As the name implies, I hope to turn the site into a useful resource for all of us in that kind of role, so for interview & articles about supporting and testing OS X and iOS apps, head on over to wesupportsoftware.com.

I often find myself sharing screenshots with colleagues and friends. There are a ton of applications out there that will help you do this, but most of them rely on you taking a screenshot and dragging it to another application.

GrabBox is a free app that lets you share a screenshot whilst skipping that second step: just take a screenshot and it will automatically add it to your public Dropbox folder and creates a short url for you to share with friends. It puts that url on your clipboard so you can paste it right away.

Here’s a clip of GrabBox in action:

[video src="movies/GrabBox.mov" width="640" height="400" options="controls autobuffer" id="vid-1"]

What I love most is that I don’t need to change my workflow: I just hit the regular OS X keyboard shortcut to take a screenshot and GrabBox does the rest: snap, paste, done.

The ugly icon, and the fact that it runs in your Dock instead of your menubar are two minor gripes, but overall it’s highly recommended!

Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, Mail – we all get more links to articles and webpages nowadays than ever before. I would often find myself coming across an interesting article, but would lose track of it in a mess of tabs, unless I read it right away.

Bookmaking is the most obvious option, but you risk cluttering your useful bookmarks with lots of items you’ll only look at once.  So how can you organise your reading? Here’s the system I use…

One-hit wonders

If I’m skimming Twitter (using Twitter for iPhone or Echofon on the Mac) or my RSS feeds (using Reeder app on my iPhone or NetNewsWire on the Mac), I probably will only read the linked items once.

But if I haven’t got the time right away to fully immerse myself in the article, I send anything that catch my eye to Instapaper, using the handy Instapaper bookmarklet. This service will store the URL for you, until you’re ready to read the full article. The nice thing about Instapaper is that most Twitter clients and RSS readers now have “Send to instapaper” functionality built-in. You can either browse stored articles via the website, or use one of the many Instapaper clients available for several devices, including Amazon’s Kindle.

Then, whenever I have a slot of time set aside for reading, I head over to Instapaper and go through the articles. Anything that’s been read is archived, unless I know I’ll what to reference it at some point later – which brings me to…

Reference Material

These are the tutorials, how-to’s, cheat-sheets and other million useful sites that the internet seems to churn out daily. If I know it’s a topic I might need to look-up later at some point, these types of links get sent to my Delicious account, where they are tagged and can be easily looked up when I need them. This helps me to save time doing research on a project or subject later, and helps solve “if I could only find that one site”-anguish.

Essentials

Any website I find myself using daily eventually gets added to my Safari Bookmarks bar (I don’t bother with the “non-bar” bookmarks). Alternatively, if it’s a project-specfic URL, it might get added to a VoodooPad document for later reference.

That’s basically the way I do most of my online reading – I’d be interested to hear the apps and services you guys use!

Let me know if you find any weirdness, or just what you think!

Head over to Simple Desktops to check them out!

• Select “More Options” on the results page
• From the sidebar, select “Fewer shopping results”

And you’re done! Google will hide most of the shopping results, making it easier to find reviews, tips and other product information.

Mail alternative: Gmail

I’ve never been willing to lock myself into a $99 / year e-mail service, simply because my main e-mail address is something I’d like to be able to keep indefinitely. Gmail can collect (and send) e-mails from a variety of providers and addresses, offers free IMAP support (a must-have for iPhone owners!) and doesn’t include advertising in the messages you send. The storage is basically unlimited and nothing is ever deleted.

Pros: No ads in mails, best-of-breed webmail interface, IMAP support, works great with Mail and iPhone once configured

Cons: IMAP mailbox configuration a bit tricky

Calender Alternative: Google Calendar

Surprise surprise, another Google app! Google Calendar offers basically the same range of features and can be configured to sync with iCal (Google actually provides a handy tool called ‘Calaboration‘ to set things up for you automatically). Perks include free SMS appointment reminders, simple calendar sharing and fast natural language scheduling (e.g typing “Dinner tomorrow at 9pm” will schedule the appointment accordingly).

The web interface is a little less pretty than MobileMe’s, but it gets the job done.

Pros: SMS notifications, iCal integration, CalDAV support, natural language entry, useful “Agenda” list view of upcoming events

Cons: -

iDisk Alternative: Dropbox

I’ve raved about Dropbox in a number of other posts, so I won’t rehash to much of the details here. Suffice to say that Dropbox has the best cloud-based document syncing and storage service I’ve come across. It’s integration with the Finder is perfect, it offers seamless version control and makes sharing with Windows & Linux users a breeze as well.

The only real difference is the storage size – but it’s a big one: While free Dropbox accounts can sync up to 2GB of files, Mobileme offers 20GB of storage. Beyond the free plan, Dropbox also offers a 50GB package, but that costs as much as Mobileme does.

If you don’t need to sync and store large amounts of data in the cloud, Dropbox is perfect. If you do need more storage, then Mobileme is worth reconsidering.

Pros: Seamless cross-platform OS integration, easy sharing, version control & “undelete”

Cons: Only 2 pricing tiers, web-interface a bit tricky at first

Photo Gallery Alternative

Mobileme’s iPhoto Gallery feature is probably my favorite aspect of the entire package. The galleries are a little slow to load, but are very nicely presented. The ability to download an entire Zip file of an album is also a nice touch and the iPhone presentation is the icing on the cake.

But there’s a plethora of picture sharing websites out there that offer similar functionality: I’m just going to name a few that stand out for their decent iPhoto integration:

• Facebook Photo Gallery
  • Pros: built-in iPhoto support, support for Faces, fast & simple web presentation
  • Cons: no album downloading, requires Facebook account
• Picasa Web Albums
  • Pros: Dedicated upload tool, album downloading, 3rd party application support
  • Cons: less storage space, uglier web interface
• Flickr
  • Pros: Community-features, built-in iPhoto support, nice web presentation
  • Cons: Limited monthly uploads and image downloads for free accounts

Overall this might the dealbreaker if you really need to share a lot of images with friends online. Sure, you could always just throw a zip file of your images on your Dropbox account (see above), but if there’s one standout feature of Mobileme, this is it.

Conclusion

There are lots of great alternatives for Mobileme’s individual services worth checking out. Whilst they may not offer the integration that Mobileme does, they sure give the service a run for its money and are worth a look if you’re on the fence about signing up or renewing your account.

Oh, but if you do decide to stick with Mobileme, you can save a bundle if you buy it through Amazon.

Songbook app

Songbook (app store link) is is a free app that will read Chord Pro files and display them on your iPhone. Getting the files into the application can be a bit tricky, but once you have figured that out it does a decent job of displaying them. However: Most not all guitarist sites on the internet offer versions in the Chord Pro format, which slightly limits Songbook’s usefulness.

Convert to PDF

You can also just convert any old webpage to a PDF and email that to yourself. It’s workable, but leaves you with fairly tiny, illegible versions of your songs… not ideal either.

Chordie.com

Chordie.com is a site that basically works as an aggreator, crawling chord and tab versions of songs on other sites. What makes Chordie special is that it automatically detects chords within files and can then also do clever things such as transposing songs for different vocal ranges or instruments. It displays chord charts for all the chords used in a song and also features an auto-scroll mode.

On your iPhone the site will be displayed in a great, touch-friendly format and a tap on a song will start and stop the auto-scroll feature. You can also create a free account on the site and strore your favorite songs in your personal Songbook, making it easy to access songs with just a few taps.

Conclusion

Personally I’ve found Chordie.com easily the best way to access chord and tab files from my iPhone. The main drawback is that it requires you to have an internet connection, so the other solutions might come in useful from time to time as well, but Chordie is highly recommended!

Dropbox

Yes – I know I’m raving about Dropbox again. But we needed a way to share files and code with a 5 member team, without resorting to e-mailing things back and forth. With various team members using Mac, Linux and Windows, Dropbox’s OS-level, cross-platform integration is a perfect fit.

Setting things up is simple too: Simply create a Folder on the Dropbox website and e-mail a link to that folder to your team-mates. They can free Dropbox accounts (which offer 2GB of storage) and simply drag & drop in their own files or revise yours. But don’t worry – Dropbox has a full revision history, so you can revert to an older version of your file if somebody screws up.

Google Docs

Whilst Dropbox is great for sharing files, there are occasions where you might all be working together on a single file or project  in a local environment. In those cases I’d normally suggest using the excellent SubEthaedit collaborative writing tool, but unfortunately it’s only available for OS X.

Instead, we’ve recently started using Google Docs. It allows you to share a file you’re working on with other members of a team and is a good way to split up assignments without having the hassle of merging the work at the end.

The editing tools are fairly basic and there’s no easy way to redefine things such as headline styles without resorting to CSS hackery, but it’s a good way to pull your text together before you put the finishing touches on in a “real” word processor. 

MIA: Basecamp Webapp for Students

These tools are pretty good, but what’s really missing is a decent webapp to pull these types of tools together in a way tools such as Basecamp do. The free Basecamp account is pretty good, but the lack of file hosting is a pretty large omission and students aren’t going to pay for this type of service. A lot of colleges and universities use software such as Moodle to offer these types of services, but they’re mostly geared towards entire courses, rather than smaller group projects.

So if anyone feels like stepping up to the plate, I’m sure there’s a market for this type of webapp!

I had no trouble loading any pages and even complex pages such as my netvibes.com customized homepage (which is slow to load on other browsers) seemed to load very quickly (and this was in a virtual machine!).

Despite this being a 1.0 release, Google has already included some more “advanced” features such as a source code view option that includes coloured markup and a DOM inspector feature. 

The “tabs on top” UI choice doesn’t really bother me – I didn’t find it inherently better than the standard tab model either though.

What is interesting is how sparse the UI is otherwise though. It mirrors Google.com in many ways: You won’t find a menu bar anywhere in the main window, just a limited number of understated buttons and a clean consistent look – quite a relief when compared with IE 7 and Firefox 3′s busy, crowded looks. 

The good

• The home screen with your latest bookmarks and most frequently visited pages looks more practical than launch pages such as Netvibes or iGoogle.
• Bookmarking with a single click
• Google searches directly from the address bar
• Intelligent address shortening (e.g. “jetplanejournal.com/2008/08/jetplane-review-v-moda-vibe-duo” is truncated to www.jetplanejournal.com in your history and recent addresses)

The bad