Among some of VWO’s features are multivariate testing (you can adjust more than one item on your site and VWO will run them in various combinations to determine which ones have a positive effect), heatmaps showing off where users are clicking (which are useful for visualizing where your visitors are clicking for different variations of a site), and split URL tests, which gives you the option to redirect
traffic to two alternate versions of your website.

The site also has WordPress, Drupal and Google Analytics plugins, and allows testing of pages which are behind login/signup wall and enables segmentation and running targeted tests (say, for example,
you want to test only new visitors who came to your site searching for ‘Techcrunch’.

Customers can use VWO’s API to integrate the data and management into their own dashboards. And VWO will track conversions across different domains via third party cookies, send email notifications of test results, and will send automatic screenshot generations of variations for archiving and reporting,

The bootstrapped startup is also seeing significant growth in traffic handles by its severs; its servers are now handing 540 million pageviews per month, a 500 percent increase in month-to-month traffic.
And VWO’s platform is being used by a number of well known companies including Microsoft, RackSpace and Vendio.

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It’s hard to believe that two years have passed since the Chrome browser first hit the web. In that time, Chrome has come to control more than 7.5% of the worldwide browser market, according to Net Marketshare. Sure, Internet Explorer and Firefox hold 60.4% and 22.9% respectively, but if one considers that after 10 years, Opera holds less than 2.4%, then it’s fairly impressive.

Now, on its second birthday, Google has released a stable build of Chrome version 6. Heralding itself as “The Modern Browser,” Chrome 6 does indeed boast a number of improvements, but as with previous updates, the focus remains on speed and simplicity.

Like its previous release this summer, the new version has Adobe Flash built in. The important thing here, however, is its handling of HTML5, which remains topnotch.

With the increasing prevalence of HTML5, it’s hard to imagine a world where Chrome’s browser share does not continue to grow.

More About: adobe, adobe flash, chrome, chrome 6, Firefox, Google, HTML5, internet explorer, opera, webkit

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7 new screencasts have been released that cover stacks from ElStacko and CosCulture. These screencasts have been added…
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Our RapidWeaver Plugin that makes it easy for you to add the awesome FlowPlayer Video Player into your Ra…
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Misinterpretation and confusion creeps in with this asynchronous feedback model and often times few comments from the customer can go unnoticed. Notebox is a design and concept feedback app that helps designers to get client feedback literally on their designs.

Overview

With Notebox both you & your clients can now make notes directly on your design, allowing the notes to appear in context. Built by designers who themselves understood the importance of getting relevant feedback from clients, Notebox is simple and intuitive to use.

Overview

Notebox makes it extremely easy to upload the concept image, organize clients, projects and designs, and get email notifications when notes are added. The look and feel of the page & notes can be changed and add custom branding elements can be added. So, there are no more PDF downloads and asynchronous feedback via email – just instant point, click and add goodness.

Pricing

Including a free trial, Notebox has 3 plans in total. The free trial lets you access most of the core features and allows getting feedback with upto 5 designs. Notebox Lite allows unlimited design uploads and the Pro version allows extreme customization & branding including the option to perform advanced CSS editing.

Pricing

Sign up is quick and the design looks great. However, when loading the sign up page for the first time, there was a strange transparency issue. Also, selecting the free trial link from the pricing page takes you to one more page that explains the same things displayed in the previous in detail.

Dashboard

After signing up, a strong password is emailed to you. The dashboard is minimal and clean looking with a textured background.

Dashboard

Unlike a lot of other apps I have seen, Notebox’s dashboard design is so intuitive, you don’t have to stumble upon links and buttons to begin using the app. The design makes it very clear to a first time user that app usage begins with adding a new client.

Adding a Design

It’s a bit to strange to see that the first step in client creation is just a single field to enter the client name. But the design aesthetics and the textured background add a sense of beauty to this minimal design.

Adding a Client

The next page also has a single field to add a name to the project and the app advises us to keep it under 12 characters as it will used in the URL to be shared with client. Once that is created, another minimal page for naming the design shows up.

Uploading Images

Once the naming has been done, it is time to upload the design for the client to review. Design images in jpg, png and gif formats are supported.

Editing the Note Color

You can also style the notes from this page so as they stand out on your design by choosing a few simple colours. An URL and a short URL are displayed at the bottom of the page to share with the client.

Adding a Note

Adding a Note

All the client has to do is to visit the URL, click on the Add new note icon on the top left hand corner and start commenting. Names can be added to comments to avoid confusion and URLs can be added to the notes as well. Yep! That’s it. I was surprised that it was just this simple to add a note.

Final Thoughts

Considering the fact that we went through to upload the design, the app falls flat with just a single feature. Apart from adding a note there is nothing else we can do with the app. Notes are not shown until you mouse the mouse across the screen to find them. Tiny icons or pins can avoid the hassle of scouting for the comment on the design.

Inspite of being a one trick pony, Notebox does give you a quick and elegant way to get concept feedback that your clients will love!

Jon’s starred items in Google Reader

Misinterpretation and confusion creeps in with this asynchronous feedback model and often times few comments from the customer can go unnoticed. Notebox is a design and concept feedback app that helps designers to get client feedback literally on their designs.

Overview

With Notebox both you & your clients can now make notes directly on your design, allowing the notes to appear in context. Built by designers who themselves understood the importance of getting relevant feedback from clients, Notebox is simple and intuitive to use.

Overview

Notebox makes it extremely easy to upload the concept image, organize clients, projects and designs, and get email notifications when notes are added. The look and feel of the page & notes can be changed and add custom branding elements can be added. So, there are no more PDF downloads and asynchronous feedback via email – just instant point, click and add goodness.

Pricing

Including a free trial, Notebox has 3 plans in total. The free trial lets you access most of the core features and allows getting feedback with upto 5 designs. Notebox Lite allows unlimited design uploads and the Pro version allows extreme customization & branding including the option to perform advanced CSS editing.

Pricing

Sign up is quick and the design looks great. However, when loading the sign up page for the first time, there was a strange transparency issue. Also, selecting the free trial link from the pricing page takes you to one more page that explains the same things displayed in the previous in detail.

Dashboard

After signing up, a strong password is emailed to you. The dashboard is minimal and clean looking with a textured background.

Dashboard

Unlike a lot of other apps I have seen, Notebox’s dashboard design is so intuitive, you don’t have to stumble upon links and buttons to begin using the app. The design makes it very clear to a first time user that app usage begins with adding a new client.

Adding a Design

It’s a bit to strange to see that the first step in client creation is just a single field to enter the client name. But the design aesthetics and the textured background add a sense of beauty to this minimal design.

Adding a Client

The next page also has a single field to add a name to the project and the app advises us to keep it under 12 characters as it will used in the URL to be shared with client. Once that is created, another minimal page for naming the design shows up.

Uploading Images

Once the naming has been done, it is time to upload the design for the client to review. Design images in jpg, png and gif formats are supported.

Editing the Note Color

You can also style the notes from this page so as they stand out on your design by choosing a few simple colours. An URL and a short URL are displayed at the bottom of the page to share with the client.

Adding a Note

Adding a Note

All the client has to do is to visit the URL, click on the Add new note icon on the top left hand corner and start commenting. Names can be added to comments to avoid confusion and URLs can be added to the notes as well. Yep! That’s it. I was surprised that it was just this simple to add a note.

Final Thoughts

Considering the fact that we went through to upload the design, the app falls flat with just a single feature. Apart from adding a note there is nothing else we can do with the app. Notes are not shown until you mouse the mouse across the screen to find them. Tiny icons or pins can avoid the hassle of scouting for the comment on the design.

Inspite of being a one trick pony, Notebox does give you a quick and elegant way to get concept feedback that your clients will love!

Jon’s starred items in Google Reader

Although we’d previously given a nod to Incompetech for their free graph paper they have a vastly more interesting collection of royalty-free music. Check out the huge selection and add some quality tunes to your next presentation or video. More »

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It’s extremely easy to share your Dropbox folders with friends but there is no mechanism for letting them upload files. Dropbox Uploader is a PHP script that turns your web server into a Dropbox portal so your friend can upload with ease. More »

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This series is supported by Rackspace, the better way to do hosting. Learn more about Rackspace’s hosting solutions here.

Mac OS X is a popular platform for developers and designers of all stripes. Apple has always had strength in the graphic design market, but even before Apple’s shift to Intel processors in 2006, developers started migrating to Mac OS X.

Mac OS X is a popular choice because it combines the power of BSD and other UNIX and UNIX-like systems with an elegant user interface. Mac OS X comes with Apache, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Subversion already installed, which makes it easy to turn a factory-fresh Mac into a local test server.

There is also a really robust and talented community of developers for Mac OS X, making some of the best apps around for designers and developers alike. Apps like Coda, CSSEdit, TextMate, Acorn, Pixelmator and LittleSnapper are just some of the many apps we love to use when designing or developing projects for the web.

As the end of summer approaches, we wanted to highlight six more Mac apps that have been released in the last few month for developers and designers.

1. Flux 3 – ₤69.99 for new users, ₤34.99 for upgrades

Indie shop The Escapers just released version 3.0 of its fantastic website design program, Flux. I like to think of Flux 3 as Dreamweaver reimagined.

It offers a visual and code-based approach to page design, along with support for plugins and code snippets, support for HTML5 and HTML5 video, ePub, WebKit transforms and other effects, and the Google Font API.

All of this power comes in an app that is easy to visually navigate or to edit as raw code. There is a learning curve, but once you’ve spent some time with the app, it’s easy to use to create and manage projects.

2. Gitbox – Free

One of the great things about the version control system Git is that it is super simple and super lightweight. Git was designed for the terminal, and oftentimes, the terminal is the fastest way to commit or merge changes.

Sometimes, however, it can be faster or more comfortable to add a visual element to the process. This can be especially useful if you are changing folder or file names or frequently switching between different places on your desktop.

Gitbox is a lightweight, single-window client for Git that makes it easy to see branches, commit, pull, merge and push all with a single click. It also supports diff viewing in either FileMerge.app or Kaleidoscope.

3. Kaleidoscope – €29

Kaleidoscope is from Made By Sofa and it’s a file comparison application that goes above and beyond a simple diff viewer.

Not only can you compare text files or code blocks, you can also compare images. If you’re working on a web coding or design project and you need to quickly view the changes between two versions of the same file, Kaleidoscope might just be your go-to tool.

It supports multiple layouts, syntax highlighting and searching, and multiple image formats. It can integrate with version control systems like Subversion, Git, Mercurial and others via the command-line or drag-and-drop, and the app is super fast.

4. Xmplify – Free while in beta

If you work with a lot of XML, you might want to give Xmplify a closer look. It’s a new app that is still in beta that makes editing XML and XSLT (XSL transformations) files really easy.

On the XSLT side, the program includes a Web Preview feature that shows a live look at the XHTML document created by the XSLTs.

You can also search using both XPath and by using regular expressions.

5. Loremify – Free

Loremify is a Dashboard Widget that can quickly and painlessly generate Lorem Impsum style text in the length and style that you specify.

This can be really useful when needing text blocks for filler content while creating a design. You can specify how many words and how many characters for a paragraph, header or list. You can also choose to automatically insert HTML tags into the generator, which makes the tool that much easier for using when designing in a browser or in a text editor.

6. Slammer –

More and more web designers are using grids, either of their own creation or something like the 960 Grid System, to create really flexible and great-looking layouts.

Slammer is a tool for applying and modifying grids to your designs or to existing content anywhere on your Mac. The app is an overlay that you can use on documents, web pages, images, previews, and the list goes on.

You can then customize the grid, get a feel for dimensions and pixel placements, and alter the layout of the grid to see how your content aligns.

You can then export your own templates as a JSON file that you can integrate with your designs or use pre-made templates for certain grid systems to use with future projects.

Basically Slammer is an interactive virtual blueprint maker that you can use for your web designs. You can try the app for 30 hours with no restrictions.

Bonus: Courier

Courier from Realmac Software won’t be available for another week or so, but as you can see from the awesome teaser video (above), it’s a utility that will likely appeal to many developers and designers.

Realmac is the same team behind RapidWeaver, LittleSnapper and Socialite, and they know how to deliver a Mac app that’s feature-packed and easy on the eyes.

I’ve been beta-testing Courier and really love the app. Keep your eyes peeled for this one!

Your Thoughts?

What are some of your favorite Mac apps for design and development? Let us know!

Rackspace is the better way to do hosting. No more worrying about web hosting uptime. No more spending your time, energy and resources trying to stay on top of things like patching, updating, monitoring, backing up data and the like. Learn why.

More Dev & Design Resources from Mashable:

– HOW TO: Implement Google Font API on Your Website
– Top 10 Accessories for Typography Nuts [PICS]
– 40+ Web Design and Development Resources for Beginners
– 10 Tools for Getting Web Design Feedback
– 10 Free Wireframing Tools for Designers

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, David Benkovic

More About: courier, Flux, gitbox, kaleidoscope, loremify, mac, mac apps, slammer, software, web design, Web Development, web development series, xmplify

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Windows: Grabbing stills from a video using a traditional screenshot tool is a tedious hit-or-miss affair. ImageGrab is feature-packed tool for grabbing single stills, a series at set intervals, or scripting your own parameters for custom grabs. More »

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