Web Worker Daily

ReadItLater: Firefox Extension of the Week Posted: 31 Oct 2008 02:38 PM CDT Ever find that little tool and think, “where have you been all my life?” We’re constantly talking about ways of dealing with information overload, so it’s a happy day when a tool can truly make a difference. Today, that tool is Idea Shower’s ReadItLater. Along the same lines as InstaPaper, LaterLoop and others, ReadItNow is simply a Firefox add-on that helps you save a list of pages for later reading. Better than regular old bookmarks, it’s for those pages you want to read when you have a moment but maybe not keep around forever. ReadItLater has been around for over a year, but this week with version .99, it got insanely useful. I understand why other sites have been talking about it so much. You can read and save pages on any computer, any platform, even a mobile device (yes, an iPhone). If it’s not a Firefox-based browser, you can use a bookmarklet to save your page. There’s an offline caching feature so you can catch up on your reading even if you don’t have an Internet connection. Great for plane reading. You can sort your reading list by Quality (aka PostRank, formerly AideRSS), so you are sure that you are reading the best stuff first. You can toggle something called “Click to Save Mode” so when you’re flying through your Netvibes or Digg pages, you can quickly collect those sites that interest you and skim them later. I’ve gotten into the habit of loading Netvibes first thing in the morning, opening the pages I want to read in multiple tabs and working through them throughout the day. Doing this in ReadItLater makes much more sense. The new Google Reader integration is simple and well done. Click the check to add the post to your reading list, without having to actually load the page just yet. The only bug I found is that it’s not 100% compatible with all 3rd party Firefox themes. If it’s not displaying properly for you, try switching back to the default theme. Happy Halloween! The Conference for Video Entrepreneurs and Influencers (at special $450 rate) Meet the creators of Heroes and CSI, the CEOs of Hulu and Netflix, and the digital VPs of ABC and FOX.

Balsamiq Mockups: Deliberately Not Slick Posted: 31 Oct 2008 01:00 PM CDT As a developer and some-time designer, I’m always on the lookout for tools to make communicating with customers easier. For many things, the textual tools that web workers reach for are sufficient: email, wikis, project management systems, instant messages, and so on. But sometimes you just need to draw a picture to get your point across. The latest tool I’ve run across for this is Balsamiq Mockups - and it’s a nice tool indeed. When you run the desktop version, you get an empty window that looks like a notebook page (complete with spiral binding) and a menu bar of controls - everything from web browser shells to progress bars to charts to maps to all sorts of widgets. To construct a user interface mockup, you drag from the menu bar to the drawing area, then click and drag and resize things. Widgets that contain data - like a table or a textbox - make it easy to edit that data, so customizing the user interface for the application you’re showing off is trivial. The drawing style is deliberately sloppy: rough lines, semi-handwritten text, even the ability to add scratch-out lines over part of an interface that you want to cross out. This is actually just what I want for a prototyping tool: something that can’t possibly be mistaken for working software, but that’s good enough to discuss design decisions and application flow. Balsamiq Mockups is built using Adobe AIR as its engine, so you can try it on the web or download it to run on your desktop on Windows, OS X, or Linux. There are also enterprisey online versions for Confluence, JIRA, and XWiki. The desktop version is free to try, but it lacks some essential features (like saving, exporting, and flipping through multiple mockups in a single session). Registering it will cost you $79, which on a big design project could be money well spent. Television is being revolutionized. What are the business opportunities for you in net video? Attend NewTeeVee Live (at special $450 rate) to find out.

Open Source Browsers Shine in Webware’s Prizefight Posted: 30 Oct 2008 06:00 PM CDT Webware has an interesting post up today called “Prizefight: Battle of the Browsers.” It’s a slightly less than scientific comparison of Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer–and in the video Webware has posted, they admit that–but it still yields interesting results. In Webware’s comparison, Google Chrome emerges as the fastest of the four browsers, and here are some of the other results. A few days ago, I posted about Webware’s Javascript-centric tests on browsers, where Firefox 3.1 (beta) emerged as the fastest one tested. Those tests were very Javascript-intensive though. In overall speed, the new Webware comparison finds Chrome fastest. In the other three categories that Webware evaluated the browsers in, though–security, customization, and “killer feature”–Firefox achieves clean sweeps. I definitely agree with Webware’s determination that Firefox gets the nod in customization because of the huge galaxy of extensions for it, but I actually think Chrome’s ability to keep the browser from crashing if one tab goes down earns it the nod in the “killer feature” category. It’s worth watching the fairly complete comparison in Webware’s video.  In any case, it’s good to see two open source browsers getting kudos for innovation. Chrome, by the way, is out in a third update of its beta. It will be automatically pushed to you if you’re running the browser. Also, over on the OStatic blog, we’ve put together a large collection of tips and resources for Chrome. You’ll find a free application for backing up and restoring user profiles for Chrome, tips on customizing the browser, ways to surf anonymously in Chrome, a lightweight version for a USB thumb drive, and more. By the way, my previous post on Webware’s speed tests produced more than 20 comments from readers who lamented the fact that Opera was left out. It is included in the video comparison, but doesn’t fare well in any of the four categories. Television is being revolutionized. What are the business opportunities for you in net video? Attend NewTeeVee Live (at special $450 rate) to find out.

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