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list.it: Post-It Notes for the Twitter Generation

While furiously trying to organize my digital life this past weekend, I found myself as I often do – with an obscene number of tabs open at the same time while hopping from thought to thought. It was in the middle of this confusing mess that I came across list.it, the self-described “simple, free, open-source note-keeping tool to help you manage the tons of little information bits you need to keep track of each day.”

Put out by the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, the browser extention is a “tool to help people cope with information overload and to stay organized” that has since helped me keep track of the common threads of an often multi-threaded day.

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What It Is

The best part of list.it is its simplicity. It doesn’t do much more than keep a list but it does that very well. List.it exists as a sort of frame on your browser that you can hide or show with a hotkey. Even it’s design is perfectly simple, with a text entry box at the top, a search bar in the middle and the individual list items below.

Big Features for a Little App

List.it has all of those things I always find myself wishing an app would do.

There are just four hotkeys to remember: One opens and closes the frame, one searches through your notes, one pops up a quick entry bar at the bottom of your browser and one adds the current URL.

The list items are kept in little boxes, which can be rearranged simply by clicking and dragging. A click on the main area of a note opens it for editing and directly clicking on a URL will open that website in a new tab. A click on the “x” deletes the item.

Information for a Twitter Generation

Now, this isn’t the type of app where you’re going to keep large chunks of text, so the search can serve a slightly different purpose. For techies like us, members of the Twitter generation, the idea of hashtags has become common sense. They work as a great way to keep your information organized, as whenever you do a search, you can click the “+” next to the search box to save that search. Instead of working in a directory structure, you create the structure on the fly.

This might be one of our favorite parts of this little app. While we can use the browser’s bookmarks or services like del.icio.us, we don’t have to spend time keeping our list organized in the same way. There’s no complicated and powerful bookmark organizer. List.it is for parceling off your information into little bites, manipulating them and working with them along the way. As long as you tag your notes along the way, these saved searches act as filters. If that hashtag appears anywhere in the note’s text, it will be displayed when you click on that search button, which is kept just below the search bar.

List.it also allows for synchronization between different browsers by saving your list on a central server, that way you can take your list with you on your netbook or your iPhone. One caveat – we ran into some difficulty while trying to create a user name and password. After installing list.it, there will be an orange triangle next to the text entry box at the top. Clicking on that will bring you to the proper location. Aside from that, we’ve had no other problems, which is always nice to see with an open-source, always in development type of app.

We’d recommend going and taking a look at the extension for yourself. It’s available for Firefox version 3.0 or greater and for iPhone and Android. The video included below gives a quick preview off the extension, but we think using it will really prove it’s usefulness.

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Google Web Toolkit: Now Making Your Apps Even Faster, Smaller, And Tidier

This evening at its Campire One event, Google showcased a number of new technologies coming to Google Web Toolkit (you can see my live blog of the event here). The big announcements include the release of a new Speed Tracer tool to help developers speed up their web apps; a code splitting tool that enables developers to deploy apps as incremental downloads; and UiBinder, a UI framework that allows developers to seperate the ‘logic’ presentation of their apps from the presentation portion.

Speed Tracer is a new extension for Google Chrome that is meant to help developers streamline their web applications. In particular, the tool is built to help optimize AJAXy applications. Obviously there are other tools for speed optimization, but many of these have to do with load time. Speed Tracer is meant to track performance over an extended period of time, as users tap into an app’s various functions. Google’s Andrew Bowers explains that Speed Tracer can track performance bottlenecks in ways that were not previously possible, because it taps into APIs that were built into Webkit for that very purpose (APIs other browser engines don’t offer).

The tool will allow developers to isolate exactly which functions in their app are taking a long time to perform, allowing them to monitor performance in real time. It will suggest that developers take a look at certain problem functions (namely actions that take over 100ms, which is when users begin to notice a lag time).

The second major addition announced at tonight’s event is developer guided code splitting. Bowers says that when the Google Wave team was first building Wave, the size of their JavaScript app grew to 1.4 megabytes (that’s a lot, and will lead to a long initial loading time for users). To help deal with this Google found a way to split code into chunks and to only initially serve the portions users needed. In other words, when you go to Wave now, your browser is only downloading the portion of the app it needs to run the most basic functions. If you decide you want to access something beyond that — say, the Settings menu — the app will quickly fetch that once you click the ‘Settings’ button.

This isn’t the first time developers have been able to split their code — in fact, some of them try to fully automate the process. Bowers says that Google is taking a different approach. Rather than try to fully automate the code splitting, Google Web Toolkit will allow developers to pick and choose which functions users will need to be able to access. The tool will then identify which code corresponds to those functions. In effect, developers are still responsible for choosing which functions they want to have available on the app’s initial load, but the tool can manage things beyond that.

The third tool to launch this evening was UiBinder, which came out of some of the work Google has done with AdWords. Bowers describes UiBinder as a declarative UI that allows developers to bind a layout template and associate it with a Java file, without having to merge the two. He explains that in a typical Java file, developers often have to combine the layout portion of the application with the logic portion of the app. In that scenario, when a designer wants to tweak the look of the app, the logic has to be tweaked too. Using UiBinder, developers can keep the two separate, so layouts can be adjusted without having to rewrite any logic code.

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Twitter Rolls Out New Sign-Up API, Citysearch First to Implement [SCREENSHOTS]

According to our sources at Citysearch, Twitter is opening a new Sign-Up API.

Citysearch wrote us to say that the API will “allow local businesses to integrate their existing Twitter presence or create a new account directly from the Citysearch business profile and tweet from their Citysearch profile page.” How does this new API relate to Twitter’s OAuth feature? What can a Sign-Up API do that OAuth doesn’t? Also, how did Citysearch get wind of this development before a general announcement was made?

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We were able to confirm that the API is, in fact, different from Twitter’s OAuth feature. Citysearch rep Brandi Willard told us this evening that Twitter has not yet made a public announcement about the API. “We’re the first company to implement it,” she said.

Willard continued, “There are a lot of options for the type of content you can show with Twitter integration. It’s pretty much the same functionality [as OAuth, but you can also sign up.”

“We’ve been talking to them for a while about integrating Citysearch with Twitter, and they were looking to bring on more smalll businesses. It just made sense.”

So Twitter is dipping into Citysearch’s trove of small, local businesses – and potential Twitter users – for the maiden voyage of its latest API. This makes sense in light of Twitter’s recent integration of geolocation information with some tweets, and it also makes sense from a monetization standpoint. Companies in the small, local business space could benefit a lot from sign-up and geolocation APIs, and many of these companies are already devoting significant chunks of marketing budgets to the online and interactive advertising.

Twitter is definitely a hot commodity for small businesses that can figure out how to use it, but we’re still unclear on exactly how the new API will work. Here’s what the sign-up looks like on Citysearch, and what the Twitter data will bring to a business’ Citysearch page:

We will bring you more news and technical details about the Sign-Up API in the morning, when we’ll interview more Citysearch execs and quiz them to our heart’s content.

In the mean time, the folks at Citysearch are happy to have another avenue to integrate Twitter data. “We really value having all the right content on our site to allow consumers to make an educated decision,’ said Willard. “We see social media as a big part of that, whether the content is generated on our site or elsewhere. The more businesses that sign up for Twitter, the more content we’ll have on our site.”

We applaud Citysearch’s new semantic, synaptic direction in aggregating content, and we look forward to learning all about how their new sign-ups will work tomorrow morning. Stay tuned!

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Nokia N900 glitch leads to useful portrait mode, caught on video

File this under “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature” if true. According to Guyver at the maemo.org forums, some glitch in the OS caused his Nokia N900 to switch into portrait mode for everything, not just dialer and photo apps as previously allowed. We’d love to eliminate the need for two hands to run our favorite chunks of mobile software, but so far we haven’t been able to recreate his trick. Try it at home if you’d like by tilting the device to launch the phone app, then sliding up the screen and closing the app. Perhaps the gang at Espoo can turn this into a legit update — if they’re awesome people, of course. Video after the break.

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Filed under: Cellphones

Nokia N900 glitch leads to useful portrait mode, caught on video originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 29 Nov 2009 15:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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DeepDyve launches rental service for scientific research

A startup called DeepDyve has already unveiled a search engine that it says beats Google’s for finding research information. But its plans go further than search — chief executive Bill Park says the company also wants to reach a new audience for academic research, today launching what he calls “an iTunes or Netflix for research”

The business model for an scientific, medical, or technical journal is all about selling your product to a big academic institution, like Harvard or Stanford, Park said. That means they’re not selling to a huge potential audience, the 50 million “knowledge workers,” a large portion of whom need to read a few technical articles every week as part of their job, or to stay on top of their field. But these technical websites charge around $30 for a single article, often not providing anything more than a short abstract before you make a decision, so most of these workers either give up or ask for a copy from someone they know with a subscription.

As evidence that this is happening, Park says that only 0.2. percent of visitors to these journal websites actually make a purchase, which is a pretty dismal conversion rate.

With the DeepDyve’s rental service, on the other hand, you can use DeepDyve search (whose main strength is searching for entire phrases or large chunks of text) to find the article you want, preview the article, then you get access to it for a limited period of time. Pricing starts at 99 cents per article, which lets you read the article for 24 hours, and goes up to a “gold plan” of $19.99 per month, which lets you read unlimited articles for an unlimited period of time.

The Menlo Park, Calif. company has already made deals many academic publishers, leading to a database of 30 million articles at launch. These publishers realize that this is something that expands, rather than competes with, their business model, Park says.

DeepDyve has raised $9 million from angel investors, and is looking to raise $5 million in its first institutional funding round.

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Indilinx firmware cleans dirty SSDs, restores performance while idle

You know those quirky, not-at-all convenient issues that can cause certain solid state drives to lag with extensive use? Yeah — not cool. Thankfully, the engineers at OCZ Technology and Indilinx are fed up, and rather than sitting around doing nothing, they’ve both collaborated on a breakthrough firmware that can actually clean and restore one’s “dirtied” SSD while the drive sits idle. In short, the firmware instructs the SSD to perform a “garbage collection” process in order to mitigate the unwanted block re-writing quandary, where the drive actively seeks and removes garbage that hinders read / write performance when handling small chunks of data. The crew over at HotHardware managed to run a few speed tests with said firmware firmly implemented, and the results are downright shocking: after just five minutes of idle time, the SSD was restored to near new, with an hour of downtime being enough to “totally restore” performance. Don’t believe us? Give that read link a tap, bub.

Filed under: Storage

Indilinx firmware cleans dirty SSDs, restores performance while idle originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 10 Aug 2009 02:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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