Menu

Subscribe

A mobile version of AlternativeTo and other news

Hi friends,

We hope everything is well with you all! Autumn is here and that means lots of time for indoor activities like coding, designing and other work on this website of ours…

AlternativeTo is getting more and more traffic every week and this makes us happy and even more dedicated to improve the site step by step. Applications and services like Limewire, Xmarks and Drop.io have recently announced that they’re shutting down for different reasons and AlternativeTo has proven to be a great resource for finding alternatives when things like these happen. Both ghacks and Lifehacker obviously agreeand hopefully we have been able to help many of you find good alternatives.

Mobile version

We have created a simple and stripped down version of AlternativeTo that is more suited for mobile browsers. It should work well on any smartphone with a decent browser and you can check it out by visiting m.alternativeto.net on your mobile device. Remember that this is a beta version but we think most of the basic stuff for finding alternatives should work. Lets us know what you think in the forums!

Meta tags

Another thing we have worked on lately is a system to be able to set a couple of “pre-defined” and important tags. These are the meta tags we have added to the list so far:

  • Discontinued – Intended for applications that is no longer being maintained. If it’s still available for usage/download we will still link to it but to know that an application has been discontinued is valuable information in your decision process. Only admins can add this tag.
  • Warning – If we for some reason think that you should think twice before using this application we add the warning tag. There are very few applications in the database that have this tag so far. Only admins can add this tag.
  • Retina Display (iPhone only) – If the application is designed for the iPhone 4 retina display.
  • Jailbreak (iPhone only) – If the application requires a jailbreak to run on your iPhone. We should probably add a similar tag for Android (Root), right?
  • Portable application (Windows Only) – The application can be executed from a USB drive.
  • WINE (Linux only) – If this application can be used with WINE on Linux. We require that the developer of the application has mentioned this explicitly.
  • *Plugin – *For plugins.

We have lots of more plans for the meta data system in the future. For example you will be able to filter the alternative lists based on these tags.

We always need your help!

Please help us out to make AlternativeTo even better. Suggest new applications, suggest alternatives and maybe even more importantly; help us to remove alternatives that for some reason are incorrect. Thank you!