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Penzu, the stylish Web word processor we checked out about a year ago is ready to make a business out of its hosted writing tools. On Wednesday the company introduced a pro version of its service that costs $19 a year and fixes many of the gripes we originally had about its very pretty, but feature-light offerings.

A pro membership now gets you all kinds of goodies, like a rich text editor, tags for organization, image hosting, 256-bit AES encryption on posts that you’ve locked, and themes that skin the entire interface to your liking. Pro users can also slurp in their posts from another blog service (currently Live Journal only), as well as export them as PDFs and raw text files.

Penzu can now be skinned in one of six themes for those who pay for the service's new pro membership.

(Credit:
CNET

New features are not just limited to pro users though. All users now have a way to share a read-only version of a post to others that does not require any special sign-up for the person who’s viewing it. The tool can also now grab your photos from Flickr, and not just your desktop. This worked without issue when we tried it, but was slow going. You first have to dig through all your Flickr albums, then cycle eight photos at a time to find the shots you’re looking for. After that, you have to wait as it’s imported, which in our case took close to two minutes per photo, making the tool take too long to be usable.

It’s worth noting the service is still designed as a diary replacement, and not as a collaborative document editor the way Google Docs, Zoho Writer, Adobe’s Acrobat.com and others operate. This makes it difficult to compare them, but to be honest, I don’t see much value in paying the $19 for some of the extra features it adds. Things like rich text editing, data exporting, and tagging should be standard features on just about any Web based writing tool if it hopes to compete for user attention, and in this case–dollars.

Originally posted at Web Crawler

Continued here:
Pretty Web journal tool Penzu goes pro

As of 2:15 p.m. Tuesday e-mail delivery had started to return to normal for some Postini customers, although problems remained.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET

Some customers of Google’s Postini e-mail security product experienced significant problems Tuesday, with reports of hours-long delays in e-mail delivery that are still affecting some customers.

Threads throughout Google’s Postini forums spread involving the issue, which seemed to begin overnight on System 7–one of several systems used by the service–and was still affecting some customers as of Tuesday afternoon, although e-mail delivery had resumed for others. Users also reported problems accessing the management consoles used to log into the Postini service, preventing them from understanding exactly what was happening.

Postini, acquired by Google in 2007, offers e-mail security services to businesses. Postini scans all e-mails directed to the networks of its customers for viruses, malware, and spam, passing along the genuine messages to the network once they have been cleared. However, Tuesday it appeared that for a significant portion of the morning, all messages for customers using System 7 were blocked before they reached their destination, and customers could not log into their accounts to see what was going wrong.

A Google representative acknowledged the e-mail delivery delays in a statement. “We’re aware of an issue that’s causing a delay in mail delivery for some Postini customers in the US, and are working to fix it as quickly as possible. We know how important mail is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously, and apologize for the inconvenience. We encourage anyone having technical difficulty to visit the Postini support portal at
https://www.postini.com/support/support_login.php.”

It has not been a good week for the cloud. Hosted applications and services such as Postini were sure to get a second look following the debacle at Microsoft involving the Sidekick and possible data loss.

It’s also another example of Google’s growing pains with customer support. Google Checkout customers reported significant issues for over a month without any resolution, and angry e-mail administrators on Postini’s message boards complained that Google support personnel were very difficult to reach during Tuesday’s issues.

Google support technicians promised some Postini customers–who pay between $12 per user per year and $25 per user per year–that their e-mails were not lost, which is at least some good news for customers affected by the problems. But running a business without e-mail in the 21st century is a very difficult thing to do.

Originally posted at Relevant Results

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Google’s Postini suffers prolonged e-mail delays

Gist on Tuesday is releasing an application for the iPhone that brings many of the site’s big features to user’s small pockets. The free app is meant to compliment Gist.com’s people-analyzing and organizing tools, letting users get an alert on upcoming meetings as well as background information on those who they’re meeting with. This includes how important the user’s contacts are, as determined by Gist’s algorithms.

Where users will spend most of their time though is the app’s dashboard, which breaks down the latest news about people and companies they’re corresponding with based on news stories, blog posts, and tweets. This screen doubles as a RSS reading tool too, since you can read small article summaries that your contacts have noted, as well as bookmark them and open them in Safari. It’s not the best way to get news headlines on the iPhone, but it’s nearly identical to how it works on Gist.com, which should help longtime users feel right at home.

Gist's iPhone app can give you a quick bird's eye view of your past correspondence with one of your contacts.

(Credit:
CNET

Other nice features include being able to send your meeting attendees a quick alert that you’re running late, and a media viewer that lets you very quickly peruse attachments you’ve been sent from one of your contacts via e-mail. These two tools alone could be their own iPhone apps.

All is not sugar and spice though. I found the app’s loading quite long at times, which can be a deal breaker when you’re trying to use it on a cellular data connection–as most users are likely to be doing. And there is no way to use the app without first setting up an account at Gist.com; you cannot do this from the app itself.

It’s also inherently missing a way to be integrated into the iPhone’s e-mail and calendaring services. This is entirely Apple’s fault but means that while you can do a whole lot of viewing of your connected calendar events and e-mail conversations from the app, as far as using it as a two-in-one office tool, it comes up a little short for things like creating new events and searching through old conversations. That falls in line with Gist.com though, which is simply there to serve as an organizational layer on top of the e-mailing and calendaring tools you’re already using. It just sticks out a whole lot more on a device where so much of the business utility revolves around those two applications.

The iPhone is not the first platform destined to get a Gist app, but according to the company, it’s been the most asked for by users. Versions for other devices will be on the way next year.

Originally posted at Web Crawler

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Gist’s people organizer comes to the iPhone

Tweetie 2 adds a boatload of new features, including persistence: It returns you to where you left off the last time you used the app.

Twitter apps are like candy bars: everybody’s got a favorite. For me it’s Milky Way and TweetDeck.

Of course, there’s always room for change. For instance, the Take 5 bar is increasingly my go-to treat (better hide your Halloween stash, kids), and I might just jump ship to Tweetie 2, which debuted in the App Store over the weekend.

Priced at $2.99, Tweetie’s the top-paid app in the Social Networking section of the store.

New features in version 2 include an offline mode, new-message indicators, full landscape support, video uploads (for 3GS users), and faster overall performance.

So this begs the question: what’s your favorite Twitter app, and why? Vote in our poll!

In the meantime, check out Webware’s recent roundup of Twitter apps that let you manage multiple accounts.

And, hey, if you’re headed to the comments to talk up Twitter apps, feel free to name your favorite candy, too. It’s Halloween time, after all, and I can’t help wondering if anyone else is harboring a secret love for Swedish Fish.

What’s your favorite Twitter app?(polls)

Originally posted at iPhone Atlas

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Poll: What’s your favorite iPhone Twitter app?

Adobe Systems on Friday introduced a new Photoshop app for iPhone users that lets them edit photos from both their phone and their online library on Photoshop.com.

The app is free of charge and offers tools such as cropping, image rotation, color controls, and simple one-touch filter effects that can change the look and feel of shots all at once. It also features undo and redo controls so that if users make a mistake, or want to revert back to the original, it takes just a few taps.

As soon as users are done editing any photo, they can either save it back to their phone or upload it to their Photoshop.com account. The app also doubles as a photo-taking tool since you can simply take a photo, then have it upload right away.

What makes the app notable (besides from being from Adobe) is that the entire editing control set works off gestures. Instead of using dials or sliders, users just need to swipe their finger across the screen to change things such as brightness or color values. The same goes for its filters, which can be whisked from one end of the screen to the other instead of taking up more screen real estate or using a drop-down menu. It’s one of the more intuitive control methods I’ve seen on a mobile photo-editing app, and can be quite precise once you get the hang of it.

The app is available now and is free of charge, although Adobe’s free Photoshop.com service has a 2GB limit, which can be expanded with an annual paid storage plan.

Photoshop for iPhone lets you do all sorts of things to your photos, including beaming them back to Photoshop.com when you're done.

(Credit:
CNET / Josh Lowensohn

Originally posted at Web Crawler

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Adobe brings Photoshop.com to the iPhone