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 SlideShare, but also provides options to download presentations as MP4 video files, putting slideshows with or without audio one step away from YouTube, iPods, DVDs, or whatever format comes in handy. To work as video, presentations must have either recorded narration or rehearsed timings added in PowerPoint, which the Digital Inspiration blog explains in detail at the via link below. AuthorStream [via Digital Inspiration]
Need to make all-caps text a little less shout-y? Don’t feel like going through a ream of lines and fixing all the capitalisation? TextOpus, a free text-filtering web app, is a great place to start. Paste in problematic text and choose from a wealth of options, from line adders to a decent, simple “Clean Text” option to a very handy “Strip tags” that takes the HTML and forum code out of a blurb. For those who know what to do with them, there’s also options to hash, hexadecimal, and encrypt text. Next time you’re staring at a wealth of un-printable babble, try TextOpus before diving in with your mouse and backspace key.
Regular expressions are archaic-looking, extremely specific, and amazingly helpful for finding the right data, files or whatever else you need. RegEx, a free online regular expression tester, lets you hone your expression language and terms down, giving you a box to put testing text in and highlighting the words that match your query. For users of Mac OS X, Linux, or even Windows with Cygwin installed, this web-based workshop (or desktop version) is a great way to get uninhibited but real practice at file-sifting. RegEx’s desktop versions require the Adobe AIR platform installed to run. RegExr [via CyberNet]
More than a year after web-based photo editors began swarming the scene, Adobe this morning unveiled its free, long-anticipated Photoshop Express web app. It doesn’t have nearly a quarter of the options, tools, and tricks of its desktop-based namesake, but it seems like a good platform for anyone who likes to spend a little time refining, and then sharing, their digital photos. The Flash-based app has just 17 basic buttons for editing, a thumbnail display of all the different changes you’ve made, and the album storing (2 GB of space), import (from Picasa and Facebook, among others) and sharing features seem up-to-snuff. In other words, you won’t get layers, channels, and dodge-and-burn, but you can remove chocolate stains from white shirts pretty handily.
Fed up with your bank’s hidden fees and customer service? Before you make the often time-consuming switch to another institution, consider checking out BankSwitcher. The web app (in beta, of course) asks you to grab the financial data from your old bank in the popular Quicken or Microsoft Money formats, then upload it to BankSwitcher. The site generates a list of everything you’d want to do to keep your same set-up—automatic payments, transfers, bill pays, and the like—at your new financial digs. The site repeatedly assures users that it keeps secure servers and doesn’t commit unnecessary information like passwords or account numbers to the hard drive, erasing them from memory after the list is generated. If that’s good enough for you, it could help you get up and running with a new bank and saving yourself money and headaches. Thanks, Keith! BankSwitcher
If you’re already using the Hardy Heron Beta, the next version of the Ubuntu Linux operating system, you’ve also got a dead-simple means of getting web apps like Google Docs, Google Calendar, Facebook, and others running in Mozilla’s online/offline access program, Prism. The Ubuntu 8.04 repositories already have a lot of Google and a few other apps available for installing (sudo apt-get install prism-google-mail installs a Gmail interface, for instance), but you create more using the official Firefox add-on. Hit the link for Tombuntu’s expanded explanation, and leave your impressions of the Ubuntu/Prism integration in the comments. Easily Install Prism Web Apps in Ubuntu [Tombuntu]
Brilliant new file sharing web site EatLime expedites online file sharing by allowing your friends to begin downloading the file as soon as you start uploading it, meaning you don’t have to wait for the file to finish uploading before they begin downloading. You can share files up to 1GB with a free registration or up to 100MB with no registration. In testing EatLime, I found that eventually—once my download caught up with my upload—I was essentially downloading in real-time from the upload, which is fantastic. If you’ve ever shared large files online, you know what a pain it can be in terms of time. EatLime could cut a significant chunk out of the time it takes to share files online.
If you only occasionally need to connect to an FTP site, or find yourself at a computer that lacks one, AnyClient, a free webapp that requires no sign-up, might be just the solution for a quick and easy connection. AnyClient’s Java-based interface is fairly similar to desktop-based FTP clients, and it appears that it can save your connection details for multiple servers, assuming you don’t wipe your cookies on a regular basis. For those not devoted to cross-platform clients like Filezilla or running FireFTP on their Firefox chrome, AnyClient is a free and worthy bookmark—if you really dig it, you can also download the client for Windows, Mac, or Linux.
Want to read a printed copy of a PDF that’s portable and staple-free? BookletCreator is a free PDF conversion webapp that creates documents that can be printed and folded into an easy-to-read booklet. Assuming your PDF is oriented to “portrait” layout and is less than eight pages, you can get what appear to be pretty decent-looking booklets from your document. Got more than eight pages? Tell BookletCreator to split the file into so many pages per booklet, and spread your words and images across multiple copies. BookletCreator is free to use and doesn’t require a sign-up. BookletCreator [via MakeUseOf.com]
Ever wonder how some people can get a grounding in a foreign language in the two weeks before they travel, but your own long-term efforts haven’t paid off? Part of it is natural ability, but another aspect is the enforced budgeting of a crash course. Learn it lists, a free language-learning web application, gives you just 10 words each day to learn the translations of. Granted, speaking and writing a language is more than just knowing vocabulary, but making a small but committed effort every day to building your skills will likely be far more helpful than that two-language dictionary gathering dust on your bookshelf. The site requires a free registration to start using, supports 15 languages (at the moment) and can have its widgets embedded in an iGoogle page. Learn it lists [via MakeUseOf.com]
