When it comes to media viewers and players I already have the tools mentioned, having collected them gradually over the past months – usually in response to not being able to do something. Generally they’ve added greatly to my user experience so I wouldn’t be without them. In regards to PDF reader, I recently found an interesting tool called SKIM that expands on the traditional functionality, allowing the user to add markup / notes etc. Very simple, and very useful I thought.
Task Objective
For this task the focus was to familiarize myself with common internet tools to assess their potential user application and value. I have focused here mainly on ones I was unfamiliar with.
Task Outcomes
Search Managers / Combiners
Glooton - I didn’t get very far with this tool, as all the links pointed me to a french language site that I could not decipher. As with any web tool or site that fails to meet it’s audience’s needs this one lost me before it had me. Perhaps it would have perservered were it not for the other options awaiting me… onwards and (hopefully) upwards
Sherlock – I expected that this would be already present in my very new Mac (after all, in addition to al my downloaded additions, my machine came packed with all sorts of cool stuff I’ve yet to familirse myself with)… but alas I searched my machine and could not find any evidence of it!!!?! Thinking that perhaps I was missing something (happens in my life with alarming regulraity) I checked the apple site, and found… nothing… a google search answered the question with this announcement from the apple archives advising that it is no longer supported in the current version. More research revealed that the functionality previously covered by sherlock is now part of:
- Spotlight – an advanced hard drive search tool that is part of finder (under services) and capable of fast and polished searching of the user harddrive. An excellent tool for cutting down on all that wheel recreating I do when it comes to pulling up information.
- Widgets (via the dashboard) – these are seriously cool, and I can’t believe I ever lived without them. I previously used the world clock widget, mainly to quickly check Perth time from the UK for assignment deadlines ;o) but had been unaware of all the other options available to to add to one’s dashboard…. never again will I have to look up a website to convert ounces to kilos in order to bake something in the UK – YAY! Simple effective tools like this are the best kind. Apples website had even more widgets available for download…. not wanting to get sucked into spending way too much time on this task, I have pulled myself away… but I will definately be expanding my use of widgets…
Acidsearch The above 2 features are both great, but compared with an application like Copernic, the missing link is web metasearch. To solve this one I ran straight to the online mac forums to see what the alpha mac geeks said. While there are a few good applications that work on Mac, the most user friendly and functional seemed to be Acidweb. I like how it sits discretely in Safari.
Bookmark Managers
Now here’s something I need a tool for, I am a huge and mostly ineffective bookmarker. Huge becuase I am interested in damn hear everything and ineefective because I end up bookmarking too much and creating a big monster. So here’s what I checked out to help me find, organise and structure all my digital pies.
URL Manager – This seems like an excellent tool. Safari on it’s own has fairly good bookmark management capabilities, but once the collection of bookmarks grows there is a need for further functionality i.e the ability to alphebetize. Unforunately, as this software is not free I didn’t download it. But I do think this would be very useful for me. I’m going to spend a bit more time looking for free versions to try.
Delicious is one that I have used before, but not enough to do it justice. really value it when I am away from my usual computer… but I tend to go back to safari otherwise.. ideally the most useful bookmark manager would a) be free b) interface with portable applications like delicious c) work accross various browsers – in my case, both firefox and safari
I am hoping that somewhere out there exists a bored developer with lots of spare time and no requirement for money!
Offline Copiers
Pagesucker I tried pagesucker (the trial version), and think that it is indeed useful for offline work. The downside though is that you do need to plan ahead and ‘pagesuck’ your reading in advance, which obviously limits much of the web’s appeal, but then working offline is just that so it’s not a shortcoming of the product per se.. anyway outside of that it is far preferable to my previous method of printing to PDF and saving the documents to my hard drive (I don’t mind admitting that until now this is what I did).
Other internet tools….
Stumble Upon - A bit like Delicious, but seemingly smarter i.e it can learn what i like…. really? It also employs a ‘human crawler’ type technology, which is one of the ways in which the deep web can be better explored.
So all this being true, I really want it to work for me… I’ve heard a lot about recommendation engines, and while I think the theory is fantastic and the way of the future, I am skeptical as to whether it can be done well enough… so this one, which is based on peer recommendation is very very intersting. The big drawback (at this stage anyway) is that it’s not supported for Safari, which is my default browser. I do have Firefox, and I’ve added it there, but I can’t help but wonder if it’s usefulness (for me) will be limited because I don’t use firefox as much…….perhaps this will be so good I’ll change my default though(?)
Posted by Suze 
Posted by Suze 
Posted by Suze 
