We need to develop a simple website based on osCommerce. Design is ready.
Budget : 80
Develop Oscommerce Website 2
Open Realty Listng Details Images Addon
An Open Realty 3.0x compatible addon to show the listing images in a nice way.
Automatic Deal Alerts with ZingSale
Nobody likes paying more than they have to for things, it’s a known fact. When you’re buying online, you’ve always got the added convenience of being able to simply choose a store and order it from there—a blessing not present when you’re trying to rush through actual shops to find the best deal. When you’re not buying online, you’ve got the added disadvantage of buying something only to wander into another store to find it for half that price but even if you are purchasing from an e-store, you can easily make this mistake too if you don’t have the right know-how.
This is where ZingSale comes in to solve just that problem for the virtual world. It allows you to easily and quickly find products you’re interested in purchasing soon, setting up alerts and then being notified every time the product lowers in price.
Overview
ZingSale is a nifty web app that allows you to select products you’re interesting in purchasing and the app automatically periodically searches top e-stores to find you the best price, alerting you when the product goes on sale. It has support for a wide range of products and it really is just too simple to use. Just find the product you would like to be notified about, activate alerts, then sit back and wait for the emails from ZingSale telling you just where to find that great deal.
It’s all completely free and the app also lists some of the best deals it offers to ensure that you find exactly what you’re looking for and if not, some other popular products that would make great gift alternatives.
Overview
Interface
ZingSale’s attractive and easy-to-use interface makes finding great products and deals a blast. The app is split into several main features that show the top deals available as well as providing a way to search the top ones. These, coupled with the really sleek design ensure the best experience with minimal annoyance.
Interface
Getting Started
It’s a really quick process to get a ZingSale account created and once you’ve entered your email address and chosen a password, you will immediately be given access to the website without having to enter any further information. The whole process of using ZingSale really is ridiculously simple and you’re not required to enter massive amounts of information to do it. Once your account is created, you can begin to search for products that you’re looking to get some great deals on and if you don’t really have anything in mind, they offer a wide variety of other popular products to help.
Registration
Finding Products
ZingSale offer an extensive range of products that alerts can be activated on. It’s also easy to search for these using their search field, with a fairly wide search criteria. Products can be searched by brand, product name or even by key words associated with that product and once these have been entered, users are immediately taken to a list of relevant items based on what they have entered.
Product Search
It’s possible to then view an additional product overview page to ensure that the item is exactly what you’re looking for, or you can immediately set up alerts within that page – taking mere seconds.
Product Overview
Deals
As well as allowing you to look for specific products, ZingSale also provides a list of the top deals currently in time for Christmas (or even if you’re just looking to bag some great bargains). It also creates a list of the most popular product searches to allow you to easily products you may have been looking for. Additionally, it also provides a list of categories populated by the most popular products in an effort to provide efficient gift ideas.
Deals
Price History
Another nifty little feature of ZingSale is the ability to view a price history on the current item being viewed. This shows, in the form of a graph, the price of the item and how it has fluctuated (if at all) over time. It can be a great insight into whether you really are getting the best deal for that product or it’s been lower-priced lately. Of course, even if it is higher than expected, there’s nothing you can do about it but if you’re simply curious, it can be a really nice insight.
Price History
Final Thoughts
Personally, I found ZingSale to be a really great app that I believe will become a great asset to those who have to buy gifts regularly and need the best deals. The design of the app is great and everything’s just really straightforward. It’s dead simple to find exactly what you’re looking for and if not, their list of deals can be a great way to find alternatives. One of the only issues I found with the app is the actual product search feature. Though I found this generally to come up with the exact product I was looking for, there is a problem when some useless accessories are also ranked quite highly within the search results.
A definite feature that would greatly benefit the app is better product relevancy within these results. Other than that, I found no real issues with the app except the possibility of better support for international users but I can understand the difficulty in creating this. ZingSale is one of the few unique apps that come along that can really benefit anyone that does their shopping online, providing not only an efficient method of providing product price data when needed, it also does it really simply.
Save & Secure Bookmarks With Pinboard
Would you like to have secure, guaranteed access to all of your bookmarks anytime? With Del.icio.us closing soon (or not?), Ma.gnolia losing all of its members bookmarks last year, and more of us using multiple browsers and devices, we need a better way to keep track of bookmarks wherever you are.
Pinboard is a newer bookmarking site that’s received a lot of attention lately. Co-operated by one of De.licio.us’ founders, it’s fast, simple, and includes many of the same things fans loved about Del.icio.us. You can import all of your bookmarks, including tags and notes exported from Del.icio.us, then quickly add new bookmarks with the bookmarklet, share your bookmarks with friends or keep them private, and find them easily on your desktop or mobile device.
Let’s look at how you can consolidate all of your bookmarks with Pinboard and keep your favorite websites easily accessible.
Getting Started with Pinboard
Pinboard uses a very unique signup process. Unlike many web services, Pinboard costs a one-time fee. Currently it costs around $8 to signup, but the price goes up $0.001 for every signup. The good thing is it’s a one-time fee, not a subscription, so it’s similar to the price of an iOS app. This helps support the service and keep it from getting killed like other bookmarking services. It also helps keep spammers out and makes sure the shared bookmarks are higher quality.
Once you’re ready to give it a try, it’s quick to signup. Just enter your info as normal, then choose to pay with Google Checkout or Paypal—your choice. If you don’t end up liking Pinboard, you can request a full refund within 3 days of signup, so you’ve got nothing to loose.
Signing up is quick and easy
As soon as your payment is processed, you’ll receive an email with an activation link. Sign in and you’ll be ready to start keeping all of your bookmarks safe in Pinboard. To help you get started, Pinboard will give you some quick tips about using the service. Most helpful is the How-to page, which includes information on importing and exporting bookmarks, along with helpful bookmarklets to help you quickly save and find bookmarks in Pinboard.
Pinboard makes it simple to get started
Bring All of Your Old Bookmarks
The worst part about switching to a new browser or bookmarking service is the hundreds or thousands of bookmarks you’ve accumulated in different places over the years. Let’s see how you can get each of these pulled into Pinboard for a seamless bookmark experience.
Export Your Delicious Bookmarks
If you’ve been using Delicious to save bookmarks, you’ll want to get all of your bookmarks moved ASAP with the service being shut down soon. Thankfully, it’s easy to get your bookmarks saved and moved. Just head over to the Delicious Bookmark export page, select to include your notes and tags, and click Export. Pinboard can import everything you’ve saved in Delicious, tags and notes included, so no reason to leave anything behind. Save your export file in a safe place; we’ll need it in a few moments.
Export all your bookmarks from Delicious
Export Your Browser Bookmarks
Exporting bookmarks in Chrome
Have you been saving your bookmarks locally in your browser instead? It’s usually pretty easy to export your browser bookmarks. Here’s how to do it in the most popular browsers:
- Chrome: Open the Bookmarks Manager, click Organize, then select Export Bookmarks.
- Firefox: Open the Bookmarks Library, click Import and Backup, then select Export HTML.
- Safari: Open the File menu, then select Export Bookmarks. Leave it to Apple to make it the easiest!
- Opera: Open the Bookmarks manager, click the File button, then select Export Opera Bookmarks.
- Internet Explorer: Open the Bookmarks menu, click the arrow beside the Add to Favorites button, and select Import and Export. Select the Export to a file bullet, then check the Favorites box, select all your bookmarks, and finally save to a file.
Import Everything Into Pinboard
Now that you’ve got all of your bookmarks ready to be imported, head over to the Pinboard import page. Click Choose File, then select one of your bookmark export files and click Upload. Repeat this for all of your bookmark export files you’ve saved. Now you’ll need to wait a bit as Pinboard imports your favorites. Usually this takes a few moments, but it may take a couple hours right now as they’re experiencing a large number of new signups this weekend.
Import each of your bookmark export files individually
Using Pinboard
Once everything’s all imported, you’ll be ready to use Pinboard as your default bookmarking solution. Let’s look at all the features and see how you can put it to use the best for your needs.
Adding New Bookmarks
The main reason most of us just save bookmarks locally in our browsers is because it’s fast and easy. Online bookmarking doesn’t have to be difficult and Pinboard makes it just about as easy as pressing the Bookmark button in your browser. The easiest way to bookmark is using the Pinboard bookmarklets. Go to the Pinboard How-to page, and drag the bookmarklets you want into your browser’s bookmarks bar.
No bookmarks, just Pinboard bookmarklets!
There’s several different ones available: the popup ones open a new small window that let you save a bookmark without leaving the page you’re on, while the same page bookmarklet opens the Pinboard bookmarking page in your current tab. Either which you choose, you’ll be able to add notes and tags to your bookmark and save it in seconds.
Add notes and tags to your bookmark and save it in seconds.
Often you interact with links you’d like to remember but aren’t currently visiting, such as links in Google Reader or articles you’ve saved in Instapaper. From your Pinboard settings page, you can add your account info for a variety of services so your links added there will automatically be saved in your Pinboard account. You can also activate bookmarking by email, which is a great way to save links from your smartphone.
Integrate Pinboard with Instapaper, Google Reader, email, and more.
Finding Info When You Need It
Pinboard has a very clean and simple interface, and is very easy to use. You can quickly view and edit notes and tags you’ve saved, or just click a link directly to visit the site. Any editing you need to do can be done right there on the same page without reloading any pages.
Edit and organize bookmarks without reloading the page
Need to find a bookmark you’ve saved, or want to explore bookmarks others have saved publicly in Pinboard? The search box provides speedy access to all the bookmarks in Pinboard, so you can find the info you need and add new bookmarks directly from the public collection.
Expand your research with public bookmarks
No matter where you go, you can always find your bookmarks with the Pinboard mobile site. Some newer alternate browsers such as the Cyberspace iOS browser include native support for Pinboard bookmarking. Plus, if you enabled email posting, you can save bookmarks from your smartphone as well.
Pinboard includes a nice mobile interface as well
Conclusion
If you’re looking for a great alternative to Delicious, or just want to keep your bookmarks in a safer place accessible anywhere, Pinboard is a great option. With integrated support for tons of services and a fast web interface, bookmarks are no longer a hassle to deal with. Pinboard is getting a lot of new signups right now so imports are taking quite a while. If you try it out today, be patient, and it’ll be back to it’s spiffy self soon. It’s one of the closest alternatives to Delicious.
What You Missed This Week in Web Apps
Last week was a great one for data lovers who were waiting for a bird’s eye view of 2010 as it comes to a close. Google and Twitter published the trends they’ve spotted based on user engagement at their sites, Bing tweaked flight travel search, Hunch lent a helping hand to find gifts, Chrome crossed 10,000 extensions and Posterous launched groups.
Read on for some of this week’s best web app news and updates you might’ve missed!
Top Trends on Twitter
Trends on Twitter
As the year draws to a close, everybody who is somebody on the internet came out with their top trends or topics and so has Twitter. From earthquakes and politics to popstars and hashtags, Twitter Trends are a window into what the world is talking about. The top most topic to trend all through the year was the Gulf oil spill, followed by FIFA World Cup and Inception (the movie). While at it, do check out the gorgeous tree view of important people who joined Twitter this year.
Hunch Gift-O-Matic Predicts Gift Ideas for Twitter Users
Picking up gifts is an art; to master it, you have to actually listen to people what they are saying (tough task!). Now that the conversation has spilled over into the internet universe, you can actually look for clues as to what a person wants only when have to. The ultra reliable recommendation engine Hunch has launched Gift-o-Matic to make your task even simpler. Enter any Twitter username into the Gift-o-matic and it will predict specific gifts that the person might like. Voila!
Chrome Crosses 10,000 Extensions
Chrome Extensions
While Google Chrome has no respect for version numbers, they did take time out to boast about their extensions count. Apparently Chrome now has over 10,000 extensions (themes and plugins put together) that enhance the capability of the browser. While Chrome extensions are not as fully featured as their counterparts and competitors at the Firefox Plugin repository, they help get the job done.
Google Zeitgeist 2010
Google Zeitgeist
Nobody processes (snoops) data as Google does. Based on the aggregation of billions of search queries people typed into Google this year, Zeitgeist captures the spirit of 2010. If not for anything, check out the neatly designed page that makes data consumption so much simpler.
Find and Book Flights Faster With Bing
After Google’s acquisition of airline software maker ITA, a lot of folks in the online travel and search verticals are worried. If the deal gets regulatory nod, there’s a very good chance that Google gets a lion’s share of the travel search market, worth billions of dollars. Bing is the first one from that list to announce faster flight search and booking for its users. You can use a number of different combinations including airline names, number of stops or time of year in your searches. Should be useful for planning trips for the holidays!
Email Delegation Comes to Gmail
Gmail Delegation
People who use email more often mostly prefer Gmail, mainly for its powerful features and simplicity. If you’re a Gmail user, there’s a pretty good chance that you have multiple Gmail accounts. Until now, accessing multiple accounts means you will have to log out of one and login to another—not anymore. With the new email delegation feature, you can grant your personal account access to a shared account and view, organize and send mail on behalf of that shared account. Sounds nice and easy!
Teach Parents Tech
Teach Your Parents Tech
Parents, however learned they are, are often wary or slow to adopt new technology, in particular computers and internet. Yes, you can teach them how to do it, but everyone has their learning curve (and patience!). Why not let people who actually know a lot about Internet teach them with professionally created videos? For free. And how convinced would you be if it were Google? Should really be a fun learning experience for parents and computer newbies as well.
Restore Your Contacts
Restoring Contacts
The great thing with the advent of smartphones is the manner in which they moved contacts to the cloud and simplified navigation with digital maps. Google Contacts is the primary mode of syncing contacts to the cloud if you are using an iOS or Android mobile. Accidental edits and deletions happen while on the go and at times can be so devastating. Thanks to Google, now we get to restore contacts by date and time. Visit Gmail’s Contacts section, select “Restore contacts” in the “More actions” menu, and choose the time you would like to revert to. You can go back for about 30 days.
Introducing Posterous Groups
Posterous Groups
Posterous lets you run a blog by just sending an email to a preset email address. While not as huge as Tumblr, they do have a sizable userbase. Posterous Groups is a new service for communicating privately with your friends, family and colleagues. Every time you post to the group, all members will receive the full content as an email and the default privacy setting is set Private. This should comfort people that their content is sent only to the hand picked audience.
Share Your Thoughts!
What news from the app universe grabbed your attention in the past few days?
Can rule.fm Streamline Your Business?
Are you tired of using a half-dozen different apps to manage your business in the cloud? Everyday it seems like there’s a new app released designed to help deal with a small aspect of your business, such as CRM or internal messaging, but with so many disparate apps it’s easy to forget what you’ve saved where. Plus, it can be expensive paying for so many different apps.
rule.fm aims at bringing some order to the confusion and make it easier to manage your business and, most importantly, get back to work. Its founders set out to bring style and simplicity to online project management and designed it to include all the tools you need to efficiently keep track of every part of your business. rule.fm already offers an impressive number of tools, with more planned to be added before its released from beta.
Today we’ll look at what rule.fm has to offer your business and see if it’s got what it takes to beat Basecamp and the thousands of other project management apps out there.
Getting Started
Ready to get started? Head over to rule.fm and create a new, free account. rule.fm is currently in beta, and you can use all of its features for free for the time being. Once it’s fully released, you’ll need to select a plan that fits your usage or downscale your usage to fit the free plan. Signup only takes a few seconds and doesn’t require much info. Make sure to pick a domain you want to stick with as you can’t change it once your account’s created.
Signup for a free beta rule.fm account
As soon as you’ve completed signup, you’ll be ready to start managing your company in rule.fm. The app is very nicely designed with a modern style and color scheme. Like many collaboration apps, rule.fm is built around a central stream that lets you quickly see what’s happening across the entire account, so you’ll see the Stream page first when you login.
Seconds after signing up, you're ready to get to work
Features & Usage
rule.fm includes a toolbar across the top of the entire suite that gives you quick access to each of the major features, including contacts, projects, messages and more.
Access all of rule.fm's features quickly from the toolbar
You can also access common tasks quickly from the plus button on the far right of the toolbar.
The main toolbar buttons takes you to the full page app interfaces for those tools but the quick tasks open in a small popover box so you can quickly add a new user or post to the stream without navigating through several pages. We found this to be very handy and it made it much quicker to use than many other project management apps.
Quickly finish common tasks without switching pages
Now that you’re used to the interface, let’s look at each of the major features included in rule.fm and see how it all works together.
Projects
rule.fm makes it easy to organize all of the tasks, documents, milestones and discussions related to a project while still keeping everything easy to find. You can quickly access all of your projects from the top Project button, which will give you a quick overview of each project.
Create new projects for everything you're doing
Once you dive into a project, you’ll be able to see everything that’s going on in the project—mark tasks and milestones as complete directly or comment and view more info on each. Or, from the left menu, you can view all of the available tasks from all projects, which makes it easy to see what needs to be accomplished across all of your company’s ongoing projects. rule.fm does a great job at reducing the number of different pages you need to go to and each view lets you accomplish a lot.
Tasks, milestones, discussions, and more, all ready to use together
You won’t need to setup a new discussion board or email list to keep everyone informed about a project; rule.fm lets you discuss a project directly with threaded conversations. You can see the discussion about each project from its tab or you can see all the ongoing discussions and other activity from the main stream.
Stay focused with project discussion
Contacts
rule.fm includes a nice contact manager for your entire company. You’ll automatically see contact info for everyone you’ve added to your account and can also add contact info for clients and companies you work with. Contacts can be organized into groups and each contact’s info can include their social media accounts as well as their traditional contact info.
The contacts feature feels somewhat unfinished right now—you can’t edit existing contacts other than your own personal profile and social media accounts and email address are plain text instead of links. Since rule.fm is still working on the CRM features, these features will likely be updated with more functionality over time.
View everything related to each of your contacts
Documents & Files
Have you ever struggled to keep all of the images and documents for your projects in one place? rule.fm lets you quickly add a wide variety of files to your account. Files can be saved to an individual project’s folder or you can save files that everyone commonly needs in main folders that can always be accessed. Most files worked great, though we were unable to upload any files with more than 3 character extensions including newer Microsoft Office files—a relatively serious inadequacy.
Add files to projects or your general account quickly
You can then view info about documents that’ve been added or even upload newer versions of files. It’ll maintain a full history of your files, so you can download older versions of files or view discussion about them.
Get info on documents or add new versions
The Stream
As your project progresses, you’ll be able to keep track of everything that’s going on from the main stream. Every new file, task, milestone and more, that’s added or changed will show up on the stream. This lets you quickly comment on what others are doing and helps you stay on top of projects.
You can also let others know what you’re doing and keep the conversation flowing like you would on Facebook or business communication tools like Yammer.
You can also add formatted text to stream posts, including lists, links, and more.
See what's going on across your company from the stream
Get notified whenever changes are made
No matter what part of the app you’re using, you’ll be able to quickly see if important changes have been made from the notifications in the bottom right corner. Of course you can also update what you’re doing from the plus button on the top to notify others—making it easy to keep everyone informed.
Coming Soon
As mentioned before, rule.fm isn’t finished and there are currently several more major features planned. These include a CRM system that will take your contacts list and give you insight on deal flows and a money tool to keep track of leads and balance sheets with a full accounting system. You’ll see buttons hidden for these on the top toolbar and once they’re live you’ll be able to access them directly in your current account.
Additionally, rule.fm is planning to offer a mobile optimized webapp and native iOS app to make it easy to manage your business on the go. Once everything’s together, you’ll have less need than ever for other business management apps.
More features are coming soon, including a CRM and accounting system
Design and Usability
Most project management apps are simple and utilitarian, with only minimal design touches. rule.fm goes well beyond this with a beautifully designed interface. It feels more like a Mac app than a standard webapp, with live search and popup input boxes that make it quick at accomplishing what you need without switching between a dozen pages. Plus, it teaches you how to use it with simple arrows and descriptions leading you through new tasks.
Small touches such as the arrow showing where to add a new contact make rule.fm easy to use
Conclusion
Project management apps are becoming increasingly prevalent each and every day, and there are hundreds of webapps vying to be the best way to manage your business. rule.fm is a surprising new competitor that’s bringing some nice new integration and style to project management. It works great, keeps up with almost everything you need, and is currently free. Give it a try and let us know what you think in the comments. We think that this webapp has a solid chance of being one of the more popular project management apps in the future.
Quick Look: Kashoo Online Accounting
Quick Look posts are paid submissions offering only a brief overview of an app. Vote in the polls below if you think this app is worth an in-depth AppStorm review!
In this Quick Look, we’re highlighting Kashoo. The developer describes Kashoo.com as an app that transforms how small businesses manage their finances. At its core, Kashoo.com is a powerful yet affordable online accounting solution designed specifically for small business. With no accounting experience, the business owner can quickly and efficiently “do the books” and move on to the business of running the business.
Read on for more information and screenshots!
Screenshots
Kashoo
Kashoo
About the App
Unlike desktop accounting applications, Kashoo.com was built from the ground up to leverage cloud computing to enable collaboration, mobility, and data sharing in a simple, secure, affordable solution.
Requirements: Web Browser
Price: $10 per month
Developer: Dobes Vandermeer
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Vote for a Review
Would you like to see us write a full review of this app? Have your say in our poll:
Quick Look posts are paid submissions offering only a brief overview of an app. Vote in the poll if you think this app is worth an in-depth AppStorm review! If you’re a developer and would like to have your app profiled, you can submit it here.
Quick Look: Santa Strike
Quick Look posts are paid submissions offering only a brief overview of an app. Vote in the polls below if you think this app is worth an in-depth AppStorm review!
In this Quick Look, we’re highlighting Santa Strike. The developer describes Santa Strike as a holiday bowling game that’s fun for the whole family. It’s a classic reborn (new take on the original Elf Bowling game), where Santa puts the elves in the lane to teach them a lesson.
Features real bowling simulation, festive music, and funny sound effects.
Read on for more information and screenshots!
Screenshots
Santa Strike
About the App
Here are the top five features you can expect to see in the latest version:
- Addicting holiday music.
- Beautiful holiday scenery, sure to get you in the spirit.
- Silly elves, trying to make Santa miss.
- Gamecenter integration. Track scores and achievements.
Requirements: iOS 4
Price: 0.99
Developer: Catharsis
Vote for a Review
Would you like to see us write a full review of Santa Strike? Have your say in our poll:
Would you like to see Santa Strike reviewed in-depth on AppStorm?online survey
Quick Look posts are paid submissions offering only a brief overview of an app. Vote in the poll if you think this app is worth an in-depth AppStorm review! If you’re a developer and would like to have your app profiled, you can submit it here.
Cloudette for CloudApp: Access Your Cloud Storage On Your iPhone
There are a few different options for online storage, and one option that’s not only easy to use but free (with a few limits), is CloudApp. Now there’s a free app for the iPhone named Cloudette for CloudApp, which allows you to access your CloudApp account on your iPhone, making it handy to get at your stored files when you’re on the go.
Sure it’s free, but is the app worth the download? Let’s find out.
Starting at the Source
Let’s begin with talking a little bit about CloudApp, the web app that you need to use Cloudette for CloudApp to begin with. Simply put, CloudApp is cloud storage for your computer. You install an app on your Mac and a little cloud appears in the menu bar. Then you simply drag a file up to the cloud icon and it uploads to the CloudApp website. A link to the file is then placed on your clipboard. You can then send the link via e-mail, instant message, or any other way you wish.
The CloudApp home page shows all of your files in one spot.
This is a free service for basic use, which gives you unlimited bookmarks, allows you to upload 10 files daily (up to 25MB total), keeps the files for three months, and uses the cl.ly domain name. If you want to upgrade and pay 4 Euros a month (approximately $5.35 US), you get to use your own domain name, upload as many files as you want up to 250MB, and use your own domain name. It’s not the perfect service for everybody, but if you need a way to quickly upload files to a server and send the links to friends, then this is well done and finely crafted way to go.
How Cloudette for CloudApp Works
Cloudette for CloudApp is a third party piece of software, created to do one thing and do it well: access your CloudApp files. Once you’ve logged into the app on your iPhone, the first thing that shows up is a list of the files you have on CloudApp. From there you can look at each file individually, or get a link for one of them that goes onto your clipboard. If that’s all that the App did, it would be sufficient. After all, CloudApp is a pretty basic system, so what else do you need?
View, Share, and Send Links to Your CloudApp Files
Fortunately, there’s a bit more to this app than just that. Let’s say that you have a link that you want to shorten for one reason or another. Simply hit the (+) symbol in the corner of the screen, click on “Shorten Link,” and enter the URL into the box. It then spits out a shortened URL and puts it onto your clipboard. Using the plus symbol again you can also take a picture to upload to CloudApp, or go to your Photo Library to pull a file as well. It’s pretty handy if you want to take a shot and share the link on your Tumblr, blog, or Twitter.
The Competition
There’s a lot of competition for cloud-based storage, two of them which are very popular on the Mac and have both iPhone and desktop versions. The first is iDisk, which comes as a part of the MobileMe service. It costs $99 per year for MobileMe ($69 with the purchase of a new Apple device), so it’s not free. Plus, it only holds 20GB worth of storage, so if you’re not using any of MobileMe’s other features, then it’s not really worth the money. Apple does have an iPhone and iPad version of iDisk as well.
Shorten Links or Share Pics with Cloudette for CloudApp
The big contender here though, is Dropbox. The popular service holds up to 2GB worth of data on its servers for free, with upgraded plans going up to 100GB for $199 a year. Dropbox has apps for both the iPad and iPhone, and also has a desktop version. The downside to Dropbox is that it stores all of your files on your hard drive as well, and syncs with the Dropbox servers automatically. Although this makes transferring files pretty quick, it does take up local storage, so if you’re running on an 11-inch MacBook Air with a small hard drive, that might be a consideration. That said, it still has more available storage than CloudApp, and no limitations on daily uploads.
The Verdict
So what’s the end result? CloudApp is a great free service that’s perfect for shortening URLs, linking quick notes or websites to friends, or keeping small files online similar to a small USB key.
Cloudette for CloudApp provides all of the same functions as the website itself, and makes it easy to move around your files via your iPhone. It’s one of those apps that does one thing and does it very well. What more can you really ask for?
Know Where Your Money’s Going With Expenditure
It can often be difficult to keep up with all of your purchases and really see where your money is going each week. Even if you take time to balance your bank account, you’ll often not notice where small amounts of money are going to coffee, apps, and more.
Expenditure is an app that aims to help alleviate this problem by making it simple to record all of your cash flows on the go. Whether you make money from selling some used books or spend $5 on lunch, you can keep track of where your money’s going. Let’s dive in and see if this app is what your budget needs to keep you on track.
Getting Started
Expenditure makes it easy to get started with an informative Getting Started guide that opens when you first run the app. Step through the quick tutorial to see how to use each of the major features, or press the x button in the corner to close the tutorial and get started entering your expenses.
Get started quickly with the informative intro guide
If you’ve held off on getting an app to keep track of finances for fear that it would be too complex, you’ll be pleased to see that Expenditure is very simple to use. The main screen on the left shows your current balance with expenses from top categories listed underneath. There’s not much to see yet since we haven’t added any transactions, so tap the New Transaction button here to get started. Now just enter the amount you spent, or if you’re recording an income, tap the green Income button to make it a positive amount of money. Press Ok when you’re finished.
Enter new transactions quickly
Your new transaction will now be ready for your to add extra information. Expenditure lets you categorize your expenses; if you can’t find a category that sounds correct for your expense, scroll down to the bottom of the list to add a new one. You can also add a photo of your purchase and enter a note so you can quickly remember what you bought. Alternately, if you’re in a hurry, just press Save transaction and you can add more info later.
Categorize expenses and add a note or image to make it easy to remember
Keep up With Your Transactions
Now that you’ve added an expense, you’ll see a negative value on your home screen, along with the expense listed under the top categories. As you add more expenses and payments over time, you’ll see a better picture of where your money’s going. Tab the button under the top amount to switch between Top categories, Top months, and Recent transactions.
See all your transactions in a glance
Tap a category name to open all expenses in that category. These will be displayed by month, with the total amount for the category listed on the bottom. Select a transaction to see more info about it in a picture-perfect receipt.
Look back at your transactions
The transaction screen lets you see all the info you’ve added to a note. Just swipe left over the receipt to see any notes or photos you added to a transaction, and you can edit any of the information as you need. Or, if you’ve made a mistake and want to remove a transaction, just pull down on the receipt to delete it. This app makes great use of a photo-realistic environment to make it easy and delightful to use with little touches like this.
See all of a transaction's details, or pull the receipt down to delete it
Adding Special Transactions
All of your daily transactions won’t be static Dollar or Euro amounts. Sometimes you may want to add a repeating expense, such as a mobile phone charge, or you may need to add an expense in a foreign currency. Expenditure makes it easy to keep up with all of these types of transactions.
When you need to add an expense in a foreign currency, press the double arrow button on the top right of the input screen. Select the currency you need from the list, and Expenditure will then show the expense in the new currency with the conversion into your native currency underneath. You can update your exchange rates online from the settings page so you’ll always see the correct conversions. Then, you can add a repeating charge right from an expense’s overview page; just press the Not Repeating button, and select how often the charge should be repeated.
Expenditure works great with international transactions
Importing and Exporting Data
One problem with many iOS apps is that they’re often not designed to share data with your desktop applications or other apps on your device. Expenditure, however, makes it easy to move your financial data to any app you need. From the settings page, just press the Export transactions button. Select any transactions you wish to export, or tap Select all on the top, then press Attach to mail. This will let you email yourself a .csv formatted copy of your transactions, as well as an .exptr file that you can use to import data directly back into Expenditure.
Export all of your data and change your settings easily
You can then open the CSV file in any standard spreadsheet app, or even import it into your favorite desktop finance tool such as Quicken. Or, if you need to re-import your financial data into Expenditure, select the .exptr file and open it in Expenditure. This will import all of your transactions, including images, notes, and categories you may have added. With these options, you’ll be sure to never lose the financial data you’ve put into Expenditure.
Open your CSV formatted data in any spreadsheet, or import transactions to Expenditure
Conclusion
We were very impressed with Expenditure’s polish and strong feature set. It manages to handle a wide variety of transactions while still remaining very simple to use. The only problem we experienced were occasional crashes when adding a photo to a transaction; otherwise, Expenditure worked great. Plus, since you can always export your financial data, you don’t feel trapped with your data stuck in one app. The only thing more we could want would be a Mac and PC program that made it this easy to manage our expenses!
Weekly Poll: Which Apple Device Tops Your Holiday Wish List?
It’s that time of year again. You know, the one where you hope to find awesome Apple gifts under the tree only to be disappointed with yet another shirt that doesn’t fit.
Sure, some say it’s all about giving but here at AppStorm we want to know what you’re greedily hoping to receive this year (or perhaps purchase for yourself). Are you finally going to toss out that iPhone 3G in favor of an iPhone 4? Or maybe you have your eye on that new watch-centric nano.
If you’re hoping for one of these devices, vote in the poll on the right.
