More services Stories

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When will we stop talking about the cloud? If history is any guide, eventually the idea of the cloud as something that is separate from the web will disappear as more people get used to it — although when that will happen is anyone’s guess. Read more »

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Tero Ojanperä, who has been with Nokia for 21 years, is leaving the company and is going to be working for a new investment fund, Vision+, that will fund apps and services. In Ojanperä, Nokia has lost a big champion of mapping-based services. Read more »

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It’s become common practice to use services such as bit.ly to shorten URLs, but this is usually done using a bookmarklet script, which only works in browsers. This Automator service allows you to select an URL in any application and shorten it using the bit.ly API. Read more »

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OS X includes a great tool called Automator, which makes it really easy to take the sting out of repetitive tasks. Recently, I ran into a situation where I had to combine a bunch of PDF files into one. Luckily, Automator makes it dead simple. Read more »

Choose to spend an hour one way, and you miss out on all the other ways you could have spent that hour. But have you ever thought about opportunity cost as it relates to the products and services you offer within your business? Read more »

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If you believe the marketing hype, you aren’t really a true Mac user unless you have MobileMe. MobileMe is pushed heavily in the Mac and iPhone UI as well as the Apple retail environment. Fancy terms like “beyond the box sales” are a clever way of […] Read more »

I’ve been playing around with Google Quick Search Box lately and am especially enjoying this services plugin from Martin Kuhl which lets you activate and pass input to OS X services right from within QSB. One snag though has been that services created through the new […] Read more »

Originally introduced in OS X Tiger, Automator is a drag-and-drop form of scripting. You can create workflows to easily speed up many tasks. With each version of OS X, Automator has seen some improvements, but with Snow Leopard, it finally realizes its full potential. It realizes […] Read more »

Much like a migratory bird is genetically driven to fly south for the winter, I am driven to bloviate online. And so over the years I’ve accumulated my fair share of blogging accounts. I’m very active on Twitter, have a WordPress blog, a Flickr account, Facebook, […] Read more »

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Last week Gizmodo published a leaked proposal (32MB PDF) from marketing agency Lippincott detailing plans for Microsoft’s upcoming brick-and-morter retail stores. It makes for mind-numbing reading, running at a mammoth 124 pages of (mostly) brain-freezing execu-speak. I’m glad I don’t work in Marketing. It’s a troubled, […] Read more »

Editor’s note:  With this post we wecome Doriano Carta to the WWD team. Doriano, better known as “Paisano” on Twitter and everywhere else online, has written for several blogs including Mashable, SarahLacy.com, PistachioConsulting and Chris Brogan’s Dadomatic.com where he is also the Editor-in-Chief. How much are […] Read more »

There are a few really handy features in OS X that get very little attention – perhaps because they don’t have a snazzy GUI, or maybe it’s because they only appeal to certain users. Whatever the case, Summarize (found in the menubar under the Application menu) is one of those handy features that gets little attention, but delivers big by helping you get to the point. Read more »

According to a report in Friday’s Charlotte Observer, North Carolina lawmakers are falling over themselves to entice Apple to build a state-of-the-art server farm in their backyard — specifically, Catawba or Cleveland county. The carrot they’re dangling? In this case, nothing short of a multimillion-dollar tax […] Read more »

As web workers are generally spread across countries, timezones, cultures and organizations, creating and applying coherent management to distributed teams is challenging. Late last year, Celine shared some tips on avoiding conflicts within a teleworking team. Around the same time I came across UK-based “business psychology” […] Read more »

A little while ago, I reviewed the service offered by GigPark, which was essentially a referrals network to help people find and share service providers. Qapacity is a new tool that works along the same lines, although it goes about it in a completely different way. […] Read more »

There’s a trusted maxim in the marketing game: cheap razor, expensive blades. It comes from the practice of selling razors like the Mach3 or Fusion for next to nothing, and then selling the disposable blades for said razors at a rather more expensive price. Consumers tend […] Read more »

As we covered last week, free services I Want Sandy and Stikkit are closing shortly, joining a growing list of Web 2.0 free-to-consumer startups that have shuttered their sites. It’s not just the little guys that are going out of business, either: Google Lively is set […] Read more »

ShareTool is a piece of software which allows you to easily access your Mac from a remote location. To quote their tagline: “ShareTool is hands down, the fastest, easiest, and most secure way to access all of your Bonjour services from anywhere in the world.” The […] Read more »

WWD’s Mike Gunderloy covered Mozilla’s Weave project back in December, noting its usefulness in synchronizing bookmarks between a user’s various installations of Firefox…essentially moving a Firefox user profile into the cloud. Monday saw the release of a major update to Weave, bringing in several new features […] Read more »

Web designers, font purveyors, professional paginators and even application developers need sample data to test their layouts, creations and algorithms. “Lorem ipsum” has been the de-facto standard when placing non-distracting text into test areas and has been shown to exhibit characteristics of standard lettter, word and […] Read more »

Joining the ranks of iPhone-specific web applications, is the web hosting company, Media Temple (mt). Their angle is to offer iPhone-toting customers, access to control panel services for their (mt) hosted websites. Buy Domains, pay bills, reboot your server, and a slew of other options await […] Read more »

Alright, so while the title of this post is more or less accurate, the polish and full suite of capabilities are not there. But Jing certainly does a nice job of combining the power of Snapz Pro X‘s video capture abilities with the simplicity of Skitch […] Read more »

So for everyone who’s ever complained about the .Mac service, someone is finally trying to do something about it. The notMac Challenge is offering up a choice bounty (at least $10k!) for anyone who can develop a .Mac alternative that’s as easy to use as Apple’s […] Read more »

Services are a part of OS X that many users either don’t even know about, or forget to use. They are a powerful bunch of actions that you can apply to your workflow – mostly in cases where you’re working with text. In this Screencast, I’ll […] Read more »