My Uninstalled Life

Jumpcut is an online tool that lets you create and edit videos online. Upload or import from services such as Flickr and Facebook. I tried it – and it’s cool!

Have you ever wanted to compare two devices, for example when buying a new mobile phone? Use Sizeasy to compare it in a 3D view, top and front!

Webjam lets you create and share your web experiences. Share what you discover!

Check out the TechCrunch and Blackwardmedia post for an online photo editing overview.

Picnik is an online photo editing tool. Remove redeye and add effects and more!

Use online tool BubblePLY to add bubbles to your video and add it anywhere you wish!

I told you about bubbl.us – a free online mind mapping software. Here’s another alternative called MindMeister. Although it’s only in a closed beta yet, here are some screenshots and it looks really good!

I love new techniques to get more effective. A few weeks ago, I went to a seminar and they talked about Mind Mapping. It’s a way of organizing your notes instead of classic “linear writing”. It’s said to be more efficient since it activates both left and right part of your brain. So I will give it a try on the university class that I’m taking.

However, instead of doing it on paper, I want to do it on my computer. At first, I found FreeMind, an open source alternative. But I thought there needed to be an online version, and of course there was! Go to bubbl.us – free of course! The interface is quite nice with animated bubbles and you can quickly create new ones with TAB and ENTER. Colors are added automtatically when you add bubbles.

Graphic editing programs are huge! Photoshop has been around for ages. Will the online editing programs be able to compete? Fauxto is one alternative out there.

You open up graphics either from your local system or remote, which is simply an URL. Each picture you’re working on is opened as a tab in the main window.

You can do Image Size, Canvas Size and Crop. You can add Layers and which each layer you can modify in different ways. You have a bunch of Filters, such as Sharpen, Blur, Find Edges, Emboss, Enrich and Clouds.

You can paint with brush, pencil, paint bucket, circles, squares. When you paint, the brush can be in several differnt formats such as round, spatter, smear and there is both size and feather. You also have the smudge, eyedropper and Text with some 12 fonts.

All in all – I would say this is a very powerful web application! Can it compete with Photoshop? Well – no, but it definitely shows there’s a possibility. At least to replace to more simple installed applications.

The application runs very smoothly – possibly much better than you would imagine! I would say I really cant “feel” any difference from this and a locally installed app – no delays or anything! And that’s just only after 2 months online! Good work by the guys over at Fauxto!

CumulateLabs have updated their Cumulate Draw with the following new features:

1. Support for connector labels
2. Support for dashed lines, both on connectors and shapes. Look for “style” drop down on the toolbar
3. UTF-8 support
4. Windows User Interface Design Palette
5. Mac User interface Design palette

The latest source code is now available too! Don’t forget their blog.

I don’t think there’s anyone who haven’t used Hotmail – so it’s time to update! Windows Live Mail is a part of Windows Live Ideas which is more than just a new webinterface to access your mail. It’s, as Microsoft says themselves:

“Your online world gets better when everything works simply and effortlessly together. That’s the basic idea behind Windows Live.”

So the live.com concept is simply putting all your online services together instead of keeping your mail in one place, your RSS feeds in another place, your favorites somewhere else and so on. But this article is not about the complete suite but Windows Live Mail. If you already have Hotmail – you can upgrade in a few seconds and still keep all your e-mails. Just go to ideas.live.com and click to register.

I already covered Hotmail, so I will only cover the news your get with Windows Live Mail. Please note that live.com is under heavy beta so new features will probably be added every week. Here are the main new features:

• Previews of your messages you can read without leaving your inbox
• Drag-and-drop organization
• Easy importing of your Microsoft Outlook contacts
• One-click control over junk and scam e-mails
• Right-click power—reply, delete, and forward
• 2 GB of storage

Compared to Hotmail – this is way better so I would suggest you change today! But if you’re using Google Apps for your domain, I think it’s just a matter of taste what you prefer.

Some time ago, I wrote about Zamzar which lets you convert your files between different formats. There’s another tool out there called Media-Convert.

There’s a bunch of formats supported. Just select your file and it will figure out the format. Then you select output format and except for format you can also have some options such as resizing, changing FPS, CODEC and so on.

Except for videos it does documents, texts, archines (zip etc), images and sounds.

Zamzar e-mails you a link to the converted files but Media-Convert starts processing online and will provide you with the link to the file directly. During the conversion, it just shows you:

Some testing shows it just takes a few minutes.

Just see yourself which one you prefer. Downsides with both Zamzar and Media-Convert is that you have to upload the file and there’s a limit of 100 MB. It’s pretty common that files are more than 100 MB, but still, you’re limited of the time it will take to upload because of your upstream speed. And since I only got 1 Mbit – I guess I’m stuck with some local tools.

Voo2do offers you to manage your to-do lists. Here’s a quote from their site that kind of gives you a good look of what they offer:
“What makes voo2do different?
Unlike most online to-do lists, voo2do tracks priority, due date, and time estimates for each task. There is no notion of “lists” in voo2do— tasks can be grouped by project, but you can view and edit a bunch of projects together. Voo2do supports some basic sharing of tasks”

With that in mind, here’s the main tabs once you login:

The interface is quite “ajaxy”. What you do is add tasks to the tasks tab. You put the description, priority, due date etc. You can also e-mail your tasks to the list:

Then you have projects. Each task can be put to a project. When you create a task you get a list of all your projects once you start writing in the projects box. You can then list the projects and see which tasks are assigned to which project:

Collaboration is possible in two ways, either you can collaborate so you can assign who is responsible for a certain task but you can also make your list viewable to public (or with a password…). Notes is a summary of all notes for all tasks. Deadlines is a summary of all tasks that have a deadline coming up. History is a list of tasks that has been completed.

Then there’s the Dashboard which gives you an overview of everything which you also can customize.

I like Voo2do. It’s playful and easy to use. However, it lacks some functionality like a calendar so you really need some other tool aswell to do the job to replace your “Outlook” or “Moleskin”. However, if you’re looking for a to-do list – check it out!

I’m always looking for a device to replace my desktop PC which makes too much noise, takes up too much space and cost too much since I only use a small fraction of the power in the box! A few weeks ago, I replaced it with a beautiful mini-ITX computer.

But what about the laptop? Craig Gunderson sent me a tip on the $150 laptop computer (wasn’t it $100 before?).

“Lite Appliances says its Lite Computer will be based on Analog Devices’ Blackfin processor and a custom-built OS that will include Web browser, media player, IM and VoIP functions and work with online services such as Google Docs. There will be no built-in hard drive, but you can attach external storage via USB.” Wired says.

These devices are made for the web! It doesn’t have all the unnecessary power you don’t need when running tools over the web! I’d get one – just for the sake of tetsing it. But I hope they make them look better than this :)

In my recent articles in 4 different ways to effective ways of starting your webapps – here are some additional plugins to Firefox that might help you! 

• Faviconize plugin for FF. It gets rid of the text on a tab and just leaves the icon so it takes up less space on the tab bar.
  
• Have you ever accidently closed the tab where you have your e-mail service? Get the PermaTabs add-on for FF and they will definitely stick around!

If you have any other plugins that might help you in effective ways of starting/running your webapps online – let me know!