DISQUS

Guillaume · 8 months ago

I have been using them for a while and they are amazing tools. Heard rumors they could work together at some point.

JasonFalls · 8 months ago

Haven't heard those whispers, Guillaume, but combining the two would be pretty slick. Of course, the business model of both would perhaps be prohibitive of that. Collaboration is always ideal until you start talking dollars. Still, Apture just got a round of funding. Perhaps they can absorb Zemanta, whose funding I'm not sure of.

Thanks for chiming in.

Betsy Wuebker · 8 months ago

Finally, a plug-in that works the way I think. I agree with your assessment that it's a little more involved than Zemanta, but holy smokes - it hits one out of the park with respect to being able to stack the links and not leave the page. Awesome recommendation. I've installed it and looked at the videos. This is a fabulous product! Thank you!

JasonFalls · 8 months ago

You're welcome. I'm sure there are some hang ups with it, but I've liked it so far. Hopefully, visitors to our respective websites will agree that it's very useful.

Thanks for the comment.

Danny Brown · 8 months ago

I looked at Apture a little while back, and I'm with you on the pop-up options - it was one of the reasons I didn't install at the time. I might have another look at it and play about with it more.

Sure you don't want to let people edit your blog? Whyever not, Jason? ;-)

JasonFalls · 8 months ago

'Cause dude. I don't make mistakes. Heh.

Adam Sherk · 8 months ago

Looks good. I like how you have to be definitely hovering over a link before anything pops up. With some other services you barely scan by and things are popping up left and right :)

JasonFalls · 8 months ago

As it turns out, it's browser-dependent. The pop-ups only happen on clicks in Safari. Guess we'll have to ask Tristan about that one.

Tristan · 8 months ago

Hi Jason,

Thanks for the detailed review! Beyond just adding context, Apture searches a huge set of sources (more than thirty different content & media APIs) which will give end-readers to truly see, hear and immerse themselves in the ideas on the page.

For those interested to grab the free WordPress plugin, check it out here:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/apture/

Thanks,
Tristan
(Apture Co-Founder & CEO)

Danny Brown · 8 months ago

Do you have an idea of when the link will close automatically? As that is one of the key stumbling blocks at the moment.

Cheers!

Tristan · 8 months ago

Hi Danny,

We chose not to make the links close automatically because we wanted to let users could dig multiple layers deep without worrying about moving their mouse too far and accidentally cause the window to close. We also saw that the mouse-over and mouse-away are especially bad for people with trackpads and trackpoints, of an increasingly laptop-bound web audience. Unlike a lot of other services you see on the web that use the mouse-out event to hide the window, readers use Apture to really engage, read, and consume the content in the windows, because it's high-quality stuff the author of the post chose for them to see.

That said, we really pay attention to user experience - and we built several shortcuts to close an Apture window more conveniently:

1) You can click on the link that launched the window in the first place (you'll notice the links icon has been replaced with a small (x)).

2) You can click anywhere on the body of the page to dismiss the last window you opened.

3) You can double-click anywhere on the body of the page to dismiss ALL Apture windows you opened.

Think of it as a stack, each window you are opening is added to a stack. And each time you click on the page background, you are closing one window off that stack. Double-clicking gets you back to where you were before.

Hope this is helpful! We'd love to hear more feedback from you, so shoot us an email at contact AT apture DOT com.

Simon Salt · 8 months ago

Jason, great post. I love Zemanta though sometimes it loads slowly in firefox and can bug me. This just takes things to a totally different level - you have it right, Zemanta on crack! Off to add this to my blog, thank you for the tip and the review of this.

JasonFalls · 8 months ago

You're welcome. We aim to please. Let us know what you think of it after some use.

Stuart Foster · 8 months ago

This is really cool. However, based on your assessment Jason I'm going to install it but not activate it. I need to work all the kinks out of it and play around with it first.

JasonFalls · 8 months ago

Always a sound approach, Stuart. Let us know what you tinker with and how it works for you once you have.