What does every writer-in-the-making need? The right inspiration, the right plot, helpful tools, or the proper environment? Truthfully, all of these! But there’s something he needs when he’s done with all of these, and that something eventually proves to be more critical than everything else. That’s a qualified, patient, and honest editor.

While there are heaps of professionals out there who can do the job of an editor extremely well, every small time writer might not be able to afford them. What he needs is someone to do the job for him equally well, but at a much reasonable price. And that’s where the Hemingway App steps in.

Hemingway App is a one of a kind online editor that allows you not just to pen down your thoughts, but helps you improve your writing performance by highlighting grammatical, syntactical, as well as prose and voice related errors so that you can make your writing bolder, stronger, and clearer. Check out the amazing features and working of this tool in our complete review here.

Hemingway App – Making your writing bolder and clearer!

Hemingway App is an online writing and editing tool that offers users a distraction-free environment to jot down their creativity. It is a rather simplistic tool with only and only what’s needed for it to do its job. When you visit the tool’s homepage, you land up right in front of the editor with a sample text written within it and suggested changes highlighted in different colors. Each color is associated with a kind of change that the tool suggests you should make. The tool indicates what kind of edit you should make to make your text more descriptive, meet it’s intended goal, hit the audience in the way it is supposed to, and be interesting too!

For example, in the sentence “You can utilize a shorter word in place of a purple one”, the word utilize is highlighted to indicate that the user should make an edit here. If the user hovers the mouse over the highlighted word, an appropriate suggestion is made by the tool to make the sentence more readable and easily comprehendible. In this case the suggestion was to replace the word “utilize” with a simpler word like “use”. So basically, the tool helps you tone down your content where needed and also makes it more forceful where applicable.

The key features of Hemingway App are:

• It cuts the dead weight from your writing by highlighting wordy sentences in yellow and fiercer ones in red
• Highlights adverbs, passive voice, and dull, complicated words while suggesting you to change them thus making your writing more powerful and clear
• The tool can be downloaded as a desktop app and used without Internet
• Includes text formatting options like bold, italics, headlines, and bullets
• Supports one-click integrations with Medium and any WordPress blog
• Handles everything you need for a web page, including HTML headings, formatting and links
• Once you’re ready to publish, it allows you to export your content as HTML or Markdown for your blogging platform or CMS
• Can work alongside other editors like Notepad, PDF, or Word by facilitating direct import options

This is how the tool works

Much of the tool’s working has been described in the previous section, however, here’s a concise account of the steps to use it:

1. Visit hemingwayapp.com and start writing in the middle of the screen
2. Wherever you make errors, words or phrases will be highlighted with one of the following colors indicating appropriate edits as described below:
   1. Yellow for length, complex sentences. These should be shortened or simplified to help readers understand them easily
   2. Red for extremely complicated sentences. This sentence should be edited to remove typically difficult words.
   3. Purple for words that have a simpler alternative
   4. Green for passive voice. This should be replaced with active voice words
   5. Blue for adverbs. These words can be omitted to make your writing stronger.
3. By default, the “Edit” mode is selected which will highlight errors on the fly. If you’d like to finish writing first and then make all the edits at one go, switch to the Writing mode by clicking on the “Write” tab on the top-right corner of the screen. This actually helps focus.
4. Text formatting options can be found in a horizontal menu placed at the top of the editor. Highlight the text you wish to format and click the appropriate formatting option to apply. Standard keyboard shortcuts also work.
5. Interestingly, the tool also displays a summary of the kind of read your writing is. To see this click on the “Show more” label from the right hand panel of the screen. You should find the following attributes:
   1. Reading time
   2. Letters
   3. Characters
   4. Words
   5. Sentences
   6. Paragraphs

This should help you get an idea of how your readers will perceive your writing.

Pros and Cons

The pros obviously include user-friendliness and utility. However, there are a few negatives too.

• Many of the tool’s features cannot be experienced with the free online editor.
• To take advantage of features like platform integrations, publishing, etc. you’ll need to buy the desktop version of the product

• Write bolder, writer clearer, with the @HemingwayApp hemingwayapp.com/ via @supermonitoring

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On the whole

Hemingwayapp is a useful tool. And priced at $19.99, it isn’t too costly either. If a basic editor with correctional abilities is what you’re looking for, this is the app for you. For advanced features however, you might want to look elsewhere.

How often have you heard the remark, “I’ve always struggled with my grammar”? Mastering the proper use of written English language is tricky even for native speakers of the language, let alone, people foreign to it. The punctuations, articles, phrases, similes, etc. that make up the language are sometimes too much to handle. And if the use of English is not directly linked to your livelihood, you can still manage. But if you’re a writer, a teacher, or a professor, the wrong choice of words could mean make or break for your career.

At this point if you’re thinking, ‘that’s why Microsoft built Word with spell and grammar check’, well, it’s time to expand your area of thought. ‘Coz we’re going to introduce you to a free online tool that will let you master written English language like never before. Presenting – Grammarly.

Grammarly – a writer’s best friend

Literally! If you’re among those who like to run a quick spell and grammar check on your documents before you submit them, you will fall in love with this tool instantly. It is slick, it’s simple, and it’s free! Grammarly not only points out errors in your documents, but also gives you suggestions to fix them. And we agree, MS Word does that too. But here’s what really sets the online tool apart from the document editor. Grammarly lets you fix highlighted errors with just one click. You read it right – one click only! Click on a suggested fix for an error, and it will be done.

The intuitive tool monitors your documents to make sure everything you write is mistake-free, easy to read and effective. And that applies not just to spelling errors, but also to misplaced words / phrases, incorrect grammar, wrong punctuation, verb mistakes and anything “grammar-y” you can think of.
Still thinking of your trusty Word spell check? These features might help in convincing you:

• Grammarly instantly fixes over 250 different types of errors, most of which MS Word cannot find
• You can find the perfect word for a sentence each time through context-optimized synonym suggestions
• It even points out correctly spelled words used in the wrong context so that you can avoid embarrassment
• The mistakes in your work are highlighted in a very subtle and interesting manner so that you can better learn about them and avoid them in future
• It lets you correct your grammar on any platform including emailing, social media, document editors and more through specialized add-ins.

With algorithms developed by the world’s leading authorities on linguistic technology, Grammarly goes beyond basic grammar and spell check and helps you become a better writer.

This is how it rolls

To start using the tool, you’ll need to create a free account with Grammarly. A simple signup later, you’ll be assigned your dashboard. In the dashboard you’ll be able to find various options in the left-hand panel that will help you perform different operations with the tool.

• My Grammarly – your work page containing all the documents you upload to the tool for correction.
• Profile – here you can view your account settings (name, email, password, etc), add words to your personal dictionary (so that words particular to your work are no longer flagged as misspellings), and / or select if you want to work with American English or British English.
• Apps – lists all apps suited to your account type. A free account is entitled to a browser extension, an MS Word add-in, and a native app for your desktop.
• Premium – page that shows what’s available with the premium edition (paid edition) of Grammarly and how much it will cost you (you can of course stick to the free account and still use the tool for as long as you want).
• Support – your help guide to the tool.

Once you’ve made the basic settings, you can start using the tool by uploading a document to be checked. If you need a little hands-on practice, Grammarly provides a Demo document with mistakes that you can open to work with yourself. Try it and you’ll get a pretty clear idea of how to use the tool (and how good it can make your work). Additionally, once you open a document inside Grammarly editor, you’re provided with a number of options to enhance it:

• You can turn specific checks on or off (contextual spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, style)
• Check for Plagiarism issues (available with Premium account)
• Enhance the vocabulary used (available with Premium account)
• Get your document proofread by a professional (available with Premium account)

Additionally, you can paste content directly into the editor or create a new document directly in the editor (so the tool becomes your online writing pad).

Just for fun and for really testing Grammarly’s capabilities, download the Demo document to your computer (there’s an option to do that). Once you have the document, run MS Word’s spell and grammar check on it and then compare the experience with the Grammarly experience. We bet you’ll choose the latter instantly!

Pros VS Cons

There’s no doubt about the pros.

• It’s way better than the simple grammar and spell check of Word.
• It includes features like vocabulary enhancement, plagiarism check, professional proofreading.
• It allows you to create new documents and check them right inside the editor.
• You may upload and download documents to / from the tool.

There is literally no con to this awesome tool. There is a free basic account that you can use for as many documents and for as long as you want. But, in order to access really helpful features like plagiarism checker, vocabulary enhancer or proofreading, you’ll need to fish out some money (the prices are quite affordable actually).

• Create brilliant, mistake-free documents easily with @grammarly grammarly.com/ via @supermonitoring

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Final Verdict

A must try tool for writers and bloggers. Give it a try for its sheer usefulness; but it you truly want to realize its potential, sign up for the premium account. You won’t regret it!

Nothing steals the thunder from good applications like bugs and errors. That’s why, when they’re still under development, every effort is made to find out and fix hidden bugs and unexpected errors. But it is easier said than done. While creating working code is one thing, fixing bugs, errors and exceptions is another thing entirely. Rigorous peer reviews and layers of checking are conducted to detect errors and fix them before an application is released. Quite often, this error tracking takes up more time than the actual code writing, making it one of the most difficult phases of application development.

What if there was a quicker, simpler way to complete this phase and move your focus onto the other aspects? A way that lets you make sure your users don’t find anything wrong with the application once it is released to them?

Intrigued? Good; because in this discussion we’re introducing a tool that makes error tracking one of the smoothest phases of application development. Meet – Rollbar.

Rollbar – Detect and fix errors before your users

Rollbar lets you prevent production issues before they begin. With an easy setup and instant meaningful results, this is one tool you’ll be glad to have on your side. It lets you analyze, diagnose and fix errors by going down to their root cause. Powered by full-stack error tracking, Rollbar has all the traits to be an integral and reliable part of your application monitoring.

Here’s what makes Rollbar worth your time:

• It collects a lot of context data, including detailed stack traces, request parameters, URL, environment, and affected users, etc to quickly pinpoint what’s broken and why.
• It lets you review error trends by occurrence, browser, deployment, OS, location, user, host and get a deeper understanding of your errors and exceptions.
• Rollbar smartly creates error groups and automatically organizes application errors by their root cause. It even lets you customize your grouping rules to reduce noise and see what’s really happening in your code.
• It works with all major languages and frameworks like JavaScript, Python, Ruby, WordPress, Drupal, Android, iOS and more.
• You can setup notifications for email and services you already use in your workflow. Moreover, you can select to only get notified about the errors you care about.

Additionally, Rollbar allows you to send in notifications of your code deployment to get a 360 degree view of the entire deployment history for each environment and how deploys affect error rates. And above all, the tool’s proprietary language Rollbar Query Language (RQL) provides you with a rich querying interface similar to SQL.

How does it work?

To start using Rollbar you need to sign up. Every account is entitled to a 14 day free trial without providing any credit card information. You can sign up using your GitHub credentials or simply provide your email address to get started. Thereafter you’re asked for basic credentials and 5 minutes later, you’re in the game!

Once your account is created, you’re redirected to a setup page where you can setup the information for the project you wish to track errors for. Enter the following information to proceed:

• Project Name
• Primary Language / Framework (you can select different languages / frameworks for frontend, backend and mobile environments)

Next, your application will be assigned a server-side access token and you’ll be given detailed instructions to setup Rollbar at your end using the language / framework you selected in the previous step. Once the installation is complete, you can move to your application’s Rollbar Dashboard. The Dashboard is linked to your application through code that you’ll be directed to execute during setup. And once the link is established, your application will start sending data to Rollbar automatically.

As soon as Rollbar starts receiving data from your application, you can start seeing its magic. Errors will start being grouped, constant alerts and notifications will be sent to you and all kinds of reports will become available. If you wish to change any setting at any time, helpful options are easily available within the tool’s interface.

In addition to error tracking, Rollbar also lets you setup Deploy Tracking. Just click on ‘Deploys’ from the main menu to access this feature. You can also use RQL to run arbitrary queries on the data you send to Rollbar through a prompt built into the tool’s online platform. If you need guidance at any step, ‘Rollbar Docs’ are available with a click on the upper right hand corner of the interface.

If you’re still confused, take a ‘Live Demo’ of the tool to sort things out.

Pros VS Cons

It all boils down to this – the comparison of the good against the bad. While the pros are easy to spot: automated error tracking, team collaboration, multi-platform integration, deployment tracking, instant reports, constant alerts and more, the cons are a little more subtle.

If you’re using Rollbar for personal projects, you can opt for a free account which entitles you to capture 5000 events per month for unlimited users, projects, and deploys. With 30 days data retention and unlimited rate limits, this account is good for individuals and for project prototypes. However, larger organizations with growing teams and high-volume products will have to fish out sums ranging from $29 – $249 per month. While some might find the price worth it, for others, it might be a little too pricey.

In addition to the price aspect, many users could find the Rollbar Dashboard a little daunting since the tool has a slight learning curve associated with it.

• Hassle-free automated error tracking for your application – @rollbar rollbar.com/ via @supermonitoring

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Verdict

Good tool aimed at a great purpose; however, suitable for a specific audience only. Try it out before you take a decision to invest in it.

Are you employed online? Do you have your business online? Is your computer your God father? If so then all your web projects need Usersnap. A visual bug tracker for all your web projects.
Most of us don’t know, don’t realize that there might be glitches in the regular online methods we use and the glitches are nothing but software bugs. Usersnap is an excellent solution for a problem like this.

How does it work?

Usersnap.com enables you to create bug reports and collect website feedback without complex feedback forms and endless emails. The Usersnap feedback widget adds in-page reporting to your web site and web project meaning you can co-relate the problems your users are facing and find the exact problem running through your page. The process not only gets simpler but gets smarter and efficient too. The only step you have to take is click on the button to send a bug report or give website feedback with an attached screenshot. No plugins required. It’s not only a generic approach to problem solving but it also allows you the functionality on every browser, even on mobile covering all interfaces.

The Usersnap dashboard is a unique feature that collects all bug reports and helps you to fix them faster whilst organizing your feedback & bug reports, easily. The dashboard has prominently three major features –The Viewer, Search and Team collaboration.

The Viewer

The viewer allows you to see the browser screenshot and every information you need to represent the issue: Meta Data, Comments, JS errors and more. You can access bug reports and browser screenshots with the Viewer with an exact visual glimpse of different issues and front-end bugs immediately. The Additional meta-information feature allows you to create website screenshots directly in your browser with the bug tracking and feedback widget. It also lets you assign bugs to your web developers in charge and discuss change requests in the Usersnap dashboard.

It is a wonder how a single feature in the dashboard provides you an easy-to-use toolkit for working on bug reports. With the zooming feature you can zoom in and out on every created browser screenshot. You can give feedback, or make a comment in whatever language you choose. The platform realizes that designers and developers or project managers are people with very different approaches; but still manages to put it all on one page. It also offers a great tool for customer support and helps you to understand your clients better creating clear communication.

No one can know your browser better, Viewer gets quicker access to the needed information to reproduce bugs faster while providing information about installed browser plugins and browser versions. It also helps you to view and solve browser-specific issues inside.

The Search

Search – as the name suggests – helps you find and track for a certain prioritized information on immediate basis. Search makes it all simple by exactly giving you the required information, screenshot or any bug report in an instant. You can look up by name, date or issue definitely upgrading your web experience.

The Usersnap Search is more than just searching. It literally gives your memory a break by offering you different options – such as Labels, Assignees and Reporters – in order to access the needed information faster. The Meta information or certain filters – can be easily accessed. It’s a productive feature as it can look up info with the user’s name or members name who have created or tested those files. Just type in the tester’s name or scroll down to “reporter” and you can select one of your bug reporters and see all the files in similar concern. You can also type full text versions for example just type “Chrome” in the search and all screens will appear. You can even add labels to your full text search (label: bug) which have been reported with Chrome and they will all magically appear. Making hours of work done in seconds.

Team work is the spirit of every task, working with a team gives you more options suggestions and faster solutions, considering the same Usersnap allows you to invite your team members and co-workers to start working together on issues and front-end bugs. You can also assign bugs to your web developers in charge and discuss change requests directly in the Usersnap dashboard.

With the bug tracking management tool provided by Usersnap you can manage your bug tracking team and work together on solving bugs. You can give feedback, create browser screenshots or make a comment in whatever language you choose. The Usersnap dashboard is available 24/7 and functionality works for every team member, in every location; even the Moon. It’s user-friendly and gives your website testing team all the quality assurance it needs.

Super power for Web developers

Usersnap has a beautiful beneficial edge for web developers. It allows them to get visual bug reports with advanced client-side JavaScript error recording making their work extremely simple and reducing thousands of possible scenarios to one.

XMLHttpRequest logging comes with every report, allowing your development team to know what actually happens when a user clicks on a button and it doesn’t work. It’s like giving your developers direct access to the Matrix. The feature also records JavaScript errors as they happen, along with a host of other information needed for super-faster bug reproduction and debugging. It is great to provide data as to which file and on which line the problem is along with even more information.
It also helps in recording user actions to submit with the bug report. In some cases the local time of the user is incorrect, so it’s harmonized with server time as well.

Website Interface

The interface is well laid out, visually attractive and very user friendly. There are familiar tools like highlight, pen, note etc. to help you to express yourself & provide feedback. The speed and function are not affected by the websites loading time. You can choose your look and themes as per your corporate identity. Custom made forms for easy information exchange.

• Never ask for a screenshot again. Get it from the visual bug tracker @usersnap usersnap.com/ via @supermonitoring

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Pricing

Usersnap gives you 15 days free unlimited access, so you can take some time to find the best plan for you. There are three major plans starting at a minimum of $19, $49 and $99. The plans are focused on the no. of projects you are associated with for starters 1 Project with Dashboard and e-mail integration is available at $19 only. There are team and agency packages as well as per your use. Easy and affordable so start now.

Sticky notes, a pen, the pixel ruler will no longer be required as now everything is simple with Usersnap

Bugzilla is an application which can be used by firms to detect and get rid of bugs in their products or softwares. Using Bugzilla developers can keep a track of bugs in their products effectively. Most of the applications developed for similar purpose come for a huge amount of fee but this application developed by Mozilla is totally free and has many features that other heavily priced defect detection applications may lack. Bugzilla is used by many organizations today to keep a check on the bugs.

Bugzilla makes it easy to manage the quality of your software or program, track changes in the code, review patches and communication with the team mates. Bugzilla can prove to be very helpful in the software development process. Bugzilla would help your team get organized and communicate with your team effectively. Bugzilla is constantly under test by the Mozilla foundation and has a good support team. Bugzilla is trusted by many world leading technology companies. It can be installed on many operating systems like Windows, Linux and Mac. Bugzilla is known to reduce the downtime and increase customer satisfaction, increasing the productivity and improving communication of the team working on the project.

Setting Up Bugzilla

It is one of the most well known open source defect tracking and management system used by Eclipse, Mozilla and many linux distributions. One can install it on Unix or Linux environment and runs on Perl, using MySQL or PostgreSQl as backing database. A web server is also required Apache would be a good choice. Installing necessary Perl modules and setting up the databases is required to set up the Bugzilla software from the command line.

Searching and Fixing The Bugs

Bugzilla has user friendly and powerful search features which is capable of detecting thousands of bugs and you can search for existing issues using keyword based search even advanced search option can be used to filter any database fields.

The bugs which cannot be reproduced are the toughest bugs to fix. A bugzilla guided bug submission process which allows a developer to gather facts and have enough information to reproduce the bug. Bugzilla will ask the submitter to provide information which is of importance to the developer and a proper fact gathering process results in an on-time resolution of a bug.

Features

• One can get email notifications for changes in the code.
• List of bugs can be generated and in different formats.
• You can schedule daily, weekly and monthly reports.
• Reports and charts generated based upon the database.
• Can detect duplicate bugs automatically.
• Can estimate the time a bug may get fixed in or can keep a track of time while you fix a bug.
• Patch viewer gives a colourful and nice view of any patch attached to the bug.
• Bugzilla has the ability to streamline the process of detection and resolution of a bug forming a logical way of bug resolution.
• Supports resolution dependencies as resolution of a bug may depend upon resolution of another bug preceding it.
• You can set bug priorities by involving customers and knowing which tickets are more important to them.
• You can restrict access to a group of engineers or a single ticket depending upon your preferences.
• You can save your search for bugs and you can use the combinations of OS, Email Address, Keyword in Ticket text, Software component, Software Version, Assigned Engineer , Bug severity, Platform and Priority.
• You can also add trace or inputs as an attachment to the ticket. These traces and data may contain information regarding the causes of the error.

These features make this tool powerful and though it has a never ending or extensive list of features, these were some of the important one’s which make Bugzilla the most quick and efficient bug tracking tool.

Bugzilla includes reporting and charting features one can implement charts, tables and to display graph of data over a time frame all you need to set up are some special data sets which would collect the data on a regular basis.

Bugzilla supports large projects and you can handle multiple projects at the same time by grouping different related projects into one category using the classification option and you can define components. One can assist project management and quality assurance by defining various versions, milestones and release versions.

Logging into Bugzilla

After installing the application to your dashboard you can login using these credentials

Username: admin@example.com
Password: password

it is recommended that you change the username and password after you login for the first time.

Setting parameters on Bugzilla

To set up parameters on Bugzilla you need to click on administration and then on parameters. you can now add the email address of the person who’ll be managing your application.

How does it work?

Bugzilla involves creating new bugs and moving them through a series of states which are decided by the developer. Each state change records data within the bug record and this can be reviewed or reported at some later date.

The process involves creation of bugs,assigning or resolving them. The assigned bugs are either resolved or changes are made to their ownership. Now, resolved bugs can be verified, closed or re-opened. The re-opened bugs are again possessed by the developer and the bug is assigned again or gets resolved by the developer.

The state of the verified bugs can be changes to Re-opened, Unconfirmed or Closed states depending upon the bug is whether fixed or is sporadic. The closed bugs can also be reopened or Unconfirmed when it is hard to trigger the error. Unconfirmed bugs can be confirmed, new, assigned or resolved.

• Track bugs efficiently using @bugzilla – the most reliable bug tracking tool. www.bugzilla.org/ via @supermonitoring

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Bugzilla is one of the best bug tracking tools available today. It helps to improve the customer developer communication and ensures that the productivity is increased by a well managed bug life cycle from the submission until the bug is resolved.Proper administration of bugs will lead to a quality product, satisfied customer, and a productive team. Bugzilla would help the developing team to reach their goals on time and delivering a quality product.

Try using Bugzilla to detect bugs on your products and do let us know about your experience in the comments.