Demo Girl

When I’m searching for the best airline tickets I usually head to multiple search engines and travel sites where I spend hours comparing flight times, connections, prices, dates and alternative airports. I do all of this because I want to not only get the lowest price, but I also want to get to my destination at a certain time without dealing with long layovers and multiple connections. Yesterday, when I found Hipmunk, I was pleasantly surprised to find one site that filters all of my concerns into one search to help me find the very best flight for my money.

Just enter in your flight details and hit “search”.  Hipmunk will find the best overall flights for you based on price, duration, and number of connections.  The results are placed on a visually pleasing graph making it easy to remove certain flying times and allowing you to further filter your results by price only, duration, and departure or arrival time.

My favorite feature of Hipmunk is tabbed searching.  You can keep multiple tabs open within Hipmunk so you can easily compare different airports or dates, which is what normally kills me when looking for the best airline tickets.

To learn more about Hipmunk, watch the screencast below:

[via TechCrunch]

ShareMyMap is a fun tool that allows you to create maps of customized neighborhoods.  It’s free to use and you can have your first map up and running in just minutes.

To create your first map you’ll just need to enter in a general location, like San Francisco, and then you can zoom in as needed to get the default zoom point set.  You can then add a title for your map, like ‘Dive Bars’, add a photo, a description, and you can add custom fields that you can fill in for each point of interest.

Once your map is created you can begin adding points to the map with an address, description, tags, and Flickr photos and YouTube videos. Other members can add media too and comment on your points.  People can choose to follow your map so they can keep up with new content.  You can also choose to sign in with your Facebook or Twitter account and share across those sites as well.

I really like ShareMyMap for the most part but I found myself wanting a little bit more.  Here’s my wishlist:

• I’d like a way to share my map with anyone with a link or embed code and/or via email
• The ability to search for a locations address from within a map – as of now you need to know its exact location
• Suggested images from Flickr based on the points name would help eliminate the step of me having to leave the site to do a Flickr search for photos
• Collaboration with a private group of people to create a group map for things like reunions and weddings
• Revision history so I can find places I may have removed from a map. This would also be helpful when used with my comment above (collaboration).

To see ShareMyMap in action, watch the screencast below:

MobileRSS syncs with your Google Reader so you can keep up with all of your favorite blogs and websites at all times.  There’s a free version and a pro for $2.99 (iTunes links) which I’ll show you in the screencast.

After you install it and sign in with your Google account it will automatically sync up.  All of your folders, tags, shared and stared items will be in place along with people who you follow.  MobileRSS works a lot like Google Reader and you can also share items via email, Twitter, Facebook, Instapaper, and more.

I installed both the free and paid-for versions and am happy with both.  If you’re unsure about spending the money then install the free version, it works great and will give you a feel of what you get for your money.

To see MobileRSS in action, watch the screencast below:

Flavors.me is a great service for anyone who wants to build their own Website  to share all of their profiles on the Web.  It allows just about anyone to design a personal site, even those of us without design skills.  You can test out Flavors.me for free but for $20.00 a year you can have access to even more design customization, use your own domain and get informative stats on who is visiting your site.

To learn more about Flavors.me, check out the screencast below:

Adobe Ideas (iTunes link) is an app for the iPhone and iPad that helps you quickly sketch out design ideas on a blank canvas or a photo.  There’s also a handy color palette generator for use on a new photo or an existing one. It’s completely free so even if you’re not very creative (you’ll see my level of creativity in this screencast ) it’s still fun to use and can be useful for sharing simple design ideas with others.

To see the Adobe Ideas app in action, watch the screencast below:

Photoshop.com Mobile iPhone App is a free and easy to use photo editor.  You can use it with new photos you take or on photos already in your camera roll.  Use it to quickly add effects, crop images and more.

Check out the screencast to see more:

CameraBag ( iTunes link) isn’t free, but it’s so fun to use that I  think it’s worth the $1.99 price tag.  It allows you to add awesome filters to your pictures almost instantly.

Check out the screencast to see more:

TiltShift helps you take any scenic photo and make it appear as if it’s a miniature scale model.  At just $0.99, I couldn’t pass it up.

Check out the screencast to see more:

ZipList is a service that helps you quickly throw together your shopping list in a seriously organized manner.  You can use it at home on your computer or on the go on your mobile phone.

You can create many lists and each item that you add will automatically be placed into the correct category of where you can find it in the store.  For example, typing in “milk;cheese;bread;tomatoes” will result in 3 categories: dairy, bread, and produce.  Each item will go into the correct category for you – preventing you from having to run back and forth around the store.

You can use the ZipList bookmarklet to easily add recipes to your recipebox and add items from that recipe to your list.  You can also choose to send your shopping list to a mobile phone or email address.

To see how I used ZipList, watch the screencast below:

Remember the days of sending out real paper invitations to your friends and then waiting patiently by the phone for them to call with their response?  OK, so some of you are probably too young to remember those days, which is unfortunate since it’s a much more personal way to introduce your event to your friends and family.  Evitations are the norm these days and, sadly, the chance of actually receiving an invitation in the mail is very rare.

RSVPhere is a site that wants to blend the convenience of online party planning with the ever-so-rare paper invite.

All you need to do is create an RSVPhere account and add all of your event details.  You can even ask questions of your guests that they’ll need to answer when responding – Things like, “What type of wine do you prefer” or, “Do you have any dietary restrictions” are extremely helpful when planning an event.  After you’ve added all of your info you’ll create a code that guests will need to respond to your event online.  This code, along with an event ID, will be printed on your paper invites that you send to your guests.  Instead of sending out a response card (and hoping that nobody loses it or forgets to drop it in the mail) your guests can simply enter the code into the RSVPhere site and respond with a few clicks.  They don’t need to sign up for anything and it just takes a minute.  As the party planner, you also save some cash on stamps.

To see all of the great features of RSVPhere, watch the screencast below:

If you’re one of the unlucky (or lucky, depending how you look at it) individuals that is required to put on a clean, crisp dress shirt every day – and often find yourself struggling to find a shirt that actually fits correctly – then Blank Label may be just what you’re looking for.

Blank Label is a web-based application that allows you to pick the fabric, style, and measurements to create your very own custom dress shirt.  It took me about 10 minutes to create a shirt the first time I used it, and the price seems relatively fair – even though I’ve never actually bought a mens dress shirt before.

To learn more about Blank Label, watch the screencast below:

Siri is a virtual personal assistant that lives in your iPhone.  It can help you find a place to get a bite to eat, show you movie listings, and even remind you to call your Mom on her birthday.

You have two options when using Siri – You can type out what you’re looking for or you can say it to Siri and it will do its best to figure out what you’re saying.  For example, you could simply tap “restaurants” and then choose what type of food you’re looking for and where.  Siri will grab reviews, menus (if available) and even allow you to add notes to your selection.  You can then map it, email it, or save it to your Siri bookmarks.  You can also choose the “say it” option and say what you want.  I tried saying, “Shutter Island, San Francisco” into my phone and Siri immediately recognized that I was looking for movie listings for “Shutter Island” in San francisco.  It brought up theaters close to me and gave me the option to reserve tickets.

You can say things like, “remind me to call the dentist” and Siri should send that info into the reminders section of your account and allow you to add a time for Siri to email you and remind you to call the dentist.  This only seemed to work about half of the time.  Sometimes it would recognize “remind” and sometimes it would think I was saying “find”.

Another little problem I had was with finding restaurants near me.  Siri doesn’t seem to know of any pizza places closer than 10 miles to my house – And that is definitely not the case.  It was also telling me that some restaurants were much farther away from my location then they actually are.  With that said, this is definitely not a deal breaker for me as Siri does much more than just find restaurants and set reminders.  You can request a cab, get the current weather, set dinner reservations, and pretty much anything else that you would have a real personal assistant do.  Except this one is free. Get Siri in the iTunes App Store here.

To see Siri in action, watch the video below: