Tag Archives: web app

Jan 12 2012

Revolutionizing Mobile Search with DoAT's Everything

DoAT, a mobile search startup that launched last spring at Techcrunch Disrupt, has taken the adage “out with the old, in with the new” in the New Year to heart. With a brand new mobile-optimized web app, DoAT promises that its new iteration, found at the site everything.me, will offer you everything on every topic imaginable in a very easy to use format. I have been playing around with the app and like it enough to offer it a spot on my home screen.

You can try it out on your computer or your mobile device, but it really shines on the latter. When you navigate to it, you are greeted with an attractive splash page showing a search box and trending searches. DoAT clearly recognizes that we lead with our eyes – the layout is really gorgeous. Click on shortcuts and see a list of popular categories. Drill down further and you will get to the real jewel of the service – mini web apps within everything.me for the most popular sources and search engines related to your search topic. When you click on this sub-apps, you will get information tied to your original search within the selected sources. The sources appear to change based on the search you run. And, when you click on an app like Twitter, for example, you will not only get tweets related to your search, but also Twitter accounts that tweet about your topic so that you can follow for future on point updates.

I can’t overstate the attractivenes of the app – DoAT has really done a nice job laying out the functionality. I was a fan of the original DoAT which promised a search experience on the mobile phone that gave homage to the apps that make such phones so useful and attractive. They are really making it happen with everything.me.

If you are a mobile search devotee, please check out DoAT and check back in here with your comments. This is a really cool interface and I believe it heralds the future of pocket computing.

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Sep 16 2010

Save Me From A Corrupt File!

C’mon, you KNOW it has happened to you. Work for hours on an important document and then BLAM! run right into a corrupt file issue. You can’t save it, you can’t open it. It’s virtually worthless and you have to do the entire thing over again, right? Wrong.

Enter Corrupt Office Text Extractor (link here) – a free web tool that will pull all the text out of your corrupt Office 2007 or later file so you at least can still access and use the meat of your document. Simply upload your document into the site, run it through the process and get your text back. Beware – the site is loaded with cautionary language as it is not yet certified as secure, so keep you sensitive documents to yourself on this one. The developer, Paul Pruitt, kindly points the secure document owner to various freeware available for download that essentially accomplishes the same task locally.

While there is very effective paid software out there to manage this task, Corrupt Office Text Extractor may still have a place in your tool belt – the place reserved for immediate, free fix of a non-sensitive corrupt file. Thanks Paul!

Feb 25 2010

Zootool: When You Want To Corral Your Web

More content means more overwhelm. It really is true. Sometimes you are surfing aimlessly and see something you want to save for later. Sometimes you are engaged in pointed search and you see something off topic that you know you need in another matter. Or sometimes, you are researching and need to snip and collect the efforts for later assimilation and aggregation.

Delicious and Diigo are the main players in the social bookmarking realm. Evernote and OneNote are competitive products in the notetaking / notebooking realm (OneNote is an off-line tool, while Evernote is everywhere).  Zotero is the academic option, offering full citation and archival benefits.

If you are a visual learner, you might want to try out Zootool (link here). Unlike FFFFound, which is limited to web images, Zootool will allow you to snip and save pretty much everything but audio.

It offers a function similar to Delicious or Diigo, but with visual rather than pure text entries. You can organize content in packs (instead of folders or, as in Evernote, notebooks). The original URL is saved, and you can edit the identifying information and tag your content accordingly. There is URL shortening, and the ability to share with social networks (such as Twitter, Delicious and Friendfeed), and quick-blogging sites like Tumblr. There is a social aspect to the site, in that you can follow others and publish links to your other on-line outposts.

The result is your “zoo” – a series of visual “files”, with tags and links, organized by type accessed by tabs marked “all”, “images”, “videos”, “documents”, and “pages.”  If you click on the image, you can either download the doc, navigate to the page or pull the image or vid. You can further organize and identify your content in packs, titling the packs accordingly. The interface is easy and intuitive.

Zootool upports more than 30 video plattforms, Slideshare and Scribd Documents and employs a special reader for Wikipedia-articles and RSS feeds. Zootool can also accompany you on the got with a mobile version for the iPhone.

With any archiving, bookmarking service, one has to be concerned with backing up the informatinon. Zootool is web-only. I haven’t yet determined the best way to create a redundant system to protect against loss of saved snips, other than possibly saving everything over to Delicious.

Furthermore, with its visual bent, Zootool does appear to be aiming for artistic types or those primarily interested in images. Nonetheless, as a visual person, I find Zootool’s interface far easier to scan than Delicious. It could definitely serve a purpose, particularly with respect to combining your docs, video and image snips all in one place.

I have to chuckle, though, at the logo. Color scheme is similar to Evernote but, in place of an elephant, insert a rhinoceros.

Hat tip to John Hicks at The Hickensian.

May 14 2009

Got Staff? Get Onyaka!

Via Lifehacker, Onyaka is a free, web-based, staff planning and organizational tool. The app offers planning and calendaring functions for a group of colleagues working on a project. Lifehacker advises the app is simple to use (I personally haven’t tested it, as I haven’t assembled my staff yet).  Based on the screen shots, Onyaka seems a viable tool for managing a group at a perfect price point!