ReadWriteWeb

Chop is a new tool for adding quick comments to code. Here's the pitch: "Giving quick, one-off feedback on code is a pain. Code review tools are complex, expensive, and hard to use. Often we just want to share a quick contextual note with someone who may not have access to the entire code base."

With Chop, you paste in some code, and then add quick a comment and share it.

The web design feedback tool Notable has taken a dose of its own medicine, if you will, monitoring its customers' usage and feedback in order to roll out today what is a major redesign of this great app. Notable is a browser-based tool that lets you easily annotate and share feedback on website design and content.

We covered Notable when the app launched a few years ago, and raved about its simplicity. As Frederic Lardinois wrote at the time, "The service works without any hiccups, is easy to use, and clearly focused on giving a specific set of users the right tools to get the job done without being encumbered by lots of extra bells and whistles." Even so, the app is now more streamlined, with many of its feedback features easier to use.

Every week on ReadWriteMobile, we've asked you a question pertaining to the mobile industry. These polls have asked you things like your thoughts on various platforms, where you as a developer may be focusing your efforts, what tools you use in your job and more.

As 2010 draws to a close, we thought it might be nice to take a look back at what you've said so far.

Error messages. Not the critical ones that require admin intervention, but those informative bits of text telling you that you missed a field on a form.

Chances are, you won't see a 100% success rate when people fill in a form on your site. The more complex the form, the more likely it is that people won't reach the end.

Forms should be easy to follow, and easy to recover from in the event of missing or invalid data. Here are some tips to help users understand what went wrong, and not just leave them hanging.

Giving and receiving design feedback can be difficult, as bulleted lists of comments and screenshots are often labor intensive and miss the context of the complete design. To make this easier, Bay Area interaction design and design strategy firm ZURB just released Bounce, a free and easy to use tool that can capture screenshots of any site and then allows you to annotate these images. You can also upload your own images and annotate them in the tool's web interface.

Have you ever found yourself ignoring the directions of your car's GPS in order to get somewhere faster or more efficiently than it can calculate? Me too. Chances are when leaving point A, you plugged in the address of point B, and a route was calculated on how to get from one to the other. The problem is, things come up on the route from point A to point B that may cause you to divert from your path such as construction, road closures, traffic, side trips you need to make or neighborhoods you may choose to avoid driving straight through.

For most startups in the early-stages of development, much of the building process includes repetitions of prototyping, testing, receiving feedback and iterating the product several times over. The toughest part of this process isn't building or making changes, it's getting that valuable feedback on where your product could be improved. Concept Feedback, a simply named online service, wants to help your startup with constructive criticism from its quickly growing community of over 5,000 designers, developers, marketers and entrepreneurs.

It's human nature - we are wired to be averse to change. When something new comes into our lives, we inherently approach it with caution, and at times, with negativity and hostility; but if that change is fundamentally good and right, it will gradually become widely accepted. For startups, especially those in the early stages of existence, changes come frequently and now and then in large chunks, which can be jarring for users who may have just become accustomed to the previous version of a product.

As the month of March trudges on, we are getting closer each day to spring and eventually summer when numerous startup incubators hold their camps for early-stage companies. Many incubators are still taking submissions, including TechStars Boulder, but in case of Y Combinator, the deadline has since come and gone. Theoryville is a startup that has already been asked to interview for a spot with Y Combinator, so if you are still looking to apply for one of this summer's incubators, you may want to heed its founder's advice.

Tuesday night, ReadWriteWeb announced that we would be taking a new approach to how we use social media to communicate with our readers. Instead of blasting out automated content on Google Buzz as we do with our Twitter and Facebook accounts, we will be using Buzz to interact on a new level by discussing anything and everything in Buzz's forum-esque threads. I described it last night in a Buzz comment as "a better version of forums meets a less frantic chat room," and many positive comments seem to be welcoming this new form of engagement. This also got me thinking about how startups, small businesses and entrepreneurs can take advantage of Buzz.