ProductReview Archives - Page 5 of 16

Memorability App Review

Memorability is a free photo book app for iPad. It uses a simple drag and drop interface to allow you to create photo books. The completed photo book can be shared on Facebook, by email, or on a private Memorability social network.

There are many themes available for the photo books. Quite a few come installed with the app, others currently cost $0.99. The themes are attractive and the finished photo books are lovely and professional looking.

I met the developer of the app at BlogHer13. She told me if I used the Promo code BLOGHER I could get a theme free. Feel free to use the promo code yourself. I should have entered the promo code the moment I downloaded the app on iTunes. Later, when I selected one of the $0.99 apps to download it was too late and I had to pay for it. Learn from my mistake.

I gave the app a test run. I didn’t have any particular topic in mind like a family event that I wanted to make a photo book for, so I just randomly choose some photos from my iPad. I selected the theme I’d purchased and was ready to go. Each theme has a number of page options, so I first selected a page type, then dragged a photo into it. Some pages allow the addition of text. Some allow the addition of sound. Some have areas for more than one photo per page. All the page options are obvious and simple to use.

I made several pages. A double tap let me preview. I selected to share on Facebook and the app created an mp4 file, which it sent to Facebook. Later I decided to email the file to myself, so I selected share by email. The iPad went through the process of creating the video file all over again and sent it to me.

Unfortunately the mp4 file created by Memorability is too large for WordPress to accept, so I can’t show it to you here. Since I only had 5 or so images in the photo book, the large file size is a drawback to sharing for someone like me who was thinking of putting the video file on the web.

It’s easy to edit a photo book once after you’ve completed it. It’s easy to get to the list of all the photo books you’ve made. Really, this app is just plain easy to use.

As far as I can tell, it’s only available for iOS right now, but it’s early days for this app. I’m sure it will expand in future versions.

Memorability has a Facebook page and is @MemorabilityApp on Twitter.

Moto X (video)

Google and Motorola have been advertising the heck out of Moto X. It responds to voice commands, uses gestures, is customizable and more. The feature that appeals to me the most is fast access to the camera. Here’s the ad for that.

I live in the Apple universe, not the Android universe, but seeing Glass the other day and looking at the features for this new phone make me think about developing a split personality.

Are you impressed with these features? What do you want your phone to do?

4 Useful Tools for Testing Page Load Speed

When it comes to maximizing the user experience, the importance of speed cannot be overstated. A slow website, no matter how great the content, no matter how aesthetically pleasing, will test users’ patience. Speaking of which, if there’s one user whose patience you don’t want to test, it is Google.

The search engine giant made it official in 2010 when it announced “we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed.” Indeed, there is a direct correlation between page load speed and time spent on site. All things equal,the faster site will achieve higher rankings. For anyone whose business model depends on high search engine rankings, speed is an absolute must.

Fortunately, there are 4 very useful tools for testing page load speed.

Firebug’s Net Panel

Firebug is a preferred tool for most web developers, and one reason for this this awesome little plugin makes life so much easier when it comes to analyzing almost any aspect of a page, including load time.

To test load time with Firebug, navigate to the page in question. Next, enable the “Net Panel” by selecting the “Net” tab and then clicking “enable.”

Now reload the page and watch as Firebug displays load times sequentially on a graphical timeline, be it for CSS, JavaScript or image files.

You can click the “+” sign to the left of any item to drill down into other sub-processes, such as headers, response, cache, cookies, etc.

PageSpeed Firefox Plugin

PageSpeed is a Firefox plugin that extends the functionality of Firebug. Once you’ve installed PageSpeed, access it by opening Firebug and then clicking on the “PageSpeed tab. Next, navigate to the web page in question. Once it has finished loading, click “Analyze Performance.”

Once the process is complete, you’ll see a list of performance affecting factors, each hyperlinked to a “best practices” help page for developers. A PageSpeed score is assigned to the page as a whole.

Click the triangle to the left of each item to expand it.

YSlow, by Yahoo!

YSlow is a tool developed by Yahoo! that suggests analyzes webpages and ways to improve speed. Once installed, the YSlow icon will appear in your Add-Ins bar at the bottom of your browser. Click to launch YSlow.

Once launched, the panel expands. Click “Run Test.”

YSlow will crawl the DOM to find all page components, such as images, scripts, CSS stylesheets, and so on. It looks at the HTTP response headers and then crunches page load data according to built-in rules. It then assigns a grade to each rule, in addition to an overall grade for the page. An “Overall performance score” is represented as a numeric value. You can click on any rule to learn why the page received a particular grade.

WebPageTest

WebPageTest is a web-based tool that tests page load speed from
multiple locations around the world using real browsers. It displays results in
a waterfall chart format, and provides diagnostic information, as well as suggestions
for improvements. Grades appear at the top of the Performance Test Results,
which you can click on to access a Full Optimization Checklist that goes into
detail about the specific findings.

Waterfall results are displayed, in addition to pie charts that show a content breakdown represented as percentages of requests made, and bytes sent.

Guest author Mike Woods is a part-time author and real estate broker specializing in helping buyers find homes for sale in Indianapolis and the surrounding area, and understand the complex home-buying process.

Adobe Creative Cloud

I knew I’d have to do it sooner or later as long as I continue to teach. And, oh, wow, look at my Dock:

That’s a lot of Adobe software, folks.

I joined Adobe Creative Cloud the other day. I downloaded everything! It took a long time, and my computer was burning hot when it was over.

I don’t know what half of these programs do. I must spend some time mining the video tutorials on the Adobe site to learn about all the fantastic new stuff I can now do. Jeepers, maybe I’ll be able to export SVG from Illustrator soon.

One piece of good news. The Extensions Manager version I had before CC crashed each time I tried to use it. The new one works. I have two extensions managers now, one for CS6 which works on Fireworks CS6, and one for CC, which works on everything else.

The biggest piece of news is that I completely misunderstood what Adobe Creative Cloud was all about and how it was going to work when I first wrote about it. So here’s the deal for those of you who are confused like I was.

When you purchase a plan, you can download any or all the software you paid for access to. It will automatically be updated (which I sincerely hope happens faster than the initial downloads). You can keep files on your own computer, you can back them up to the cloud, you can share them with collaborators – or not. You can install on more than one computer, too.

You see that curvy looking icon at the far left in the image of my Dock at the top? That’s the CC icon, and it works like going to the app store for updates (well, until iOS 7 kicks in). You see what you have downloaded, what’s available for download, and what’s ready to update in a handy little interface.

You don’t have to be connected to the Internet to use the software.

Review: WordPress: The Missing Manual

product

[Disclosure: I received a free copy of this book from the publisher for this review. Opinions are my own. Links to Amazon are affiliate links. Here is my review policy.]

WordPress: The Missing Manual (Missing Manuals) is by Matthew MacDonald from O’Reilly (2012). It provides complete coverage of everything that WordPress can do. You’ll learn how to set up a blog from scratch, all about plugins, widgets, themes, hosting and more. I’ve been using WordPress for years and I learned several new things that I didn’t even know WordPress could do.

Topic by topic, the writer leads you through each section of the book with clear instructions, lots of good screen shots, and plenty of tips about how to make it all work perfectly. I like the fact that this book deals with everything from starting the simplest blog on WordPress.com to the most advanced and specialized uses you can create with a self-hosted blog.

Downloadable code examples are included with the book.

The table of contents is huge. I will give you a fast glance of some of the topics included. I’m skipping a lot – if it’s about WordPress and you don’t see it in my list, it’s probably here, because everything is here. My fast list of topics: getting started, writing posts, URLs, themes, media, pages, menus, comments, plug-ins, mobile sites, authors, SEO, feeds, stats, child themes, fonts, custom category pages, custom fields, e-commerce and more.

I’m scheduled to teach some WordPress classes soon, and I’ve been looking for a book to help me organize the topics that need to be included in that class. This book is perfect for that.

O’Reilly has a whole series of Missing Manual books. This book is representative of the entire series, which are generally a great resource for complete information about software.

Summary: Positively everything you might ever want to know about using WordPress is in this book.

You can buy the book from O’Reilly, as well as Amazon.

A review by Virginia DeBolt of WordPress: the Missing Manual (rating: 5 stars)

Playing catch up with HTML and CSS? Here are some recommended books.

Carolyn Wood asked this question on Twitter yesterday.

I used plain old HTML and CSS yrs ago. Now so much to catch up with. If I only read 1 or 2 books to COMPLETELY catch up, what shd they be?

— Carolyn Wood (@carywood) June 9, 2013

I responded with two suggestions that are current favorites of mine. I’ve reviewed them both here. If you’d like to know more about what I recommend as the two best books for catching up, here are my reviews:

I often see people in my classes who learned HTML and basic CSS back in the day and who need to bring themselves up to date. These two books will be a big help if all you want to deal with is two books.

Useful Links: Up to Date, Responsive Radio, Syfy app

How to Keep Up To Date on Front End Technologies is a new site with suggestions for Twitter lists and websites that can help keep you up to date.

Web pages that respond to the device is now a mantra in the web dev world. How about radio broadcasts that respond to the user’s situation and location? Check out The BBC shows off “perceptive radio” that can alter scripts. Here’s a working demo, which they suggest works best in Chrome from locations inside the UK.

In a similar vein to the BBC experiments, I am here to sing the praises of the Syfy app. I’m a fan of several shows on the Syfy channel, including the currently running Defiance and Warehouse 13. With a sync feature, the app pings you periodically with information about what’s happening on the screen – simple things like the name of a song in the background or something about the scene or actors. Here’s the really cool part. If you record the show to watch at a different time from the original air time, the app still knows where you are in the story and the information it feeds to you matches your personal viewing schedule.