The creative approval process wrAPPed up

What do you get when you mashup Google Docs, Huddle and Evernote? A pretty good show is what you get, and it’s called Notable.

There’s a fantastic array of web based productivity tools available these days, most of them with free versions, with the likes of Huddle, GlassCubes, SocialCast and many more.

They use and develop features from other more mainstream services and mould them into a bespoke product for a specific purpose. Notable is one of those, providing the ability for indviduals involved in creative proofing and development to colloborate with feedback, suggestions and distribution.

With a slick user interface and raft of features, it’s an effective tool that can slide right in to your workflow.

Capturing
Notable offers an impressive and importantly, accesible range of methods to capture imagery/coding for review including bookmarklets, browser plugins, traditional uploading, capture from URL and the iPhone app via it’s camera.

The URL function, in my experience doesn’t always work, trying to bring in my own site as well as the BBC’s home page just brings up error messages or blank images.  Although a nice feature that it is, it’s not worth it from Notables point of view to have a function that doesn’t operate anything but how it should be.  The uncertainty for users who are trying it for the first time will only cause them to ditch the tool as soon as they run into problems.  We’re all very guilty of doing that I’m sure.

Feedback
From the image you’ve captured/uploaded you can then select multiple parts of the image to provide feedback and notes on.If you’ve captured a particular URL, you can view the source code too which you can again give your thoughts on for future changes.

Sharing
Share and share alike, although you may already have the users involved in the review, inviting others is a snip with a simple email facility and a not so simple PDF export feature which gives great functionality and traction to the overall product.

All these images and feedback is held in the increasingly heavy cloud computer hovering above our daily digital lives, in addition to our Spotify playlists, Google Docs, files and address book.  Notable embraces this fully and provides a great collaboration tool for a wide range of potential users.  The free version gives a newbie a good starting point, with 3gb of space which can be upgraded to 50 with unlimited workspaces with the Max package.

A key reason why I believe Notable can be a success, apart from the aforementioned glowing report I’ve given it so far, is the people behind it.  ZURB, formed in 1988 are a strategic and interaction design firm that are behind the strategic masterminding of some of todays most well known websites and applications including Facebook, eBay and PhotoBucket.

Notable smells of a well thought out and designed application, that meets the needs of of wide range of potential users including agencies, freelancers, marketing departments and even open source development projects.

Head over to notableapp.com to try their free account and experience the productivity value it can offer you and business.