Zotify will allow you to download any liked songs, entire albums, artist catalogs, singles, podcasts or playlists from Spotify at up to 320kbps quality in multiple audio formats. Get it while it’s hot.
tools
Five Web Based Analytical Tools That Will Improve your Writing
Over the last couple of months I have stumbled across a slew of new writing tools. Below is a collection of ones I determined to be helpful or interesting.
Sharethrough Headline Analyzer: Helps you craft successful headlines that engage the brain, communicate an idea at the moment of impression while still enticing readers to click through to a full content experience. The analyzer will help you analyze and improve the quality of your headlines, optimizing for both impression and engagement. More here.
Expresso: A practical tool to analyze, edit and compare text styles. Enter your text into the web app, hit analyze, and you’ll get a breakdown of filler words, weak verbs, modals, clustered nouns, and more. The tool relies on metrics that are broken down into two groups: metrics for editing and general metrics. As the names suggest, the first group has useful tools for editing your texts and improving writing style while the second one contains other interesting metrics to explore.
Cleartext: A Mac text editor that only allows the 1,000 most common words in English. It is based on Randall Monroe’s Simple Writer, a web app that does the same thing. Don’t miss out on trying out the Trump Mode.
Proselint: This tool calls itself a linter for prose and is currently only available as a command line utility or a plugin for Sublime Text. Its focus is on detecting redundancy, jargon, clichés, sexism, misuse of symbols, malapropisms, oxymorons, hedging, apologizing, pretension, and more.
Hemingway App: This web app puts an emphasis concision and brevity and not general style. Its goal to help your reader will focus on your message, not your prose. There is also a recently released desktop app called Hemingway Editor 2 for Mac and Windows.
Tweet Topic Explorer
Jeff Clark has created this neat tool called Twitter Topix Explorer that allows you to type in anyones twitter ID to help visualize which topics a person tweets about most often. The tool uses word cluster diagrams to show the most frequently used words in their tweets and how they are grouped together. A Tweet Topic Explorer diagram for my own account can be seen above
The Simplest Weather Forecast On The Web
Umbrella Today? is the simplest weather forecast on the web.
Avoid Street Sweeping Tickets
It’s that time of year here in Denver. Those pesky street sweeping laws that have laid dormant all winter sneak up on you. If you’re not on the ball, you’re getting slapped with a $25 fine ($50 if your not quick). Below you’ll find a map for Denver’s street sweeping areas.
Somebody is doing something about it. Finally.
Enter MyMotorMaid, a “small consortium of concerned citizens whom share an especially acute dislike of gratuitous and unnecessary vehicle parking regulation enforcement.” They will send you an email or text message the day before, and the morning of, your street’s particular days for street sweeping or snow removal. If last year was any indication, this service (which is FREE by the way) will save me about $100. Thank you MyMotorMaid! My suggestion to you, go sign up now.
Xobni Invites
I have five invites to Xobni (private beta). If anyone is interested leave me a comment.
Prospector
Dang! I can’t believe I didn’t know about this before now. But Cass’, the incredibly cute young thing up in Laramie, pointed me out to Prospector. Prospector is a catalog of twenty three libraries in Colorado and Wyoming. Through Prospector you have access to over 20 million books, journals, DVDs, CDs, videos and other materials held in these libraries. With a single search you can identify and borrow materials from the collections and have them delivered to your local library. It’s so easy I can’t believe it. This is gonna save tons of time and increase my library usage.
If your interested in other useful local library tools you should check out this incredibly helpful bookmarklet. It allows you to both search for and hold books books at the Denver’s Public Library straight from any Amazon.com book page. This will allow you to quickly find out if the library has the book before I purchase it.
Stop Snap
Do those annoying little snap preview pop-ups that seem to be proliferating on the webbernutter annoy you as much as they annoy me? To me, they’re simply irritating advertisements that serve no purpose other than to raise awareness for snap.com while masquerading as blog-bling. Yech. Here is how to get rid of them.
Sorry Gotta Go
when you absolutely, positively have to get off the phone use SorryGottaGo.com to help end neverending phone conversations.
Noisely allows you to listen to thousands of podcasts played continuously. Just enter the kind of audio podcasts you would like to listen to.