Archive for the 'applications' category

Zoho as an Alternative to Microsoft Office 2008 for Macs

Jan 31 2009 Published by Adam under applications

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I generally try to keep my posts on here pretty postitive.  Basically if I don’t really like an application, why should I bother writing about it.  Comparing apps is one thing, but just posting a negative review has never appealed to me.  So, I won’t go into the intricate details of why I’m so dissappointed in Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac.  It’s actually great, and I really enjoy using it – when it works.  When things break, the support is non-existent, and fixes come about a bug too late.  Anyway, I became crippled this week when multiple issues with Office began surfacing (scan Mactopia.com forums if you want details), and I had to find an alternative to get me through some of the issues.  Of course I’ve used Google Docs before, but I really am not comfortable with it.  I also have checked out OpenOffice and NeoOffice, but I didn’t really want to run a so-so office app on my machine if I didn’t have to.  So, I decided to really look at Zoho’s various tools.

SwellPath has been using Zoho CRM for some time now.  Not sure if we’ll continue to use it long-term, or if we’ll make the leap to Salesforce, but it has worked rather well for us so far, so Zoho was a natural place for me to look for alternatives to Office.  First I checked out the Word equivalent, Zoho Writer.  Without a doubt Writer is superior to Google Docs.  It is a cleaner interface, more condensed and easier to navigate through the menus and options.  It also seems to be a bit quicker to react than Google.  Comparing it to Word is rough; its a less robust web-app, so you have to readjust your expectations a bit.  However, I find it pretty easy to get comfortable with and crank out documents.  The one major issue I have so far, and I’m guessing this will go away over time, is that I feel the need to print (to PDF) everything to check the layout.  This is especially true with client-deliverables that have lots of screen shots and “dressing”.  Otherwise, I definitely recommend it as a superior alternative to Google Docs.

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My experience with Zoho Sheet (the Excel substitute) was similar to Writer; it is superior to Google Docs in the ease of use, quickness, and overall interface usability.  I haven’t had a chance to try out Zoho Presentation yet, and luckily I don’t have to depend on PowerPoint as much as Excel and Word.

The costs for using the Zoho office suite is free for personal use, but it’s not clear what the business use cost will be (or is).  Most of the Zoho apps that have pricing are free for the first several users (it varies from 3-10), with costs varied for more than the base number of users.  If you are planning on using Zoho as your primary office suite, it’s likely the costs won’t deter you.  You’ll likely spend around half of what an Office install would cost, if not even less.  If you’re looking to use it merely as an alternative, you can probably survive on the free version.  I haven’t touched on colloboration and sharing features in the Zoho apps, and I don’t have much experience with them, but they seem fairly straightforward and on par with Google Docs.  Overall, Zoho is worth checking out, and, for me personally, a great temporary solution for my Office for Mac woes.

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Plinky Asks You What’s Up

Jan 22 2009 Published by Adam under applications, communities

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Plinky.com debuted today.  The site has an interesting business model; for one thing, it’s a social networking application that already seems it might have found a way to monetize it’s content.  Plinky asks you a question everyday, and you answer, and can then promote that answer in various places like Twitter and Facebook.  When you view the answer you can then click through to Amazon and buy the song or album.  It’s kind of a massive affiliate that drives sales through this creative user-generated content application.  It’ll be very interesting to see how they do.  Check my first answer: http://www.plinky.com/answers/2006.

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Quarkbase is Site Research in One Step

Jan 18 2009 Published by Adam under analytics, applications, blogs

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Quarkbase is one of the best aggregators that I’ve come across on the web in quite a while.  It looks like they just launched in August of last year, but the application is loaded with information.  The tagline is “Everything about a website.”  It’s hard to argue that you need much else when you’re doing a surface level investigation of a site; any additional information and Quantcast will be boardering on being akin to an SEO analysis tool.

Besides extracting basic meta data and general indexable data from the site homepage, the Quarkbase results pool data from (or equivalent to) WHOIS, Alexa, Bloglines, CrunchBase, Twitter, Technorati, and countlesss other social bookmarking sites.  It also pulls in data from Yahoo! Answers and Wikipedia, as well as business oriented links to Hoovers and Zoominfo.  It is impressive how much data is aggregated in the results already; knowing that Quarkbase is going to add more features and data makes it even more impressive.

The data is grouped into sections like Popular, Technical, and People that you can navigate to independently.  This makes it a littel easier to get around the data for larger, more established sites.  An example of Quarkbase’s “smart” data is the People section.  For example, it listed me as associated with SwellPath, an association it derived from Twitter.

Visit the Tools section in the bottom navigation on Quarkbase to get the bookmarklet.  I have it prominitely featured on my toolbar with a question mark as the name; a quick click when I’m on a site and I have a wealth of info in seconds.

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Soocial the Solution to Syncing Contacts Across Your Blackberry, Gmail, and Outlook?

Jan 04 2009 Published by Adam under applications, communities

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If you have a Blackberry, and you are a Entourage user, and you use Gmail, it’s pretty much impossible to sync your contacts across those three locations.  I’ve spent way too much time trying to find a way to do this.  In my searching, I recently discovered Soocial.  The most impressive thing about Soocial is that someone finally figured out that there is a need for this type of syncronization.

Soocial is in Beta, and there is no lack of warnings letting you know that you may lose a bunch of data by using the service.  This is one of the more negative aspects of the service, I was so scared by the warnings, that I used an alternative Gmail account I have to test the service out.  I didn’t have any issues though, so I’m guessing all of the warnings are mostly to cover Soocial just in case.

I set it up to sync between my Mac address book, and Gmail.  Blackberry support isn’t available yet, so I couldn’t test that out, but it is coming very soon apparently.  But I also don’t need that, since I sync with Gmail through GoogleSync.  There is support for Outlook, but unfortunately not for Entourage.  I would like to see that, as that’s my ultimate challenge.  But it appears that the Soocial folks plan on adding a number of platforms to the list.  Highrise is an option, and supposedly LinkedIn and several others are coming.

The online interface itself is very basic, and doesn’t support categorization, which was somewhat dissappointing, and made it difficult to scan through the hundreds of contacts I had.  However, it looks like Soocial has the right idea, and just needs to dress it up a bit and add a bit more integration.  It has been compared to Plaxo, which I don’t think does it justice.  Plaxo seems to have alterior motives and purposes, whereas Soocial simply seems to be a tool focused on fulfilling a need that has arisen for those of us utilizing many different devices and networks for communication.

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Create Your Own Comics with Toonlet

Dec 01 2008 Published by Adam under Portland, applications, communities, news

Ever wanted to draw your own comic, but just don’t quite have the knack for drawing?  No need for those skills, put your imagination to work on toonlet.  toonlet allows you to select from a multitude of characters’ torsos, arms, heads, noses, etc.  You assemble characters and then put them in strips.  The options might be a bit more limited then your imagination, but you can still have a lot of fun and waste a ton of time.  I spent about 20-30 minutes constructing this gem:

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Pretty awsome Flash application.  There is, of course, a community and crowdsourcing type aspect to toonlet.  You can follow other creators and I’m guessing you’ll eventually be able to communicate with them on toonlet, or at least there will be other community integration, like links to users Facebook, MySpace, Twitter profiles.  There is a multitude of enhancements the toonlet folks could make to further facilitate sharing and spreading strips.

The crowdsourcing aspect is the “top strips”, which I’m guessing is driven by the number of shares and embeds that are done with a given strip.  It might be cool if some of this data was transparent to the community.  I’m not sure how toonlet expects to make ends meet.  I assume through merchandise and maybe eventually advertising.  But check it out and become the next Bill Watterson or Gary Larson.

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