I’m struggling a litte bit with my usual routine. Spurl.net was recently added to the blacklist at work because they maintain cached copies of websites —and can thus serve as a sort of anonymous-browsing tool. Because of that, I find myself struggling with what to do with my usual online bookmarks.
I’ve been using Spurl because they are the only online bookmarking and tagging service that I’ve found that lets me import the bookmarks to my browser with subfolders properly configured. Without folders and sub-folders (or “categories” if you prefer), importing thousands of bookmarks into my browser is simply out of the question … and I don’t want to rely on the web-based bookmarks for most of my use because it’s just too slow compared to typing a key word into my browser side-bar. If anyone’s got another product that understand sub-folders, I’d love to try it out. I tried Yoono, but they don’t seem to get the whole tagging concept, so they’re basically just a more painful version of my old standby: bookmark synchronizer.
Anyway .. in the meantime, I’ve got a few interesting links I’m going stick here until I can get around to figuring out what I want to do.
The Microsoft scripting guys have a column up on Creating Windows Gadgets for Vista, with a promise of more to come. Pretty simple stuff … just making clear that Gadgets are just HTAs with a new (eye)candy shell. I’ve been assuming there’s some extra scripting objects in Vista to support Gadgets … but I’m starting to wonder how many gadgets would run fine if you just wrap them in a borderless HTA.
The Microsoft Product Feedback Mapping Tool is out in beta. I really want to have a look at this and see if it’s possible that someone like me, with little free applications could actually get access to crash reports …
The Microsoft Component Installer SDK hit version 2.0 last week… I’ve lost track of how many different versions of these pre-requisite installers there are now … Microsoft really needs to buckle down and clear out some of the old cruft and make these easier to use (particularly, I need a way to use this with WIX when packaging upgrade installers … that doesn’t involve hackish things like creating an installer that installs the installer that runs the component installer and then runs the installer that installs the actual product … and ends up breaking the “advertising” functions because the MSI that’s needed gets deleted in the process. Ugh!
Colligo has release a free off-line reader for Microsoft’s SharePoint®, with a $100 enhanced version that allows you to create and edit documents while offline. That’s pretty impressive.
Winternals is suing Best Buy for copyright infringement, circumvention of copyright infringement systems and misappropriation of trade secrets. This trifecta is also known as stealing software. Yep, that’s right. Best Buy’s Geek Squad has been using unlicensed copies of Winternal’s products to diagnose systems.
CollabNet is offering SVN on demand Would you consider out-sourcing your source-change management system? What if it only cost you $50 per-user per-year, including the cost of hardware, management, and tech support from a team of Subversion experts?
Speaking of trifectas … Does Mac have the perfect storm? (their profits are up over 40%) How much would you pay for a triple-boot machine?
The Toshiba PortA?gA? M400-S933 is one of the few 12-inch convertible (tablet/laptops) with a built-in optical drive, and it also has an integrated fingerprint reader and built-in TPM. This means it’s got good expansion, and good security … but $1700 is still a bit steep for my tastes. I wonder if they’ll ever make a tablet cheap enough that you’d dare to use it in one hand?
Remember when “hand-held scanner” meant a big bulky thing that scanned 4 inches at a time and required years of practice to scan straight with? I do … and it makes me want one of these incredibly 007ish scanners even more… The DocuPen RC800 scans in full color at 8.5 inches wide … it’s really not a pen so much as a 9 inch wand: unlike regular pen scanners, this things scans the whole page at once as you slide it accross the page, and you don’t even need a PC, as it can scan to TransFlash cards. It looks like the only real downside is the $300 price tag.
PC Magazine is calling the $30 FeedDemon 2.0 “the best desktop RSS aggregator money can buy,” saying it is “the most comprehensive, feature-rich, and intuitively organized” product in the market. From their review, it does indeed looks like what feed readers should have been all along, with filtering, sorting, and flagging … keyword watches and adjustable automatic purging … the ability to modify feeds … and of course, podcast support. Maybe I should check it out … but I’m honestly so over RSS, I just can’t be bothered.
As a side note: can anyone explain why the BBC calls this mournful march a protest? What are they supposed to be protesting?
Hi Joel,
Regarding your problems with Spurl, may I suggest that you try Yoono ? Yoono is a collaborative search engine which forages its users’ bookmarks to help you find sites and news that are of interest to you. Your privacy is protected because it can work in a totally anonymous fashion, and on top of that you can prevent some parts or all of your bookmark from being used by the community.
What might interest you, apart from the search engine itself, is that we provide both a Firefox extension and a Windows desktop application that can be used to synchronize your bookmarks online and between different computers. The nice thing is that it’s completely transparent – you install the extension or the app, you give a login / password combination, and your bookmarks are automagically synchronized wherever you give the same login.
There are a lot of other nifty features, like an integrated RSS reader, an RSS feed builder, and so on and so forth. Please visit http://www.yoono.com/ and tell us what you think about Yoono!
Regards,
Nicolas