Showing posts with label Schedule. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Schedule. Show all posts

Thursday, May 9, 2013

Review: Pingraphy lets you schedule your future Pinterest pins, get stats

Pingraphy Pingraphy is an essential service for Pinterest users who need to post at all hours of the day.

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Social media is popular, but needs to be taken in small doses. Nobody wants to be bombarded with lots and lots of status updates and photos all at the same time. When posting your items to a social media site, it is good practice to spread everything out over a 24-hour period. Services such as TweetDeck help us do this for Twitter, but Pinterest is a different matter. But unless you are the world's biggest insomniac, you are going to need a service such as Pingraphy to help you out.

Pingraphy is a Web service that enables you to log into your Pinterest account and schedule images to automatically be posted on a set schedule in the future. There is even a bookmarklet you can use which, when clicked, will pull all of the images from a webpage and then send them to Pingraphy for you.

Once your image has been uploaded, select the date and time you wish it to go out.

But first, you need to log into Pingraphy using your Pinterest credentials. Unfortunately this involves giving Pingraphy your password. As of this writing, there is no way to sign in with a permissions system which can be revoked later, similar to Google Accounts or Facebook. So you have to decide if you are comfortable giving out your Pinterest password.

This is where one of the drawbacks of Pingraphy becomes readily apparent. There is no function to revoke the website's access to your Pingraphy account, which means the only way to block Pingraphy is to change your Pinterest password.

The dashboard gives you an excellent overview of which pins are scheduled to go out and when, as well as which ones have recently been published.

Assuming you are OK with revealing your password and you have logged in, you will then be invited to drag the bookmarklet up to your browser toolbar. When clicked on a webpage, the bookmarklet will pull all of the images into a clickable list and you can choose which ones you want to be scheduled to get pinned in your Pinterest account.

Also, as part of the setup, you are provided with a calendar and sliders so you can specify the exact date and time the first pin should go out. You then specify your timezone and the interval (in minutes) between each pin going out. So theoretically you could schedule pins days, weeks, even months ahead if you want to. Perfect if you are going on holiday or if there will be an event which will necessitate you being away from the computer for extended periods.

Pingraphy provides you with statistics which will show you which of your pins were the most popular, the most shared and the most liked.

The dashboard gives you a nice overview of all the scheduled pins, so you can see at a glance what is due to go out, and what has gone out recently. From here, you can also click on "track", which allows you to see which of your pins were the most popular, how many times they were repinned and liked, and how many comments were received. These numbers are displayed in table format for easy viewing.

Using these numbers, you can see right away which kinds of images generally do well and which ones don't, enabling you to fine-tune your social media policy, which is important if you rely on social media to do your job more efficiently.

Apart from the inability to revoke the website's access to your Pinterest account and a bug in the bookmarklet which overrides the timezone settings (the latter of which is a very minor thing), Pingraphy is definitely a service you should consider if you are looking for this kind of thing, given that it seems to be the only service right now which schedules Pinterest updates in advance.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can use the latest version of this Web-based software.


From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Rein in your inbox and schedule email reminders with Right Inbox

Send an email sometime on the weekend, and by the time Monday rolls around, it will be buried under a pile of other emails crowding your recipient's inbox. But what if you don't have time to send the email at just the right moment for it to be seen? If you're using Gmail, Right Inbox can do that for you. This service ($5/month or $39/year, free feature-limited demo) can also track sent emails and report when the recipient opened them, and remind you about emails that haven't received a reply so you can follow up.

Right Inbox screenshotRight Inbox shows up as a set of buttons on the email composition screen.No aspect of Right Inbox is really unique: ActiveInbox has been offering a browser add-on for managing Gmail more efficiently; Boomerang is another add-on that offers remarkably similar functionality. And then there are Followup.cc and FollowupThen, two services that provide follow-up reminders without any add-ons--you simply CC the service when sending the email. Finally, Google published its own way to create your own reminders using Google Docs and some scripting. But Right Inbox is more focused than ActiveInbox, better-priced than Boomerang (which costs $15 per month for Google Apps users), can do things the two follow-up services simply can't, and doesn't require any coding skills to set up.

Right Inbox comes as a browser add-on for Firefox, Google Chrome, and Safari. It blends into Gmail so seamlessly you may have trouble finding it at first. There is no control panel, and nothing to configure. Unlike ActiveInbox, it doesn't create lots of new labels within Gmail. It simply shows up as a few new buttons in the email composition screen, and one new button in the message reading screen.

Right Inbox screenshotYou can use Right Inbox to snooze an email you received until it's time to handle it.When composing a new email, you can now click the Send Later button and specify when you want that email sent. While waiting to be sent, the email is stored in your Drafts folder, so you can still edit it. You can also tick the Track checkbox, which will embed a tiny invisible image into the email, and will let you know when your recipient opened the message (assuming he opted to display images you send). Finally, the Remind Me button lets you push the email into your own Inbox after some time, star it, label it as a Reminder, and even mark it as unread. You can have Right Inbox do all of this only if the recipient doesn't reply to the message, so you're not flooded with unneeded follow-up reminders.

The Remind Me button is the one that also shows up in the message reading screen: You can use it to snooze threads that don't require immediate action or are awaiting other information, and have them come back to your inbox when the time is right. This is also the only part of Right Inbox that gave me any trouble: The button wouldn't always show up, and I had to refresh Chrome every now and then to get it to display.

Right Inbox gets a lot right: The interface is simple and well-integrated, and the price is reasonable. If you're a Gmail or Google Apps user looking for an email scheduling and tracking solution, you should try it out.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download use latest version of the software on your Gmail or Google Apps account running in a supported browser.

—Erez Zukerman


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Thursday, February 16, 2012

Egg Timer Plus Keeps You on Schedule

With its bare-bones interface and basic feature set, Egg Timer Plus isn't going to bowl you over. But if you're looking for a simple, lightweight timer tool to run on your Windows PC, this $5 application will meet your needs.

Egg Timer Plus makes it easy to add and saved customized preset timers.Egg Timer Plus offers both a countdown timer and a stopwatch, and lets you use both at the same time--a nice touch. You can easily create and save preset timers, which you can run over and over again, in case you'd like to be reminded when, for example, the laundry will be done. And it's a cinch to add customized sounds to alert you when the timer is finished--as long as you've paid the $5 fee to register the software. The free version doesn't let you add custom sounds, and limits you to two saved presets.

If you'd like to keep an eye on the timer while you're away from the computer, you can resize Egg Timer's window to gargantuan proportions, making it easy to see from across even a large room. (If your computer's screen saver blocks your view, you will have to rely on the audible alarm.)

While you can use the timer and the stopwatch simultaneously, Egg Timer Plus does not let you run multiple timers at once. For that, you'll have to open and run multiple instances of the program itself. While this is certainly possible, it's also somewhat confusing: With multiple Egg Timer Plus windows open on my desktop, I couldn't remember what I was timing and why. But that's about as confusing as it gets.

Egg Timer Plus is pretty darn simple. Still, it offers enough features and customization options to make rival BringFocus, which allows you to countdown time in very limited pre-set intervals only, look like something out of the Stone Age. Still, BringFocus is free, while a fully functional version of Egg Timer Plus will set you back $5. It's not a big expense, certainly, but when my iPhone's alarm clock offers similar features, it's a price that's hard to justify.

--Liane Cassavoy

Egg Timer Plus was made due to the need for a quick, easy to use timer. How many times have you decided to use your microwave to time something you were cooking just to use the microwave half way through and have no idea how much time was left? For me, one to many times. Thus, Egg Timer Plus was born. Egg Timer Plus is a small, easy to use stopwatch and egg timer. Resizeable on screen timer display. Seperate Timer and Stopwatch modules. Save your own preset timers and have unique audible timer completion sounds for each preset.


From PCWorld. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center here