Working with your documents and spreadsheets at Google Docs just got a whole lot easier, thanks to the introduction of contextual menus. Now, right clicking a doc provides most of the popular options that you typically need to use the navigation toolbar for. Google Operating System has some good ideas for where this feature can go next, such as searching the web for selected text and even exporting documents as MP3s using a text-to-speech engine.

This feature works of course in Firefox and we assume Internet Explorer as well, and while Google Docs doesn't work in the current v2.0 of Safari on Mac OS X, Safari 3 beta handles Google Docs and this new contextual menu like a champ.

Fire up Software Update, Mac OS X users, for iPhoto 7.0.2 has just been released. This update addresses "issues associated with publishing to .Mac Web Gallery, rebuilding thumbnails, and editing books. It also addresses a number of other minor issues." Thanks for clearing up those 'other minor issues', Apple.

All we know is: this better fix the renegade Spotlight "mds" process that peaks our CPUs for a few minutes every time we start iPhoto '08. There's nothin' like shiny new software draining our batteries dry to get us out of bed in the morning.

Someone apparently thought there was plenty of room for innovation in the "Flash-driven creepy talking head ad" space, and Motion Portrait has certainly picked up the reigns. Since our screencap really can't do the video justice, check out the real deal at Motion Portrait's site, and be sure to move your mouse over her and ring the bell.

The obvious advantage here is a stunning aesthetic boost; this digital secretary moves in a way no other talking head presentation has, even while talking. Still, we hope to see this far more advanced tool used with restraint when it comes to advertising on the web (and let's face it: it will come to that). No matter how real or natural presentations like this may seem, they can still be a thorn in a site's experience and drive visitors away if they start blabbing immediately or simply won't shut up.

Motion Portrait, we tip our hat to the impressive work you've done in the creepy talking head space. Let's just hope you can recommend some equally impressive advice on restraining the use of these to the marketers who come a'knockin'.

Twitter and Gmail - some would say they're two great tastes that could taste great together. While these two services haven't quite melded into a cutting-edge new way to communicate and micro-blog at the same time, Twitter has just made it a little easier to find your Gmail friends who also have Twitter accounts. Like so many other services (Plaxo, Facebook, etc.), Twitter now has a twitter.com/invitations/gmail page that allows you to securely enter your Gmail credentials to see if any of your friends' and coworkers cross paths between the two services. After a brief waiting period (depending on how large your Gmail address book is; ours is around 500 or so), you'll be presented with a grid layout of boxes containing the names and images of Gmail friends who are also on Twitter. You can click each box to immediately begin following these friends, and you can specify whether you receive their updates via SMS as well. Links to each member's Twitter profile are also provided in case you need to double check just to be sure who you're following. All in all, we're pretty impressed with this integrated lookup between the two services, especially since Twitter can't seem to stop blazin' up the social popularity charts. This was a great idea, and it'll be nice to see Twitter hook into more email, contact and social services to help users tweet with even more of their friends and coworkers.

Highrise, the popular web-based contact and correspondence app from 37signals, has a new dedicated Tags tab in the dashboard. This will help users filter and sift through their contacts and notes much more quickly, especially since the company built in the slick ability to select multiple tags with which to filter. Clicking one tag in the cloud begins the process, while clicking another will switch to filtering by just that tag. After clicking a tag, however, the upper right of the tag cloud (pictured) will offer a 'Multiple tags' option. Once clicked, each subsequent tag you select will add to the filter, not replace it. This is a very smart way to offer the best of both worlds for everyone, no matter how they work and use tags to sort their correspondence.

Love WordPress? Know how to set up, hack or write plug-ins for it? Then perhaps you might be interested in finding a WordPress Job. Hosted at jobs.wordpress.net (but apparently run by Automattic, developers of the now default WordPress widgets plug-in), WordPress Jobs is a pretty straightforward site hosting job offers for those who need WordPress ninjas of every order. Heck, there are even a few blogging jobs up there, and one (as of this writing) is paying $5/post for a web 2.0 blogger. The two most populated categories right now are General Positions and Programmer Positions, but each of the categories offer RSS feeds to help you stay on top of that next killer WordPress gig.

Shaun Inman's Mint quickly rose to the top of our list of web stats tracking tools as it offers a powerful, customizable interface and a rich plug-in architecture that has quite a following. After launching Mint v2 back in January of this year, Inman has been releasing minor .x version updates to address the usual bugs and other quirks, but a new Mint v2.12 release brings some minor new features and one big new pepper (that's Mint-speak for 'plug-in'): the Outbound Pepper. As its name suggests, Inman's new pepper tracks outbound links from your site, helping you to see where exactly your visitors surf next.

Other changes in this new version include some updates to the display and handling of Mint's advanced preferences, as well as a new 'Ignore IPs' advanced preference to help you keep track of just the traffic you want. There is also a new 'Found' tab in the Searches pepper that lists pages at your site and the keywords used to find those pages.

As usual with Mint updates, this new version is available free to all registered users. You can find out a lot more about Mint from Haveamint.com, with a demo installation for your to tinker with before buying. Licenses for Mint cost a mere $30/domain.

[via Peppermint Tea]

Most blogging tools and web-based dashboards don't offer much in the way of graphically viewing your post schedule. You typically get a list of your posts that you can search and order by date, but that's about it. If you're blogging on WordPress and would like a more graphical view of your posts that should play well with just about any calendar app you're using, this iCal-Posts plug-in by Gary King might be just the thing you're looking for. Offering a zero-config setup, you simply upload King's plug-in to your WordPress plug-in directory and activate, then add '?ical' to the end of your URL (i.e. - downloadsquad.com/?ical). In our tests, this causes most browsers to download a .ICS file which was immediately opened by iCal on Mac OS X. Adding the URL to web calendars like Google Calendar also worked perfectly. If you would prefer to follow only a specific category in your calendar, you can tweak the URL by adding '&category=' (i.e. - downloadsquad.com/?ical&category=blogging).

Gary King provides his iCal-Posts plug-in for free from his site.

Webmail is a hot industry these days, with Gmail, Yahoo! and nearly every provider in between vying for users by adding as many features as they can dream up. Fortunately, a small provider named Litepost is taking a different approach, offering a streamlined webmail interface with just a dash of web 2.0 to help bring your email into the 21st century web. We found Litepost back in June when they announced very limited private beta testing of their product, and it seems as though they have quietly lifted the veil so the public can sign up. While there is no official announcement on the company's blog, the Litepost registration page is live and working, and we were able to sign up for an address just fine.

Litepost stands out with a number of unique features, including email tagging and rating, as well as interesting 'Who, What, When, Why' sorting methods with which, for example, you can sort by date first, then sender (or vice versa). You can also arbitrarily group messages together for any reason, solving one of the complaints of the message threading or conversation view that Gmail made popular. Another strong appeal of Litepost is the fact that it is open source, and a Litepost Webmail Server is in the works, which will allow individuals, organizations and businesses to download and install the Litepost software on their own server for domain and security goodness.

If all this has sparked your attention, take Litepost for a spin. In our testing we found its features and unique UI to be quite compelling, and its open source, portable nature will likely give it some legs with which to grow.

Thanks Alex

For bloggers both old and new, a choice of blogging tool (or a switch) is a crucial step to make while building the empire. There are of course a boatload of choices, from Drupal, to Blogger and even the lightweight Textpattern, but for the serious blogger that needs every ounce of power and customizability from their platform of choice, WordPress and Movable Type are the reigning kings across the web. They're both very mature products, and while WordPress has been open source from the start, Movable Type recently joined that party as well with a vastly updated UI and a strong set of features straight out the gate. But how can you decide which one to chose without having to muck around with their respective PHP and MySQL configurations just to get started?

Fortunately, Mashable has published a general comparison of both platforms, ranking them in categories like ease of installation, usability and the all-important user community. We won't spoil the outcome though, because there are some great thoughts and tidbits about both platforms that can make or break the decision for some folks. You'll just have to head over and check out Mashable's comparison for yourself.

Start pages and portals have become all the rage these days, with everyone from Netvibes, AOL (our parent company) and Facebook getting in on the action. Word on the street is that search is a pretty hot market as well, and we can understand if Google and Yahoo!'s tried and true approach doesn't quite cut it for those who demand more out of search. Offering an unassuming, slick and simple UI, smplr is just such an alternative search tool.

Upon your first visit, don't dismiss the single search box and cool background for all walk and no talk (though it is a nice touch that you can change your background via the menu in the upper right). By default, smplr sends all your searches to Google; certainly nothing special. But be sure to check out the legend at the bottom, which lists smplr's bread and butter in the form of triggers you can add to your queries that can direct your search at everything from films, stocks, eBay, PriceGrabber and much more. By adding the proper 1-5 letter trigger before your searches at smplr, you can begin to save quite a bit of time if you're a frequent users of even a couple of the sites to which smplr can direct searches. Heck, there's even a Mac OS X Dashboard widget available under the Helpdesk menu that provides full access to smplr's services.

As a project from Nik Iliadis, smplr has a nice approach and a good implementation so far. If smplr expands its support for more services, it could become a great resource for those interested in a simple (har har) way to use a few keystrokes to direct their search across a wide variety of important services and engines. It will certainly be interesting to see smplr evolve over time.

Mozilla Links has posted details and a few screenshots of how Firefox 3's new download manager will look and function. In general, users will gain more control over their downloads, actions such as opening a file have been changed from text links to icons to comply with the rest of Firefox's design paradigm of buttons for actions, words for website links. Users will also be able to click an (i) icon on completed downloads to view details such as the website the download came from, the location of the downloaded file on local computer and when the download finished. Chronic downloaders will also appreciate a new search box, and an option to show the download manager in the status bar or sidebar is also being considered.

Overall these look like some strong features for a much-needed upgrade to the download manager, but we would still like to see a little more innovation here. For example: the download manager in Camino, a Mac OS X browser that uses the same Gecko rendering engine as Firefox, can not only clear the download manager's list of files, but also move those files to the trash. And what about actual download file management features, such as moving files to specified folders or importing into apps based on file type (ZIP, audio, video, etc.)?

If you're itching to try out these new features, Mozilla Links says this new download manager should be available in tonight's nightly build.

At Gnomedex this afternoon, Mahalo, the human-filtered search engine, introduced an intriguing new feature called Follow. Combining Mahalo's clever use of topical experts to build search result pages with website keywords and search technology, Mahalo Follow offers two key features: First, operating as a Firefox add-on (support is on the way for more browsers), Follow will piggyback on queries you enter into any search engine and display Mahalo results in a sidebar if Mahalo has a search page for your query. While Mahalo only has 8,500 search result pages built right now, Mahalo Follow's second and more significant feature is really where the genius lies: In addition to comparing their search results with the likes of Google, Ask.com or Yahoo!, the sidebar will follow along on your surfing (hence its name) and continue to provide relevant results and links based on the sites you surf to. In fact, Follow has a feature I haven't seen done (at least quite the same way) anywhere else: within the Follow results sidebar, the 'Open all' option at the top of each section of links will open every one of those links in tabs. It's like having your own personal search secretary sitting right by your side, continually providing increasingly fine-toothed results without you having to lift a finger; all you need to do is search and browse.

I had the chance to speak with Jason Calacanis, founder of both Mahalo and Weblogs, Inc. (this blog's parent company) yesterday about Follow, and I have to admit that I think they're on to something pretty interesting here. Again, Mahalo's search results are nowhere near as comprehensive as most search engines when it comes to every niche subject you can think of to search on, but that isn't the point. The Mahalo staff uses various tools, custom data and techniques to stay on top of as many subjects as the company can expand to handle competently (and their surging growth, according to Calacanis, has been pretty surprising even to them), and it is in this area where Mahalo Follow shines. In fact, I'll dare to say that uniting Mahalo's human-filtered database in real time with the searches and surfing you're doing could be the next big thing in search.


As you can see, the Mahalo Follow add-on installs a toolbar in Firefox (which you can disable if you want it out of your way) which I'll expand on later. The sidebar of searches you see actually remains hidden until you perform a search at seemingly any engine or even via the search box next to the address bar. I searched for 'digital cameras' in Google, and since Mahalo has their own search results page for this topic, the sidebar kicked into action, displaying their results right alongside Google's. Through this initial action, many of Mahalo Follow's strong features are revealed. First: the sidebar groups links that Mahalo chose for this topic into relevant categories and groups, such as Digital Camera Manufacturers, a Comparison Shopping category that lists the top price watching sites and a Buying Guides and Reviews section. This makes that Open All feature especially handy, since you can open, say, the most popular digital camera guide and review sites in separate tabs with a single click. Now it's time for that searching secretary to kick in.

We've noticed various bloggers kicking around options for moblogging pictures. Some use Blogger, which has its own built-in moblogging options, while most others use something like WordPress, which doesn't have the most straightforward process for setting up a blog-by-email conduit. The one common thread among everyone one of these bloggers, however, seems to be that nearly every one of them has a Flickr account. If you're in this same bucket - wishing to moblog and using a service that doesn't have a moblogging flip to switch but you also have a Flickr account - you're in luck, because Flickr can serve as your one-stop hub for posting photos via email from a mobile device, while simultaneously auto-blogging each one at a wide variety of compatible services.

Fortunately, setting this all up isn't very difficult. All you need to do is log into your Flickr account, go to your account management page (click on your name/user name in the upper right) and then click on the Email tab. On that screen are two options: "Your Flickr upload email" and "Your blog upload email." As you mght guess, we're going to focus on the latter for now, and this Upload by email link might take you straight there. If you haven't set up any blogs to use with Flickr, you'll be prompted with a setup wizard that walks you through allowing Flickr to post to your blog (and a surprising amount of blog systems are supported, including Manila, Vox, Blogger, Typepad, WordPress and more). Once you have that all set up, you should see a dialog much like the one in this post, allowing you to chose basic image layouts for your Flickr-powered moblog posts, as well as whether Flickr should post any text in the body of your email as text in the blog entry. Flickr even allows you to add tags to your images when uploading via email, and it looks like those tags are stripped out when this is all converted into a blog post.

And there you have it - easy-breezy Flickr uploading + moblogging that doesn't require a fancy plug-in or PHP ninja skills.