40Tech

Make Google Reader Pretty with Reeder for Chrome

Bobby Travis — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:25:58 +0000

Google Reader is the best RSS subscription collector out there — but only as a base. In practice it has one of the ugliest user interfaces I’ve ever come across. It’s busy, cluttered, and generally hard to look at and use. If it weren’t for all of the apps that utilize Google Reader within their own UI, I’m guessing it would have tanked along with other unwieldy Google services. Thankfully, some enterprising folks have used browser technology to re-skin Reader into something that actually makes content easy to consume. One of the best is Reeder for Chrome.

First things first: Reeder for Chrome is not an official extension by the creator of Reeder for iOS and Mac, Silvio Rizzi. It was created by @DazChong, someone who loved the slick design and easy usability of Reeder. 40Tech’s Evan Kline shares that love — he’s included Reeder as the first of his top 10 consumption apps for the iPad and one of the top 10 Mac App Store apps he can’t live without, and has cited it in several posts as his go-to app for RSS.

Note: Reeder for Chrome will, at some point, be changing its name to avoid confusion.

Reeder for Chrome delivers. It may not have all of the features you’re used to from the actual app, but most of them are there, and the look and feel makes Google Reader not just bearable, but a pleasure to use. It is especially useful for Windows, Linux, or Google ChromeOS users that want what those Mac folks have.

Download Reeder for Chrome

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Rizzoma May (Soon) Be the Wave Alternative You’re Looking For

Bobby Travis — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:20:09 +0000

In our last post on Google Wave, we talked about the impending final shutdown of the service on April 30th, 2012 (it is currently in read-only mode), and the potential for Apache Wave and Walkaround to keep the real-time collaboration tool going. We’ve even done a bit of hunting on our own for a suitable Wave alternative, but the reality is that Wave was a bit ahead of its time. Fortunately, another possibility for resurrection has surfaced: Rizzoma.

Rizzoma is a free, open source version of Google Wave that boasts some improvements to the look, feel, and function of the service. Some of the features they talk about on their site are an easy to use mobile version that actually works, improves search, the ability to to assign and track tasks within Rizzoma, easy team management and content sharing, and a built in mindmap mode.

Rizzoma also promises the ability to re-install your favourite open source gadgets from Google Wave, and the ability to import your old Waves to the new platform.

The unfortunate truth, however, is that Rizzoma’s current level of marketing far outstrips the actual state of the product. Their website looks very promising, with a big button that says log in with your Google account and a video that makes you believe that the service is ready to go. I don’t know if it was an oversight on their part that they don’t include a note that the service is in beta and most of the truly awesome features are still on their way, but the reality is that a newcomer to Rizzoma will likely find themselves confused and disappointed. At least for now. After a bit of hunting on their support forums, I found that the bulk of what’s promised should be available within a month.

Right now, @mentions work, basic document creation, editing, and collaboration is available, the mobile version is functional, and the improved look and feel is on point. Importing your old Waves is also working, via the WaveShortcuts Chrome extension created by Project Volna — who are also the people behind Rizzoma. Importing your Waves via the extension is fairly simple, and the final result is readable and usable, though huge Waves with a lot of nested upon nested replies could get a bit unwieldy.

If you have been on the hunt for a Google Wave alternative, or are just looking for a real time collaboration tool that works across platforms, Rizzoma looks promising, despite the potential marketing/first impression snafu. If they are true to their word about getting the big features up and running effectively within a month, then we may finally have a winner here — proivded they can get enough support. Rizzoma is definitely the most promising Google Wave alternative I’ve come across so far. If you are at all interested, you may want to check them out and start importing your Waves now, as the time window is closing fast.

Check out the video below to see where Rizzoma is taking Wave:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Learn how to import your Waves to Rizzoma:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Check out Rizzoma and tell us what you think!

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App of the Week: Paper Camera [iOS, Android]

Evan Kline — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 02:00:00 +0000

Both the iOS App Store and the Android Market offer an abundance of camera apps. There are so many, that it takes either great functionality or a unique twist for an app to stand out. One that does so is Paper Camera, available as both an Android and an iPhone/iPad app. Paper Camera lets you use your camera to output real time cartoon and painting effects that have to be seen to appreciated.

I’ve tried out Paper Camera on Android, so I can’t speak for the iOS version. On Android, the app takes a few seconds to start, but when it does you’re presented with a unique interface, that almost looks hand-sketched.

From that interface, you select the effects you want by scrolling through options. The effects include ones called Sketch Up (your image looks like a sketch), Comic Book (your image looks like it jumped off the pages of a comic book), Old Printer (your image will look pixelated, like it was printed with an old printer), Neon Cola (your image will have parts of it outlined in Neon), Pastel Perfect (your image will be shaded in pastel tones), and a few others.

You’re also presented with sliders to adjust the contrast, brightness, and lines, and buttons to zoom in and zoom out. There’s a button to take the photo, and one to go to your photo gallery. If you go to the gallery, you can select a photo, which will then be imported into the app. From there, you can apply the same effects that you can to photos taken from directly within the app.

There’s also a share button and an email button on the screen, but they’re not there to let you share your photos. Instead, they only let you share news of the app or email the developer, respectively.

Paper Camera is one of those apps that, when I’ve shown it to people, they’ll often pick up their phone, head to the App Store or Android Market, and download it. It’s currently $1.99 in the Android Market, and $0.99 in the App Store.

Paper Camera [iOS] [Android]

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How to Take Screenshots With Your Mac

Evan Kline — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 02:00:00 +0000

You’ve got your new Mac, and want to take a screenshot. Where’d that Print Screen key go? Things work a bit differently on the Mac. You could go with a third party solution, such as Skitch or Littlesnapper. Or, you could use your Mac’s built in ability to take screenshots. There are three different ways to take a screenshot on your Mac, by holding down key combinations. All screenshots go to your desktop by default.

COMMAND – SHIFT – 3

This takes a screenshot of your entire screen. In fact, it is instantaneous, so you might not even know it worked.

COMMAND – SHIFT – 4

Your cursor changes to crosshairs, and you can then take a screenshot of whatever area you select.

COMMAND – SHIFT – 4, THEN HIT SPACEBAR

Your cursor changes to a camera, and you can then take a screenshot of the dock, the menu bar, a single open menu, the desktop, or any open window. Whatever you hover over will become the target of the screenshot, and turn blue.

That’s all there is to it. If you’d rather have a screenshot go to your clipboard instead of to the desktop, then add the CONTROL key to each of the above methods. So, for example, COMMAND-CONTROL-SHIFT-4 will let you select an area of the screen to send to your clipboard.

If you’d prefer a free app that comes with your Mac, you can also try out Grab, which is located in your Applications/Utilities folder.

What’s your favorite method for taking a screenshot on your Mac?

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What’s Your Favorite App – Ever? [Reader Feedback]

Evan Kline — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 02:00:00 +0000

In a recent TWiT podcast, one of the hosts mentioned WordPerfect 5.1 as an all-time great piece of software. That got my mind racing, trying to think of some great apps that I’ve used over the years. While those of us in the 40+ age bracket might have a longer timeline of app usage to draw from, we probably all have our favorite apps. What are yours?

To be honest, I had a hard time thinking back to the apps that I’ve used over the years. Some that came to mind were WordPerfect 5.1, Netscape Navigator, Dreamweaver, Eudora, and an old version of Paint Shop Pro that I used for many years. I also turned my mind to games, remembering fondly Zork and an early Ultima game, as well as Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights (which, along with its sequel, sustained me for years and also led me to meeting our senior editor, Bobby Travis). I’m sure some modern apps would have to be in the running, too. Evernote, Dropbox, and LastPass are such an integral part of my daily life, that they’d be hard to overlook

So, travel down memory lane with me. What apps would be on your list? If you had to pick a favorite, what would it be?

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Producteev Gets a Massive Upgrade: Android App, Windows Desktop App, and an All Around Makeover

Bobby Travis — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 05:16:54 +0000

Producteev, one of our favourite — and one of the best — to-do apps, has released a massive upgrade that includes some long-awaited features and platform updates. The web and iPhone apps have gotten a makeover, the much clamoured-for Android app has finally arrived, and there is now a Windows 7 desktop app to balance out the Mac version. Even the logo has been updated (bye bye Tasky the beaver)!

To top it all off, Producteev has added a few new features into the mix — and yes (drumroll), that does include sub-tasks…

Check out the video below for the overview of some of the new functionality in the multi-platform task manager.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There have been usability and visual enhancements across all apps, improvements to some of the main Producteev feature-set (discussed in previous posts), and some brand new features such as integration with TaskRabbit (a service for crowdsourcing small tasks), the ability to print tasks and export them to CSV, as well as the aforementioned sub-tasks.

Now, I know many of you have been waiting patiently for sub-tasks, but don’t get too excited. At this time, sub-tasks are really nothing more than a checkable list added to the top of the main task’s detailed view. There is no way to interact with them outside of that view, or to add specific dates, labels, or anything else. Also, they don’t appear to work in the mobile apps yet, either. Hopefully, there will be improvements, and soon, especially in the case of the missing mobile integration.

The Android app is great. I can now use Producteev with my wife’s phone just as easily as my own, and with an interface that’s nearly identical to the iPhone’s. As Producteev mentions in this post, however, Android users should be aware that the new app is in beta. Don’t expect an error-free experience, just yet.

As always, Producteev is free to use for workspaces that have one or two people. If you want to collaborate with larger teams, unlimited people and storage space can be had for $20 USD per month (it gets cheaper the more workspaces you buy).

Update: Google Calendar integration has been temporarily disabled due to stability issues. It should be back up and running within the week — and it will be better than before. Two way task-sync with Gcal, folks!

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Summify Acquired by Twitter (and Going Bye Bye)

Bobby Travis — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 03:27:55 +0000

Back in August of last year, we wrote about Summify, a fantastic tool for getting to and sharing the highlights of your social streams and feeds. I’ve used this tool religiously for the past several months and have found it to be incredibly useful, especially with Twitter. Just last week, however, I received an email from the Vancouver-based start-up and discovered that they had become yet another in a long line of services to be snatched up and absorbed by a tech giant — in this case, Twitter. Great for them, but sad for you and me.

The Summify team will be moving to San Francisco, where they will become a part of Twitter’s growth team. Summify the service will be stripped down for the time being, and will eventually shutdown altogether as a standalone product.

Here’s the main list of changes from their announcement:

New account registrations have been disabled.
Email summaries remain, but only for a few weeks, and then they are gone as well.
Users will still receive their summaries via the web app (and the iPhone app, as well, I believe), but will no longer be able to make them public.
Profile and influence pages are gone, as is auto-publish.

I’ve also noticed that sharing posts to Twitter from Summify no longer adds credits to the end of the tweet. Previously, the tweet would add in an @mention to a few of those in your network that shared the information with you in the first place, but this is no longer the case, at least from the mobile app.

There is no word yet as to when Summify will shut down completely, or what cool newness might arise in Twitter as a result. Either way, while I’m happy for the people behind the great service, I will really miss Summify as a standalone tool. Hopefully, something truly great comes out of this. In the meantime, we can only hope that Zite — and maybe Flipboard — will pick up the slack by improving how they filter our streams.

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Easily Preview the Output of Your HTML and CSS With A Web App

Evan Kline — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 02:00:00 +0000

If you ever play around with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and don’t want to set up a testing environment, check out JSFiddle. JSFiddle is a web app that lets you input HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, hit a button, and see the results of your code.

There are four main boxes on the JSFiddle screen: one for HTML, one for CSS, one for JavaScript, and one for the results of your code. You enter your code in the first three boxes, as appropriate, hit a “Run” button, and then you can see your results in the fourth box.

JSFiddle has some options that you can set, such as choosing Mootools or jQuery. It also lets you tidy up the appearance with your code with the click of a button. This doesn’t seem to change your code at all, but can add line breaks and indentations.

When you’re done with your code, you can share a link to it, share it on Facebook or Twitter, or even embed it on a page. That makes JSFiddle not just great for testing out some code, but having someone else take a look at it for you.

Do you have any tools that you use when trying out code?

JSFiddle [via Webmaster-Source]

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Top 10 Mac App Store Apps I Can’t Live Without

Evan Kline — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 02:00:00 +0000

Early in my Mac life, I looked at ten apps that were essential to me at the time. Looking at that list, I realize that my usage has changed a bit over time. Since then, the Mac App Store was born as well. A recent post by Dan Gold on Google+ inspired me to try to list my ten favorite App Store apps. It was hard narrowing that list down to just ten, and even harder ranking these from 1 to 10. Here’s what I came up with.

First, though, a disclaimer. Every app on this list is available in the App Store, although there are two on the list that I purchased outside the App Store as part of bundles. I’ll use an * to designate those.

1. TextExpander*

In my previous list, I wrote about TypeIt4Me, which is a great app and has been around a long time. Both TypeIt4Me and TextExpander are apps that allow you to create snippets of text, and then set up abbreviations to trigger the typing of those snippets. We’ve given you some examples of how this can be useful and make you more productive. TextExpander, though, was one of the apps that came in a bundle, and I switched to it because of the sheer number of iOS apps with built-in support for the iOS version of the app, and because of the ability to sync my text expansion snippets with a Windows text expansion app.

2. Sparrow

Sparrow is an IMAP email client, but where it really shines is in its support of Gmail. It handles labels better than any other desktop client that I’ve seen, and makes it quick and easy to blow through your email. For a longer look at Sparrow, check out our review.

3. Alfred

Okay, time for another disclaimer. I do love Alfred, but I’m currently kicking the tires on LaunchBar to see how I like it. Think of both as Spotlight on steroids, since they allow you to use keystrokes to find and launch apps, perform web searches, execute math calculations, and more. Alfred strikes me as more elegant and easy to use, while LaunchBar seems more powerful. Once I’ve put LaunchBar through the paces, I strongly suspect that I’ll be back to using Alfred.

4. MarsEdit

MarsEdit is a blogging app that I’ve previously written about. There’s not much more to say other than it is the best native Mac blogging app. If you blog, check it out.

5. Acorn

Acorn is an easy to use image editor. I have Pixelmator, too, but Acorn is the app that I always find myself using.

6. Reeder

Reeder is my RSS reader of choice, both on the iPad and on OS X. It’s slick and elegant, and, makes it easy to quickly browse feeds.

7. FileShredder

FileShredder adds a “secure shred” option to the context menu when right-clicking in Finder. I use it after downloading financial information to my desktop. FileShredder deletes it, and then securely overwrites it so that it can’t be recovered.

8. Littlesnapper

I use Littlesnapper to take screenshots when writing articles for 40Tech. It makes it easy to annotate those screenshots as well. I keep meaning to try Skitch, but I have Littlesnapper pretty much integrated into my workflow right now

9. Yoink

Yoink is another app that I’ve already written about. It adds a box to the side of your screen that only appears when you drag an image or file to it. That box acts as a holding area for the file while you swipe between windows. You can get to the app of your choice, and then drag that file into the app.

10.Fantastical*

This is my newest addition. Fantastical is an app that you really have to see to appreciate. It makes the entry of calendar items fun, believe it or not, as it recognizes natural language. It integrates with both iCal and BusyCal.

Honorable mentions:

For some other opinions, check out Dan’s thread on G+. What are your essential Mac App Store apps?

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Find the Best Channel for Your WiFi Network With WiFi Stumbler

Evan Kline — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 02:00:00 +0000

I’ve recently started having issues with my WiFi network, such as dropouts and slowness. One of the first steps I’ve taken to address the problem is to try to determine if I’m getting interference from other networks. To see nearby networks, and what channels they’re using, I’ve found WiFi Stumbler to be valuable.

WiFi Stumbler is a web app, in the form of a java applet. It works by scanning for nearby networks, and then listing their MAC address, radio type (B, G, N, etc.), channel, signal strength, manufacturer, and security used. As signals drift out of range, they are grayed out in the list.

Using WiFi Stumbler, I picked an unused channel for my network that had the least amount of interference based on number of connections, nearby busy channels, and signal strength from surrounding devices on those nearby channels. My WiFi connection is much better now, although I still have a few more tweaks to make.

As an aside, what surprised me the most about WiFi Stumbler, and perhaps taught me a bit about how WiFi signals travel, were the number of networks at home versus at my office. I live in a fairly rural neighborhood, with houses that aren’t too close together, yet WiFi Stumbler picked up a total of 17 networks. Two of those were unsecured, and three were using the insecure WEP standard. I work in a downtown area, and assumed that I’d pick up even more networks, yet WiFi Stumbler detected only four WiFi signals, one of which was unsecured and one which was using WEP.

So, color me curious. Head on over and try out WiFi Stumbler, and let us know in the comments how many networks you pick up, and how many are unsecured or using WEP.

WiFi Stumbler