Mashed Articles

And so it happened: on 28 of May, I entered the realm of the fanboy. Early morning saw me queueing outside the Apple Store in Bath, eager to get my hands on one of the first British iPads. As the utterly incongruous whooping and hollering began to emanate from the bowels of the store – and those in the queue looked around sheepishly, hoping they wouldn’t be expected to HIGH FIVE! – we knew we were just seconds away from the doors being thrown open to… yet more queuing. This is how these things tend to play out. It was a bit crap, really – especially considering that over the following few days, I couldn’t move for sodding iPads. Still, unfounded fears of gadget scarcity aside, what the queuing did reveal was a serious amount of excitement about a bit of kit that most of the assembled shoppers hadn’t even played with yet. iPad fever appears to have landed in Blighty, too.

For the past few weeks, I’ve had to listen to gushing accounts from our American cousins about how great the iPad is (as well as a few crowing importers who couldn’t wait to experience the joy of Apple’s new device). At last, I can finally make a few observations based on more than blog posts and Twitter witterings myself.

1. The iPad is going to be huge!

I’m not really saying anything new here, but there were reports that claimed the iPad wouldn’t resonate with the British. Simpson Carpenter’s qualitative research concluded that the iPad “won’t be mass market in the UK”. ‘Mass market’ is a very vague term, but the report did get more specific, claiming that “the iPad will take longer to achieve the sales growth and wider market impact of the iPhone”. My qualitative observations don’t quite reflect those of Simpson Carpenter. For instance, the last time I visited an Apple Store, around 100 people were assembled around the iPad display area, leaving the flashy new MacBook Pros feeling like Woody in Toy Story! The people responsible for this research may need to rethink their esteemed judgement, given that the iPad has already pushed past two million global sales.

2. March of the web apps

The iPhone’s big story was the sheer number of apps you could download from the App Store, which was perfectly summed up in Apple’s ‘There’s an app for that!’ marketing campaign. But I think the iPad’s 1,024 x 768 pixel resolution will provide a great canvas for developers wanting to create web apps that utilise the strengths of the next generation of web standards, such as CSS3 and HTML5. The iPad version of Safari doesn’t have full support for these technologies just yet, but you can see some great examples of what it does support.

If monetisation isn’t your primary focus, then the simpler development route (using web standards, rather than Cocoa Touch) and cross-platform support should see a big increase in optimised web apps. Gmail is already optimised for the iPad, but there are still issues for developers: take Google Docs, for example. As things stand, Safari for iPhone OS does not support ‘contenteditable’ (which is used to enable text input within a styled element), but contenteditable is an integral part of the code that powers Google Docs (and many other web apps). Bummer! There are claims that version 4 of the iPhone OS will support contenteditable, and this will be an important addition – requirement, even – if web apps are to take off in earnest on the iPad.

Is the iPad a laptop replacement?

No. It’s already become patently obvious to me that trying to execute certain processes just doesn’t work on the iPad. Tasks such as heavy word processing, and any editing job that requires precision mouse control, are severely limited by the iPad’s design (and the need to navigate the device using a chubby skin stylus, otherwise known as your finger). But what you have in the iPad is a perfect bridging device: one that enables you to take care of day-to-day tasks for which a laptop has become overkill. Watching videos, playing games, checking email and browsing the web no longer require a laptop, and the iPad looks set to launch a new wave of optimised sites and apps that address the challenges of designing for gesture-based tablets. It’s only once you’ve had the device in your possession for a while that you begin to realise the impact it could have on the development, design and consumption of digital media.

 

Online apps let you become more productive on the move, doing away with software installation entirely.

Thanks to the ubiquity of internet access, web-based applications are taking off like never before. Beyond the realms of Twitter and Facebook lurks a fresh and vibrant world of online software that’s designed to run anywhere on our connected planet.

As the distinction between computers, mobile devices and the internet continues to blur, web applications are coming into their own, becoming globally important services. These are sites that do one useful thing and do it well.

But sites promoting applications have been around for donkey’s years, you might say. What’s the difference between a web app and an application that’s available for download on the web? Well, web apps are applications that run over the internet. So unlike the free utilities hosted on Sourceforge or similar, there’s no download, installation or configuration to carry out, nor hours of frustration to endure while you try to find the right libraries to compile them. Just point your browser at the relevant website and it will do the rest.

Outside of the box

Freed from the restrictions of an operating system’s windowing subsystem, software designers can allow their imaginations to run riot. Interfaces that owe more to high-tech thrillers than to Windows, Linux or Mac OS X are beginning to appear. Also emerging are more intuitive drag-and-drop interfaces that require at most a few seconds of exploration to get you going. Software use is slowly evolving and becoming as much about discovery and experimentation as it used to be about reading manuals and clicking options.

In this special roundup, we bring you 10 cool web apps that all share these traits. It’s a diverse bunch, ranging from future essentials to those that you’ll need infrequently. They all exhibit the sort of rich functionality that is beginning to appear through the medium of web browsers, and remove the need to download and install an application suite. If you want something, it’s probably already been written, and so we’ve also included a site that will help you to find other incredible web applications. Happy browsing!

Newsmap

Newsmap is a global news aggregator site like no other, and it’s almost guaranteed to get people peering over your shoulder as you use it. The app presents a page covered in blocks of different sizes. Each represents a story, coloured by subject. Newsmap takes input from news feeds and then gives the stories that are more prominent bigger boxes on-screen, a little like a tag cloud. Simply move your mouse over a story to see its details and a link to the original article.

PC Plus Verdict: 4/5

Instapaper

Instapaper is a way of bookmarking long web pages so that you can read them when you have time later on. The URLs are stored in Instapaper’s central database, so you can access them from anywhere. A range of iPhone apps support it, as does the Kindle, making it flexible and a great way of keeping hold of interesting things to read on long journeys. To use Instapaper, drag and drop the ‘Read Later’ icon onto your toolbar. When you subsequently find a page you want to save, just click the icon.

PC Plus Verdict: 4/5

Lovely Charts

There are plenty of times when you need access to some good chart-drawing software for just half an hour. However, it’s usually supplied as part of a far larger application. Lovely Charts is different. It’s a free web app that creates some very lovely charts indeed. After signing up and creating a new document, you simply drag and drop symbols and connectors from a range of predefined types to create the chart you want – anything from a simple flowchart to a complex route map.

PC Plus Verdict: 4/5

Bing Visual Search

Bing’s Visual Search capability is still in beta, but it’s already showing promise as a new way to search the expanding universe of information out there. On the main Bing page, click the ‘Visual Search’ link. Search categories are organised into galleries, and everything is point-and-click. Instead of typing in your search term, you simply click the relevant picture. The list of galleries is still small, but it’s an interesting glimpse of what could be to come.

PC Plus Verdict: 3.5/5

Fonolo

Calling Fonolo a work of genius is perhaps a little strong, but if you’re heartily sick of wading through phone menus to talk to a human being then it probably comes close. Fonolo walks you through company phone systems to find a human voice. If a company isn’t listed, you can add your own, and test the service by calling special test hardware set up by the developers. Ideal for Skype users, Fonolo’s is also available for the iPhone, which should see its popularity rise further.

PC Plus Verdict: 4/5

Netvibes

Netvibes allows you to create what it calls a dashboard for your interests. Unlike a simple RSS feed reader, the app has a large number of widgets that present feeds from your favourite sites in a highly editable form, making it very customisable. Netvibes is also partly a social-networking service. People can follow you and read your public page if their interests are the same as yours. For the sake of privacy, you can also set up a private page with feeds that only you can see.

PC Plus Verdict: 4/5

Floor Planner

People are crazy about home improvement at the moment, but good, free planning software is hard to find. The free version of Floor Planner allows you to create a plan, make specific rooms and then decide where to place the windows, doors and any of a large number of items of furniture. You can inspect your work in 3D from any angle to see exactly how your ideal home would look. You can then save your work and send it straight to your architect – easy peasy!

PC Plus Verdict: 4/5

Wakoopa

The brainchild of Dutch founders Wouter Broekhof and Robert Gaal, Wakoopa is a social-networking site that is designed to help its users discover new web apps and other software they might enjoy. It does so by first searching for people that use the same apps and installed software as you do. It then finds the software they use but you don’t, and which they rate highly. These it recommends to you. But how does Wakoopa know what software you and others use? A downloadable tracker monitors the sites you visit and the installed applications you use.

Every 15 minutes, it sends this information to your Wakoopa profile for those on your contacts list to take a look at. When your contacts search for new apps, this information is cross-matched with their own to generate a selection of software recommendations picked especially for them.

It’s a simple idea, and one that lets you explore an ever-expanding universe of web apps and installable applications and utilities without ever having to spend hours scouring the web for information – plus you know that none of the programs will turn out to be malware.

Explore and amaze

Once the tracker is installed, right-clicking on the Wakoopa icon in the system tray enables you to suggest a new application that others may like to try. To keep the underlying database free of spam, any suggestions you make that aren’t either installed apps or something that runs in your browser will not be accepted.

When you find a particularly intriguing application in Wakoopa that you’ve never heard of before, clicking on its symbol opens a page giving its details, alternatives that you might like to try and – perhaps most importantly – both good and bad comments from its existing users. This enables you to quickly make decisions about whether to use the app without the frustration of downloading and installing it, only to later discover that it’s not for you.

As well as relying on custom recommendations generated via your contacts list, you can also use the Wakoopa search box to simply enter an application field, making software experimentation as easy and hassle-free as it could ever possibly be.

PC Plus Verdict: 4/5

RescueTime

You’re in the middle of writing an important email but the right words won’t come, so you decide to spend a couple of minutes reading your friends’ statuses on Facebook to clear your head. By the time you’re finished, you fancy having a look at what the celebrities on Twitter are up to. News doesn’t read itself, so it’s off to the RSS feeds next, stopping on the way back to drop by a hobby forum. Armed with more coffee after posting a detailed rebuttal of another forum member’s argument, it’s time to check Facebook again for any replies, and perhaps to glance at Twitter again to make sure that Stephen Fry hasn’t unexpectedly returned. What began as a break to clear your head has somehow blossomed into over an hour of wasted time.

With so many cool new web apps appearing, distractions can only get worse. Some are great for getting things done, but without that vital pinch of self-control, we risk becoming ever busier while paradoxically achieving far less. RescueTime promises to show you how you spend your time online, and also to help you develop the increasingly important skill of self-control.

After installing a Data Collector plug-in, you tell RescueTime the three most distracting and three most productive things you do online. Data Collector then logs the time you spend using your local apps as well as the websites you visit, and can even monitor which of your browser tabs is active. You can also tell it to ignore the time you spend away from the PC so that you get an accurate view of your working day.

Once the Data Collector plug-in has gathered enough data, you can go to your RescueTime account and view detailed reports containing information on everything from the sites you visit to how efficiently you use your time based on how you categorise your activities.

The personal Solo Lite version of the service is free. The paid-for Solo Pro edition ($6 to $9 a month) allows you to block unproductive websites when you visit them too much, and alerts you when Data Collector notices you’re spending too much time dodging work. But you don’t need to splash out: the free service provides a fascinating insight, and helps you to learn a skill that will surely become as essential as using a search engine.

PC Plus Verdict: 4/5

Data entry is not everyone’s job; you need people who are technically qualified to do the job for you. Data entry is one of the common sources for which outsourcing are done on a large scale. To an average person, this may appear to be a thing that can be done easily without any special effort. But doing this job can be very tiring, time consuming and may also require huge amounts of money, so data entry outsourcing is an option that business owners or other professionals can explore. Data entry outsourcing is not just about entering information on certain aspects, but also about lessening the workload on other professionals.

Data entry is the process of feeding data or information to the database of spreadsheets. There are two ways of doing data entry to the database. One is that process where the entry is done manually while the other is the process where it is done automatically by a machine. There are many people who prefer using the automated process of data entry, as they find this to be more suitable for them. Nonetheless, each form of data entry has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Data entry outsourcing works out to be beneficial in two ways. First, the company that is outsourcing the work saves huge amounts of money, since the work will be done at a low cost. Also the company that is doing the work will be benefited as they will do the work at a cheaper rates compared to others and the amount they have to spend for doing the work is low. So if a process works out to the advantage of two parties, then this is certainly a good way of doing business. Data entry outsourcing is being undertaken on a very large scale these days.

That is not all; data entry outsourcing enables you to get your work done from professionals who are highly qualified. This is the reason why there is very little chance of anything going wrong with your data entry outsourcing work. Also all outsourcing work is under strict security, so there is no chance of your data falling to the wrong hands and then being used for any fraudulent purposes. All the different aspects are taken care of by third parties that do the outsourcing work, so data entry outsourcing is a safe option for you to invest in.

Data entry can be of different type and used for different purposes. It can be for entering visitor’s data for a website, data for keeping track of credit card and debit card transactions, processing and submitting of forms that are filled out online by visitors, creating a database for emailing and also entering images in different format for different purposes. You may need to enter numeric data, alphabetic data, alpha numeric data and text data. Whatever type of data you may need to enter, the baseline is that data entry outsourcing will surely work favorably for you.

Allies Harbor is a writer for http://www.ifrstaffing.com – IFR Staffing offers services for Accounting outsourcing,India outsourcing accounting, Data entry,Business Process Outsourcing. You can have benefits of SEO outsourcing,Software outsourcing India.

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