Web Authoring

At some point you’ve probably used evite, either by receiving or sending an invitation. In the past the online application was great for sending invitations but it was a one shot deal - create and send an evite and when the event is over, the evite is dead.

Last year evite went mobile in an effort to keep up with all of us and on Friday, evite went 2.0. Users can now integrate photos from Flickr, videos from YouTube and playlists from Imeem. The changes should make it easier to integrate content you already have on the web into your evite options instead of requiring separate uploads of information.

The redesign also attempts to make evite easier to navigate, introducing more tabs for organizing different sections of the site. Developers have also added some custom options for the way hosts and attendees can interact with each other.

[via Mashable, CNET]

Online music sites Pandora and Last.fm do a great job of providing you with streaming music you might like based on your listening history. But what they don’t do a great job of us letting you listen to any song you want at any time. That’s because music labels actually want you to do things like you know, go out and buy the songs.

But in this new information age, practically any song you could ever want to hear has been uploaded to one web site or another. All you need to know is how to use search engines like Google to find them. And that’s where music search engines/players like SeeqPod come in. The site doesn’t actually host any audio, it just provides the means to play audio hosted on other sites. So while the music may kind of sort of be illegally hosted, SeeqPod isn’t violating any laws.

Favtape combines some of the best features of Seedpod and Pandora and Last.fm, with a whole lot of muxtape thrown in for good measure. Here’s how it works. You visit Favtape.com, enter your Pandora user profile or your Last.fm username and Favtape will find your favorites and/or bookmarks. It will then create a playlist out of those songs by tracking down the music from other sources online.

The upshot is that you should get a playlist with up to 10 songs that you’ve already said you like, and you can hit the play button to listen at any time without any of the limiations imposed by Pandora or Last.fm. The downside is that sometimes Favtape will think it found your song when in fact it found another song with a similar file name. See that BNL link above? Yeah, when we clicked play we got some song we’d never heard before and didn’t particularly much care for.

[via TechCrunch]

DeepTrawl is an application for Windows / Mac OSX which takes the headache out of finding website errors. Without DeepTrawl, keeping your website error free is a laborious manual process of checking for dead links, spell checking static and dynamic content, validating your html page by page to insure browser compatibility and many other time consuming tasks. With a single click DeepTrawl quickly scans your entire site for these and many other issues.

Our software works with any kind of website. Whether your site is a blog, is generated dynamically, hand-written or created using Dreamweaver, Frontpage or any other editor, every feature of DeepTrawl will work just the same. DeepTrawl can even show you the errors on your pages highlighted in your web browser or in the integrated html editor.

Regularly using DeepTrawl to quality check your whole site with 1 click frees you to relax and create.

DeepTrawl is an application for Windows / Mac OSX which takes the headache out of finding website errors. Without DeepTrawl, keeping your website error free is a laborious manual process of checking for dead links, spell checking static and dynamic content, validating your html page by page to insure browser compatibility and many other time consuming tasks. With a single click DeepTrawl quickly scans your entire site for these and many other issues.

Our software works with any kind of website. Whether your site is a blog, is generated dynamically, hand-written or created using Dreamweaver, Frontpage or any other editor, every feature of DeepTrawl will work just the same. DeepTrawl can even show you the errors on your pages highlighted in your web browser or in the integrated html editor.

Regularly using DeepTrawl to quality check your whole site with 1 click frees you to relax and create.

[Read the rest of this entry...]

The clock just turned 5pm, and if you are like us, everything you have worked on all day has instantly evaporated from your mind (yes, this just happens, we don’t need alcohol). Luckily, we left all those papers on our desk, the scribbled whiteboard, and a monitor-o-sticky notes to help us figure out where we left off.

5pm by QG | Software is a web-based project management suite that provides us the tools needed to get back on track at 8am.

The underlying features of 5pm are fairly standard in the project management world. You create projects and assign them to one or more users or groups. The project can have a deadline, a client, and a priority level. Once you have created a project you can add items such as tasks and files. Tasks can be assigned to individual team members and emails can be sent to the group when tasks are completed. etc…

To help visualize your project over the course of its life, there is a timeline feature that shows your projects and tasks in a “Gantt” style chart. In addition, there is a reporting section that can help determine who is completing their projects on time and who isn’t.

One nifty feature is being able to synchronize with Google calendar. We like the idea not needing yet another calendar.

Where 5pm separates itself from the pack is in the design. We have used project management suites in the past that were so complicated or bloated we instantly abandoned them for the old pen-and-paper todo list. The 5pm interface is clean yet completely customizable. Their website touts they have been improving the interface for 5 years based on user feedback and the latest technology. It shows.

5pm doesn’t have as many features as other popular project managment suites such as mobile device support, active/open directory integration, and chat rooms to name a few. However, 5pm keeps project-management simple, and sometimes that is preferable to being drowned with options.

5pm offers a 14-day free trial on their website and costs start at $14/month for 5 users, 10 open projects, and 150mb storage.

So, you spend more time surfing the internet than actually working, you met your significant other on the internet and maybe, just maybe you know what a MUD is. Whether you are a geeky boy or the more rare and exotic geeky girl you haven’t lost yourself in the rabbit hole of the internet until it becomes time to plan your wedding.

MyWedding is one of the most useful (and free) wedding sites out there. You can create a “wedsite” that will be the envy of your friends even if you don’t know a lick of code. The site allows guests to RSVP for the big event, leave comments, sign a guest book and more. The couple can list accommodations, directions, gift registries and even create photo galleries. Once guests have entered an email address on the site you can also easily send out a message to them all if plans change or you update the page.

The design templates vary from the simple to the ornate, cute to couture. No need to have wedding bells plastered everywhere unless that’s the look you are going for. Page addresses can be a bit unweildy but that is easy enough to fix by redirecting your own domain name to your MyWedding site.

Digital and satellite TV stations have given us so many channels to choose from it’s sometimes difficult to decided on what to watch. And with the availability of shows on the Internet that decisions has become even harder. What if you could just type in what you felt like watching, maybe something romantic or some dancing and a list of videos that fit your criteria all came to you ready for viewing. If you like the idea of watching videos this way then iSofa may be what you’ve been waiting for.

In order to use iSofa, simply type in a search string and iSofa will bring back videos that matches your search and displays them in a heads up display type interface. From there you can just let them play in order or pick and choose what videos you want to watch.

The site is clearly in beta as some options only have graphic placeholders instead of actual functions. Also video quality is poor when you have your browser scaled larger than a post-it note, so we wouldn’t even recommend you try the full screen option at this time.

Despite the negatives, we really like the idea behind the site and hope that in future versions iSofa increases the video quality as well as include an option to save favorites videos.

So far we like what we’ve seen and iSofa just might have something here.

There’s no shortage of music recommendation engines. Whether you want to find music from artists that sound like Madonna or Meat Beat Manifesto, all you have to do is hit up Pandora, Last.fm, or a similar site and pop a name in the box. If the web site starts playing a song you like, you give it a thumbs up, while a thumbs down should help the software avoid playing music that makes you want to throw up in the future.

But one thing that Pandora and Last.fm have in common is that most of the music they play comes from major label artists. If you want to find music from independent artists, you might want to check out StumbleAudio. The web service uses a music recommendation image engine much like the other sites. But all of the artists are independent acts, which means they’re either unsigned or signed to smaller labels.

If you find an artist you like, you can flip through the tracks on their album and listen to full length audio streams. Or you can click on the links on the side of the page to purchase digital downloads or physical CDs.

StumbleAudio currently features over 120,000 artists and 2 million songs. We found the recommendations were decent, but not exactly spot on. For example, the service claims it was able to find 388 artists that sound like the Allman Brothers. As far as we can tell, it actually found about 5 or 10 southern rock/blues bands, and a few hundred artists that sound nothing at all like the Allman Brothers.

[via TechCrunch]

The newest version of the VLC media player isn’t ready for the streets yet, but if you’re they type who doesn’t mind risking your precious computer for the sake of satisfying a primal curiosity for experimental software, the pre-release of VLC 0.9.0 is now available for both Windows and Mac. Unfortunately, anybody with a Windows 98/ME or OS X 10.3.9 machine is out luck since such technology is no longer socially acceptable as those operating systems are no longer supported.

It now supports Last.fm (AKA Audioscrobbler) straight out of the box disk image, so it’ll update your Last.fm account as you play music through VLC. To enable Last.fm support in the 0.9.0 release, enter your username in the preferences pane under Audioscrobber, but don’t forget to visit Control interfaces to check the box labeled “Submission of played songs to Last.fm.”

Other changes also include better tag support, more subtitle support, improved mouse gestures, album art support, Shoutcast TV listings, and a lot more that we don’t want to bore you with, but you’re more than welcome to check out the whole list on the VLC forums.

[via CyberNet]

Web Audio Maker makes audio for your web site and plays instantly. It is a very easy to use software. Web Audio Maker records sound and converts into Adobe Flash file (namely SWF). The software also allows you to convert audio files into SWF format. The Adobe Flash is the most pervasive software platform, used by over 2 million professionals and reaching over 98.8 percent of Internet enabled desktops as well as a wide range of devices. It supports a broad range of platforms and browsers, including new browsers such as Firefox and Safari. You may make an audio instruction for your product, service, or web site to increase sales and traffic. No matter how good your web designed, nothing can compare to hearing a real voice. It has been proven that audio can increase your sales by as much as 300 percent and some report up to 426 percent increase. Speak to your customer and get instant credibility and trust. Web Audio Maker supports popular audio formats such as MP3, MP2, MP1, WAV, OGG, AU, SND (NeXT/Sun sound), MOD music (XM, IT, S3M, MOD, MTM, UMX), and MO3 music (MP3/OGG compressed MODs). It also supports batch conversion.

Web Audio Maker makes audio for your web site and plays instantly. It is a very easy to use software. Web Audio Maker records sound and converts into Adobe Flash file (namely SWF). The software also allows you to convert audio files into SWF format. The Adobe Flash is the most pervasive software platform, used by over 2 million professionals and reaching over 98.8 percent of Internet enabled desktops as well as a wide range of devices. It supports a broad range of platforms and browsers, including new browsers such as Firefox and Safari. You may make an audio instruction for your product, service, or web site to increase sales and traffic. No matter how good your web designed, nothing can compare to hearing a real voice. It has been proven that audio can increase your sales by as much as 300 percent and some report up to 426 percent increase. Speak to your customer and get instant credibility and trust. Web Audio Maker supports popular audio formats such as MP3, MP2, MP1, WAV, OGG, AU, SND (NeXT/Sun sound), MOD music (XM, IT, S3M, MOD, MTM, UMX), and MO3 music (MP3/OGG compressed MODs). It also supports batch conversion.

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