Foxylicious as the Start Menu of the Web
on
Gates on Google
·
· Score: 1
"There are fewer uses for the start button in Windows now that Google's desktop search can locate any program, document, photo, music file, or e-mail on a computer."
Haven't tried it yet (just signed up), but a Technorati search shows that Upcoming.org has been recommended by some as being a good alternative to Meetup.com. The front page says "Upcoming.org is, and always will be, free."
One option to get your name out is to contribute some tracks to MyVirtualBand.com. Musicians from around the world put songs together simply by recording an MP3 track and combining it with MP3 tracks recorded by others. It's just getting started, but already they have made three podcasts (downloadable radio shows) containing increasingly better songs.
I haven't used it that much, but Brainboost.com seems to be better for natural-language queries.
It's being used in a NASA-sponsored project, so it's gotta be pretty good.
Re: GMail Coolness: Downloading Multiple Attachmen
on
Gmail Goes Public
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· Score: 1
My enthusiasm comes from my Mission, which is, silly as it may sound: "To influence humanity to use technologies that give individuals superhuman control over their information space". I'm a huge fan of GMail because it does so many things right (many of which are quite subtle). Ya gotta try it!!
GMail Coolness: Downloading Multiple Attachments
on
Gmail Goes Public
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I recently discovered another cool GMail feature: it lets you save all your attachments at once (as a single zip file). Other webmail systems (and even desktop mail clients like Outlook) force you to save each attachment, one at a time.
That's the thing about GMail - it is constantly being enhanced with new features, requiring no user intervention, with no updates to install. Features are being added to it more quickly than Yahoo Mail and Hotmail, and far more quickly than desktop mail clients like Outlook, which get new features (and bugs) on a yearly cycle.
Oh, and GMail is free.
And free forwarding! Not many webmail services...
on
Gmail Goes Public
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· Score: 1
POP3 access, no strings attached (read, stupid Hotmail requiring Outlook)
And free email forwarding! Not many free webmail services give you that!
GMail as the Notepad of the Web
on
Gmail Goes Public
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Today I realized that
GMail's latest features make it an excellent replacement for Notepad
and other basic desktop text editors. (Use its Save Draft feature so
that you can edit your text whenever you want.)
GMail has a number of powerful advantages over Notepad:
Filename is optional. No need to think of a unique filename to save under -- just enter your content and go.
Search all your past files at once. Try that, Notepad!
Spell-checking on demand
Load/save your text files from any computer in the world
Cross-platform
Undo Discard. Ever wish you could retrieve your file after closing it without saving? Now you can!
This is incredibly cool - a viable web-based replacement for basic desktop text editors. Yes, the Web OS is slowly coming together!
It's a freeware Windows utility called Push That Freakin' Button (PTFB). Drag the PTFB finger over a button on any annoying dialog, and it will automatically close it for you from now on.
Actually it is meant to work with standard Windows widgets, which Firefox does not use. But the PTFB author has cleverly supplied a way to push non-standard widgets: when you drag the PTFB finger over the button, hold down *both* mouse buttons - this will tell PTFB to click by *coordinate*.
Using this technique, you can make PTFB work with Firefox (or any other web browser) !!!!! Goodbye annoying login screens !!!!!
It's a freeware Windows utility called Push That Freakin' Button
(PTFB). Drag the PTFB finger over a button on any annoying dialog, and
it will automatically close it for you from now on.
Actually it is meant to work with standard Windows widgets, which
Firefox does not use. But the PTFB author has cleverly supplied a way
to push non-standard widgets: when you drag the PTFB finger over the
button, hold down *both* mouse buttons - this will tell PTFB to click
by *coordinate*.
Using this technique, you can make PTFB work with Firefox (or any
other web browser) !!!!! Goodbye annoying login screens !!!!!
Regarding "all the good stuff not on C:\" -- you might want to try Copernic Desktop Search -- you can specify what folders/drives to index. Pretty slick.
That's why I skimp on extensions and go for *bookmarklets*. Here are my bookmarks and bookmarklets: http://www.geocities.com/jonathan_aquino/bookmarks.html. Firefox has a load-bookmark-as-sidebar feature that is perfect for this narrow page.
(Some of the cooler bookmarklets here are text-to-speech on the selected text, and highlighting all occurrences of a regular expression).
I wrote a Groovy script that goes through a text file and does a Google search on all 10-word sequences. It then outputs HTML that bolds and underlines any words for which the Google search returned hits: http://wiki.codehaus.org/groovy/PlagiarismDetector
Online apps give you freedom to work on something whether you are at home, at your office, at the client's office, at your supervisor's computer, at your brother's place in Vancouver, or at the library. (These are places I've found online apps to be handy).
Actually an "online browser" has some merit... Sometimes when I'm using a computer without Firefox I wish I could go to firefox.com and have tabbed browsing, find-as-you-type, URL aliases, searching Google from the toolbar, etc. All this implemented in clever JavaScript, perhaps.
What I like about Yahoo Calendar: Password-protected. Day, Week, Month, and Year views. Recurring events. Optional email reminders. Syncs with your Palm.
More of my free web-app picks are here
One of the useful things you can do with this web service is make it operate on the text selected in your browser. I've written a bookmarklet to do this -- load this into your Firefox sidebar, select some text, then click "TTS:Charles": http://www.geocities.com/jonathan_aquino/bookmarks.html
Or if you don't have Firefox, drag the "TTS:Charles" link to your Links toolbar or whatever.
Then again, I do love the 1-button "Enhance" feature (compare to Adobe's 4 buttons: AutoColor, AutoLevels, AutoContrast, Sharpen) (and I love how the enhancement "fades in"). And the preview of the next and previous pictures.
The scrollbar is not a normal scrollbar -- it's this pretty thing that unfortunately imposes a maximum scroll speed on you. So to get to the last picture, I can't just drag the thumb to the bottom; instead I have to pull this thingamajig to the bottom and wait as it nauseatingly scrolls through all my pictures.
I really wish I could sort newest pictures first! Or just some way so that I immediately see the newest pictures (Adobe Album does both -- presents you with the group of newest pictures, and also sorts pictures in descending order by date). The newest pictures are what I'm most interested in.
I hope that by the next release Picasa gets some usability improvements -- maybe with input from the usability gurus who worked on GMail!
To balance my criticism I want to add that an earlier post did mention a couple of advantages of Picasa over Adobe: speed (though I haven't noticed it on my 2.4GHz 256MB) and watching folders for new pictures (whereas Adobe requires you to explicitly run an import).
Slashdot Mirror
"There are fewer uses for the start button in Windows now that Google's desktop search can locate any program, document, photo, music file, or e-mail on a computer."
- as-start-menu-of-web.html
I have written up how to use the Foxylicious Firefox extension to create a Start button for the Web OS: http://jonaquino.blogspot.com/2005/04/foxylicious
Haven't tried it yet (just signed up), but a Technorati search shows that Upcoming.org has been recommended by some as being a good alternative to Meetup.com. The front page says "Upcoming.org is, and always will be, free."
One option to get your name out is to contribute some tracks to MyVirtualBand.com. Musicians from around the world put songs together simply by recording an MP3 track and combining it with MP3 tracks recorded by others. It's just getting started, but already they have made three podcasts (downloadable radio shows) containing increasingly better songs.
I haven't used it that much, but Brainboost.com seems to be better for natural-language queries. It's being used in a NASA-sponsored project, so it's gotta be pretty good.
My enthusiasm comes from my Mission, which is, silly as it may sound: "To influence humanity to use technologies that give individuals superhuman control over their information space". I'm a huge fan of GMail because it does so many things right (many of which are quite subtle). Ya gotta try it!!
That's the thing about GMail - it is constantly being enhanced with new features, requiring no user intervention, with no updates to install. Features are being added to it more quickly than Yahoo Mail and Hotmail, and far more quickly than desktop mail clients like Outlook, which get new features (and bugs) on a yearly cycle.
Oh, and GMail is free.
And free email forwarding! Not many free webmail services give you that!
GMail has a number of powerful advantages over Notepad:
- Filename is optional. No need to think of a unique filename to save under -- just enter your content and go.
- Search all your past files at once. Try that, Notepad!
- Spell-checking on demand
- Load/save your text files from any computer in the world
- Cross-platform
- Undo Discard. Ever wish you could retrieve your file after closing it without saving? Now you can!
This is incredibly cool - a viable web-based replacement for basic desktop text editors. Yes, the Web OS is slowly coming together!Amen!
It's a freeware Windows utility called Push That Freakin' Button (PTFB). Drag the PTFB finger over a button on any annoying dialog, and it will automatically close it for you from now on. Actually it is meant to work with standard Windows widgets, which Firefox does not use. But the PTFB author has cleverly supplied a way to push non-standard widgets: when you drag the PTFB finger over the button, hold down *both* mouse buttons - this will tell PTFB to click by *coordinate*. Using this technique, you can make PTFB work with Firefox (or any other web browser) !!!!! Goodbye annoying login screens !!!!!
It's a freeware Windows utility called Push That Freakin' Button (PTFB). Drag the PTFB finger over a button on any annoying dialog, and it will automatically close it for you from now on.
Actually it is meant to work with standard Windows widgets, which Firefox does not use. But the PTFB author has cleverly supplied a way to push non-standard widgets: when you drag the PTFB finger over the button, hold down *both* mouse buttons - this will tell PTFB to click by *coordinate*.
Using this technique, you can make PTFB work with Firefox (or any other web browser) !!!!! Goodbye annoying login screens !!!!!
Regarding "all the good stuff not on C:\" -- you might want to try Copernic Desktop Search -- you can specify what folders/drives to index. Pretty slick.
That's why I skimp on extensions and go for *bookmarklets*. Here are my bookmarks and bookmarklets: http://www.geocities.com/jonathan_aquino/bookmarks .html. Firefox has a load-bookmark-as-sidebar feature that is perfect for this narrow page.
(Some of the cooler bookmarklets here are text-to-speech on the selected text, and highlighting all occurrences of a regular expression).
I wrote a Groovy script that goes through a text file and does a Google search on all 10-word sequences. It then outputs HTML that bolds and underlines any words for which the Google search returned hits: http://wiki.codehaus.org/groovy/PlagiarismDetector
Yeah, Bloglines is mentioned in the Usenet thread, together with other good stuff
Here's a neat twist: text-to- song
I'm dismayed to see a space in the URL I gave -- here's a proper link to it: my Firefox sidebar, with cool text-to-speech bookmarklets that operate on the selected text
This one seems quite good: it gets Mathematica to do the graphing - no Java required:
Online apps give you freedom to work on something whether you are at home, at your office, at the client's office, at your supervisor's computer, at your brother's place in Vancouver, or at the library. (These are places I've found online apps to be handy).
Actually an "online browser" has some merit ... Sometimes when I'm using a computer without Firefox I wish I could go to firefox.com and have tabbed browsing, find-as-you-type, URL aliases, searching Google from the toolbar, etc. All this implemented in clever JavaScript, perhaps.
What I like about Yahoo Calendar: Password-protected. Day, Week, Month, and Year views. Recurring events. Optional email reminders. Syncs with your Palm. More of my free web-app picks are here
One of the useful things you can do with this web service is make it operate on the text selected in your browser. I've written a bookmarklet to do this -- load this into your Firefox sidebar, select some text, then click "TTS:Charles": http://www.geocities.com/jonathan_aquino/bookmarks .html
Or if you don't have Firefox, drag the "TTS:Charles" link to your Links toolbar or whatever.
Then again, I do love the 1-button "Enhance" feature (compare to Adobe's 4 buttons: AutoColor, AutoLevels, AutoContrast, Sharpen) (and I love how the enhancement "fades in"). And the preview of the next and previous pictures.
To balance my criticism I want to add that an earlier post did mention a couple of advantages of Picasa over Adobe: speed (though I haven't noticed it on my 2.4GHz 256MB) and watching folders for new pictures (whereas Adobe requires you to explicitly run an import).