Atistr

I was pleasantly surprised this morning to find an invite to Zoho Mail in my inbox. Zoho offers several high quality online office apps. Several months ago I was dismayed to find that Zoho Mail was in private beta, with a lack of information about the product. As usual, I was hyped. Could there finally be an online email solution better than Gmail?

I had tried Zenbe, a mail solution with a good interface and a feature called ZenPages to manage events. It came with a built in calender app and a wigitized sidebar. It rocked. But it also made me realize how ingenious gmail is when it comes to threaded messages. Does Zoho Mail do any better? Read the rest of this entry »

Time flies when your having fun. Somehow, it’s been almost a month since I’ve updated. For starters, my computer is, and has been broken, for the past week. The computer that I’ve resorted to isn’t the best. It’s so bad, it has trouble rendering text as I type, in any program.

Once my computer is fixed, I’ll be able to continue posting at the usual rate. As it is though, blogging’s more of pain then it’s made out to be. Somehow, my computer has a tendency to corrupt RAM cards.

This post won’t be entirely without merit though. Our favorite web based rss feed reader, Google Reader, has an easter egg. Try entering ↑↑↓↓← →← → b a while using it. If you recognized this as the Konami code, you get extra credit and a pat on your back.

Mozilla’s been hard at work on Firefox 3. Their latest efforts have paid off, and now the first release candidate for Firefox 3 has been released. For those who’ve already grabbed the beta, to upgrade go to Help/Check for Updates. For those a little bit squeemish about getting a beta, if your fears have been assuaged now that it’s in the final, bug-fix only stage of release you can grab it from firefox.com.

This is the first version of Firefox 3 that is feature complete. Unless some major, life ending bug is found, this release will simply be renamed to 3.0 when June rolls around.

Why are you still here?

I’m apologizing for the lack of updates. Almost two weeks without an update! Basically, my exam week is coming up (next week) and I’m trying to focus on getting good grades instead of goofing off online. My subscriber count and pagerank are important, but grades come first.

To keep yourself occupied, go download Worldwide Telescope, Microsoft’s answer to Google Sky. I haven’t had much time to play around with it yet, but my initial reaction is that it blows Google’s offerings out of the water.

What are you waiting for? Go explore the (digital) cosmos!

For those who don’t know, Twitter is a microblogging client used by about a million people around the world. Some people are addicted to it, while others label it as dumb. Each “tweet” is limited to 140 characters to insure that each update is short and to the point. The popularity of Twitter and its extensive API make it the subject of many web 2.0 mashups and experiments.

Twistori is a Twitter visualization experiment. It scans the twitter stream, organizes it into categories based on emotion, and presents them as a never ending river of thought.

Watching the stream of tweets is actually very addicting. It would make a great wallpaper. Twistori is described as

The first step in an ongoing social experiment, based on twitter. inspired by wefeelfine and drawing data from summize, hand-crafted by amy hoy and thomas fuchs.

Twistori is a genius implementation of Twitters API. Unlike other visualizations, Twistori doesn’t just present twitter data, but it organizes it by content too. If this is the first step in an experiment, I can’t wait to see the second.

Last Christmas I recieved a 2gb usb drive, which far outclassed previous usb drive of 256 mb. What good is so much storage space you wonder? Backing up key files is important, but unless you go crazy you should have ample space left over. Having a backup of files is important, but what about being able to edit them on any computer, using your software with your settings, not the computer’s that you plugged it into.

A portable application is an app that can be installed and booted from your usb drive, no matter which computer your using. In other words, all the files for the portable app have to able to fit on the drive. This opens up a whole new realm of possibilities, editing your files on the go, taking your workstation with you, even your games.

But a persistent question remains - what to put on it? From my own experience, these are the top  apps and games to put on your usb drive, in no particular order. Read the rest of this entry »

Google’s recently released App Engine is already spawning several interesting projects. One of my favorites is MyTextFile. It has a simple premise: online text editing with no distractions.

Unlike online text editors like Google Docs, MyTextFile doesn’t try to include rich text editing. As it’s hosted on Google App Engine, you log in with your Google Account. Once logged, you are presented with simple text area.

You can write. That’s it. Code, to-do lists, whatever. But whatever you decide to do with your text file, it’s their when you log back in. Theirs no managing, no complicated settings. Just distraction free editing of a single file.

Other online text-editors have gone for this approach, such as Writer. But these apps are too complex by being so simple. To continue editing a file, you have to download a .txt of your work, and then copy and paste back into the app when you want to continue. With MyTextFile, you have one file tied to your account that’s their when you log back on.

Try it out at mytextfile.com

Items of Interest is a sidebar item that contains my shared items from Google Reader. It uses a feature that I discovered in the online feed reader called “clips,” which can create a widget of any public tag.

View my items of interest in the right hand sidebar.

Let’s face. Notepad doesn’t get the job done. It’s okay for creating txt files, but for anything else it lags. The open source editor Notepad++ gets the job done with features like syntax highlighting, tabs, and line count. It makes programming so much easier.

You can get it from it’s Sourceforge site here. If you spend a lot of time editing code, Notepad++ is a must. You can even choose to totally replace Notepad with it. It also comes in a portable version via Portable Apps. What’s not to like?

Notepad++ is available for Windows and, with a bit of tinkering, Linux.

It’s that time of the week, friday! I’m pleased to announce a new weekly feature which will appear every friday, Friday Diversion! Look forward to the best ways to waste your time, games, and random websites to burn your time. What? You say that friday isn’t the time to be playing games? Leave. Now.

Today’s diversion is a free game called Teeworlds. It’s a 2D online shooting game. Their tagline? “Cute little buggers with guns.” It’s basicaly “Kirby with guns,” but that has copyright issues. Duh.

Teeworlds is still in beta, with 0.4.2 being the most current release. Your character in Teeworlds looks like Kirby (though different color schemes and skins are available.) You’re weapons? A hammer (hmm…), a pistol, a shotgun, a rocket launcher, and laser. Needless to say, it gets hectic. Read the rest of this entry »