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A.nnotate Shares Documents for Peer Review
Posted by Kevin Purdy at 6:30 AM on May 23, 2008
Free markup sharing site A.nnotate offers a simple tool for letting co-workers or friends comment and review a document or web page without installing specialty software or hosting a web conference. Upload a Word document, PDF, or other file, or just pass A.nnotate a web page address, and you can start highlighting text or choosing areas to leave notes, either in the margins or as floating boxes. Once a page is started, the creator can email links to as many people as they want to comment. A free account at the site gives one person about 25 pages per month to offer for markup with unlimited annotators, but advanced offerings are available starting at $10 per month.
Cubescape, a free design tool from code wizards The Man in Blue, is a refreshingly easy way to design a great-looking logo, send a memorable message, or just doodle with the simplicity of stacked blocks. The controls are super-simple, consisting of coloured and clear blocks you drop and arrange into patterns and a tool to destroy your errors. Hit "Save," and your design is locked away, and you can link to a time-lapse animation of how you built it. Feel free to send the URL to that discouraging high school art teacher.
If you've been tinkering with (or just thinking about) Adobe's multi-system AIR platform and wondering if any apps are worth your time, 
Free travel guide site Schmap has crafted a pretty nifty interface for iPhone and iPod touch users looking for spots to hit while travelling. Navigate to the city you're travelling through, pick a category like restaurants or banks, and scroll through the vertical list of results. Flip your iPhone/touch sideways, and points from the section of the list you were scrolling through are mapped out, and contact and directions info are provided when tapped. Pretty handy for finding notable spots nearby without having to cross over applications. Point your iPhone or iPod touch to the link below to access the web app (but regular browsers can head there as well).
For certain projects, even the gargantuan list of pre-installed fonts on your system just won't do. When you want to create your own font but don't want to learn the archaic process for doing so, you want free font designer webapp FontStruct. FontStruct provides simple tools to colour in integrated blocks. You can fill out just one key letter or a whole font, distribute your creation freely or with rights reserved, and offer it up as an easy-to-install TrueType font. Using FontStruct's tools requires a free sign-up—or you could just browse FontStruct's library of original fonts for download.
Once upon a time, if you wanted to access or share a file over the internet, you either had to have your own web server to upload it to or hope the file was small enough to sneak in under your email account's upload limits. Nowadays, you can upload and share gigabytes worth of data for free using a handful of web applications designed to make sharing and storing files online a breeze. We've covered 
The Red Ferret Journal points out a slick, Japanese upload-and-convert tool for giving photos that browned-out, decades-old look. Select a photo or paste in a URL (both words are written in English, as luck would have it), and hit the bottom blue button. The photo results aren't returned at full resolution, but, depending on lighting, quality, and, of course, modernity of subject, you can get pretty authentic-looking results without any image editor filters or plug-ins. The site is free to use, and (it appears) doesn't restrict upload file sizes.
Internet Relay Chat, or IRC, is the grand-daddy of group chat applications, but it's far from the most inviting and easy-to-grasp apps out there. Mibbit, a free web-based IRC client, aims to change that. Jump right into a chat node if you've got the address or a specific search, or register an account and see what people are talking about. A huge number of tabs can be kept open simultaneously, and registering gives you a Firefox-like ability to launch all your favourite channels upon signing in. If you're looking for tech support, looking for a chance to yak, or just looking to try out IRC, Mibbit is a slick first step.
Want to share a presentation with friends, co-workers, or the web at large without worrying about who does or doesn't have PowerPoint installed? authorStream, a free presentation sharing site, offers the same kind of embed-anywhere utility as previously-posted 
