Keeping 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?

Facebook's making some big changes around its application platform, particularly concerning how much access apps have to a user's activity stream and notifications. If you're a Facebook user who hates app spam, that's good news for you. It's terrible news for developers, though, because getting their links in front of you is how they spread virally and pick up more users.

This doesn't mean that apps won't be able to communicate with their users. They're getting put back into the sidebar, and that (virtually useless) boxes tab is going away. App and Game notifications will be handled by a new sidebar dashboard, moving them out of your stream once and for all.

Email will also figure more prominently in the user-developer relationship, with developers getting the option to ask users for their email addresses and send notifications that way.

Facebook isn't mincing words about what it's trying to do, here. In the official blog post announcing the changes, they come right out and say they're trying to cut down on spam: "Application communication in channels like notifications and requests aren't effectively serving their original purpose. There is a significant opportunity to improve the user experience and reduce spam by replacing them with better features and moving most communication to the stream and Inbox."

Take that, Farmville!

[via TechCrunch]

Microsoft's Steve Ballmer is not known for a lack of enthusiasm or hyperbole. It's surprising, then, to see him downplaying the expected effect of Windows 7's release on new system sales. Reuters quoted Ballmer on Wednesday at a news conference in Munich as saying "There will be a surge of PCs but it will probably not be huge." Certainly this is not a doom and gloom statement, but considering the source it's also not the inflated PR-speak that we've come to expect.

Does this mark a new approach for Ballmer? Are the days of the monkey-boy dance, or the developers, developers, developers chant gone? Or will Steve return to his shilling ways soon enough? Only time will tell.

A video of Ballmer selling Windows 1.0 like it's a used car is embedded after the break.

[via X-bit labs]

One of the more frustrating things I found when moving from Windows to a Mac in a business environment was receiving email messages that contained other messages as attachments. This is a fairly common thing for Outlook users to do, and it doesn't usually cause problems because Outlook can happily open those messages. It's not very good email etiquette and you should avoided doing it if possible (forwarding the message makes it possible for the receiver's email program to index and search the contents), but there are times when it makes sense -- such as when forwarding a batch of messages at once.

The problem is that the Mail app that comes with all Macs unfortunately isn't capable of opening Outlook's .msg files. If you use a Mac and regularly receive messages from Outlook users, it's likely you've run into this problem at some point.

45RPM Software created MailRaider to solve just this problem. It's a free app that does one thing, and one thing well: makes .msg files created with Microsoft Outlook viewable on a Mac, including any included attachments. Formatting may be lost, but typically that's not a huge issue.

One interesting aspect of MailRaider is that the developer has pulled out the code that he uses to read the mail messages, and has turned it into a framework he calls MOLE. MOLE is a free framework for developers to use that need to read Microsoft OLE documents on a Mac.

There are other ways to read Outlook messages on a Mac, but MailRaider's price (free) and simplicity are definitely compelling.

[via Lifehacker]

On the heels of last week's release of @mentions and the new Facebook Lite, today Facebook announced "Prototypes".

Prototypes give users a chance to test out cool new applications and functionality "going on inside the walls of Facebook" and to provide feedback to the who built the prototypes, directly.

To begin testing and providing feedback, simply find any application available in the Application Directory that is marked as "Prototype". Some cool examples that have come out of Facebook prototype apps include Desktop Notifications for Mac, recent comments filters and enhanced event emails.

Think of Prototypes much like the recently released Mozilla Test Pilot; Giving users the chance to opt-in to new features not quite ready for primetime.

Knowledge exchange site Stack Overflow and its cousins Super User and Server Fault created quite a stir when they were released by noted developers Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood. And though it should probably have been obvious, in the process of building out these niche sites, what they had actually done was build a knowledge exchange platform.

Now that platform, called StackExchange, has been released to the general public to build their own knowledge exchange sites. That is, if you're willing to pay a monthly minimum of $129US.

That's right; the smallest plan that is available right now would cost you $1,548US yearly. I hate to make this story about the pricing, but given how outrageous it is, it's hard not to. As someone who has struggled to launch sites, it seems to me that the only people that would choose this platform for a fledgling site would be people with money to burn. Now, Joel and Jeff are smart guys. Maybe they've simply figured out that people with money to burn are the best customers.

Another surprising thing about StackExchange is that of their four plans, only the most expensive one allows you to actually host the site on your own premises. That plan costs $2,500US per month - for the privilege of using your own bandwidth!

There's no doubt that StackExchange is a powerful platform. And anyone that claims they can reverse-engineer it in a weekend is insane. It's the kind of platform that you would love to see generating interesting little sites all over the place dedicated to tight niches like woodworking, late 60's Mustang restoration, DIY plumbing, or even whistling. But the pricing model that is being used threatens to make StackExchange virtually irrelevant -- to everyone online except for Spolsky and Atwood, that is.

Open-source software is everywhere, and developers use it to speed up their development on a regular basis. This is as it should be, for the most part, assuming the developers follow the licensing for whatever open-source software (OSS) they use. Along with licensing, the open-source community is, probably rightly so, very focused on attributing credit correctly. Considering that most OSS developers do not make any money for their contributions, credit and reputation are really the only compensation they can expect.

Imagine the horror in the OSS community then, when a mini-TEDTalk was released today that had presenter Chris Hughes showing off augmented-reality software that is built on very powerful open-source toolkits, but fails to attribute any credit to them, or even mention their existence.

Ralph Hauwert certainly took issue, and wrote a scathing blog post describing the offense. To TED's credit, they have updated the page for today's video, acknowledging the furor and offering an explanation. According to the update, Chris hadn't been intending on presenting at TED, but after privately showing his project to a number of people, he was invited to do a short 2 minute presentation. Due to the extremely short format, there was apparently no time for attribution of credit for the software frameworks his software was based on.

This is a cautionary tale. Clearly someone made a mistake, and Hughes' reputation may end up bearing the brunt of the error. It's important to remember that in the software business there are always two currencies at play: the typical financial currency that we usually think of (you know, money), and credit for the work that was done. Although there is a lot of open-source software that is licensed to be free to use, that fact amplifies the focus on correctly attributing credit for the work that went into the software.

My guess is this is a lesson Chris Hughes isn't likely to forget again.

Speaking of Joel Spolsky, it turns out that he recently unveiled a new online community for software developers to ask and answer questions. Well, Joel didn't do it himself; he partnered with Jeff Atwood, another well-known developer.

The concept behind Stack Overflow is that it is a focused arena where developers can help each other, with a digg-like voting scheme to try to bubble the good stuff to the surface. The homepage at Stack Overflow certainly reminds us of digg, but hopefully the level of discourse is not similar.

Stack Overflow has been criticized for solving a problem that does not exist, and for having a questionable reputation system. Developers looking for answers typically turn to Google, so why the need for a new site? I think Stack Overflow could turn into a bit of a nexus for developers looking for quick answers. A clearinghouse, maybe.

StackOverflow is currently in public beta.

For those who have hoped for less application madness on Facebook, an announcement on the Facebook Developers blog should be of interest to you: a reward system for applications that are "compelling."

So, instead of giving applications a limit of 40 notifications per user per day, the amount of notifications sent out will adjust in accordance with the feedback an application gets. The more an application gets ignored, reported as spam, or hidden, the less notifications users will receive. The aim of this little adjustment is to reduce notifications that users will find to be of a "spammy" nature, while encouraging developers to make applications that users will want their friends to know about.

Whether that means that notifications of friends adding or using applications that have gotten a "bad rep" will start disappearing, is still not clear. But, it's reasonable to think that some of the notification "noise" will be reduced.

In the meantime, until the update is put in place, developers will be provided with two new "Insight" statistics tabs, to give them a better understanding of how users are responding to their applications. Users can expect to start seeing changes as early as next week.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

On February 5, MySpace will open its system to developers so that they can begin building applications (similar to Facebook applications). MySpace intends to offer advertisement-revenue sharing to developers while avoiding the feed/request pollution that Facebook has.

MySpace will be supporting OpenSocial which is a collection of API's for developers to create applications that run on multiple social websites. The theory is that with OpenSocial a developer can make one application that interacts with different sites (like MySpace, imeem, Plaxo, etc.). So now instead of asking one group of contacts if they want to take your "how funny are you?" quiz, you can ask all of your contacts!

If you want to write apps for MySpace, you can pre-register on their developer site now.

[Via Mashable]

Yahoo! is the next big company planning on opening up its source code, giving application developers more power in creating tools that engage users. The company has already opened up access to their email letting third parties create widgets that access address books and mail services, but is planning on rolling it out on the Yahoo! homepage and other services.

To a large part, the future of successful online services depends on companies listening closely to what their customers think. That's why many companies are handing over the keys to outside developers and letting them run with anything that makes people stay interacted with the site longer.

Yahoo!'s move is long overdue, but at least they are jumping in the game now to make their stickiness factor increase. We hope.

No Apple hasn't finally given us what we want by releasing an official iPhone SDK so developers can create true apps for the phone, but that doesn't seem to be holding back enterprising hackers. Erica Sadun at our sister site The Unofficial Apple Weblog has released a basic text editor and even a screenshot app for the iPhone, while Gizmodo has MobileTerminal, a command line app that should allow for all kinds of iPhone hackery goodness.

Gizmodo also makes a great point: the code for MobileTerminal is being hosted at Google Code, which could mean a number of things, including:

• Apple hasn't fired up the cease & desist engine just yet
• They are quietly sanctioning this kind of hacking
• They're listening to demand and are working on opening the phone up
• They already have an iPhone SDK prepared and are waiting for something like Leopard in October because of specific code constraints

While we're likely to never hear word from tight-lipped Apple on an official iPhone SDK until it's actually made available to download, power users and iPhone enthusiasts are sure to take some solace in the fact that iPhone hackers seem to have opened it up quite a bit on their own already. We'll definitely be keeping an eye on what grassroots iPhone apps appear.

FreshBooks rolled out their API yesterday, a little early it seems as they were outed by TechCrunch.

FreshBooks is an online tool that users can create, send and manage invoices, track time and accept payments with. This new API will allow developers and businesses to integrate the FreshBooks billing platform into a variety of services and solutions they may offer, allowing for a little streamlining to take place.

The FreshBooks API support materials include an update blog, scripts, samples and examples. There is also a forum to guide developers along the way in creating their timers, planners, and widgets.

The iPhone isn't even out yet and there are scheduled conferences, iPhone specific applications and now an iPhone developer's platform.

A company called Morfik has created a platform that will give developers the ability to build applications on Apple's new iPhone. This new platform is said to be the first of its kind, and usually the first ones to market hit it big with consumers. Morfik has said that its WebOS AppsBuilder will be able to make web applications that are optimized for Safari running on iPhones. Don't have a technically included background? Morfik will also enable everyday users a way to make their own AJAX powered web applications with writing any code.

Morfik already has one application ready for the iPhone called ichess. http://ichess.morfik.com

It's been said that Google Gears and Adobe's AIR could also be big with iPhone developers.

Web 2.0 is all about mashups, and Microsoft wants to get in on the action. They have set up a new competition where winners can walk away with up to $25,000. The competition, announced at the 3GSM World Congress, is asking developers to create mashups that merge telecommunications features with Web 2.0 applications. So, basically, calling for some applications that weave voice and text with mapping and search features. The winner doesn't only get their share of the prize money, from $2,500 to $25,000 in cash, but if their mashup gets scooped up and released by a telecommunications company the developer could see a chance to share in revenue that it generates.

The first stage of the competition set for March 6th will see developers creating storyboards with written or graphic ideas of their ideas to show to a panel of judges. The winners from this round will move to the second phase which is to build a prototype with winners being announced for June.