But most companies and content creators don’t realize the volume of sites out there that are available for hosting your videos. YouTube is just one site, but there are dozens of others out there, too, of varying quality. Below, we’ve covered twenty of the best (including YouTube), with information on content restrictions, cost, and whether they permit commercial content, as well as key features of each.

Free and Freemium Platforms

There are a ton of free and freemium video hosting platforms available, though many have content restrictions. Some don’t allow commercial use, some only take certain kinds of videos (like episodic web series), and some limit how much you can upload. Many of these platforms have paid plans that let you overcome some or all of the restrictions, and some have partner programs that let you earn money from your videos.

YouTube

YouTube, owned by Google, is the most popular video hosting platform out there. There are millions of videos on YouTube, covering virtually every topic and style imaginable (with the exception of pornography). YouTube has a lot of advantages as a video host, but also has some pretty distinct disadvantages for some users, namely the inclusion of ads on and around your videos, which may be undesirable for many businesses (the last thing you want is for a competitor’s ad to pop up next to your video). YouTube’s partner program does let you earn revenue from advertising, though.

More info:

• Cost: Free
• Content Restrictions: No pornography or sexually explicit content, no videos intended to shock or disgust, no videos showing illegal activity, no graphic or gratuitous violence
• Commercial Content OK: Yes

Vimeo

Vimeo is one of the more popular video hosting platforms, especially for non-commercial video. There have been reports of difficulties with the Vimeo player for some users, though other users definitely prefer the Vimeo player to many others. They have two plans for non-commercial users, though they do allow commercial use for small, independent production companies with some restrictions. Vimeo also offers Perks to their Plus members, along with advanced statistics and unlimited groups, channels, and albums.

More info:

• Cost: Free for Basic plan, which allows up to 500MB/week uploads, including 1 HD video, or $9.95/month or $59.95/year for Plus membership, which includes up to 5GB/week uploads and unlimited HD videos (see Premium section for Vimeo Pro)
• Content Restrictions: No commercial content
• Commercial Content OK: Generally no, there are exceptions for small production companies and similar

Metacafe

Metacafe focuses on entertainment more than many other free video host, and specifically entertainment aimed at a particular demographic. They have more exclusive, original, and curated premium content than any other entertainment site, and are among the top 3 video sites in the U.S. They’re dedicated to showcasing short-form videos from the world of movies, video games, TV, music and sports, primarily aimed at young men. If your video content is likely to be appealing to that demographic, then Metacafe might be a good choice to host your videos.

More info:

• Cost: Free
• Content Restrictions: No content that is unlawful, obscene, defamatory, libelous, threatening, pornographic, harrassing, hateful, racially or ethnically offensive, or encourages illegal activity
• Commercial Content OK: Yes

Vitomy

Vitomy is a hosted video player that lets you completely customize the video player to meet your branding needs. You can build your own unique and creative templates for your video player more easily than many platforms. The only downside is that only the paid plan allows player customization. Both plans, however, offer video uploads, previews, search, and built-in Vitomy templates. The free plan offers 40GB of bandwidth and storage, while the paid plan offers 200GB.

More info:

• Cost: Free to $59/month
• Content Restrictions: None listed on website
• Commercial Content OK: Yes

Blip.tv

Blip.tv is focused on distributing original web series for content creators. They automate uploading of your videos to various channels, including YouTube, and allow for revenue generation. They offer insights and analytics into your traffic, a massive distribution network, and a number of powerful social tools. They also have completely customizable video players that can display a single episode, your entire series, or specific playlists.

More info:

• Cost: Free
• Content Restrictions: Aimed a episodice web series
• Commercial Content OK: Yes

Premium and Enterprise Platforms

Many of the free platforms above don’t allow you the full control you need over your content, especially for enterprise users. That’s where premium video hosting platforms come into play. The biggest downside to premium video services like these is their cost, often in the hundreds of dollars per month. But what you get is superior service and generally more control over your content, as well as more advanced toold.

SproutVideo

SproutVideo is a business video hosting solution that offers a number of features important to businesses. These include security and privacy options, SSL embeds, domain whitelists, HD video, mobile playback, easily customizable video players, and embeddable videos. Their analytics will show you how many plays your videos get, where those plays are coming from, which videos are popular, and where your videos are being viewed on the web.

More info:

• Cost: $10 to $750 per month depending on bandwidth and storage needs, there’s a $1 free trial available
• Content Restrictions: None specified on the website
• Commercial Content OK: Yes

Viddler

Viddler is a video hosting platform for businesses, including educational institutions and non-profits. They offer three plans depending on your needs, including a customizable enterprise plan. Videos hosted with Viddler are HD quality, embeddable, and will play on mobile devices. They have their own ad network to help you generate revenue with your videos, and they also offer a plan to sell access to your video using subscriptions, both available on their Business plan.

More info:

• Cost: Starting at $50/month for Pro and $100/month for Business, discounts are availalbe for education customers and non-profits.
• Content Restrictions: No hateful, threatening, pornographic, obscene, abusive, unlawful, harrassing, racially or ethnically offensive, libelous or defamatory, or any content that encourages illegal activity.
• Commercial Content OK: Yes

Google Video for Business

Google Video for Business is part of the Google Apps suite, and is optimized for internal corporate and enterprise video communication. It’s private, secure video hosting that makes it easy to share things like training videos with your coworkers without making them public on the web or having to deal with an on-site solution. It’s accessible from anywhere, and works on Mac, PC, and Linux computers.

More info:

• Cost: Included in Google Apps, which is $5/month/user or $50/year/user
• Content Restrictions: None specified on the website
• Commercial Content OK: Yes

iPlayerHD

iPlayerHD is a high definition hosting service for businesses. It’s ad-free, includes a DRM streaming option, allows you to choose whether videos are embeddable or not (or choose which domains can embed them), and allows for unlimited video length. They also offer analytics, and they auto-detect the device the video is being accessed on so the appropriate file is automatically delivered. You can set up custom landing pages for you videos and even choose a "no encode" option that won’t re-encode or compress your video files.

More info:

• Cost: $30/month or $300/year. A 30-day free trial is available
• Content Restrictions: None specified on website
• Commercial Content OK: Yes

Framesocket

Framesocket is a premium video hosting platform designed for developers. It offers an API to make uploading easy (as well as a desktop uploader), an easily customizable video player, customizable channels, automated audience building tools, and mobile compatibility. You can gather videos from an unlimited number of users and sources, and then securely store or serve them via Framesocket’s content delivery network.

More info:

• Cost: $25/month including 5GB of storage and delivery, additional storage is available at $.50/GB and additional transfer is available at $.25/GB
• Content Restrictions: None listed on website
• Commercial Content OK: Yes

23 Video

23 Video is a premium video hosting platform that’s aimed at high-traffic enterprise videos. It includes 1TB of traffic per month, with additional traffic available. You get an unlimited number of videos, unlimited users, and unlimited video length. You have full freedom over the design of the open source video player, and you get your own fully-customizable videosite with your design and your domain. There are powerful analytics included, as well as a variety of distribution options (including subscribing via email, podcasting, iTunes or AppleTV), and videos can automatically be posted to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Google Video.

More info:

• Cost: $675 per month, plus $250 per extra 1TB of traffic
• Content Restrictions: None on website
• Commercial Content OK: Yes

Vzaar

Vzaar is a professional video platform that is easy to use but quite powerful. It includes a video player with customizalbe colors, borders, brand overlays, brand text & links, subtitles, end screen text, and more. Videos are high definition and iPhone compatible. You have access to privacy controls, domain controls, and more. Videos can be set to autoplay and loop, and you have a variety of encoding options. Vzaar also offers integration tools for Ebay, embeddable video code (including HTTPS embed code), and integration with Google Analytics and Mail Chimp.

More info:

• Cost: $29 to $499 per month depending on bandwidth, video numbers, and optional iOS streams
• Content Restrictions: Nothing tasteless, offensive, or obscene (including pornography)
• Commercial Content OK: Yes

Brightcove

Brightcove offers an enterprise-level video hosting platform that includes live streaming capabilities, YouTube sync, and other distribution and syndication options. They offer monetization and advertising opportunities for your online media, as well as powerful analytics and integration options. There are fifteen video player templates you can choose from, all of which are customizalbe. Smart Players let you deliver both Flash and HTML5 video so you don’t have to manage separate players or have extra code on your website.

More info:

• Cost: $99 to $499+ per month
• Content Restrictions: No content that contains pornography, promotes illegal activity, is unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortious, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive of privacy or publicity rights, hateful, or racially, sexually, ethnically or otherwise objectionable.
• Commercial Content OK: Yes

Vimeo Pro

Vimeo Pro is an enterprise video solution from Vimeo. Pro videos don’t show up within the regular Vimeo site (though you can enable the "Community Pass" for videos which meet Vimeo’s regular content guidelines), and you can host commercial content. You get 50GB of upload space and unlimited on-site plays, and up to 250k embed plays (additional space and plays can be purchased), with no bandwidth caps or time limits. High definition video is available (with full 1080p), and it’s compatible with mobile, tablet, and connected TVs. You get fast priority uploading, as well as HTML5 support with the Vimeo Universal Player.

More info:

• Cost: $199 per year
• Content Restrictions: Not specified on site
• Commercial Content OK: Yes

Oculu

Oculu offers unlimited video uploads for your commercial videos, with restrictions on storage and plays based on the plan you select. Their controls are incredibly easy to use, with a dashboard for customizing each individual video. They offer multiple embed options (including standard embed, overlay, and lightbox videos), and tools to manage, measure, and optimize your video campaigns.

More info:

• Cost: $19/month to $245 per month
• Content Restrictions: Not listed on site
• Commercial Content OK: Yes

Ooyala

Ooyala makes it easy to manage your video content across a variety of CMS platforms, including WordPress, ExpressionEngine, Drupal, and others. They automatically transcode your videos into a variety of formats and sizes to support major devices and screen sizes. You can customize your player however you want, with completely customizable player templates that can be used with Silverlight, Flash, and HTML5. They offer APIs for integration with third-party CMSs as well as for bulk uploads and importing of content (including YouTube content). Ooyala works with Flash Access Digital Rights Management and supports custom meta data. Full syndication is possible across YouTube, Facebook, and iTunes, as well as through custom feeds.

More info:

• Cost: Starting at $500 per month
• Content Restrictions: Not listed on website
• Commercial Content OK: Yes

Kaltura

Kaltura is an enterprise video hosting app with some of the most versatile options out there. They offer browser-based, bulk, desktop, FTP-based, and drop folder uploads, among others. They let you transcode your videos to a variety of formats and sizes, using teh transcoder of your choice, and they have powerful management and publishing tools for your video content. Their video player works with Flash or HTML5, and it makes it easy to share content via Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and over fifty other social networks and blogs. Kaltura is one of the only commercial video platforms that also offers basic video editing tools, including the ability to trim and clip content, and add subtitles. They offer a variety of options for monetizing your content, including adveritising, pay-per-view, and VAST support. They offer deployment options for SaaS, self-hosted, community, and cloud editions.

More info:

• Cost: Not specified, though a free trial is available
• Content Restrictions: No content that is unlawful, obscene, defamatory, libelous, threatening, pornographic, harrassing, hateful, racially or ethnically offensive, or encourages illegal activity.
• Commercial Content OK: Yes

Limelight Networks

Limelight Networks offers the Limelight Video Platform, which gives you flexible tools to publish, manage, analyze, and monetize your video content. You can manage your entire online video workflow with Limelight or just the parts you need. It includes sophisticated metadata management, integration with your existing CMS, analytics, in-video search, and support for free, suscription, and ad-supported videos.

More info:

• Cost: Not listed on website
• Content Restrictions: Not listed on website
• Commercial Content OK: Yes

GravityLab Multimedia

GravityLab Multimedia offers a number of premium video hosting plans that makes it easy to deliver your content from your website to computer screens, TV screens, and handheld devices. Their videos are fast streaming with little buffering required, work with Windows Media, Quicktime and MP4, and Flash streaming with pause, fast forward, and rewind. They don’t require any annual contract, so you can cancel at any time.

More info:

• Cost: $19.99/month to $420/month
• Content Restrictions: Not listed on website
• Commercial Content OK: Yes

If there’s one thing great about competition, it is that it brings out the best product between companies. I’ve read up some of the features that Microsoft’s Windows 8 will be offering, and am now both intrigued and excited for what’s to come in the full version. It will even come with a new and unique kind of user interface (UI) known as the Metro.

Here are brief descriptions to some top features you would be keen to know about:

1. Speedy Boot Time

The load and boot up speed has improved significantly over Windows’ predecessors. This is partly due to the better resource allocations to applications and the system. When compared to Windows 7 desktop CPU, Windows 8 has an even speedier boot time.

(Image Source: Within Windows)

How did they improve so much over Windows 7? Well, Windows 8 employs a technique of hibernating the system kernel (think of it as your OS’s resource manager) when you shut down, such that it becomes almost like a partial hibernation each time. When you reboot the system, the ‘memory’ of your previous session gets reinitialized quicker.

2. Innovative & Dynamic Desktop

The tiles-based interface, or the Metro UI, will be the first thing you see upon logging in to Windows 8. At first glance, the UI seems to go intuitively with touchscreen devices like tablets and smartphones. Indeed, in such devices, you tap on those apps to open them. The grid layout seems to facilitate such interactions. Needless to say, you can customize your grid by adding and arranging applications.

(Image Source: JRtheTech)

The coolest thing, however, is that not only does Windows 8 allows you to personalize your desktop with the organization of the apps, it is also able display real-time information through them. Microsoft had demonstrated how the tile for a weather app could reveal the current temperature in a city without having to activate the app. The same goes for emails and such. In one glance over your tiles, you can have access to all that you need to be notified and take action on those which are urgent.

3. Improved Search Function

8 has no search box at the bottom of the Start menu. Heck, it doesn’t even have the trademark Start menu! That doesn’t mean that there’s no convenient search function available. All you need to do is to type anything, and a search box will appear from the right and give you the results. The search capability is even stronger this time, displaying all the matching apps and files instantaneously.

(Image Source: JaisonYR)

Unlike Windows 7, Windows

You can also search within apps that utilize Windows 8′s search function. The search pane that pops out on the right of your desktop will contain the list of apps which you can conduct the search in. For instance, if you’re looking for the emails sent by a particular contact, typing that name and clicking on the email app would allow you to search from within.

4. Windows To Go

Of the entire list here, this is one feature that offers the most convenience to users. Windows To Go allows users to make a copy of their OS complete with their settings, wallpapers, files and even apps, into a USB thumb drive. Plugged it into another computer with Windows 8 already installed, and you can boot up the PC and make it look exactly alike the OS you normally use, with all settings intact.

(Image Source: Engadget)

It sounds rather amazing, doesn’t it? The potential for such a feature is high and possibilities, many. For one, a virus-infected and crashed system could be revived by simply plugging in the USB thumbdrive with your last saved settings, inclusive of all your files, apps, etc. Users don’t have to worry about losing the ability to work on their projects just because their PC is down; they can always rely on plugging in that thumbdrive into another Windows 8-installed PC. Another is that users may simply bring back work from the office with that thumbdrive rather than a much bulkier laptop.

5. Windows Live Syncing

Similar to Windows To Go, the new Windows 8 will provide Windows Live syncing, such that users can login on any Windows 8 PC with ‘Live ID’ and get back their own personalized settings on it. The desktop will look the same every time the user login on a PC with their Windows Live account. Migrating to a new PC is probably made easier when the user has all the essential settings synced.

(Image Source: Windows 8)

How different will this be from Windows To Go? Well, Windows To Go seem to serve more as a controlled device for IT administrators to distribute to employees (with exact duplicates of Windows 8 with the same settings, wallpapers, apps, etc on thumbdrives), while Windows Live Syncing is more to allowing users to keep the basic settings and data available even if they’re away from their primary PC. We can only anticipate how the former and latter will be truly be like until they are unveiled by Microsoft in due course.

Increasing pageviews from inside the site is cheap, but requires a bit of a technique. When a visitor lands on one of your pages, find ways to encourage them to read the next page, and another page, and another and so on. One of the most common ways to do this is by using social toolbars.

The "Related link section" is yet another common practice used to encourage visitors to stay longer on our website by promoting and recommending them to read another article similar to what they are currently reading. If you are a WordPress user, you know that this can be done easily with plugins, or without plugins.

This method is a crowd favorite, and we now see many emerging third party services providing similar services – good news for non-Wordpress sites. In today’s post we take a detailed look into three of the most popular third-party related link services on the Internet.

Full list after the jump.

Outbrain

Outbrain‘s widget is pretty customizable; you can have it displaying links within your website (to increase pageviews), or from external yet still relevant websites, or a diplomatic combination of both. The widget can display thumbnails, simple text, or a combination of the two. There’s also a rating feature where visitors can rate an article based on a 5-star rating scale, or thumb up an article.

Customers like Slate, Huffington Post, ELLE and TMZ pay Outbrain to distribute their content. If you run a high-traffic website with high-quality content, displaying Outbrain’s paid distributions or sponsored posts may open up an additional revenue stream for you!

To understand more about Outbrain for publishers, click here.

Pros:

Outbrain gets visitors more engaged by listing related posts, and has a paid distribution program, but it is only for websites that has more than 500,000 monthly US pageviews per month. Customizing junkies will love the fact that the

Outbrain’s CSS guide allows you to change your related content widget’s appearance to merge with your site design. If you get stuck, ask for help in the forum or from their newly released support for mobile website.

Cons:

I encountered a problem, among others, with the installation. Upon signing up, a key is sent to you to input in your blog’s control panel. The "key claiming" process seems a little buggy, and you may need help from one of Outbrain’s staff for the claiming process. Also, you have no control over the size of the thumbnails no matter how customizable Outbrain gets.

nRelate

Similar to what Outbrain does, nRelate’s Related Content displays related links from your blog/website or from your blogroll. Between the two, nRelate is easier to customize as it is easier to control which links and from which blog is to be displayed.

nRelate’s design is pretty responsive in a sense that it reads your website’s theme and follows it to fit the background. It supports 13 major languages, a perfect solution for non-English blogs. And according to nRelate you can get a traffic spike of somewhere between 5%-12%. That sounds like a great deal!

Pros:

nRelate gives users the freedom and flexibility to manipulate the widget – from how texts should appear to the sizes of the thumbnails – through the control panel.

It also gives old content revived circulation, allowing them to get equal exposure as do their newer counterparts. In this, nRelate has an option to let you choose how far back you want archived posts to be recommended. nRelate also has a revenue-sharing program with its publishers/subscribers.

Cons:

With about 12,500 publishers, nRelate has fewer publishers than Outbrain’s 70,000. Thus, you may not want to keep your hopes up with the traffic and revenue expectations. In addition, nRelate takes two hours or more to index your website upon installation. Recommended links will only start showing up after that.

LinkWithin

LinkWithin is relatively new. It provides services similar to nRelate and Outbrain but currently it only shows related links from within the website. Other functions will probably come in at later stages.

Its selling point is in its simplicity: it is simple to set up, and simple to use. You don’t even have to sign up for anything in order to get started.

Pros:

One of the things I really like about LinkWithin is its ability to deal with non-image content intelligently. Upon detecting an article that doesn’t have a thumbnail, rather than displaying a blank box to fill the gap, it displays texts with links instead of a dummy image which usually looks like an error image. LinkWithin is light and fast. Its design is simple, nothing fancy, so it blends well with most layouts.

LinkWithin currently does not provide a revenue-sharing option which may seem like a disadvantage but without ads, it makes your related links more relevant, and visitors are less likely to be irked by ads and compelled to leave your site.

Cons:

LinkWithin lacks of advanced analytics to track visits and the popularity of articles. Similar to Outbrain, to customize your widgets’ look and feel, it has to be done via theme files. This may be a challenge for some users. Lastly, there’s no option to remove any recommended links you may find unsuitable for your website.

In a Nutshell

Here’s a tabulated summary of my findings to help you decide on which service to use.

WordPress Plugins

Prefer WordPress plugins better? No problem. Here are some of the favorites when it comes to displaying related content and links.

• YARPP
• Related
• WP-Thumbie
• Microkid’s Related Posts
• Related Posts Slider
• Contextual Related Posts
• Related Posts Thumbnail

(Image source: Fotolia)

Graphics editors, code editors, file sharing and transferring tools, document and spreadsheet editors all cost money. These are future expenditures hard to anticipate. If you’ve went all-in into getting the best laptop, chances are it leaves you pretty limited in terms of budget for software. To give you an idea – Adobe Design Standard (comes with Photoshop, Illustrator and inDesign) costs about USD $1299; Adobe Photoshop alone costs about USD $699.00.

Way out of budget? No worries, good news is, you still can get projects kick-off without spending a dime. Sounds familiar somewhere? No we are not talking about download pirated software.

In today’s post, we are going to give you a guide of all Windows software you may need on your laptop or desktop, and all of them are free. We’ll also throw in our recommendation as well as more free alternatives to give you more options, so let’s dive into the heaven of free software and see what they have in stock for you!

Also, check out our lists for more useful tools and applications!

• 70 Free Useful Portable Applications You Should Know
• 22 Useful Wireframing And Prototyping Tools
• 19 Tools To Improve Your Website’s Usability
• 18 More Useful Web Usability Testing Tools
• 10 Project Management Software For Remote Teams
• 10 Tools To Protect You From Infected USB Flash Drives

Web Browsing

Don’t look at me like that, I know all web browsers are free, just want to make sure that you have all awesome browsers in your garage!

For web browser, we think the Google Chrome is the best browser for now. Why? Faster browsing, cleaner user interface, better HTML5 and CSS3 support, and awesome Chrome extensions are rising more and more these years.

Besides, as the mobile has taken over some acres of the land of Web Design these years, it’s really important for you to have Opera Mobile Emulator to test your website on mobile browser settings.

We Recommend: Google Chrome

More Alternatives: Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera Web Browser, Opera Mobile Emulator, IETester

Graphic Editing

There are a lot of graphics editors released to challenge the realm of Photoshop these years, but the GIMP stands firm on top of them, mainly due to its extensive features.

From photo enhancement to digital retouching to file format support, GIMP will let you feel that it’s the best alternative to the Photoshop. Its cluttered interface might be a bit complicated at first, but it’s far better than the pain of having software with fewer features.

Alternatively, check out our post for more Photoshop alternatives!

We Recommend: GIMP

More Alternatives: Paint.NET, Chasys Draw IES, FastStone Image Viewer, Picasa

Vector Design

There’s a time when you just need to create some perfect shapes that form awesome icons, logos or buttons, and the job can be well done with Inkscape.

Inkscape includes capabilities similar to Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw, with the support of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Its main features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns and grouping, basically everything you need for drawing vector graphic!

We Recommend: Inkscape

More Alternatives: Serif DrawPlus, Creative Docs.NET, Alchemy, Pencil, InsightPoint

Coding

Code Editor is one of the software you shouldn’t spend a buck on it, as there are just too many awesome code editors in the web!

For advanced coder, Notepad++ is your friendliest companion as it does not contain any complicated plugin or feature that drags the execution time and even your computer speed down. In short, it’s lightning fast.

If you would like to seek coding guidance from the editor, both Komodo Edit, Aptana Studio 3 and NetBeans IDE could be your good master. Also check out our list for CSS Editors.

We Recommend: Notepad++

More Alternatives: Komodo Edit, Aptana Studio 3, NetBeans IDE, Bluefish, RJ TextEd, TotalEdit, ConTEXT, Geany, Sublime Text, Editra

FTP / File Transfering

FTP (File Transfer Protocol) software helps you to transfer files from one host to another host over a network, such as your computer to your client’s website.

Filezilla makes sure you don’t spend any money on FTP software in your entire web design career. It not only allows you to browse the directories and upload multiple files real fast, but also provides secure connection to ensure that everything you do in the software is safe.

Alternatively, check out our list for more FTP alternatives!

We Recommend: Filezilla

More Alternatives: WinSCP, Cyberduck, FTP Rush, Core FTP Lite, Free FTP

Notetaking & Productivity

I’ve heard so many designers telling me the moment that the great ideas slipped through their mind, just because they didn’t take note of it. You probably don’t want this kind of incident happen in your life, and Evernote could prove to be a great helper in securing your precious ideas.

As its slogan says, Evernote helps you to remember everything, in everywhere. You can not only store text note but also audio note and even webcam note as well. What’s really awesome here is you can sync the documents to other devices of any Operating System such as Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and more!

We Recommend: Evernote

More Alternatives: Memonic Desktop, AllMyNotes, RedNotebook, EssentialPIM, KeepNote, Tomboy, WikiPad, Zim, CintaNotes, Personal Brain

Mind Mapping

You got to believe this: you need a mind map to organize, manage, and even spawn your ideas. Mind map makes you clear about what you’re doing, what you should not do, and what you can improve.

Most of the time we draw the mind map though papers and pen, that’s fine, but what if you want to carry the notes to everywhere, or you want to link certain ideas to the website? You need the mind mapping software, and XMind could be your best companion, as it got basically everything you need for doing a mind map, and the user interface is even intuitive.

And of course, it’s sleek.

We Recommend: XMind

More Alternatives: Freemind, Freeplane, Blumind, SciPlore

Documents and Spreadsheets

From Text Document, Spreadsheet, Presentation and Database, OpenOffice is your reliable partner to assure your client’s confidence about your professionalism. The user interface is also intuitive enough that you can produce a presentation directly after the installation. Forget about Microsoft Office!

Libre Office 3 and Lotus Symphony 3 are relatively new but they also include certain awesome features as well, so do remember to check them out and choose the best for your office works!

We Recommend: OpenOffice

More Alternatives: Libre Office 3, Lotus Symphony 3, SoftMaker Office, KOffice, GnomeOffice

File Sharing

Many of the computer users are still using the mail services like Gmail to send file(s) to other user. The method is fine, but now we are in the era of cloud computing, why don’t have a place in your computer, where you or your client can just put the file into a folder, and it will sync automatically on the other side?

Dropbox is the elf that allows you to share files with ease. The fact that this software is so awesome is that it actually requires no professional knowledge to setup the environment, it’s foolproof! Probably saved you tons of time on explanation part.

Alternatively, check out our list of file sharing services.

We Recommend: Dropbox

More Alternatives: Box, SpiderOak, Ubuntu One, Windows Live Mesh, Wuala, TeamDrive, ZumoDrive, Tonido

Screen Capturing

They say a picture worth thousand words, and screen capture tools gotta help you capture any picture that you think it’s worth thousand words. There are a lot of screen capture tools in the web, but I found the Jing from TechSmith (the same company that forged SnagIt) particularly useful.

Jing allows you to not only capture screen, but also record 5 minutes of screen activities. After the capture, you can also put text, arrow, and frame to give the graphic some annotation, and that’s pretty much everything I need from a screen capture tool.

Alternatively, you can visit our guide of screen capture tools for more alternatives!

We Recommend: Jing

More Alternatives: ZScreen, PicPick, Greenshot, DuckCapture, Shotty, PrtScr

Fonts Management

As a web designer, type is a big deal for us, as it’s one of the most essential elements that define the aesthetics of the web design you crafted, therefore knowing every type in your computer is important for you to choose the best one for your design.

While Nexus Font is not a font creation tool, it proves useful to provide you a glimpse of every font installed in your computer, making it possible for you to actually study, consider and choose the best font for your design.

We Recommend: Nexus Font

More Alternatives: Cfont Pro, Dp4 Font Viewer, FontViewOK, Font Xplorer

I certainly hope you found your Mr. Right Software! But hey, if you already have one that is not existed in this list, feel free and proud to show it off to all of us in your comment!

Today we’ll be looking into some really cool and popular online resources for data visualization. You can see all kinds of data like human population, world condition and even human emotion presented via the visualization. While some of the visualization might be experimental, all of them have one similarity: they help you understand the data better, and this is exactly what visualization is for.

If you’ve designed your own infographic or visualization tool we’d love to check it out. In addition to the examples highlighted please offer your ideas or thoughts in the discussion area below!

Better World Flux

Now this is one beautiful visualization tool! Better World Flux is an interactive information graphic encompassing important ideas around the world. Select a single country or countries of your choosing, followed by indicators such as life expectancy or access to water. They have a small video demo you can watch on YouTube.

The refined condition of BWF’s design comes as no surprise. The amount of data available is so pristine, you can easily track the global improvements in society over the past 50 years. Though I will admit the data graph is originally very difficult to understand. Try playing around with just your country to start getting comfortable with the interface.

Visual.ly

This is perhaps one of my favorite new online tools today. Visual.ly is built with social networking features in mind to connect members all around the world. Designers are able to submit their own projects on data visualization and infographics into their site gallery. The showcase can be broken down and sorted into further categories like Food, Environment, Technology, etc.

If you check out their labs page it includes some fantastic links about what the team is building. The ideal goal is to offer an interface for creating dynamic infographics directly within your browser. The tool isn’t currently live, although I have heard of some private beta testers. You can sign up with your email address to receive updates and possibly an invite for testing.

To add onto their networking features Visual.ly has provided a handful of partner pages. These are similar to a profile page where you can view comments, likes, views, and infographic submissions, but these are targeted towards big-name brands – think National Geographic, eBay, Skype, CNN, etc.

We Feel Fine

As advertised We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion. This is one of the most unique visualization engines I’ve ever seen built into a web page. To get started click the large button on their home page. The app will load according to which Operating System you’re running, but thankfully everything appears the same in your browser.

Along the top row you’ll find fly-out options to sort the data. Their criteria include age, gender, weather location, and even date. The project offers an extremely detailed analysis of the entire world’s emotions at any given point! It’s truly an astounding experiment for humankind.

As you click anywhere in the canvas the flying balls will scatter about. If you mouse over one of them it’ll provide a bit more detail, and clicking will open a whole new bar at the top. Many of the results are pulled from Twitter and actually include photo/video media as well. The number of emotions and feelings are beyond belief. You could easily blow away a few hours playing around in this app.

RSS Voyage

Another personal favorite of mine which really helps to visualize data around the web. If you log into RSS Voyage you are able to import custom RSS feeds into your account for one whole data graph. Alternatively on their homepage you can hit “Start” to go right into the app with default feeds. In this scenario RSS Voyage will pull from a few popular blogs such as The New York Times, Engadget, The Guardian, and others.

If you move through the graphic and click on a particular article the view is fixed on screen. This includes the title, a short description, meta data for the publishing date along with the live URL. If at any point you’d like to start creating your own RSS visualizations, all you need to do is create an account!

Signup is totally free and you can create your account through the registration form at the bottom of the page. As another bonus feature RSS Voyage allows you to easily set fullscreen mode to browse your RSS feeds in style.

Revisit

The official Revisit project is a way to redefine how we look at Twitter. With this tool you are able to create custom line maps of data connecting tweets related to one or many keywords. You can additionally add a title to your graph and share the link online (even onto Twitter).

Clicking on an individual breakaway line off the graphic will display further details. Tweets will often include metadata such as the time posted and important/related keywords. The search criteria are limited to standard Twitter notation which uses a comma separated list of keywords.

For the best results keep your queries below 4-5 words since Twitter often has a difficult time matching overly-complicated content. If interested I recommend viewing other projects located on the same website for creative data visualization.

Tag Galaxy

With a fun play on words Tag Galaxy is a really unique visualization tool. Their home page is clean and easy to understand with a single search form for tags on Flickr. In addition the bottom left corner houses some popular suggestions for new users. Simply enter a term and hit Enter as Tag Galaxy queries through Flickr photos.

Their rendering engine duplicates the look of our solar system with the central Sun representing the main search term. The orbit of external planets represents similar tags you can look through. This is one of the coolest visualization demos I’ve ever seen rendered with Flash.

Notice that as you hover over each planet it’ll provide you with a small preview number. This is the total number of queried photos found for that tag in Flickr. Clicking on the sun will open a sphere of related photo thumbnails, while rotating planets will add their search terms into the query. Naturally you can find out more about a photo by clicking to bring up full-view.

Google Fusion Tables

We all know about the powerhouse that is Google. They have been running some really fun experiments in the back of their labs for years, and Google Fusion Tables is one of these. To sign in all you need is a Google Account and some time to play around. This tool lets you share data openly online and build custom visualization graphics.

These can be imported from a .csv or Excel spreadsheet. Although not currently supported I would imagine Google will allow the import of Google Docs very soon. After logging in you’ll find a table of public data lists to demo with. These are updated constantly with new user submissions – and I’ve found some real kickers in here before! After opening a document the top toolbar has a Visualization link with additional menus to customize your graphic.

Dipity

Nothing can be more interesting than our history on this earth. There have been a lot of events over the past 10 or 20 years – let alone a decade or century! Dipity is a wonderful tool to create and externally embed custom interactive timelines. You can pin markers on important dates to include photos, links, audio/video, and other forms of media.

The service requires that you sign up for an account before creating timelines. They do offer a free plan with the option to upgrade to premium plan at a later date. Luckily the most popular member timelines are offered public, so you can easily sort through an exciting laundry list of dynamic timelines. My personal favorite is Steve Job’s Life and Career fully formatted with photos even up until 2011.

Many Eyes

Many Eyes is the unique data visualization tool put out by IBM. They offer a whole slew of categories to explore for customized data topics. Some of the most popular examples are featured on the home page, many of which are user-created. Examples include Number of 3D Films released from 2001-2010, and even a word/tag tree from Obama’s recent Jobs Speech.

To create a set you’ll need to first organize your data. This can be practically anything, but should be something relatable and easy to display. If you want to publicly store the visualizations I recommend creating a free account on the service. There are a ton of features available to members plus the added benefit and security of storing personal data sets. If you get lost spend some time browsing the FAQ/Tour page to learn a bit more about the Many Eyes’ interface.

WikiMindMap

Speaking of unique visualizers Wikipedia is also a network you don’t see developers playing with as much. This is surprising, since the main Wiki contains a ridiculously large amount of data! WikiMindMap lets you select a region and enter the URL for a page.

If your keyword doesn’t exactly match up with a page ID the app will offer you the closest suggestion. The link generated inside the circle will lead out to the main Wiki page, while the refresh link opens a tree of options. These are all related links pulled off the main wiki page coordinating to your keyword. It’s also really easy to switch onto a new root node by clicking the green refresh icon.

HTML Graph

It might seem like we’re trying to trick you, but HTML Graph works exactly as advertised. On the home page enter an URL to any website and hit Enter to generate a node graph. The entire applet is built using Java to help examine the HTML structure of your web page.

As explained on the details page each of the nodes is color-coded to represent a HTML tag. Blue represents anchor links, red for tables, violet for images and so on. The app doesn’t provide much practical benefit, although it is quite visually appealing.

The programmer Marcel Salathe has offered the open source code for others to mess around with. You can actually find more information about him on the author info page.

Axiis – Browser Market Share

Axiis is notably one of the most popular websites for data visualization software. On their homepage you can find a handful of cool downloads to run on your PC or Mac computer. However along with these resources there are plenty of tools online to fidget around with. Notably one of my favorites is the browser market sharing graphic.

W3Schools has been polling users and tracking browser stats for a few years now. Axiis has compiled a beautiful visualization graphic from 2002-2009 relating to the most popular web browsers. Among the many listed include Safari, Opera, Netscape, Internet Explorer, and Google Chrome. The list hasn’t been updated for 2010/2011 but we may see a newer infographic released in the coming months.

Tweet Spectrum

I’m sure when you think of data visualization Twitter is one of the first networks to pop up. There are billions of tweets flooding the Internet every day, so it comes as no surprise the network is huge. Tweet Spectrum is a custom built web app using Java. Enter two keywords you’d like to compare and the spectrum will fill in surrounding keywords.

This is a fantastic way to visualize words related to similar topics. For example you may enter “monkey” and “chimp” to find similar animals and lifestyle habits. It’s difficult to expect any typical results since Twitter is such a robust network, but this is what makes Tweet Spectrum so unique!

The app was created by developer Jeff Clark who runs a popular data visualization blog. On his site you can find loads of graphics and charts relating to visualizations over the years. He also hosts a slew of similar Twitter apps which you can find throughout his portfolio pages.

Wordle

Another really fun browser app is Wordle. You can play around with graphic visualizations of word clouds from practically any medium. Best of all you don’t even need to sign up for an account to create a mashup. Wordle gives you three options: pasting in custom text, adding the URL to a blog or feed, or using a Del.icio.us account name to display their tags in cloud format.

Wordle isn’t all about interactivity. Even just browsing through the site you can find a lot of really neat mashups from previous users. Check out the Wordle Gallery to see what I mean. The system is a bit convoluted to get adjusted with right away. I personally love text and word visualization trees.

The features Wordle offers are not something you can easily find in any standard web application. I highly recommend toying around with their interface even for just a few minutes – you won’t be disappointed.

Tag Crowd

Tag Crowd is an awesome web-based cloud visualization tool. You can paste in your own text or even link to another website online. The application will automatically parse the page for content and rearrange popular keywords by size and density.

There have been a few other popular solutions to this, however I feel that Tag Crowd is the most elegant, not to mention it doesn’t require installing any 3rd party software. They additionally offer you 3 choices: uploading a file (such as .doc or .pdf ), linking a web page, or directly pasting your content into a text area. There are also some configuration options including max and min word frequencies.

Vuvox

Vuvox is another interactive web app for designers and data lovers. You can share slideshows and photo galleries dynamically on your own website or profile page, but you aren’t limited strictly to photo media – in fact Vuvox allows for music and video uploads as well!

Notice this is another service which does require you to sign up for a free account before creating visualizations. This requirement is in place mostly to cut down on server costs from anonymous usage, but after joining you have access to some really fun tools for creating collages and data slideshows. Many users offer their creations publicly to browse through.

Vuvox has a featured gallery for exactly these types of presentations.

Yooouuutuuube

This custom-built app made it very popular in the blogosphere just a few years ago. Yooouuutuuube will create a trippy mashup wall of videos which you can configure through settings. Basically you enter a YouTube URL and choose how to tile the video frames.

The audio is synced perfectly, and the videos cascade by default. This means the lower screens will be in-sync while the upper frames seem to drag behind. You don’t see a lot of customizations with YouTube data, but this visualization app is just too cool to pass up! Check out my favorite example with scenes from Alice in Wonderland.

Analytics Visualization

Do you run any websites with visitor tracking data? Chances are you’ve heard of Google Analytics and at least toyed around with the service at some point. Juice Kit runs a fantastic appspot web interface called Analytics Visualization. After connecting into your Google Account the app can pull out data from any of your profiles.

This lets you organize and examine number of pageviews, popular page content, and related keywords throughout Analytics. Each of your websites can be configured to display data in a weekly/monthly/yearly cycle. The graphics can be split into a word tree or block area content, respectively. Check out the Juice Analytics official website to learn more about the company and their goals online.

Newsmap

Here’s another really fun tool to examine the latest news around the world. Newsmap was built by a Japanese developer to import all the latest articles from Google News. The mosaic displayed in-browser can be customized by region and category. There is additionally some really great search functionality built into the top-right corner.

If you notice an interesting news story, hover over the block area to be given a preview image. This often includes some of the article text along with a link to the domain URL and time of publication. Articles with a larger block are generally more popular among Google users. The visualization techniques used are perfect for those looking to check news at a glance among a wide range of topics.

If you didn’t notice by now each of the news blocks are color-coded to match a selected category. You can figure out which ones are matched in the key menu at the bottom.

LinkedIn Labs – InMaps

Big fans of LinkedIn will really enjoy this app. The developers of LinkedIn have been working on private apps in their Labs area. This is similar to how Google, Digg, and other popular social networks have begun tinkering with new features. Simply connect into your LinkedIn account and InMaps will do the rest!

The visualization is performed in-browser with a complicated web of connections. These stem from your main network node to include your friends and people you may know. In simpler terms you are constructing a map of your professional relationships on LinkedIn. All the maps use a stringy color-coded formatting effect but you can rearrange the look by clicking “Next Map” in the bottom-right corner.

Wolfram Alpha

We are all familiar with Wolfram Alpha by now, or at least heard some ideas about the search engine. The goal was to build where Google left off by taking in arguments far more complicated than general searches. These include mathematical graphs, unit conversions, historical events, and scientific formulas.

It’s more of a wiki of scientific information combined with a dynamic computer search, and the developers are constantly refining how search keywords are used to display results. For those of you still confused check out their quick site tour to get a better idea. Not everyone will find Wolfram useful but it is a very mathematical tool to have accessible from any browser.

Global Incident Map – Earthquakes

Earthquake is a natural phenomenon we have to deal with, but luckily humans have evolved over thousands of years to develop useful technology to aid us in survival. Global Incident Map is a visualization tool that is powered through Google Maps. You can check out fires, AMBER alerts, aviation accidents, and a lot of others.

The earthquakes map is updated locally and fresh to the minute. Below the actual map is a table sorted by most recent EQs worldwide. Important data is included such as geo-coordinates around the globe, magnitude, and depth. These days you can never be too careful, and this is one piece of technology I’m happy to have at my fingertips!

Google Public Data Explorer

Here we have another cool Google project that is distinctly different from Fusion Tables. Public Data Explorer is a unique app which lets Google users upload and check out older data sets. This includes practically anything from worldwide fertility rates to US unemployment ratings. You also have Google’s graphic engines at your disposal to mockup the data in any way you choose.

Google Maps and charts are some of the most popular choices. Bar graphs, pie charts, and scatter plots elegantly display some of the most complex data right in front of you, and the best part is that Google will host your creations for free under your own account.

Just hit the admin area to get started uploading data. You can even open your visuals publicly to be added into the directory of live projects. Some really cool stuff pumping out of Google Labs!

Conclusion

This fantastic collection of tools covers some of the greatest apps we have in 2011. Web developers are constantly looking to push the envelope further, so we can surely expect to find even more exciting releases in the coming months. For sure we would love to hear your feedback and ideas on data visualization and infographics around the web.

Well, you don’t! Instead, you can rely on one or more shopping tools to do all of the work for you.

This list will take a look at some of the best online tools that are available for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE, and even Opera. These tools will not only save you a lot of money and help you become a smarter shopper, but they’ll also save you a lot of time since they’ll do all the searching and price comparisons for you.

Chrome Extensions

Add to Amazon Wish List

If you have an Amazon account, then more than likely you’ve added items to your wish list. This extension allows you to add products from any website (not just Amazon.com) to your Amazon wish list. This extension makes it easier to track items that you want to eventually buy from anywhere on the Web, all from a single site.

This tool is also available for Safari under the Shopping category, and Firefox in the form of a toolbar and button.

InvisibleHand

This is a very useful tool that shows you the lowest price for whatever you’re currently viewing. For instance when viewing a specific product on Amazon, InvisibleHand will notify you if that product is cheaper on another retailer site. The tool supports over 200 retailers from the US, UK, and Germany. Plus, not only is it great for products, but it can also help you find the cheapest flights from various travel sites.

This tool is also available for Firefox and Safari under Shopping category.

eBay Extension for Google Chrome

Have you ever missed out on an eBay auction because you weren’t able to stay on top of it? With this extension you can keep track of items that you’re selling and bidding on and keep up with daily deals. It keeps you signed in securely and lets you place bid on active items, save searches, and keep up with saved sellers.

This tool is also available for Firefox and Safari.

PriceBlink

This tool is similar to InvisibleHand (mentioned above), in that it shows you the lowest prices for any product that you’re viewing; it supports over 3,000 merchants. In addition, it also shows you coupon codes and shipping codes that you may be able to use for the retailer you’re currently on. This helps you to save even more money on your purchase. For many products it even shows you user ratings so that you can find the best products.

This tool is also available for Firefox and Safari under Shopping category.

Shopping Buddy (by Google)

“The Shopping Buddy displays the rating of stores you are currently visiting right in the omnibar; you can also read reviews by clicking directly on the rating icon.” So if you’re worried about how trustworthy a retailer is, this extension can help you with that. It will also let you know (via a notification banner) if the retailer you’re on offers any discounts for using Google Checkout. You’ll be able to see full details of the promotion along with the minimum purchase requirements.

Craigslist Preview

If you’re a frequent Craigslist user, you know how frustrating it can be to have to click-through each ad just to see the pictures that are included. With this extension, you can actually see the pictures on the search results page. This saves you time (and clicks) when shopping on Craigslist since you can quickly scan through all the pictures at once.

Similar Craigslist shopping tools include: Craigslist Peek (also available for Firefox), Craigslist Image Preview, and Craigslist Fancy Preview.

Craigslist Helper

If you’re looking for more than just image previews on Craigslist (like the extension above), you’ll really enjoy Craigslist Helper. This is the ultimate tool for shopping on Craigslist with numerous features that include:

• Image thumbnails and previews
• Ad previews – view ad text without having to click-through
• Alerts via desktop notifications when a new ad matches one of your saves searches
• Searching through multiple cities at once
• Ability to add notes to ads – great for keeping track of communication efforts and other relevant information
• Totally ignore and hide ads so that you never see them again
• Blacklist ads containing specific keywords
• and much more

This tool is also available for Firefox and Safari.

The Camelizer

This tool lets you track price changes on various retailers like Amazon, Best Buy, Newegg, and more. It helps you figure out if a price is “good” or not by showing you the long-term price history for the specific product that you’re viewing. Plus, the chart is unobtrusive since it is viewed by clicking on the extension icon in the omnibar.

Similar price tracking tools include: Ookong: Amazon Price History & More (also available for Safari) and PriceTrace: 1-Click Price Comparison Shopping.

This extension is also available for Firefox.

Groolu

If you’re a fan of shopping deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial, you’ll love Groolu. It collects coupons on a daily and hourly basis for the above-mentioned deal sites plus Tippr, Zozi, and Dealster. It then notifies you when a new coupon available and gives you relevant information such as an image, vendor details, deal name, percent off, and sale price.

The Best Price

This extension adds a button to your browser that lets you automatically compare prices in real-time. It works with over 300 online retailers and will alert you (via the browser button) when a cheaper price has been found for the product that you’re viewing. Once you click on the browser button and open the window, you’ll notice 3 different color badges:

• Green – The product is cheaper somewhere else.
• Blue – The price is the same on all retail sites.
• Orange – The price is higher on other retail sites.

So you can use these colored badges to quickly see whether you’ve found the best deal or not.

This tool is also available for Safari.

Compass

Compass enhances your shopping experience by providing you with a navigation menu on every product page. This is helpful because it allows you to quickly find what you’re looking for, without having to scroll through the entire page. You can also hide the content you’re not interested in on the menu, so that it’s easier to find what you are actually interested in. Compass is a definite time saver for long product pages and helps you cut back on scrolling.

This tool is also available for Safari under Shopping category.

If you don’t currently shop online, you may want to start because you’ll often find that products are much cheaper online once you find the lowest prices and add in a coupon code.

Firefox Add-ons

Boo.ly Shopping

Boo.ly is an all-in-one tool that acts as your personal shopping assistant. You can compare product prices, see special offers and deals, and find coupons to save money on your purchases. It works on thousands of shopping sites and sections like Amazon, Google, Yahoo, and Bing. In your results you’ll see a little shopping tag with a “b” on it; clicking on this will bring up a window with more options and relevant information.

This tool is also available for Chrome and IE.

WindowShopper

Window Shopper helps to notify you of lower priced items on various retail sites; it covers over 130 million products in various categories. Just click the “See Similar” button on your favorite shopping site to open the Window Shopper window and see identical and similar products. You can then click on the stores like to see all stores that are selling that item. This is great way to save money on and get the best price on an item of interest.

PriceTrace

With PriceTrace you can compare prices, check price history, and subscribe to price drop alerts for any product in just one click. This add-on adds a toolbar to Firefox that lets you “trace” any item on most retail sites like Amazon, Walmart, Newegg, and Best Buy; it also works on the search engines Google, Yahoo and Bing. You can also use the website to search for items and compare them by UPC, SKU, title, or URL.

This tool is also available for Chrome and Safari; IE is coming soon.

Ciuvo

This tool allows you to get the best deals by “presenting contextually relevant information in real-time.” Not only will you see the best prices, but you’ll also see relevant images, videos, customer reviews, and even availability of products in your local area. Ciuvo currently only works for retailers in the USA, Germany, and Austria.

This tool is also available for Chrome, Safari and IE.

FreePriceAlerts

This tool lets you know if the current price that you’re viewing is the best price. If it is, a green check mark will show in the top left corner of the screen. If it’s not, it will show you the best price and where you can find it online. You can also add items to your wish list and set price alerts so that you’ll receive an email when the product hits your target price.

This tool is also available for Chrome, Safari, and IE.

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While many of the tools seem to accomplish the same task, there are quite a few unique extensions and add-ons that once you start using them, it’s hard to live without them. So let’s take a look at some of the most useful and helpful tools currently available for Gmail service, and make your Gmail experience better than ever!

Related: Gmail Advanced Search – Ultimate Guide

Chrome Extensions

Send from Gmail

The genuine benefit of having Send from Gmail is that any time you click on an email address on any web page, it will automatically open a Mail Compose window in Gmail – right within your browser. The extension also provides a browser button so that you can open the Mail Compose window quickly by just clicking on it.

If you’d rather have this feature without a button, check out the Send using Gmail extension.

WiseStamp

This extension allows you to have a customizable email signature with social media and HTML integration. This is a great opportunity for branding your company and sharing your social profiles with anyone you correspond with via Gmail.

You can also include other cool things in your signature like your latest tweet, Google+ update, latest blog post, and more! This extension is also available for Firefox and Safari.

Blank Canvas Signatures for Gmail is a similar Firefox extension that lets you insert HTML signatures into Gmail. It supports up to four different signatures.

Minimalist for Everything

The extension lets you hide elements within Gmail, and it has a huge options page with tons of things to customize. You can also add custom row highlighting, show attachment icons, enable desktop notifications, as well as customize the graphics, colors, and top menu.

There are so many options that you can remove or change just about every element within Gmail. This gives you the ability to make your Gmail as clean as you like.

Boomerang for Gmail

Boomerang for Gmail allows you to schedule email messages to be sent or returned to your inbox at a later time. The extension is great in helping you reach "inbox zero" quickly because you can archive messages and have the important ones return to the top of your inbox at the specified time, when you have time to read them.

The extension also lets you schedule follow-up reminders and it can return messages to the top of your inbox if you don’t hear back from the recipient within a certain amount of time. It is also available for Firefox, Outlook, and Mobile devices.

Snooze Your Email for Gmail

The extension works similar to the above-mentioned one. It lets you snooze email messages for a few hours or days, then get a reminder later about them, or have them re-appear in your inbox as unread.

This is helpful for remembering important messages that may get pushed down in your inbox when you’re busy. It’s also useful for remembering messages that you need to follow-up with.

TrueNew Count for Gmail and Google Apps

This extension does one little simple thing: instead of showing only your unread count, it also shows you the number of new emails since the last time you took any action on your mailbox.

It’s great for people who get stressed out or anxious when they see such a high number of messages in their inbox! Instead of worrying about the hundreds of old messages in your inbox, this extension lets you focus just on the actual new ones.

ActiveInbox for Gmail

This is one of the best tools available for getting your Gmail and Google Apps email account under control. It helps to manage your inbox so that you can focus on the more important messages, thus reducing overload.

There are numerous features like email prioritization, deadline tracking, a snooze button for messages, project folders, email notes, previous conversation viewer, 1-click shortcuts and much more. If your inbox is out of control, you need this extension! It is also available for Firefox.

Better Gmail

With Better Gmail you can remove features in Gmail that you may not want, like chat, ads, web search, etc. You can also add attachment icons to make Gmail your default email application, enable desktop notifications, and add row highlighting.

A more advanced version of this extension is available for Firefox and it’s called Better Gmail 2.

If you’re just looking to remove ads within Gmail, you may prefer the Ad-blocker for Gmail Chrome extension or Gmail Ad Remover add-on for Firefox.

Rapportive

Rapportive shows you everything that you need to know about your contacts, in the right sidebar of your inbox. You can connect your Facebook, Twitter, and/or LinkedIn accounts to gather information about your contacts.

From there, every time you open a message from someone you may be able to see things like their picture, latest tweets, links to social profiles and more. You can even add your own personal, private notes to their profile for safe-keeping.

It is also available for Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Mailplane.

OmniMail for Gmail

With this extension you can send email messages right from the address bar (also known as the omnibox) in Chrome. Just type in “mail email address“, then press enter to open up a new Mail Compose window, right within the Chrome!

Firefox Add-ons

Google Mail Popup Unread Manager

This add-on lets you manage your unread Gmail messages right from the status bar in Firefox. You can preview messages, mark messages as read, delete messages, mark messages as spam, or move messages to different folders with this add-on. You can also choose to enable toolbar icon, which will display the number of unread messages in your inbox.

The Gmail Manager is great for anyone who just wants to see number of unread messages in their various Gmail accounts.

Meeting Scheduler for Gmail

This is a great meeting scheduler that will help you find meeting times that are convenient for all attendees. You can create and manage meetings from ScheduleOnce right from your inbox.

The add-on also helps to track replies from attendees, then automatically displays the best meeting time to accommodate everyone.

Integrated Gmail

Have you ever wished that you could have Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, and your other frequented online tools all in one place? Well your dream comes true with the Integrated Gmail add-on.

What this add-on does is it makes your inbox collapsible and gives you the choice of adding other Google tools or custom URLs right into the Gmail interface. It’s a great way to access all of your most commonly used tools right from one location.

Google Redesigned

With this add-on you can completely change the styling of your Gmail account via integrated CSS stylesheets. It gives Gmail a totally different feel with a dark gray theme and also works on Google Calendar and Google Reader.

Gmail Watcher

Gmail Watcher can alert you of new messages, and the notification can be limited to inbox only, mails with labels only, unread mails only, or newly arrived mails only. You’ll also get a toolbar button with unread mail count on it.

Other add-ons similar to this one are: Gmail Checker, and Gmail Favicon Notifier.

Search Tabs

This is a cool add-on that lets you personalize your Google search results. You can get search results from Gmail, Youtube, Facebook, LinkedIn accounts and more on the right side of Google search results page.

You don’t need to find important stuff in your Gmail any more, just Google Search is enough!

CloudMagic

This add-on is a supercharged search engine for your Gmail account that works both online and offline. It indexes all of your messages and stores them locally so that you can perform searches quickly and securely.

Along with relevant email messages, it also shows related documents, calendar events and contacts in real-time. Best of all, you can choose to enable combined search so that you can search through multiple Gmail, Calendar & Document accounts from a single service. This add-on is also available for Chrome.

GmailTeX

This is an interesting add-on that lets you use LaTeX (a method for typesetting mathematical formulas) right within Gmail. This is great for anyone doing any kind of technical work that involves advanced mathematics. The screenshot speaks for itself.

Bonus

FollowUpThen

An email reminder service where you can forward messages, then later get reminded to respond back to them. Much like a few of the tools mentioned above, this service reminds you to follow up with important emails. If you happen to be on a mobile device where you can use a Chrome extension or Firefox add-on, this tool is the next best thing available.

Hit Me Later is a similar service that has three different plans: basic (free), pro ($12/year), and exec ($30/year).

Find Big Mail

If you’ve run out of space in your Gmail account, this tool will help you find out just what messages are using up all of your space. Just enter your email address and it will scan your account and create new labels displaying the message’s size.

You can then review those messages and delete the ones (preferably of larger size) that you don’t need any more in order to make more room in your inbox.

That’s all from us! What is your favorite Gmail tool?

Well, the fact is that if Siri is the edge that the iPhone 4S can give to its fans, Apple will probably need to work harder for the iPhone 5, as there are just too many Siri alternatives for Android, and we’re gonna feature 10 of them in this particular post.

The assistants featured here will be able to voice dial, send text and emails, search information on web, update social media status, manage contacts and reminders, check in with Foursquare, find local shops, etc. Oh, one more thing: 9 of them are even free! So choose your favorite today to make your Android become your best assistant!

More: In case you want your Android to be a more powerful assistant for your design work, check out our collection of 65 useful Android apps for designers!

Vlingo Virtual Assistant

Vlingo Virtual Assistant will complete whatever action you’ve told it to do and it is highly recommended by most Android users. Some even claim that Vlingo is more powerful than Siri in term of usability, capability, accuracy and speed.

As a full-fledged assistant, it can voice dial, get directions, open apps, send text and emails, search the web, find local shops, buy movie tickets and book hotel rooms, update Facebook or Twitter status, check in with foursquare, etc. Pretty much everything you need! (Free)

Speaktoit Assistant

Speaktoit Assistant is a brilliant voice assistant for your Android device. It understands (almost) everything you say as voice commands and responds to it accordingly.

The assistant is able to help you to get maps, send email, launch apps, find information and news, look up weather reports, dial, text and email friend from contacts and even connect with various services like Twitter and Facebook. (Free)

Voice Actions

Voice Actions is an awesome app which enables Android users to command their phones via voice commands with Google’s PHENOMENAL Speech Recognition. You can simply start a conversation with Voice Actions by sending voice command and ask any question.

With the voice command, it’s able to play music, launch browser, painting, send text messages and emails, voice dial your contacts, open favorites and recent contacts, set alarms and reminders, search Ebay, Amazon and Wolfram, control Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, volume etc. (Free)

EVA Intern

EVA lets you control Android phone with natural language. It’s using text-to-speech technology and voice recognition to turn your phone into a completely hands-free powerful device. The coolest part is – you can activate EVA by just shaking your phone.

Its features include making memos, calls, expense reports, getting basic stock quotes, announcing incoming calls, mapping addresses and locations, posting on Facebook, starting applications, loading web pages or bookmarks, managing contacts, contact groups, lists, calendar, etc. (Free)

Edwin, Speech-to-Speech

Edwin is a speech recognition app for Android phone. It requires SpeechSynthesis Data and TTS Extended apps to be installed. The translate function is fun. It’s a must-try Android voice utility.

The assistant is also equipped with solid features like tweeting, SMS, search, date and time management, translation, weather forecast, calls, application launcher, etc. (Free)

Cyberon Voice Commander (UK)

Cyberon Voice Commander allows communication between people and Android phones through voice. It lets you control phone without even using hands (for Android 2.2 and above) and eyes.

Cyberon Voice Commander allows you to say commands like “call contact“, “digit dial”, “redial” or “callback”, “call history”, “find contact“, “start application“, etc. ($5.99)

Hands-Free Voice Dialer

Hands-Free Voice Dialer is the ideal Siri alternative for virtual voice assistant. You can just speak any command naturally and it will reply with a confirmation before it executes the given command.

This version allows you to make voice commands like “Call Jim Harris at mobile”, “Next song”, “Shuffle play music”, “Find contact for Ed Bly”, “Send a text to Jay Snow”, and “Set my Facebook status”. (Free)

TopVoiceControl

An amazing free voice assistant app for Android with text-to-speech feature. It has a very user-friendly interface to show all the commands you can speak to Android phone.

Features include number dialing, application launcher, service enabler, text-to-speech and acting without key-pressing when only 1 recognition result is available. (Free)

Sonalight Text by Voice

Text by Voice turns your Android phone to a hands-free and eyes-free device through speech recognition. It reads incoming SMS aloud and you can simply reply a text message just by voice. (Free)

PhoneVoice

PhoneVoice is a text-to-speech utility for Android phone which is able to send you notification in voice form for incoming calls and SMS. Useful for people who are driving, on meeting, having important appointment or doing work. (Free)

With an eyedropper tool you can simply click anywhere on your computer screen to grab and copy specific colors for your own personal use such as making palettes or color schemes, and we want to save your resourcing troubles by listing more than 25 eyedropper tools with convenient features for Windows, Mac, Firefox, Chrome, iPhone and Android!

No more trouble on getting or memorizing the color anymore, grab them to speed up your design work!

Shortcut to color pickers for:

• Windows
• Mac OS X
• Firefox browser
• Chrome browser
• iPhone
• Android

Windows Apps

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Instant Eyedropper
Instant Eyedropper is a free tool that helps you find HTML color codes of any pixel on your screen. With just a single click the code will be copied to the clipboard, then you can paste it wherever needed.

Eye Dropper 3.01
Eye Dropper is a simple tool that attaches a magnifier to your mouse pointer so that you can zoom into specific pixel on your screen. The tool then displays the RGB, CMYK, and HEX value of the color.

Eyedropper 4.0 beta
Along with finding out the color value of any pixel on the screen, Eyedropper also lets you measure the distance between pixels, with the option to zoom in for better accuracy. Color value is automatically saved to the clipboard, and formats for display include HEX, RGB, and CMYK.

ColorPic
ColorPic is great for high-resolution monitors. It includes a magnifier so that you can get the color precisely. You can save up to 16 colors in the palettes, and use 4 advanced color mixers to select a spectrum of possibilities. It has many other advanced features like color adjusting and mixing, the ability to view web-safe version of each color, and a resizable magnification area.

Quick HTML Color Picker
Quick HTML Color Picker is a free tool for picking colors from your screen, with the ability to preview before selecting. The color will then be displayed in RGB and HTML formats and be automatically copied to the clipboard.

ColorPix
ColorPix picks colors from your screen and displays them in RGB, HEX, HSB, and CMYK formats. There is a built-in magnifier that lets you zoom in for more precise viewing and picking. Values are automatically copied to the clipboard.

Just Color Picker
Just Color Picker is not just your average color picker. It displays colors in HTML, RGB, HEX, HSB/HSV, and HSL formats. It has a magnifier with 3 different settings, RGB and RYB color wheel to display triads and complementary colors, a color finder for harmonious matching, color code conversions, and much more!

GetColor!
GetColor! is a very simple color picker that displays colors in RGB, HEX, HTML, and WinAPI formats. You can then copy one or all of them to the clipboard. It can also be minimized to the system tray.

Color Cop
Color Cop may be small, but it has a lot of great features. You can use the eyedropper to grab colors from anywhere on the screen and even use the magnifying glass to zoom in for closer view. Colors can be displayed in HTML hex, Delphi hex, Powerbuilder, Visual Basic, Clarion, Visual C++, RGB float and RGB int formats, which will be automatically copied to the clipboard. You can save up to 7 colors in the history, find complementary and web-safe colors, minimize the app to the system tray, and more.

ColorMania
ColorMania lets you pick colors from anywhere on your screen. There is also a built-in magnifier for greater accuracy. Colors can be displayed in RGB, HSV, HSL, and CMYK values. You can also save up to 6 colors in the palette.

More: Click here for more Windows tips.

Firefox Addons

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PixelZoomer
PixelZoomer is great for grabbing colors and displaying them as HEX code. It works slightly different from the norm because it renders web pages as screenshots and zooms in using a new CSS attribute. This is done so that the pixels are rendered crisp without using anti-aliasing.

ColorZilla
ColorZilla is just like your basic color picker and eyedropper tool, except it lives in your browser. It’s an addon for Firefox that lets you grab the color of any pixel inside your browser. The built-in palette browser allows you to choose colors from pre-defined color sets and save the most used colors in custom palettes.

Rainbow Color Tools
Rainbow Color Tools includes the analyzer that extracts the color scheme from the current website’s images and CSS, a picker that picks color in RGB and HSV values, an inspector that retrieves the color of any pixel on the browser, and finally a library that filters through saved colors by tag or the url of the page the color was found.

Rainbowpicker
Rainbowpicker is inspired from the advanced color picker that can be found in Nvu and ported over to Firefox. It’s very simple and easy to use: just click and pick. Colors are displayed in their HEX and name values; you can also change the hue, saturation and brightness to create slight variation.

More Firefox stuff:

• Firefox wallpapers
• Firefox themes
• Firefox add-ons, and
• Firefox tips

Mac Apps

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ColourMod Color Picker
ColourMod is so unique that it comes in 5 different versions: Konfabulator, ColourMod V1.9, ColourMod V2.2, Unbranded, and Personalized. Each version is customized to fit your needs. Konfabulator is a desktop version that is available for Mac and Windows. ColourMod V1.9 is a Mac dashboard widget. ColourMod V2.2 is a plugin for web-based applications. Unbranded removes ColourMod’s branding and Personalized lets you add your own logo on the application.

DigitalColor Meter
DigitalColor Meter is a tool that comes with Mac OS X. As you move your mouse around, it will show you the color value of any pixel on the screen. You can choose the format to display the color, such as RGB, YUV, or CIE.

ColorSnapper
ColorSnapper is very simple and useful. It describes itself as “the missing color picker for Mac.” It lives in the menu bar until it’s called via a hotkey, and features a magnifier for better accuracy. Grabbed color is automatically copied to the clipboard and can be reused as needed. You can also choose from around 13 different formats if needed.

Hex Color Picker
Hex Color Picker puts an extra tab in the system-wide color panel and lets you see the hex code for any color instantly. You can then edit the color using a set of shorthands and see a live preview.

RCWebColorPicker
RCWebColorPicker is a very simple tool that displays RGB value in HTML-friendly HEX value. You can limit the slider to show only web-safe colors if you prefer. This tool should show up in the color panel of most Cocoa and Carbon apps.

Pipette
Plain and simple, Pipette lets you grab colors and copy them in HEX format. It’s lightweight and easy to use.

Chrome Extensions

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colorPicker
With colorPicker you can grab colors from any web page, then save or copy them to your clipboard. Colors are displayed in their HSB, RGB, and CMYK values. It’s loaded with advanced features for web developers, such as the ability to check for WCAG 2 compatibility, adjust the area of the eyedropper, and a DOM-Explorer to find the elements or tags on the page easily.

Rulers, Guides, Eye Dropper & Color Picker
Along with being able to pick colors from any web page, this extension also lets you display guides, rulers, and grids on any web page. It has many features for the rulers, guides and grids, but the color picker itself is pretty basic.

Eye Dropper
Eye Dropper is a great extension with an advanced color picker that lets you see the HSV, RGB, and HEX color values of the grabbed color. Colors are stored in your history for later reference, and it can also be copied to the clipboard.

Color Pick
Color Pick is a very simple eyedropper with an attached magnifier. Once you’ve picked your desired color, the extension will save it for you until you pick a new one. Colors are displayed in RGB, HSL, and HEX formats.

iPhone Apps

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Loupe
If you’re a designer who owns an iPhone, Loupe lets you grab inspiration wherever you go. It lets you capture colors from photos in your library or just snap something live and get the colors. You can then create color swatches, save color values, and add notes to help you remember details later.

cliqcliq Colors
Cliqcliq is a great color picker for creating and managing palettes on your iPhone. It also converts color values between RGB, HSB, and CMYK. You can grab colors from the camera, your photo library, or Flickr. Palettes can then be shared via email and are even compatible with Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, and Microsoft Word.

Android Apps

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Magic Color Picker
Magic Color Picker is a powerful color selection tool suitable for designers, artists and programmers. It supports 7 different modes with RGB, HSV, HSL and YUV color models. Use either palette or sliders to adjust. Colors are shown in decimal and HEX.

LifeDropper
LifeDropper is an Android app that can tell you the color of real-life objects by utilizing your device’s camera. Colors will be displayed in RGB and CMYK values, along with the hexadecimal code.

That’s all!

With more than 25 eyedropper tools to choose from, which one is your favorite? Do you use certain eyedropper tool that’s not on the list? If so, feel free to share your preferred tool in our comments!

As you have expected, iOS 5 is not just a regular update that’s nothing but all talk. According to its feature page, it combines 200 features which not only greatly improve user interface, solve serious user experience issues, but also introduce brand new features like Notification Center, iMessage, Newsstand, Reminder, and more!

So while waiting eagerly for the update to complete, we want to uncover more features that add just awesomeness to iOS 5, and you may not know about them. Enjoy reading or exploring new features and rejoice, as your iDevice will look and act better today!

1. Notification Center Customization

If you visited Apple’s iOS 5 feature page or watched the keynote, you probably know about Notification Center. It’s a revamped design of push notifications, with primary purpose to unite all notifications in one place and remove interruption during your iActivities.

Sounds really good, but Notification Center is more flexible than you think. By going to Settings > Notifications > (Application), you will be able to customize the center by either turn off the notification center, set numbers of showing items, choose alert style with 3 options available and even set the alert rate. It’s your notification center, it’s your will to customize it to your liking.

2. Private Browsing

Come on, who doesn’t have a secret? Often we want to visit certain website content that’s either your company’s confidential data, or your first girl friend’s blog which you still care about, and you probably don’t want anybody knows about it.

Apple understands your concern on privacy, thus enabling a Private Browsing mode in Safari to let you browse any website without leaking out a bit of data. You can turn on Private Browsing mode by access to Settings > Safari. Your Safari’s interface color will turn to dark grey after the activation, which means you are browsing website with Private Browsing mode turned on.

Well if you’re too lazy to turn on and off Private Browsing mode every time you want to visit certain website, with iOS 5 you can also remove website data by selection, by accessing Safari > Advanced > Website Data.

3. Camera

This is a killer feature for iPhone camera lover. In past it takes some steps to switch between Camera app and Camera roll, but now you can switch to Camera roll right from your Camera app. All you need to do is simply slide to the right from the Camera app’s interface.

Photos inside Camera roll are shown one by one, and you can continue to slide to the right to view more photos. After you viewed the Camera roll, you can slide to the left until you return to the Camera app. A very brilliant solution, I’m pleased.

4. Delete Button Everywhere

This is a very small tweak to the iOS, but a great step Apple did to improve the iOS’ flexibility! Starting from iOS 5, there’s a red delete button hidden in many applications like Notes, Music, and even Settings.

You will be able to delete everything in list by simply swipe right on the item. Be it songs in the Music app, notes in the note list, or even application data in the Usage setting which I will cover below, you can simply get a delete option by swipe your finger to left or right direction on the item. Say Goodbye to iTunes even just for song deletion!

5. Emoji

A very cool (and sweet!) international language is added into iOS 5! It’s called Emoji and yes, it’s just what you think, an international language about Emoticons. You can add Emoji language by tapping Settings > General > Keyboard > International Keyboards > Add New Keyboard > Emoji.

A picture worth thousand words. With Emoji, you can express your emotion by choosing 33 different emoticons from the list, yet it’s not the end of the story. Emoji is more than emoticons, it contains different kinds of awesome icons, grouped into 6 specific categories.

Sunshine, Animals, Christmas Santa, iPhone, Pumpkin, any icon you might need in chatting. I’m not too sure about their proper usage, but for my experience these icons allow me to create lots of laughter during my conversation with friends who use iDevice. Nice job Apple, your design is not only user friendly, but human friendly.

6. Custom Keyboard Shortcut

You need no longer to type repetitive long words in any typing work within the iOS 5. A simple ‘OMW’ will create a phrase ‘On My Way’. It’s called keyboard shortcut, and you can create it by tapping Settings > General > Keyboard > Add New Shortcut.

The creation is amazingly easy, just input a shortcut and a phrase, then you’re done! Also I’ve been worrying about language compatibility with keyboard shortcut, so I tested it with Simplified Chinese and Emoji, and Apple never disappoints me, it works very well with languages other than English!

This not only saves a lot of exhaustive typing work for common users, but also those coders who do some coding using apps like Editor for iPad, for instance you can set shortcut “pp” for paragraph tag.

7. Custom Vibration

This cool feature is for iPhone only. Originally created for people with disabilities, custom vibration is one of the new magic of iOS 5 which you will love to play with. Just as its name, by accessing to Settings > General > Accessibility > Custom Vibration, you will be able to set your own version of vibration for phone calls.

(Image Source: MacRumors)

By default there are several patterns like heartbeat, S.O.S and Symphony, but you can slide down to the bottom of the option and press on ‘Create New Vibration’ to make your exclusive version of vibration. You can also assign this vibration to certain people in the contacts so next time the iPhone vibrates, you know who’s calling. Pretty cool isn’t it?

8. AssistiveTouch And Custom Gesture

iOS 5 is so amazing that it’s not only available to common people, but also people with difficulties using the iOS device, and the new feature that solves their problem is named AssistiveTouch. Well, the feature is originally designed for people with disabilities, but it can also be a lovely feature for common users!

You can access to Settings > General > Accessibility > AssistiveTouch to enable it, and a semi-transparent square button will appear at the bottom of the device. With a click on the button, you will be able to perform actions like Shake, Pinch, Lock Screen, Rotate Screen, etc.

If you tap into Settings > General > Accessibility > AssistiveTouch > Custom Gesture, you get an option to create and save your own version of custom gesture. The gesture will be saved into the Favorites section of the AssistiveTouch, and it will do exactly what you’ve done in the recording session. It’s clear that the custom gesture is created as a macro shortcut to do certain task easier, so be prepared to use this convenient feature after you got the iOS 5!

9. Usage Management

Apple hopes to achieve the PC Free era for iDevices, and Usage option is existed to substitute certain features of iTunes. Again, you need to access into Settings > General to get the Usage option. In this option, you will see storage space that’re still available for new stuffs, and allocated space for installed application and its data.

You can also delete the application right here if you’re not happy with its data size, just tap on the application then a red “Delete App” button will do both application and data deletion. Besides, you can also manage your iCloud storage here, without the involvement of any extra application like iTunes!

10. Feature, Feature, More Feature

There’re just too many minor tweaks in iOS 5 that make your iLife easier, so in this last section I will share about some little yet awesome features which are noteworthy. These are tweaks which greatly smoothen your iOS experience, also which iOS users have cried for since the version 4.

You’re now able to use iOS device while it’s still syncing, saves a lot of waiting time! Also there’s an update called Delta Software Updates, which means the software upgrade will only change particular files, so you don’t need to download entire OS with pretty fat size. And it’s OTA (On-The-Air) update, which means you can update your iOS version straight from device through Wi-Fi or 3G.

Besides, you no longer need to memorize or note down what apps you have purchased, as there’s a section called “Purchased” existed in the App Store, and you will be able to check up iPad-specific or iPhone-specific apps you’ve purchased and installed.

Other minor yet notable improvements are ability to create and manage album, open iTunes and Safari links in background, swipe left or right from one’s mailboxes folder list in Mails app to take you to another account’s mailboxes, and more! iOS 5 is just about more features!

Reference

• Apple: iOS 5
• Apple: WWDC 2011 Keynote
• iOS 5: Version History
• iOS 5: Beta 7′s Change Log

Reflection

In iOS 5′s promotional video, Scott Forstall of Apple said that they are constantly challenging themselves on a question, which is how they can make iOS’ user experience even easier, or friendlier. I always feel that Apple has its own autocratic way to develop the iOS, but this time I’m really pleased with their improvements on iOS 5, which proves that they accepted users’ opinion and suggestion. Good job, Apple.

It can be the 10 key features covered in the keynote, or features shared in this article. Which feature you favored the most in this update? My personal favorite is the Notification Center feature, and do share with me yours!

This month our selection includes useful web app that helps you to register and manage domains very easily, a great tool to help you manage relationship with your users who are using your web apps, a very neat and effective project managing tool, and even a social network for food recipes!

Don’t forget you can also suggest apps for the list by commenting below, or sending us a tweet @Hongkiat using the tag #hkwebapp. We’d love your feedback on the types of apps you’d like to see, and your favorite apps. On to the apps then!

Intercom

Intercom is a fantastic tool for anyone who runs a web app. It enables you to develop and maintain personal relationship with everyone using the web app, and that means users always know there is a friendly face waiting at the end of their support queries. In essence, it humanizes the relationship between you and your users.

Furthermore it enables you to see how users are using your app, where they are using it from, and a whole range of other useful information. One of my personal favorite features is that it shows you the local time of each user, which really helps smoothing out the communication process.

We’ve been using it on our very own web app, IntutionHQ for a while now, and we’ve had some really great feedback on it. People love interacting with people. It’s currently in private beta, but you can sign up for an invite, and one should be floating to your inbox in the near future. Well worth a look for anyone who runs a web app.

Pivotal Tracker

Pivotal Tracker is a great tool for anyone who follows Agile development practices. You create tracker stories and move them from step to step as they go from an idea in your head to finished product.

I’ve tried a whole range of tools for this purpose, but Pivotal Tracker has been the best I’ve tried so far. It’s got a slick interface, lots of keyboard shortcuts to make the process quicker, a fantastic free iOS app, and great team integration. If you work in an Agile environment, this is an app you should check out.

IWantMyName

IWantMyName is a domain registrar with a twist. Along with having more the 90 domain extensions for registration, they also have a killer feature on top: 1 click web app configuration for your domain.

As anyone who has gone through the set up process for a new domain can tell you, it can be pretty time consuming. Setting up Google apps, Blogger, Flavors.me or whatever else all takes time. With IWantMyName, there 70+ services you can choose from to set up in an instant, with a huge range of app types to choose from.

If you’d like your domain setup process to be a little easier, I suggest you check them out next time when you are considering a domain register.

WebPutty

WebPutty is a neat tool for all the CSS junkies out there. It gives you a syntax-highlighting editor in the cloud for whenever you need to make changes and your favorite text editor isn’t by your side.

In fact, even if your favorite text editor is by your side, there are some really great functions built in that make WebPutty incredibly useful, the most obvious of which is one click publishing. On top of this it also features live preview, and CSS3 support, so you can easily try out all the new ideas you read about online. Great.

Trello

Trello is a really neat tool for managing projects together with teams, released by Fog Creek Software, whose CEO Joel Spolsky (of Stack Overflow fame) many of you might be familiar with.

Trello lets you organise all your different projects into boards, share them with your team, and see very quickly what is being worked on, who is working on what, and where something is in a process. It’s a great concept that looks to make managing even more effective. It’s currently free to sign up, so head on over and have a look.

Recipefy

Recipefy is a social network for recipes, which enables you to share and discover recipes in a rather unique way. Essentially you can start sharing recipes with your followers, follow people who share recipes you like, reshare recipes that appeal to you, and like recipes!

As I said, it’s really a social network for recipes, and one that who enjoys good food should take a look at.

Sifter

Sifter is a bug tracking app for keeping track of all those nasty issues in your apps, and how far along you are to fixing them. It lets you create projects, set milestones, assign different issues to different people, reply to comment threads, and everything else you might expect from bug tracking software.

What appeals to me about Sifter is their marketing copy – they don’t claim to be the biggest or bad-ass bug tracking out there, just a simple tool that works well for small teams. Nice.

Tout

Tout is an useful app for those of us who have to send a lot of repetitive emails, where you have to repeat the same content. You create templates of those repetitive tasks (which you can also sort into categories), and when it comes the time to send them to someone, just enter their name and email address, that’s possibly all!

One of the neat features of Tout is that you can link it with your Google, LinkedIn, Twitter or other accounts, and it can automatically populate different fields based on the information it pulls from there, talking about less typing works!

Yoono

Yoono is a tool to unify all your social sources, and to enable you to share from one central location. It’s very powerful and comes in several different flavors – browser/web app, iPhone app and desktop app.

For people who have to manage multiple profiles on multiple sites, tools like Yoono are essential. Yoono enables you to sync your status across multiple sites, share great content to all of your different networks, and stay connected wherever you are.

Action Method

Action Method is a tool for ‘capturing tasks, collaborating and getting organized’. That means you capture your action steps, delegate tasks (if required), manage projects and get things done. Action Method also has a strong product roadmap with a whole range of new features on the way including a focus area (with your top 5 tasks), team projects, and more.

There is also a great iOS app available, and for those of you who like throwbacks to the good old days, you can even get paper copies printed out to jot down your actions on the go.

Portrit

For those of you who have trouble sorting through photos, Portrit could be the tool for you. Rather than sorting through all of your photos in isolation, you and your friends can come together and rate your photos, add a range of different tags, and decide which photos are the best. Think of it as crowdsourcing for photos sorting.

They have also added some fun and encouraging features where you get badges for rating your friend’s pictures. It’s a great way to find which of your photos stand out from the rest, and it’s pretty fun to play with as well. Check it out!

Listhings

Listhings is a very simple tool, but for one thing it does, it does very well – sticky notes in the cloud.

If you are always searching for the little bits of paper you jot your notes down on, or you often have (and often forget) great ideas that will make you rich, Listhings could be a lifesaver. Just head to the website, jot down your note, and you are done. It’s free to use, and (apparently) very eco friendly, so try it out.

Crowdbooster

Crowdbooster is a tool for managing, measuring and optimizing your social media marketing. It shows you what works and what doesn’t so you can focus more on the things that actually make a difference.

You can see charts of your follower numbers, retweets, view your influential followers and top retweeters and find out all sorts of handy information. It’s also a very useful way for showing people the true value of social media. It’s also free, so you can have a play, and make sure you are doing as much as possible with your social media presence.

That’s all for this month…

That’s all for this month, but we’d love to hear your suggestions for next months’ list, as well as your comments on the apps we’ve featured this month.

What is your favorite web app? What kind of web apps would you like to see more? Be sure to let us know in the comments below – we’d love your feedback.

Be sure to subscribe to our Newsletter or RSS feed to keep up with all the latest and greatest web apps, and all the other great content we offer.

Suggest An App!

This is a monthly feature, so if you have any great app you’d like to suggest for our next month’s round-up, here’s what you can do:

• Leave a comment below,
• Submit us via our tip submission form,
• Send a tweet to @hongkiat with hashtag #hkwebapp

Sensing the importance stated above, it will be really wise for you to consider a mobile version of your website. Well, going mobile entails another hefty development process, but the good news is there are cheap but quality solutions, and what’s better: right here is a list of services that you can use to either convert your website into mobile version, or create it from scratch.

Details after the jump!

5 Recommended Services:

mobiSiteGalore

mobiSiteGalore claims itself to be the easiest mobile web builder, for as average as 54 minutes their customers can already build a fully functional mobile version of their website. Another good thing is, as you may have noticed, many of the services listed below focuses on smartphones. Well, mobiSiteGalore do support low end phones that aren’t so smart. (Free – $225/year)

mofuse

With mofuse, there are two ways to convert your site to mobile: building it yourself through mofuse or hiring them to build it for you. By building it yourself using their application, you have more control over the design and development process, only you’ll have to pay a monthly subscription to keep the service going, else you can hire their design experts to build it for you. (Self Service: $7.95/month – $199/month)

bMobilized

Turns your website into mobile version really fast with bMobilized. It offers the fast conversion with comprehensive customization as an option available for you to tune the design well.

bMobilized claims they support more than 13000 mobile devices, including all major brands. Also the more website you host using their service the higher the discount you get. So if you have a network of websites that needs conversion, bMobilized is the perfect service for you! ($19.99/month)

ConvertWebsite

ConvertWebsite requires their customer to send them the PSD file of the website they wish to convert. Why? To determine what approach is best in the redesigning process from desktop to mobile. Its method is quite similar to Code My Concept, which means handcrafting your provided PSD into mobile website.

Unlike other services, this service actually takes days for the conversion. For a general conversion the delivery date is 9 days, with option to expedite the process. The price is fairly high compared to other service, but consider that your site is handcrafted by industry professional. ($307 – $362)

Mobify

If you are engaged in e-commerce, Mobify is probably the best service out there for you. Mobify offers HTML5 features for its clients, and their experienced teams will design your mobile site to your specific requirements, with the fact that most stores going from concept to launch within 3 weeks. You can also go for self-serve solution by referring to their Publisher page. (Publisher Pricing: $0 – $1000)

More:

onbile

In a hurry to create a mobile version of your website? Well, with only 3 very simple steps and 5 minutes at hand you can! Onbile supports smartphones like iPhone, Android, and Blackberry. The only disadvantage here will be its limited templates, but their templates are generally awesome! (Free)

Mobile App America

Mobile App America promises better SEO for your website, and most of all it helps to gain a competitive advantage among your competitors who doesn’t have an elaborated mobile version of their websites yet. As of writing this, it supports devices including iPhone, Blackberry, and Android. (Free)

MobStac

MobStac delivers the future-ready, HTML5-enabled experience for your mobile website. It also got easy customization, and supports several themes (if you want a change of design) and CMS integration.

Among other services, MobStac is probably one of the few that has an in-depth monetization plan for mobile websites. The only disadvantage is the service is currently in Beta, but you can sign up for an invite. (Free – $19/month)

Conclusion

Think if you will really need a mobile version of your website. Mobile conversion has its ups and downs. The pros are indeed easier navigation, optimized user experience, and focused site content.

Its disadvantage, however, is there will be limited advertisement space. Really. Also, if your website exists with heavy and tantalizing graphics and you want it the same in mobile version, you might need to think to redesign the current site or abandon the conversion as the mobile website should be designed with minimalism in mind.

So consider carefully between the pros and cons, and make the wise decision that will benefit your users and you.

If the USB flash drive is infected with virus, not only you may lose the data in the storage, you are also affecting the security of every computer once it’s plugged in. The following post features a list of 10 tools to protect your computer against any infected USD flash drives.

Prevention is better than cure, and it’s never too old for that saying. Full list after jump.

Note: It’s strongly not recommended to install multiple tools in the same computer for various critical reasons, just try and get what really suits your needs!

USB Disk Security

USB Disk Security provides protection against any malicious program trying to attack via USB flash drive. It delivers high level of protection against theft and accidental disclosure of confidential data, and prevents unauthorized person from stealing your data.

USB Threat Defender

USB Threat Defender is not just another autorun.inf virus remover, it takes more than that to provide maximum protection guarantee. Its new protection level detects viruses missed by the best antivirus software, and provides maximum protection against any threat that tries to attack a system via any USB storage device.

McAfee VirusScan USB

Proven antivirus security for your USB drive. Automated, daily antivirus updates install silently in the background, ensuring your USB drive is always protected from evolving and emerging virus threats. The software does not provide trial version, but considered it’s the famous brand McAfee, it’s probably worth your consideration! And did I mention 30-day money back guarantee?

USB immunizer

The Immunize option allows you to immunize your USB storage device or SD card against infections with autorun-based malware. Even if your storage device has been plugged into an infected computer, the malware will be unable to create its autorun.inf file, thus annihilating any chance of auto-launching itself.

Panda USB Vaccine

Panda USB Vaccine can be used on individual USB flash drives to disable its autorun.inf file in order to prevent malware infections. When applied on a USB drive, the vaccine permanently blocks the malicious autorun.inf file, preventing it from being read, created, deleted or modified.

Ninja Pendisk

Ninja is the popular and free program designed for guarding computers against viruses transmitted by USB pendisks. This ninja waits quietly in the system tray until an USB pendisk is plugged into the computer, which it will be examined to uncover the commonly malicious or virulent files known as autorun.inf and ctfmon.exe amongst many others.

USB Guardian

USB Guardian allows you to safely enjoy file sharing with USB thumb drive. Movies, MP3s, documents and pictures can be copied from one computer to another without worrying of getting infected by worms and viruses trough USB drive.

Autorun Protector

Autorun Protector is a two-way protection standalone software that prevents your PC from infection by autorun worms and also protects your removable device from being infected from other sources. Hence, it decreases the spread of the virulent worms.

Autorun Virus Remover

Autorun Virus Remover uses proactive technology to permanently remove autorun & autorun.inf viruses, also it can block those viruses trying to infect the system via USB flash drives.

The USB Program

The USB Program is designed to help prevent computers being infected by autorun viruses. The program is loaded into system memory, and technically it automatically renames autorun.inf files on new device into autorun.inf_current date_time, and sets its attribute to “normal”, making it visible for the system. As a result, it isolates any infection.

This month our selections include web app that helps you get into shape and eat right (yes health is no.1 for everyone), a really pretty CRM tool, a couple of web apps to help you produce the perfect resume/CV, and apps for programming online, talking about diversity!

Don’t forget you can also suggest apps for the list by commenting below. We’d love your feedback on the types of apps you’d like to see, and your favorite apps. Full list after jump!

Oobafit

Oobafit is a really neat tool to help motivate you to improve your fitness, lose weight, eat better and meet any other goals of that nature that you might have.

When you first sign up to the app, you simply choose your goals – getting toned, losing weight or whatever it might be, and drag some sliders to specify certain areas of your body you would like to focus on. Oobafit then automatically generates a plan for you with both exercises and meal plans to help your reach your goals.

If you have a Tesco supermarket in your area, you can even order food online through the service. If not you can simply print off a shopping list to take with you next time you go shopping. Pretty neat. The service is still in its infancy stage, but it’s a really great concept and looks to have a strong future. Check it out.

PocketSmith

PocketSmith is an app for managing your finance, which it does in rather a unique fashion. The main view is a calendar view where you can enter all of your recurring events – payday, rent and so on, as well as one off events so you can quickly see how your finance is working out.

My personal favorite feature is the graph that shows you exactly how your finances are panning out, with a forecast of where you will be in a year time as well of how you are progressing currently. Seeing your finance in this way is really motivational and makes you think a lot more about where your money is going. Pretty cool.

Pipedrive

Pipedrive is an innovative CRM tool that is mainly designed around managing your sales flow. Its interface is super simple, super fast, and it’s really a pleasure to use.

Pipedrive is one of the more modern feeling CRM tools that I have seen (although I’d welcome any suggestion on this front), and the fact you can easily drag and drop deals around is really a plus. It’s hard to describe how slick the interface is, but if you’ve got any needs for a CRM tool it’s really worth a look. It’s currently in beta, but it sounds like improvements and features are coming, so it’s a good time to get onboard.

The Birdy

The Birdy is similar in some ways to OhLife, a tool we recently featured. It sends you a daily email to which you reply with your daily purchases, with totals, descriptions and hashtags (like Twitter). It then automatically sorts them out and presents you a great overview of what you’ve been spending your money on.

I think this is really a great concept – I’ve tried using a number of tools to track my spending before, but I’m terrible at keeping constant track of where my money has been going. The Birdy is great because all you need to do is reply to one email a day. Within that one day period it’s fairly easy to remember where your money has been going, and anything you forget isn’t likely to be major issue anyway. It’s really a great approach.

280Slides

280Slides is a web alternative to PowerPoint and Keynote, which is both easy to use and really good looking at the same time. All from the comfort of your browser window.

It got a load of great features which make it really powerful – you can import your current presentations from PowerPoint, you can choose from a number of very pretty themes, you can take it anywhere (that’s why we love the cloud, right?), and you can even publish your presentations straight to the web. It’s the future of presentations.

beanstalk

Beanstalk claims to be the easiest way to manage code, collaborate and deploy.

It got version control, collaboration and deployment features all baked in, and it integrates with lots of your favorite web apps (Basecamp, anyone?), it automatically backs up to multiple off site locations, and it looks great while doing all of this. If you’ve got a team of developers working together in the cloud, it’s really a wonderful tool – take a look.

LazyMeter

LazyMeter is a to-do list for lazy people, which is great because most people I know are too lazy to keep up with to-do lists.

The key to this app is its simplicity. Entering and scheduling tasks are really an one click activity, and that means you are much more likely to set up and follow through the tasks you have listed. It has a really simple chart/graph system which shows you immediately how many tasks you’ve done, how many you have to do, and how many you’ve paused (put off to another day). It’s quite motivational and makes you want to get your tasks done.

ResumeBaking

ResumeBaking is a great app for anyone hunting for a job. It got a really slick interface, and makes building a resume a breeze.

I always find putting together a resume a huge chore but ResumeBaking quickly and easily helps you list all the relevant information, share your new resume with potential employers, view stats about your resume and more. And did I mention it’s free? It’s pretty fantastic, and the small amount of effort you need to put into it will be paid back in no time when you get some great job offers. (Suggested by Hammad)

Kindle Cloud Reader

You can’t mention hot web apps this month without talking about the launch of the Kindle Cloud Reader from Amazon.

I’m sure most of you are familiar with the Kindle – the Cloud Reader is the latest in their huge range of ways to access your books. It’s really cool because it syncs your last read page to all of your devices, updates automatically with all of your purchases, and best of all, the web app even supports an offline mode so you can read your books in the web app without being connected to the internet. Pretty awesome.

Penzu

Penzu is a great option for anyone interested in keeping a diary or journal with all sorts of neat features.

With the web app you can write and share with whoever you like, import your photos from Flickr, email entries and more. I like the fact you can set up different journal types – I’ve used it as a travel journal, and sharing it with others is really simple. Worth a look. (Suggested by Anca Bolocan)

Zerply

Zerply is another neat tool for creating an online resume. It’s really social, and makes the process very simple.

It’s pretty cool because it links up with all of your different social network accounts. You can sign up with Twitter or Facebook, and then import all your work details from LinkedIn before going on to share it and get recommendations from people around the web. It got a great design to it, and the resumes you get out look top notch.

Cacoo

Cacoo is a tool for creating diagrams of all kinds online.

It comes with a wide variety of stencils, a cool history features so you can move backwards and forwards to see what changes you’ve made; it has sharing and collaboration features built in so you can work together with a number of different people, it lets you export in PDF and SVG as well as PNG and has a range of other features to explore. If you need to do some diagramming and sharing them out, this could be what you need.

News360

News360 is an online aggregation tool that learns by who you follow and what you subscribe to the kind of stories that really interest you and the things you are interested in.

It exists on almost every platform you can think of including iOS, Android and Windows Phone 7. I really like these kinds of tools as the more you use them the more value you get out of them. I’ve been using it for a few weeks, and it’s really starting to understand my interests – I get lots of Tech/Apple/Google news and keep finding a whole lot of interest stories to look though. Pretty great.

That’s all for this month…

That’s all for this month, but we’d love to hear your suggestions for next months’ list, as well as your comments on the apps we’ve featured this month.

What is your favorite web app? What kind of web apps would you like to see more? Be sure to let us know in the comments below – we’d love your feedback.

Be sure to subscribe to our Newsletter or RSS feed to keep up with all the latest and greatest web apps, and all the other great content we offer.

Suggest An App!

This is a monthly feature, so if you have any great app you’d like to suggest for our next month’s round-up, here’s what you can do:

• Leave a comment below,
• Submit us via our tip submission form,
• Send a tweet to @hongkiat with hashtag #hkwebapp

These 3rd party commenting systems do more than just allowing visitors and readers to drop comments. Most of them support comprehensive comment managing backend, spam control, blacklist/ whitelist management, integration with social media, theme customization and much more.

Today, I’m going to bring to your awareness three of the most commonly used (by bloggers and site owners) 3rd party commenting and discussion systems, respectively Disqus, IntenseDebate and LiveFyre. I’ll also discuss some of their key features, what I like and what I think they may lack of. Lastly, at the end of each, I have also thrown in a couple of useful links for your reference.

1. Disqus

Disqus is a mature comment management system and perhaps the most used amongst bloggers and website owners. Introduced back in 2007, it is currently serving more than 750,000 websites. According to a recent study done by folks at Lijit, 75% of the websites using 3rd party commenting system are powered by Disqus.

Whether you are using Disqus for the first time or migrating from other commenting systems, integrating Disqus with your website can be fairly simple. Right after you’ve signed up with Disqus, do check out the Import / Export section to find out more instructions on how to import your existing comments from various platforms (WordPress, Blogger, Movable Type, or other commenting systems) to Disqus.

Disqus is mobile friendly; its interface swaps according to different media so commenting is not affected even if your readers are on mobile browser. On top of that, Disqus also offers a mobile app for the convenience of site owners to manage comments and their communities on the go. Disqus apps are currently available for iPhone and Android.

Leaving comments or responding to a comment on a Disqus-powered system is a bliss, it is almost real time. Latest comments are reflected instantly without the need to refresh the entire page. For site owners, you can (optionally) be notified via email when a comment has been made on your website, and the best part is – you can respond to it right away from your email. And for commenters, you can even attach additional media (photo, link, video, etc) along with your comments.

Disqus’ core platform is free, but if you need more out of your commenting system, Disqus offers 3 subscription-based paid packages, each with their own respective of premium tools.

Here are more Disqus features worth knowing:

• Compatible with search engines, in another word – SEO friendly.
• Integrates with Akismet.
• Allows commenters to post as guest, or login via OpenID or social networks IDs (Facebook, Twitter, Google and Yahoo).
• Allows user to flag comments.
• Easy comment moderation via admin panels.
• Supports blacklist/ whitelist and word filtering.
• Allows site owner to display Tweets and other reactions.

Useful Disqus related links:

• Disqus official website | Sign up
• Disqus features
• Disqus blog
• Disqus premium
• Disqus demo
• Disqus for users
• Disqus for developers

2. IntenseDebate

The easiest way to sell IntenseDebate is probably stating who are the folks behind it. IntenseDebate is an Automattic product, the same guys who brought you WordPress, PollDaddy, Akismet and other cool web services.

If your blog is running on WordPress and you are looking for a 3rd party commenting system for a chance, you know this may be your best bet as IntenseDebate is created and maintained by the same people who coded your blog platform.

Reputation points is one of the key features I like about IntenseDebate. It allows users to reward well-thought and constructive comments with points and have them appear on top of others less quality comments. I find it a pretty good way to encourage higher quality discussion.

IntenseDebate sends an email to commenters whenever someone response to their comment. Not only this is a good way to keep the discussion going, it also makes readers keep coming back!

Similar to Disqus’ comment flagging, IntenseDebate allows you to report any inappropriate comment and on top of that, IntenseDebate allows you to state the reason for reporting.

Another great function of IntenseDebate is that it allows users to simultaneously tweet when they post a comment. It is yet another great way to draw more attention and traffic to the post.

More IntenseDebate features:

• Supports numerous widgets to show off your comment stats, most recent comments, most popular comments and top commenters.
• Allows users to login via OpenID, Twitter, Facebook or even WordPress.com ID.
• Developers can take advantage of the Plugins API to make commenting and discussion even more interesting. E.g., adding PollDaddy polls, embedding YouTube Videos, etc.

I noticed that IntenseDebate seems to be a little slower in terms of loading speed compared to Disqus and LiveFyre. Anyway, it could be my setup or my Internet connection.

Useful IntenseDebate related links:

• IntenseDebate official website | Sign up
• IntenseDebate features
• IntenseDebate blog
• IntenseDebate WordPress plugin
• IntenseDebate help page
• Contact IntenseDebate

3. Livefyre

Last but not least – Livefyre, the latest addition to the 3rd party commenting and discussion system market. They may be new but that does not make them the weakest. And as the matter of fact, pardon my subjective opinion; LiveFyre is my favorite among the three.

It is simple, very human-engaging, easy to use and consists most features we see in Disqus and IntenseDebate.

Livefyre allows commenter to tag other users in their comment using the ‘@’ symbol, pretty similar to what you can do on Facebook. Tagging LiveFyre, Facebook, Twitter users are supported.

Every time you enter a comment, you can also choose to have them posted simultaneously to Twitter, Facebook or both. Similarly you can also share someone else’s comments on Twitter and Facebook.

Whenever someone chooses to “follow” a conversation, they are automatically listening – meaning they will get notification whenever there is an update. Livefyre shows you in numbers, how many commenters are online and how many are listening to a particular conversation.

Other notable Livefyre features include:

• Supports comment votings and user ratings.
• Mobile-friendly interface.
• Centralized admin panel for comments moderation.
• Supports blacklist/ whitelist and spam control.
• Social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) sign in.

Useful LiveFyre related links:

• LiveFyre official website | Sign up
• LiveFyre demo
• LiveFyre features
• LiveFyre blog
• LiveFyre help page

If you have experience using any of the mentioned commenting systems, or you’d prefer sticking with WordPress (and others) native commenting systems, I’d love to hear your comment. :)