Facebook stole the English language. Instead of inventing its own words for actions — ala email, google (yup, an official word now), Tweet (ok, so that was a word already), and others — it just took over existing words. Now, like, friend, fan, poke, and more are part of the Facebook vernacular, and there’s not much we can do about it.

We might resent them for co-opting friend and like, but some actually want Facebook to take over one other word: dislike. See, there’s a lot of stuff that most of us don’t like. You know, ugly ducklings. And sad stories. And, I don’t know, skunks.

You don’t passively just want to ignore it. Nope. You want to tell the world how much you dislike it. But in Facebook’s world, there’s the like button, and nothing else.

So you tell us: should Facebook add a Dislike button, or have they already taken over one word too many? Feel free to tell us how much you dislike this poll — or Facebook’s policy and button/word choice — in the comments below.

This week’s poll was inspired by my wife, Raht. Thanks, sweetie!

The most prominent example of this has been Mailbox. Now owned by Dropbox, this iOS email app has shown one new way in which we can organize our huge flow of incoming messages. For those yet to encounter Mailbox’s basic concept, the sorting process in Mailbox is based upon priority, providing one-finger sorting into categories like Later and Important. Given that Mailbox had a one-million user waiting list during its private beta phase, this idea clearly appeals to many people – including those who don’t have an iPhone.

It is no doubt with some of these people in mind that Handle was created. Handle is more than just another way to access your inbox, though. Billed as a “Priority Engine,” this private beta provides task management, itinerary tracking and an email client all rolled into one.

But is this integrated approach helpful, or a recipe for confusion? Time for a test…

How It Looks

Nice, in a word. The orange and blue colour palette is classy, and Handle’s icons are clear. Oh, and it’s flat – those who get an allergic reaction to skeuomorphism can enter Handle’s dashboard without fear.

Handle is pleasing on the eye and information is presented clearly

Down the left-hand side of the dashboard is your daily agenda, and to the right of it is the email area. A list of your emails is displayed on the left, and the email you’re reading is on the right. Should you wish to access your tasks, or add a new one, the Tasks tab can easily be revealed, with one click, from its hiding place behind the Inbox tab.

Email Sorting

Handle currently only supports Gmail email accounts, and it shows. From the layout to the controls, Handle’s email interface is very Gmail-like in all respects other than colour.

Whilst every email- and task-related command can be made with a click, Handle is at its best when you’re skimming through emails using your keyboard. For those who aren’t used to keyboard-based email sorting, the controls are pretty easy to pick up, in part aided by their logical nature – a for archive, d for delete, and so on. Once you know the shortcuts, it is amazing how fast you can sort email and make to-dos on the fly.

Handle helpfully displays keyboard shortcuts in context

To help you get moving at this pace sooner rather than later, Handle helpfully displays every single shortcut next to its on-screen counterpart.

It would seem to me that the keyboard-based system (which includes the creation of to-dos) is an attempt to emulate the ease of use and rapidity of Mailbox’s workflow, and whilst it isn’t quite as intuitive as swiping emails hither and thither on a touchscreen, it is certainly as fast as any other method of email sorting I’ve seen on a desktop.

“Priority Engine”

In addition to the standard email sorting options, Handle allows you to create tasks out of your emails (or standalone tasks, manually), and attach a level of importance to them. The default options are Must do, Should do and Want to, although you can create custom labels. As usual with Handle, all of this can be done without going near your mouse.

Emails which have been turned into tasks in this way show up in your Tasks list, with items ordered by importance.

Tasks are ordered by priority, and can be dragged across to today’s schedule

Handle offers another level of organization, however. Rather than just creating a task and noting how important it is, you can tap the tab key to open up a whole new range of options.

The tab key reveals a whole new list of sorting options

With the new menu accessed, you can give your task a due date and put it on snooze for a custom amount of time. Equally, you can add the task to a project – these are essentially folders of related tasks, which are particularly useful when you’re working on something. The Task list allows you to sort tasks by project for swift later access. You can also add a comment to your task, or instantly add the task to today’s itinerary with one press of the t key.

You can schedule tasks in advance using this calendar

No calendar

The one slightly annoying and beta-ish issue with Handle is the lack of on-going calendar. I appreciate that Handle is a service designed with the here and now in mind, but only being able to see what you need to do today can be a bit frustrating at times.

Conclusion

I get the sense that Handle has been designed to be the first page you visit on each weekday morning. As a dashboard, it contains your itinerary for today only, your outstanding tasks and your emails, so it is an environment that doesn’t allow your mind to wander from your daily to-do list.

The keyboard controls are easy to use – very quick to react, too – and the simple, clean layout of Handle‘s dashboard somehow allows a lot of information to remain visually clear. Some users might find Handle‘s lack of on-going calendar extremely debilitating, especially those whose work requires them to think ahead, but if you like to knock down your tasks one by one, this isn’t likely to be an issue.

Overall then, whilst Handle isn’t overflowing with features, it provides an extremely simple, fast and focused home for your daily task management – and I very much recommend it.

But the internet’s a fast-paced place, and stuff changes faster than we’d ever expect. So what’s one to do in a world where apps become popular overnight, get bought out for billions, shut down on a whim, and lost to history in less time than a movie can get produced?

Keep Calm, and Blog On.

Yahoo!’s own gif about their Tumblr acquisition

When it’s the norm — not the exception — for bought-out apps to get sidelined and shutdown, for privacy terms to change, and for companies to eventually get so big and corporate that the startup values we loved get lost, we get cynical. We become Chicken Little running around thinking the sky’s falling. And perhaps it is, but not for the reasons we think it is.

See, startups cost to run. And the ones that get massive consumer traction are almost always 100% free. Those server bills don’t pay themselves, and with employees to pay and investors to give a return on their investments, startups need a massive payday. Either they’ll have to charge for the app (which would make users flee en masse) or ram up the advertisements (ditto, though perhaps not as quickly) or get bought out by a larger company (ditto again).

Call it a rock and hard place. Or the main problem of startup culture today. Either way, it’s what gives us the apps we love, but it’s also what gives us the drama of shutdowns and buyouts, of fantastically rich (or failed) founders and fired dev teams, of the rest of us looking for new apps to replace those we loved. Rinse, repeat.

Trust. The Lost Virtue.

A reminder of acquisitions gone bad.

It’s at the point where people don’t even trust apps to stick around. When you hear of an app getting bought out — like Yahoo!’s $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr this week — you immediately assume it’s getting shut down. After all, Twitter bought out Posterous last year, and last month, we were having to move old Posterous blogs to new homes as the service got shut down. And Yahoo! itself doesn’t have the best track record in this regards, having bought out GeoCities in the late ’90′s only to shut it down a decade later.

Even when acquired services don’t get killed, they often are left to stagnate, or are changed enough that their original magic is lost. Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram caused an internet uproar over the new Terms of Service, which were quickly redacted but had already caused many to declare they’d leave the service. Yahoo! never did kill Flickr, but it sure did feel like they let the service sit and rot without updates, while photo sharing on social networks took over.

And without acquisition, apps still are likely to die without funding. It’s rumored that Tumblr was close to running out of money, so perhaps without Yahoo! buying them out, we’d be having to write about ways to leave Tumblr today instead. Being bought out isn’t the end of anything, necessarily, but our trust has been broken so many times, it only takes the slightest change for users to declare the old king dead.

Live and Let Live

The bold new Flickr

But you know what? It all doesn’t have to end bad. First off, Tumblr is still a great place to start a blog today — one with a built-in social network that’s active and fun. In many ways, Yahoo! just bought the most unique and expressive social network, and I think they know not to mess it up. I think they’ll try hard with Tumblr, based on their own posts today about the acquisition, and based on how they’re running Flickr today.

Because, if you haven’t heard yet, Flickr just got a great new upgrade with a new design, 1Tb of free storage for everyone, and more. Perhaps it looks a bit more like Google+ and every other social network these days, but Flickr is still one of the best places to share pictures.

The best news, though, was where that update was shared officially by Yahoo!: on Tumblr. If that’s not a good indicator that they’ll keep Tumblr great for the long haul, I don’t know what is.

Away With the Pitchforks

No. Just please, no.

Sure, we’ve gotten burned. But that doesn’t mean we have to be reactive. When there’s an app or service that fits your needs, just use it. Try to choose wisely and go for services that’ll let you take your data with you if you leave in the future, but for the most part, just use what works for you and go on with your life. Life’s too short for online protests against Yahoo! buying out Tumblr, or whatever the major breaking news of tomorrow is.

Then, if an app gets shut down, you’ll find something better. There will be better options then, likely, as we’ve all seen since Google Reader got shut down.

But maybe, instead, you’ll find that the service you stuck with actually got better over time. That’s what I think just may happen with Tumblr, as seems to have now happened with Flickr. And perhaps with Yahoo! itself too … one of those tech startups that never got bought out, but also nearly died on its own — and now seems to be making quite the restart.

And thus life goes on.

You will be able to see from the screenshots that the design of the app is very slick. Often design for invoicing or financial apps suffer as they are primarily seen as function over form. LaCuenta shows that they are not mutually exclusive, there’s no reason why you can’t have function and form in the same application.

General Application Use

Generally, action is taken in the large middle pane, and then the confirmation or choices are chosen from the smaller right hand pane. For example, clicking on an item in the settings menu in the main pane brings up the options in the right hand pane where you can then choose and save your choice.

Home is where you are sent to once you register, or when you subsequently log in

There is a main navigation menu to the left of the screen, which affords easy access to the main features of the app. the items included in this menu are Home, New Doc, Search, Activity and More. Each has a shortcut key (alt + 1-5) so you can jump to each at will. Keyboard shortcuts are a great time saver so it’s great to have them included in this app.

The new document section is the next item on the main menu. Here you can add items to the page which is then turned into a quote automatically. Creating an invoice is super fast, it’s as simple as adding a client and some items to the list and clicking save. You can then email out the invoice, or send to PDF to save or email separately. Once you have done this you can then see the quote in the activity list.

There is a powerful search option in the menu to the left. This searches all facets of the application, and everything you have put into it. You can filter the search by documents, customer, supplier items or your own products. The search is fast and very easy to use to find what you are after. Filtering by ‘invoices’ and ‘unpaid’ shows you the unpaid invoices for example.

The Activity menu item takes you to a list of all activity on the account. You can very quickly filter or group this by deselecting items so that they don’t show at all, or by choosing the type of document that is shown, (or none), the status of the payment that is shown or the employee that is involved

A lot of the management tools are under the ‘More’ menu item

The ‘More’ menu item holds a lot of the back end management of the application, things such as analytics, stock control, employee management and settings. This keeps a lot of the management side of the application away from the everyday running, which is a good and bad thing. it keeps it uncluttered, but it also means that useful places such as Stock Management and Manage Customers aren’t easily accessible on the main menu.

Management Tools

When you start you are prompted to enter your company name. following this you can enter your own name and contact details. Each person that you add (referred to as employees) then has a password and PIN that they use to access the system. There is an audit trail attached to most of the actions that you can take, so you can trace what your employees have been doing, who made that sale, who sent that quote etc.

There are a number of tools aimed at a managerial level to allow the user to monitor the state of everything from the company itself in terms of turnover, costs and profits, to the employees and stock levels.

You can set permissions on a per employee basis to control access

Employees can be granted certain permissions to allow them to access different parts of the application and to make certain changes. The employee also has an email address attached to their account as well as a postal address, country and language, nice touches in this age of remote and international working.

The analytics tool shows actual incoming and outgoing transactions, indicators grouped by employee, sales grouped by customer and stock movement.The key areas of stock management, customer management and so on are also under the More tab.

One of the most important features is a comprehensive stock management tool

Stock management can be found within the ‘More’ menu and is how you manage all aspects of your products and services. You can add products here, detailing their value, quantity, stock code, whether they are physical or not (a useful attribute these days) and so on. You can add products to categories to allow easy allocation on invoices and quotes as well as grouping by category when you look at the performance metrics.

There are loads of options to allow you to customise your experience with LaCuenta; from charging VAT by default to allowing you to set your opening hours, your trading country and company details such as a logo.

What I would like to see

At the moment you can add products to your inventory, and you can stipulate the quantity, but thereafter you can’t add new stock to your products. It goes without saying that this is rather important in terms of stock management! There is a placeholder for this, so it is obviously in the works, but has not yet been implemented.

I would like to see the side menu made customisable so that you can drag and drop tiles from the more page on and off the menu at will. There is plenty of room on the interface for more options so it seems silly not to be able to utilise it. This would create a really cool individual user experience for each person who uses the system.

Somewhere to manage the people you buy from would be pretty useful. Often companies use a great number of suppliers and not being able to keep track of them is a bit of an oversight.

Customisation for the way that the invoices are presented would be good, not to the point of themes, but being able to upload a template or similar would be useful. It might be that this is in the pipeline for a new release.

People

It’s all very well having products and a snazzy application, but without people to sell to and work with, you don’t have a business. Under the ‘More’ menu item you will find two places that you can add people to your system.

You can keep track of your customers from directly within the application

If you want to add customers to your database then you need to head over to Manage Customers. in here you will see a list of the customers that you already have in the system. it is very straightforward to add new customers along with all of their details so that you can contact them and arrange deliveries etc.

Manage Employees lets you do the obvious. As previously mentioned it is where you allocate permissions and manage your staff.

Conclusions

A very powerful app, it certainly is more than just an invoicing app as one might assume. As a business management application it covers all of the bases except adding new stock and a little customisation. Other than that, a very competent all in one tool for management of a business. I would recommend you try it out, and do give it a little while, it’s quite complex in its abilities so it will take a little time to get used to. Overall, a good application that has a few things to add to make it exceptional. The inability to add stock yet is a bit of a deal breaker if it something that you use.

Talentguide is a hiring tool for selecting the best applicants for technical positions. It works great when you’re looking to build a developer team in-house but also when you’re looking to hire developers from sites like Elance, Freelancer or oDesk. That’s why the tool is being used successfully by enterprises like HubSpot, Ooyala or Oracle but also by small companies and individuals.

As an employer, you can pick from a good variety of coding challenges designed to test the fundamental coding and problem solving skills that your candidate should have. If you already have your own programming challenges, the Talentguide team will quickly add them for you. You’ll then be able to quickly evaluate each candidate by their skills, and find the best person for the job.

Go get it!

Ready to find the perfect candidates for the jobs at your company? Then you should check out the Talentguide tour, and then give Talentguide a try. When you signup for Talentguide, you can test your first 5 candidates for free. Then, as an AppStorm reader you’ll get $50 off your first month’s fee of $199 by signing up with the link in this article: http://www.talentguide.co/?promo=appstorm.

That’s why today we’re going to present you a tool called Lift that can help you keep track of any new habits you’ve set for yourself, as well as keep you motivated through its great community. It’s one app you actually might get in the habit of using, and be excited you did.

What is Lift?

Lift came out as an iPhone app last year, and it has seen a few revisions since then that have added some extra functionality to the app, the latest of which is a complementary Lift web app. But what is it exactly that you can do with it?

The original Lift

Think of Lift as a habit forming app, one that can help you keep motivated and on track when you’ve set yourself up to start doing something or stopping a bad habit. Biting your nails, going to class every day, eating healthy, you name it: habits you want to start, or stop, can be kept track of in Lift. It’s a community-meets-habit-tracking service. And now, it’s not just an iPhone app, as it has a new beta web app that brings all those wonderful features to your browser.

Interface & Interaction

The web app is topped off with a pretty simple interface, where access to the list of your habits and your activity is always handy, making it much easier to check into multiple habits at once. The recent activity of any given habit is also one click away, and adding new habits or deleting old ones is just as well a breeze.

Interface

Have you spotted a pattern here? Yes, everything in the web app is readily accessible and seconds away, unlike the iPhone app where you have to navigate through a number of different screens just to check into your daily habits. I’m already enjoying more using the web app for marking my accomplished habits at the end of the day.

Features

I have yet to find anything the iPhone app can do that the web app can’t. Everything you’ve come to expect of Lift if you’ve used it before is there: interacting with the community (giving props, commenting, etc.), finding friends and following them, exporting your trends to a .csv file, connecting with your Twitter account, and even setting reminders that’ll work with your phone. There’s even a new feature called “Trends” that gives you handy graphics on the patterns of your habits over time.

Trend View

Does Lift Work?

Opening an app to “check in” into a self-imposed habit might not seem like enough to get you to change your lifestyle, but if you hold yourself accountable to your results and take Lift as a serious tool for staying on track, then yes, it works.

There are several things that make the app successful at what it does:

• Checking In: If you get used to checking into your habits everyday, you’ll feel compelled to get as many of them done by the end of the day, otherwise you won’t be able to shake off that failure feeling.
• Friends: If you have friends you use Lift, you can keep each other accountable by peeking at their check ins and giving them props or dropping them a comment for doing or not doing what they said they would.
• Community Feedback: I don’t know a lot of people who use Lift so the “Friends” thing doesn’t really work for me, but the community found in a few of my habits is what keeps me going. Not only is receiving “props” from a stranger quite encouraging, but I’ve also gotten answers and started conversations regarding my habits with people who are also interested in accomplishing the same thing. That’s my favorite thing about Lift.

Community Interaction

Web App or iPhone App?

I have an older iPhone and firing up an app is not always as quick as I would like. Therefore, checking into Lift has become somewhat of a dreadfully tedious and slow process. In the few days that I’ve spent with it, I have found that the web app is much easier and faster to use, as you don’t have to go navigating around a number of screens just to mark a few habits as done. I’ve already noticed an increase in my use of the service now that it doesn’t feel like a habit in itself checking in to my other habits.

Lift Feed

I’ll choose the web app for now, but if the Lift team can somehow make it faster to check into my habits everyday, I might reconsider using the iPhone app regularly again. Maybe looking into something like Clear’s swipe gestures for checking into habits wouldn’t hurt?

Conclusion

Yes, checking into your habits in Lift can become a chore in itself and a habit that you’re gonna have to form along with the other dozen habits you said you’d do, but once you get used to it, Lift can be a very powerful motivational tool for staying on track with your resolutions and forming habits.

Lift’s web app is just as good as its iPhone original counterpart, and I have to admit I found it even faster and much more convenient to use. No doubt, they’re both excellent complements to each other and together they have turned Lift into a superb tool for keeping you motivated and on top of whatever it is you are trying to accomplish.

But after all, it’s up to you to make some changes, and as useful an app as this is, it always comes down to how serious you are about improving yourself, don’t you think?

WeVideo is a very handy online video editor that makes editing videos a very simple task. You can upload videos from your computer or import them from cloud storage services and select the editing mode depending on your experience. Once done, all you have to do is edit the video by adding titles, themes and other effects, and you are done. The service also has a dedicated Android app that can help you edit videos on the go.

Getting Started

To start editing your videos, you’ll need to visit the  WeVideo home pageand sign up for an account. If you want, you can even use your Facebook, Google or Yahoo credentials to access the service. Then, you’ll be directed to the WeVideo dashboard from where you can upload, create and invite people to collaborate on videos.

You can upload videos from your desktop, import them from Facebook or other cloud services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, Facebook, Picasa, Instagram and Flickr. Select any service where you have the video file on and authorize WeVideo to access that account. Once done, it will show you all the files that are saved on your cloud storage service. Just select the file you want to upload and it will appear under Media tab. The time it takes to upload the video depends on its size. Just make sure it’s not too large, as the service only gives you 5Gb storage in the free plan.

Working with WeVideo Editor

Click on Create Video button from your dashboard and you will be redirected to WeVideo editor. When you launch the application for the first time, you will be asked to select the editing mode which includes Storyboard, Timeline and Advanced Timeline. Storyboard mode is for absolute beginners who have no idea about video editing. On the other hand, Timeline is for users with a little experience and lastly, Advanced Timeline is for video editing professionals.

The uploaded videos will also appear in the editor under Video section. In the left side bar, it will show you all the effects and media files you can use in your videos such as audio files, images, transition effects, texts, etc. Note that you will not be able to see the transition effects and graphics in the Storyboard mode.

To get started, select the Timeline mode and click on the Video tab. It will show you the uploaded video files, simply drag and drop it anywhere in the first timeline. The reason we selected Timeline mode is to show you all the features it offers. You can split the videos using the scissor tool located under the preview window. Just move the red line, make your selection and click on the scissor icon.

Click on the Transitions tab to check the effects offered by the service. To use them, just select the effect you want to use and drag it in the second timeline.

Click on the Graphics tab and it will show you all the graphic effects you can use in your videos. Drag and drop the selected graphics on the timeline where you want it to appear and add the text.

You can even invite other people to collaborate on your projects from your dashboard, if you wish. After you are done with the editing, you can easily publish and save your videos online. If you want, you can easily upload the videos to cloud storage accounts as well as publish it to the video sharing websites including YouTube and Vimeo.

Pricing

WeVideo also offers users with paid plans starting from $4.99 per month. The paid plans offer users with more features and storage space as well as a higher resolution video. In the paid plans, there are no watermarks on the videos as well.

Wrapping it up

Overall, WeVideo is one of the most simple and easy-to-use video editor I have used. This is the second time in my life that I used a video editor and it was so simple even in the timeline view. The best thing about the service is that you can easily import/export videos to Dropbox and other cloud storage services. You can even use WeVideo to create professional presentations as well.

However, there is only one drawback, all the videos that you publish under the free account comes with a WeVideo watermark. To remove the watermarks, you can sign up for a paid plan which comes at a nominal rate of $4.99 per month especially if you use video editors on a regular basis.

Feel free to share your thoughts if you tried WeVideo.

My wife and I have found the web to be very helpful for a lot of answers to our questions that we have about our son, when it comes to simple issues like when to potty train, to more complex ones like “Why is our son not eating?” But, as we have found, we can spend hours on the web finding the answers to our questions and we can get many different opinions from people. That is great, but I would love to be able to condense that into one site — where hopefully the answers are all high quality.

As I was looking for answers to a question a few weeks ago, I stumbled upon Quib.ly, which is a question and answer site, similar to Quora and the like, but puts its focus on parenting and technology. Those are two areas where I can offer help and learn a great deal from so I thought I would give it a spin to see how beneficial it could be for me.

Asking Questions

There are two main features in Quib.ly: you can ask a question or you can answer them. There are a couple of ways to do this. First, you can search for the topic that you are looking for and if it isn’t already being asked, then you can create a question for the community to answer. You can categorize it as well as request what kind of answers you are looking for, whether you want someone with experience, their opinion, or facts.

Asking a question on Quib.ly

Secondly, you can search through topics to see if you can find more information about something that you are curious about. When you find a topic or a question that you want to continue to see what people answer or ask, you can follow them and any time someone answers the question, you will get an email letting you know. This is a nice feature in that you don’t always have to go back to the site to see responses from others. The downside is that if the question is popular, your inbox can get flooded pretty quickly, but you can always unfollow it if it gets too overwhelming for you.

Contributing to Questions

Of course, sites like this only survive if there are people that are willing to answer questions that are being asked. It is very easy to answer a question if you feel like you can contribute to the community. On the homepage you will see featured as well as trending questions that you can answer and you can also go to a specific topic and browse what others are asking. When answering a question, you are given a few editing tools to have at your disposal. You can also answer it anonymously if you don’t want to let people know that you are answering.

Quib.ly homepage

There are also some social features that are built in when answering questions. You can up vote someone’s answer if you feel it is a good one. You can also share other’s contributions to Twitter and Facebook. Lastly, you can comment on the answers that others give, which is a good way to interact with people, especially if you are asking the question and you want clarification on someone’s answer.

Answering a question

Can It Work?

Question and answer sites have been around for a little while now, and there are a few that stand out, so the question is, “Can Quib.ly?” make it? I personally think they can because what they have done is that they have carved out a nice little niche for themselves. With their focus on parenting and technology, they will attract people who may not want to use other sites like Quora, but would use this. Although Quib.ly does have a focus of technology, it doesn’t feel like it is too nerdy to use or that your average web user can’t feel like they can benefit from it.

In my experience with using the site, I found that when I asked a question I got thoughtful answers from those who had experience or had a wealth of knowledge on the topic. I really felt like I was getting quality answers to what I was asking. I also felt that when I answered a question, I got great feedback from the person asking the question or others who were answering as well. I felt like we all could be a part of the conversation and it didn’t stop when I answered the question. People would ask followup questions to continue conversing with you. It seemed like people were genuinely interested in knowing what others had to say.

Final Thoughts

Quib.ly is currently in beta and you can sign up using your Facebook account or your email to get instant access. The site itself worked well and I found it very helpful in finding out answers to my parenting questions. I think they have done a good job with the site and I like that they are focusing on two topics that a lot of people can relate to and they haven’t just made it another question and answer site. Quib.ly is free to use at the moment and is really handy. So, if you are looking for parenting and/or technology advice, I would highly suggest you head over to Quib.ly to check it out and if you are an expert on these topics, I would love to get your wisdom as well.

What one needs to stay productive is a solution that’s a combination of the three. From what I hear, Onehub comes close to what I am looking for. I immediately jumped on the opportunity to take it for a test drive. Care to know about results? Read on!

My Workflow and Expectations

So, this is how I utilize my cloud services. I use Google Drive to compose content and I am heavy user of Google Docs, creating multiple files a day. Dropbox helps me sync my mission critical files that don’t exceed a total of 1 GB. This self imposed limit is to ensure quick sync when I am setting up new devices.

All my useful, but non essential files that I don’t access on a daily basis are stored in Box. Thanks to their generous 50 GB free space promotion for iPhone users and an intuitive interface, I am a big fan of the service. Though not a cumbersome process, it would be fabulous if I could get rid of atleast one app to simplify the workflow. Let’s see if Onehub can help me achieve that.

Getting Started

Onehub has a rather costly pricing structure. Plans start at $29 a month for 5GB of space, which is costlier than many well known cloud storage alternatives. However, given the gamut of offerings promised, I’ll reserve judgment till I evaluate the app.

Pricing Structure

Submitting your credit card information is mandatory to sign up for an account. You won’t be charged until the 14 day free trial expires, but asking for the credit card information is not a standard practice anymore. Why scare away potential customers?

Uploading and Organizing Files

Onehub sports a clean layout. They have opted for labels instead of a bunch of buttons and this design choice is refreshing. There isn’t much to speak about the workflow. If you have used a cloud storage app in the past, you should get used to Onehub in no time at all. If in doubt, the walkthrough wizard is always there at your disposal.

Organizing Files and Folders

After creating a workspace, start uploading the files. When creating a folder, you have the option to keep it hidden. It’s a great feature when you are sharing the workspace with others.

Uploading Files

Onehub supports uploading multiple files and all you need is to drag and drop files to the browser window. Yes, the uploads were fast and the app was successfully able to utilize my maximum upload bandwidth. Unfortunately, there weren’t any options to cancel uploads mid way. The only way to do that is by forcefully navigating to another page. Definitely not an ideal solution.

Working with Files

Predictably, previewing is limited to a few file formats. PDF files, the most common of the lot, can be consumed in their full glory. The online reader is feature rich and allows you to perform many file level actions that includes adding comments, creating associated tasks and many more.

Reading a PDF File

While you are at it, try the fullscreen mode as well. It’s just great! In my opinion, the USP of Onehub is the Google Docs integration. And, the integration comes to effect in just two clicks! After the integration, when you create a document or a spreadsheet from Onehub, an embedded Google Docs window will show up.

Google Docs Integration

It’s the good old Google Drive, and you can create, edit and format documents like you always do. All changes are saved to your Google Drive as usual. Additionally, you can save the same file to your Onehub account for quick access. In that case, you’ll have a copy of the document available in your Google Drive account and the Onehub account.

To start editing or downloading the document, use the respective buttons in the Onehub app. This saves you a trip to the Google Drive folders.

Final Thoughts

The cloud version of Onehub doesn’t come with a desktop app like Dropbox. You’ll have to use the web app for uploading, managing and accessing your files. This is not a big deal considering the desktop apps of all competing solutions are lacking one or another. However, the steep pricing warrants as many perks as possible for a customer.

It’s clear that Onehub is not a cloud storage solution like Box. The app is highly useful to those who use Google Docs heavily and collaborate a lot with their team to create documents. The interface and ease of organization for sure puts Onehub ahead of Google Drive in many respects.

So, if you are in the league that’s looking for a cleaner version of Google Drive, Onehub is the solution you’re looking for!

But Google’s also successful, wildly so. It’s a rare day when any internet connect human doesn’t touch at least one Google products. Not because we’re forced to, but because we want to. Google Search just works, and its popularity got us to try the rest of their apps. And you know what? Google Maps, Gmail, Docs, Chrome and more all work so good, most of us choose them because they work great. They may be spartan, but they sure do the job.

That’s not enough. The new Google, one increasingly infused with Google+ DNA since its launch 2 years ago, is focusing harder than ever on design. And features. And glasses, and driverless cars, and beating Dropbox, and more. It’s a busy — and shiny — new search giant, and that’s on showcase more than ever at this year’s Google I/O developer conference.

Web Apps Don’t Have to Be Dull

If there’s one quick takeaway from the first day of Google I/O, it’s that web apps have grown up. Google’s paved the way to a cleaner web with its own spartan web apps, which dropped the flashy banners and gradients for plain white, treys, and scientifically tested blues. Google+’s launch started a new, more stylish trend for Google, one we’ve seen take over everything they offer over the past years, but even that looks quaint compared to the latest changes.

Take the new Google Maps, the star of what Google’s unveiled at I/O. The soon-to-be-released version of Google Maps is beautifully animated in Chrome, powered by WebGL, with all the features you’d expect from Google Earth right in your browser. It’s smarter, too, with location reviews and smart maps that show you points of interest along the way to the place you’re going. With prettier images, a more fluid experience, and the directions you already trust, it’s an update you’ll want to sign up for (yup, you’ll have to sign up to get early access).

But it doesn’t stop there. The poster child for Google’s new designer future, Google+, has gotten a ton of beautiful updates. It’s been almost fully redesigned, while yet recognizable as Google+, with a new 3-column plus side menu design that feels like a Googly, super-sized Pinterest. A beautiful one, though, one that’s more animated than ever.

Remember the animation in Google+ when adding new people to your circles? The new post box animation when you start to write something is even more dramatic, in a nice way you’ll have to try out to see how it works. It’s nice, but I’m not sure it’d be that fun to see animate every time you want to post something online.

Just, wow.

Now, remember when we said we use Google’s apps because we want to? Google+ never managed to hit that level for most people, except for three things: keeping your web profile up-to-date for search purposes (useful, needed even, but not fun), Hangouts (group video chats that are useful and fun), and photo sharing (thanks to generous storage limits and Android integration). Google’s now made those last two even better.

There’s brand new Hangout apps for iOS, and it’s built into Gmail — it’s Google’s new central messaging service, and we must admit it’s a good one. Then, for photos, you can still store unlimited standard sized photos for free, with auto-backup from your phone if you want. There’s also new Auto Enhance, Auto Highlight, and Auto Awesome (really) features to help you get the most out of your pictures. Here’s more on those:

Bringing Everything Together

If there’s one thing Google hasn’t always gotten perfect, it’s pulling all of their diverse apps and services together in a way that makes sense. They’re doing far better now. First off, rather than having separate storage in Google Drive, Gmail, and more, every Google account has 15Gb of free Google Drive storage, shared between all of the services – even Gmail. You can then upgrade for more storage starting at $4.99/month for 100Gb, which is half the price of Dropbox Pro for those keeping track.

Next up, Gmail now is integrated with Google Wallet, so you can send money right inside Gmail just like another attachment to your emails. It makes Google Wallet a closer competitor to PayPal, and it gives most of us a way we could actually make use of Wallet today. As soon as it launches, that is.

Sending money through the mail, reinvented

Then, voice is the new big Google tech that’s already in Chrome but will soon be the killer Google feature, at least if we can all get used to talking to our laptops. The new Google Voice Search will be much more like it is on Android devices, letting you start a conversation by saying “OK Google,” and then both search by voice and get followup queries by continuing the conversation. It’s like Siri, super-powered, in your browser. If the web ever gets Google Now, you’ll have your full digital assistant in Google.com, from anywhere.

Ok Google…

And Google’s doing everything to make sure you’ll both start your day at Google, and keep using it throughout the day. There’s search and Drive and Gmail to keep you working, but there’s also the brand-new Google Play All Access, a $9.99/month streaming music solution that lets you stream millions of songs that are ready for purchase in Google Play. If you sign up before the end of June, it’ll just cost $7.99. The streaming music playing field just got a bit more competitive.

Streaming music, Google Style

Google’s the new Software Giant

It’s fashionable to refer to Microsoft as the “Software Giant”, but the name more aptly applies to Google these days, what with its myriad array of integrated services and apps that nearly everyone uses day in, day out. There’s all the web apps, the Chrome browser, and Android … not to mention ambitious new projects like Google Glass and self-driving cars.

Google’s one company who’s future is hard to predict, but one thing’s for sure: the future at Google will look pretty. Each of their new apps looks shinier than the last, and Google’s not about to let Apple or anyone else beat them in the design department. And they’re far more likely to work together — or be deeply tied together — than ever before.

You can watch the whole Google I/O 2013 Keynote on YouTube, if you’d like.

Even still, on the desktop you’ll often find that you need to use Flash. That’s why our writer Nathan Snelgrove just wrote an article on our sister site Mac.AppStorm on the best ways to avoid using Flash on your Mac.

It’s aimed mainly at Safari users, and even recommends using Chrome for Flash since it’s built-into Chrome. But, if you’re an IE or Firefox user on a Windows or Linux PC who’d rather get around using Flash, it’s got enough tips that you might find some of them helpful.

Continue Reading at Mac.AppStorm…

You’ve likely got a notes app built-into your OS of choice, too. And another in your email client. Even Dropbox itself makes a pretty compelling choice, as you can store plain text files in it and edit them as notes anywhere.

And yet, Evernote remains the crowd favorite. It lets you take notes about anything, throw in files, pictures, web clips, and more, and search through it all effortlessly. It lives in the web, but also has native apps for practically ever OS out there. It’s even in a Samsung fridge. It seems cluttered, with everything in one place, formatted text mixed with plain text and PDFs and everything else. And yet, it works – and is beloved by millions.

So, for those of you who swear by Evernote, what is it about the service that you love the most? We’d love to hear your thoughts — or your dissenting views if you hate Evernote — in the comments below.

Take for example, the app that I am reviewing today called Feeder Ninja, which does something so simple in nature, but yet can come in very handy when you are creating your own site. Feeder Ninja takes your social media feeds and creates an embedable  window that you can insert into your website. Again, simple in nature, but they make it so easy to do and it looks very professional.

Creating Your Own Feed

When you first get started with Feeder Ninja, you can select what kind of feed you want to create. You can select between Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and an RSS feed to use. Once you select the one you want you then have some settings to tweak to make it your own.

Selecting a feed to create

You can change a variety of things of the look and feel of your feed so that it matches how you want it to look. The width and height can be manipulated to ones that will fit your site. You can also change the feed style, where there are two free choices to choose from, and a few other premium ones, which I will talk about more later.

Editing your feed’s appearance

There are also a variety of colors that you can choose from to make your feed stand out. Again, if you stick to the free plan, you can either choose between black or gray and if you upgrade to a paid plan you get a lot more to choose from. You can also create your own custom color if you so desire. Lastly, you also have the option to insert some kind of background for your feed. You can insert an image url or use the paid plan to upload your own picture.

Choosing your color and background image

Using your Feed

Once you are finished designing what your feed is going to look like you are now ready to insert it into your website. Feeder Ninja gives you some code that you need to insert into your website in order for it to show up. This is where, if anything, you need to know a little bit about where to put this so it will show up properly on your site. Lastly, once your feed is inserted into your site, Feeder Ninja gives you stats on how many people viewed your feed.

Meets a Need

When I first started to peruse through Feeder Ninja, I felt that this is great for those people that want a simple and easy way to insert their social or RSS feeds into their site. I know that there are plugins you can use through WordPress that do the similar, if not the same thing, that Feeder Ninja has to offer. But, in my opinion this app is for those that may not use WordPress or those that just want an easy way to create something like this.

In my experience, sometimes WordPress plugins can be frustrating to use, especially if you are not one that has the patience to find what will work for you or tinker with the code to make it your own. With Feeder Ninja, it literally took me less than 5 minutes to create a good looking feed for my social networks and it just works, which is something that I can appreciate.

Conclusion

Feeder Ninja is a great web app to use to create good looking social feeds for your website. I would love to see them add more social sites in the future like Instagram, Flickr, Google+, etc. If you want to unlock more features, they offer a paid plan which is $4/month or you can also pay for the year or for life if you choose to.

For what it is worth, if you are a WordPress user, you could probably save some money by searching for a plugin that does the same thing as you could possibly get more bang for your buck. But, if you don’t want to fool around with plugins or you are using a different platform, then go and check out Feeder Ninja for yourself and see if it will work for you.

Syndifeed is a very handy online RSS client that takes the simplicity of The Old Reader and feeling of Feedly. With Syndifeed, you can subscribe to all your favourite blogs and read them from where ever you are. Let’s take a look.

Getting Started

To get started, you must sign up for an account on Syndifeed which hardly takes a minute. Just go to Syndifeed homepage and enter the required details. After the registration is complete, you will be redirected to your dashboard showing you some of the latest news from the web.

Personally, I like the interface of the app as it’s really clean and simple. The list of feeds are shown in the right side bar with all the posts on the dashboard as shown below.

Adding Feeds

One of the first things any user who is planning to switch from Google Reader to any other RSS client is whether he can import his subscriptions from Google Reader or not. The process of adding every feed one by one can be a time consuming task. Luckily, the process of importing subscriptions to Syndifeed takes less than a minute, unlike The Old Reader where I had to wait for almost 10 days to get my feeds transferred from Google Reader.

Just click on My Account and go to Feeds from the sidebar. From there you will be able to add new feeds to the list. Just enter the name and URL of the website you want to follow and click on Add. All the websites you are subscribed to will appear under Edit Feeds section. If you want, you can manually delete any specific website from there.

To import feeds from Google Reader, you need to first create a backup of your Google Reader subscriptions. If you don’t have your Google Reader backup, we have covered a guide to help you create a backup of your Google Reader feeds. Now, scroll down the same Feeds page and browse the location of your subscriptions.xml file. As I said earlier, the transfer process was simple took hardly 10 seconds.

Some Useful Features

The service offers its users with some nice features. When you click on any article, it will open the article in the same window as a popup where you will be able to read your feeds in a clean and ad free user interface. Apart from reading yours Newsfeed, you can also save the article for later reading on Syndifeed or save it on Instapaper if you use it. If you want, you can even share the articles from Syndifeed to different social networks including Google+, Twitter and Facebook.

Some websites have enabled excerpt view on their posts, in that case, you have to open the complete post in a new tab by clicking on View External option.

All the articles that you save using Syndifeed can be found in the Saved tab on the taskbar. The articles saved in Syndifeed are sorted according to the date they were saved and shows the most recent saved article first. This feature is already available in some RSS clients like Feedly.

You can even create new folders and organize them according to our own preferences as well. There is an option to create and edit folders in the sidebar.

The service also has a mobile friendly interface meaning you can open Syndifeed on your mobile device and view your RSS feeds in a mobile friendly interface. You can select your feeds from the list view them on your device, clutter-free.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that Syndifeed is a very useful RSS client that may be considered as a worthy Google Reader alternative. However, the app has some flaws as well. When I was trying to add folders from settings, I had to try a couple of times before it added the folders. Despite of a mobile friendly interface, I would love if the service has a dedicated mobile app to check the feeds.

But I don’t think these flaws matter that much as the main functionality is importing and reading RSS feeds in a clutter free interface. The developers have said that they have some cool new features which will be released soon. So let’s wait and hope for some feature that is not present in any other RSS client.

Often services that offer image display turn out as design showcases, regardless of their viability of comments. Hunie comes to change the game, as a place to host your designs and get honest feedback for a tiny price: your own critiques to other users sketches. It’s a pay it forward model that just might work.

Introduction

“What if someone just babbles on about my design?” I know this question is tingling in your head, but before going to second base, allow me to show you around on Hunie. Similar to Dribbble, you must request an invitation to the service, registering your basic information and linking to your portfolio. But, relax: as long as you have some stuff out there, the folks at Hunie will get in touch soon, so this seems more like an anti-spam feature than an evaluation process. You can also ask for an invitation if you have an insider friend. All in all, it’s far more open than Dribbble has ever been.

See that portfolio field? Add your link and right next to it include “(appstorm)” to jump to the front line.

As soon as you get in, you’ll be introduced to the gallery of recently sent drafts, where everything is up for critique. You can narrow down the displayed items with the categories offered by Hunie: Interfaces, Graphics, Identity, Mobile and Icons. You can also check what is trending and who you follow (probably nobody at the moment).

Every 10 designs on the stream, you have a section for the Fearless Experts, where Hunie recognizes their most active and competent designers according to Karma, which is the measure of reputation in Hunie. There are also Points and these you need to exchange for submitting designs. How do you get more points? Writing critiques on other people’s designs (and getting up-voted).

Social Feedback

Find a design that you have something to add and open it. This will bring a whole different panel, which from now on I’ll call the Critique panel. Going from left to right, you can find some context written by the designer on the piece. Then comes the menu, where you can collapse the first panel and take a look at the other reviews, the Hunie Board – which ranks those who gained points from their critiques in the piece you’re checking out, and all the viewers.

If the design is inside a project, you can check its siblings from the navigation bar, there you can also zoom or toggle commentaries off. On the bottom, the most important resource is the quick access to other drafts from the same design. Let’s talk about the design we’re reviewing, shall we? If there is any critique there already, you’ll find the circle with the reviewer’s profile pic, now look for something to bash, click and boom! A little text bubble pops up so you can write a suggestion for that segment.

You can even navigate between the reviews using the arrows atop the critique bubble.

People can up-vote your critique if they find it interesting or mark as useful, you earn 1 point every time any of these happen. People can also reply to your comment and start a discussion. You may also write a general comment, without pointing out anything in the design, still it turns out a bit loose and doesn’t allow replies.

Uploading your designs

Unless you’re the next good samaritan, you joined Hunie because you were helpless looking for feedback to your sketches. Just click that cloud icon and the “Submit Design” panel comes up. There you can give a title, choose a topic, add it to a project and write about your objective with that design. There’s no size or resolution limit to your preview. According to Hunie’s guidelines, avoid “shots” and skewed images. Post something people can criticize you for having a line 1 pixel out of level.

There are only two differences which were not covered previously that you can do with your own designs. The first one is updating it with a new draft. You have a limit of three drafts per project, so use them wisely, though they’re point-free. You may also add more screens for your project, yet these will cost you as a submission. Still better to keep your project in detail, willing for feedback in a concise and well-organized place. There’s no excuse not to organize everything.

Include more screens and update your drafts to give your reviewers the best view of your project.

Now your design is going straight to the main showcase and everyone who logs in will visualize a thumbnail of your project. You’re up for feedback. Also, don’t expect your sketches to disappear under the stream, Hunie is still a small community and you’ll rarely see more than 10 drafts being submitted daily and you can also abuse the extra visibility offered by the specific categories.

Closing lines

With your first design posted, the critiques will come shortly. Meanwhile, instead of refreshing and checking your notifications every couple of minutes, why not review a few more designs and accumulating points? That’s the goal here: the time you spend on Hunie, evaluating the received critiques, is also time you could check other projects and keep the community objective.

Also remember: you’re the best judge for the feedback you receive. Not everything will be helpful; still, everyone is trying to help, since they rely on the interpretation of their critiques by other users to acquire points. Expect feedback, at any stages, be it in form of a suggestion or a compliment, as every social network, the user base is the sole responsible for the growth and leverage of Hunie as a place amateurs and experienced designers can break their creative blocks.

Oh, I almost forgot: If you’re interested in Hunie, go to the Request an Invite page and beside the link to your portfolio, add “appstorm” between brackets and you’ll get fast tracked for an invitation. In my case it would be like this: http://philgr.com (appstorm). Jumping to the front line, how cool is that?

Finally I found what I was looking for, in the form of Kloudless for Google Chrome.

What is Kloudless?

Kloudless is a very useful Google Chrome extension that allows users to integrate multiple cloud storage services in Gmail and move files from Gmail to cloud storage services and vice versa. You can even create rules that allow users to upload email attachments to Dropbox or any other selected cloud storage service automatically.

Let’s take a look at how you can setup Kloudless and integrate it with your Gmail account.

Setting Up Kloudless

Using Kloudless is really simple and straightforward. Just go to the Chrome Web Store and install the Kloudless extension for Google Chrome. Click on Add to Chrome button and authorize the extension to access your browsing, google accounts and cloud services data. They need access so that they can easily move files from one service to another.

Once installed, it will automatically open Gmail and you will notice a new option appearing in your Gmail interface, right next to your name. Click on it and it will ask you to setup Kloudless which is really simple and straightforward.

After you click on Get Started, it will ask you to authorize the application to access your Gmail account.

It will open a new window with Kloudless settings where you will be shown three different tabs: Account, Apps and Add-ons. The account tab will show you the Gmail account from where you want to transfer your files. After authorizing your Gmail account, click on Apps tab. In the Apps tab, the app will show you all the services they support. Currently, Kloudless works with Dropbox, Box and Google Drive. Just select your desired service and authorize it as well.

Here is the most interesting part: you can set up rules to automatically move or copy your attachments from your emails to different cloud storage services. Click on Add New Rule and select the type of attachments you want to move to your cloud storage account. You can select attachments from specific people, have specific keywords, etc.

After customizing the type of attachments, just select the folder where you want to copy the attachments.

Another useful feature of this extension is that it adds a new option to your attachments as well. When you open any email with an attachment, you will see a Copy/Move option that will allow you to transfer that specific attachment to Dropbox or any other cloud storage service.

Adding Files As Attachments from Cloud Storage

If you want to email any file that is saved on your cloud storage service, you can attach it to any email in Gmail. The extension adds Kloudless icon right next to the attach files option that allows users to attach files from Dropbox or any other supported cloud storage service.

When the recipient receives the email that contains the files you attached using Kloudless, they can view them without downloading the file right in their browser.

Conclusion

Kloudless is a very handy extension especially when you want to create backups of your attachments automatically. It can help users save time as it automatically uploads the files to your selected service. However, there are some minor problems with the extension. One problem I noticed is that you have to login and authorize your accounts twice before the option shows you the cloud storage service from Gmail compose window. But this should not stop you from using Kloudless as it is still in beta stages and sending feedback to the developer about known issues will help them improve the extension. Apart from that, I didn’t come across any issue with the extension.

The folks over at Kloudless will also release the same extension for Outlook as well. That will be very useful for all those people who use Microsoft Outlook as their default email client.

Clickberry lets you add those extras to your videos, and share them online with your audience. You can share the very best pieces of video – whether it’s top highlights, tagged friends, interesting things worth buying, or memorable moments. Curating and archiving the best video from around the web has never been easier.

Clickberry is a delightful, new way to share the moments that move you. Highlight dramatic moments, interesting things & friends and quickly bring stories to the world’s attention. It’s fun, simple, and free!

Go Get It!

Ready to start adding annotations and more to your videos? Then go download the Clickberry Tagger extension for Chrome or Firefox so you can add annotations to videos already online in YouTube. You can also download Clickberry app for your Mac or PC to create interactive videos and upload them to share. Or, you can download the free Clickberry Tagger app for your iPhone to take videos on the go, add the tags you want, then upload and share the videos with your friends.

In a sales process, it is very common for businesses to haggle over the price and in turn, a quote ends up edited and updated multiple times. There will be customer specific charges and fees as well. So, it’s imperative that the quote creation app is flexible enough to accommodate all the crazy changes.

That’s exactly what I’m going to look for in Sparkling. Join me!

Before Jumping In..

Usually I comment on whether the user interface of an app is simplistic or not. For a change, the simplistic homepage design of Sparkling grabbed my attention. SaaS apps tend to have flamboyant homepage designs and there often will be information overflow.

Sparkling’s design is simple, neat and there is no information overflow. But, there is way too little information to convince a visitor to explore the app further. Lifting a couple of key points from the tour page will make for a more convincing argument.

The app offers only one subscription plan that costs $29 which includes unlimited quotes, clients and team members.

Getting Started

I signed up for a 14 day free trial and was pleasantly surprised when I saw the dashboard. The user interface is built on top of Twitter Bootstrap and as a fan of this amazing open source framework, I got a warm, fuzzy feeling!

Bootstrap User Interface

Sure, if you are tech savvy and in particular someone with an eye for design, the use of a stock UI elements from Bootstrap might put you off a bit. But, in my opinion, Sparkling is one app that has brought the best out of Bootstrap in a web app.

Workflow

If you are trying to keep an eye on what everyone in your team is up to, you’ll love the activity feed in the dashboard.

Item Types

For those in a hurry, a prominently placed Add Proposal button is hard to miss. And, before you ask, the workflow is extremely simple as well. It all starts with a brief description of the proposal and the client information. Interestingly three types of items are available to select at start – text, video and budget.

Follow that with a few lines of charges and taxes, and you’re done. The process was simple, but I got totally confused with the Amount and Price per Unit fields.

Adding Charges to a Proposal

I ran into huge numbers when I entered my charge in the amount field followed by the price per month fields. Apparently, amount refers to the quantity of units and not the actual amount. Renaming the amount field to quantity or something similar will definitely avoid this confusion.

A Quote before applying a theme

The quote I generated looked decent enough, but was rather bland. I tried to make it look gorgeous by applying a theme.

Themes

Theme Editor

You can do so much with the theme editor. The downside is you’ll have to be someone that understands code and have an eye for design. Options to edit the HTML and CSS should make a designer very happy when it comes to customizing the theme. Sparkling team also offers free custom theme consultation as well. Grab it if you are not so into tinkering with code!

Templates

Saving time at every possible turn is vital to close a deal. The text and product templates help you do just that. Quickly insert content created earlier and get the job done. The search box at the top right corner makes the process of finding the right templates painless.

Keeping an Eye on Status

You can send a proposal right away, bypassing the hassle of downloading and attaching a PDF file. And, I just love how these quote management apps allow tracking what happens with a proposal.

Tracking Proposals

Sparkling alerts you with an email when a proposal is opened. Multiple proposals can be easily monitored from the Proposals dashboard. Being able to see who viewed the proposal is awesome, additional perk!

Final Thoughts

Sparkling scored perfectly on the flexibility part of the equation. Affordable pricing and a simple workflow work in favor of the app. Lack of easy to use templates is a major downside. In addition to a variety of color themes, pre built templates for common quote types will make Sparkling’s offerings more competitive.

A lot of new quote generation apps have come up in the past few months. While one excels in creating gorgeous proposals, others focus on analytics, niche targeting etc. Sparkling’s strong suite is its simplicity. But, if you are looking for something more, do check out our coverage of the competition. And, don’t forget to tell us about your pick!

The latest feed reader on the block is Feed Wrangler, a project that’d already been in the works for several months prior to Google’s announcement and that’s now ready for use. It’s simpler to use than many feed readers, though also more geeky with ways to make your own dynamic feeds from the sites you’re subscribed to. Let’s take a look.

Feed Wrangler

Feed Wrangler isn’t designed as a new way to read your news, or surface the best links from your feeds. It’s not shiny and eye-catching, but rather sports a spartan gray+text UI that’s reminiscent of the bookmarking service Pinboard. And it’s not free, but rather costs $19/year (which works out to around $1.50/month, which is hardly a princely sum).

Feed Wrangler is instead designed to be the best way to subscribe to all of your feeds, with a lightening fast interface and clean fonts that make it easy to browse through the day’s headlines or read articles in full. It’s got deep Read Later integration so you can save the best articles to read later, and full text search through all of your feeds and their article content to find exactly what you’re looking for. Most interesting, it’s got a unique Smart Streams feature that lets you make your own custom feeds based on queries you’ve setup. Plus, it’s got a sustainable business model, so you can bank on the fact that Feed Wrangler will be there when you need it, and won’t meet an untimely death like Google Reader.

Feed Wrangler isn’t a simple clone of Google Reader. Instead it is an alternative take on aggregating RSS that I think makes it much easier to manage.

~David Smith, Feed Wrangler Developer

So far, so good. In fact, it just might be what you’ve been looking for in a feed reader, if you really wanted to replace Google Reader with something that was similar, but then also pushed the bar with unique tools that make feeds more powerful.

Moving’s Easy

Moving over from Google Reader

If you’re a Google Reader refugee, you couldn’t have it easier with Feed Wrangler. It has a prominent Google Reader import tool that, after a quick authentication with your Google account, will pull all of your feeds and favorites over in seconds. It imported my full Google Reader account and had my latest unread feeds ready to read about 20 seconds after I completed my Google Reader import.

Of course, if you used another RSS reader app, or are just getting started with RSS, Feed Wrangler works great too. You can import your OPML file or add individual feeds directly. Then, going forward, you can use the bookmarklet to subscribe to RSS feeds from sites you visit.

No favorite left behind.

The best thing is, Feed Wrangler brings over everything from Google Reader, including your starred items, something that few Google Reader alternates do. It’ll even bring over articles you starred that aren’t currently in your feed list, so nothing is lost. If you’re moving from Google Reader to Feed Wrangler, you won’t need to worry about importing starred items into Pinboard or something else; there’ll all here in one app.

Time to Settle In

Feed Inception.

If you wanted a straight-out feed reader, Feed Wrangler has you covered, no questions asked. But it has some features that go beyond that. Most obviously, there’s built-in search that searches the full contents of your feeds, which is very nice but often overlooked. Then, there’s very nice Read Later app support, which will both let you quickly send articles to your favorite service and will also check Instapaper to see if articles are already in your Reading Later list.

Best of all, there’s support for Smart Streams — your own feeds made dynamically from articles in your feeds. You can enter search filters to surface articles with the keywords you want in their text, then set what feeds you want it to include in the Smart Stream. Save it, and you’ll instantly have a set of all articles with those keywords. It’s a simple way to keep up on what’s most important to you in all of your feeds, and will be interesting to see what more you can do with it in the future once the API is released.

Beyond that, Feed Wrangler works much as you’d expect. You can browse through a list of your feeds in order, or just see the unread items. Click on an item to read it in full in the app, or click the read-it-later icon to save it to your reading app of choice. My only frustration was with the lack of keyboard shortcuts, something I hope will be added in the future to make reading sans-mouse easier.

Designed for Apps

Feed Wrangler, looking great on iOS

There’s more than just the web app, too. Feed Wrangler’s already got its own iOS app for free, that if anything is more polished than the web app. There’s also a promised full-featured Mac app, as well as a complementary iOS Podcasts app, presumably using Feed Wrangler as a way to subscribe to podcasts and listen to them on the go.

But that’s not all. Feed Wrangler is designed with a full 3rd party API, so 3rd party feed reader apps can plug into Feed Wrangler just like they did with Google Reader. The Android app Press has already announced Feed Wrangler support, and hopefully more apps will be coming soon.

Conclusion

When David Smith set out to build Feed Wrangler, he didn’t want to simply clone Google Reader. Instead, he wanted to build a sustainable service that builds on the very idea of feeds, in a way that users would love.

On that goal, Feed Wrangler’s already a great accomplishment. It’s smart feeds go where no other feed readers I’ve ever used have gone, and the lightening-fast app makes checking the news simpler than ever. When more native apps are available, Feed Wrangler will definitely be one of the most attractive options for switching away from Google Reader. If the web app just had keyboard shortcuts, it’d have everything you’d be used to in Google Reader, and more.

Feed Wrangler is a great choice to try out if you haven’t found the perfect feed reader for your needs yet, and it’ll be exciting to see how it improves and takes feeds further going forward.

Since then, though, Adobe’s refocused on native web coding — and seems to be distancing itself more and more from Flash. They’ve bought out Typekit but kept its free plan, and even made their own free web font library for unlimited use on any site. They also have a number of useful web apps, for everything from basic photo editing to a surprisingly robust screenwriting web app (which we can’t figure out why they made as a web app after killing their office web apps).

We just rounded up a dozen free apps and tools from Adobe over at Mac.AppStorm, and you should take a minute to check it out. There’s a number of web apps in the list, as well as native Mac and Windows apps (and even one for Linux) for everything from photo syncing to web coding.

Checkout our full Roundup of free apps from Adobe at Mac.AppStorm…