Mygazine a Great Compilation of Magazines

Mygazines is an online, simple yet comprehensive magazine archive. User upload, share, bookmark, send via email, comment on and, of course, read articles from magazines from all over the world. All this is a very sleek interface. First the user logs in and searches for a magazine they want to read, then they click on “read” and the magazine pops up on the screen in form of an elegant and feature-rich “flipbook”. The quality of the material is fantastic! Users can also use their keyboard arrows to browse through the pages of the flipbook.

Here are some of the features of the flipbooks (more info on their “flipbook help” page):

Just like anywhere on mygazines.com, from any page in the flipbook you can:

 rate an article (you must be logged in)
 comment on an article (you must be logged in)
 save an article to a mygazine collection (you must be logged in)
 share with friends (you must be logged in)
 social bookmark to your favorite site
 email an article to your friend
 tag article with unique keywords (you must be logged in and have permission)

Gliffy - an Online Alternative to Microsoft Visio for Flowcharting

Well, everyone is talking about Gliffy and I don;t want to be redundant, but I have to give my opinion about it as well. The program lets users collaborate on flowcharts and diagrams online. This is a very good and free (for public documents) alternative to desktop diagramming tools such as Microsoft Visio, OmniGraffle, FreeMind and many others, but with an advantage: besides being online with no extra plugin required, it also allows users to collaborate and co-author flowcharts and diagrams, which comes in handy when participating in some sort of creative process while geographically distant.

Even though the web application is an innovative technology that can not only compare but also outdo desktop applications and is definitely is ahead of everyone else in the online diagramming arena as far as professional look and feel is concerned, Gliffy is still a little glitchy (no pun intended) if not missing features. (I’m sure they will work on this soon.

One of the major flaws in it is the lack of immediate update without attaching a “version number to the file”. There are to bad outcomes of this:

1- If you and a colleague are collaborating AT THE SAME TIME on the same document you won’t immediately see the changes they’ve made to a document. I haven’t tested this on complex flowcharts but I wonder if there will be any conflicts between versions if both save their version simultaneously.

2- If you make any minor change to the document and decide to hit the “save” button, a new version number is attached to the document… So, a freak about saving stuff like me will have a v178 of a document after 20 minutes of editing and saving.

Another catchy thing about Gliffy (and it is part of their business plan) is how they only allow free accounts to create public documents and require users to purchase their premium account for unlimitted documents and the option of making them private.

Competitors can be:

• Bubbl.us
• MindMeister - more focused on “mind mapping”.
  
• Mindomo - same as above.
• Mind42 - Another collaborative mind mapping tool that stands out for the array of features ranging from keywords to speed up the process of creation to assigning icons to process and creating image nodes that import images from URLs.
• Comapping - not free but cost-effective and feature-rich collaborative diagramming solution.

A.Viary Invites

So, I have been testing a.viary features. Aviary is a collection of online imaging software. Their suite is supposed to be feature-rich. The developers keep a very creative and thought-provoking blog. You can tell they are really trying to approach online production tools from a different perspective.

So far they have Phoenix (image editor, like an online “Photoshop”) and Peacock (a pattern creator) running. But they plan on implementing many other tools soon.

I have 4 invites for Aviary and would like to give them to people in the learning field so they can have a chance to try these tools while they are still in private beta.

Please leave a comment here telling me what connection you have with learning or eLearning (instructor, student) and come back to let us know what you think about the tools once you’ve used them. I think it would be really interesting to know what people in the education field think of this type of tools.

A hint, leave you email address in the comment in this format (to avoid spam): username [at] domain.com.