Filed under: World wide web, E-mail, Web services

When we first looked at Zenbe two months ago, the service was still in private beta. Now anyone can sign up for Zenbe. The company has also added several new features that help transform the service from a simple webmail client to a personalized begin page.

For example, you can now sign into Google Talk and Twitter in the Quick View area on the right side of the page. This lets you chat with your contacts without leaving the email/calendar client. You can update your twitter status or read updates from your contacts.

Zenbe has also created a new email notification script for Firefox, redesigned the task list, and added buttons for easily deleting all items in your deleted and spam folders. Zenbe also states it’s working on adding a Gmail-style conversation e-mail view, and is working to add IMAP support.

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Filed under: Design, World wide web, Web services, web 2.0

The world may not really need another on the web image editing application. After all, there’s already Picnik, Adobe Photoshop Express, FotoFlexer, and dozens of others. One of our favorites is Splashup, which has a very desktop application-like feel. And for the life of us, we can’t decide if Sumopaint is just a easy Splashup clone or just an incredibly similar web app.

The two web apps have extraordinarily similar user interfaces and you can apply a similar array of effects to images you upload. You can also import images from online various on the web accounts, even though Splashup is the clear winner with the capability to import images from Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, and other web sites, while Sumopaint only supports Snap.

Check out an image of the two apps side by side after the jump and you be the judge. Separated at birth, or imitation is the sincerest form of flattery? After all, both look a bit like PhotoShop or the Gimp.

[via jkOnTheRun]

Continue reading Sumopaint: There’s something familiar about this online image editor

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Filed under: Design, Web services

WiX is a web site creator that lets anyone design attractive (or not so attractive) web sites. You don’t need to know the first thing about HTML or CSS to use WiX, because everything is drag and drop-based.

While WiX might sound a lot like Google Page Creator or Weebly, WiX pages are entirely Flash-based. That means you can use the WiX editor not just to create standalone website, but also Flash objects that you can embed in other web sites. There’s even a MySpace tab in the editor in case you want to be one of those people who make ridiculously flash (and Flashy) elements that show up on MySpace pages.

WiX offers a fair number of templates that you can alter, but you can also create web sites and other objects from scratch. When you’re completed creating a site you can publish it on the internet, but the URL will begin with www.wix.com. You can also generate embed code that’ll let you include anything you create using WiX on another web site.

[via WebWare]

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Filed under: Internet, Web services, Search, web 2.0

Ever wonder what FISA, NSA, or AFL-CIO stand for? Sure, you know they’re acronyms, but each letter’s supposed to mean something, right? Acronym Finder can help you figure out what acronyms mean. It’s sort of like an online dictionary, but instead of typing in words and getting definitions, you type in a series of letters and get a series of words.

Of course, knowing that AFL-CIO symbolizes American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations doesn’t necessarily help you figure out exactly what the organization does.

And like any good world wide web tool, you don’t have to use Acronym Finder for its intended purpose. You can type in your initials and see what organizations or technical terms share a set of letters with you. There are more than 4million acronyms and abbreviations in the database.

[via MakeUseOf]

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Filed under: Internet, Web services, web 2.0

There are dozens of services that let you shorten long URLs so it’s easier to replicate and paste them into emails, instant messages, or micro-blogging services like Twitter. TinyPaste does basically the same thing — but with chunks of text.

Here’s how it works. Say you want to write a short book explaining in explicit detail everything you’ve done this day. And you want to share it with all of your Twitter followers. Unfortunately Twitter has a 140 character limit. What do you do? You cheat by writing your diatribe into a TinyPaste text box and clicking submit. What you get is a short URL that you can paste into Twitter. Anyone who clicks will see the full text of your unreasonably long narrative.

Of course, you could also just write your story on a blog or other web site and use TinyURL or another service to shorten the URL. But what’s the fun in using a full service blogging client with rich text formatting tools when you can use TinyPaste’s plain text box?

In all seriousness, if you don’t have a blog but want to share something with a bunch of people swiftly, we have the ability to see how TinyPaste could come in handy. But it does seem a bit like a solution in search of a problem.

[via TechCrunch]

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Filed under: Video, Web services, Beta

We’ve covered the BBC iPlayer in great depth here at Download Squad - from its inception to nationwide rollout - and today, the BBC has announced version 2 of the (hugely successful) project. The new-look site has been heavily re-designed, bringing together both Radio and Television shows in a central portal. Personalisation also seems to be the key to the new release, which incidentally runs side-by-side (at least for now) with the previous version. The iPlayer site keeps track of what you last watched, listing up to ten recently-viewed shows and if that weren’t enough, a list of ‘last night’s TV’ is available to help you find shows to catch up with. The video playback size also increased from 512 pixels wide to 640 pixels (a jump of 25%) and the BBC has promised a more ‘cinematic’ feel to pages playing video.

The iPlayer continues to use Flash to stream videos on the internet for seven days after broadcast, and remains available only to UK residents due to the BBC’s publicly-funded status - but if you’re a UK resident then you can get started with this new beta here.

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Filed under: Internet, Office, Web services, web 2.0

Those folks at Zoho just don’t quit, do they? Last year the company rolled out a major redesign of its powerful, web-based PowerPoint clone. And now Zoho Show 2.0 has 8 new features, some more exciting than others.

1. Export to PPT, PPS, PDF, and ODP. You’ve been able to export files as HTML for a while, but the addition of PowerPoint and PDF export brings Zoho Show a bit closer to being a true PowerPoint replacement
2. You can now import images from Picasa (Zoho Show already supported Flickr importing)
3. Support for up to 50 undo/redo actions
4. Support for 9 new languages: Chinese, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Portguese, Spanish, and Swedish.
5. Create contact groups for sharing your presentations with
6. Copy and paste slides from one presentation to another
7. Enhanced remote presentation user inteface
8. Advanced options for embedding presentations on a web site

You can see a demo presentation highlighting the new features after the jump.

[via Mashable]

Continue reading Zoho Show now supports PPT export, Picasa import

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Filed under: Design, World wide web, Web services

While it’s nice to think that anyone can create an awesome web page or desktop application just by typing a few lines of code into a computer, the truth is good design is good design, whether it’s sketched out on a computer or on a piece of paper. Deeplinking has put together a pictorial showing some of the paper sketches that led to popular applications like Twitter, Vimeo’s profile pages, Flickr’s Places feature, and the AbiWord word processor port for the XO Laptop.

There are a few other paper prototypes to check out as well. In some cases the paper sketches look strikingly like the completed product. In other cases, they just look like a blur of lines and arrows.

Most of the images were found via Flickr. Odds are if you spend some time searching, you can find a few other gems. Let us know if you find anything good in the comments!

[via Boing Boing]

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Filed under: World wide web, Web services, Social Software, Search

With Twitter, you generally follow people you know or at least have heard about from others, but that limits your social circle. Twellow attempts to change how you find people to follow by indexing all the publicly available messages floating around the twitter network into searchable categories.

Twellow’s website is laid out so you can click on a category and it will display all the members that have expressed some interest in that particular subject. In addition, Twellow also provides a search box for more free form searching.

But if the idea that your messages are being indexed so that others can find you is a bit unnerving, just make sure you send your twits in private.

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Filed under: Utilities, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Chi.mp is an on the internet identity aggregator — don’t begin groaning just yet, it’s different from the ones we’re used to. Chi.mp stands for Content Hub and Identity Management Platform, and it’s centered around your own yourname.mp domain. Instead of keeping your data fragmented across several different social networks, you own your data, and you can keep it all on one domain and control what flows out to where (and to who).

Chi.mp is still in alpha, but we can’t wait for a chance to see what it can do. We already know that your chi.mp domain will work with OpenID, and consolidating your login is definitely a good begin. The specifics of chi.mp’s interface and how it will interact with existing networks are still under wraps, but this looks like one to watch. Signups for the beta are still open, so head over and check it out.

If you’re curious about how chi.mp has got its hands on all those .mp sites, here’s the explanation: “.mp, the ccTLD for the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands (CNMI) is being repurposed for personal identity and social networking. Second-level .mp domains will be integrated into the chi.mp offering and given away to personal owners free of charge.” If you want to get in on the sunrise registration for .mp, you can score a domain for $50.

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