webware

Grooveshark released a major update to its popular streaming music service with a slew of new features and changes. We jumped into the waters to play around with the bigger, badder shark and see how it compared to similar alternatives.

The first thing you'll notice is a sleeker, cleaner layout. The universal sidebar on the left has been removed and consolidated into the My Music option. We found this change to be welcoming, as it not only frees up space, but also brings the spotlight to the navigation changes. Grooveshark has organized navigation and exploration into four main … Read more

Whether you're an aspiring producer or just itching to drop a beat, Beatlab makes it fast, easy, and fun to forge a quick track.

Many of us march to our own rhythm, sometimes unconsciously. We see it everywhere: commuters bobbing their heads on the way to work, students lost in their music players, or even those who beatbox under their breath when they think no one else is watching. Don't kid yourself; we know you've done it, too, at some point. Artists, musicians, and producers consciously try to tap into this rhythm when they are brainstorming or … Read more

Ever wanted to give your old 2D pictures or photos that extra oomph? How about adding an extra dimension to that dusty two-axis plane?

3Defy Modeler is an interactive Web app that allows users to transform their photos into three-dimensional objects for free. Built by a team of passionate engineers, designers and 3D enthusiasts, 3Defy provides a a relatively basic set of tools to alter two dimensional images. Powered by Adobe Flash Player 11's 3D technology, users can turn various objects in their images into separate layers. Each layer can be exaggerated by users using 3Defy'… Read more

When it comes to sharing ideas and communicating stories, sometimes it's just easier to present your thoughts by drawing them out. Not just for Pictionary, online whiteboards are great collaborative tools to help you visualize your thoughts and brainstorm ideas. These Web apps not only throw out the smelly dry-erase markers, but also add a few tricks to make sharing your works faster and easier than ever.

A Web Whiteboard (AWW), developed by Senko Rasic, was designed to be minimalistic and simple to use like a real whiteboard. Coded in HTML5, AWW not only performs smoothly, but leaves little … Read more

There's something about cookbooks that has always amazed me ever since I was a child. Cookbooks have a story-telling quality where the pictures hold as much influence as their complementary textual directions. Have you ever caught yourself staring at a photogenic plate, struggling to imagine what it might taste like or if it was something in your realm of cooking skills? Like a great children's story, visual cookbooks capture the imagination of taste and encourages us recreate what the cook/artist shares before us, without information overload. 

Gojee is a Web app that sets out to … Read more

Talk about a flashback to the early 2000s. Tower defense (TD) games are still kicking strong, and just when you thought it couldn't get any better, Symphonic Tower Defense rolls around.

Symphonic Tower Defense is a rhythmic tower defense game by FrozenFire and JonSandness and is currently featured on Newgrounds as one of the top most played games on the site. In true Plants vs. Zombies style, Symphonic takes a linear, multilane, music-driven approach to the tower defense genre.

The title draws its inspiration from the once-popular Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) series. Those who recall the golden … Read more

When we hear "File-Sharing,", we tend to think of P2P, Torrenting, or even cloud services. Services like DropBox, Fetch.IO, and MegaUpload all support file storage and sharing in some way or another but require a number of steps, such as registration, browsing files, labeling... a process that can easily become messy and time-consuming. Instead, Carl Hu and John Xie strive to remind us of the good ol' days of grade school back when sharing was considered fun, fast, and easy. Their philosophy gave birth to Minus, a Web application that makes sharing files so simple that even … Read more

If someone plotted out your life over the past five or so years, what would it look like? What if you could revisit every comment you've posted, every tweet, every photo you've uploaded or was tagged in, and recall every expression of the ups and downs you've made on the Net...all on a single timeline?

Memolane is a Web app that makes walking down memory lane visually interactive and borderline effortless. It extracts each moment you've shared with your online accounts from popular services such as Facebook, Last.fm, Twitter, Foursquare, and more and combines them into one visual timeline. Each tweet/photo/post/scrobble is organized by its respective tag dates, drawn from APIs and then posted as "memos" under each day.

Once you sign in with your various online accounts, Memolane will lay out your content as memos dating all the way back to the first day you activated your account. (Mine dated back to 2005, which was when I first started using Facebook.)

The Memolane timeline can be controlled either by mouse or keyboard. You can swipe through memories by clicking and dragging the memos left and right or by clicking on a timeline segment located at the bottom of the page. Playing with the HTML5-driven interface felt tabletlike and smooth. … Read more

Let's face it; your daily routine of checking Facebook, browsing RSS news, writing e-mails, sending tweets have evolved into quite the laundry list. Sweet Labs just released Pokki to sweeten up the task.

Pokki,  not to be confused with those delectable Japanese snacks, is a compact HTML5-based framework that allows users to view commonly used Web APIs in a pop-up shell.

As Web 2.0 continues to gain traction, companies are pursuing new ways to bridge the gap between the web app and the native desktop application. Sweet Labs has recognized that as … Read more