Incredible Services and Products
Okay, okay; this may be a thank you posting for the wonderful sponsors of our massive HTML5 competition, however, it’s important for me to note that I refused to accept sponsors of any product that I didn’t honestly feel was fantastic. What this means is that, as the editor of Nettuts+, I fully endorse each and every one of the following services and products, and, in fact, use many of them on a daily basis! That’s why I asked these companies to sponsor the competition!
1. TechSmith
TechSmith has been extremely generous to Envato in the last few years. Luckily, that has no effect on the fact that the products they provide — everything from Camtasia Studio to Jing Pro, are amazing.
Did you know that I personally use their products every single day? When you watch screencasts from Nettuts+, they were recorded with Camtasia Studio for Mac. When I send out quickie videos and images, I use Jing Pro to distribute them on Twitter. Not only that, but they’re constantly updating their products, and support both Windows and Mac.
“We’ve stayed on top of the screen capture and recording game since the launch of Snagit nearly 20-years-ago.”
2. Media Temple
In addition to being my personal web host of choice, Media Temple is hugely respected around the web as being one of the premier web hosts. Whether hosting jQuery, or Starbucks, or even Django’s site, MediaTemple can handle the load! They come highly recommended.
“Media Temple hosts websites. Big and Small. For years we’ve taken complex technology and simplified it for the everyday website owner. Our products are designed to be powerful, affordable and relevant. Please take a look around; perhaps (mt) is a good choice for your next project.”
3. FormStack
Do we recommend FormStack? Well consider this; the submission form to enter the HTML5 competition…was created with FormStack. Their service is incredibly simple to use.
“Formstack’s easy form builder gives businesses and organizations an easy way to build any type of online form, integrate it with their website and begin collecting data. ”
4. Wufoo
At Envato, we use Wufoo as well. If you haven’t heard Chris, from CSS-Tricks praise Wufoo enough, let us assure you that their service comes with the highest recommendation from Nettuts+. I even use them on my own personal sites!
“What is Wufoo? Wufoo strives to be the easiest way to collect information over the Internet. Our HTML form builder helps you create contact forms, online surveys, and invitations so you can collect the data, registrations and online payments you need without writing a single line of code.
5. FusionCharts
FusionCharts has long been regarded as the premier solution for rendering animated graphs and charts for your business. Just browse through their various demos if you don’t believe me!
“FusionCharts v3 helps you create animated and interactive Flash charts for web and desktop applications. It livens up your applications by converting monotonous data into exciting visuals. “
6. Pagelime
We’ve published PageLime tutorials a couple of times on Nettuts+ recently. The huge advantage with their service is that zero coding is required on your part. This makes it significantly appealing to non-tech savvy folks. Most recently, they’ve launched a reseller program, as well as a new navigation manager.
“Pagelime is a brandable CMS that lets your clients manage their content. No installation, no coding to integrate, and no wasted time. Just add the cms-editable CSS class to any HTML element on your site and Pagelime does the rest.”
7. Campaign Monitor
There’s a reason why Facebook, Ebay, and Twitter utilize Campaign Monitor’s services: they’re the best! In fact, their email CSS guide has been proven to be a bible for me, when creating designs optimized for email. They even contributed a tutorial to Nettuts+ not too long ago on the state of CSS3 in email designs.
Send beautiful email campaigns, track the results, and manage your subscribers.”
8. Snippets
If you’ve watched my tutorials, you might have noticed a little scissors icon in my menu bar. That’s for Snippets. It’s an incredible code snippet management tool for Mac, that I use on a daily basis. Even better, it has support for Snipplr uploading — which Envato recently purchased!
“Snippets is a powerful application for Mac OS X that stores the most valuable pieces of code you can reuse in different projects many times.”
9. Querious
In need of a kick-ass MySQL database management app for Mac? I was, and Querious proved to be the best tool for the job. I use it often in my SQL-based video tutorials.
“Querious is a MySQL database management application written from the ground up for Mac OS X. Unlike mindless Mac OS X ports of applications originally made for Windows or Linux, Querious works the way you’d naturally expect it to as a Mac OS X app.”
10. Miva Merchant
Miva Merchant has been around for a long time, and is one of the top providers of e-commerce solutions on the web.
Miva Merchant is a leading supplier of e-commerce software and services to small and medium-sized businesses. We provide online merchants, developers, web designers and web hosts with the information and technology needed to be successful in today’s online selling environment.
11. Rockable Press
Envato’s publishing branch, Rockable Press, is in full force these days — especially with the release of our CEO’s newest book, “How to Build a Successful Blog Business,” which I’m currently reading through. To be objective…it’s fantastic.
“At Rockable Press, we produce simple, straight forward how-to guides and resources for web and creative professionals. We are a small web publishing outfit operated by Envato with authors based around the world. ”
12. jQuery Enlightenment
To this day, jQuery Enlightement holds the spot as my most recommended book on jQuery. Written by Cody Lindley, the book is succinct, and cuts out all of the fluff. As a result, you learn everything you need to know…as quickly as possible. Not only that, but he utilizes JSBin to provide clickable code examples for all of the demos. This has proven to be an extremely smart decision on his part, and you’ll surely see others adopting this same method in the future.
“jQuery Enlightenment was written to express, in short-order, the concepts essential to intermediate and advanced jQuery development. Its purpose is to instill in you, the reader, practices that jQuery developers take as common knowledge. Each chapter contains concepts essential to becoming a seasoned jQuery developer.”
13. WP Structure Theme
Chris Robinson is far and away one of the best authors on ThemeForest, and this theme is a perfect example of his talents.
“Months in development WP Structure is a highly flexible and heavily optioned premium theme, to be used for almost anything business, portfolio, blog, magazine & more!”
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We salute Envato and all the sponsors for this HTML5 app contest.
Cheers!
wow, not earning enough money that you still have to add an ad post, uh?
It’s a sponsors thank-you post. Is quite common.
That’s the wrong sort of attitude to take really.
The sponsors have donated quite a bit of money’s worth to bring the community a super competition with some awesome prizes – so a bit of a promo here and there can’t hurt can it?
I think the Media Temple site is down. Kind of ironic.
I much prefer Linode anyway.
The site seems functional for me, try visiting http://mediatemple.net :)
I think you guys should include skimlinks.com on your list, after all you guys do use them for all your affiliate links.
@jordan If you are not Envato or Starbucks they either don’t give you support, blame you or ask you to upgrade or on weed…or both.
Thank you for the tip will give a try with linode
That’s not true at all.
Media temple has poor service when it comes to their Grid Service. I’m talking from experience here, I don’t understand why it is advertised so much by everyone. Specially “I fully endorse each and every one of the following services and products, and, in fact, use many of them on a daily basis!” Puh-lease….
About Media Temple.
Sure its a great service. But..
For a while now I have been looking for a host that lets me offer hosting to my own clients. I have searched and searched and searched.
MT offers this with a (gs) Grid-Service plan:
* 100 GBs of premium storage
* 1 TB of short-path bandwidth
* 100 unique sites / alternate domains
* 64MB Ruby on Rails (RoR) GridContainer (for accounts opened on or before September 1, 2008)
* A free 30-day trial for any entry-level sized GridContainer. (RoR, Django, MySQL)
* 1,000 GPUs
* 100 databases
* 1,000 email addresses
Which is nice for $20 per month.
However for people like myself, who wants to resell hosting to my clients they say in the GS faq:
“Can I Resell Resources on my (gs) Grid-Service?
Yes. However customers serious about reselling should look at our (dv) Dedicated-Virtual Server…”
So I looked at the DV offers, and here begins what I cannot understand.
They have 3 plans:
1. (dv) BASE ($50/month)
Premium Storage: 20GB
Dedicated RAM: 512MB
Network Transfer: 1TB
2. dv) RAGE ($100/month)
Premium Storage: 40GB
Dedicated RAM: 1GB
Network Transfer: 1.5TB
3. (dv) EXTREME ($150/month)
Premium Storage: 60GB
Dedicated RAM: 2GB
Network Transfer: 2TB
To me this seems like very little Premium Storage for “customers serious about reselling”. I contacted them about this and they told me that the only way to get more storage is to upgrade to a higher level plan. So to get 500GB (which should be decent for “customers serious about reselling” ) you would need:
$(8EXTREME x 150) + $(1BASE x 50) = $1250/Month.
I told them this was a rather expensive and they agreed.
I don’t understand how they can seriously suggest this as an option for “customers serious about reselling”.
Am I missing something?
Regards,
Jaidev
We have never really had a reseller-type program like other hosts do. Our system is better suited to the small-business designers/developers who use their servers to host their client’s websites. For people interested in simply reselling hosting, we might not be the best fit. While the (dv) may be a good option for some customers, it’s not a perfect fit for everyone. Also, you can always stack your VPS hosting along with something like Amazon S3 in order to get more storage.
“Also, you can always stack your VPS hosting along with something like Amazon S3 in order to get more storage.” yeah…upgrade upgrade upgrade upgrade upgrade upgrade upgrade
By the way are you going to reimburse me for your hotline not working in Japan and me having to call you in the US
Techsmith are amazing, I too use their products often for screencasts, incredible stuff!
@ Jeffrey:
I see you mention a lot of mac stuff, I’d (as a windows user), like to see maybe so alternatives for these who don’t have one?
Why no apps for Windows??? Not all of us are on a Mac. Good PHP and MySQL applications are hard to find for Windows and you never seem to mention any here.
Guess I should have read all the other comments 1st.
So, YA what ShadowAssassin said!
TechSmith have camtasia studio, snag-it for windows too. i use them..
Quality list, Structure looks like a really nice theme. I like all of the different home page variations.
Nice stuff, but why only mac apps?
PageLime looks nice. I’m using CushyCMS now and might just change since the Lime looks sweet! Plus you can’t beat http://www.itislimetime.com
MediaTemple is a horrible provider. All of their sites were recently exposed to threats because they kept their users’ passwords as plain text in their database, then ALL of their sites went down the other day. They don’t alert customers to any issues that are going on. Every time you email support they don’t read your message properly and they give you a canned response – you need to email them AGAIN and wait another 24 hours for a response. Half the time you have support issues they try to up-sell you to DV instead of helping you sort out your issues.
All of the big boys who are on MT are all VIP members that get special treatment. You guys can try payment $20 a month and see what kind of treatment you get.
The only good thing about them is their marketing which is obviously very effected. Just search for mediatemple on twitter and see what kind of results come up.
Unless you are Envato
Well i use MT, but i dont have any problems with it. But they do have a lot of issues(upgrades/updates/and more) lately
I’m a support rep over at (mt), I can say with total honesty that we try to treat every single customer question or issue on an individual basis. We’re active on the net and read your comments, we’re not trying to provide anyone a service that they’re unhappy with – that’s just bad business mindset. If you or anyone else hosting with us ever has a problem, don’t hesitate to contact us – we’re available 24/7. If you’re unhappy with response time, or a response you received… call us, ask to speak with someone else, we *want* to help our customers. Sure, we’re 100% not perfect. There’s no shame in admitting that, but realistically nobody benefits from sweeping problems under the table.
The incident you’re referring to was rectified and huge changes were made in the back end to prevent things like that from occurring again. What makes us different, is that we accept constructive criticism and strive to better the services we offer our customers. For instance, we had some major stability issues for a period in early 2009. Instead of a bandaid fix, we completely scrapped an entire hardware vendor and restructured the clustered architecture from the bottom up as a response. It was a huge re-investment and took a lot of architectural work, but we want our customers happy.
From several years of web hosting and development experience prior to working at (mt), I can easily say we’ve got some of the best support staff in the industry. We don’t care if you’re paying $10 a month or $50 a month, if you’re a customer you have access unlimited technical support and your voice will be heard.
I’d be willing to speak with you personally about any issues you’ve experienced with us, if you’d like. Feel free to DM us on Twitter and we can exchange emails or I can give you a call.
Querious is nice, but i prefer using Sequel Pro ( http://www.sequelpro.com/ ) who is free for similar features.
I agree with ZeB. Sequel Pro is an excellent program for managing MySQL databases using a GUI.
Great List except for number 10! I have been using miva merchant for the past 6 years. And to do anything to it requires that you buy modules to give it more functionality. And learn miva scripting to do simple mondane things that other ecommerce solutions already provide. The functionality is very limited, and is not the best ecommerce solution out there. You also have to pay a yearly fee to make sure you get the security updates, and other bug fixes. Plus it is not even PCI compliant, just recently with the new wombat will it be pci compliant, but your looking at spending alot of money for the modules to give it more functionality. And the support for the modules are horrible, some of the major module developers dont even get back to you when requesting support for their modules.
Try Magento.. it already has more functionality, which means you wont have to shell more money to give it the features Magento already has out of the box. I would not recommend Miva Merchant, if you want to grow your ecommerce business for the future!
Thanks for the mention Jeff!
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