Monthly Archive for February, 2008

How not to do stuff

What’s a feed reader? Well, it’s a piece of software that lets me read RSS feeds. So what’s a good RSS feedreader? One that at least lets me read the feeds I want to read. What’s a bad feed reader? Well, a feed reader that won’t let me read my feeds. One that actually goes as far as to establish that my feeds are just not good enough to be put into the feed reader.

But surely, no feed reader would do this, right? Well, there’s one. Fav.or.it. Launched today into private beta, it shows this message to users (click to view in full):

favor.it

Well, here you go. If those stupid users weren’t so inconsiderate as to try to import their feeds, the feed reader would actually work. I don’t really care how many great new features, including commenting of posts directly from the reader, a reader has. As long as I’m told what to actually read, it sucks. Ass. Especially when it’s used as an excuse for not scaling.

Picnik - Still better

Picnik, which I so elegantly discussed when it launched, today announced that they had opened up all the functions previously only available for paying members of the service. Here’s the TechCrunch post on it.

Well, I think that’s a fantastic move. With other webbased photo editing services cropping up like mushrooms in a humid forest on a spring day, this helps to really draw people to your service (and keep them there). I guess there was a reason why Flickr decided to partner with Picnik for direct editing of Flickr photos, and why Picnik is the default application to edit photos stored on Box.net.

Will Evernote read my handwriting?

That’s what I was wondering when I received an invite to the preview version of the Evernote Webservice today. And as a matter of fact, it does:

Evernote

Evernote, previously known only as a very popular notetaking application, has ventured forth and is planning on conquering the web as well. Complementing that new webversion, Evernote offers a beta desktop version, which lets you synchronize your content. And here’s another plus: The Windows version of the app (a Mac version is soon to come) can be installed and run via WINE on Linux. Apart from a single button you better not click, the app is working flawlessly on my computer. In case you don’t trust my word, here’s a little screenshot:

Evernote on Linux

So what is it Evernote can do for you? For one, it can do what I so elegantly displayed above: recognize writing in an image, even handwriting, and even when it’s written by me and photographed using a crappy cameraphone. Meaning you can just take an image of a handwritten page, put it either into the desktop app or send it to the webversion (either way, since they’re synchronized anyway) and the search function will find whatever’s written on that piece of paper.

In addition, Evernote offers a webclipping bookmarklet, letting you clip images and text right into your Evernote notebook.

And since we’re all social, you can publish your notebooks too, like so:

http://preview.evernote.com/pub/stormgrass/Public/

Go on, click it.

Well, what can I say. I’m impressed. Even though there are other notetaking services online (most prominent ones being Google Notebook or Zoho Notebook), none of them offer a service as sophisticated as Evernote.




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