Online Observations

A great place to see which iPhone App to buy

The iPhone is all about great user experience. And one of the things that makes it great is all the cool and useful applications that you can download for free or for payment. The Apple App Store now boasts of over 100,000 applications – so it is almost a certainty that you will find what you are looking for (whether its an app that you need for some work or you just want to have some fun). But, here’s the big problem – its a certainty that you will find the app that you are looking for, but how do you even begin searching in a list of 100,000. Here’s where a website such as AppVee comes in handy.

AppVee is the definitive source (as they say) for iPhone application reviews. It’s a great place to read about the top apps for a particular type of application (for example, the Top Business Apps and new business apps are on this page, and here’s the page for the best and new photography apps). The website carries out daily reviews. They have a great blog and a forum. You can follow them on Twitter to stay updated with their reviews.

One of the reviewers on AppVee, recently guest posted an article on TechCrunch about the Best iPhone Apps of 2009.

I like AppVee overall for the content that they provide, although I think they can possible improve how information is accessed on their website. So, you may have to spend some time before you figure out how to get to the information that you need, but once you do that, the information is fairly useful.

A great place online for all your tools and utilities needs

If you are a person who has to provide IT support to your friends and family, then I have found just the thing for you, but before that, answer this question – how many times have you asked a family member to go download AVG and have them come back to you asking where to download it from? Yes, I though so. Well the person who has put together this site (hang on, I will reveal the name in a second) has had an even worse experience. His family member accidentally downloaded spyware when he asked her to AVG from FileHippo.

So, he decided that he had had enough, and he put together a site where he will start storing all utilities that you would ever need, so that he can provide safe links to his family and friends for downloading software. And he made it public so that others can benefit from this store as well. Allow me to introduce MSunderground – an add free repository of useful tools and utilities (and here’s the link to the incident with his family member).

This is the “promise” of the site: We want to provide the easiest means possible for people to get the software they need. Without ads, flashy banners, and built in adware.

And he intends to be free forever for this service. But if it becomes popular, all these files have to be stored somewhere, and all the bandwidth has to be paid for, and so he has a link where if you like, you can donate to the cause. I hope many people donate to him so that he can meet the cost of hosting and bandwidth for this great site.

And I wish that this site becomes larger than all those stupid money-grubbing download sites.

YouTube for Audio

I was recently looking for a service like YouTube where one can host audio files for free. While YouTube is great for hosting video files, it just doesn’t have any support for audio. So, where could I go? I didn’t want just any file hosting service. I wanted some place where I could upload the audio file, and then get a code to embed this file in various web pages if I wanted. I wanted to track how many times the file has been listened to.

After much searching and rejecting tons of file hosting sites, I came about the perfect candidate: HoundBite. HoundBite is a site which lets you host audio clips by either uploading onto the site, or even simply recording directly. The size of the uploaded clips cannot be more than 8 MB, and the length of recording cannot be more than 15 minutes. That fell right within my requirements of what I needed.

So, if you are looking for a YouTube like site but for audio, then give HoundBite a try.

Convert Html to PDF

I am a great fan of free tools on the Internet. Tools that do only one thing, and do it well. I don’t care if they are ad supported. That’s what keeps them free after all. And one such tool is hosted on a website called http://html-pdf-converter.com/. As it is obvious by the name, it converts any html page to PDF.

It works simply enough, when you navigate to its home page (http://html-pdf-converter.com/), it asks you to specify the URL of the html page that you want to convert (yes, that is the only caveat, that it has to be hosted on the Internet); then you click a button, and after some gears turn in the background, you get a prompt to download the PDF file which represents the HTML page you just converted.

As I said, it does ONE THING, and DOES IT WELL. Perfect for downloading articles into PDF format from blogs, and then being able to read them offline (or if you have a Kindle, then you are all set).

Move over Meebo, welcome IMO.IM

Meebo as many of you know used to be the final destination for web-based multi-client instant messaging. it had support for a variety of messaging platforms such as yahoo, aim, etc. Well, recently I discovered IMO.IM, and I have to say I got blown away by its simple ease of use and accessibility.

IMO supports MSN, Yahoo, AIM/ICQ, Google Talk, MySpace, and Skype (yes, you read it right). That is a great list and in my opinion covers most of the chatting platforms out there (maybe they are missing Facebook and Orkut, but they may come soon). On top of providing Instant Messaging facilities on the above mentioned service, IMO provides Voice and Video as well on all these services (and all this through a browser, of course).

But, its not just the fact that there are so many features available on IMO which makes it a very good service to use. There is also the fact that it is insanely simple to use. I can go in there and get set in literally less than half a minute. I don’t need to create any logins, etc. I think that makes it a very good option for quickly hopping over to when you want to quickly have a chat with some of your Yahoo contacts, but you don’t have access to your machine, and the computer you are on, doesn’t have YIM installed (or any number of similar scenarios).

Oh, by the way, I didn’t even go through a fraction of the total feature set. That’s because I haven’t had the need to use it all. But do check it out. Go IMO.IM.

Bloggers can fight recession by blogging, if informed correctly of their options

For the last 3-4 years, there has been a great increase in people making money online. There are all types of sources available: freelance writing, pay to blog, pay to click, taking surveys, adsense and other ad programs, playing games, etc. As we go into a recession, these types of services will become all the more important and even more widely used by people. However, as with anything that involves money, there is also the problem of a lot of scammers being present in this space. There are companies which will get you to work for them and not pay up. It becomes very important for users to get reliable information about all the options available. There are many sources for this so called ‘reliable’ information, but even these are hard to find. A lot of forums can help you out, but it still helps if there is one blog/site which can keep you updated. Well there is.

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Comparison shopping at its best

I have always had the habit of going through all my options whenever I want to buy something new. When I bought my car, I went through all the various models available in my budget in great detail, made several comparisons on features, service centers, etc. I did the same thing when I wanted to buy my LCD TV. I needed Full HD capabilities, a very fast response time (because of my gaming needs), and on and on. I had so many TVs to choose from.

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