Weekly Kickass Web App x 2! Backboard vs Bento
Creative Fluff is coming at you with a Holiday Special: We’re tossing out two weekly kickass web apps in just one week! That’s a lot of awesomeness, I know, so just calm down and bear with me. I’ve made things easy by finding two web applications that are similar enough for comparison. No need to thank me now, just sit back and lets examine BackBoard and Bento. The first application we will discuss is Backboard, which at first seems like any other online project management software, but on closer inspection it’s actually a tool for people to review your work, leave comments, and offer advice. The second unique web app is Bento was is a great tool for freelancers to keep track of projects and invoices.
Backboard is a relativily new application which sets itself out to be an: ”easy [way] to securely collect feedback and approval on documents, presentations, graphics, and websites.
Use it with your team in the office or around the world. There are no meetings to schedule and Backboard handles all of the coordination for you.” Backboard makes a great place to have virtual meetings and get feedback and I figured the best way to see just how great the software was would be by testing it out. As most of you know I launched Megalongcat.com about a month ago so that Creative Fluff would be spared of my rants; so I decided lets test out how good it is at managing my super awesome game-plan for marketing Megalongcat.
There are some issues that are easily overlooked. You can set Backboard to take a screenshot of a website if that’s what you’re designing, however the script that takes the picture can sometimes mess up and it reads the code on the page wrong and re-creates the page wrong. Notice the two “feedback” buttons in the screenshot. There should only be one. Aside from the simple quirks of any online application, I found Backboard to be really streamlined and efficient. I could add a list of people via email addresses to review my work and leave comments. There was even a pen tool so that a person could mark up the page (with a red pen, get it?) and leave comments on why they did. However, all of this falls apart if you don’t have the proper personal file organization to even get work up on BlackBoard to review. That’s where Bento Comes in.
Bento is a file organizational software platform that has it built in to pretty much organize anything you might need, here are some examples:
- Address Book
- Animal Stats
- Article submissions
- Artwork
- Assets
- Book Characters
- Buddies
- Chat Dictionary
- Classes
The only gripes that I have with Bento are that it is only available MAC OS platforms, and that it’s a solid framework which doesn’t allow for excessive amounts of custimization. However I strongly reccomend Bento for Mac users who don’t want to bother with the nuts and bolts of a program and just get the files in order. If you haven’t looked them up already check these two programs out at:
http://www.filemaker.com/products/bento/overview.html
Weekly Kickass Web App – Action Method
Action Method – Online Project Management software for when Sticky Notes aren’t Enough.
That’s what the tagline for Behance’s online project management software called Action Method. The software claims to be a “radical approach to productiviity and project management”(ActionMethod.com) both online and offline. Therein lies one of the most interesting features: the fact that whether I’m on the go or at home toiling away, I can access my projects at any given time and update them with where I am on a project. Let me tell you being a designer means at any given moment there’s 1000 projects that you have to keep track of.
After making a free account you set up your project based on the following factors:
ACTION STEPS are tasks that need to be completed. Each Action Step should start with a verb: “Call Y,” “Follow up with X,” “Buy a gift for Z.”REFERENCES are notes, links, files, sketches – any information related to a project that gives context to your Action Steps.BACKBURNERS are the brilliant ideas that you want to come back to later, but are not yet actionable.DISCUSSIONS enable you to manage ongoing conversations across all of your projects with anyone that works with you. All relevant communications (shared documents, solutions to problems, feedback, decisions) are in one place.EVENTS are the key occasions/meetings/milestones/etc toward which you (and your team) are working. Events can be used to coordinate deadlines for Action Steps. (ActionMethod.com)
Weekly Kickass WebApp: Friendfeed & Twirl – Twitter’s Stalker Replacement
Before even talking about this week’s kickass web application, lets talk about what makes it so especially awesome. Most kickass web apps come not from invention, but from innovation and FriendFeed is no different. Twitter, perhaps one of the most widely used microblogging tools has indefinitely been filled to capacity and we’re starting to see scene girls from Facebook (who came from myspace) pour into our tweets and @replies leaving us designers and creative individuals with a bitter taste in our mouths. In order to make life easier to deal with in regards to Twitter, there was an amazing innovation. Why not just let us just have multiple microblogging and social networking streams flowing through one application. Twirl and Friendfeed do exactly that.
Twirl is actually a program developed on the Adove AIR Platform (Guess adobe is getting pretty serious). Twirl describes its main features as such:
- runs on both Windows (2000/XP/Vista) and Mac OSX
- connects to multiple Twitter, laconi.ca, Friendfeed and seesmicaccounts
- notifications on new messages
- shorten long URLs (using snurl, twurl or is.gd)
- cross-post twitter updates to Pownce and Jaiku
- post images to TwitPic
- search tweets using Twitter Search and TweetScan
- timeline filtering
- color schemes
As you can see it’s got what it takes to make stalking easier and Twitter a little less trendy. The only gripe I have with Twirl is that it’s directly related to Twitter. Friendfeed on the other hand, is something new unto itself.
FriendFeed talks about itself as a place where you can:
“invite some friends, and get a customized feed made up of the content that your friends shared — from news articles to family photos to interesting links and videos. FriendFeed automatically imports shared stuff from sites across the web, so if your friend favorites a video on YouTube, you get a link and a thumbnail of the video in your feed. And if your friend likes a news story on Digg, you get a link in your feed. FriendFeed makes all the sites you already use a little more social.”
Friendfeed is nice because it allows for direct embedding into things such as iGoogle so there’s no need to install any sort of software to your desktop. It just needs access to your other social networking applications and you’re good to go. Imagine it as a combination of Feedburner, Wordpress, Twitter, and Twirl. You end up with Friendfeed. Give both of the applications a go if you’re looking for something different ot manage your blogging or social bookmarks. Enjoy!
