TiltShift By imimux

We’ll start with the basics, which is about all your going to get from this app. You can take your own pictures or load images in from your Photo Albums, and save your images when your finished tweaking them. No emailing them, no in-app sharing.

On to the tools.TiltGen does have some nice “extra” options like two different blur types “Gauss” and “Lens”, and a “bloom” feature that can give your night shots that Bokeh effect, which TiltShiftGen doesn’t have. Both apps have radial and linear blurs, saturation, brightness and contrast.

TiltShift lets you chose between visual guides so you can actually see where your blurring is fading off at which can come in handy on the small screen.

Both apps also allow you to tilt, and resize your blur area via multi-touch and pinching, although I did notice a fairly significant delay between update with TiltShift each time I made adjustments to my blur area, and all of the different tools are very sensitive so dialing in an exact setting takes a bit of getting used to.

At $0.99, it’s a good buy, and if you absolutely must have the bokeh effect, then TiltGen is the way to go. As you can see from the before and after below, you can get some pretty impressive effects.

BEFORE & AFTER IMAGES FOR TILTGEN

click for large image

TiltShiftGen by Art&Mobile

You know how sometimes you get a feeling an app is going to be good simply based on the icon? (I’m not suggesting you actually do this) Well, TiltShiftGen gave me that feeling, and I wasn’t disappointed in the least!

Right away I notice TiltShiftGen’s UI. Very Apple-like. It doesn’t look like a native iPhone UI, but it’s enough that right away makes it feel familiar. Very clean, large buttons for my fat fingers, and even the pixel font used is very readable. I think it’s ok to stray from looking completely like the iPhone UI, but that’s something I didn’t like about TiltShift. It was too far from what most people are used to and took some time to get comfortable with.

TiltShiftGen has the glossy menus at the bottom where they should be, and even though they took a sub-menu approach, it’s still very intuitive where you are with the arrow pointing down to the parent menu selection. With TiltShift, all the menus were at the top which just didn’t feel right.

As we move into the settings I am very happy to see that I can post my creations to Twitter for everyone to ignore, I mean bask in my awesomeness! And I can do so using twitpic, twitgoo, or yfrog.

Diving a little deeper into the settings I see, “Communities” with Flickr, Facebook, and BigCanvas PhotoShare. At first I thought I was going to be able to post directly to these from the app, but alas I was wrong. It simply opens Safari and takes you to these sites for you to do your own manual posting.

I don’t understand why these are even in here. It’s very misleading and unless Art&Mobile is planning on adding in-app Facebook, and Flickr posting as a feature, I suggest they remove it. It’s unnecessary and could cause someone to write bad things about it. ;)

Other settings include, “Resolution” where you can change your size from 1200×1600, native to the 2.0 MP camera, all the way down to 320×427. Great for posting your Tweets and not having to send such a large file. There’s also the “Shake for Reset” and “Autoload Image” which you can turn on and off as you please. All in all a nice set of features.

Now onto the actual tilt-shift part of TiltShiftGen. Just like TiltShift, it has Radial and Linear Blurs, Saturation, Brightness and Contrast. One thing this app had that TiltShift didn’t is Vignetting. I think this feature is more valuable than the bloom effect of TiltShift. It really puts a “polish” on the end result and used correctly enhances the tilt-shift effect. The controls were very responsive and I was able to quickly get to the desired result as the image updated fairly fast and I didn’t have to continuously minimize the controls each time I wanted to see what changes I was making.

As we mentioned before, TiltShiftGen has the ability to post to Twitter and save it to your Gallery, but also lets you sent it by email, another feature lacking from TiltShift. It’s not crucial. You can always mail it from your Gallery the old fashioned way. However, reducing the number of steps to accomplish something you’re probably going to want to do anyway, is an added benefit.

Also weighing in at $0.99 TiltShiftGen is another great buy.

BEFORE & AFTER IMAGES

click for large image

Summary

TiltShift may have more tools, but TiltShiftGen wins this hands down with features alone. The UI is superior, the controls are more responsive and really there’s just no comparison. If Art&Mobile add Facebook and Flickr API implementation, this app would be over the top!

Photo by @dandenny

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iPhone App Head To Head – TiltShift vs. TiltShiffGen

I recently had the pleasure of sending Andy Hatkoff, the Vice President, OEM and Technology Licensing at PANTONE some questions about their iPhone app myPANTONE. myPANTONE is an awesome companion for designers and creatives alike. We are excited to bring this information from behind the app and a review of the app itself.

The iPhone is a perfect platform to carry a pocket PANTONE guide, what steps have you taken to make this be the easiest way to locate and use the PANTONE colors you need?

In the development of myPANTONE, one of the key fundamentals in the design of the app and its user interface was to make it easy for the user to find the desired PANTONE colors.  To that end we have taken advantage of the iPhone’s “touchablity” with the fanned out guide view and allowing the user to move about the guide until they locate the color range they wish and then by touching the page desired bringing up a close-up few of a numerous pages and scrolling through the colors in a page view.  The idea was find the general area of color and then “zoom in” to get a closer view of the colors.  I liken this to mapping solutions that let to zoom in closer for more detail once you have the area geographic area identified. Another approach is the SEARCH function that allows the user to simply type in the PANTONE number desired.  myPANTONE will then return the colors where  those numbers are used. myPANTONE also provides color sorting in two ways (1) the standard order used in the fan guides and (2) a sort in more of a chromatic type sequence.  This make chromatic type sequence makes it simple to find, for instance all the reds or blue,  etc.

How accurate is the iPhone screen and what steps have you taken to make sure that the color displayed on screen are correct?

iPhone screens are not synonymous with color accuracy.  There are a number of limitations and issues that make accuracy of the display of colors on an iPhone a problematic.  ANY app on the iPhone that uses color to its benefit (including photo apps) suffers from the same issue – iPhones are not meant to be color accurate. There exist differences on the displays between the various versions of the iPhone. For example: the first iPhones were set to a cooler white point that made the screen whiter and bluer, while subsequent versions use a warmer color temperature and different white point.   From a developer’s point of view the Software Developer Kit (SDK) provided by Apple does not give us access to anything about the actual display except its size. At this point in time, the SDK does not offer the possibility to provide any control over the calibration of the display.  Additionally, issues such as ambient lighting and the angle from which the screen is held (and viewed) can affect the perception of color.

Because of these inherent limitations, we would caution users of myPANTONE (or any other color intensive app) should not be used to validate and approve color.  MyPANTONE is a creative tool and not a production tool. It allows users  to capture the idea of color with a wonderful mobile device  that is used broadly in the design community. The user of myPANTONE  can select a color and play with it, amend it and use it as inspiration in the design process. That’s what myPANTONE was developed for; and it is what you can expect of an iPhone app. A PANTONE Color guide should ALWAYS be used for an accurate representation of a color in a print environment, regardless of whether you used an app or a monitor in the design process.

Creatives are on the go more and more these days especially as mobile technology is getting faster and easier to use. This app allows you to share via email, post to the myPANTONE site & send to other devices. Why is sharing and integration the best possible outcome for an app like this?

It was important for us not only to provide a way to deliver a creative tool, but also to add significant utility and shareablitity.  By taking advantage of the iPhone’s  connectivity functionality, we can e-mail a palette as not only an HTML document, but also as enclosures whereby the user created palette can used within the Adobe Creative Suite and QuarkXPress.  Getting information into the iPhone was only one half of the equation for the user experience- the other half is getting the information out of the iPhone and a way to make it useful and usable.  Through support of the popular design and page layout apps it is now possible to create a palette in your iPhone with myPANTONE and then easily integrate and use the palette in the design process.

At what point did a PANTONE app seem like a logical step?

It was clear that the paradigm for creativity was rapidly shifting from the confines of the desktop (or laptop) to a mobile environment.  The device was there waiting to be populated with tools.  In the same way that the computer is rich environment that will only become useful if  it was populated with meaningful solutions, the mobile platform of the iPhone also offered a robust canvas waiting to be inhabited with solutions that provide a rich user experience.  In focus groups and discussions with our customers, it was apparent that their creativity is was not restricted to the time they spent in front of computer.  They were seeking the freedom to be creative wherever they are and wherever they go.  The iPhone represented a great platform to untether their creativity and give them the capabilities to work with a highly portable version of the PANTONE Color Systems.

How many different variations of the current app have there been before it went to the final version?

It is hard know exactly how many concepts, wireframes and prototypes were iterated before we decided upon the current implementation.  Needless to say we wanted to take full advantage of the iPhone user experience and provide a robust app that would be not only cool but have a high degree of utility.  Our team wanted to make sure the app deployed the touchable aspects of the iPhone to full advantage and at the same time provide a visually interesting environment for a creative audience.  Obviously dealing with the size of the screen and understanding that apps need to be focused and are not just a small desktop application were challenges we had to understand.  At the end of the process, we were delighted that we had successfully married the user interface and capabilities of the iPhone platform (touch, e-mail, GPS, voice functions) with an app that is not only fun, but useful.

Now that the app has launched, is this app finished or will there always been a constant refinement of the app and pushing it into new developments and integrations?

When we were designing the myPANTONE app, we had so many more features, functions and product ideas that, rest assured, there will be ongoing enhancements to the existing product, but also a series of the other apps.  The mobile platform is an exciting way to deliver tools to our audiences.  Also, the mobile environment is part of a larger strategy where the desktop, the web and mobile will all be tied into a large Pantone ecosystems that will have a high level of interoperability and synergy.  The key is providing access and usage of the PANTONE Systems regardless of whether you are on the go, on the web or on the desktop.

The app is listed at $9.99 how does pricing weigh in to the app? Did you think of other price-points and has this one worked for you thus far?

The setting of price points provided many interesting internal discussions.  I think the market is in the formative stages whereby developers are trying to balance the original concept whereby a vast majority of apps were free.  But as the mobile platform evolves to serve as not only a delivery vehicle that is beyond games, social networking and other similar apps, there is a realization that developers can provide highly useful tools that can be monetized.  We have been extremely pleased with the response to myPANTONE.  In less than 2 months since it was launched we have over 27,000 downloads.  It is a learning experience and the customers ultimately will tell us what is working (and what is not).

The Review

myPANTONE gives you the ability to have several PANTONE colorbooks in your hand at any given place in the world. This is a perfect app for designers, Art Directors, Creative Directors, Interior Designers or anyone that has to deal with PANTONEs. myPANTONE is an amazing app to use. The app has a simple and clean user interface that is both intuitive and consistent with normal iPhone standard applications. The beautiful thing about myPANTONE is it operates like a PANTONE swatch book and you can rotates and flick through colors. This is extremely enticing if you have ever needed to leaf through a PANTONE book while you were on the go and needed something. However, this is not just for people that use PANTONE’s anyone could enjoy this app and learn new things about colors, hues and how to make a color palette.

The fundamentals are simple and the app gives you access to big and bulky swatch books with just a few flicks of your fingers. Some other awesome features are the fact that you can share your colors between your machines (that will open the colors in In-Design or Quark or CorelDraw) or to your friends. You can email the colors which is great if someone in the office is asking for a color palette or a client wants to know their PANTONE color.

myPANTONE also allows you to pull colors from a photo which is great if you are trying build a color palette from a photo for a room or a design. This feature works flawlessly. I used a very complex image and this app was able to handle it with relative ease.The only minus that I found with the app is the fact that there is not a way to see the CMYK value for a PANTONE chip. This seems a bit off to me as color books give the CMYK value. It gives the RGB but not the CMYK. Aside from that being the only feature that I could see the app was lacking, this app surpassed my expectations.

Some other features include:

• You can capture and extract colors from photos and snap to the closest PANTONE Color.

• Automatically generates harmonious color combinations

• cross-reference PANTONE colors to other PANTONE color libraries

• Email an HTML image of your palette

• Email color palettes that can be used in Adobe Creative Suite and QuarkXPress & CorelDraw

• Text & Voice annotations of palettes.

• Post notifications of new palettes to twitter and facebook

• GPS tagging of palettes

Conclusion

myPANTONE is the perfect companion for any designer/creative that needs a simple and effective mobile solution. The pricepoint of the app is $9.99 which at first seemed high to me however, if you have used any PANTONE product you know that they are not low dollar and being able to have several swatch books in one application is more than ideal instead of ordering swatch books in paper form. The app has a robust enough feature list to be listed at $9.99  and more importantly is an app that anyone can use and get a grasp on quickly and easily.

Screenshots

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myPANTONE: Questions, Answers and a Review

Delibar is a full featured Delicious.com Mac client. Delibar focuses on giving Mac OS X users an easy and quick tool for searching, managing and sharing their Delicious bookmarks. Delibar will be your best friend while using Delicious!

Delibar is a beautiful Mac App by Shiny Frog that solves the problem of being able to share your bookmarks to delicious simply and easily. I know what you’re thinking, “Oh good grief Charlie Brown! Another delicious application that I will never use?!?!” Lets stop that train of thought there. If you don’t know Delicious is a social bookmarking platform that has been around since 2003. In 2006 Yahoo acquired what was then del.icio.us now known as delicious. Delicious provides a way for you to bookmark your sites  and share them with your friends, co-workers or anyone who has access to the site. Delicious allows you to “tag” your websites so that other people searching on delicious can find specific resources and sites based on your “tags”.

So which app is right for you? A plugin? A Standalone? But if I get a standalone I can’t update it from the site! Not true. Delibar has all of this covered in a small and neat package. I think I have tried every for of delicious app or plugin at some point and could never get anything that worked just right. Delibar has solved that and  I am can undoubtedly say that “Delibar brought the fun back to delicious”. No, that was not a paid plug. The reason that Delibar makes this so easy is because it utilizes  a bookmarklet to upload the URL which is great because you can click, tag and then go do something else. A really big asset to the app is that if  other people have already tagged this site, in the right column it shows you what they have already tagged so you too, can tag the site with the same tags (with a few clicks) or add your own.

Delibars integration is very good it allows you to share via email, twitter, shorten the URL, share with MarsEdit or send to Facebook all from its nice little compact interface. A benefit of Delibar is that you can run it in menubar icon only so you can that precious dock space for apps that you run on a daily basis and let your Delicious network only be a click away. The UI of Delibar is amazingly simple, clean and beautiful. Its not overpowering nor weak and puny. It is also is very easy to setup and use on a daily basis.

Delibar is definitely the last delicious app you will ever need. The app is updated regularly which is a great sign that this app will receive some awesome features in the next version. We can only hope that the second released will be as feature packed and successful as the first.

More Info

Site | Twitter | ShinyFrog Home

What is Shiny Frog?

Shiny frog is a small software and design company based in Italy.  Since 2005 they have been dealing with web design and development of high quality applications for Mac and iPhone. Their mission is creating applications that combine nice look-and-feel and usability with a great set of features, both for Mac and Web.

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The last delicious app you’ll ever need?

Dan Rubin @danrubin | Site | Some Work Samples

designer, singer, photographer, philosopher, polymath in training; improving the world through design. also, half-English by birth.

I use a combination of Textmate and CSSEdit, and couldn’t be happier with the two. I used to use BBEdit back in the days before editors were cool, but I left it behind the day I first encountered Textmate. For me, using an app is as much about features and functionality as it is about “feel” — I need to enjoy using it, and looking at it for hours on end. BBEdit never quite reached that level, Textmate did the first time I launched it.
CSSEdit is likely the most underrated application on the Mac for front-end developers — it does one thing (CSS), and it does it incredibly well. I’m constantly giving demos of it to people, and they all end up falling in love with it (a similar reaction to people really using a Mac for the first time). My favorite feature is the ability to view a live site, extract its stylesheets and edit them, seeing the effects in real-time on the live site.

I’ve tried Coda and Espresso, and though I love Panic for Transmit (it’s all I’ve used for FTP/SFTP since at least the OS 9 days) and MacRabbit for CSSEdit, the attempt both developers have made to squeeze so many different apps into one interface falls short. The features of CSSEdit haven’t made it into Espresso (and it feels like CSSEdit has been forgotten as well, though I hope that isn’t the case), and Coda’s file transfer feels nothing like Transmit — if both all-in-one apps incorporated the full feature set of their publisher’s exceptional standalone apps, I would be more inclined to fall for them…

The theme for me is simplicity: Textmate and CSSEdit both focus on allowing a limited set of tasks to be performed as easily as possible, and because of that they both succeed.

Niki Brown @nikibrown | Site | Some Work Samples

I’ve been designing since I was a little kid – drawing cartoons, making fake newspapers, and planning my plot to take over the world. (Just kidding). My early interests in design were heightened when I got my first computer, it was love at first sight! I made my first website in 1996, with the help of geocities and word-art.

I use dreamweaver mostly for the instant visual feedback. I tend to use the split view (code & design) since I’m 2 parts designer 1 part coder. I know that the Dreamweaver design view isn’t completely accurate (I still check designs in safari, FF, chrome, and satan…i mean IE) , but it gives me the fastest feedback on how my design looks as I code. I’m also a fan of the auto complete feature and the source formating.

I have also been using Espresso which i got with the most recent Macheist bundle, and have tried Textmate and coda. When I’m on the go with my EEEPC I use Notepad++ mostly because its free and was easy to figure out.

Chris Spooner @chrisspooner | Site | Some Work Samples

I’m a creative Designer, avid Blogger and I’m generally crazy about pretty colours and shapes.

Nowadays I tend to use Coda for all my XHTML, CSS and the odd snippet of PHP. Previously I’d been a Dreamweaver user simply because it’s the app that introduced me to web design so I simple stuck with it out of comfort. It wasn’t until I switched over to Mac that there was a selection of great looking coding apps such as Coda, Textmate and Espresso that took my fancy. I tried out all the demo versions but always went back to Dreamweaver because I’d got used to the workflow and shortcuts. I hated how Dreamweaver took years to boot up, but I also couldn’t get used to an app automatically closing my tags for me right after I’d written it after being used to DWs ‘bracket, slash’ way of working.

Nevertheless, I was still determined to switch to an alternative, so I went ahead and bought Coda on one of their discount days and stuck it out over the first week or so. Now I’m happily typing away on a swish looking app that loads at light speed, I’m also enjoying a whole new collection of features that I’d certainly miss should I migrate again!

Adii Rockstar @adii | Site | Some Work Samples

Entrepreneur, co-founder of WooThemes and general creator of Rockstar Awesomeness!

First thing you’ve got to note, is that I’m not a natural coder and that what I know, I’ve taught myself. So when it comes to choosing a development app, I use whatever works for me, because of convenience; and not necessarily because it’s a hardcore development app. Anyway… When I switched from PC to Mac 2 years ago, I had to find a replacement for Dreamweaver and my best available option at the stage was Coda, which I continue to use to this day. I love the fact that’s it’s simple and uncluttered, as I don’t need much else from my development app. I’ve tried Espresso a few times, but I think I’ve just become to used to Coda.

Chris Coyier @chriscoyier | Site | Some Work Samples

Lead cascader. Head tag closer.

TextMate is the code editor of choice on the Mac. It’s incredibly simple to add in commands that do simple things. For example, I set up command-L to wrap selected text in <li> tags. I write a lot of HTML, so that type of stuff is awesome. But yet, I end up using Coda more than any other editor. I work live right on servers most of the time and having it all integrated with FTP is priceless. I’ve been trying to switch to the ExpanDrive / TextMate combo, which I think will be the winner. What I really want is a merging of the code editing powers of TextMate with the integrated awesomeness of Coda. And to be fair, I haven’t really given Espresso a fair shake yet. I did a little Beta testing but it wasn’t compelling enough at the time to make a big impression for me.

Jeff Croft @JCroft | Site | Some Work Samples

Knowin’ nothing in life, but to be legit. Don’t quote me boy, cuz I ain’t said shit.

For pretty much all of my coding, I use TextMate on Mac OS X. When TextMate first came out, it quickly became my favorite text editor, and the bundle approach to extensibility ensured that it continued to serve my needs, even as I explored different languages. I still think it’s the best overall app for my needs today. However, I do admit that I’ve grown frustrated with the lack of a significant update to the app since it’s original release. It’s still very good, but enough time has passed that it’s time for a refresh. I will note that I’m a big fan of Panic’s software and have considered switching to Coda, especially now that there are Django and Python plug-ins for it, but I have a certain inertia causing me to stick with TextMate — sometimes familiarity rules.

Tim Van Damme @MaxVoltar | Site | Some Work Samples

Designer at Made by Elephant, blogger at Maxvoltar. Will design for a warm bed.

A bit of history: I started with Microsoft Frontpage. As I learned that writing HTML manually was the way to go, I switched to Dreamweaver. After I said goodbye to Windows and started using a Mac, Dreamweaver was terrible slow. I did some research and ended up with a combination of Textmate, CSSEdit and Transmit. When Espresso launched, I didn’t like it at first. Maybe it was because it’s a Belgian product, but I forced myself to use it for an entire week. It just clicked. It combined the simplicity of Textpattern with the sexiness (and a lot of features) of CSSEdit. Another important aspect was the workflow, a reason why I never used Coda (it looks great, and a lot of people say some really positive stuff about it, but it just isn’t for me I guess).

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Web Dev App Reviews from the Pros – Part 1, Mac

The Review

First, let me just say that Loren did his homework; Tweetie 2 is everything one could want in a mobile Twitter app. Since he re-wrote the entire app from the ground up, Tweetie 2 is smaller, faster, and more sleek, than the original application. The user interface is a beautiful adaptation of a Twitter app that implements an easy-to-use design. For example, when viewing your time line or @mentions feed, you can refresh the feed by “pulling down” on the feed. You would normally scroll to the top of the app to see the most recent tweets anyway, so this is certainly convenient. Also, you now have the ability to double tap on direct messages and @mentions to mark them all as read. Additionally, all tweets in the replies/main time-line are able to be indexed and searched in real time. These are just a few examples of the unique features that make this app better than its predecessor.

The original Tweetie application won an Apple Design Award in 2009 for being cutting edge, and I strongly believe that Loren is in the running for another one. Tweetie 2 uses the iPhone platform to its full advantage and adds features that are not only simple to use, but are also 100% useful. Tweetie 2 is heavily designed to keep you focused on the task at hand, which is to send tweets. As seen on the “Compose” screen, there is a “down” arrow that allows you to hide the keyboard, as well as expose several other features, such as shortening links and adding an image.

The Price Debate

As previously mentioned, Loren has received some flack by not offering an upgrade price. Now, if you are buying this app for the first time, it’ll cost you $2.99, which is cheaper than a few of its top competitors. However, if you are upgrading, it’s a bit different. You paid for the first one at the price of $2.99, and the second is also $2.99. This brings you to a total of $5.98, which is about the price of a $5 Footlong from Subway with some tax. It is also just barely above its competitors:

• Echofon (formerly Twitterfon) – $4.99

• SimplyTweet – $4.99

• Birdfeed - $4.99

If you ask me, with all the research and functionality over gadgets and whistles that Tweetie 2 has, I would pay for each additional update to this app. My reasoning is that Loren literally thought about all sides of this app. The only negatives that I have seen or heard, is that there are no themes like there were in Tweetie 1.0, and it also doesn’t have a “Reply All” function (I know there is a way to reply to multiple people in one tweet, but I am talking about multiple people in a time line.)

Now, to the controversy (that I wasn’t going to talk about, *cough*.) Do I think that Loren has a good reason to charge original users to upgrade? Simply put, yes, I do . He completely re-wrote the app to be faster, kinda like Apple did with Snow Leopard (and their upgrade was $30.) He also added more features that impact your user experience everyday, like Adobe does with its products (except Tweetie doesn’t cost $700 for an upgrade.) Now, regardless if you agree with me that he has a reason to change or not, you should be able to agree that this app is stellar and there is not like anything else on the market.

Concluding Thoughts

The little details that have gone into this app separate it from all other Twitter apps. Once again, Tweetie 2 sets the bar high, through its speed, sleek new features, and its amazing user experience. Most importantly, though, you should purchase Tweetie 2 because it was created by a developer who pours his heart and soul into his work, and doesn’t settle for anything less than stellar. Tweetie is setting the trend for iPhone Twitter clients and I am deeply looking forward to seeing what the next step for Loren Brichter is.

Note: Do you need help using Tweetie while on your iPhone? Loren even thought of that too. He made an iPhone optimized help guide that gives you all the simple/advanced features for the app.

Screenshots

More Info

Full Feature list/Reveal Post

Twitter

iTunes Link

Site

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Tweetie 2: Beautiful on Your iPhone

Helvetireader

Helvetireader is a userscript that pares down Google Reader to the essentials. In particular, it is made for looking at just unread feeds in the expanded view, using Keyboard Shortcuts instead of on-screen buttons. It’ is not going to suit how everyone uses Google Reader, so you can take the CSS and personalize to your hearts content!

Better GReader

Better GReader is a Firefox Add-on that adds a menu of options that you can enable within Google Reader. You can find a list of the scripts featured at the download page.

Smart Subscribe Button

The Smart Google Reader Subscribe Button places an unobtrusive feed icon in the upper-right portion of the screen, allowing two-click subscription to feeds that are encountered and also lets you know if you are already subscribed to that feed or not.

Read it Later

Read it Later is a Firefox Addon that allows you to save pages of interest to read later. It eliminates cluttering of bookmarks with sites that are merely of a one-time interest.

Google Reader +

Google Reader + Twitter adds an option to posts allowing you to tweet that post with one press of a button.

Google Reader + Bookmarks adds an option to posts allowing you to add that post to Google Bookmarks with one press of a button.

Google Reader + Facebook adds an option to posts allowing you to share that post on Facebook with one press of a button.

Google Reader + Delicious adds an option to posts allowing you to add that post to Delicious with one press of a button.

Wrap Up

So, that’s that. Those are my favorite Google Reader game changers that are always inhabiting my reader. If you want a few more options take a look at Mashable’s 50+ Google Reader Extensions and Scripts For Firefox…that should keep you busy for a while. Also, if you have any favorites not mentioned here, please comment with a link!

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5 Tips to Improve Google Reader

While using Screensnapr I found it a very simple and easy to use program to take and share screenshots on your Windows based PC. The program was very unobtrusive and it ran in the background without any real notifications or pop-ups. (In all reality there were times I forgot it was even running) This is very crucial for something like a screenshot app because you may need it at times and others you need it to just blend into the background. For this app to not draw so many system resources is a big perk for a screens

Setting up Screensnapr is very easy. Downloading was super quick, (the size of the app is only about 74kb total) and set up took maybe 30 seconds to unzip and open the program. Lastly using the program was simple, just press the hot key, (ctrl+1 by default) select the area you would like to capture and you are provided with a url of your image.

As to the other features I was especially fond of the custom FTP options, which let you store and access the images to the server of your choice. Also the built in url shortening could come in handy while using twitter or any other social media applications.

Features:

• Simple and minimal interface
• Light weight and unobtrusive to your computer
• Easy to use
• Custom FTP options and built in url shortening
• It’s FREE!

Rating:

Screensnapr was easy to use and was very reliable. Overall I would suggest this app for anyone on a Windows based PC.

More Screensnapr

Site | Twitter | Facebook

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Screensnapr – A wicked alternative for PC users

First Impressions

The first time launching the application, you’re presented with a registration screen. You will need to have an eBuddy account in order to use the service. If you don’t already have one, registration is very simple from within the application. Once registered, you can then begin adding instant messaging accounts. I was able to add my Yahoo, Google Talk, Facebook and AIM accounts with no trouble at all.

Features

eBuddy is full of some truly great features. Being able to access all of your instant messaging services in one place automatically makes this one of my favorite instant messaging apps. It even supports multiple screen names on the same messaging service. Another detail I appreciate, even though it’s a rather small one, is the message notification chime. To me, the chime is far more pleasant than the default chime in AIM.

The biggest feature eBuddy touts is push notifications. When you exit the application, you can opt to receive push notifications when you receive a message on any one of your accounts. Sound and vibration are options that can be turned on or off via the app’s settings screen.

While push is the most appealing feature of eBuddy, it also leaves a few things to be desired. Push notifications from eBuddy notify you that you received a message and tell you from whom, but the message itself is not displayed in the notification. To read the message requires launching the eBuddy application. I also noticed that when receiving a push notification from a Facebook contact, a string of numbers shows up instead of the contact’s name. Having used the AIM iPhone application, I much prefer being able to see the message in the notification pop-up.

Another thing lacking in eBuddy’s push notification is that it only allows me to stay signed in for up to 30 minutes, after which push notifications stop. I would much prefer to stay logged in for at least 24 hours, if not permanently. A push notification is also sent to the iPhone when you are logged out of eBuddy after the time you’ve specified in the app’s settings. This notification seems unnecessary.

The only other feature that is noticeably lacking in eBuddy is landscape mode. I’m not sure how difficult it is to enable such a feature, but the application’s developer promises it will be coming soon. They also promise other free and frequent updates in the future.

Final Thoughts

Overall eBuddy is a very solid iPhone application. It’s one of the few iPhone applications that enable access to multiple instant messaging services in the same place. The most-notable application providing a similar service is BeejiveIM, priced at $9.99. With a well-designed, easy-to-use interface and a price that can’t be beat (free from the iTunes App Store), eBuddy is definitely an application worth downloading, and certainly worth keeping an eye on for future updates and enhancements.

Where can I see more eBuddy?

Site | iTunes | Twitter

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eBuddy iPhone – Messaging for Everybody

As you may have read Fuel Your Apps went to Awesome Inc over the weekend for a Mini App conference. The content was amazing and learning and sharing were the key things that participants and speakers engaged in. The conference was divided into Four Tracks where you could learn General things, iPhone Beginner, iPhone Experienced or technical. While being there they encouraged popping around from session to session to engage and take as much benefit as home as possible.

Noah Kagan – Facebook @noahkagan

The conference kicked off with a Keynote from Noah Kagan who dropped some science on the people in attendance. Even though in the US all we think about is iPhone and some BlackBerry’s thrown in there 50% of the the rest of the world is on a Symbian OS phone. So there is more mobile development out in the world besides iPhone apps. Kagan talked about how he used to work at Facebook and created the Your Pimp Name apps. Kagan talked about the new “lazy web” where a user doesn’t have to update their devices they do it automatically to show their location or status. Auto location updates have caught on the most in urban markets through devices such as Boost Mobile. Noah Kagan then talked about how in the net 5 years in mobile marketing you will start to see much more GPS based advertising and has a hunch that most everyone will have a smart phone in the next 5 years.

John Soward – University of Kentucky @jpsoward

“Choosing a development strategy for your iPhone application” is what John Soward from the University of Kentucky talked about.  There are 3 different dev platforms to explore when you publish an app: Web-app, Application or Hybrid of the two. The reasons to consider are: a Native Application will have access to the GPS as well as be able to use the wonderful SDK apple has provided. However if you design a webclip or a web-app you are not able to use all the full potential of the phone or setup payment through the appstore. There are also many pitfalls to having a webapp/clip. If the user can navigate away from the intended page in any way your app will be rated NC-17 because they could navigate to bad content. This is a challenge because if you are making a kids app for an iPod Touch and its NC-17 its not going to work.

Sam Soffes – Soff.es @samsoffes

Sam talked about his Bible app he developed that has been downloaded 1.5 Million times. Sam then talked about how pricing your app is crucial to the exposure you will get. Bible is a free app and would not have the same exposure if it was a pay app. Sam instructed everyone to keep the pricepoint as low as possible to enable you to have the most users possible. “If you’re not charging for the app and it has ads in it you better have a good reason. Which usually you don’t and you should just go ahead and sell it for .99 cents. “ Sam Soffes stressed over and over the importance of reading the Human Interface Guidelines and how that is key to making a successful application.

Slides

Sam also was kind enough to put up his slides from the presentation if you wanted to hope over and check them out.

Brendan Lim – Intridea @brendanlim

Brendan closed the conference with a talk about ubiquitous mobile. Lim mentioned how one day we may be connected to everything at every moment. Our phones could be credit cards they could store your car driving preferences. Applications and social media as we know it today could be one seamless experience. Much like if you were looking at a hotel that you just booked on your computer when you left the house it would be pushed to your mobile device and you could continue looking from there.

There were several other speakers that Fuel Your Apps was unable to see because of them speaking at the same time, other speakers included

Markus Spiering – Yahoo Blueprint @spieri

Zuv Tarsi – TuneWiki @ztarsi

Brian Slick – BriTer Ideas @BrianSlick

Jake Behrens – The Oklahoma Publishing @withfoam

Justin Raney – Apax Software @jarane2

This was an awesome event put on by the team at Awesome Inc. They have an amazing collaboration space setup for people in the community to use and share in art talks, conferences, gallery shows and work! If you are in the Lexington, KY are you should make it a point to stop by. I recommend you get your calendar out and mark next years mini conference down because this one was a huge success.

Can I Have More Info?

There are pictures and more information about the Awesome Inc. Mobile Mini-Conference (@awesome_inc) on their site. Give them a follow and a big thank you for doing so much for the app community!

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Awesome Inc Mini Conference Recap

Firefox

Use – Web Browser

Bonus – Install Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar to complete your toolbox

Size – 27-77MB (depending on addons)

Download Portable App | Visit Main Site

Thunderbird

Use – Email Client

Bonus – Also has RSS Capabilities

Size – 25MB

Download Portable App | Visit Main Site

Sunbird

Use – Calendar, Scheduler and GTD

Bonus – Leaves no personal information behind on the machine you run it on

Size – 17MB

Download Portable App | Visit Main Site

OpenOffice

Use – Office Suite including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, drawing package and database

Bonus – Compatable with MS Office, Word Perfect and Lotus

Size – 231MB

Download Portable App | Visit Main Site

Notepad++

Use – Text Editor

Bonus – Major features include syntax highlighting and auto-completion

Size – 10MB

Download Portable App | Visit Main Site

Xampp

Use – Setting up an integrated server package of Apache, mySQL, PHP and more

Bonus – Available in both a full and lite package depending on your personal needs

Size – 221MB

Download Portable App | Visit Main Site

FileZilla

Use – FTP Client

Bonus – Has an intuitive drag and drop interface

Size – 9MB

Download Portable App | Visit Main Site

Gimp

Used For – Editing Images

Size – 67MB

Download Portable App | Visit Main Site

7zip

Used For – Compressing and Uncompressing Files

Bonus – Compress and Uncompress 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2, and TAR. Uncompress RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB, and NSIS

Size – 2.5MB

Download Portable App | Visit Main Site

Sumatra PDF

Used For – Viewing PDFs

Bonus – Extremely small and starts very fast

Size – 1.5MB

Download Portable App | Visit Main Site

VLC

Used For – Media Player (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, XviD, WMV, mp3, ogg, avi, DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols)

Bonus – Can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network

Size – 32MB

Download Portable App | Visit Main Site

Toucan

Used For – Synchronise, backup and encrypt data

Bonus – Includes portable variables, point to places on you USB drive no matter what its drive letter is

Size – 3.1MB

Download Portable App

pidgin

Used For – Instant Messaging

Bonus – Works with AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo and more

Size – 50MB

Download Portable App | Visit Main Site

Your Turn

Were there any apps essential to your toolbox that I left out? Leave me a comment and let me know.

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Portable Web Toolbox

So, I was lucky enough to score an invite to a new app called Notable, created by ZURB. I say lucky and I really mean it. This app rocks!

Feedback

Notable is designed to be an app that teams who create websites can use to give feedback on projects. Their website states that it is the “Easiest way for teams to provide feedback on websites.” It is not only the easiest, it is also the most extensive. Within minutes of receiving my invite, I had a site into the app to begin testing. (To make this very easy, they provide a Firefox add-on which lets you capture a site with a single click.)

Feedback, Feedback, Feedback

As an app fan, I have tested out multiple feedback services. Notable utilizes familiar controls to highlight and comment areas, but expands greatly on the overall functionality. I immediately started highlighting areas of the site that I imported and making comments. When I was done, I noticed a down state on “Screenshot” and two buttons for “Code” and “Copywriting”. Can you guess what they let you do?

You got it! You are able to switch over to the source code and mark it up. It also strips all of the actual copy writing from the site and lays it out like an office document for easy reading and review. When I finished playing with these features, I saw the huge potential that Notable has. Most feedback apps that I have tested are geared towards making revisions or getting approval. Notable is designed to manage a project from start to finish.

Everyone can use it

Each person involved in the creation of a website can, and probably should, use this app. For a decent-sized project, you may have a designer, developer, copywriter and project manager. Oh, and don’t forget: the client! Notable provides a centralized location to review and provide feedback for all aspects of the design process. Understanding the need for this tool to be used by the team and also to get final approval from a client, Notable allows you to set permissions for each user.  (This means your client won’t have to see the designer/developer arm wrestling that went on during the building of the site.)

It’s all about the Team

Along with the ability to give feedback for multiple areas of the project, you also get the ability to view this feedback in several ways. This is vital when working in a team environment, where people have different preferences for consuming information.

Features Include:

• Section Feedback:

Each comment is highlighted with a yellow background in its viewing area: screenshot, code and copywriting.

• Dashboard Style:

Feedback is also displayed in well-designed layout including a screenshot with feedback list, each snippet of code that was commented on and any text that was commented on.

• PDF:

At the click of a button, a very eye-friendly pdf is created featuring the applicable parts of each section. (The one used in this sample was 1.3mb)

Those are the features that stood out from the crowd, but they also offer the standard ability to email feedback and send invitations for users to access the workspace.

My feedback

Overall, Notable was a joy to test out. The design is minimal, in the best way. It stays out of your way, providing excellent navigation with good usage of colors and sizing for buttons and titles. Creating users is very simple and the organization available for projects is deep. It takes a little getting used to the difference between workspaces and sets, but makes great sense once you have arranged them properly.

It’s hard to criticize functionality on an invitation-only beta app, but the one thing that I would like to have improved is importing a site without using the Firefox add-on. It is very easy to find how to import an image using the website alone, but I could not find a way to import a site by just typing a url. I highly recommend that you request an invite and check out this app. It has huge potential!

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Team-Oriented Feedback with Notable

The new generation Twitter client for people who value their time and are tired of information noise.

Mixero is a unique twitter client it prides itself on being able to characterize data, make it easy for you to find and use and be minimalistic when you don’t need it. Now before you get all bent out of shape about it not being Tweetdeck or Seesmic this app stands a chance. Why? It has all the features the others have. Except one. Multiple account support. However, the app hasn’t launched so we can’t dock them on that yet. Whats the good news? This app has some wicked features that are creative, fresh and functional.

Avatar Mode

This is probably one of my favorite & most innovative features I think have seen come to the twitter client spectrum. When you don’t have your twitter app up you still want to monitor it right? You just don’t want it to take up your whole screen. So what has the group at Mixero done? Just that. When you create people and groups that go into the Activelist (explained below) it hides on the righthand side of your screen with just the key avatars. It tells you if you have any tweets, if they have tweet or your search columns have updated. Why is this features amazing? Because you can continue other tasks and have this twitter client open and not be fully consumed by it.

Groups

Of course. Its a standard who wouldn’t? It however does ad some extra functionality to the normal groups feature. You can filter them by specific content. So lets say you have a group of power bloggers and you want to see if they reviewed the app Ghost yet. (hypothetical to my knowledge) You can see and it filters within that group and then  the group users tweets.

Activelist

Is a way for you to put all your I gotta keep tabs on people in one place. Search, group and individuals can be placed on this list. Why is this good? They will show up in Avatar mode and you will be able to keep fine tune track of them. This is a fresh way on the typical “groups” feature.

• Can include users, groups of users and channels.
• Shows information from all contacts, groups and channels as one timeline!
• You will be notified only about updates that are really important for you.
• Most recent updates are automatically shown on top and indicate the amount of unread messages.
• Synchronized! Your ActiveLists stay with you on any PC, mobile phone and browser.

Context

You can have multiple active lists. Why? Are you at work and only need to see people in your office? Working on a huge project and need to see people competing against your project? These are just a few uses for context. This is another brilliant idea for them to show up in Avatar mode by defining who is around in each context list.

• Create new ActiveLists and switch between them to read what is most appropriate to your current environment.
• Only get the information that is interesting for each of your locations or modes – Home, Office, Train, Most important, Buzz etc
• Synchronized!

More Features

These have just been a few notable features that I think will make this app stand out. However it has not launched yet and will be interesting to keep tabs on. There is plans for an iPhone app if you want more information check out the links below. I think this app has a great start at carving out its own niche in the twitter client realm. It has the standards and some innovative features to make it swing with the big players. Keep your eye on this app and see where it goes.

Need more Mixero?

Mixero is a multiple platform application that will be available for PC and Mac. I have tested it on a Mac but will be similar experience on a PC because it runs in adobe air.

Site | Twitter

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Mixero – A Creative Twitter Solution

I have setup multiple apps that I run like this but one of my favorites is Instapaper. If you’re like me you have 65 tabs open in your browser and you sometimes need to clear those out and check them later. Instapaper is an app that lets you add the links to their service through an applet and then you can look at them later. Great! So now I can get rid of my 65 tabs in firefox and be more productive because I don’t have all of these other distractions.

Video How-To

Resources

Instapaper

Fluid App

Instapaper Restyled

credit to finding this add-on to TimVanDamme Site | Twitter

Fluid Icons Flickr Group

Free Menubar Icon

instapapertif

This is designed by me (chadengle) I am giving this icon away free for whatever you wish. Did you end up using the icon? Take a screen cap and add it to our flickr group.

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Using Menu Extra SSB’s for Better Productivity

Unobtrusive, intuitive, and simple to use. Espionage is designed to integrate with Apple’s Finder seamlessly, so that you can protect only the data that you want protected, and without having to resort to any special “vaults”.

Espionage is an app for locking your stuff on a mac. I had the pleasure of reviewing this app of the last few weeks and I am sold. It blends into the background, its only there when you need it and that my friends is my favorite kind of app. Now, setting up the app to work with other applications on your system is super simple. What does this allow you to do? It allows you to protect folders and app’s you want to keeps safe. Regardless if you share your computer or not some things should be kept safe, especially email. If you have any clients or anyone that you care about (I call it the “mom effect” if you get embarrassed thinking about telling them stuff) you probably don’t want that info in the wrong hands. This app gives you peace of mind from having someone snooping on your machine in your e-mail or whatever else and when it comes to business and clients no one can be to careful.

ScreenShots:

Highlighted Features:

Application Associations

Espionage already works seamlessly with folders in the Finder, and now 2.0 brings that level of integration to other applications. Just as you can double-click on a folder to unlock it, you can now launch an application to unlock its data on-the-fly. Click the play button above to see this in action.

Sparsebundle Support

Introduced in Mac OS X Leopard, sparsebundles mean faster backups for encrypted folders. Instead of resending the entire folder, only the changes will be sent. Speaking of backups, Espionage 2.0 includes built-in backups functionality that makes it easy to restore your encrypted folders.

DelayedLauncher

built-in You’ve encrypted your Mail folder, but you’ve got it on your list of login items. That can cause problems if it launches before Espionage does and discovers that its data has been encrypted. DelayedLauncher was the solution to this in 1.x—now it’s built-in as a checkbox.

Support for Separate Keychain

Don’t want to use your login password as Espionage’s master password? No problem. Espionage 2.0 gives you the option of storing your folder passwords in a separate keychain, protected by a custom master password.

Protect Individual Folders

No longer is it necessary to encrypt your entire home folder just to protect your email or your chat history. Espionage can protect individual folders, allowing you to easily secure sensitive data for applications like Mail, iChat, and Adium without the penalties of encrypting too much.

Built-in Backups

Espionage comes with built-in backups, custom-fitted for the way it works with folders. This means it no longer matters whether the folder is locked, or unlocked. Espionage will backup your folders safely and efficiently, making it easy to restore them later if disaster strikes.

Full Feature List:

If you want a full feature list or a ton more information as well as forums check out their site or check them out on twitter.

Site | Twitter

Rating:

This app is simple and easy. Takes virtually no effort to set it up and use it. I love it and think its a must have if your a mac user and need some extra app security.

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Review: Espionage 2.0 The Tao Effect

To make the most of the Hot list, Fever asks you to make a simple distinction between essential and supplemental feeds. Essential, must-read feeds are Kindling. Supplemental, low signal-to-noise feeds are Sparks. Sparks ignite Kindling raising the temperature of items and links that should not be missed.

Fever is an awesome alternative for readers because it lets you know what you need to read. I felt like I needed more information or a demo before I made my $30 purchase so here is a video review about the app.

Availability:

Fever comes as a web application. This means that is open to PC and Mac users. However you have to host it yourself so if your server doesn’t support a Unix-like server (no IIS) running Apache, PHP 4.2.3+ and MySQL 3.23+ then you can’t run it. The good news is that it also has an iPhone version as well. This makes it super easy for you to take your feeds with you and keep them in the same exact order that they were in when you left your desk. You can also run fever using Fluid App (highlighted here) and I am 99.9% sure you can run Mozilla Prizm as well. This means you can have an awesome stand alone reader to use with your feeds.

iPhone Images

Where can I connect with the Creator Shaun?

Shaun is on Twitter he also is the creator of HaveAMint a fresh look at your website traffic. Shaun also has a blog and a wicked looking website.

Twitter Buzz:

Future Posts?

I am going to play around with Fever more and get to know the ins and outs of it. I plan on making a review of it vs. Google Reader to see if the app lives up to its $30 price tag compared to its free G-Reader counterpart. Where ratings are given to both of the apps and the +/- are weighed to see which one is the best bet depending on what you want out of your reader.

Stay tuned for the post. The best way is to subscribe or follow us on twitter so you don’t miss a beat.

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Fever: Creative RSS Solutions for Busy People