ShowDocument: The ‘Super-Collaboration’ Website That Integrates Various Web Apps Together

Hammad — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 14:58:49 +0000

Thanks to numerous ‘collaboration’ websites, you can easily create and edit documents online with help from your friends. But what if you wanted to collaborate on more than simply documents? What if you wanted to perform some calculations or watch a YouTube video together with your online friends? To perform these and other similar tasks you will need a ‘super-collaboration’ website.

“ShowDocument” is that super-collaboration website.

Introduction

ShowDocument is a user-friendly website that lets you freely collaborate with online friends using numerous web applications. The collaboration apps provided by the site include a document creator plus editor, a video conference tool, a live chat room with translation features, an online whiteboard, a tool to watch YouTube videos together with your friends, and many more.

Usage

Before you can start using ShowDocument, you will need to sign up for an account. With it activated, use your account information to login to the website. You will find a big orange “Start a Session” button.

Clicking on this button will display a new window with the available applications that let you collaborate.

A wide array of collaboration apps are available for use. In addition to the abovementioned apps, these apps include sharing a computer file, sharing the feed from your webcam, sharing your monitor’s output, jointly using a units converter, jointly browsing websites, and playing Set or Tick-Tack-Toe with online friends.

In this review, we will be covering the YouTube application. You can easily try out the other apps and use the sharing procedures outlined below – they apply to all ShowDocument apps.

The ShowDocument YouTube Application

To open the YouTube application you simply click on the corresponding icon. A application tab will be opened in the same window. All the opened apps are viewable via tabs on the top. With the YouTube, you get links and thumbnails to popular YouTube automatically displayed. You also search for YouTube videos and enter the URL of the video if you already have it.

The selected video is played across all participants’ windows at the same time so you all view the YouTube video together. While you view the video, you can draw on it using the pencil tool; the drawings are shown across all participants’ screens.

In the left-most pane of the application window you will find a chat window where participants can talk to one another.

Inviting Participants to Your ShowDocument Application

Under the participants list in the chat window you will find a button labeled “Invite New Participants.”

Clicking on this button opens up a window that displays the URL to the ShowDocument application you are using.

In addition to the sharing the URL, you can send email invitation or copy share the numeric code; friends can type in the code at ShowDocument’s homepage and reach your app’s page. Before joining the application, friends specify a nickname for themselves. That is all they need i.e. they do not need to register for a new account on the site in order to start collaborating with you.

Pricing

ShowDocument’s free account offers collaboration sessions that are only 30 minutes long. You get only 10MB of storage and each app can have up to 3 participants with the audio and video disabled in chat. These restrictions are lifted if you go for the paid option; the paid account costs $30 per month. Before going for the paid account you can test it for free for 30 days.

Conclusion

ShowDocument is definitely an amazing website. It is perhaps the only website that merges so many collaboration web apps and provides them under a single dashboard. The features offered by the free account are sufficient to benefit most computer users.

You can visit ShowDocument by clicking here.

ShowDocument: The ‘Super-Collaboration’ Website That Integrates Various Web Apps Together originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)
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Manage Your MP3s In Mac with Tagr

Jeffry Thurana — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 13:43:14 +0000

Collecting music in this era has become much easier. People don’t have a big room with wall shelves full with cassettes and discs anymore. Instead, almost everything has been converted to digital file and is tucked inside a digital storage. Saving real storage space, searching time and eliminating the pile of dust.

On the other side, the convenience of digital music raises another problem: digital file management. Take a peek into your music collection, how many files have their names and information right? Maybe it’s far less than a half. If your collection consists of less than a hundred MP3s, the process of tidying up the wrong names would be a breeze. But everybody I know has thousands of tunes in their library.

Tidying Up With Tagr

Luckily, the “organizing MP3 collection” process could be simplified with the help of a free app called Tagr. This little app (only about 2.3 Mb) claims to be able to edit information such as a song’s artist, title, or album cover. Tagr also allows you to control the way your files are named. Tagr also features integration with discogs.com that allows you to search for album information and artwork and apply it to your songs.

To use Tagr, users simply drag and drop their MP3s into the Tagr windows to be edited. Dropping down an entire album is possible (and advisable), so the user can add or edit the information in a bulk. Just select all MP3 files and user can tinker with the attributes.

There are sets of editing menu available:
- Numbering: to edit the tracks numbers. Users can choose to have a leading zeros before the track numbers (01, 02, 03, and so on) and the track counts behind the track numbers (01/18, 02/18, 03/18, and so on).

- File Naming: Users can edit the original file name to include either: Artist and Title, Track and Title, or Track, Artist and Title.

- Capitalization: Users can choose to change the track names into: Title Case, UPPERCASE, or lowercase.

- All In One: do all the above at once to all the file selected.

As an addition, users can add attributes such as Artist, Album, Genre, Year, Comment and album art to the selected files. These attributes will be part of the file, and users should not be afraid that they would be lost – even if the files are moved to another computer.

Just be sure to hit the “Save to Disk” icon after you change the MP3s information.

The Minus Side

IMHO, here are the few things where Tagr could be improved:
- I tried to drag and drop songs from iTunes and failed. Maybe the future version of Tagr could support this. iTunes might be a superior player, but it still has some limitation such as adding album art. It would be nice if we could do it easily with the help of Tagr.
- To retrieve songs’ information and art from the Discogs.com to be applied to the songs, users have to go to coverflow menu. This additional step is not described clearly and lazy users could get frustrated trying to locate it. Maybe adding a search box and a right click menu to access this feature would greatly appreciated by the users.

So, in conclusion, Tagr is a nice little helper in managing names and tags of MP3 files, but it could be improved.

Have you tried Tagr? Or do you use other application to manage your MP3s? Share your thoughts using the comment below.

Manage Your MP3s In Mac with Tagr originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)
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