Finetuna: discuss a design in detail without any hassle

Written on June 10, 2008 – 2:18 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

No, this has nothing to do with tasty fish, the name of this service refers to the process of fine tuning a design. Irish design agency Spoiltchild Design came up with a handy tool that helps you and your colleagues to address every detail in an image, without bothering to describe the spot you’re talking about. You just put a note on the desired spot and email the image to a colleague, who can also easily edit the picture as well.

This can come in particularly handy when discussing a site design. I know from my own experience that instead of sending a 3-page email, you just paste some notes on the design. One minor thing though, this experience comes from using Fleck. This Amsterdam-based service offers you the possibility to note specific places on any web page with a bookmarklet or fancy flash browser tool. A disclosure is in order here, as Fleck sponsors this blog. I think though, that for tech-savvy users, Fleck is the better tool. Yet for people who just want to add some text to an image, Finetuna is a good alternative since it’s really simple.

A bit too simple maybe, as Finetuna could use some extra features like an embed option and Twitter integration. Speaking of which, I’ve praised web development companies in the past who make Twitter mash-ups to promote their services. These companies add something to the web, while working on their PR. It’s probably the same story with Spoiltchild Design, as there are no advertisements on Finetuna, nor do visitors have to register. The consultants of Spoiltchild just needed a tool like this and then decided to make it publicly available. And before you know it, some blogger mentions their company name three times.

I hope you like that post!

The Next Web Blog covers start-up news from all over the world (not just the Valley), exciting new technologies and inspiring entrepreneurs. If you're new here, you may want to read our 'About' page and subscribe to our RSS feed.

Do you have a start-up that we should write about? Contact us! Thanks for visiting and hope you come back again!

annotation, design, finetuna, fleck, spoiltchild design, webdesign

About the author: Ernst-Jan is blogger and co-organizer of BLOG08, who previously worked in New York to cover news at the United Nations. Next to writing, he's also a singer in the band Christina Five. Follow him on Twitter or read his personal blog Dutchproblogger.com .

Post that could be related to this post:

Why measuring engagement will not suffice in explaining the succces of social sites (1)

Engagement is the new holy grail. The term doesn't suffer from a lack of attention recently with the rise of tools like Nuconomy, Microsoft's attempts to discuss engagement mapping and others trying to define the...

The Next Web Conference Design: Your Turn…

The guys (and girls?) at freshheads have just sent us their design for The Next Web Conference 2009 website. We like it but what do we know about design, right? Maybe YOU have some ideas...

Ep5: Companies Who Make Money: Stylizer visual CSS editor

Following on from Patrick's wish for a specific tool to edit the theme of Wordpress blogs, I want to introduce a company that I would love to use and have been drooling over but can't...

10 comments/trackbacks to “Finetuna: discuss a design in detail without any hassle”

Jun 13, 2008: Web 2.0 Ireland » Blog Archive » Web2Ireland - what’s going on - week ending June 13th
[...] launches - coverage on Nextweb - another great service from Alan and his team at [...]

By Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Jun 10, 2008

I use Fleck for sharing individual pages on websites but Skitch for ‘pixelperfect’ stuff. They let you annotate screengrabs with text and upload the images to their site. Works very well!

[Reply]
By Alan O'Rourke on Jun 10, 2008

Cool, thanks for the mention Ernst-Jan.

[Reply]
By Sebastian Moeys on Jun 10, 2008

Actually Fleck is useless for the purpose Finetuna serves, because the position of the notes totally depends on screen resolution/window size etc. It renders the positioning of notes useless.

[Reply]
By Patrick de Laive on Jun 10, 2008

@sebastien That’s true, fleck puts an overlay on top of the whole page and doesnot peg the notes to html. So different screen resolutions will show the notes on a different horizantal axes (vertical is precise).
Although fleck is used by a lot of webdevelopers who want to communicate with their clients, I like to use it more as a collaborative bookmarking tool to share interesting websites within groups (and yes I can see the notes that other people leave on those websites, which comes in handy sometimes)

[Reply]
By Patrick de Laive on Jun 10, 2008

Oh, and by the way I think Skitch is by far the best solution for Mac users if you want to annotate pictures. This is also a great tool for bloggers.

[Reply]
By Sebastian Moeys on Jun 11, 2008

@ Patrick

Not arguing Fleck’s value - in this context it just isn’t the right tool to be compared to Finetuna (or Skitch).

Don’t you think finding a solution for fixed positions would be a smart move though?

[Reply]
By Patrick de Laive on Jun 11, 2008

@Sebastien The (dis)advantage is that whenever the word annotation is mentioned, regardless of the context, fleck is compared to it.

Less than 1% of all flecks are actually placed somewhere in context with the page behind it. I believe that web annotation is a nice tool but not good enough for a true service .That is why Fleck shifted to sharing links and interesting websites within groups, creating a collective brain. The web overlay and the notion that it is possible to add stuff to any website is really cool, but up until today not one company (also not our competitors with several millions in funding) proved that there is a big enough market for ‘web annotation’.

[Reply]
By Ernst-Jan Pfauth on Jun 11, 2008

@Sebastian and Patrick, I’m pretty sure it’s a good comparison, as I’ve used it quite a lot for this purpose. Although you’re right about the horizontal bias. Other from that, it works just fine: http://twitter.com/dutchproblo...../756018472

[Reply]
By Patrick de Laive on Jun 11, 2008

@ernst-jan Nice!!

[Reply]

The Next Web