Too good to forget!
Despite our email dominated lives, there are still times when we need to write real letters. Often they’re for official and serious matters, but sometimes they can be strictly for a laugh, or to impress. However writing letters is now something of a lost art, which is why we thought we’d bring you a selection of automatic tools to help you do it without too much effort. Enjoy.
The web is wonderful all right, but it’s also a pretty volatile place unfortunately. How many times have you bookmarked a site or a page, only to return later on and find that it has gone or been significantly altered? The problem is, there’s no guarantee that the page you left is the one you’ll return to, and while we can capture pages to our local computers, that gets unwieldy real fast.
You’re a designer and you’re trying to create something glorious, but you need help. Your web design just doesn’t look right without some placeholder images to bring it all together, man. Things are getting desperate and you’re running short on time. What do you do?
We first reported on Lucid Software three years ago and even then we marked out the company and its approach as something special. “All in all this is one superb drawing and charting app, and deserves to carve a significant chunk out of the market.” Well fast forward to today and they’ve gone and done it again, with another superb web application which fills a real need and competes aggressively against an expensive big league incumbent.
We first covered LibriVox way back in 2007, and it’s great to see it’s still going strong. The open source service provides free volunteer created audiobooks for all, divided into a nicely categorized library. Think of it as the Gutenberg Press for audio books. One of the great features of the service is the fact that it also offers foreign language audio, which is something sorely lacking in the literary world.
Ever played 20 questions? Fun isn’t it? Well just recently I came across a site called Filmillion, which is an online version of that game focused on movies. Basically, the website requires that you answer 30 questions to help guess the movie you’re thinking about, and would you believe that it actually works? I kid you not.
YouTube is a revolution all right, and we probably haven’t seen half of what it’s going to evolve into eventually. But even now it’s clear that the mega popular video site dominates across the world in a way that no other medium, even television, has ever done. How else to explain the mind-boggling 1.8 billion views of a Korean pop music video?
It’s really surprising to us that after all these years there’s still no real simple tool which lets you control Internet access in your home. Like a kill switch or similar. The idea is not so weird, there have been times when we felt that switching off the whole internet would be very useful, such as when strange data accesses occur which we can’t identify.
It’s getting near the end of the week, and we thought you might enjoy a little R&R from our friends at Open Culture. So we’d like to offer up 575 Free Movies for your enjoyment. The list is fully curated and annotated, and is culled from a mixture of the Internet Archive and YouTube.
If you do a lot of video work on YouTube, cable or anywhere else for that matter, you’ll probably know just how useful a teleprompter can be. For those who don’t know what we mean, these devices deliver a slow scrolling stream of text next to the camera which lets you look straight at the lens, read and yet look like you’re talking freely about the subject at hand. No more having to memorize all the information.
Sometimes a whole video is overkill, when all you need is a short clip of something. And it’s not just for LOLcats or other silliness either. Extracting a clip of a video can be very useful to demonstrate something, or teach and explain, and even to learn how something works in detail. The trouble is it’s not that easy to create short clips from full videos, unless you use complicated GIF tools.
We love tools that use the power of computators to make our lives easier, especially when it also helps us make more money at the same time. In the past we’ve seen a fair number of services like Omgili which help to search forums and deliver up their hidden goodness, so it’s nice to report on a new site which gives the same kind of deep data search for eBay.
It’s amazing what you can do with technology if the right amount of data is available to you, and a couple of enterprising folk in San Francisco have gone and produced a rather delicious online service which proves the fact perfectly. If their idea starts a trend, we could see an interesting tussle begin between techies and the parking system in cities everywhere.
Apps are big business, or they’re not. There seems to be very little middle ground. Either your mobile app makes it huge, or it disappears without trace in the marketplace, and there seems to be no logic to how it works. Maybe it’s a bit like life in that way? What makes it even more difficult is the cost and difficulty of getting your app idea developed, if you can find a coder willing and able to do it.
The cloud may have taken a huge hit post NSA snoopergate, but there are still compelling reasons for using online storage and apps, even if it’s better to avoid putting your extra private data up there. For instance we love the ease and value of Amazon S3, and Google Drive, Dropbox and Sky Drive are great services for storing and collaborating on files with clients and colleagues.
