I’m super excited to announce a first on DemoGirl (insert suspenseful drum-roll here). App Happy: iPhone App Reviews for Everyone. Or something like that. Ok, so now that I got that out of the way, and you’ve all had a chance to put on a fresh pair of underwear, let me explain:
This past weekend I got my hands on an iPhone, rigged up a mini-iPhone recording studio, and went to work. I chose the WordPress iPhone App because I use WordPress on a daily basis and, in all seriousness, it is a super useful App for anyone who uses WordPress.
Technically this is not a screencast. But, I am recording the screen of the iPhone and our mission remains, to help everyone understand and see how to use fun and helpful applications – Web-based or, now, mobile.
Please watch the video below and let me know what you think in the comments. Is the lighting terrible? Is it too hard to see the iPhone in action? Am I in desperate need of a manicure? Or do you think this is the most amazing thing you have ever seen in your entire life? Your feedback is so important to me and I thank you in advance.
If you’re a freelancer you may find it hard to determine a fair hourly rate to charge your clients and still make a decent living. You don’t want to overcharge because you need to remain competitive – however, if you undercharge clients you won’t be able to to do things like pay rent and buy groceries.
That’s where the FreelanceSwitch Hourly Rate Calculator comes in. It helps you calculate what you spend annually on business expenses, personal costs for things like rent and car repairs, and how much you want to put into savings each year. It combines this information with how many days and hours a year you work, along with the percentage of hours you can actually bill people, and spits out an estimate of how much you should be billing your clients.
To see how the FreelanceSwitch Hourly Rate Calculator can help you make more money, watch the screencast below:
1DayLater is an application that allows you to track the hours you work on projects, the distance you drive everyday, money you spend on groceries, hours you put in at the gym, and anything else you can squeeze into a day.
Using 1DayLater is extremely easy – Enter in hours, mileage, or money spent and then a project/client name and description. A project/client name could be for anything you want to track, so if you’re tracking how much you spend at Whole Foods every week you would put “Whole Foods” into the project/client field. Lastly, add the date and click on “Go”. This activity will be placed into your activity stream for that day and the amount you entered will be added to any other day that you created an activity for that project.
You can view a graph that shows just what you’re spending your time on and export your data for further use. Future features include invoicing information and mileage calculation.
To see how 1DayLater can help you track your life, watch the screencast below:
MemorizeNow is yet another application that I wish existed when I was still in school. It helps you remember short and long phrases of text by training your brain how to read the phrases with different words removed in each sequence. This can be used for something as simple as word definitions to long speeches or poems.
It was initially created to aid in memorizing passages from the bible, but obviously it can be used for just about anything you need to remember.
To see how MemorizeNow works, watch the screencast below:
TabJump is an extension for Google Chrome that helps you manage your tabs. After you install it you’ll see all of your most used tabs that are open, related tabs, and recently closed tabs. You can also lock tabs – but since you can find recently closed tabs, this feature doesn’t seem all that necessary. It’s a really handy extension that doesn’t take up a lot of browser real estate, much like most Google Chrome Extensions.
To see what TabJump can do, watch the screencast below:
First of all, let me say that I will try to make this my last post (for a while) about anything wedding related. It just so happens that I received a note from the founders of MyWeddingBinder yesterday and after using it a bit today, I really feel that it is a very useful tool. Since I spent so much time testing it out I figured it would be worth my time to go the extra mile and share my experience with you.
Disclosure: I am currently planning a wedding so please excuse me if I get over excited. I can’t help it.
MyWeddingBinder gives you a space to plan and organize the details of your wedding. Everything from your guest list, to your vendors, to the seating chart, to your budget – it’s all there to help you keep track of the madness that lasts just one day.
Now I know that there are a lot of sites out there that can be used to help you plan your wedding. The problem with most of these sites, however, is that they do not focus just on your wedding day – they focus on shoving ads down your throat (a bit extreme, but it’s pretty much true) for things like dresses and floral arrangements that most people can’t even afford. What I’ve found (and believe me, I have looked and looked) is that most wedding planning sites put your actual wedding planning in the background and pictures of extravagant ceremonies and merchandise in the foreground. And that’s why they’re free. So fine.
MyWeddingBinder is not free. In fact you can’t even set up a free trial account to test it out. There’s a fee of $29.95 to create your account, but once you’ve paid you have an ad-free, clean and organized space to plan out your special, and costly, day. At first I was a bit turned off by the fact that I couldn’t test the site out before handing over my credit card but then, after they were kind enough to let me use a test account for free, I realized that this is something that’s worth paying for. I’m not sure if it’s worth $29.95 yet, but it definitely made an impact. I think some additional features are needed to warrant the price tag. This is my wish list:
I want a way to customize the table set-up. As it is now there are only round tables available to create your seating chart.
Adding guests is a pain. You have to add them one at a time, click on “save”, and then click on “add guests” again. Maybe add an “Import your address book” feature.
How about a blog to keep your guests up to date on wedding day details?
A section to upload your inspiration photos
If you want to see all of what MyWeddingBinder can do, watch the screencast below:
ShowMeWhatsWrong gives you the power to force your not-so-tech-savvy friends and family to show you what their problem is.
All you need to do is head over to ShowMeWhatsWrong, enter in your name and valid email address and click on “Generate”. You’ll get a link that you can send to your troubled friend and all they need to do is click on it to get started. From there, they just need to enter in their name and click on “Record”. ShowMeWhatsWrong will begin to record their screen (they’ll be screencasting and not even know it!!) and they can go through the steps that are giving them problems. When they’re done they just need to click on “Stop”, and automatically ShowMeWhatsWrong will upload and email you the video. They don’t have to do anything else. Seriously.
From there it’s up to you to decide how you want to move forward to help your buddy. You could call them up and try to explain what they’re doing wrong, or you could create a screencast using Screencast-O-Matic (the creators of ShowMeWhatsWrong) and show them what they’re doing wrong.
To see ShowMeWhatsWrong in action, watch the screencast below:
Google City Tours is a Labs project that has some pretty helpful features for people planning a trip to an unfamiliar city. You can begin by entering in the name or address of the place where you’ll be staying. From there, Google City Tours will load a map with various points of interest that you can walk to from your originating point. Each destination shows an approximate amount of time it should take you to walk as well as walking directions from point A to point B to point C…
You can also remove and add points of interest to the map and include the number of days you’ll be in town so that your sightseeing can be spread out over a few days.
I really like Google City Tours, especially because my Mom is coming to visit me in San Francisco next month and I would love her to map out all the places we can walk to from her hotel. With that said, these are my issues:
How do you save your Google City Tour? I couldn’t find a “save” link anywhere.
Can you share your City Tour with, for instance, the person who’s visiting?
I’d like options to switch from walking to driving to public transit. My Mom is NOT going to walk to the Golden Gate Bridge from Union Square.
Of course, Google City Tours is in Labs, which means that it’s a work in progress. Those are just some things that I think should be at the top of the “to-do” list for the people working on it .
To see Google City Tours in action, watch the screencast below:
As some of you may know, I’ve got wedding planning on the brain. And it’s stressing me out. A lot. Thankfully there are a ton of online tools that are easing a bit of the stress. I honestly don’t know how anyone planned a big event, like a wedding, without the help of the Internet. I don’t even want to think about that! I can’t even think about that. This leads me to the event planning site MyPunchBowl. I knew that MyPunchBowl was a great site for planning parties and managing events, but I didn’t know that they had an entire section dedicated to weddings! (Thanks Paisano!)
MyPunchBowl Weddings gives you a quick and easy way to send out engagement announcements without the cost of expensive save the date cards. In fact, it’s completely free to use (although there is a premium account which gives you more customization and ad-free announcements).
I’m not quite ready to send out save the dates, but when I am I think this just may do the trick.
To see MyPunchBowl Weddings in action, check out the screencast below:
Google Chrome has a lot of Extensions worth checking out, but these are three that I find myself using throughout the day. Don’t expect a lot of bells and whistles here, folks – these three Extensions just help me get things done a bit quicker. Watch the screencasts that follow the brief introduction to see how they can work for you:
The Picnik Extension for Chrome allows you to easily take screenshots and edit them using the online image editor Picnik.com.
The Session Manager Extension gives you a really handy way to save your browsing sessions so that you can come back to them later – without having to bookmark a bunch of sites.
Tab Menu is an Extension that allows you to easily sort through, organize, and even close your tabs within a drop-down menu in your bookmarks toolbar.
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