Skip to Content

Free TUAW iPhone app -- try it now!
AOL Tech

WebService posts

Filed under: Text, Freeware, Open Source, Web

SimpleText.ws is a dead-simple online text editor

SimpleText.wsKeeping notes, todo lists, or just anything you are writing synchronized between computers can be a hassle. Some solutions, like using DropBox, require you to install software on computers that you regularly use. If your needs aren't that heavy, but you'd like a free way to keep your text available wherever you are, check out SimpleText.ws.

SimpleText.ws is an open-source, very light text editing environment that allows you to create and manage documents in a web service, and access them anywhere. It uses Google for authentication, so if you already have a Google account, signing in is as simple as clicking the Sign In link.

The fact that SimpleText.ws is open source means that if you're not comfortable hosting your text on someone else's server, you can grab the server code and host it yourself.

There is also a public API available for SimpleText.ws, which means that developers can write applications that synchronize with it. Currently there is only one, but it's a good one: Hog Bay Software's WriteRoom for iPhone.

How do you keep your text files available no matter what computer you're working on?

Filed under: Security, E-mail, Web services

2 Prong: Easy spam-fighting disposable e-mail addresses

2 ProngI'm a big fan of services that help me keep spam out of my inbox, and I'm an even bigger fan of services that make it dead easy like 2 Prong. Like many, many other services 2 Prong gives you disposable email addresses that you can use when registering for web sites that require a valid email address and clicking on an emailed validation link. What makes 2 Prong special is that it reduces this to a two-step process that's just as easy than using your own email address. All you do is visit 2prong.com and it will give you an email address (it even copies it to your clipboard for you, which may be an annoyance for some users). Then you fill out the registration form on the site you want access to and, by the power of Grayskull Ajax, the activation email will pop up on the 2 Prong page as soon as it's received. You don't even have to register with 2 Prong or give it your real email address, unlike similar services. On top of that, 2 Prong intends to provide continually changing domain names so that sites can't get wise to their game. Very cool, very easy.

[Via Lifehacker]

Filed under: Developer, Web services

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) from Amazon

Amazon Elastic Compute CloudAmazon has just launched Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2), a "Tier 0" service in the same vein as S3 (Simple Storage Service, launched earlier this year), but for processing power instead of storage. Amazon describes EC2 as "a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud ... designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers." Developers can run anything they want on EC2--web servers, database servers, game servers, 3D renderers--though currently only Linux is supported. The way it works is this: You create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) which contains your environment, programs, data, and so on and upload it to EC2 (or choose one of Amazon's "pre-configured, templated images), then use the EC2 web service to configure its security and network access. Then you can programatically "start, terminate, and monitor as many instances of your AMI as needed" on the fly. According to Amazon, each instance "predictably provides the equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth," which is, well, a whole lot of power.

For what you get, EC2 is fairly inexpensive, though that's to be expected having seen the pricing for S3. Here's the rundown:
  • Pay only for what you use.
  • $0.10 per instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed).
  • $0.20 per GB of data transferred outside of Amazon (i.e., Internet traffic).
  • $0.15 per GB-Month of Amazon S3 storage used for your images (charged by Amazon S3).
If you're using it 24/7, that comes out to about $74 per month per instance, which isn't bad when compared to a dedicated server with similar specs. And if you're not using it constantly, the deal is even sweeter. The biggest advantage, though, is that you can start and stop new instances on the fly: Whereas setting up an additional dedicated server can take days, with EC2 it takes minutes, and since it can be controlled programmatically, you can set you programs up to automatically start or stop instances without your interaction.

Filed under: Internet, Web services

Sabifoo: IM to instant RSS feeds

SabifooNow, this is pretty cool: Sabifoo is a service that lets you create and add items to an RSS feed simply by sending IMs. It's a delightfully minimal service. There's no registration or sign-on, and in fact you can get started without even visiting the Sabifoo web site. Just send a message to sabifoo on your IM service of choice (or sabifoo@sabifoo.com for MSN or Jabber) and it'll be added to your RSS feed. You can type !help to get a link to the help page as well as your RSS feed. One thing that's missing (at least when using AIM) is text formatting, but hopefully they'll get around to that. I can think of a number of uses for this, in particular linkblogs and sending yourself notes from your mobile phone.

[Via Mashable]

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

View more Time Wasters

Featured Galleries

Defective by Design, London: Protest Pictures
Microsoft Security Essentials
Chromium Pre-Alpha on CrunchBang Linux
Safari 4 Beta
10 Firefox themes that don't suck
IE8 RC1
Download Squad at the Crunchies After-Party
Download Squad at the Crunchies
WordPress 2.7
Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals
Windows 7 Hands On
Comodo Internet Security
Android First-look: Amazon.com MP3 Store
Android First-look: Twitroid
Google Reader Android
Android Hands-On
Twine 1.0
Photoshop Express Beta
Mozilla Birthday Cake
Palm stuff
Adobe Lightroom 1.1

 


Follow us on Twitter!

Flickr Pool

www.flickr.com

More Tech Coverage

AOL Radio