Used to be desktop applications were essential to getting the job done, whatever the job may have been, large or small. Now, with all the nimble web apps to choose from, the idea of firing up a huge application for a small task seems almost, well, unproductive and wasteful.
Yeah, sure, no one is suggesting you do away with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Illustrator, Photoshop, Quickbooks and other heavy hitters. However, there are excellent tools on the web where less, in many ways, is actually more. Here are 10 of my favorites.
1. ScribeFire - essential Firefox add-on for bloggers. Allows you to to easily drag and drop formatted text from the Web into your blog(s), post entries, take notes, and optimize ad inventory, directly through the Firefox browser.
2. Firefox - great web browser whose charm lies in all those irresistible add ons that make the whole interwebs experience that much sweeter. Once you pimp out your Firefox, it seriously is difficult to function on anything else. Yes, there are the crashes and other peccadillos, but they're easy enough to overlook especially if you are truly in love.
3. Skitch - this is the best, quick image editor and photo sharing web app that is dead simple to use. For quick screenshots and sharing photos, you cannot beat it. For Mac only though. Sorry.
4. Gmail - I've done away with Outlook and Mail and rely on Gmail for several reasons: free, 7090 MB capacity, integration with Google calendar, Gtalk, great search functionality, and the portability is sweet.
5. Google Reader - free, powerful feed reader which allows you to share items with your friends and slog through all your news feeds as fast as your bleary eyes will let you. Bonus - I'm playing with Feedly (Firefox extension) which provides a magazine like start page of your feeds with complete Google Reader integration and Twitter and FriendFeed and more. So far I like, but Google Reader is still number one for now.
Monday Google unveiled yet another beta site. Google Reader is now formatted for the iPhone. iPhone users tired of pinching and stretching and tapping text only links in the normal version of Reader or dealing with the plain Classic mobile version of Reader can head over to http://www.google.com/reader/i/ to check out the new beta site.
With the iPhone-enabled web-app, Google joins Ask.com in the web-based RSS reader marketplace. Ask.com's Bloglines has had an iPhone version available to users since July 19, 2007. iBloglines was created with less than a 1000 lines of code on a lark by an internal developer who bought an iPhone and wanted better access to the site.
Google Reader is the RSS aggregator of choice for many a Download Squad reader, but everyone has an idea of how it could be improved in one way or another. There are some popular Greasemonkey scripts that enhance the experience, but what if these scripts could be rolled into one Firefox add-on?
Lifehacker has set out to do just that. A while back they released Better GReader, a Firefox add-on that collect some of the best Greasemonkey scripts for Google Reader. And this week they've update Better GReader with a few new skins and other tweaks. The add-on basically does three things:
Institutes keyboard shortcuts
Maximizes the viewing area
Bypasses the Google's annoying default subscription mechanism
To get the Better GReader Firefox add-in, head over to Lifehacker's site and install it. After installing the add-in, you'll see the above preference pane in your add-ons menu allowing you to customize Better GReader to your hearts content.
Google Reader, the preferred news reader of many Download Squaders and our readers, has added a little nugget of a feature that will allow you to finally see how long it took Google Reader to show you a post from your favorite blog or news source. You see, one criticism of Google Reader has been the lag between when an item is posted in an RSS feed and how long Google Reader shows it to it's users. Now with the timestamp, you can see for yourself exactly when the RSS item was posted.
In more minor news, it appears Google has changed the favicon of Google Reader. The new version is a tad more colorful than the last.
Life's getting mobile, and it seems that's the way it's always going to be. Humans don't come off as the traveling type, yet we do. From horse carriages to cell phones, we're always looking for ways to do more on the move, so what's missing from your mobile life in 2008 and how can you fix it? The following list may help.
1. Full access to YouTube in Windows Mobile: Everyone's got a solution for playing YouTube Mobile videos on a Windows Mobile phone, but it seems no one's giving Windows Mobile users a way to access YouTube.com's full, flash video library. Oh wait, there is a solution. It only requires users to install a specific version of TCPMP and the Flash Video Bundle, an add-on to TCPMP to give it the ability to play flash video. Use Pocket IE to navigate to YouTube (a few other flash video sites are also supported). Clicking on a video will open TCPMP to play it. Easy, right?
You could also install Orb on your PC and use the Orb mobile client to find YouTube videos on the go, but that solution requires you to leave your home PC on all the time.
If you believe the claims in an apparently "leaked" video from Google, there are a few updates headed Google Reader's way. More social features are coming, there will be a way for Reader to recommend feeds to users, and Google might add the ability to comment on shared items.
That last one caught the attention of Duncan Riley over at TechCrunch. The way he sees it, allowing users to share articles in a link blog style format already violates the copyright of blog and web site publishers by reproducing their work out of context (and devoid of any original advertising).
Of course, most web publishers have looked the other way so far, because nobody's making any money off of these link blogs, and while entire articles are being reprinted, there's clear attribution explaining where they came from and no way for users to add original content, thus making a link blog something less than a regular blog.
If Google adds the ability to comment on shared items, Riley suggests, then it will essentially be granting users the ability to publish their own blogs using content from others without permission.
Another way of looking at it is that few link blogs (Robert Scoble's included) have the readership of a popular web site like Engadget. If anything, when someone like Robert Scoble shares an occasional item from your feed, he's popularizing your brand and perhaps driving traffic back to your site. After all, he doesn't publish every article you've written, does he? And really, how different is a link blog from an feed reader? In both situations people are reading your content outside of the context of your blog -- because of the RSS feed you have provided them with.
What do you think? Is link blogging stealing? And should Google add a comment feature to Google Reader?
If you subscribe to 2 or 3 RSS feeds, you might not have noticed. But Google Reader used to have this annoying habit of capping the number of unread posts that it would notify you about at 100. If you had 87 unread posts in a category, you could tell at a glance. If you had 874, you were in the dark.
Google has raised the cap to 1000. But as you can see from our little screengrab, even that's not enough for some people (who we won't name).
Back and forth and back and forth again
Don't like having to look at just how many unread message you have? Just click the arrow that separates the side navigation from your reader window and you'll be left with nothing but articles. Or you can just hit the letter U on your keyboard, like always.
And Google Reader now supports navigating with the back and forward buttons on your browser. If you switched folders and want to switch back, just hit the back button.
Google Reader has become a very popular RSS Reader, but despite being a Google property has ironically never contained any baked-in search functionality. It seems this little cloud has been hanging heavy over the Reader team, and they've finally done something about it.
Good news! They've done a heckuva great job on it. The search field contains a drop-down list allowing you to search on all of your feeds, or within a specific folder, or even within one specific subscription. And of course you can search either your starred or shared posts.
Once you've entered a search term, a green border shows up around the main content area in Reader to signify that you are are viewing search results. There is also a tab added to the top right of the interface so that you can switch between your search results and your regular Expanded or List views.
The typical Google Reader Ajaxy goodness is there too, so you can scroll down your search results to your heart's content, and more results will continually load at the bottom.
Finally. A search feature from Google. What took you so long?
E-mail notifiers are great if you're the sort of person who doesn't like to keep a lot of unread messages in your inbox. But unless you only subscribe to a handful of RSS feeds, we're not convinced that an RSS notifier is anywhere near as useful. That's because we've never met anybody who manages to actually keep up with their RSS feeds. And what use is a notifier that constantly reminds you that there are thousands of unread items awaiting you?
Well, it turns out, Google Reader Notifier actually can be kind of useful. That's because you can set it to monitor items with a particular label. So if you've got one label for general news, another for technology news, and another for silly pictures of cats, you can just check out the unread cat photos every day. We're big advocates of setting low goals to avoid disappointment.
Unfortunately, there's no way to select multiple labels. If you'd rather have your notifier as a browser plugin, check out the Google Reader Notifier add-on for Firefox.
Apple's decision to keep 3rd party apps locked out of the iPhone (for now) is still disappointing both users and developers alike, but that doesn't mean we can't get some actual functionality out of some truly unique web apps. For this week's brief Mobile Minute, I'm going to highlight some web apps, utilities and bookmarklets designed specifically for the iPhone that are rising above the rest.
1. 17 iPhone Bookmarklets
Chanpory Rith at LifeClever has published a list of 17 powerful bookmarklets for your iPhone, containing some truly useful stuff beyond the typical web app launchers that are quickly becoming a dime a dozen. At the top of my list are 'marklets like movie times and Wikipedia, which offer one-click popup access to search for local movie times or articles on Wikipedia (respectively). Other really useful ones are 'Find in this page' which is pretty straightforward, as well as 'Open links in new window,' which will reload the current page you're viewing on your iPhone and edit all the links on the page to, well, open in a new window. This is particularly useful since the iPhone doesn't seem to cache pages well (or it possibly uses a caching system that most sites simply haven't accounted for yet), but MobileSafari (the new name many are using for the iPhone's Safari browser) does tabbed browsing like a champ. In fact, it even remembers opened tabs after you power down and restart the phone, making a bookmarklet like this very handy to those like to truly explore the 6 degrees of the world wide web on their iPhone.
To get set up with these bookmarks, visit the LifeClever site in either Safari or Internet Explorer and add them to a folder of bookmarks you're synching with the iPhone. Perform a sync and you're ready to go.
