Make Your Website Part Of The Nifty Collection

Dispatch

How do you collaborate with others? If you’re not collaborating in the cloud, then you’re missing out on an incredible opportunity to be more productive and develop ideas more effectively. Just launched cloud collaboration tool Dispatch is making the entire process easier with integrated cloud resources and a dead simple interface. Continue..Read more about Dispatch.

Visit Dispatch

Marklet

One of the most common practices in a browser is saving bookmarks and with so much information floating around the web, saving can get out of hand quickly. One way to organize and store your bookmarks in one place is Marklet, a cloud based app for storing all your favorites. Continue..Read more about Marklet.

Visit Marklet

Wild Mood Swings

Discovering new websites is something many users enjoy. One of the best ways to discover new online sources and cloud tools, other than our Nifty Websites Collection that is, is through web discovery services. Wild Mood Swings is a web discovery service that sends users to websites based on their mood. Continue..Read more about Wild Mood Swings.

Visit Wild Mood Swings

If you enjoyed or found this article useful, please show us some support by liking us on Facebook or by sharing us on your favorite social website. Thanks!

Make Your Website Part Of The Nifty Collection

One of the most common practices in a browser is saving bookmarks and with so much information floating around the web, saving can get out of hand quickly. One way to organize and store your bookmarks in one place is Marklet, a cloud based app for storing all your favorites.

Modern Bookmarking

One of the great advantages of cloud computing is that users can access the information saved to the cloud from anywhere at anytime and from any device. That pure constant is what makes Marklet such an attractive way to save and store bookmarks

Through Marklet, users can save favorites much as they would through a browser then access those bookmarks from a mobile device, work computer or wherever they have access to the web. Marklet works through any browser which means it’s accessible from any phone and doesn’t require an app to use.

How It Works

Marklet has several options for saving favorites. Since most of us already have bookmarks saved in browsers, an import feature is available to quickly upload bookmarks from all major browsers. Additionally, Marklet allows for upload of bookmarks from other cloud services such as Delicious.

To make saving favorites quicker, Marklet offers extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari browsers. The browser extension adds a quick add button to the browser so users can simply click the button to add a favorite to their marklet dashboard. Users of other browsers will need to login to Marklet, then save the favorite.

Those who like to organize their bookmarks will find that Marklet is quite convenient with its categories and drag and drop reordering system.

Dashboard Interface

We’re genuinely pleased with the interface. The soft colors make viewing the page easy on the eyes and the proportions for items are appropriately scaled. The interface can be customized to have a varying number of popular favorites, displayed with color logo. The larger blocked marklets are convenient for keeping frequently visited websites a single click away.

The remaining Dashboard information revolves around categories and the favorites associated with them. For example, a Shopping category may have Amazon, Newegg, Target and others. Categories can be minimized to save screen real estate and new categories are created with a quick click of a button.

One very notable Dashboard feature involves video. Marklets of video favorites play directing from the Dashboard so that users never have to leave their Marklet page. The video integration means a lot less clicking around for users and the dimmed background effect during playback makes viewing enjoyable.

Limitations

Marklet has just about everything a user needs to move from traditional browser bookmarks to cloud marklets. However, every service has its limitations and Marklet is no different. Marklet does allow importing of bookmarks, but is too limited for anyone who already has an established library containing 1000’s of organized favorites. However, that amount of favorites is not the norm which means most users shouldn’t have a problem.

The other noticeable limitation is the omission of tags. Again, this goes to sorting and searching a large database of favorites. Without tags to find favorites it may be difficult using Marklet as the only bookmarking service.

Summary

Marklet is visually appealing, free, polished and provided without advertisements of any kind. The interface is fast and responsive and Marklet continues to offer convenient ways to bookmark with their service as well as improve on their platform.

We’ve already touched on what we’d like to see from Marklet which includes a greater import limit if not abolish the limit entirely as well as a tagging option to make bookmark retrieval easier. Another feature that could be useful is the option to rearrange the dashboard to make it more personal for users. The interface is adequate as it is, but the ability to customize the dashboard could make Marklet more appealing to a larger audience.  We’d also like to see utilization of sub-folders or sub-categories to organize favorites to an even greater extent.

Finally, Marklet has all the right base parts in place to be a top notch cloud bookmarking service. The service, which was launched in April 2012, doesn’t have limitations severe enough to turn users away and the service continues to mature to meet users needs. We recommend giving Marklet a test drive to see if it’s the cloud bookmarking service for you.

Visit Marklet

If you enjoyed or found this article useful, please show us some support by liking us on Facebook or by sharing us on your favorite social website. Thanks!

Make Your Website Part Of The Nifty Collection

Make Your Website Part Of The Nifty Collection

Pelotonics

Collaborating on projects can be productive for all parties, but can also be a huge hassle in terms of coordinating tasks, events and updates. That’s where Pelotonics can help. Continue..Read more about Pelotonics.

Visit Pelotonics

Stay Invisible

If you’re at all conscious of the personal data transmitted across the internet, then it’s likely you’ve wondered what information of your own is visible. Stay invisible shows you what types of personal information are being shared when you browse the web. Continue..Read more about Stay Invisible.

Visit Stay Invisible

Ribbet

Launched in June 2012, Ribbet is what could be considered the next best thing to Picnik which was closed down by Google in April 2012. Fans of Picnik have been searching for an adequate replacement and Ribbet might just be the answer. Continue..Read more about Ribbet.

Visit Ribbet

If you enjoyed or found this article useful, please show us some support by liking us on Facebook or by sharing us on your favorite social website. Thanks!

Make Your Website Part Of The Nifty Collection

If you’re at all conscious of the personal data transmitted across the internet, then it’s likely you’ve wondered what information of your own is visible. Stay invisible shows you what types of personal information are being shared when you browse the web.

The Data

Stay Invisible may sound like a tool to keep you anonymous on the web, but in fact it doesn’t. Instead, it tests your existing connection and determines which parts of your browsing session are visible to the outside world.

The data returned is presented by Stay Invisible as a means to provide users with information about the data being shared, what that information represents and how unique each individual session is.

The Results

Results of the test indicate typical data such as IP address, location, language and browser. Extra data includes cookie types, cache data, session storage, plug-ins, java version, screen size and resolution along with a host of other bits of information.

Summary

Stay Invisible is designed to expose your privacy holes through a browser interface. There is a large amount of data returned from the scan and is thorough in definition. The scan is informational only and it is up to each user to decide how to better prevent the information from being transmitted across the web.

Some of the data is inevitable. For instance, javascript is a requirement to run the scan so any javascript information is going to be picked up by Stay Invisible. Other items, such as font types are a way to uniquely identify your system, but as security threats go, their exposure is of minimal concern.

Use Stay Invisible to determine your unique fingerprint across the web and not as a security guide, which it is not.

Visit Stay Invisible

If you enjoyed or found this article useful, please show us some support by liking us on Facebook or by sharing us on your favorite social website. Thanks!

Make Your Website Part Of The Nifty Collection

The back to school rush is hitting its stride and with it comes the need for more resources to enhance education and make studying a more simplified practice. Awesome Highlighter is one of those resources.

Highlight Pages

Awesome Highlighter is like a virtual highlighter for everything on the web. Much like physical ink highlighters are used to note passages in books, Awesome Highlighter does the same for web pages.

Users enter in the url of a website, click Highlight Page and away they go. Awesome Highlighter renders the web page inside the existing window and places a toolbar at the top of the page. Users then take the on screen highlighter and click and drag it across the areas they want highlighted. When finished, there is a Done button on the toolbar which tells Awesome Highlighter to render the newly highlighted page.

Interface

Loading of a web page inside Awesome Highlighter does take a moment or two, but otherwise the interface was very responsive. Using the highlighter does take a bit of getting used to though overall was accurate.

The toolbar at the top provides several items including a link back to the Awesome Highlighter homepage, highlighter color choices and the sticky note feature. Sticky notes are just like they sound, a note is placed on the web page with an area for text. The note can be hidden or moved about the page as needed.

Other Features

After a web page has been highlighted, users are presented a shortlink url which points back to the annotated page. Awesome Highlighter has also incorporated Delicious, Facebook, Twitter and WordPress into their platform for sharing purposes.

Awesome Highlighter also provides very minimal stats tracking which shows how many times your highlighted page has been viewed, date and time of viewing and location of viewer if available.

Issues

We did have some problems highlighing web pages from Linux platforms. While the service did highlight sections on screen, the service didn’t recognize the highlights in the final product. Notes however functioned properly across the board.

Final Thoughts

Nowadays, it’s simply not enough to read a textbook and obtain all the information needed for study. Students need to share notes and expand beyond traditional textbooks to digital resources. Awesome Highlighter makes learning sharing possible and in the process guides users into prioritizing what’s actually important.

Visit Awesome Highlighter

If you enjoyed or found this article useful, please show us some support by liking us on Facebook or by sharing us on your favorite social website. Thanks!

Make Your Website Part Of The Nifty Collection

It seems like every other week we’re reviewing a cloud bookmark manager these days. The fact is though, that choosing one is a big decision. Any user who entrusts their bookmarks to a cloud service has to feel comfortable with it because they’ll be accessing that website everyday. This time around we’re looking at Wonderpage, a cloud bookmarking service that appeals more to your visual side.

Wonderpage has many features we expect from a cloud service seeking to store favorites. An import function from browsers and Delicious, user input keywords and descriptions, folders for organization and privacy settings at both account level and bookmark level. Wonderpage helps users along by automatically generating keywords for new bookmarks which furthers the process along for anyone who doesn’t have time to tag every bookmark and micromanage their favorites.

The big feature of Wonderpage is its visual appeal. Wonderpage uses thumbnail images of URLs to visually identify bookmarks inside user accounts. There are 6 different sizing options for the thumbnails along with a sidebar menu to quickly navigate between favorites. Users who are more visually wired will find Wonderpage to be an ideal option for cloud bookmarking.

Wonderpage also has social features which include their own built-in friend and follower interaction. Instead of merely sharing a link through another service, Wonderpage makes it possible to share an entire collection of bookmarks. The creators of Wonderpage seek to create a new homepage for users with it’s visual design and need of access to bookmarks. Whether they succeed at that is up for debate, but you can’t dismiss the actual service. Wonderpage is fantastic at delivering a eye-catching, easy to interact with cloud service that users will feel comfortable entrusting their bookmarks to.

Visit Wonderpage

If you enjoyed or found this article useful, please show us some support by liking us on Facebook or by sharing us on your favorite social website. Thanks!

Make Your Website Part Of The Nifty Collection

HTML5Media

HTML5Media is small snippet of javascript code designed to allow for <video> and <audio> to be used in all browsers. The single line of code is placed in the web document. Afterwards, webmasters or whoever adds content to your site can embed video or audio by using the <video> and <audio> tags respectively.

This powerful little javascript snippet is an excellent option for avoiding unsupported codecs or problems caused by older browsers. This form of delivery allows for all your website visitors to see the video and hear the audio you want them to.

There will come a time when all browsers have <video> and <audio> tags standard, but until that time, HTML5Media is a solid choice to ensure functionality for everyone.

The code:

<script src=”http://api.html5media.info/1.1.5/html5media.min.js”></script>

You can view HTML5Media in action and view code samples from their website – HTML5Media

If you enjoyed or found this article useful, please show us some support by liking us on Facebook or by sharing us on your favorite social website. Thanks!

Thumbnail Previews

New tabs now offer Thumbnail Previews for quick access to sites you visit the most. It’s similar in nature to a quick dial feature. While it’s not a groundbreaking new feature for browsers in general, it’s a nice addition to the already existing Tab Grouping and Pin Tab features. Note: In order to benefit from this feature, you must have History preserving enabled. If you’re not sure what that means, then the feature will work fine.

To add sites to your Thumbnail Previews new tab page:

1. Open your bookmarks library by either clicking the bookmarks button or by clicking the Firefox menu, selecting Bookmarks, then Show All Bookmarks.
2. Drag any bookmark to one of the Thumbnail Preview boxes.

To make a site permanent in its location just click the pin in the upper left hand corner of the Thumbnail Preview box.

To remove a site from Thumbnail Previews, click the X in the upper right hand corner.

Firefox Homepage

Along with Thumbnail Previews comes a new Firefox Homepage. It’s still bland, but adds some shortcuts to make getting to Firefox tools a bit quicker. The new shortcut links include:

• Downloads
• Bookmarks
• History
• Add-ons
• Sync
• Settings

Users can access the new homepage by typing about:home into the address bar. To use this page as your new homepage, simply click and drag the Firefox logo from the address bar and drop it on the Home button icon. If done properly, you will be asked to confirm the new homepage.

If you enjoyed or found this article useful, please show us some support by liking us on Facebook or by sharing us on your favorite social website. Thanks!

For that reason, Google’s Chrome browser offers an incognito feature which prevents the browser from storing information about the websites you visit. It’s a way to surf naturally and make your own opinions and decisions rather than being force fed ads or services matched to your browsing habits.

While Incognito Mode is handy, it can be much more useful when manipulated to function automatically whenever users visit certain websites. Ghost Incognito is a Chrome extension designed to do just that. It instantly switches the browser to incognito mode when a site on the list is visited.

How To Automatically Open Websites In Incognito Mode

1. Download and install Ghost Incognito.
2. After installation you’ll notice a small ghost icon in the extensions toolbar area.
   
3. Browse the web as you normally would. When you navigate to a website you’d like to prevent Chrome from tracking, simply click the ghost icon. That’s it!

Remove Websites From Ghost Incognito

To remove websites from the Ghost Incognito list, click the wrench icon and navigate to Tools → Extensions → click Options under Ghost Incognito → Click Remove all (#) domains.

To remove specific websites, allow Ghost Incognito to run in incognito mode. Navigate to Tools → Extensions → check the box labeled Allow in incognito under Ghost Incognito.

If you enjoyed or found this article useful, please show us some support by liking us on Facebook or by sharing us on your favorite social website. Thanks!

The extension is lightweight and as the author puts it, “Pinterest Photo Zoom does one thing and one thing better than the rest: Enhance your Pinterest photo viewing experience.” It’s true Pinterest Zoom is a one trick pony and only works on Pinterest, but that’s a good thing. It’s nice to have an extension that does its job and isn’t overloaded with extra features that users don’t need or already have.

You won’t find a lot of fancy configurations either, Pinterest Zoom has a tiny icon which sits inside the address bar and is only visible when on the Pinterest site. You can download Pinterest Zoom from the Chrome Web Store.

Download Pinterest Zoom

If you enjoyed or found this article useful, please show us some support by liking us on Facebook or by sharing us on your favorite social website. Thanks!