In general, the programs and tools I use revolve around a couple of considerations:

1. I need to use them at home/at work (or more precisely, from different computers)
2. I want to use the same tool regardless of the operating system I’m using (I have linux at home, but must use Windows elsewhere)

Ideally I’d like my data accessible from anywhere, and I don’t want to have to learn new applications just because I’m on a different operating system. Obviously there are no hard and fast rules because some programs are just too useful not to have around even though they only run on Linux. (Don’t let the mentions of Linux scare anyone off here. Everything I discuss is either a web application or works on Windows as well as it does on Linux.)

In practice, this means I gravitate toward browser based utilities and open source cross platform utilities. In the former category are many of the Google tools: Gmail, Calendar, Notebook, plus others such as Bloglines, Meebo. In the latter category are Firefox, Thunderbird, Open Office, Gimp. Sometimes there are programs near and dear to my heart that I take the trouble to locate off platform versions of them, such as vi (yes I know I’m depraved) but this last category I’m not addressing here.

I’ve actually known about Meebo for some time, but I’ve started experimenting with it only in the last few days. I have no complaints whatsoever with Gaim which is what I normally use. However, when I was travelling for a few weeks last year, it was very cumbersome to download it, unpack it, use it, and then delete it. I should have made use of Meebo then although I’m not sure how usable it was at this point. Right now, it’s pretty sleek, works very well. Could use some more bells and whistles (I do not mean this literally in the sounds sections) — I have a hard time telling when I’ve got a new message in, for example. But it’s got a good interface, looks very smooth, and is worth checking out. It also offers a one stop place to log all your conversations, which could be a good thing or a scary thing, depending (completely configurable, never fear).

Feed aggregators have been interesting. There’s plenty of computerside clients, of course, but for this one I definitely want a web based one! Google Reader and Bloglines seem to be the main contenders out there. I tried Reader first, but it has an inherent disorganization that makes me want to scream. You get fed a steady stream of all the new articles that have come out. And if non has, no problem, it will show them to you over again. You wind up completely uncertain of what you’ve seen, where you’ve seen it or even when you’ve seen it. You lose all context since a post from that political blog might be followed by a post from that comics blog and then your little sister’s journal entry. No thanks. Yes, there’s kind of an edit subscription mode at the top you can turn on that helps organize the information, but there’s no settings to turn that on or anything. Bloglines is much better organized, although their frames setup makes me want to scream. They could set the sidebar up without frames, I’m sure, and make a much nicer interface. Still, the organization of the subscriptions into orderly files is wonderful, and they have several API’s for accessing the feed list which you can turn to nefarious purposes on your own website and so on. My particular favorite has been to assemble a comics folder, in which I placed all my comics subscriptions — rigorously selected to actually display the comic (some will just give you links to go to your comics — no thanks!) — and in the morning i just flip that folder on, go to wide view and jump down each one almost like a regular newspaper. I love it! And of course all I need is a browser and I can go thru my feeds.

Different web utilities can be combined in sometimes unexpected ways. Here’s one that’s proved very useful (via LifeHacker) if you use Google Calendar and you want to track the daily weather: Go to Weather Underground and find your zipcode or area of interest. When you get to the page in question, you’ll find a green ICAL link in the upper right hand area of the screen. Copy the link location for this ical file (in FF, right click and choose copy link location) and then go over to your Calendar, click on Settings, then Import Calendar and paste the ical address in there. What’s cool is that the next seven days or so have weather information in them, which gets updated. It cleans up after itself: the weather information is always eight days including yesterday. Plus, as the weather info updates during the day, the info box also updates in the calendar.

I’ve been using Delicious for several months now to collect my bookmarks in a completely accessible fashion, although I use DR’s delicious account more for “reporting back” here, so with that account I take the trouble to copy or type up some notes with each link. Either way, Delicious offers a way to access your bookmarks from anywhere, and through the different utilities and API’s that it has, you can do all kinds of stuff with the bookmarks you make, besides go searching or browsing through them at Delicious itself. They finally took the smart step of adding private entries to this utility, which is good for people who want to keep certain work links or personal links private and yet keep everything together. I experimented with Magnolia as well, which could be another alternative, but I have enough links on Delicious that exporting/importing isn’t an attractive proposition. Oh, and you can save an xml export of the Delicious bookmarks, although at present I don’t know of any utilities that work off of it (even Delicious itself!). Still, you can download that to your personal computer for backup.

The final sort of online utility I’ve been considering but have not actually used yet, is an online password saver. I’ve looked at this one, but I have serious reservations about saving passwords online. At the same time, if they are saved on my personal computer, I’m really screwed if I can’t remember something while away from my computer. (As an aside, I should note that I’m very strict about setting FF and other browsers and utilities to never remember passwords. Even if someone should get on the computers I actually use, they will find that nothing has my passwords: not my ftp or ssh utilities, not my browsers, nor my mail clients. Nothing logs in automatically and so on. Perhaps the constant need to remember my passwords will keep Alzheimers at bay, who knows…)

I don’t think I need to extoll the virtues of Firefox here, but it sure does have good extensions, which would make a post in of themselves. I’ll confine myself to the latest one I’ve nabbed: the copy as html link firefox extension which is a boon to bloggers everywhere (along with Google Notebook) in cutting and pasting links (how often have you copied the address, come back here, pasted it, gone back, copied the title, back here, paste, and so on ad infinitum?). With this, you highlight the text you want, right click, choose the copy as html that is now present, and go back to paste in one step. This is one of those tiny little utilities that fix something which was truly headdesking and yet never addressed till now and you wonder why it wasn’t done this way to begin with. This is functionality that should be built into browsers.

Thunderbird is a very well thought out program, and I do like how it’s set up. However, while it meets my criteria for operating across different platforms it still renders my mail inaccessible if I download mail with it onto a particular computer. So although I prefer its interface to Gmail’s, I primarily use it to retrieve and archive my email, from Gmail and IMAP clients (had to leave the pop ones alone). Still, if you use something like Outlook (shudder), you should definitely be looking at something like this. Plus, Thunderbird also has cool extensions like Firefox does, to help you customize it exactly the way you want.

I was initially somewhat dubious of Open Office’s Write as I’d tried converting a few files a couple years back and had too much trouble with tables, but the OOo team seems to have been hard at work and I’ve been very pleased with the results this time around. No trouble with any of my files so far. Ditto Gimp — I coudln’t figure out how to do anything the first go around, and this time I transitioned right off Photoshop with nary a hiccup. I’m particularly pleased that the interfaces on the Windows version are the same as in Linux. Saves me a lot of bother. Plus which the applications are smaller, faster, and somewhat cheaper than the Windows counterparts Even if you’re not a Linux user, you’d probably be pleasantly surprised at the speed and ease of use of these programs. They keep getting cast in terms of substitutes for Windows programs, but in reality they’re full fledged programs with a good deal more functionality plus interoperability.

If you’re not off internet cafe hopping, Gaim’s a great application. It combines all the major IM interfaces into a single program. Yahoo IM, AIM, Jabber (which hooks up to Gtalk), and others are all represented here. You don’t have to have multiple programs running if you’re talking with people on different IM’s. It’s got a slick interface, tabbed conversations, and it can do group chats as well.

There. That should be plenty of toys to look over…

Lifehacker put out a note about one of Google’s latest, Notebook, and one of the comments pointed out that Clipmark already offered the same functionality. I thought I’d take a look at both of them. I love Google’s stuff by and large, but there are some alternatives I prefer, plus it seems prudent not to centralize all one’s online information. So I think Bloglines is easier to work with and sort through rss subscriptions than Google Reader. I think del.icio.us blows Google Bookmarks out of the water. So when I hear about a couple of alternatives to a Google tool, I usually check them out.

Starting with Google Notebook, I installed the Firefox plugins with no trouble. After I did so, I had a small Notebook icon in the lower right Firefox frame that allowed me to open or close the notebook; when it’s opened it’s in a small summary view which can either close (back down to the icon), minimize (to a small hovering line on the body of Firefox, or open to a new/full window with all the details. It’s extremely easy to add clippings by highlighting the desired text and right clicking to choose “Note this.” I can create multiple notebooks and switch which one I’m adding to (or create new ones on the fly) through the Actions option on the summary view.

I like the interface — I right click extensively for “additional” options anyway, so putting the “Note this” in the right click menu works perfectly for me. So to clip something, it’s just like copying: I highlight the desired text, right click, and choose the new “Note this.” The three “levels” available are a little confusing at first, but I quickly sorted out how each was useful. Clipping is possible in any of these modes. It’s intuitively and quickly usable, which I appreciate.

I would like some modifications, though (of course!). I’d like to be able to copy and paste out of the full Notebook view into my articles, preserving the links and such. As it is, I have to use the Firefox’s Edit/Copy after highlighting in the full view, no right click copy is given here. And when I do Firefox’s Edit/Paste, it carries over only the text of the link and not the link as well. I’d also like to be able to right click on the links shown in the summary/full views of the notebook and be able to copy link location like I can normally in Firefox. As it is, at present right clicking on links in the summary and full views causes the link to come up (and in the same page, not a new window or tag), which I find confusing and clumsy. Particularly since opening up the full view does cause a new window/tab to open (my tabs are set to capture new windows into tabs; your mileage may vary).

As you can imagine, there have already been a number of reviews of Google Notebook published: here, here, and here .

But I think some of these folks are missing the point. I would never consider this a substitute for del.icio.us. That seems like an odd equation to me. del.icio.us is about organizing links, Google Notebook is about saving and referencing snippets out of assorted web pages. In particular, I’ve been using this to save up collections of links and comments for articles that I write, including this one! Afterwards, I discard those notebooks now that I’m done with them. It’s a great way for organizing the bits of info I come across when researching something.

That said, I do agree that this makes Google Bookmark look like even more of an orphan. That tool needs to be overhauled or quietly dropped.

I went on to check out Clipmarks, and I want to like it. It’s also a plugin and you have to sign up for a free account (the Google Notebook also requires a google account, which anyone with a gmail account (for example) already has). This utility has been around a while longer. I googled up reviews here, here, and here.

Once you install the extension you have to remember to customize your toolbar in Firefox, and drag the Clipmark icon to one of your toolbars. Their simple “setup” view on their webpage does not mention this last part, so that could be a little tricky for folks without the investigative chops to figure it out.

Once it was properly installed, I had four new icons (I rearranged things to keep my real estate at the top minimal). To clip something, I clicked on the green clip button, hovered over the text/pictures I wanted until an orange outline appeared, clicked again inside the orange outline of what I wanted. I had some trouble with this — the orange outline does not always show up, and when it did, sometimes I clicked on the inside of it with no result, and so forth. Perhaps it was just net latency time — now that I think on it, it may be reading in the entire web page in order to find the html/css blocks contained in it. If I was patient and waited until my hovering created an orange outline around texts and blocks in the web page, then I was able to click inside the orange outlines I wanted to clip.

At this point the chosen block and the save and print icons turn orange. The save dialogue box then let me tag, title, and categorize the clipping. It seemed to need me to log back into Clipmarks frequently, I’m not sure why or what was going on; I had another window logged into Clipmarks open at the time. My clippings defaulted to public until I changed it (the save clippings dialogue box contains a link to change the default, which is a nice touch).

To review the Clipmarks snippets, I had to go back to my logged in Clipmarks window and go through the “mine” button (since I made all my clippings private). So it’s more cumbersome to retrieve the saved clippings than in Notebook, but since it’s on a proper web page, I’m able to copy text and links as I’d like.

I also poked around the public clippings. If I want, I can flesh out my login with a profile and list my blogs, pictures, IM handles, emails, use an avatar or photo, list a little about myself and so on. There’s a tag cloud available of public clippings in order to choose different sets of clippings to look at.

I do like the overall look and feel of the Clipmarks site. The orange highlighting does need to speed up because its unresponsiveness is confusing: I started clicking all over to try to get something to happen, and wasn’t sure what was going on for a while. That issue about repeatedly signing in needs resolving as well. I’d also like some way of conveniently looking at thumbnails or summaries of my clippings without necessarily going back to the Clipmarks site.

I think there’s pros and cons to each. I like the general design and scope of Clipmarks and if I were more oriented to the social aspects of sharing clippings, I’d go that way. As it is, I’m a private misanthrope and I like the intuitive copy/paste interface of Google’s, so I’m going to go with that. I’d encourage you to look them both over and see what you like. If you object to plugins (as one reviewer did), you’re sort of out of luck…