7 Apps We're Falling in Love With
We test a lot of software around here, on the web, on our desktop and on our phones. It's a great job to have, but only so much of what we test really sticks and becomes a part of our daily routines. Every once in awhile we like to compare lists in our team chat room and then share them with you.
Here are the latest tools and services we've come to love, maybe you'd like to give them a try too.
Posterous
Think you find a lot of great stuff online? You should try sharing it with people using Posterous. The user experience for this curation and blogging tool is remarkable, a real model for other app makers to check out. Posting by email, iPhone and a web bookmarklet are all really easy. My Posterous is here and Frederic Lardinois shares some of this favorite stuff here. If you like what we write about on ReadWriteWeb then check out the cool little things we find but don't blog about at the day job - or the things that will make it to ReadWriteWeb later. Posterous just went real time this week, too.
See also: How to Use Tumblr, Posterous and Other Light Blogging Services
Topify
Ever feel frustrated by the emails you get from Twitter? We did, until we signed up for Topify. From really smart "X is now following you" emails to the ability to reply to direct messages by email - Topify delivers Twitter emails like Twitter ought to. It's another project from Ouriel Ohayon, who's also behind the wonderful iPhone app sharing service AppsFire. Ouriel makes cool stuff.
See also: Ten Companies Twitter Should Consider Acquiring Next
Seesmic Web
The never-ending battle between Seesmic and Tweetdeck to see who can make the coolest Twitter client is great for users. Tweetdeck ate my groups last night in an upgrade, after I'd spent hours building them, and so I decided to give Seesmic another try. The Seesmic Web app is awesome and Mac users can turn it into its own app on the desktop using Fluid. The best of many cool features? List support! You can turn any list you're following on Twitter into its own column in Seesmic. Frederic Lardinois says he's been using this combo for a few weeks, I still have some kinks to work out.
See also: Seesmic + Twhirl is a Vision of the Web's Future (From 18 months ago, how did our prediction turn out?)
Tweetie 2
The iPhone app Tweetie (iTunes link) made a major upgrade last month and we're loving it. Sarah Perez put this one on the list but everyone agrees - this is hot stuff. Will the forthcoming Seesmic Mobile app be as good? Will Tweetdeck's eventual support for Twitter lists turn into an awesome iPhone app? We'll see - but Tweetie's many rich features make it the app to beat right now. My favorite feature? The way the replies page can be pulled down like a spring to prompt a refresh. It's a little thing, but it's fun.
See also: The Favorite iPhone Apps of Five Geek Rock Stars
Aardvark
Aardvark leverages what it calls "the real-time web of people" to deliver answers to any question you have - from people in your social circle who know about the topic and are available at that very moment. Vark gets mixed reviews from some people, but I love it. From technical questions to practical ones about life to opinions about questions I have at work - I've been getting a lot of fast, helpful information from people on Aardvark lately. It's another app that scores very high on User Experience, especially in its iPhone and IM interfaces.
See also: The Robot Made Me Do It: Comparing 3 New Cyborg Q&A Services
Chrome/Chromium
Google's web browser is fast, it's really fast. It's hard to say goodbye to all the wonderful Firefox extensions we've been using for years - but it's harder to use any other browser once you've been using Chrome for awhile. We have high hopes for Chrome plug-ins, but even without them it's a joy to use. You can download Chrome for Windows here and Chromium for Mac here.
LazyFeed
LazyFeed is a topic-driven "discovery engine." It's basically a blog search client that brings in the freshest posts about topics you're interested in. A couple of months into using it, I'm still finding great content every time I fire it up. I've got this running in Fluid and it works great.
Want some serendipity on the iPhone? Try out competitor YourVersion's app. The first version isn't easy on the eyes, but it delivers roughly the same experience on the go.
See also: Ten Useful Examples of the Real-Time Web in Action
Those are some of our favorites lately. What apps have you fallen in love with this season? We'd love to know.
See also our previous installments in this series:
30 Days Later: 22 Apps We're Still Using One Month After Finding Them From one year ago!
Still Shiny: 23 Apps We're Using One Month Later From this Spring.
What We Use: A Tour of RWW Desktops (Mac & PC) Video screencasts.
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Another tech blog shillin for Tweetie2, who'd have thunk it? Tweetie 2 is a bog standard iPhone Twitter client with a bit of extra lipstick slathered in top. It's nowhere near being the best Twitter client for iPhone. This is a case of emperors new clothes if ever I saw it. Have you guys even tried using it's so called hash tag support? I doubt it because if you did you'd still be rolling around the place laughing. It's that bad, really, it's next to useless. In fact it is useless after a couple of hours I went back to simply retyping them. Drafts? Yipee, sheer genius, Tweetie2 finally has them, yonks after Twittelator, and the droids who pass as tech journos are falling over themselves praising Tweetie for adding them. Pity they're so damn inaccessible. There is no way of accessing them directly from the compose window. The almost complete lack of any concept of workflow in Tweetie 2 makes me wonder if the designer even uses the app himself. And the gushing reviews the likes of yourselves have lavished on this, very average, app really make me wonder if you guys even attempt to evaluate the products you endorse or do you, as so many others seem to, simply chrun out hasty rewrites of reviews from other review sites. Tweetie 2 is not, by any means, a bad app overall but come on, get real guys, it's no where near being the best.
Hi, Marshall. Thanks for the mention, and I'm glad Seesmic is working for you. We recently put up a post on our help site for using Prism (for both Mac and PC) http://help.seesmic.com/forums/29256/entries/76510 - I'll also follow up with you regarding the kinks you mentioned. Yama
Thanks Marshall 2 apps in 1 is really cool :)
regarding tweetie, i got so used to refresh my Tweets by pulling down the list that sometimes i find myself doing the exact same thing with email...until i realize it does not work :)
But how do you really feel, Moby? What other apps would you suggest?
Marshall:
You should make 2 categories:
- Consumer / entertainment apss
- Business apps
2 different markets.
LEADSExplorer, which are the above? I use them all for business, personally.
I love most of these apps but fins Aardvark a little intrusive when it pops up on IM. Other than that, Lazyfeed is the only one I've yet to check out :)
I like the idea of Lazyfeed, blog aggregation by topic? A new way of looking at subscriptions? Instead of subscribing to 'feeds' you subscribe to 'topics' and let the engine produce results on its own by employing its own classification and categorization schemes.
Feedly is an application I am falling in love with. It has made me read more than I have ever read. More tweets, more blogs, more delicous bookmarks... I have started to learn at a much faster pace because of feedly.
whoa...i just know seesmic!
i'll try to visit the others.
Thanks for sharing this one, too bad there's no application for Blackberry here but I heard so much about Tweetie on my Iphone user friends.
http://www.advertisespace.com
I tried out Chrome, but until the Linux version comes out, I can't use it for every day work. I read that Google was the principle funder of Mozilla Firefox development, but that Mozilla maintains it's independence. Since a browser is so central to computer use today, independence is reassuring.
Will there be reason enough for both browsers? Are we headed for a single browser product on all computers, possible an open source one? Isn't it interesting that a competitive free-enterprise marketplace has produced so many near-monopoly products in software?
Posterous is great. Was very excited about Lazyfeed in the beginning but I hardly use it anymore. Partly because of some usability issues.
Some of my fav apps:
Diigo
Evernote
Xmind
Dropbox
#12: exactly. I wish you guys would stop pumping Chrome for a minute, take a step back and remember that Firefox is the only truly independent browser. This is surely more important than the latest speed benchmarks. We need to treasure and protect Firefox.
I'm addicted to Feedly.
em... posterous is a copy of Tumblr, isn't it?
Hi,
I liked the Seesmic web, I wish if they have this app in the Apple Store. Right now is just available with Android.
http://www.OnlyJust.net
Thanks