If you ever searched for something like “share designs with clients,” you’ll find this topic has been covered quite a lot. Sharing files with clients is still a task for designers, despite how technologically evolved our society becomes.

For designers, there are countless options. You could email your work, but what the client’s inbox is filled or only accepts small files. You could send a link with Dropbox, but what if the client can’t open the file type. You could use a service like Mocku.ps, MockVault, Influence or Shipment, but which one fits in with your workflow?

All in all, there’s a reason why so many solutions exist. Designers aren’t a “one size fits all” breed. For those of you out there that cling to email and refuse to use anything else for deliverables and mockups, Mail’ette may win you over with its simplicity. More complex solutions exist, but that’s not what many of us need.

With Mail’ette, all you need to do is email your work to the service and you’ll quick get a link that showcases your uploaded designs. From there, your clients won’t have to register, use passwords or learn a new system. There’s just a basic feedback form built-in. That’s all. If you’re searching for a no-fuss solution, this may be just what you need.

As far as pricing goes, a free membership scores you up to 3 active projects and one user. From there a $9/month premium membership gives you unlimited projects and 3 users. I’m glad they kept that simple as well.

All in all, Mail’ette is a simple solution for a simple problem. It may not be feature packed, but it certainly has potential. If all you need is an easy way to share and display your designs to clients, this is worth a look.

➤ Mail’ette

With smartphones approaching near-ubiquity, people must learn to behave in public and watch everything they say and do. You never know when your inappropriate actions could be captured for posterity.

But what about if you’re happy to circulate, say, images of yourself for a short period of time on the condition that all recipients delete the snaps upon you command? Well, that would likely never work, which is where Snapchat could come in handy.

Snapchat is a free iOS app, primarily aimed at those wishing to participate in real-time picture chats. This is all very innocent on the surface, but a quick peek at the app’s stock images on the App Store reveal what many people may want to use it for, sharing flirty or other risque content. But we all know what can happen if we upload images into the digital realm. They can have a tendency to find their way permanently onto social networks and other public forums for all the world to see.

This is why Snapchat has built an interesting feature into the very fabric of the app…you control how long your friends can view a picture for. When you take a snap, you simply set the timer for up to ten seconds and hit ‘send’.

You can select which of the contacts on your iPhone to send the image to, and the recipient is asked to press and hold to view the image which will then display for the preset period of time.

Now, you’re likely thinking ‘but what about screenshots’? Well, if the recipient tries to take a screenshot, you will be notified by the app if this happens. There are other ways round it too, if you’re fast enough. You could take a photo of the photo using another device, but the quality won’t be very good and you would have to be quick off the mark.

So, it’s far from flawless, but Snapchat certainly provides some decent first-stage friction to prevent ‘private’ images from becoming truly public.

As Michael Fertik, chief executive of Reputation.com, says in the New York Times today, this extra hurdle could make all the difference for those looking to retain a little more digital privacy. “We know that friction is a very powerful tool to deter people from taking things that are meant to be private and sharing them,” he said. “It’s probably impossible to completely deter people, but adding friction in a second-to-second environment — like sexting — can be very powerful.”

➤ Snapchat

“Is this the next Web?” asked Frommees‘ self-proclaimed ‘Founding Father’ Martin Brouns, holding aloft a small, coin-shaped piece of recycled plastic. “Is this technologically anything? It doesn’t have a QR code on it. It doesn’t have a chip in it, it’s just a little piece of plastic. But still…I think it’s the next Web.”

Given a whole twenty minutes to prepare his wildcard pitch at The Next Web’s conference ten days ago, Brouns did a stellar job of composing himself to win over the panel of judges and collect the ‘Most Remarkable Presentation’ award at the TNW Startup Rally.

Ten days on from this 5-minute impromptu pitch, we caught up with Brouns again to delve a little deeper into Frommees, and see what it’s really all about.

So…what exactly is a Frommee?

I’m not quite sure whether this ingeniously simple concept could be big, or whether it’s destined to go the way of the dodo before it’s even gotten off the ground. It is a neat idea though, and it’s certainly worth exploring further.

But what, exactly, is a Frommee? There’s a clue in its name – ‘from’ and ‘me’. In the simplest possible terms, a Frommee is a physical keepsake of digital content. It is a token with a unique code printed on its back, and once you enter this at Frommees.com (post-registration), you’re asked to add something you like to the Frommee. This could be a YouTube video, picture…or any kind of digital content.

After this you pass your Frommee to a friend, or leave it somewhere to be found by a stranger. “Once registered, you can always return to the world of Frommees,” says Broun. “It’s a place that is filled with travel information about your Frommees like the connections and treasures it collected on its journey.”

How a Frommee works

Armed with a Frommee, you enter the 9-digit code on the back of it into Frommees.com.

If the Frommee is fresh and unregistered, you’ll be told so and then invited to attribute content to the little plastic disc. You’ll need to give it a name, and a message:

You are then invited to search for content in YouTube, Flickr, SoundCloud, Vimeo…or upload your own content from your computer.

There is also a section in your account called ‘More From Me’, where you can add things like Twitter and Flickr streams, or integrate blog updates, meaning that Frommees can act as a sort of convoluted business card to dish out to curious strangers at events.

The potential use cases for Frommees are plentiful. You can hand them out when courting someone you like, or leave them in public places for people you don’t know to pick up. However, it’s clear that these could be used by brands to market new services or products…they could perhaps be given away in cereal boxes or through other marketing channels.

“Another section we are extremely proud of and building at the moment is ‘From me to the world’, adds Brouns. “This is a place where we give our users real money that they can donate to charity of their liking. This money, of course, comes from the company whose brand, logo or campaign is associated with the Frommee.”

In terms of getting hold of a Frommee, the idea for now is that companies will order them in bulk to hand out content on, or the startup will hand out starter kits to those that request them.

The Frommee story

Founded in the Netherlands in the winter of 2011, Brouns says the company saw about 3,000 Frommees travel from person to person within four days of launch. “At the moment about 20,000 Frommees are traveling, with some going as far as Switzerland,” he says. “Kids and young adults went nuts for Frommees, they liked the fact that they could find and spread something that has traveled far and holds secret content on it that they could unlock.”

How did they get the good word out though, given that you can’t just walk into a store and buy Frommees? Brouns explains:

“In December 2011, there was a big charity event in Leiden, called 3FM Serious Request. We thought it would be cool to have a preliminary open beta launch. So we invited people into our office, which we’d rebuilt to hold a midget-golf track.

In exchange for money people could play the Frommee-themed course, afterwards they could register a special themed Serious Request Frommee. In the course of 5 days we had 3,000 people entering our office and most of them went home with a handful of Frommees and a smile on their face. We raised more than €3,400 for the Red Cross. It showed us that Frommees had the potential to really help charity.”

I asked the 28-years-old Frommees founder what the inspiration behind the idea was, and it seems it has been brewing within him since long before the World Wide Web.

“With Frommees, I am following a dream or a wish I had as a child,” says Brouns. “It all started when I was six years old. I really wanted to have the Lego Monorail, so my mother thought it would be a good idea to let me empty my piggybank, and head to the toy store. The money I paid the cashier with, I had gotten every week from my grandmother, so strangely enough I had formed a bond with this money and found it somewhat hard to give it to a stranger. My eagerness for the Lego bricks won out though, but not before my mother had convinced me that the money would be safe and would start to travel again and make other people happy. I thought about the idea that my money made other people happy a lot and would have loved to meet this people and see what cool things they did with “my” money.”

As Brouns grew older, this fantasy never really vanished, and when he was in his early twenties, he founded a small media company. “I came into contact with all kind of brands, and I noticed that most of their Web efforts actually went unnoticed by their target audience,” continued Brouns. “At first I thought it was a lack of interest in the products, but when I thought about it a little bit more, it occurred to me that the audience wasn’t unwilling to engage with a certain brand, it was the fact that they didn’t come into contact with it at all.”

So whilst banner ads and such like do guide some Internet-users to a certain website, Brouns says that most people ignore them completely. “What this world needed was something you could physically hold and would direct you to all these great Web initiatives,” he says. “I wanted something that I could hold in my hand that would symbolize the Internet.”

It has taken Brouns the best part of four years to get Frommees to where it is now, and he has been combining everything that he loves about the Internet in the years leading to today. ” The launch at the Next Web 2012 was really strange, because it was the first time the global potential of Frommees was fulfilled by an eager international crowd,” he says.

Frommees is headquartered in Leiden, the Netherlands, and currently has six employees, “…but with all the requests and great feedback we are getting now, I think this number will be growing,” says Brouns.

Thus far, they have largely been working during weeknights and weekends, as they have had no external funding. “All the money I have earned making movies and e-learning modules, I’ve  invested in Frommees, ” he continues. Though it’s worth noting that they switched to full-time upon launching at the TNW conference.

Frommees is still in beta, and Brouns says that they’re looking to work on things quite a bit to get things up to standard.

“The site you are seeing now only represents 25% of the final design,” he says. “So we need some time to make it bigger and tweak it. We started to look for an outside app developer. The next thing we need to do is find companies and brands that like to have a big social or charity presence and who like to try out new ways of social media branding.

“But probably most important of all is we need to have our Frommees on the street and that’s why we turn to our users to ask them to spread them,” he continues. “For as long as we can afford it, we will also send starter kits to everyone who wants to get started with Frommees.”

➤ Frommees

Back in early February, word got out that Tumblr had hired an editorial team to surface noteworthy content from the network. Now, Tumblr has announced the results of this initiative, which takes the form of Storyboard, a hub for in-depth conversations with Tumblr’s creative community.

We had known that Tumblr’s editorial team would consist of editor-in-chief Chris Mohney and executive editor Jessica Bennett of The Daily Beast. Though the final outcome isn’t surprising, I was expecting something a bit more tech-driven instead of a blog managed entirely by hand.

If you’re a Tumblr user and want to share a story with the Storyboard team, all you need to do is tag a post with #storyboard. According to the announcement, Tumblr’s editors will “monitor the tag and the community’s interactions there, promoting stories that resonate.” If the team finds that “your story really works, [they'll] ask to expand it for publication on Storyboard itself.”

Tumblr’s editor in chief, Chris Mohney, says he sees Storyboard as a venue to “shed light on content and creators that otherwise might not get discovered, to surface stories and bring them to an audience that is always hungry for new ideas.” Executive editor Jessica Bennett states: “If you think think of Tumblr as a city of 50 million, we’re drawing out the narratives, the ideas, the social trends and themes that affect the people who live in it.”

From Tumblr:

We’re excited to announce the official launch of Storyboard, our new hub for in-depth conversations with Tumblr’s creative community. We’ll be posting regular features on creators working in and around Tumblr’s massively diverse cosmos — writers, musicians, animators, scientists, artists, archivists, chefs, comedians, or anyone else with a great story to tell. Today we’re talking about Michael Stipe, the New York Times, Afghanistan, and the design mechanics of the Tumblr Dashboard.

We want to hear your stories too. If you’re interested in submitting a story (or even a story idea) for us to publish, just post it on Tumblr tagged with #storyboard. Our editors will monitor the tag and the community’s interactions there, promoting stories that resonate. And if your story really works, we’ll ask to expand it for publication on Storyboard itself.

Last but not least, if you find yourself in New York City on May 10, we’d love to hang out at the official Tumblr meetup celebrating Storyboard’s launch. It’s at Powerhouse Arena, 7-9pm, with drinks on us and several Tumblr celebrity mystery guests (cough Topherchris, Tommypom, cough).

This is certainly an interesting project, but it likely won’t help to resolve the need for improved discovery tools within the blogging network itself. So far, surfacing new content isn’t Tumblr’s bread and butter and Storyboard won’t change that.

➤ Storyboard

We’ve already come across a way to transform your Facebook feed to make it look like Pinterest, and it was only a matter of time before someone came up with something similar for Google+.

Using the aptly named Greasemonkey userscript Google+ Pinterest, you can instantly transform your Google+ feed into a Pinterest-like grid of posts and photos.

To install a userscript on Firefox, make sure you have the Greasemonkey add-on installed, while Safari users can opt for GreaseKit. Chrome users can simply install the userscript directly from the site.

With Google+ recently introducing a revamped design, the look hasn’t gone down well among all of its users. If you’ve been particularly annoyed by that great big chunk of white space glaring back at you, and aren’t sure what to do with it, this is a great way to get rid of it.

Once you’ve installed the userscript, your Google+ newsfeed will be transformed into three columns, and photos, of course, really come to life with the new layout.

The same goes for profile pages, and Google+ pages, with all the content displayed in a grid. The changes are of course only skin-deep, allowing you to interact with Google+ as you normally would – leaving comments, sharing content and more.

Aside from giving your Google+ feed the ultimate Pinterest feel, the script also puts the focus on the content you’re viewing, hiding the menu and chat window out of sight. The menu slides into sight when you hover over the left hand side of the screen, with the same effect used to slide the chat window into sight on the right hand side.

If you follow a lot of photographers on Google+, this userscript offers a pretty visually appealing way to keep up with their latest images.

Unlike its Facebook counterpart, there is no real Pinterest integration here, and the process of pinning or repinning content is nowhere to be found. It’s simply a cool way to reinvent your Google+ experience.

What do you think of bringing some of the Pinterest feel to Google+? Let us know in the comments.

➤ Google+ Pinterest

Evernote is waiting for approval from the Chinese government before it introduces a dedicated data center in the country, as it seeks to grow its user base and unlock the potential of ”the hardest” market on the planet.

The company is waiting on the go ahead for the installation of the dedicated servers that will allow a fuller experience for Evernote users in the country, the Wall Street Journal reports. Evernote has already introduced a dedicated Chinese service — which has 1.1 million users — and the expansion will see it take on 30 local staff, taking it up to 200 worldwide.

The opening of a Chinese data center raises the possibility that the firm will need to censor information on its service however, while the security of data secured on the servers is likely to be brought into question.

Evernote CEO Phil Libin — who spoke at The Next Web conference last month — says that the possible government intervention is part and parcel of entering China:

We worry about all of that stuff [but] you can’t allow yourself to be paralyzed by the worries.…If Chinese authorities need access to Chinese data in a lawful way I don’t think it’s realistic to say we’ll be able to stop it.

Libin says that, as a compromise, users in China will be able to choose to run the service through the Chinese center (once established) or its US-based servers, as is currently default. He also pledges to treat data requests from the government with ”as much openness and transparency as possible”, which could be interesting.

Outside of possible data issues, local payment options are a priority for Evernote as it seeks to grow its revenues in China. Its user base there makes up 4 percent of its near 30 million registered users, but just one percent of its premium customers.

Libin told the WSJ that payment is the chief issue in China. He’s confident that there is considerable demand for its premium service, which include larger data allowances, increased sharing options and more, and expects that support for the Yuan will increase the number of paying customers in China.

As well as improving the service’s performance in China, a local data center will help Evernote appeal to local developers to build new apps and third-party integrations to make it more useful and used in the country.

Adobe has just announced that Creative Suite 6 is now available, but there is a wait for for its Creative Cloud product, which will be available May 11, but it is now open for pre-order.

Just two weeks ago, Adobe announced Creative Suite 6 and the new Creative Cloud subscription model. At the time, Adobe was quiet about the actual launch date, but now the details are out.

The dates were confirmed by David Wadhwani, the senior vice president of Digital Media Business at Adobe, who said:

We announced Creative Cloud and CS6 two weeks ago and these releases have caught the imagination of creatives everywhere. Today we’re shipping CS6 and look forward to the beginning of an exciting new era as we introduce Creative Cloud later this week.

The costs are a bit high, as is to be expected, and the Master Collection is priced at $2,599, the Production Premium at $1,899, the Design & Web Premium at $1,899 and the Design Standard at $1,299. High prices are exactly why Creative Cloud has potential, as it only costs $49.99 per month on a yearly subscription.

For many designers, this still isn’t affordable enough, but if you’re already planning on buying the entire Master Collection, Creative Cloud promises a ton of extra perks and future upgrades that make it worthwhile.

This year’s release was interestingly lacking in suspense, as much of the news was leaked long before the official presentation. That said, there are certainly plenty of features to get excited about, including major improvements in Photoshop’s Content Aware Fill tool, Illustrator’s new Pattern Creation tool and Dreamweaver’s emphasis on responsive design.

If you’re still using CS 4, now’s the perfect time to upgrade. As for users of CS 5 or CS 5.5, there’s no need to rush, but the improvements are still worth looking into.

Creative Cloud, which was first announced last August, is fundamentally a $50 per month subscription to all things Adobe.

It’s a massive combination of software and services, featuring the CS6 Master Collection, Muse (1.0), Edge (preview release), Lightroom (coming this summer), Business Catalyst, Typekit (portfolio level), 20 gigs of Dropbox-esque file hosting/sharing, syncing and heavy integration with Adobe’s touch apps.

Over time, a number of new features and releases are promised to CC subscribers, including community galleries, an all new Kuler app, Lightroom 4 and something involving PhoneGap.

The full details are still unconfirmed at the moment, but you can find out everything we know about the solutions here.

If you’re still seeking more information, be sure to check out everything you need to know about this year’s Adobe event.

➤ Purchase CS 6 or pre-order Creative Cloud

This is the sort of story that hits your inbox, and you just know it’s going to be amazing. And I was right, this is hilarious.

In the days of Gmail offering you 10 gigabytes of free storage, and Google proper providing a suite of products that work with Gmail to give you a tidy, powerful digital life, to compete is difficult. So, obviously, the way to combat all that would be to create a new email service that’s expensive, less featured, spammy by nature, and hard to sign up for, right?

Yes. From their email to me:

Dear Conservative Friend,

As you know companies like Google, Yahoo, Hotmail and many others offer free email. Well, its time for a Conservative company to offer the same! You don’t have to pay for basic email!

Now have a Conservative alternative to free email: RonaldReagan.com.

You can get a FREE email account or upgrade to a paid account with more options. Your choice!

Plus, you will be proud to have your name associated with the greatest President, Ronald Reagan.

This is epic. Now, to the service itself. If you want to see how ugly their site is, head here. But if you just want to laugh at its pricing scheme, well, here you go:

Wow, less than Gmail and I get to pay for it? Excellent! Now, the Pièce de résistance, the sign up menu:

Holy check! That’s quite the list. Of course, myself and TNW’s Drew Olanoff tried to spoof our way past the system, but the damn thing wouldn’t let us. From my personal set of rejection notices:

That’s quite the ‘no,’ isn’t it?

What the hell is going on? I don’t know, but it appears that a bunch of yahoos snagged RonalReagan.com (the real Reagan links are here, and here), and are using the dead man’s name to make a buck. It’s a bit scummy, I think, to grift on a dead man’s legacy.

But yeah, this exists. Get some?

I haven’t been secretive about the fact that I don’t use my iPad for much of anything anymore. I use it on plane rides, instead of pulling out my laptop. Even then, I only use it for basic web surfing and checking tweets if I’m on a Wi-Fi enabled flight.

The one thing that I could never do on my iPad is write things, like this blog post for example. Using the iPad keyboard has always been an awkward experience for me, and I end up holding it like an iPhone and typing on it the same way. Rarely have I ever put an iPad in landscape mode and typed on it like I see other people doing.

However, an app that’s in the works called SlideWriter might change all of that for me.

It’s not out yet, and not much is known about it, but here’s how its creator describes it:

SlideWriter for iOS lets you quickly move the cursor or select text by sliding your finger above the keyboard. It makes editing text faster and much easier than tapping and holding for every edit.

It does not require a jailbreak, all functions of the built-in keyboard stay intact including splitting the keyboard.

Here’s a seriously impressive demo of it in action though:

I want this. As in, right now. I could see this turning the typing experience on an iPad into an easier task for me. I find that having to move the cursor to the exact spot to make an edit is a pain in the ass, thus turning me off of the whole experience entirely.

Until the app is available, go shout at the team on Twitter and tell them to rush it to the App Store!

Being a foursquare superuser is serious business, there’s a lot of responsibility that comes with the honor. Not sure what a foursquare superuser is? Here’s how the company characterizes it:

If you’re a perfectionist who loves proper grammar and spelling, if you twitch a little when you see a duplicate venue, or if you cringe at a venue with missing or incorrect information, just fill out this application to apply (make sure you’re logged in to your foursquare account). Friendly tip: you should read our guidelines first!

Basically, if you use foursquare a lot and get annoyed by duplicated, unorganized, or bullcrap venues, then you’re the type of person that the company wants to be a “superuser”. Once your account is given this blessing, you’ll be able to make changes for venues. It’s a brilliant way for foursquare to harness its community to help it make sure that it has as much correct information in its databases as possible.

If you’re one of the superusers who have signed up for this crowdsourced policing, then you know that making changes to venues isn’t the easiest thing to do, especially since the web is the best place to do it. If you’re not at your computer, then you’re pretty much out of luck.

A new third-party app called “hopscotch” is specifically for foursquare superusers and brings all of the tools together that you need to update venues on the go.

Protect and serve

If you’re a foursquare superuser then it’s very likely that you enjoy editing venues to make they’re as accurate as possible. I’ve met a few people who have complained about specific venues not having the proper address and such, and I’m always the one that ends up fixing it to their delight. It’s a neat trick at a bar, for sure.

Hopscotch for iOS isn’t a full-featured foursquare app, it’s just for superusers and allows you to search for venues to edit, or check the ones that are close to you for accuracy:

As you can see above, once you click on a venue, you’ll be able to make the changes that you see fit. Of course you must be a superuser to be able to use the hopscotch app, and once you allow the app to access foursquare, you’ll be able to make all of your edits as expected.

Sure, this is an app for a small subset of users, but it definitely makes the “job” much easier. When I’m waiting to hop on a plane, I usually go through all of the suggested venue changes and duplicates reported by foursquare users to do my part and clean things up.

Hopscotch makes this all easier. If you’re not a superuser on foursquare, you can apply to be one here.

➤ hopscotch for iOS