PageOnce - Manage all your online accounts

 

PageOnce is a great app that lets you access all your online accounts from one portal, which is great if like me you're one of those people that pays most of your bills online. The list of supported services is quite exhaustive and includes everything from Amazon to Comcast to American Airlines. PageOnce also supports most email accounts and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. While I personally don't like using it to manage my email accounts, its great for managing utilities - I can look at my cable and phone bills from one convenient interface without having to navigate through Comcast and T-Mobile's awful account pages. Plus it also has an iPhone and BlackBerry app that let's you access all this information right from your cell phone.

Links: PageOnce

NIN - Music for the people

You may wonder what a Nine Inch Nails music video has to do with webapps or collaboration, but bear with me here for a second - what I really want to talk about is nin.com, the band's online portal. Reznor is probably the music industry's most 'techy' artist, something that becomes pretty apparent when you visit the NIN web site and are presented with RSS feeds, IRC chatrooms, multiple streaming video feeds and forums, not to mention the blog which avid fans can use to follow and support the band as they tour.

Reznor's viral marketing approach and dedication to his fans has created a powerful brand image in the music business, and many would say he's catalyzing the shift away from an RIAA dominated industry. I mean, the guy even released an entire album to his fans for free - that makes his business model OK in my books. Even Radiohead seems to agree.

Links: NIN: The Fragile live from on stage, Adelaide 2.28.09 [HD]

Gliffy – Flowcharts for everyone

gliffy is a great little diagramming tool that lets you create room layouts, flowcharts, ERD’s and much more through any browser. This web app also packs some powerful collaboration features that let you share and create diagrams with other people efficiently. I’ve used Gliffy many a time to throw together quick wireframe mockups or charts for presentations when I’m not at my computer.

Another thing to note about gliffy is the powerful version control that lets you restore your diagram to virtually any point in the past. While the gliffy’s interface may not seem as pretty or polished as some of its competitors (Lovely Charts), its powerful collaboration features, seamless interface and simple learning curve make it my personal favorite.

SnapPages – Slick personal homepages in a snap

I stumbled across SnapPages while trying to find an easy way to set up blog/website for Moocher with little or no effort. I have to admit I was very impressed with this little web app when I first signed up. SnapPages has a very fluid, feature rich UI that lets you create and host a personal web site with little or no actual knowledge of HTML. The web site lets you choose from a set of templates and set up basic pages as well a photo gallery, calendar and a social networking tool that lets you communicate with friends and family.

Now the downside is that a lot of the templates and features are only for premium users, which basically means that the free version is only good for people who don’t want to have to deal with HTML/CSS. Another issue is that SnapPages isn’t very customizable and is more of a drag and drop web site creator, which means that a lot of power users will steer clear of it. Don’t get me wrong though, I still think this is a great tool for people who want a nice looking portfolio site set up in under an hour. I would recommend taking a look at it, simply because the UI design and color schemes are really well done.

Links: SnapPages

Vimeo - Downtime is a terrible, terrible thing

I'm not much of a video uploader. I didn't have a YouTube account till a few months ago. In fact, I've never uploaded a single video to YouTube - I use my account to manage playlists. But today, I wanted to share a Moocher demo video with a few friends, and I decided to try using Vimeo, a popular YouTube alternative.

Vimeo's UI is simple and clean and the player itself is minimalistic and unmarred by ugly control elements. Vimeo imposes a weekly 500 MB upload limit, which isn't an issue for me. I uploaded my H.264 video file and it nicely offered to convert the file for me and informed me that I would have to wait 15 minutes. No problem at all. Half an hour later, Vimeo still said I had a minute to go in the queue. A couple of refreshes later, Vimeo is 'out on vacation' and will be back soon. Whatwhatwhat?

I've only had web applications bail on me a couple of times, but the result has always been the same - total panic. An hour later, Vimeo is back up but logins dont work yet and my video is nowhere to be found. The moral of the story? Always back up your data - even cloud computing isn't as infallible they'd like us to believe. I just uploaded my video to YouTube as well - ugly player is better than no player at all.

Links: Vimeo

UPDATE: 2:35 PM - After 3 hours, my video is finally available for viewing

Mozilla Bespin - Code in the Clouds

When we started developing Moocher, I did my customary scan of Lifehacker archives and a Google search to see if my favorite IDE, Notepad ++, had any decent competition yet. Turns out that its still the best out there, but I did stumble upon Bespin, another diamond in the rough from Mozilla Labs. Like the Bespin of Star Wars lore, Mozilla's application floats in the (digital) cloud, and lets you manage your code projects from anywhere via a web browser.

I signed up for an account immediately and began poking around to see if this was going to become my new favorite IDE. I liked the default dark background with light font colors, but the interface felt sluggish and wasn't as seamless as expected. Now I usually rely on Dropbox to keep my project files synchronized across my devices, but I have to copy files to a local folder and fire up my IDE before I can start developing. With Bespin, I can open up Firefox, mosey on over to the website and start coding. And I did just that later that day, during my 15 minute break between meetings at the library.

After running into a couple of other bugs/issues I decided that it wasn't for me.... yet. Bespin shows great potential, and I'm sure it will rise to challenge conventional editors, especially when plugins like Firebug are ported onto its extensible framework. I'm going to keep an eye on this project in the coming months.

Links: Mozilla Bespin, Dropbox, Notepad ++