Technology Bites » Web Apps

Twitter to acquire TweetDeck for $50 Million

vrreddy — Tue, 03 May 2011 06:44:09 +0000

Twitter has acquired TweetDeck, the popular multi-platform twitter client according to Techcrunch sources. Neither twitter nor tweetdeck announced the deal, but Techcrunch says it will be announced in the next couple of days.

The deal is interesting because Twitter acquired TweetDeck to stop UberMedia from acquiring TweetDeck. UberMedia has several application under its belt.

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Send RSS feed updates to Twitter via Feedburner

vrreddy — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 23:09:52 +0000

Feedburner which stopped to innovate after Google acquisition added an useful feature which might of interest to bloggers. Now it is easier to publish your RSS feed headlines to twitter directly from Feedburner.

There is a new feature called socialize, which can be accessed from the publicize tab in feedburner allows you to push RSS feeds to twitter. You need to authenticate your twitter account first, this is done using OAuth so no panic there. Once you authenticate you can configure the options to send new tweets as soon as the feed gets updated.

If you have ever used services like twitterfeed, this feature looks familiar. You can send only titles of the posts or title along with body, add categories as hash tags, alternate text you want to add to the tweet etc. You can also filter out sending certain tweets to twitter using keywords.

Now with this “Socialize” feature enabled directly in Feedburner, i am sure that twitterfeed will loose much of its users. Why any one want to use another third-party service when you can directly use feedburner for that.

Another interesting thing is that Google is using Goo.gl URL shortner, currently the URL shortner is only available via Feedburner and Google Toolbar, but it wouldn’t be a surprise if it will be integrated to other Google services.

Goo.gl short URL service will be a bad news for the popular URL shortner bit.ly, as of now it may not be a big deal to them but once Goo.gl integrates it will Google Analytics then they are in soup. Also bit.ly’s strong point is that they are default twitter URL shortner, but there is no guarantee that twitter won’t switch to Goo.gl, atleast if Google offers payment for the same.

One thing is for sure, whatever web service gets popular with users, Google will jump into that. Isn’t it scary?

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5 Handy Web Based Image Manipulation Tools

Srikanth AD — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 20:26:40 +0000

Following are some useful web based utilities which enable you to manipulate images like removing red eye, splitting and slicing, adding watermark, extracting color schemes etc.,. These services are free for use and do not require any registration and extra software to get started with.

Watermark Images: Free batch watermark images online

With this web application you can quickly watermark your images online. You can use this application to watermark up-to 20 images at once. It provides you with options to select the font type, transparency, position of watermark and other special effects. You can download the watermarked images at once. You might want to check out a video tutorial here. It’s free and easy to use.

Fix Red Eye: Online red eye removal tool

To fix red eye on your images, just select an image from your hard drive, select an area with red eyes and click on the ‘fix it’ button in the sidebar. Once you are done with the fixes, you can click the download option. It also provides with options to set the tolerance and zoom level. This is a hassle free web service to remove red eyes on your images. You can upload images upto 2MB in size. It’s free for use and does not require any registration.

Online Image Splitter

Online Image Splitter is a web application which makes it easier for you to slice images and download the HTML tags for pasting the slices back together. It also provides you with options for optimizing the sliced images. Using Image Splitter you can quickly create navigational bars with mouse-over effects. To get sliced images and the HTML tags, just select an image and click Start.

Pic2Color: Get color schemes from pictures

Pic2Color is a web service which allows you to easily extract color schemes from images. Just upload your image from a file or a URL and Pic2Color will provide you with color schemes in that image. You can also create further color schemes and palettes from each of the colors extracted.

Text-Image

Here you can easily generate cool text images from almost any picture you have on your computer. You can choose to convert your images into HTML, ASCII and matrix text images. Options for setting extra contrast, font size, characters, background and image width are made available. This free web application will be helpful in generating cool text images. You might want to check out a few samples here.

Related: 13 Online Photo Editors

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5 (Really) Handy Web Based PDF Utilities

Srikanth AD — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 21:01:40 +0000

When there are handy PDF utilities available on the web, you might not have to spend money buying expensive software to view, edit and share PDF files. There are prolific services like Zoho and Google Docs, where in you can compose a document and save it in PDF format. If you aren’t pleased with the output, following are some alternate options to process PDF documents.

PDF Online: Convert documents and images to PDF

PDF Online enables you to convert Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents and images to PDF in three quick steps. Just select the document to be converted, enter a name for the PDF file and provide your email address to which the PDF document is to be sent. PDF Online also provides you with free services to convert PDF to Microsoft Word and web pages to PDF format. You might also want to check out PDF service for iPhone

PDF to Excel: Convert PDF documents to Microsoft Excel

With PDF to Excel you can create editable Microsoft Excel (.XLS) files. This allows you to re-use tables and spreadsheets from PDF files elsewhere. This service is free for use and does not require any registration. You might also want to check out their PDF to Word web service.

Free PDF Unlock Online Utility

PDF documents might have restrictions on the usage. Some documents prevent you from copying and pasting or printing it’s contents. Ensode provides you with a free online utility that unlocks PDF documents. Once you upload a PDF, a PDF version without printing or copying/pasting restrictions will be displayed in a new browser window.

DocQ: Online suite to open, edit and share PDF documents

Image Source: Web Crawler

DocQ is a web based alternative for Adobe Acrobat. You can view PDF documents online without having to download any extra software. Just upload a PDF document to view, edit, annotate, store and share documents online. You need to register before getting started with DocQ. And, the free service provides you with unlimited Doc/PDF Markup and publishing with a 2MB file size limit and file storage limit of 100.

Count on it: Free Online Word Count

Count on it is a simple online utility for getting word and character counts for various file types. Currently it supports PDF, HTML, XML, CSV, text formats. It’s free, light weight and allows you to upload files upto 1MB.

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Flickr App Garden: Developer Showcase

vrreddy — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 21:52:10 +0000

Flickr, the popular photo sharing site has an open API that allowed developers to build applications on top of Flickr. Some of the featured applications are earlier included in Flickr API Services page as a list. Now Flickr has created an application showcase called App Garden.

The app garden shows the list of application built for various Flickr functions like uploading, retrieving photos. You can explore the apps using the tags or search for apps using the search box. Each app has its own page where users can comment and add them to their favorites.

Now you can find out which application your friends are using for uploading the photos. Each photo pages shows Uploaded using “appname”, this is available only of the application is added to the app garden.

App Garden: Flickr Application Showcase

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Create fillable PDF Forms online

vrreddy — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 22:13:37 +0000

PDFAmigo is a browser based tool for creating fillable PDF forms in your browser. This tool is simple to use and intuitive. It allows you to create PDF files with fillable forms using text fields, list boxes, radio buttons etc, in your browser.

The basic service is free to use and no registration is required. But it includes a big watermark across the generated file, if you want something professional you can register and pay for removing the watermark. You can use your Google account to sign-in to the service.

PDFAmigo is useful of you want to create a PDF fillable form occasionally. It allows you to use variety of fonts, colors and sizes for the fields.

The first page will cost you $1.00 and the subsequent pages are priced at 50cents. The pricing is only for one time, if you want to modify the file at later date you need to pay again.

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Tweak Windows Services Online with ServicesEditor

vrreddy — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 18:54:56 +0000

Tweaking Windows Services to disable unnecessary services can help improving your system performance. Windows has an in-built services tool for doing this. But the long list of services list confuses you, then head over to ServicesEditor, an online service that helps you in tweaking the Windows services.

ServicesEditor supports Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. First select your OS then it will present you with the list of services with radio buttons, you can toggle between automatic, manual and disabled to change the behavior of the services. Tweak all the services according to your need and once you are done, click submit, it will prompt you to download a .reg file. This file you can merge with registry file to apply the changes.

It is a handy tool to edit the windows services without pain.

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What Does the Internet Think about?

Srikanth AD — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 04:50:49 +0000

If you ever wondered what the internet thinks about, lets say – Financial Crisis, Global Warming, a Celebrity or a specific topic of your interest. Here is an interesting way to find answers to your questions in an easy and effective way.

Whatdoestheinternetthink is a web application that lets you find out what the internet’s global opinion is on a given search term. It displays the search results as an aggregate expression: positive, negative or indifferent. You can search for results based on search engines Google, Yahoo, Bing or all three collectively.

A couple of quick examples,

A search for ‘Barack Obama‘ using Google search engine, as in the image below leads to a substantial positive global opinion.

A search for ‘George Bush‘ using Google search engine, as in the image below leads to a mixed result.

How it Works:

Basically, it will search for your query on associated English sentences. These sentences are then sent to various search engines and the number of results returned are counted.

The sentences are double quoted before they are sent off, so as to make sure the search engines search for occurrences of the whole sentence. The more results returned, the more reliable these results can become.

It’s a quick and easy way to know what the global audience think about a specific topic. It also provides you with interesting statistics like, popular searches and the trending topics on a daily/monthly basis.

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Trendsmap: Twitter Trends in Real-time

Srikanth AD — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 07:27:43 +0000

Trendsmap is a web service which provides you with real-time mapping of Twitter trends from across the world. It lets you see what are the current trending topics in any region of the world like a tag cloud. Upon clicking any of the topics, you can see real-time tweets posted by users on that specific topic as a pop-up information box in the sidebar.

It also provides you with the local and global seven-day histories of the topics popularity as well as some related top news links. You an check out the trending topics as a world view, region or city view.

One of the interesting features of this site is that, it gives each city its own trends page. Here you can browse through the latest local trends. You can view the trending topics stacked against each other along with the local 7 day history and an option to view each of the topics globally. It also aggregates related local media like photos, videos and the latest tweets.

To get started, just move/zoom around the map and click on topics to catch up with the local and global Twitter trends in real time. Check out whats trending in your local area for the upcoming Halloween. You might also want to go through a overview of the Trendsmap features here.

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4 Handy Web Based Tools to Optimize your CSS Code

Srikanth AD — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 09:29:49 +0000

Optimizing CSS code is not just about reducing the file size but making the code effective, well organized and clean. Non-valid CSS files might be messy and can result in errors. So, following are some handy web based tools to help you optimize and organize your CSS code in quick and easy steps.

CSS Optimizer

CSS Optimizer is a web utility for optimizing your style sheets. You can optimize your CSS via a URI, file upload or by direct input. You can opt whether or not to have line breaks in the output code. Once optimized, the CSS optimizer will provide you with the file sizes before and after optimization and the savings. You can either copy the optimized code directly or use a direct link to the style sheet (css file).

Style Sheet Optimizer
This tool takes a CSS file as input and parses and outputs an organized and effective version of the code, removing any redundancies and attributes which are not needed. It basically removes comments and white spaces, converts multiple border values into single attributes. It converts RGB values to Hex code and changes values such as border: 1px 2px 1px 2px; to border: 1px 2px;.

Clean CSS

Clean CSS is a handy resource for web developers and designers. It’s an effective CSS optimizer and formatter. Basically, it takes your CSS code and makes organized and clean. It helps you with shorthand coding and helps you get reduced CSS file sizes and well formatted code. It provides you with options to removed unnecessary backslashes and optimizes selectors and their properties. You can even choose the compression standard ranging between readability and file size.

Code Beautifier

Code beautifier is a CSS formatter and optimizer based on CSS Tidy 1.3. Similar to that of Clean CSS mentioned above, you can choose the compression standard. Other options include sorting selectors and properties.

You can choose to discard invalid properties, include a timestamp and output the code as a file.

Related: 40+ CSS Tools

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