Filed under: Productivity

Weighing in at a massive 13 kilobytes, PureText is a classic freeware utility; it's tiny, portable (single file), straightforward, does one thing, and it does it well. It lets you copy rich text from a Web page, Word document, or any other source and paste it, clean and devoid of any formatting. It also makes a cute "bong!" sound when it does its job, but you can switch that off.

I can't begin to count the number of times when I wanted to paste a snippet from a Web page into an email, and the formatting completely screwed the rest of my email. You know, it changes the font, and then you have to copy the beginning of the email again, paste it after the Web page snippet, and edit over it (so that the formatting matches the beginning of the email); the whole thing gets pretty messy.

With PureText, just hit Win-V, and you're done. It's really handy!

The other day I asked about real-time collaborative Ruby editing. I mean, I found Amy Editor, but it just wasn't good enough. It was too slow and wonky, and didn't work well.

Well, I still needed a tool for coding collaboratively over the net, so I kept hunting and searching. And what do you know – it turns out Notepad++ has a plug-in that does exactly what I need.

Notepad++ is an awesome text editor in itself, and it's extremely versatile. It's one of the many editors I went through before finally settling down with Komodo Edit (for now, at least). It has themes, syntax highlighting for numerous languages, macros, endless configuration options, and, of course, plug-ins.

To use a cliche, the best just got a bit better. WriteMonkey, one of the very best full-screen freeware text editors for Windows, has now been released as 0.9.9 Final. This final version was preceded by no less than three release preview versions, so I expect it to be quite bug-free (also, I have been writing all of my posts using WriteMonkey for the past few months, and it has yet to crash once).

Besides the usual soothing full-screen text-only view, 0.9.9 introduces several new features. Here are just two:

• Export templates: You can now write your texts with Markdown or Textile, and define export templates using CSS. You can then easily export your documents into DOC or HTML files, formatted for users to view. This means you can write a novel on WriteMonkey and easily print it in wide-margin, double-space format for proofreading/reviewing, or create web pages, or do anything else CSS lets you do.

• Typewriter scrolling is a feature dubbed "experimental" which keeps your current writing position constant. This means you don't have to keep looking down towards the bottom of the screen while you write: you can just place your cursor somewhere near the middle of the screen, and that line will always be the last line. I am using this feature right now, and it's pretty nice!

There have been quite a few other additions, all of which you can see on the release notes. If you haven't tried WriteMonkey yet and you do any sort of writing (heck, even emails), you should definitely grab it for a spin!

Keyboard Leds is a simple, freeware application that does one thing: it adds an icon with a tiny three-square grid to your system tray, and that icon reflects the status of your keyboard LEDs. So, if you turn Caps Lock on, the middle "LED" turns white. Scroll Lock is the right one (and in case you're wondering, it still does stuff, especially in Excel), and Num Lock is the leftmost square.

It's also supposed to have an OSD feature that pops up a message saying something like "Caps Lock is on," but this feature didn't work so well for me – I'm not sure why.

At any rate, it's a handy application for those of us whose laptops tend to place the LEDs in obscure spots, make them tiny, or do away with them completely (as is often the case). Just make sure that Windows doesn't hide the icon.

Amy Editor is an interesting find; it is an advanced online programmer's editor, which apparently has not been touched since April 2008 (current build is 080401, dubbed version 1.0). But it's still online, and it is very, very impressive.

My need was simple: I need to collaborate on a Ruby project with someone in real-time, working on the same file while discussing it on Skype. And I wanted syntax highlighting and some other niceties to make the process easier. I came across several advanced editors, but none of them had Ruby support -- which is interesting, since Ruby (and Ruby on Rails) appears to be all the rage these days.

While very advanced, Amy Editor still feels half-baked in some ways. For example, I could not figure out how to save my file online or how to start a project. The editor does have a notion of "projects", but you can only "open" a project – I really couldn't figure out how to create one, even after reading the online help (which does exist, and is well-written).

Another thing you should know is that it is not fast; I mean, if you're both going to be working on the same exact spot in code (within one function, for example), the lack of speed might get in the way. But if you just want to collaborate on one Ruby file and are willing to put up with its quirks, Amy Editor is the best solution I could find.

Does anybody know of a better one?

I often write and translate in an office environment, which can be distracting. Sometimes people talk around me or work together on something, and sometimes noise from outside breaks my concentration.

Music is one possible solution; but when working with words, music with lyrics can be an even bigger distraction. So I can try putting on some instrumental music; while that can be nice, it still impacts my mood. It can be too energetic, too sleepy, too sad ... it's music, and it makes me feel things – which isn't always what I need.

So when I need to just focus, I find myself turning time and again to SimplyNoise. While we covered SimplyNoise before, the site was recently completely revamped and now sports a much slicker interface.

Functionality remained essentially the same; you can choose white, pink or brown noise (I like brown noise best). You can set the volume, and also have it oscillate. One new feature is the "sleep timer", where you can set it to shut off after a certain interval.

The other big news from SimplyNoise is that they now have an iOS app. It's $0.99, and provides similar functionality to the web version. One could argue that if iPhone supported Flash, there would be no need for this app. But as things currently stand, this is certainly a useful addition for any mobile device.

Apparently, the Google Chrome team has been circulating a list of awesome Chrome extensions around Google, and everyone there liked it so much that they published it on the Official Google Blog. You can see the whole list there, but here are a few picks I wholeheartedly agreed with:

Readability: Great for removing ads and extra cruft from articles, paring them down to highly-readable text.

Turn Off The Lights: Darkens video pages to highlight the video you're watching. Works on YouTube and many other video sites.

After The Deadline: The ultimate spelling and grammar checker, brought to you by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.

There are more where those came from, to pump up your browsing experience. I'll say this for Google: they have great taste in extensions for their own browser. It's nice to see them encouraging their developer community, too.

xoki's about page says: "I am a webpage that displays a blank empty screen, freeing you from the information avalanche. Take a moment to relax. Pick your favorite colors and dream away". While the original text is missing some of the punctuation, this is one About text I'm inclined to agree with.

It's just a blank page. There's no music. There's nothing. It's awash in one shade of color. Move your mouse, and get a color picker (which is what you see above).

The color picker doesn't actually pick one color; it lets you assemble a "playlist" of colors, which you can pick out of several categories: Random, Custom, Basic, Soft and Popular.

Just click-click-click to add colors to your playlist, and then hit Play. The colors will start gently shifting from one to the next, and a moment later the interface will disappear and you will be left with a soothing, silently shifting background. You can also set your playlist to repeat.

The only feature it's missing is an ability to set how long each color stays on the screen before shifting to the next. You can click a color multiple times to make it stay longer, but I wish I could make the whole thing a bit slower.

Design is an amazing thing; I mean, take a checklist. In itself, a checklist is nothing special. It's just a bunch of items which you can mark as done. You can make a checklist with a scrap of paper and an old pencil and it would work just fine.

But take that checklist and wrap it with Web 2.0 bells and whistles, awesome typography, Javascript animation, a color scheme that pops right out of the page, slick rounded lines and lots of common sense, and you've got Launchlist.

It's essentially just a bunch of items you need to make sure are in place before you launch your website. "HTML has passed validation", "Forms send to correct recipient" (should that not be "sent"?), etc. Simple stuff, common sense. You can send your checklist as an email to one recipient, too.

So no big news here, functionally. But I must admit I was simply smitten by the site's design; it is a great study in how design can add value and make common, ordinary things appear ever-so-sexy. The site made me want to use it. Very, very nice!

Converter is an old, mature Firefox add-on that provides solid unit conversions. When I say "old," I mean that version 0.1 alpha was released in 2004 – it actually preceded Firefox v1.0.

The latest version was released on December 5, 2009. I'm not sure if development is still ongoing or not, but to be honest, I am not sure what remains to be added to this Swiss Army unit conversion tool.

Converter has two main modes. One mode is context-sensitive, so you select a chunk of text on the page and right-click. Converter then extracts a measurement from that text and displays the conversion in the context menu. So, if your text says something like "The device costs 150 USD and is easy on the eyes," you can just select the whole sentence and see what "150 USD" is in your own currency.

However, if the text says "$150," you will not see the conversion. That's a problem, but I can see why the tool works like this; the dollar sign ($) does not necessarily mean USD. This only happens with this particular symbol, though; if the text says, "the box is 3" wide," Converter works just fine.

The second mode is a more conventional two-field dialog; you enter your text at the top and hit Enter, and then you get a conversion at the bottom. All in all, it's a very useful little add-on, especially if you don't like googling every arcane measure that you come across.

Let me start off by saying I am not a huge fan of the Windows file context menu. On my system it contains twenty eight separate entries, just on the main menu (not counting sub-menus). It's an abominable UI pattern, and I wish it would be replaced by a simple command-entry interface, like Microsoft did with the Start menu. I mean, how many people actually use the "menu" part of the Start menu in Windows 7? I bet the vast majority of users just use the Quick Search box.

Now that I have this out of my system, you can probably understand why the screenshot of Dropbox Shell Tools is not from my own system; the last thing I need it another context menu entry.

However, the tool itself does seem very useful. It's originally German, and the English version was created in response to interest from GadgetHubs. That means documentation is a bit on the thin side (read: "does not exist"). But the menu entries seem rather self-explanatory. You can click on any file on your system, and immediately transport it onto your Dropbox public folder, or onto a specific subfolder within your Dropbox. If you use Explorer (rather than Total Commander) that should save you a few clicks.

Know of a quicker way to put stuff in your Dropbox? Tell me in the comments!

Calcmoolator is a very neat collection of task-specific calculators, with a cute bovine mascot. The site provides an enormous number of calculators, like "Auto Lease vs. Buy", "Tip Calculator" (shown above), "Canadian Mortage", and even "Cost of a Baby" (a weird one, but it must come in handy for some people).

The site looks very clean. Once you enter all of the variables and hit Calculate you get a human-readable result, such as "One baby will cost you $4,284.00 for one year". You can then click the Summary tab and get a tabular result ("One Year Costs: $4,284.00").

Since the site is so numerically-oriented, it should not come as a surprise that they offer a Calculator Stats page which shows a list of all of the calculators they offer, sorted by popularity, with a nice pie-chart on top. You can also search for a specific calculator from that page.

One notable omission is any sort of health-related calculation. I mean, calories vs. food, how long it would take me to lose X pounds, anything like that – not on this site.

There are also iPhone and iPad versions of the site, which is good because it seems to be a very handy tool when you're out and about.

While I am not an Evernote user myself, I hear it's great. It's a very well-known app, but in a nutshell you could call it a "complete capture tool". It comes as a desktop or mobile app, and lets you save "your ideas, things you see, and things you like".

And now, with the Trunk app store, I just discovered Evernote has its own little ecosystem. It turns out the company has many partners developing products that tie into Evernote itself (this is news for me), and Trunk now makes all of these products available in one location. VentureBeat reports that the store has about 100 apps from 67 different companies.

One interesting note is that the store actually offers hardware too; I am not sure if these devices count as "apps" in VentureBeat's tally. These are devices like scanners and printers from Canon, Fujitsu and Lexmark, and even the Nokia N900 phone which has an Evernote Sharing plug-in.

Does anyone know how good Evernote's right-to-left language support is? For me, the main drawback for these capture systems is that they often support only left-to-right languages, thus making them less than ubiquitous.

Many geeks view daily life and its challenges the way they view a role-playing video game. Clean up your apartment? Get experience points! Go to work? Collect gold! Work out? Increase your strength attributes! Well, a new iPhone app called Epic Win attempts to translate those imaginary points into real points in a game.

It hasn't been released yet, but the trailer shows how the game will work. Completing different types of to-do items offers different levels of XP and loot, motivating you to actually get things done. Your character develops based on what you do in your real life, and traveling to different locations opens up possibilities for new kinds of loot.

What do you think, DLS readers? Would an RPG like this actually help you get things done?