Awesome Web Applications You Can Not Live Without
Written on November 1, 2009 by Kay
The web is overflowing with applications and services that you can’t live without—Google, Google Maps, Gmail, Facebook, et al.—and, of course, there are the sub-par incarnations of web-based apps that seem to pop up everyday and are abandoned just as quickly as they are created. It’s difficult to know the cream of the crop from the bottom of the barrel at first glance. Read on the learn about a few great services that will make your computing life easier.
Comparison Shopping Made Easy
I’m notorious for waffling around before actually clicking that “Buy Now” button on Amazon or New Egg. I’ll add an item (or several) to my shopping cart, surf around the site, Google up some results, e-mail a friend, and basically float about in cloud of indecisiveness, all in the name of comparison shopping. We all want to get the best deal, but how do we know we’re getting the best bargain if we don’t do a little research first? Nobody likes to do research, even if it’s just a little bit.
This is where PriceTrace comes in. PriceTrace is a Firefox add-on whose aim is to make comparison shopping less laborious. PriceTrace can be used in two ways. Type a product name (or a URL or SKU or UPC) in its search box. PriceTrace goes through the motions and sends you its comparisons results conveniently inside a new tab. PriceTrace even offers its own spin on things with its Price History chart, giving you more data to make a more informed purchase.
New Egg and Amazon have stepped on board by integrating PriceTrace directly into their product web pages. Clicking on the “Trace the item on this page” button will give you the same results as above. Very cool. Other features of PriceTrace include e-mail alerts if a particular product drops in price and a section that you can peruse to discover products with the biggest price drops. Saving money on the web just got a whole lot easier.
Large E-mail Attachments
One of the rotten things about some e-mail services is that when your in-box becomes clogged, new e-mail simply doesn’t arrive and you can’t send outgoing mail, either, at least not until you clean out your inbox to make room. Is it your fault that someone sent you an unannounced 30 megabyte file attachment and now your future e-mail gets bounced until you delete the attachment? Nope, it’s not. And it’s really annoying for the poor recipient.
The solution, would everybody start using this, is to use the Drop.io service With Drop you can upload extremely large files to their servers, and instead of attaching said file to your out-going e-mail, you simply add the Drop link to your file in the e-mail. With only the Drop file link in the message, you’ll need not worry about gumming up your recipient’s inbox.
Best of all, the Drop service is absolutely free to use. Drop doesn’t even require you to sign-up for an account (a perpetual annoyance that most other “free” services require), and the Drop link isn’t restricted to just an e-mail; the link can be used anywhere.
Free Reference Guides
I can’t count the number of times I needed to quickly learn how to do something in MS Word or Excel. Or forgot how to do something in Photoshop. Most of us don’t have time to do lengthy Google searches, wading through dozens of incomplete forum posts, typo-riddled blog guides, and suchlike to find the particular bit of information that we need.
It would be nice if there was one source for guides and tutorials for today’s most popular applications, and here’s the good news: There is! TechPosters. This site is home to hundreds of quick-reference guides for Microsoft Word, Power Point, Excel, Photoshop and hundreds of other programs. Older guides even reside on TechPosters, which is great if you’re stuck in a time-warp and are still using Word 97. PDF files of each quick-guide can be downloaded and printed for your convenience. If you’re trying to learn a new application, or simply forgot how to do something in a particular app, then give TechPosters a look-over.
