I dislike todo list apps. Every single one of them. How many times have I eagerly hit the sign up button convinced my days of unproductivity are behind me for good to inevitably witness my initial excitement quickly die out in a smoldering pit of neglect?
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APIs turn web applications you love and use everyday, like Facebook and Twitter, into more seamless and connected experiences. For instance, the Facebook app Selective Tweets allows you to update your Facebook status from Twitter with just a hashtag. But building these connections require countless apps made by different developers. With If this then that, or ifttt, you can create your own connections, allowing you to streamline your online activity to work together.
The web can be a truly ugly place to navigate. As a blogger myself, I understand the difficulty of reading articles with mediocre typography, endless ads, and poor layout (Yes, go ahead and rip this site’s design to shreds. I welcome it). With tools like Readibility and Read Later Fast, there are many options for users to enhance the look and feel of any page they read.
Chrome’s Web Store has been live for several months now, and a flurry of great apps have launched. Some of my personal favorites are Grooveshark, Springpad, and Read Later Fast. Not to mention, Angry Birds is now a webapp!
Anyhow, if you have aspirations to create your own webapp, here’s a very basic “Hello World” style app to get you started, courtesy of the folks at Lifehacker.
Image credit: Dropbox
It’s no secret: the entire universe is in love with Dropbox.
I, myself, can’t stop raving about the online syncing tool. Since downloading the app late last year, it quickly became my most frequently used app.
Dropbox lets me:
Earlier today, Lifehacker wrote a post about SugarSync, another Dropbox competitor who is now offering all free accounts 5 GB of free storage space. Meanwhile, Dropbox offers only 2 GB of free storage. A comment by a reader stated that he had earned nearly 19 GB of free storage through Dropbox’s referral program! I was astonished. And quite sad. I had managed to eke out 11.25 GB of free storage thus far.
In my post 8 Useful Dropbox Tips and Tricks, I explained how you can sync files and folders outside your Dropbox folder by creating symbolic links using the Dropbox Folder Sync addon. While this method did work, I didn’t find it ideal since it wouldn’t let me remove the symbolic link in any simple fashion lest I choose to delete the file or folder itself. Or, at least that’s what I experienced anyways.
Luckily, there is a far better way to sync files outside of Dropbox using the Mac program, Automator. Automator is this really neat program on the Mac that lets you automate many repetitive tasks for you. For example, you can create what are called “workflows” that can rename a large batch of files, or resize numerous images quickly.
In this tutorial, I will create a workflow using the Services template in Automator. Services are these custom context menu bar items you can add to almost any Mac program. This tutorial will show you how to create one that adds a “Sync with Dropbox” option to menu items so that you can easily right-click any file or folder and sync it with Dropbox.
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Confession: I’m madly in love with Dropbox.
Managing your files across multiple computers used to be accomplished through inefficient means like email and USB drives. No more. Dropbox made these old habits obsolete. The formula was simple: place your file into your Dropbox folder, and the file will be instantly synced across all of your computers.
Beyond syncing, Dropbox also became a valuable backup tool for your most important documents. Also, sharing documents with others became incredibly easy with Dropbox, further plummeting the value of email.
In this post, I share 8 great tips and tricks for you to get the most out of Dropbox.
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Google Chrome 4 was released fairly recently, packaging the highly-sought extensions that many believed separated the speedy browser from Mozilla FireFox in the browser wars. The upgrade was amazing, as users were finally able to download a wealth of useful extensions without the label of being in beta form no longer. Though the selection is rather sparse, there were several notable extensions worth taking a look at.
On February 1, 2010, Chrome received another major boost when it launched support for Greasemonkey scripts, essentially adding over 40,000 new extensions to its small library. For the unfamiliar, Greasemonkey scripts allow you to customize the way your browser looks and behaves. For example, there are scripts which can disable text ads, allow you to login to multiple Gmail accounts, and even pre-fill comments on blog posts.