DemoGirl

As most of you may know, the way we monetize DemoGirl is by creating custom screencasts for various Web companies. Sometimes I need to keep these private and can’t share them on DemoGirl but when possible, I like to show you some of the things I’ve been doing — especially when I find the services actually useful. That’s where these next two sites come in:

UpTake is a service that wants to help make planning your next vacation, easier. It searches for hotels and things to do based on the type of vacation you want to take. For example, if you’re planning a trip with the family, UpTake has a family vacation theme as well as pet friendly, girls getaway, romantic getaway, and a theme if you just simply want to get away. It pulls results from 400,000 U.S. hotels and attractions and gives you reviews and ratings from different review sites all over the Web. You can also filter your search by amenity and price. If you’re planning your summer vacation and aren’t sure exactly where to start, I’d definitely give UpTake a look. Here’s a custom DemoGirl screencast of UpTake:

Click Here To Watch The Screencast 1m42s

Ztail is a service that wants to help you figure out, “what’s it worth?”. What’s what worth? Well, it could be an old camera, a vintage tennis racket, or a pair of skis. It’s described as the Kelly Blue Book for everything, and I think that’s a great description. There are a couple of ways you can use Ztail – you can add your own things to the Ztail community and have other members tell you what they think it’s worth and see similar items on eBay to get a better idea of how much you could get for it. You can also browse through items people are trying to get value on and give your own opinion. If you’re a vintage roller skate expert, you may find a lot of people on Ztail wondering how much their old pair of skates are worth. I think everyone has some sort knowledge that they could share on Ztail and if people start posting their opinions and their stuff, I could see this being a great place to go before placing an item up on ebay or even before pricing your “valuables” to sell at your next garage sale. Here’s a custom DemoGirl screencast of Ztail:

Click Here To Watch The Screencast 2m27s

(Disclosure:  DemoGirl.com was paid to create these screencasts for use by the company.  We were not paid in any way to write these reviews, or any other review.)

It’s Friday, and you know what that means! It’s time to show you some useful applications in the quickest amount of time – hence the name, quickcast. Today I’m featuring some Applications built on Adobe Air that I think are pretty useful, and fun. One to make reading your RSS Feeds more exciting, one to help you listen to Muxtapes on your desktop, and one that will allow you to take hideous photos of yourself sitting in your room.

Snackr pulls random items from your RSS Feed and streams them along your desktop in a ticker-like fashion. You can import your feeds or add them manually and you can read stories easily by clicking on them. It’s pretty much never ending so if you’re easily distracted, you may find yourself staring at Snackr instead of actually getting any work done. You can edit the settings of the ticker to have it sit on any side of your screen and you can easily minimize it if it’s getting in your way.

MuxMaster is an awesome compliment to Muxtapes, the service that allows you to make cool MP3 mixtapes to share with your friends. MuxMaster automatically provides you with 10 Muxtapes that you can browse through to discover new music. If you don’t like those, then you can select another random 10. If you know the name of a Muxtape you can enter it in and MuxMaster will load that along with other relevant Muxtapes.

Fotobooth is a fun application that allows you to instantly take photos with your webcam and add effects to them. Even better, fotobooth works with Flickr so you can instantly upload all of the photos you take to your Flickr account. Every time you snap a photo, it’s dropped onto the application and will stay there until you delete it.

To see these applications in action, watch the screencast below:

Click Here To Watch The Screencast 3m40s

Want this screencast on your site? Click here to get the code for this and other DemoGirl screencasts!

[via freshAIRapps]

ReadAir is an application built on Adobe Air that brings your Google Reader to your desktop. First of all, it doesn’t resemble Google Reader in any way, aesthetically speaking. It has a lot of the same features that Google Reader has, but in a much sleeker interface. You can log in right away with your Google account and all of your feeds, tags, stared and shared items are ready and waiting. There are a few things missing though (I think, because I don’t use Google Reader). You can star items but it doesn’t seem that you can share them in ReadAir. Also, you can’t use any keyboard shortcuts and it doesn’t seem that you can drag and drop feeds into folders or rearrange feeds with drag and drop. ReadAir is still in very early stages, so I’m anxious to see what features they add next. Here’s my screencast tour of ReadAir:

Click Here To Watch The Screencast 2m9s

Want this screencast on your site? Click here to get the code for this and other DemoGirl screencasts!

There’s this person I know, I’ll just call her Mom for the sake of this post, who is notorious for checking into a hotel and then switching rooms over and over because something is just not right. I never really had a problem with this because we always ended up getting a great room and she had no problem paying for it – she just wanted the perfect place to relax. She’s been talking about making a trip up to San Francisco to check out my new digs, and I know it will be my job to scout out the perfect hotel and hotel room. This is how TripKick is going to save my you-know-what.

TripKick is all about room reviews. They provide you with details like noise, size, and views of specific rooms located in a hotel. Before I go any further I should add that TripKick is only available (right now) in Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, NYC, Orange County, San Diego, San Francisco, and Washington D.C., but they have plans to add a new major city every month. You can search for specific criteria such as pet friendly, romantic, or trendy and then TripKick will list the hotels with rooms that match your request. You’ll see a list of the best rooms and you can read and leave reviews and add photos. You don’t need to sign up either, just leave your name and email address with your review. TripKick also has a compare feature which will compare rooms by view, noise, size, location within the hotel, and bathroom notability. You can print all this info out and bring it with you when you check in so you’ll be more knowledgeable up front, and shouldn’t have to worry about switching rooms later. For my sake, let’s hope the reviews on TripKick are correct. Otherwise, I’m sicking my Mom on you. Here’s my screencast tour of TripKick:

Click Here To Watch The Screencast 4m20s

Want this screencast on your site? Click here to get the code for this and other DemoGirl screencasts!

[via TechCrunch]

Blip is a social networking site for sharing, “what are you listening to?”. If you think it sounds a lot like Twitter, you’re exactly right. It works in almost the same way except instead of letting people know that you just drank a delicious milkshake, you can share the music you’re listening to. You can do a search by song or artist and Blip will pull music from SeeqPod that you can preview and then “blip” to your friends. You can also leave a message (150 characters or less) to go along with your song. You can also cross post to Twitter, Pownce, FriendFeed, and Tumblr – sort of. This is where I had an issue with Blip. When I chose a song and then typed a brief message explaining why I chose that song, it posted fine to Blip. When I jumped over to my Twitter profile, I noticed that it had not posted my message at all. This is exactly what it said, “listening to Uncle John’s Band – The Greatful Dead at www.fuzz.com/blip/us”. I was a little perturbed that what I posted to Blip was completely different than what appeared on my Twitter profile.

My final thoughts? Well, I think Blip is great for people who want a place to quickly share music with a group of friends and hear what their friends are listening to. Twitter isn’t for everyone and Blip is great for doing what it wants to do, share music. I won’t, however, be cross posting to any other sites using Blip unless this issue is fixed.  Update:  I was contacted by the guys at Blip about the Twitter posting catastrophe and they completely fixed the problem!  Now your message will show up on Twitter as it does on Blip.  Thanks guys! I currently use Songza to post songs I like to Twitter, and I think I’ll stick with them for that purpose. Here’s my screencast tour of Blip:

Click Here To Watch The Screencast 2m26s

Want this screencast on your site? Click here to get the code for this and other DemoGirl screencasts!

[via Go2WEB20]

Last Monday I promised you another healthy dose of fun applications to accompany Twitter, and here they are:

Tweetshots is a handy tool that allows you to automatically post screenshots of tweets to tumblr, or email them to friends.  Whenever you see an interesting tweet, just click on the tweetshots bookmarklet and a screenshot will be generated.  You’ll get the embed code along with an option to send it to an email or post it to tumblr.

Autopostr alerts your Twitter friends any time you upload a new photo to flickr.  You need to add your flickr URL and Twitter username to autopostr first, but then all you need to do is add a # into the title of every flickr photo you want to share on Twitter.  Autopostr will automatically tweet your photo to all of your friends.

Twitsay allows you to, you guessed it, post voice messages to your twitter account.  You need to sign up for a twitsay account (which is basically entering in your twitter credentials) and then call the number for the area in which you live.  Twitsay currently supports Austria, Germany, the US, and the UK.  You can record up to 10 seconds and your voice message will be automatically posted to Twitter so your friends can all hear your sweet voice.

Here we are again my lovely DemoGirl readers. It’s Friday and you’re ready to punch that time card and head out for the weekend. I know that attention spans can be minimized in the afternoon on one of the greatest days of the week, so I’ve decided to profile three applications in just three minutes that may help you out this weekend. One to help you keep track of new episodes of your favorite TV shows, one that may help you find a great deal while shopping online, and one to help you find your lost cell phone.

MyTvRSS allows you to create an RSS feed that will update you every time one of your favorite TV shows has a new episode. All you need to do is select the shows you like, and MyTvRSS will create the feed that you can add to your reader of choice. This is especially useful for people like me who never turn on the TV, but probably would if they knew a that a new episode of House was going to be on.

PriceAdvance is a Firefox Extension and Internet Explorer plugin that gives you instant price comparisons of items you’re shopping for. It doesn’t necessarily only give you better prices, it just lets you see what everyone else is charging for something you’re thinking about purchasing. The affiliate merchant sites are somewhat limited so you may not see results if you’re looking for something like sneakers or a set of white wall tires, but if you’re looking for electronics or DVDs, I’d definitely give PriceAdvance a try.

PhoneMyPhone needs minimal explanation – it will ring your phone for you at any time you tell it to. There’s no voicemail task reminder service, no free text messaging, and it won’t tell you how to get anywhere. It will, however, help to get you out of a boring meeting, help you to flee an excruciating blind date, or ring your phone if you’ve lost it somewhere. Done, done, and done.

Here’s my Friday Quickcast Special:

Click Here To Watch The Screencast 3m

Want this screencast on your site?  Click here to get the code for this and other DemoGirl screencasts!

[via downloadsquad, CenterNetworks, and MakeUseOf]

Readbag is a link bookmarking site that runs on Google Apps. It has quite an attractive interface and since it runs on Google Apps, you can log in using your Google account. It’s very simplistic in that it’s really just a place to store links to read later. It’s not really supposed to do the job of a regular bookmarking service because there’s no way to really organize the links or archive them into different folders. There are a couple of different ways you can add links – using their bookmarklet, by downloading the Firefox extension, or manually. You can also send links to your Google Reader but you need to have Greasemonkey installed. You can share your links on the list of popular social networking sites, post them to Twitter, and have a daily digest of links sent to your email every day at a specified time. Here’s my screencast tour of readbag:

Click Here To Watch The Screencast 2m6s

Want this screencast on your site? Click here to get the code for this and other DemoGirl screencasts!

Do you ever wander around your neighborhood coffee shop and wonder, “Now where did I put my laptop? They all look the same!”? Of course you don’t. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t tag your laptop so it stands out from the crowd. That’s where the website of the day, Schtickers comes in. Schtickers is a company that sells pre-designed or custom laptop skins that can be removed and reapplied at will. They have hundreds of designs to choose from in a variety of categories — anything from animal inspired to pop and retro. But I think the best part about Schtickers is that you can completely design your own laptop skin. You can add background images, choose from their graphics or upload your own, and add text. It’s noted that soon you’ll be able to create customized skins out of photos. It’s really easy to use and it costs just $24.95. (Pre-designed skins are $19.95) I think these would be great for promoting your company or even your own personal blog. Just think how cool it would be if all your friends had your URL plastered all over their MacBook Pros.

[via Digital Inspiration]

I’ve noticed that over the past few weeks Twitter has been receiving a lot of attention.  Seriously, it’s being talked about at dinner parties, at happy hour, and all over the Internet.  It could be that my friends and I just don’t have anything better to talk about or it could be that Twitter is spreading like a Southern California wild fire.  Since Twitter is becoming more and more popular, Twitter applications and Twitter Bots are popping up all over the place as well.  I wrote a post a few weeks ago showcasing some of the “Twitter Courtiers” that I had come across and since then, many more have surfaced.  So, without further adu, I present to you “Some Of The Many Twitter Courtiers, Part Deux”:

TwitterSnooze allows you to put a virtual snooze button on some of your overzealous Twitter followers.  You just need to enter in your Twitter username and password and then the name of the person you want to keep quiet.  You can tell TwitterSnooze how long you want to keep them quiet and, the most humiliating part, you can announce to all of your followers that you are shutting @whoever off and they can too.  It will say something like this, “Hitting snooze on @whoever.  You can hit snooze too at TwitterSnooze.com”.  You don’t need to select that option, but I think it’s pretty neat if you want to let someone know that their tweets are really getting on your nerves.

Twistori isn’t really a useful Twitter application, but it is an interesting one.  It shows you tweets containing one of six emotional words:  Love, Hate, Think, Believe, Feel, or Wish.  It streams the tweets continuously and you can select to switch to a different emotion to view.  It’s really amazing how many people hate ticks, going to work, and Toshiba.  It’s almost like viewing overheard tweets, in that it’s really amusing.  The best “Wish” I just read was, “I wish I was naked in a warm bath with a bottle of vodka”.  I wish I could have Twistori as my screensaver.

TrackThis allows you to track your packages over Twitter.  You need to follow TrackThis first, and then send them a direct message that contains the tracking number and brief description of what you’re tracking.  You’ll then receive a direct message whenever your package changes locations.  You can follow TrackThis here, but make sure you send your tracking code in a direct message and not an @reply.

Roll.The.Dice will provide you with results from random events like flipping a coin, dealing cards, and generating random numbers.  You need to follow rollthedice here and then just send it a direct message telling it what you want it to do.  For example, you could dm rollthedice with the command “roll” and it will roll a six sided die and send you the result.  You can do the same to flip a virtual coin — just dm “flip” to get your result.

Hopefully those will keep you busy for the week.  I’ll be back next Monday with “Some Of The Many Twitter Courtiers, Part Trois”.