Raindrop is one of the latest attempts to centralize all messaging and social netwroking activities on the web. It is an as yet unavailable prototype from mozilla messaging, the people developing the Thunderbird email client.
At first look at the early screenshots and concept videos available at the above site it looks like the developers are trying to aggregate all activity, twitter, email, youtube etc. into one place. As such this is not necessarily a new idea and places like Friendfeed (the link is to RGdot.com’s Friendfeed page) come close to doing that right now. I think what Raindrop tries to improve on is that experience but by allowing better syncing between devices, promising more customization and above all using an engine that can decide and help the user divide messages between the important or personal and the bulk or the spam – without going through filters or forever browsing through junk - it can be even more. Not to mention that this is an open source project which goes beyond supplying an API, like most services like twitter already do. Raindrop aims to allow it to be used to store info locally or on a server. All these therefore make it really fully extensible and customizable.
A promising new tool which may be able to stake a place on many desktops and gadgets.
Pigeonhole is a useful notes organizer that does a simple job well. The program interface is divided into a grid, clicking inside a grid opens a window where a note can be entered and formatted with anything from color to text case, blank line removal and more.
When a note is saved the first few characters would be visible on the program grid and here is where the usefulness of Pigeonhole comes in. Hovering over a note triggers a relatively large preview of the saved note. This used in conjunction with Find (Ctrl+f) makes it really easy to not only find a note but to also get an idea of its contents without too many keystrokes. The program also includes options to set it to start with Windows, to be maximized with a hotkey or by moving the mouse to the edge of the screen. The note data are saved in files named group.0, group.1, etc. but a peak inside using a text editor confirms that the they saved as pure text which makes future access to the data relatively painless.
The free version includes one group or set which means 175 separate notes can be stored using it instead of the 20 groups in the professional or full version. Groups would be accessible from the File menu. Pigeonhole runs on Windows, from 98 to Vista.
StickySorter is another rather pretty innovative idea from Microsoft’s Office Labs, the site with ‘grassroots’ projects coming via ‘employee initiative and ingenuity’. StickySorter is akin to mind mapping or brainstorming software but with a twist. The twist is that, as the name of the program implies, brainstorms take the form of sticky notes. Many a number of sticky notes can be added to the program’s interface and arranged in several different ways.
Each note can belong to a group to make sorting and arranging easier. Clicking customize under the note menu one can also create separate fields so that the text on the notes themselves can be categorized. The view menu includes several ways to arrange all notes such as piling notes on top of each other or aligning notes to grid. The search box works well as a text filter and does a good job with large collection of notes as well. The interface can be zoomed in and out or panned to bring into legible view as many or as few notes as needed. There is no networking or sharing feature built-in but separate *.csv files can be inserted into existing ones as a way to merge notes.
The program’s FAQ page has a few more hints on usability. For example creating a field, using the aforementioned customize menu, and placing an ! in front of it will make the field appear only on the back of the note and selected notes can be flipped by pressing Ctrl+t.
Perhaps the best attraction of StickySorter is that it saves everything in *.csv format. It is therefore usable even if the program is discarded for another similar software. StickySorter works on Windows XP or Windows Vista with .Net Framework 2.0
JetPhoto Studio is described by its author as
JetPhoto Studio is a feature-rich and easy-to-use digital photo software
With JetPhoto it is possible to organize photos into albums, and to archive and back them up as well. One can browse collections or albums in the usual thumbnail mode where not only it is also possible to add notes or tags to individual images or collections of images but it is also possible to star or favorite selected ones, view them by date either utilizing the file creation/modification information or EXIF details. Double clicking on individual photos takes the user to an (almost) full screen mode with some of the expected effects and tools included. Images can be made into a wallpaper or a screensaver, sepia effect can be added, the image can be cropped and watermark added just to mention a few.
One of the negatives of the concept of JetPhoto is that when it creates its albums it actually copies or replicates the photos. Perhaps it is possible to choose the album location (prompted when first creating it) to be in the same, originating folder that your images reside in but I did not test that possibility. Another unexpected behaviour or bug is that the magnifier did not always work in my usage, the icon did change to a magnifying glass one when the image was loaded into the full screen mode but actions -clicking and holding the mouse- had very little or no effect on the portion of the image the focus was on and even then that depended on the actual image size. A look at the program’s features pages explains
You can place your mouse pointer on an interesting part of a photo, press and hold the mouse button to reveal a magnifier which magnifies the image with actual pixels at full size of the original photo.
so perhaps this is not actually a full blown magnifier in the true sense of the word or is it?
JetPhoto makes it easy to search an album or across albums and besides the normal search criteria there are possibilities of searching photos by location if the photos have that info attached to them. To do that JetPhoto can connect to a map server to allow the geotagging of photos or to connect to google maps and generate KML or KMZ files for use with Google Earth.
JetPhoto adds a few attractive output options (see image) but some are either crippled by bearing the JetPhoto text in one frame (in the web flash gallery for example) and/or limits on the number of times they can be used to create an output. A PhotoJet server can be setup to store images online on any webspace using the program itself as a management interface. This is available as a sort of alternative to flickr, which the program itself also supports. JetPhoto runs on Windows 2000, Windows XP and Vista. A Mac OS X version is also available.
Shortly after I wrote about the dirhtml index.html generator I received an email from its developer. In part due to my confusion about the way the sorting options were presented and how the output listing was actually sorted Eric, the enware developer, had released a new, then beta, version. It has since gone out of beta and v4.833 presents a more intuitive sorting menu (see images below).
Older version of dirhtml
New version of dirhtml
In my opinion it is now easier to visualize the output because the ‘Unsorted’ option is now in a column with all the primary choices that determine the shape of the output.
Two notable omissions in the original article were that at the ‘Input/Output’ and final tab it is possible to create a batch file by clicking the ‘Save Batch File’ button or F7. This will generate a batch file and an associated .ini file. Launching the .bat will use the .ini file, containing all the settings that have been gathered by going through the program, and this will then immediately generate the required output. This is very useful as it makes subsequent uses much easier and faster. Also worth pointing out is the ‘div_recursive.txt’ script, one of the ‘Script’ choices in the initial ‘Folders, Files’ tab. This will generate an output with a recursive listing of the folders and files being worked on. It is a very useful way of presenting the results.
I also want to take this opportunity to write about the other freeware Eric is and has worked on.
First up is the Mp3 ImageMap. This is free for non-commercial purposes and portable. The developer, Eric, describes it as
…an attempt to bring back the shock value of music finding to people who know all their tunes and searches by heart, and incorporates a rather unique algorithm for dividing rectangles into N squares.
It works by the user specifying a folder (containing MP3 files for example), file extension(s)(MP3 and WMA for example), path to the output HTML file, image (GIF, JPG, JPEG or PNG) and choosing one of several sort types and then clicking ‘Build It’. The app will use the image to generate an image map with different areas linked to the different MP3 and WMA files. A nice and fun way to listen to music or simply launch files.
Next is the ScrapBook described as
ScrapBook is a freeware, unstructured database program that holds chunks of text.
A lightweight and only 252KB download, it is surprisingly useful. It is possible to save all sorts of text with the first line of the said text acting as an index. It is also possible to differentiate and separate different chunks by placing them in different ‘cards’. To navigate between cards one can, for example, use the left and right arrows or click Alt+L, F2. Even easier is finding text by using the ‘Find’ box. It is also possible to save shortcuts in ScrapBook and use it as a launcher by moving the cursor over the text or shortcut and clicking F12. One interesting feature is the ability to ‘tag’ cards, by clicking Ctrl+space, and therefore making an index or listing even more intuitive by then viewing a list of tags (Ctrl+T). As with dirhtml ScrapBook is filled with useful features.
Finally there is CopyDate, taking a further step in making tasks easier, described as
Copydate copies files, optionally inserting today’s date/time into the copied filename.
Last week I posted that in my opinion there is a general need for applications that do more than just tag music and photos. Tagging that extends to all file types can ease organization not least because searching for files in folders is not always the most efficient.
Therefore it was great to see that Samer @ Freewaregenius has found and reviewed TaggedFrog. In very much the same way and perhaps even better ways TaggedFrog does what I was looking for and perhaps more importantly is being developed and is not abandoned.
It is described by its author as
TaggedFrog allows you to organize your files, documents and Web links. Just add objects to the library and tag them with any keywords. That’s it. You can forget the file name or where the file is located, but don’t worry – the tags will find the file for you.
and it looks good. Although, in general, I think one would prefer to do without a .NET requirement but since Ultrafolder is dead and tag2find runs as a service this is a good and promising alternative.
There are many tools available to organize media, audio mainly, files. Mp3Tag and MediaMonkey being just two that support tagging music files among other features. One area that is not as populated is a desktop application that supports tagging files of any kind.
Ultrafolder, now defunct, was one such promising application. Upon installation a shortcut would be placed on the desktop and any file, be it music, word or image that was dragged to the shortcut would launch the program and allow the addition of tags. The only negative aspect that I can think of was that all the tagged files would reside in a single folder, otherwise I found it very useful and bug-free. Ultrafolder existed for a while under an expiring beta @ ultrafolder.com, but after the author discontinued development, due to lack of interest as he put it, the executable would only prompt for an update check and no longer launch. A very unfortunate decision by the author in my opinion.
In my search I have come across another app, it is called tag2find. Its development seems to have slowed since it initial launch and even though it is promising and with more features than Ultrafolder it has the disadvantage of needing to run in the system tray to monitor folders and also needing to be installed as a Windows service. It does have advantages, of course, and among them is the ability to move any tagged files and since it runs on a NTFS volume the meta information is easily carried over.
My search for similar apps continues, if you know of any please leave a link and a comment.
