Entries Tagged 'Tools' ↓

Social bookmarking website del.icio.us just announced today that they’ve been purchased by Yahoo!. As you can see by the comments on the del.icio.us blog there are mixed reactions. Many congratulations for their “big payday”, and quite a few unhappy readers who are making plans to find a new web-based bookmarking utility.

I’ve had a del.icio.us account for a while, but haven’t used it much. They just recently released an official Firefox extension and I’ve used it more since installing said extension. I’m not too hip on the “traditional” method of adding bookmarks, but this extension makes it much more friendly. It will be interesting to watch how Y! ingests this morsel. I’m looking forward to seeing how they couple del.icio.us and Flickr.

I’ve started a page (also available off to the side) with a list of my favorite FREE software. I got the idea from here. Leave me comments as to your favorite free software, and maybe I’ll add it to the list

1. You can now get weather from Yahoo! through an RSS feed. What makes this cool is it enables web programmers to include weather information onto their web pages with relative ease. Talk about some new plugins for blogging/CMS software.
2. Zimbra is an open-source, web based email package with a “commitment to improving enterprise messaging and collaboration.” There is an online demo that you can try the software out. Right now it’s only in beta, but it looks very promising.
3. RoundCube is a new open-source, web based email package geared towards the individual user (as far as I can tell). This is still in the alpha stages, but based on the online demo it looks very promising as well.

Considering I tend to take semi-pride in my level of geekiness, there is a considerable amount of new technologies and innovation that I find out from my wife. I find that fitting though, as I think she would make a wonderful research librarian. She loves doing research and finding new things online, and she uses that talent to find things that she thinks I might enjoy.

Well, today she found a new one for me, Pluck. From my limited time playing with it tonight, Pluck is a decent cross between Bloglines and del.icio.us. It’s similar to Bloglines in the way you can subscribe to and organize feeds. It’s similar to del.icio.us by the fact that you can also store links. It differs from del.icio.us because it stores the links in the folder structure used by the feeds rather than by tags.

You can run Pluck one of two ways. You can run it as a web app, like Bloglines and del.icio.us, or you can install an addin to IE or an extension to Firefox and run it as a browser app. I started out by trying it as a web app, but the interface operated rather slowly. Once I got the Firefox extension installed it is now working like they probably intended it to.

On my initial review I think that heavy users of del.icio.us will not like going back to folders. I never got into del.icio.us that much. I think I only have 10 links there. I am a moderate user of Bloglines, and my wife is a heavy user. While the interface is very similar, it might take me a while to consider leaving Bloglines for Pluck. All in all, Pluck is definitely worth a closer look.

Have you heard the big tech news of the day? Konfabulator was purchased by Yahoo! You may ask, what is this Konfabulator thing, and why do I need to use it? Well, here is the exact text from the Konfabulator web site:

Konfabulator is a JavaScript runtime engine for Windows and Mac OS X that lets you run little files called Widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to. Widgets can be alarm clocks, calculators, can tell you your WiFi signal strength, will fetch the latest stock quotes for your preferred symbols, and even give your current local weather.

Users of MacOS 10.4 (the Tiger…grrrrr) don’t need to use this because Apple included a similar widget feature with that OS. But for the rest of us stuck in the Windows world (or the few pre-Tigers out there) this is a supercool tool with seemingly endless capabilities. These widgets tell you everything from how much battery life you have left on your laptop to the sports scores of the day. With a simple tap of the F8 key it brings forward all of the widgets and greys out the background.

So, Yahoo! purchased this company, and for what purpose you might ask…to better compete with Google of course. Y! will open up an API for use with Konfabulator and extend their data out to more people. I need to play around with it a little more, but I’m excited to try it out. There is a Gmail notification thing, plus various web search options, so I might not need to keep a web browser open all day anymore. Lots of possibilities, lots of cool toys to play with too

I know that I’ve talked about this guy before, but he posted another great tool on his blog. This time it’s a slick script that allows you to quickly append text to a scratch file using AutoHotkey. Bren also talks a lot about GTD, and I’m going to start using this AutoHotkey script to try and organize my “to do” crap. So far, in my limited reading of the book, I’ve recognized my failure to get things out of my head and out on “paper”. You can find more stuff about GTD here and here and here.