Kodingen

As a coder, I've never found cloud-based IDEs to be very useful. Sure, its a great idea, all of your data and project work accessible from any location and securely stored. It sounds like the perfect development environment. I had played around with Cloud9IDE, but I never felt that they were getting it quite right, they had moved in a good direction, but their scope was too limited. I didn't just want to store my open source projects in the cloud, I wanted shell and FTP access, I wanted a small hosting platform for testing, I wanted the ability to share and publish my creations at will. No cloud IDE could give me that... until now.

Enter: Kodingen. Kodingen is a web developer IDE, plus FTP server, plus SVN/Git/CVS host, plus web host, plus platform. Its hard to describe all the things Kodingen does, or... will do, rather. Lets get that point out of the way first. The first thing you should keep in mind when building things on Kodingen is that it is a beta platform. Work has been progressing fairly rapidly as they gear up for their big stable release, but in using this as a development platform, you'll run into things that just aren't built yet. For instance, the integrated domain purchasing/linking: I have no idea how this will work in the future, it looks like a good idea, but the final product has yet to be released. As far as version control systems go, don't count on it just yet, those are still in development. For every feature that Kodingen has, there's another feature that just isn't finished yet. I don't really see this as a downside, however, instead, I feel very excited for what the future holds.

For a very-much-in-beta project, Kodingen is one of the slickest HTML5 applications I've laid eyes on. Everything slides in panels, smooth animations permeate every little thing, right click menus are abound and easy to use, and the interface is extremely clean for how powerful it is. They rely on a bunch of open source tools and technologies, which is a huge benefit for them (no licensing) and for their users (we can move away if we want). The major gripe I have is that we haven't heard from the developers in quite a while, the last public post was from March 16th. When you get into the backstory of the project, though, you can't really fault the guys. Kodingen was built from savings, without investors, without VC funding, without Techcrunch Distrupt or the LAUNCH conference. This incredibly useful, incredibly cool project was built by a very small team of developers with their own money. Very cool.

One thing that I wish worked now was the ability to pay for an account, out of all the features to lock out in the beta, I was initially surprised this was one of them. When thinking about it, you wouldn't want people paying for a half-baked, unfinished product, though. These guys are smart, they aren't greedy, and they know how to make their users happy. Progress is slow, but the site is fast and stable, and I'm sure when they finally release 1.0, its going to make a lot of people happy (and hopefully make them a lot of money as well). In the mean time, why don't you sign up for the free account over at https://kodingen.com and consider throwing these guys some dough if you like what you see.

Aardvark

I've stumbled upon a cool, new web service called Aardvark. Essentially, its ChaCha, but with a much higher limit on the amount of questions you can ask (7 at the moment), and on top of that, the limit resets daily. I've been using the service for a while now and have not been disappointed. Lets take a look at how the service works:
You submit a question to Aardvark via web, IM, or iPhone app (SMS and Android app in development!). Aardvark then sends the question to other users who want to answer questions on that topic. For instance, my topics include: Linux, Technology, Android, The Internet, and Operating Systems, among many others, so I receive questions on those topics (If you want, you can also take on any open question that has not received an answer yet). Aardvark then passes your question around to various individuals and has them give their best answers. Questions usually receive 2-3 answers, and times range around 5 minutes to a few hours for all answers to roll in. The time taken to get an answer back is relatively short, and the answers themselves tend to be more personalized and helpful than ChaCha's, which I have found to be unreliable at times. Question-askers are then asked to say "Thanks!" click one of three choices to rate the answer they received. "Was So-And-So's Answer Helpful?", you can choose: Yes, No, or Kind of but not for me. This helps Aardvark weed out the less-than-helpful users and give more questions to the higher-rated ones.
Aardvark is a pretty cool service, and with enough people and time, it could be as well known as Yahoo Answers or ChaCha, there are only a few things holding it back:

• The lack of an SMS option:
• The lack of an Android App
• Any major (revealing) news from the site regarding them being picked up by Google.

But the service has more going for it than against it, including: Social integration with Twitter and Facebook, a very well done (and innovative) community voting page, and a service that not only works, but provides great service to all of its users. Whenever I'm logged into my IM client, I absolutely love seeing Aardvark pop up with a tech question for me to answer. If I don't feel like it at the moment, I can tell it, "Busy" or "Pass" and it gets the idea. Aardvark doesn't bug me at all, its all very wonderfully tuned to be just the perfect amount of user interaction. Do yourself a favor and try it out today, I'm sure you'll quickly become a fan.


Aardvark

When is Good?

Have you ever wanted an easy way to set up a time to meet somewhere, do a project, plan a big dinner, or just about anything else that involves a group of people with busy schedules? If your group is part of the digital age, plan your next dinner party/act of terrorism with When is Good. A very simple site, but it does the best job of getting you an answer with the least amount of hassle, you don't even have to register!

First: Choose some dates and times that work for you by clicking them.

Next: Write down your super secret code (remember, you don't have to register!).

Then you'll receive some links to throw around. Need to change the event? No problem! Just be warned though... any already submitted responses will be deleted. Send the invites off and wait for everyone to chime in!

When you get responses, When is Good will bring up a helpful little chart of who can and can't make it.

If your invitees leave comments, you'll be able to see those as well with a mouseover.

Click on a day, and a synopsis of who can and can't make it will pop up. Leaving you the amazing task of who you should leave behind.

And that concludes the screenshot tour of "When is Good" . A simple little web app that comes in handy just often enough to be of use.

http://www.whenisgood.net/

SnapPages: Website creation for the rest of us.

Have you ever wanted to build a webpage without bothering to need Dreamweaver, Frontpage (also known as 'complete shit'), or an open source solution, like Kompozer? I've got the answer for you: SnapPages! This isn't a site for you hard-core hand-tweaked code people, nor is it a solution for people that need an relatively large amount of space to play with. But for everyone else just looking for a website building utility that comes with more power than the others, you've found your fit.

SnapPages makes every page a drag and drop effort. Pick the piece you want from the sidebar, drag it over, then click it and edit its options. SnapPages has an amazing amount of content to choose from and modify. If you want, you can even use the built in banner-creation utility to create modified and animated banner logos for your website. 

But you don't only get to create simple pages, you can choose from themes, blogs, photo galleries, shared, public, or private calendars, or pages that only your friends can see.

Don't know exactly where to get started? Let the "Page Templates" fuel your curiosity. From profile pages to contact forms, this is pretty much as easy as it gets. 

Go ahead! Give it a try! The only thing you need to be concerned about is that some of the themes require a paid membership, but the free stuff works well enough for personal pages. A great option for those looking to create a webpage for personal use, but aren't willing to grab a dedicated server or hosting plan. Sweet, simple, sexy, SnapPages brings Web Design to the average user.

Daily Lit

Haven't posted in a while, but I've been reading about a ton of new tech. While I could go on about the amazing Public Beta of Windows 7 (which I've been using for about three weeks already), or Palm's return to form with the new Pre. I'm going to delve into a website I've been using for years that I think you should give a shot.

First off: We don't have time to read. We have jobs, classes, friends, family matters, and reruns of I Love Lucy to attend to on a daily basis. Reading just doesn't top our priority lists, and even if it does, we have to deliberately carve out sections of our day to make it fit. The solution is DailyLit. An amazingly simple idea that allows you to read a book slowly over time through email or RSS. DailyLit sends you small, easily digestible chunks of books to your inbox, your cell phone, or your favorite RSS program. They even include a link to grab the next chunk instantly if you get really involved in the story.

Most of the books on DailyLit are public domain or Creative Commons licensed (this means FREE), but there are a few premium books scattered here and there. You won't find the newest books or best sellers here, but if you feel like reading a classic, you're in luck. Next time you're at work, checking emails, browsing digg.com, and genuinely wasting your time, try something new, feel like you're making a slow but steady accomplishment by reading a book on DailyLit. Check it out, I'm sure you'll like it!

DailyLit.com

By the way: Right now I'm reading Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, and I'd suggest starting out with Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. Its quite the amazing book that takes a detailed look at Copyright and how its essentially broken and useless in this day and age of technology. But that's another post for another day.