Gone are the days when shopping needed people to step out of the comfort of their home. With facilities like multiple choice, cash-on-delivery payments, free first-hand trials, and easy returns, shopping for anything, from everyday essentials to luxury items to clothes and accessories, has become a sit-at-home thing. All you need is a hand held device or a laptop with an active Internet connection and you’re set to go. Even leading product vendors realize the immense potential of the mobile device market which is why they come up with novel ways to entice more customers and make online shopping easier than ever before.

One of the newest trends to overtake the online shopping market is that of displaying shoppable images on websites. A shoppable image is one where you see a still photograph of a product in use and can click on it directly to see its price and purchase link. This setup saves you from the headache of having to browse through product catalogues and makes things a lot simpler. Some of the most popular clothing, accessory, make-up, and home decor brands are making use of this kind of direct marketing by simply putting shoppable images as advertisements on various blogs and webpages. If a user sees something he likes, he doesn’t need to click on the image and be redirected to the vendor website where he has to browse through products. Instead, he is straightaway given small clickable icons on the exact products on display which when clicked give him the price of that product and the link to its purchase page. Direct and simple!

Wanna try out this brilliant sales mechanism? Visit LinkLay!

LinkLay – Quickly make product images shoppable

LinkLay is a unique online tool developed with the aim to give bloggers, content creators, online marketers, and even businesses to increase their profits by increasing the click-through rates to product sales pages. It introduces website visitors to a new way of shopping – picking out the exact product they like from the advertisement they’re attracted to.

How many times have you come across an advertisement for a dress or a bag maybe which you really liked but which on clicking led you to the vendor website where you had to sift through thousands of products to find it? Well, say goodbye to that with direct links to the “buy now” page of the exact product you click on in an advertisement, thanks to shoppable images created with LinkLay.

Getting the drift? For some more clarity, here are the best benefits of LinkLay at a glance:

• It caters to the growing needs of internet users who want instant results and a seamless experience
• It gives vendors the chance to keep their audience engaged by directly leading them to the sales page for the product they like and thus prevent a hot sale from going cold
• With LinkLay, embedding a shoppable image on your site is as simple and copying and pasting code snippets where you want it to appear
• Shoppable images created with LinkLay are kept free of any logos
• The platform is Pinterest friendly, Google compliant, and mobile responsive. Plus it integrated with Google Analytics to let you monitor the user impact of your shoppable images
• It is a great way for bloggers, content creators, and e-commerce vendors to convert more sales

LinkLay is compatible with all website builders and e-commerce platforms that accept HTML code like WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Magento, etc. It is powered by an extremely user friendly interface which makes creating shoppable images a matter of a few clicks.

Here’s how it works

To start using the tool, visit linklay.com and click on the red button that says “Start your 14-day trial”. This should lead you to a signup page where you’ll be required to fill in the usual new user information. Once through you’ll reach the dashboard with the following options:

1. First, you’ll be prompted to take a 37-second video demonstration of how to use the tool (first time users should take it). Close the video dialog when done.
2. Play around with the sample image provided by LinkLay to get a better hang of the product usage. Hover over the image to see 4 options – edit, copy code, analytics, and delete.
3. Since you’ve not added any clickable points on the image yet, select the ‘edit’ option.
4. You should now see the enlarged version of the sample image in the right-most panel of the screen and editing options in the middle panel.
5. To start adding click-points on the image, click anywhere on it. An instantaneous pop-up will appear containing the following fields
   1. Product name
   2. Price (indicating price with the appropriate currency symbol is recommended)
   3. URL to the buying page for the product
   4. Option whether or not you wish the user to open the link in same tab
   5. Option to enable / disable a no-follow link
   6. Option to enable / disable affiliate link disclosure
   7. Option to delete this click-point
6. When you’ve filled all fields in this pop-up, close it. The cursor will automatically take you to the next required setting which is color, shape, and size of the clickable icon. Make the desired changes (you’ll see the effects instantly on the image to the right) and click on ‘Save’.
7. Scroll down and give the Call-To-Action button an appropriate name like “But Now” or “View on Vendor Site”
8. Give the shoppable image a name (this is for identification purpose only, the name will not be displayed on the image)
9. Select the gallery on your website where you wish to place this shoppable image
10. When everything looks the way it should, click on “Save and Get Code”
11. This will open a floating pop-up with the HTML code for your shoppable image. Copy this code and paste it into the HTML section of your blog post or webpage where you want the shoppable image to appear.

That’s it, you’re all done. To create a new shoppable image, click on “Create New” from the left hand panel of the dashboard and you’ll be given the option to upload the image which you wish to edit with the same editing options displayed in the middle panel. To have a look at all your shoppable images, click on “Gallery” in the left hand panel.

Pricing & Licensing

For a tool that holds the potential to boosting direct sales, a monthly price of $7 (billed yearly) for a standard account is actually not bad. With an investment as low as that, you get to create 10 shoppable images a month that you can use on 1 website with Amazon Cloud Services backup, Google Analytics integration, no-logo images, as well as email support. Advanced higher priced packages come with even more features.

Not bad at all!

• Boost product sales with shoppable images created through LinkLay linklay.com via @supermonitoring

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Verdict

Quite as expected – a straight double-thumbs up!

One of the most effective ways to market your brand online is through banners. Attractive, eye-catching banners don’t just play the part of getting customer attention they are also one of the most traditional-but-still-relevant methods of promoting your brand image. The easiest example of effective banner marketing is affiliate program banners. They have all the relevant information squeezed into a box sized attractive banner that’s so catchy that a significant percentage of people viewing them end up either visiting the affiliate marketer’s website or actually enrolling for it.

While using banners is one thing, designing them is an entirely different story. Actually, the way your banners perform depends to a large extent on the way they are designed. That’s probably the reason organizations really wanting to reap a significant advantage hire banner designers and marketers dedicated to the end. However, affording good banner designers is not everyone’s cup of tea.

So if you’re a professional just starting out, does that mean you have to lose out on online marketing? Of course not! With Bannerwise, you can design and use engaging banners at an affordable price and capture all the audience attention you want.

Bannerwise – Easily create beautiful banners!

Bannerwise is a tool that lets you easily design ad banners of different sizes for different devices like mobile, desktop, and laptop. Suitable for businesses of all sizes, this cloud-based tool provides users with an interactive online interface where users can either upload images and design custom banners or choose from a rich library of pre-built templates. With users across the globe raving about it, Bannerwise is well on the road to grabbing the spot of the most coveted online banner designing product.

Key advantages Bannerwise offers include:

• Allows thousands of businesses to scale-up their banner production
• Optimize their display campaigns
• Improve their workflow

Here’s a quick glance at the best features of Bannerwise:

• Enables users to create professional HMTL5 banner ads quickly and easily
• Intuitive interface means no coding skills needed
• More than 100 professional animated banner templates
• Allows you to create one design and scaled it to fit all sizes and formats automatically
• You can edit all your banners simultaneously and monitor the changes keenly
• Banners designed with the tool are compatible with most popular ad networks
• Banners are high resolution but low in size
• Professional animations in a few clicks
• Allows easy banner optimization and testing

How the tool works

Trying a tool out before putting money on the line is the smart thing to do. So start using Bannerwise through the free 14-day trial by clicking on the dark pink button that says “Get My Free Trial” on the home page; doing that will redirect you to a sign-up page where you need to fill in your details. Once done, you’ll reach a login activate page with the message “We’re very excited to have you on board!”

But this is where the story sadly took a halt. Quite surprisingly, this message was followed by another one stating that we’ll be contacted by one of Bannerwise’s display experts soon. We weren’t sure why we were rebuffed like that when the next screen we should have seen was the tool’s dashboard. One reason we could think of was that we filled in dummy details since we simply wanted to check out how the tool looked in action.

But even after trying with legitimate details the message was the same. Either the platform was under maintenance or they weren’t accepting new registrations at the time, or maybe that was just the way they operated. But it was unusual. There was nothing more we could do except wait around to be contacted.

Pricing & Licenses

Bannerwise can be used in one of 3 flavors:

• Starter plan that gives a single user access to create about 25 banners for €99 per month
• Standard plan that allows up to 2 users to create unlimited banners for €239 per month
• Professional plan that lets up to 5 users create unlimited banners for €399 per month

There are additional benefits associated with each plan with more features being available with the higher priced plans, obviously. Steep prices if you ask us, but then, if you strike the right cord with your audience through banners created using the tool, you’ll end up making much more that you spend.

• Design creative, elegant, catchy HTML5 banners within a few clicks with @BannerwiseNL bannerwise.io/ via @supermonitoring

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Verdict

We actually couldn’t find out any pros or cons with Bannerwise because we didn’t get a chance to use it. At the time of writing this review, we were waiting for someone from Bannerwise to contact us and take things forward. So saying anything at this point would be futile. But we promise to put up a review of the tool’s working with its pros and cons as soon as we get the chance to experience it.

“As an avid blogger, my mind often throws situations at me that I try to put into words and share with the world. But I’m not great at taking or collecting photos. Thus, often, my personal blog posts don’t feature an image. And I’m well aware that reading a blog post without an appropriate picture takes away half the fun from it. So I usually rely on the Internet for copyright free images. However, recently, I’ve been having a little trouble finding the perfect photos for my blog. Can anyone suggest any good tools or websites where I can find great pictures of random shots? I don’t mind buying them at a nominal price too.”

Sorry, if that went on for a little too much! But what we wanted to share was a problem quite a few bloggers and social media marketers come across. A picture adds weight to any post, thought or expression. You can’t express as much with words as you can with photos. Thus, people are always monitoring different photo-sharing websites in search of the perfect shots to adorn their blogs or social media pages. If you like sharing beautiful shots on your social media timelines or blog posts, Pablo is one tool you should definitely check out.

Pablo – Create the perfect social-media sharable images!

Pablo is an online tool that lets you upload photos or search photos from a huge library and add quotations, statistics or logos to make them sharable on social media and blogs for personal or professional purposes. The makers of the tool quite aptly recognize the fact that a blog post or a Facebook / Twitter share with a picture is read and further shared a lot more than one without a picture. Similarly, consider the case of a lengthy blog post. If it’s just an array of paragraphs with continuous text or statistics, no matter how interested you are in the subject matter, as a reader, you will get bored at one point. But if that same post contains 2 – 3 photos with appropriate quotations, percentage figures etc. the post engagement would be much more.

This is where Pablo steps in. This unique tool lets you transform beautifully captured random shots into pieces of art or information by adding custom text or quotations to it and then share them on popular social networking websites. You may also choose to download the photos to your computer and use them on your personal blogs or professional articles. Neat!

Here’s how you can use Pablo

To start using Pablo, you can click on the big blue button that says “Try Pablo it’s free!” on the homepage or click on the “Menu” button on the upper right corner of the screen and select the option to Try Pablo. If you’re expecting to find a sign-up page, here’s another good news – it’s not required. Could it be any simpler?

As soon as you click on the ‘Try’ button, you’re redirected to the image editor page. Before you start using the tool, in order to help you out with the nitty-gritties, a quick tour of the app is displayed in quite an interactive manner. Once you’re through, you can start playing around.

Towards the upper left side of the tool’s screen, you’ll find a “Search” box. Enter a keyword for the kind of picture you wish to search. For example, type ‘Pasta’ and hit enter. All images of pasta that exist in Pablo’s database will be listed vertically. Select any of the images by clicking on it and it will be enlarged in the space adjacent to the list. Now comes the interesting part – the edits.

You can:

• Alter the size of the image as per the social media platform or technique through which you wish to share the image: Pinterest, Email, Facebook / Twitter
• If you’ve uploaded a photo that doesn’t make a good background, you can apply effects (Contrast, Blur, Black-and-White) to it to fix it
• Insert Text on the image. The text can be something you type (custom) or a random quote from Pablo’s database. You can also alter the font size, type, alignment, and color of the text.
• You may share the image to Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest or Buffer directly from Pablo or Download it to your computer.

Additional Features

In addition to the above mentioned way to use it, you may also choose to join the Pablo community in order to receive articles about how to create engaging social images and other interesting things (this is where you need to sign up).

Moreover, you may also install the browser extension for Pablo to make using it easier.

Pros VS Cons

There are several plus points to the tool:

• A photo library with more than 50K beautiful photos
• No sign-up required, no hidden costs involved
• Option to upload self-taken photos and share with the world
• Facility to apply edits on pictures
• Facility to share or download pictures without any strict license requirements

As far as the negative are concerned, there was only a single noticeable one:

• There should be more advanced edits available

• Prepare perfect images for social media with pablo.buffer.com/ @pablobybuffer via @supermonitoring

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Final Words

Pablo is one tool that won’t disappoint you. So the next time you wish to grab your 10 seconds of fame by sharing something awesome with the world, create the perfect image with this simple, yet brilliant tool.

A simple collection of random data can often be confusing and unintelligible. However, if you organize it and attach meaning to it, it can depict useful information for different purposes. When it comes to depicting information the right way, there are quite a few alternatives. More often than not, information about systems and procedures is depicted through various diagrams such as charts, graphs, flow charts, use cases and more. However, unless one has extensive experience in making them, people often commit embarrassing errors while creating simple charts or graphs.

To avoid giving a wrong impression to clients or customers and to create easy to understand charts / graphs / diagrams that present correct information about your business in a concise way, the best option is to use an automated tool that takes data as input and gives ready diagrams as output. In this discussion we’re focusing on one such online tool that serves as a haven for those hoping to create great charts in a few simple clicks. Presenting – Infogr.am!

Infogr.am – Create & Publish Interactive & Engaging Charts / Graphs

Infogr.am lets you create and publish beautiful visualizations of your data. Highly interactive and responsive charts let users play around with data representations like never before.

Picture this scenario – You see a complex graph in-front of you but don’t understand it. How the data on the x-axis affects the data on the y-axis is something you just cannot comprehend in a single look. You wish there was some explanation with the chart that would make things easier. With Infogr.am, you don’t need any explanation. You can click-and-drag or touch-and-drag around data values in the charts to see their real-time effect on other values and understand all intricacies.

Infogr.am lets you make your charts move at your commands. Its interactive visualizations add a new dimension of engagement and experience for readers across a wide range of devices. What’s more, you can connect live data sources to Infogr.am’s infographics so that charts are updated in real-time to reflect the latest values. Using static data to make charts is so old-school! Additionally, with Infogr.am, you can embed and share infographics and charts anywhere – documents, web-pages etc. You can even download them and share them privately. Above all, this unique tool lets you brand-ize your charts. Whenever you need to add life to a report, insert a custom, attractive, branded infographic from Infogr.am in a few clicks.

With over 30 chart types (bar graphs, line graphs, area graphs, map distributions etc.) to choose from, Infogr.am makes sure it has at least one chart suited to every organization’s need.

This is how it works

There are 4 legs of the tool’s scope. Depending upon your purpose, you can use Infogr.am for:

• Media & Blogs
• Education
• Brands
• Organizations

For each, you’ll first need to create a free account with the tool. For this all you need to supply is your full name, email id and the purpose for which you wish to use the tool (choose from one of the options listed above).

Once your account is created, you can start with the design. Choose what you wish to create: Infrographic or Report / Chart or Graph / Map. All these options are displayed within small blue squares and on hovering on each a plus sign appears indicating a prompt to add new. You can create a folder for each project and store the diagrams you create accordingly.

Infographic or Report

Clicking on this option expands the page to display various themes for your project. There are free themes and pro themes. For starters, you may want to stick to the free themes. Each theme has different color and font schemes and to select a theme all you need to do is hover over it and click on the “Use Design” prompt that appears. Once selected, a sample graph is displayed in a pop-up with helpful tips showing how to work with it. Follow the tips to get a basic know-how. Double-clicking on values opens up an Excel like editor on the left hand side of the screen wherein you can edit values. Here you can also change the kind of graph. To directly upload values, you can also upload CSV or Excel files to the tool.

Chart or Graph

Clicking on this option opens a pop-up with graph options on the left hand side and format options on the right. For example, a bar graph in radial format will display a radial formed with colored bars depicting information. The editing and other options can be accessed as described above.

Map

Clicking on this option opens a pop-up with a black-and-white world map. Other available countries are listed in the left hand side and their respective maps open up on the right on clicking on the country names. For the free account, only the world map and the map of U.S.A are available. For maps of specific countries you’ll need to upgrade your membership. Editing options are described above.

In addition to these options, you can choose to import data or source from Google Spreadsheet, Dropbox, OneDrive or JSON feed.

Additional Features

Infogr.am can also be used for team collaboration. Shared folders, access permissions and a simple per-seat pricing can allow your team to efficiently make your data look its best with Infogr.am. However, this feature is not available on a basic account. You’ll need to sign up for a Business or Enterprise plan to avail this.

Pros Vs Cons

The high points of the tool are evident from its description above.

As far as the low points are concerned, it all comes down to the price. At $25 per per person per month under a Pro plan and $79 for a single / team license under a business plan, the tool is a bit on the pricy side.

• Who knew creating Infographics could be so much fun? Check out infogr.am/ @infogram via @supermonitoring

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Final Words

This one is actually a great tool. With no learning curve it lets you create attractive and interactive charts and reports to make your work more fun. If you’re not looking for very extensive features, this tool might be all you need. But if you want more, well, you gotta pay for it!

What lies at the core of all application development, testing and actual deployment? Data; realistic, abundant and quickly generated! Any application developer knows how important it is to test an application with lots and lots of data. Having repetitive tests with different kinds of abundant data validates how robust and reliable an application will prove to be when real data to the tune of terabytes is fed into it. Will it be able to handle the pressure or will it crash?

Though it is a crucial step in the application development process, testing with realistic data is often a tiresome task. Hand-filling data into a test environment one record at a time using the user interface can take days altogether. And if there’s a mistake or an unexpected result, to retest you have to undergo the same process again. Moreover, with one person filling in thousands of records, at one point, the data will start to become repetitive, following a particular pattern rather than being random.
So how does one overcome these issues of random data generation? With Mockaroo of course!

Mockaroo – The realistic data generator that lets you relax while it works!

Mockaroo is a brilliant online tool that lets you solve your data generation problems in a few clicks. It lets you generate up to 1,000 rows of realistic test data in CSV, JSON, SQL, and Excel formats. And if you need more data, you can buy one of their nominally priced plans. All you need to do then is write a simple script and the data from these formats will be automatically fed into your application for testing. How awesome is that!

If you’re application is tested against realistic data, you’ll have two very distinct advantages. One, you’ll be more engaged as a tester. Realistic data will mean your application will face challenges that it might face in real-time (like special character errors or jumbled jargons) thus helping to make it more robust. Two, when you demonstrate the features of your app to other users making use of realistic data, they’ll understand quicker and easier.

With Mockaroo, you don’t have to worry about the technical aspects of testing like learning about mock data libraries or new platforms just to perform stress testing of the application. You can focus on the application development and leave the rest to this unique tool. It will let you download large amounts of randomly generated test data based on your own specifications which you can then load directly into your test environment using SQL or CSV formats, without any programming required.

This is how it rolls

On visiting the tool’s website you see columns with data field names, their data types and blank options which you can alter to adjust to data order and specifications. The column named ‘Field Name’ accepts simple text input, ‘Type’ accepts data type and ‘Options’ accepts numerical input (fields with the same blank percentage are left blank at the same time). You can click on a type to open a pop-up showing the available data-types from which you can select the one that suits your application. You can add more fields by clicking on the “Add another field” button and remove them by clicking on a small cross (x) adjacent to them.

At the bottom of the boxes you see a box specifying the number of rows that will be generated (you can alter this to any value below 1000), the format in which the data will be generated (this too can be altered through a drop-down) and a button to “Download” the data. You can even choose to preview what data will be downloaded by clicking on the “Preview” button. There are even options to save the setting to your profile through the “Clone This Schema” button. You can also choose to directly load your application’s fields from a CSV if they are too many.

In this sense, Mockaroo actually gives you all that you need to generate random data for testing. With no signup required for this basic functionality, anyone who just wants random data to test their application can use this tool for free. In our opinion, it’s a win-win tool in this regard.

Additional Features

If you thought that was all, think again! A super cool feature of Mockaroo is its random data generation at runtime. If you wish to take your application’s testing a step further by runtime testing of your application with realistic random data, you can do that too. For this, Mockaroo offers a REST API which you can configure into your application to make the downloading of data happen automatically. Just feed in your application’s fields as a schema, configure the REST API from Mockaroo into your application and see the magic happen.

This feature is a bit restricted though. First, it requires you to signup, which is still free. It has usage limits – 200 POST requests per day for a free plan. If you however wish to go for one of their plans (Silver or Gold), you get to download up to 1,000,000 records / day for Silver and 10,000,000 records per day for Gold plans with no POST request limit. That’s a lot of data. The other big restriction is that only 2 formats are supported here – JSON and CSV. Other details about the API feature can be found through the API link given in the header menu of the website.

Pros VS Cons

Do we need to say the pros again? Data – realistic, random and lots of it; those words pretty much sum up the awesomeness of this tool.
There isn’t really a con with this tool, literally. If you regard $50/year for Silver (100,000 rows) and $500/year (10M rows) a con, well, you’re better off spending days filling the data yourself. Plus, up to 1000 rows it’s absolutely free, so test it out first and then go further if you need to. What’s there to lose?

• Generate realistic random data for your application with @mockaroodev mockaroo.com/ via @supermonitoring

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Final Words

A win-win tool in our opinion that you should try out immediately if you need random data generated quickly and easily.

Planning to launch a new app? Have you covered everything – the look-and-feel, the functions, the utility factor? Great! You’ve probably catered to every angle after all. And since you’ve been so careful, you must have made sure your app is so user friendly that people will instantly know how to use it. If not, well, how would you make sure your intended audience uses your app the way it is meant to be used? Let us boil it down for you with an example.

Suppose you’re launching an iPhone app for a restaurant locator. Since there’s a humungous variety of such apps already available, you’ve gone ahead and made it different in usage to the other apps in the manner in which it asks the user for information. You’ve paid quite some attention to every aspect, but overlooked the usage commercial tutorial. The end result? Your app could fail miserable simply because users couldn’t quickly figure out how to use it.

In the cut-throat app market, small mistakes like not creating quality demos or commercials for your app could be all it takes to turn the tide. So how do you stay with the flow? Just leave it to Placeit.

Placeit – The Mockup & Demo Video Genie

With Placeit you can create awesome mockups, demo videos and commercials and make your app reach the right audience in the right way. This intuitive online tool contains thousands of crisp-clear high-definition video and picture templates in which you can just “place” your app screens, record your swipe and touch hand movements and create customized advertisements for your app. Just like a dedicated YouTube video infomercial that showcases your app in a few seconds. Cool huh?

In case you’re confused about where we’re leading to, just visit the tool’s website and watch their video commercial. At the end of it, you won’t be able to stop yourself from using the tool, even if it is just for fun.

Placeit has made something unimagined hitherto, very plausible and easy to do. To record a video demo of an app, the methodology followed till now was to procure a screen recording tool, create a proper setting to record everything with quite some hit-and-trials along the way. The backgrounds to use, the light setting etc were aspects you needed to take care of at your own end.

Placeit does it all for you. With this tool, you don’t need to create any setup. Just “place” you app’s screenshots within their photo templates for photo commercials or record your hand movement and app screens and “place” them within video templates for video commercials. Just like placing your phone and in a dock; so fit it and forget it!

How it works

To create a picture advertisement, on the device tab (default), pick a template you like by clicking on it and you’ll be redirected to an editor page. Upload your app’s screenshot or any image you like and it will appear placed within the template you selected. You’ll then be prompted to download the small version of the image (that’s free). Thereafter you can apply effects to the image if you wish to. Click on the Save button and the edited image will be saved to your machine. To download a bigger, higher resolution version of the picture, you’ll need to purchase it for a nominal amount.

To create a video advertisement select a template and proceed to the editor page as indicated above. Thereafter click on “Record Your Screen”. You’ll need a program called ‘RecordIt’ installed on your machine to proceed. That’s Placeit’s proprietary screen recording software and it is offered for a free download. Record screen movements and download the small version of the video for free or a bigger one for a nominal amount and proceed with effects similarly.

In both video and photo demos, you can change backgrounds from a vertical list on the right hand side. Switching between templates is also made quite easy through a vertical list on the left hand side.

Additional Feature

In addition to the app advertisement creator, Placeit offers users a platform to create any kinds of commercials through a ‘People’ section. Just click on the ‘People’ tab and you’re able to choose a random face, team it up with a background of your choice and cr2ate a static advertisement for anything. With this feature, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that this online tool is not just an app advertisement creator but a complete online advertisement creator. How easier can it get!

What’s more, the ‘People’ feature is completely free for a limited period of time. That is, you can download small, large or extremely large and super high-resolution pictures without watermarks from the Placeit People section for now. So what are you waiting for?

Pros VS Cons

The high points of this tool are many. The huge number of device images (iPhones, Android devices, iPads, PCs), people images (men, women, children), backgrounds (beach, library, office, home, garden) and effects make it almost impossible to believe that so much can be packed into a single online tool. Plus, even with high-definition video templates and loads of crisp-clear picture templates, the loading latency is zero, that is, everything loads almost instantly.

• Prepare fancy mockups and demo videos for your app in just minutes with @placeitapp placeit.net/ via @supermonitoring

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Though they’re tough to spot, the tool does have a few low points. The first one lies in the ‘People’ tab. While you can upload your app’s image to create demos for it, there’s no way to upload a custom person’s picture (say your own for instance) and team it up with one of the backgrounds. But then with the variety Placeit offers in the section, you would hardly need that. The second con lies in the video commercial of the tool on the homepage. The voiceover they’ve used in the commercial makes the video sound a little tacky and sleazy. With the overall look-feel and utility of the tool being so professional, the kind of pitch and words used in the voiceover seem a little out of place. Then again, this is not so much a low point after all. Thirdly, there a price associated with this tool so if you want a high-definition commercial without a watermark, you’ll have to fish out some funds.

Final Words

There’s so much more that we could write about this tool but we’d run out of words. So go and experience it out for yourself!

Let’s start with the basics. For those of you who aren’t familiar with a Favicon, it is a short term used for “Favorite Icon”. A Favicon is basically the shortcut icon, website icon, bookmark icon or tab icon for a website. It is just a file associated with a website or webpage that contains one or more small icons about 16 x 16 pixels in size.

Let’s boil it down to a common man’s language. A favicon is the small icon or picture you see on the extreme left hand side of a tab when you open up a browser window. It might be the picture of the website’s name initial or any other picture that is unique to that website. For example, Facebook has a white “f” symbol within a blue square as its favicon and it is used as the default symbol for Facebook on all platforms, PCs (websites), mobiles and tablets (apps) alike.

When you launch your website, you take care of all the little aspects there are to it. You even test the website on different platforms and devices. But often you find that the favicon you selected for your website though looks good on PCs, becomes garbled, rescaled or is absent on mobiles and tablets. And no matter how much you try, you can’t seem to fix this issue until you get into the core programming. Why bother so much when you have Real Favicon Generator at your service? Check it out!

RealFaviconGenerator.net – The Favicon Genie

Real Favicon Generator is an online tool to generate very real and usable favicon pictures and HTML code that work on all major platforms and browsers. The tool is backed by extensive research and testing to provide you with awesome favicons that work on PCs, Macs, iPhones, iPads, Android devices, Windows 8 devices and more.

The tool works on the basic principle that instead of giving you a single favicon.ico file, it gives you all the pictures and HTML code you need to get a cool, mobile and tablet-ready favicon. This is in sharp contrast to most favicon generators that stick to the .ico only methodology which works on some platforms and doesn’t work on some.

Your website’s favicon is probably just a picture on the PC but it becomes the identity of your website as you shift to other devices like smartphones and tablets. As your website’s or application’s popularity soars, users start recognizing it through its favicon itself. It hence is pretty worthwhile to have a good favicon and to test its working on all devices and platforms. Here’s where Real Favicon Generator works its magic.

Basic Working

Visit the website of this brilliant tool and scroll down. You’ll see a big blue button that prompts you to select your favicon picture and a smaller green one that gives you a demo option with a sample picture. Clicking on the blue button open the Windows browse dialog box through which you can select your favicon pictures if you have any. First time users should click on the green button to understand and try the tool out.

As soon as you click on the green button, another page will load showing you sample favicons for iOS (Web Clip), Android (usual icon) and Windows 8 (Tile) including the sample icon for a dummy website “mywebsite” to give you an idea how your favicon would look once generated. With each platform’s favicons you’ll be given some options to customize their look and feel through radio buttons and text fields.

On scrolling to the very end you’ll see other Favicon Generator Options to customize the following settings:

• Path – where you’ll place / upload your favicon files and HTML code
• Version / Refresh – to set if the favicon being generated now is a new one or a newer version to an old one
• Compression – to compress the favicon pictures by 50 – 80%
• Scaling Algorithm
• App Name – a caption for your website / app’s homepage

Once you’re satisfied with the settings, click on the “Generate your Favicons and HTML code” button. Another page will load showing options to “Install your Favicon” in a host of language options including HTML, XHTML or Jade. Alternatively, you could use the Real Favicon Generator API to copy the code to your clipboard and use it directly.

Scrolling down further brings you to a “Share and Support Us” section where you can choose to tell the world about this awesome tool or donate to it and support the talented minds behind it.

Additional Features

If you already have a favicon in place, you can see if there’s any room for improvements in it through a “Check Favicon” button given on the tools homepage. Just type the URL of your website and hit the button to run the check. No harm there!

Pros Vs Cons

Obvious high points of the tool include its sheer utility, ease of use and simplicity. It’s not a very wide spread tool in terms of its purpose but it achieves what it claims to do. In our opinion, that’s more than enough! Plus, it doesn’t need the users to give sign-up details and waste their time. Rather it allows them to get straight to business. And above all, it’s a free tool. What more can you ask for!

There is no real con in this tool except that there could be more web development languages supported. Though it tried to make up for it through its API that can be copied and used, dedicated code that could be just download and straightaway uploaded would be much easier.

• Generate perfect favicons for all platforms with @RealFavicon realfavicongenerator.net via @supermonitoring

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Final Words

All in all, Real Favicon Generator is a brilliant effort deserving its credit. If you have or are thinking of launching your own website, don’t look further to search for the perfect favicon generator.

There’s no end to a creative mind’s errands. Each new day we come across a unique tool which is so novel in its concept that it makes you wonder, “Man, there’s a tool for even this?” The first time we heard of the tool being discussed here, that’s the exact thought that crossed our minds. For people who make use of random user data for their application development or testing, this article will turn out to be especially interesting.

During the course of an application’s development a lot of dummy data is required primarily to test the functions and reach of the application. Often collecting such dummy data can prove to be a pain. Coming up with a thousand random user names, filling in their hypothetical data and searching for appropriate user images can take a deathly time and effort toll. It would be so much better if there was a quicker and easier way to do this.

By now you would have guessed where we’re headed, so let’s get straight to the point; introducing, RandomUser.me.

RandomUser.Me – Random user data with a few clicks!

Most websites and tools that play around with text documents (creation, formatting or simple display), make use of a sample text paragraph that is known by its two initial words “Lorem Ipsum”. It is like the de facto standard dummy paragraph text we come across on quite a few applications. RamdomUser.me works on the same concept. It brings the ideology behind “Lorem Ipsum” to user data. With this one-of-a-kind tool, you can instantly generate random user data consisting of a user image, user name, an email address, a date of birth, an address, a phone number and even a sample password. Neat huh!

So if you have an application for say a contact synchronizer, you don’t have to spend any time in coming up with hundreds of users and their related information. You can concentrate on your core programming while RandomUser.me does the user data generation for you. The tool offers a free API (AJAX code) that you can paste into your JQuery code body to generate random users instantly. If you’re using a different set of languages, you can contact the development team at RandomUser and ask for a randomly generated user. The application will provide you with a JSON, SQL, CSV, or YAML object that you can parse and apply to your application. Simple!

How the tool works

On visiting the tool website you’ll see a randomly generated user photo and name in the center of the screen. Hover over the option icons below the image to see random data associated with the user.

Once you’re through that, you might feel a little lost for a couple of seconds; that’s because there is no link to sign-up or see examples etc on the homepage. So what you need to do is, click on the “More Options” button on the top right corner of the screen.

On clicking on this button you’ll see a host of things that you can do:

1. Home: To get to the home page.
2. User Photos: To browse the gallery of photos (faces) of random users. This page contains three sections of photos: Gentlemen, Ladies and Lego. This dedicated photos page comes in handy when you don’t want any user data and just need a friendly user face, for example for a dummy testimonial on your website. To pick an image just click on it and a larger version of the image will open on your computer screen; right-click and select the usual “Save Image As” option to save the photo.
3. Documentation: This is the worthiest page of all. It contains various self-explanatory links that offer help and instructions for using the tool.
4. Change Log: This option is informational and is more suited for experts of the field. It contains revisions and change logs to the tool and APIs.
5. Stats & Graphs: This links boasts of the tool’s popularity. Graphical statistics show how many people visit the tool on a daily basis. Number of users generated every day, downloads and API uptime etc. are also shown on this page.
6. Donate: After all, hard work yielding in such awesome results deserves some credit. You can donate to this otherwise free tool through an easy link given on this page. The makers have even gone to lengths justifying why they deserve a donation (even if as low as $1) from you. Sweet!
7. Copyright: This page claims to show the “fun legal stuff”. It contains copyright notices and lists out what you can and cannot do with the content on RandomUser.me and under what terms.
8. Photoshop Extension: This one is interesting. A randomly generated user photo and name will greet you in the center of the screen with options to download the installer for Photoshop CS6 and Photoshop CC. Instructions below point out how to easily use the Photoshop extension of the tool after downloading it.

Pros Vs Cons

RandomUser.me bags some very crucial points in its favor.
Point 1 – the entire look and feel of the tool is quite classy. Its simplicity and the to-the-point approach are very appealing.
Point 2 – the innovative concept behind the tool instantly grabs your imagination and makes you want to try it out.
Point 3 – the database of user photos is very attractive.
Point 4 – The tool taps a territory that’s been limited to boring code generators hitherto and makes it pretty.
Point 5 – Photoshop extension that makes using random user data as easy as drag-and-drop.
Point 6 – Free tool with no sign-up required!

It’s actually pretty hard to find a drawback with this tool. It is simple, easy to use and achieves what it claims to do. For the sake of pointing out one, the only glitch is the slight loading time each consecutive enlarged user photo takes after having visited one before.

• Don’t waste your time on creating dummy user data, automate it with @randomapi randomuser.me/ via @supermonitoring

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Final Words

Don’t waste any more time in coming up with random user data for your application. Visit RandomUser.me and automate one of the toughest parts of application testing today!