. With so many social networks it’s not so easy to monitor the social media interactions happening. If you know your away around code, you can tap into the API of social networks to gather social data, even if it involves handling dozens of APIs, multiple formats, maintenance, coding knowledge and more.

Gnip helps businesses save money and time by cutting down on tedious processes and costly engineering teams. Interested in learning how to make the most of Gnip? Read on.

Overview

Gnip is a 360 degree social monitor for dozens popular social platforms including the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Myspace etc. The web app uses the official APIs of social networks and hence the data provided is accurate. They handle all the grunt work associated with handling APIs and you just pull data with keywords.

Overview

Use their built in keyword or user search feeds for specific results, or get it all using their full and partial firehose feeds. Consider this to be Tweetdeck or HootSuite, but with support for loads of other social networks.

Login Screen

There’s no sign up form as all accounts are created after contacting the sales team. However, there’s a requisition form for getting a 3 day trial account. Once you submit the request, an email with the URL and login details will arrive at your inbox. In my case, the login information arrived within ten minutes.

Pricing

Gnip offers four different subscription plans starting at $300 a month. Based on your plan, the subscription is either monthly or annually. There aren’t free accounts available but users can avail a free 3 day trial period for evaluating the web app. You don’t have to submit credit card information for availing the free trial.

Pricing

Most feeds are free to Gnip customers, however, some data sources set prices for some of their feeds. Feeds that incur an additional charge are called “Premium feeds” and poplar premium feeds include Twitter User Mention Stream, Twitter Decahose for Tweet data and Newsgator and Postrank for blog data.

Getting Started With Gnip

Setting Up a Sample Feed

Getting Started

After signing up, a getting started page will offer to create a sample feed from the four preconfigured sources or create one from scratch for the other 44 social networks. Let’s start with a sample feed for preconfigured social networks.

Dashboard

Hit Add Data Feed to initiate the process building your own feed. In the upcoming page, all social networks supported are listed and IMHO, there’s almost all of them here. To see what functions or data can be pulled from each each network, click on the name of your choice.

Some networks have many data streams while some might have just one. This is a limitation of the API offered by the social network and not a deficiency of Gnip per se. All data streams are accompanied by clear descriptions which should help you avoid ambiguity in selecting the right data stream.

Monitoring a Facebook Fanpage

Creating a Feed

I selected to monitor the comments posted by fans of Facebook pages. Much of the data from the Facebook fan pages is public, but some of their content may not be. If you plan to monitor stuff that’s not public, you’ll have to use Tokens. Gnip gives a clear idea as to how to create a token and that should be sufficient to create one.

Output Formats

The rest of the steps are really simple. Add a list of fan pages you plan to monitor, one after another. Then specify the data collection intervals. Gnip allows you to track data in real time or at preset intervals. So either way your data collection is covered.

Select the output format and default delivery method to complete the process.

Note that you have the option to expand short URLs, which could be useful if you want to know which sites are attracting the fan base.

Viewing Data Collection

Check if all the details you have entered are correct and confirm the creation of this feed. You can alter the feed from the feed settings page if you feel the data collected is not accurate.

Feed Confirmation

Based on the type of activity you chose to monitor, the usage at the social network and other factors, user activity will start to show up in the graph and the table below it. There’s no jargon and the interpretation of data is simple, thanks to the well thought out tools of Gnip.

Interpreting Data

Data Volume

The graph can be set to show user activity by the second, minute, day and so on. The only thing that stops you is the volume of data that you can handle and interpret. For example, in the graph pictured above, I am trying to monitor responses for the keywords – birthday, cake and party in Facebook. Given the fact there are 500 million registered users and how common the keywords are going to be in a platform that handles personal connections, this could end up overwhelming and actually it did.

Inbound Queries

In the tabulation below, each keyword is accompanied by a timestamp and the number of results pulled in at that time. Use the number of queries requested and the responses they get to identify the highly trafficked ones. Create a separate one to monitor them as Gnip let you create multiple feeds.

Final Thoughts

Gnip delivers your online conversation data efficiently and reliably. It’s the kind of app that makes a data miner salivate. However, the pricing is a huge road block for smaller scale users and is definitely not going to be in the budget of a lot of small businesses. Gnip might consider offering some plans with limited number of feeds and limited number of social networks.

Also, the representation of user data could be made more readable. Instead of an XML file, a section to consume the comments or tweets as is (or close) would be great. For those who have a war chest, Gnip is a treasure trove of social reactions.

Share Your Thoughts!

How useful Gnip do you think could be? Are their pricing plans a sticking point?

Want to find out what your audience thinks without adding another subscription service to your budget? There are dozens of survey apps available today, and many of them are simple to use and offer impressive features, templates, and more. However, it can be frustrating to have even more of your business’ data in another app instead of being an integral part of your main site.

If you’d like to run surveys directly from your own server or hosting account, Survd is a great new choice we’re going to look at today. It’s a self-hosted survey management system that makes it easy to create and run surveys and polls, then get the feedback in the format you want. You can install it in a few steps, and you won’t even need to setup a database for it. Let’s take a look at how Survd can make it easier and cheaper for your business to learn more about its audience.

Setting Up Survd

When you purchase a copy of Survd, you’ll receive a zip download of the files needed for installation, as well as a registration code to activate the software. To set it up on your site, just unzip the files and upload them to your server. It’ll usually work best to upload the files to a sub-folder, so then you can use Survd from, for example, yoursite.com/survd.

Each license is tied to the domain you register it on, so you’ll only be able to run surveys on the main domain or subdomain you installed Survd into.

Once everything’s uploaded, browse to the domain you uploaded your Survd files to. If everything uploaded correct, you should see the installation screen as below. Enter your name, username, email, and password as normal, then also enter the registration code you received after purchasing Survd.

Install Survd by just entering your info and registration key

Seconds later, you’ll see the Survd login screen, which is what you’ll now see by default when you visit the site or subfolder you installed Survd into. You’re now ready to start creating surveys to add to your site.

Welcome to the Survd dashboard!

Using Survd

Creating Your First Survey

Creating a new survey is fairly easy. Enter a name and description for the survey on the right sidebar and choose if you want to save submissions in a CSV or XML file, as well as whether or not Survd should email you whenever you get a new response to your survey. You’ll also need to enter a shortcode for the survey. By default, Survd will use a lowercase version of your survey name without spaces as the shortcode, but you can use any alphanumerical code to indentfy the survey if you wish.

Now, you can start adding fields to your survey. Enter a label for the question, then choose what type of response is required. Your surveys can include text fields, radio buttons, check boxes, true/false options, and more. You’ll also need to enter a unique shortcode for the question, but again Survd will fill this by default so you don’t have to change it if you don’t want to.

Create a survey, form, poll, or more

If your question requires multiple answer options, including a radio or checkbox question, then you’ll need to add response options. Click Add Validation under your question, then enter the option’s name and a value that choice represents on in the form. You can add as many options as you wish. Click Save Values when you’re finished.

Enter as many options as you wish for your questions.

Now, if you’re finished editing your question, click the checkmark on the right to accept the changes. You can add as many questions as you need, go back and edit questions, or drag and drop them to get them in the order you want.

Accept changes before going on to create the next question

When you’re finished creating the survey, you can click Preview on the bottom of the question list to see a preview of what your survey will look like. You can even enter sample data in your form which will be verified and saved in Survd just like it will when people are actually taking your survey. If everything’s working like you want, close the preview and save your survey.

See how your survey looks before publishing it

Installing a Survey on Your Site

Once you’ve created a survey or poll, you can install it into your main site for others to fill out. Click the Install tab in Survd, select whether your site uses jQuery and an event listener, and you’ll get code to add to your site’s header and body to embed the poll.

Install surveys on your site by copying embed code from Survd

Survd sends a basic HTML survey or form to your page, which will simply use the existing stylesheets on your website. Whether you’re putting it into a static HTML site or a CMS powered site, your polls will blend right in with your existing style and branding. Plus, anytime you make changes to your survey in Survd, they’ll automatically show up on your site without changing any code. Visitors can now take your poll or survey easily without visiting another site. Once they’re finished and hit submit, their responses will be saved without needing to refresh the page.

Rather than making new themes for your surveys, just add them to your own existing theme in a couple steps.

Get Your Survey Data

You may automatically receive an email whenever a completed survey is submitted if you selected that option when creating a poll. Either which way, you’ll always be able to view all of your survey data from the Survd web interface. You can sort and search your data; just click the top of a column to sort it. You can copy data directly from the fields, or download a CSV or XML file of the results. One of the best advantages of running apps on your own server is that you have complete control over the data, and Survd makes it easy to use it however you want.

View all of your responses quickly from the web interface, or download in CSV format.

By default, online reports will be displayed in table mode, but if your survey included multiple choice options, you can see a pie chart of the results as well. Select Pie as the report type, then select the question to display. This is a quick way to get an idea of your audience’s responses without reading through mind-numbing charts.

Get a quick idea of your audiance's preferences and more with visual charts

Support

Installing a new webapp isn’t always a breeze. Sometimes you may hit a snag or have a problem that is difficult to figure out even with all of your web technology expertise. This is one of the selling points of software-as-a-service webapps: they keep everything running smooth and you don’t have to worry about it. Thankfully, Survd is both easy to use and well supported, so this shouldn’t be too much of a worry with it. I hit a few snags while testing out our review copy, and the developer was quick to help. Survd’s Twitter feed is full of helpful support responses, so you can feel sure that you’ll get quick support if you have a problem getting it up and running on your site.

Additionally, Survd contains a fairly detailed help file, which you can access from any screen in Survd. This should help you understand how Survd works and help you get started creating complex surveys, forms, and more without much difficulty.

Get help whenever you need it

Conclusion

One of the best ways you can reach your market and serve your customers better is to know more about them. If you’ve hesitated to run surveys on your site because you felt the subscription costs were too steep to justify, Survd might be just right for you. It makes it easy to build anything from a poll for your site’s sidebar, a contact form for potential clients, or a full-blown survey to find out more about your audience. You’ll never need to worry about your survey service shutting down or losing your data again. Plus, for a limited time, you can snag a copy for only $9.95, which is 80% off the normal price.

What do you use to power surveys and polls on your site? Let us know your favorite survey tool in the comments and if you’ve tried out Survd, let us know how it went for you!

In this Quick Look, we’re highlighting Fillrr. The developer describes Fillrr as an easy way to track, share, and compare your gas use. After choosing your vehicle, enter ‘pitstops’ every time you fill up with gas. Then, let us do the rest by showing your average MPG or by graphing the data into your average MPG, other users with the same vehicle, and the manufacture’s average. Finally, easily share your data with friends on Facebook and Twitter.

Read on for more information and screenshots!

Screenshots

Fillrr

Fillrr

About the App

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

1. Easily track your gas use
2. See graphs for your averages and more
3. Share with friends on Facebook and Twitter
4. Enter Pitstops via SMS*
5. Track Multiple Vehicles*

*Paid accounts only

Requirements: Browser
Price: Free
Developer: f4 Design

Life is a sequence of experiences, some are good, some aren’t, but they don’t stop and we get to experience things one after another. While there’s no chance you can control every experience in your life, it’s absolutely possible to plan and feel something new; like a picnic in the park, getting punched in the face, standing in the queue to get that new Apple gadget knowing full well of its half life and so on.

Skyara is a marketplace for experiences and after the break let’s take a look and see if it can help you experience something new in life.

Overview

Skyara is a community of people that love experiencing new things and it brings together people who have something of interest to offer—and, no it isn’t a dating site. Anyone can use Skyara to find something to do, meet fun people and share an experience.

Overview

Skyara offers a 360 degree service. On top of featuring experiences, the app also provides options to book an experience, pay for it and schedule it at a time of your convenience. As for providers, complete control over their listing and the option to accept payments directly online are nice perks. Now that localised deals are such a rage, Skyara also offers experiences exclusive to cities.

Pricing

As a buyer, Skyara is completely free to join and use, and for sellers too; there are no listing fees or monthly fees. However, Skyara takes a 12% booking fee, which includes credit card processing and our service fee, only when a customer makes a confirmed booking for your experience. Since the charge is just a bit above 10% and is all inclusive, it could be very profitable.

Buying Experiences

Skyara uses all web 2.0 tricks and design elements to help users have a smooth experience while using the app. Experiences for Sale are featured in the homepage but if you’re looking for something very specific, try the Buy section. Searching for things you look for can be done in three different ways. First up there’s a straight forward search option; enter the terms you have in mind and the results will be listed.

Experiences for Sale

The second method is a mostly a “fine tuner”. Use the sliders on the left to specify your budget and distance from your present location. If you’re looking for opinions from the community before making the decision, move the sliders to the ratings and number of votes the search has garnered so far. As a third option, you can search listings based on the dates they actually take place.

A Listing on Sale

Most of the listings on sale are very comprehensive. A detailed description of the listing combined with a set of photos make a very positive impression. Seller details and reviews are displayed prominently ala. eBay, which is always a good thing for the customer. A map marking the place where the experience is about to be hosted and a calender to display the dates are available too. You can follow the seller for future listings or send messages to them to get some clarity on the listing.

Skyara offers a satisfaction guarantee to buyers. If for any reason you are not satisfied with the experience, give Skyara a call and they will return your purchase. Simple as that!

The number of listings are a bit thin at the moment, so if you don’t see something you are very much looking for, wait for some more time or try to sell it yourself and bring others onboard to enjoy it together.

Selling Experiences

Creating a Profile

To sell on Skyara you’ll have to sign up and, for the impatient types, one click sign up using your Facebook account is available. After going through email activation, the app prompts you to complete your profile and to their credit they politely nudge the user to upload a profile pic to gain buyer confidence.

Templates

Skyara tries its best to impart to sellers some best practices. They offer some ideal examples to help sellers understand what it takes to build a full fledged proposal. Another laudable point is the availability of templates. Sellers have a number of templates from a variety of domains to select the one similar to their proposal.

Editing a Template

The back end of Skyara is simple, yet loaded with a ton of interesting features, although there aren’t any WYSIWYG or HTML editors to complicate things. Text input fields and drop down menus make it so easy to add your listing. Even complex features like recurring experiences can be enabled with just a check mark. To seller’s delight, they can set their own pricing and Skyara does not interfere in the pricing process.

Referral System

All registered users can take part in a Referral System. You can refer Skyara to your friends on Facebook and both of you will get a $5 credit. Referral coupons are limited to 10 per person though.

Final Thoughts

While the experiences are said to be listed citywise, Skyara actually hasn’t been rolled out in many places. In fact, the service is available only in San Fransisco at the moment. If you really love the idea of Skyara and can’t wait to get it in your city, you have the option to let the developers know. Even though there’s no time frame or there’s a minimum number of requests to tip the service towards your city, this is a step in the right direction.

Skyara is a great idea coupled with neat execution and is an app that deserves the support of all us—by becoming its patrons. Go lend them a hand!

Share Your Thoughts!

What do you think of Skyara? Is this a novel attempt at making lives better or just a cheesy startup?

Red Giant TV has a new tutorial and project by Seth Worley, Episode 52: Re-creating the Lost Smoke Monster. The tutorial features Trapcode Particular and 3D tracking with the Camera Tracker plug-in from The Foundry.

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This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series Fallout 3 Vats

Today we’ll go over setting up our scene and preparing it for keyframe animation. We’ll begin to build the elements of the V.A.T.S effect such as the outlines, grids, and percentage boxes.

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Tutorial

Download Tutorial .flv

File size: 180 MB

Additional Aetuts+ Resources

• Program A Fallout 3 “Pipboy” Touch Screen

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Andrew Devis has 2 more tutorials, this time on some AE camera basics:

“Cameras are notoriously difficult to get to grips with in After Effects. In this tutorial, Andrew Devis explains some of the behaviors and problems that are common to camera animation and then shows how … to create a simple camera rig, and why it is important to get the order of the layers correct to achieve predictable results.”

• Animating a Camera 1: Camera Difficulties
• Animating a Camera 2: Simple Rig

Here’s a few more resources on the AE camera:

• AE Camera Basics links to tutorials from Chris & Trish Meyer, Motionworks, Aaharon Rabinowitz and others.
• Camera and 3D view improvements in After Effects CS5
• Rotate AE camera around point of interest
• Sure Target 2 from Video Copilot is a free AE plug-in (with tutorial) that offers advanced control over the After Effects camera. An older version, Sure Target 1.5 comes as a preset that works with the VC 3D Falloff preset.
• Pixel-Perfect Camera Move Transitions from Greyscale Gorilla
• Simple Camera Rig tutorial and script from Maltaannon
• Simple Camera Rig Script and tutorial free from Hypoly
• Pro Training for the After Effects Camera is a video training set by Rob Birnholz sold at Toolfarm.
• There’s a good number of handy scripts at AE Scripts that make working with 3D and the AE camera easier.

There’s much more in the AE Help page Adjust a 3D view or move a camera, light, or point of interest and in many AE Portal posts tagged AE camera.

Here’s a sample from the Birnholz training:

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