Archive for the 'Interesting Web2.0' Category

Online photo editor: Picture 2 Life

Online photo editors to my mind is one of the most interesting fields of web2.0. I have reviewed about 5 of them in my russian blog already and here is the first one review in English. The service is called Picture2Life (by the way here is russian version of this review).

Uploading a photo

Picture2Life (P2L) offers many ways of uploading: import from Flickr and 23, IE and FF plug-ins, java-script applet that allows uploading photos simply by moving them to its area and standard file/URL uploading. By all these features the authors obviously tried to enlarge the number of their potential clients. Free users are limited to 10MB per month.

Photo edit.

There is a wide range of editing functions, but I couldn’t find the essential one - resizing (changing picture size). At the same time there is a rotate function which allows you to turn a pic about any value of degrees, make it horizontal or vertical. There is another function - crop” which is described in the tips. I also consider it to be important but I couldn’t find it on the main effects” bar. While editing, the picture can be zoomed. Canvas function given here is very unusual for online photo editors. You can resize the file of your picture either vertically or horizontal and put the image into any of its part. There are hips of effects, just have a look at this screenshot: Here you can see both their titles and results. There are also Pixelate, Oil Paint (painting imitation), possibility to add some text (the Russian language is available, but you can’t set the font size) and some more. The functionality of the editor is good enough.

(more…)

7 new ways to use Google and Gmail

Sometimes I meet people who use different web2.0 sites in not a proper, standard ways. So I decided to group some of them in this list.ScreenShot320

  • The Galculator. You can enter arithmetics expression to the google search query field and it will solve it. You are able to group numbers with brackets, to extract any root, to solve trigonomethrics, e.t.c. Here is a simple example.
  • The Currency Rate Informer. You can use google search query to get the rate of exchange of any kind of foreign currency. For example let’s enter 5 EUR in USD and we will get 5 Euros = 6.3865 U.S. dollars. Don’t you think it rather useful? So fast and without any research!
  • The Googlepedia. Let’s enter “define:Internet” to the search query. In response we will receive a number of “Internet” term definitions. So if you still don’t know what’s “blogger” term stands for just click here :) However they doesn’t have a definition for the “problogger” :)
  • The Gogledrive. Gmail gives every user over 2gb of free space to store emails. But it’s really a sin not to use it in some more interesting way. A little application called Gmail Drive will create an additional drive on your file system but will store all the files copied to this drive at your Gmail account. You will be able to access files using standard applications.
  • The Gviewer. Gmail has very useful internal viewer for a number of different file types (such as pdf, doc, xls and even more). So it means you can always open such files even you don’t have proper applications installed (e.g. reading mail from Internet Cafe). It is so simple and useful so even with all these applications installed on my home PC I usually use it to read incoming documents. Moreover u can use it on your PDA and it makes it really priceless!
  • GMailed GTD. Gmail has that brilliant “labels” functionality (labels are equal to tags) so it is a great way to use it as a base for GTD. You can read more on this topic in this detailed instruction: “Getting Thinks Done with GMail
  • The GM Data Manager. Gmail is very useful to store and organize information of any kind. E.g. simple copy/paste to a new letter will take less time to open some other application, copy/paste there and then save a new file. And organizing features like labels and stars combined with the Google search would make the data loss impossible. By the way do you know you can use the plus symbol in your gmail address? If your address is e.g. nick@gmail.com, you will also  receive emails to such addresses as nick+work@gmail.com or nick+something@gmail.com. So you can setup a number of rules to sort the information depending on it’s “To:” field.

That was my simple list for the group writing project at ProBlogger. Hope you will forgive me my mistakes cause English isn’t my native language but I am trying hard to make it proper. If you know some other interesting non standard uses of some web2.0 services could you please post them in the comments?