Right now we’re working hard on bringing you new features and also a cleaner look and feel of the whole site. So what have we done lately?
Discussion forums
Some of you took the time to provide feedback, praise, complaints and questions via the Getsatisfaction service we previously used and we really appreciate that. Even though Getsatisfaction is great we also felt the need for a system that we could integrate tightly into AlternativeTo, so we built our own discussion forums. They’re not only intended for feedback and questions but also for general discussions about software. Be sure to check out the first version of the discussion forums and while you’re there why not leave us some feedback on what way you want us to improve the forums or anything else on the site.
New logo and menu
It’s been a while since we introduced our new logo (see the image above) and last week we also redesigned the menu. We got rid of the tabs and moved the platform switch to the white bar that wasn’t used for anything important. This saves some space and we think the new look is fresh. What do you think? We’re planning on making many small design tweaks in the coming weeks.
Widgets for applications
This one is aimed at software developers that want to show off their applications popularity on AlternativeTo and encourage visitors to go to AlternativeTo and leave comments and to “like” the applications they enjoy. Devs can find the code to use on the widget tab on each application page or go to the Widget & WordPress plugin page.
iPhone = iPhone OS
Have you heard of this thing called iPad? Okay good. When Apple introduced a new device running the iPhone OS we thought it was about time we changed the name of this category from just “iPhone” to “iPhone OS”. All applications running on iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad belong here.
Two new blogs: iPhoneUpd & AndroidUpd
Besides working on AlternativeTo we have also launched two small side projects. iPhoneUpd.com and AndroidUpd.com are intended to deliver quick and short updates about all things iPhone / Android. Check them out if you’re interested!
Until next time…
Join the discussions, suggest any new applications you found recently, join us on Facebook and tell your friends and followers on Twitter and/or Facebook about AlternativeTo. Everyone needs an alternative to something 
Have a great summer!
Markus & Ola
RSS is a great way to keep yourself updated about stuff that interest you and of course AlternativeTo provide a couple of different RSS feeds for our content. Read on for a detailed explanation.
RSS for all new applications
These feeds are a subscription of all new applications that get added to our database and there are two separate feeds for the desktop and mobile categories. If you’re only interested in one specific subcategory (like “iPhone” as a subcategory to the mobile category) you can also subscribe to only new applications from that specific subcategory. As an example; this feed lists all new applications that works on Linux and this one gives you a list of all new application for the iPhone. So how do you find the different RSS feeds? Let’s say you want to subscribe to new Blackberry applications. Just go to the mobile category, click on Blackberry and then you get a link to the RSS feed in the right hand sidebar.
RSS for popular applications
Since we get a lot of new content every day, and the main feed might bee too much for most people, we added another type of RSS feed a couple of months back. The popular applications feed gives you all applications that reaches more than 10 likes. We believe that for most people this will be much more useful than subscribing to the feed for all new applications. So if you want to keep an eye on new popular Online applications just add it to your RSS reader of choice. The system works exactly the same as for all new applications if you want to subscribe to only a specific category or subcategory.
RSS for new alternatives to a specific application
This is actually the one feed that we find the most useful. Lets say that you really want to find an alternative to a specific application but you can’t find it anywhere, not even on AlternativeTo. Obviously you don’t want to go back to the site over and over again to see if somebody has added an alternative to the application. Then the simple solution is to subscribe to the RSS feed for the specific application and as soon as someone finds an alternative you will be notified in your RSS reader. You find the link to this feed in the right hand sidebar when you are browsing an application.
A while back we released a WordPress plugin and an API for AlternativeTo and we believe that they both have the potential to be very useful to any website dedicated to software for computers or mobile phones. But we also wanted to give something back to people that link to us and that’s why we introduced a pingback/trackback feature a couple of weeks back.
Pingback is a feature that is very common among blogs. It basically means that if you link to a blog post you get a link back from that blog in its comments or wherever the author of the site chooses to put the links. On AlternativeTo it works the same way. If you link to any of our “application pages” (example: Photoshop) we automatically link back to your article in the sidebar under the header Sites that links to this page.
These links are a great way for users to dig deeper by checking out other websites and blogs opinions about the application and you as a publisher will get more visitors (and some link love) from us.
Enjoy!
The last couple of months we have been planning for the future of AlternativeTo and we also made some small improvements to the site. You can expect major changes coming this spring but today we want to give you an update about what we have done lately.
- Applications that have not been approved yet are marked with a yellow notification bar. You can still browse to these applications and tell friends about them but we can not guarantee that all of them will be approved.
- Our API has been rebuilt. The main difference for users of the API is that the URLs have changed to make them much cleaner. Read more about it on our API page.
- The RSS feeds had some small bugs that have been fixed.
- We have had problems getting some OpenID providers to work well on AlternativeTo but after some tweaking we think that we got most of these problems out of the way.
- Contributors and the users that added an application are now given rights to change the names of applications.
- We made it possible to like applications from all pages on AlternativeTo. This will hopefully make it easier for you to tell the world what applications you like and make AlternativeTo an even better place for finding great alternatives.
- We are giving some credits to Rackspace Cloud in the website footer. We are really happy with Rackspace Cloud and if you want to try it out for yourself then please use our referral link and you will support us in the process.
- Applications that exist on both the desktop and mobile versions of AlternativeTo are now linked. You can see this on applications like Evernote and TweetDeck.
Thanks for your support and for using AlternativeTo. Stay tuned for some exciting stuff coming soon!
We know, it’s only been a day since we released our API, but we have something nice for you today as well. In our quest to help people find better applications our latest project is a WordPress plugin that you as a blogger can add to your post and display great alternatives to applications you write about.
The plugin is really simple to use. You just add the shortcode and it will add some basic info about the application and its top rated alternatives on AlternativeTo.
You can also filter by license and platform.
- License filters: free,opensource and commercial. If you use free all applications that has Free, Open Source, Free with limited functionality and Free for personal use will be listed. Open Source and Commercial just list the items that has these licenses.
- Platform filter: You can filter by multiple platforms but they will do a OR query. So if you use windows|linux we will give you all items that is Windows OR Linux.
There are three different skins avaliable right now, but feel free to modify it the way you like it, or build your own plugin based on our API.
Default
Small
Minimal
Hopefully we will see more plugins in the future – both made by us and by the AlternativeTo user community. If you are a developer and have done something nice based on our API please let us know so we can tell our users about it.
We would also appreciate imput from experienced php and WordPress developers on how to improve the plugin in any way.
You can download the plugin from the WordPress plugin directory and you can always contact us on hello@alternativeto.net with any questions or suggestions. Enjoy!
Wohooo! Today we are releasing an early beta of the AlternativeTo API. It is in its early stages but we want to get it out to you guys so that we can get your opinions which will help us develop it the way you want it. The API lets you get basic information about applications and users on AlternativeTo.
The API returns data formatted in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). The plan is to support more data formats in the future. You can read more about how to use jQuery to request and consume JSON data on this website:
http://docs.jquery.com/Ajax/jQuery.getJSON
We really want your feedback on the API so if you have requests for more methods, what kind of data you want to get or any other questions or suggestions then please feel free to comment or send us an e-mail at hello@alternativeto.net
Get an application and it’s alternatives
- http://api.alternativeto.net/software/firefox/?count=5
- http://api.alternativeto.net/software/spotify/?count=5
- http://api.alternativeto.net/software/firefox/?count=5&platform=linux|mac
- http://api.alternativeto.net/software/firefox/?count=5&license=free
Returns information about the specified application and the specified number of alternatives. You can also filter the list by platform and license.
Get recently added applications
- http://api.alternativeto.net/software/recent/?platform=iphone&license=opensource
- http://api.alternativeto.net/software/recent/?count=5
Returns recently added applications.
Search applications
- http://api.alternativeto.net/search/software/antivirus/?platform=windows
- http://api.alternativeto.net/search/software/antivirus/
Returns a freetext search of “antivirus”. Can be filtered by platform.
Get a list of applications a user recently liked
- http://api.alternativeto.net/user/ola/software/likes/?count=5
- http://api.alternativeto.net/user/markus/mobile/likes/
- http://api.alternativeto.net/user/ola/likes/?count=5
This method returns a specified number of applications that the user likes.
Get a list of application a user has added
- http://api.alternativeto.net/user/ola/software/added/?count=5
- http://api.alternativeto.net/user/ola/software/added/?count=5
- http://api.alternativeto.net/user/markus/added/?count=5
Returns the applications that the specified user has added to AlternativeTo.
More info about the paramaters
You can filter all the list by platform and license.
- License filters: free,opensource and commercial. If you use free all applications that has Free, Open Source, Free with limited functionality and Free for personal use will be listed. Open Source and Commercial just list the items that has these licenses.
- Platform filter: You can filter by multiple platforms but they will do a OR query. So if you send in windows|linux we will give you all items that is Windows OR Linux.
- Count: Count is always optional and default is 5
See some examples above.
Unfortunately we’ve had a problem with OpenID the last couple of days that caused some issues with both new registrations and signing in to existing accounts. If you have been registered for more than a week and haven’t experienced any issues then you should be fine. If you have had problems signing in the last couple of days it should work just fine now.
If you signed up during the last couple of days with Yahoo or Google OpenID there is a possibility that AlternativeTo will not recognize your OpenID login if you try to sign in now. If you experience any issues like this please send us an e-mail at hello@alternativeto.net and we will try to solve the problem.
We’re very sorry for the inconvenience.
It’s getting cold outside (we’re from Sweden) but on AlternativeTo it’s definitely heating up! We have been hard at work trying to enhance the look and feel of the site, and as always we added new features and got rid of some bugs as well.
- New startpage with featured applications.
- Updated design across the site.
- Automatic userlevel system.
- User profiles have been updated with support for Gravatar and the option to show what country you are from. More updates on the profile will come in the near future.
- Public “points” system. Points are based on your actions on AlternativeTo and your total amount of points is displayed on your profile. And of course there is a list of the top contributors.
- You will now see how many likes an app have in all types of application lists.
- In order to keep the lists of alternatives as correct as it possible we have made it easier for you to alert us when something is wrong. Please use the link called “Not an alternative?” when you find something that is wrong.
- New RSS feed with the latest applications with more than 10 likes. You find the links to all RSS feeds in the sidebar.
- Every application now have a information tab with some basic info about the application and some stats.
As always, please give us feedback if you have anything to share. Thank you!
It’s now possible to add AlternativeTo Search to your browser. We have tested this in Firefox (2+) Internet Explorer (7+) and in Google Chrome. Just go to our search page and click on one of the links to the right to add them. If you use Chrome or Firefox you can also assign a keyword to your search which makes it possible to search directly from your adress bar. Just follow the instructions below and when you are done you should be able to typ something like “a photoshop” (keyword application) in the adress bar and find some good alternatives to Photoshop on AlternativeTo.
Firefox
Click the little arrow right next to your search box. A list of providers are shown and at the bottom of that list there is an option called “Manage Search Engines”. Just click that and then “Edit keyword” to set a keyword (or a single letter) for the search engine you want to edit.
Google Chrome
Right click in the adress bar and in the menu that pops up you should find “Edit search engines” at the bottom. Click that one and then find the search engine you want to add a keyword for. Simple as that.
Please write a comment or send us an e-mail if you have any questions or if you have instructions for other browsers.
Anything else?
We have also fixed numerous bugs and made some small enhancements during the last couple of days. It is now possible to use gif and jpeg as icons instead of just png. We have also fixed a couple of bugs that caused errors when you posted messages or comments.
If you want to be notified when we do smaller changes be sure to follow us on Twitter and if that is not your thing you could become a fan on Facebook. As long as you show us some love we are happy
We recently added some new features that will make it easier for you to tell your friends about cool applications you find on AlternativeTo. If you “like” or comment on an application you now have the possibility to publish that on Facebook or Twitter. We thought that if you really like an application it’s likely that you have friends who would like it as well.
Sharing on AlternativeTo is really simple. When you like an application you will see a new yellow bar at the top of the page. To spread the word just click on Facebook or Twitter and you will be prompted to add an optional personal message to your friends.
We hope you are having a really nice summer (or winter if you are down under), and keep those app recommendations coming!
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