One of the hardest aspects of managing email is keeping track of sent messages where a reply is expected. Do you have this problem? I know I do. Some of the people I correspond with are completely reliable, and I know that if I send them something, I will get a reply within 24 hours and often sooner. But some of my other regular correspondents are not so reliable.

At all.

It's really frustrating.

Luckily, if you're a Gmail user, there is a very simply method for keeping track of messages where you are expecting a reply. You see it every day, and you might even be using it for something else.

What am I talking about?

The Starred attribute. With a single key or button press, Gmail allows you to add a star to a message which prominently appears whenever that message or thread is in view.

This process is incredibly simple, but effective. Now, I should first point out that starring an email is for all intents and purposes the same as labeling a message with any arbitrary label. But I think stars work better as an expected response reminder than a label would. So follow along with me and see if you don't come to the same conclusion.

Panic Inc.'s Coda, the one-window web development wonder for Mac OS X, has just been updated to version 1.5. Coda is a great program, designed to put source editing, FTP, CSS and command line access all in one application. It's a great, great application for developers and is definitely one of my most-used applications.

With version 1.5, Coda adds Subversion to its tool-belt, which is sure to make many, many users extremely happy. Git might be the new hotness, but seeing as graphical SVN clients are just now starting to trickle onto OS X, this is great news to any Mac developer.

In typical Coda-style, Subversion access is clean and easy to manage. Source-control is set-up on a per-site basis. If your existing site already has a SVN directory, Coda detects it automatically. You can also enter in a repository's URL and login details to checkout a copy of a repository if no local copy exists.

In addition to Subversion support, Coda 1.5 also boasts a much-improved find and replace system. The find and replace command can now span all open files, files in a directory, or files in the local root site. In the past, this was one of my only problems with Coda -- I had to search through each file to find a specific line of code, instead of being able to search across a group of files. This is great for updating an image directory or changing a file name across a bunch of PHP or CSS files.

The "Books" menu has also received a big update: support for custom books. Coda's Books feature works by connecting the user to a web page housing a book's complete text. Out of the box, Coda comes with access to a CSS, HTML, PHP and Javascript manual. When writing anything in those languages or formats, you can also refer to the reference books to look up commands or syntax rules. This can be very handy. Now, with the custom book feature, you can add other online books. For instance, I added the Django Book to my bookshelf so that I can have easy access to it anytime I'm working on a site that uses that framework.

Coda's Clips feature has also been improved with support for groupings, importing, and exporting. There are lots of other improvements (check out the release notes) that make an already great program even better.

Coda 1.5 is a free update for all existing Coda users. You can download a 15-day trial from Panic's site. Pricing is $99 for new users, $85 for existing Transmit 3 customers. Coda requires OS X 10.4+.

You've no doubt learned to take the various claims software developers make about their products with a grain of salt, but the gang at Lastpass may be right on with theirs. Lastpass may just be the last password you'll ever have to remember.

Other DS bloggers have looked at plenty of other options, like Passpack and good ol' Keepass. Lastpass has put together an extremely worthy competitor, and I was impressed with how it performed in my test runs.

Lastpass installs as two parts: the core application and as plugins for both Firefox and Internet Explorer. All data is encrypted on your PC, and only your encrypted file is stored on the Lastpass servers. It's also cross-platform, so you can sync your password data to Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs.

During install, the manager effortlessly captures and imports local passwords from both browsers (which shows you just how much you need an encrypted password store) then gives the option to clear them. It also does imports from RoboForm, Keepass, Password Safe, and MyPasswordSafe.

There are many applications that allow you to snap snippets of text from web sites and mark, tag, and otherwise share them. It's not a new concept, and truth be told, I wasn't expecting to be too terribly impressed with Deepmemo.com. Their site seemed visually messy, and the mixture of Cyrillic and Roman character sets in the tag cloud area had me concerned, because it didn't seem to change when I selected my language.

The application and delivery of this service, though? Nicely done, guys. You changed my pig-headed mind.

So why does Deepmemo (DM) stand out from the pack? There are a few reasons. The DM toolbar can be used with Firefox, but...hold on to your hats... there is an IE7 version. I know more than a few developers who have no bones saying they'd love to port their add-ons to IE, but it ain't easy. This could be a huge advantage for the DM crew.

It also allows for logins with OpenID, Facebook, or any registered user name associated with a Google service. The caveat is that dm is a third-party application, and it asks for access to your Google (or Facebook) account. If that makes you uncomfortable, it is also possible to just register with dm directly.

Ready or not, here it comes. And it is Firefox 3.0.1. Mozilla has been issuing automatic updates for Firefox for ages. If you're running Firefox 3, you were probably prompted to install version 3.0.1 a few weeks ago. But if you've been running an older version of Firefox, you might still be at version 2.0.0.16. Now Mozilla plans to push out an update to all Firefox 2 users that will prompt them to update to version 3.0.1.

The update could come as soon as next week. Firefox 3 offers a number of advantages over Firefox 2. First, and probably most importantly, it's the most up to date version of the browser when it comes to security features. But it also has improved JavaScript support, faster page load speeds, and improved performance with web applications like Gmail, Google Docs, and Zoho Office. Firefox 3 also has a completely redesigned location bar that makes it much easier to find pages you've recently or frequently visited.

Firefox 2 users don't have to update. If you're happy with your existing browser experience, you can either postpone the update or decline it.

[via WinBeta]

I've never been particularly put out by needing to click the "Next" button on a blog. Sure, there are always exceptions, like when I find sites that archive oddly or only have a few posts per page. And don't get me started on the "Next" buttons and surprise ads (do I want two free iPod Nanos? Only if I can beat the advertiser about the head and neck with them).

LifeHacker introduced me to the AutoPager add-on for Firefox. The idea behind AutoPager is a good one. It takes a web page with continuous content (such as a blog) and allows you to scroll through it all as if it were one page . So that you're not waiting for years for your page to appear, AutoPager allows you to choose the number of pages displayed at a time. It also has a few pre-configured web pages in its clutches, like Digg and Twitter.

The good news is that AutoPager can be set to scroll through just about any site with a next button. The bad news is, it's not really apparent how to do this. I was pointed to the Site Wizard, which worked just as well as many wizards I've encountered -- not at all. I couldn't select the "Next" link, and it kept aborting (and it's too early in the morning where I am to be doing that).

I know little about XPath (the underlying AutoPager mechanism) or how it works, but I did still get AutoPager to give me several pages of Download Squad at once. Truth be told, I'm still not sure what it was I did. I clicked the AutoPager icon on my toolbar, and got a sidebar that popped up in the browser and seemed to autodetect both the "Next" link and the content I wanted to see. I clicked the green checkmark on the sidebar (did I need to? no clue), and we were finally in business.

AutoPager is great for getting your eyes on a lot of information quickly. Once it's configured to the sites you want to see in this manner, it's really handy. But for the first few sites you configure, make sure to take frequent breaks for deep, cleansing breaths.

About six years ago Mitch Kapor, the guy behind Lotus 1-2-3, started a new open source project called Chandler. The goal was simple enough: Create an personal information management tool that would allow users to store, share, and collaborate. It would have things like a calendar, address book, and to do list.

In other words, Chandler is a lot like Microsoft Outlook. But there are a few major differences:

1. Chandler is open source
2. Chandler works with Windows, Mac, and Linux and has a web interface
3. You can sync your Chandler tasks with an online server and share them with others

Overall the interface of the desktop and web clients is pretty, but not necessarily intuitive. For example, there's a nice big text entry box at the top of the application that you would think would be for searching. But it's primary use is for entering new tasks. Type something into that box and a new task is created. If you want to use the text area as a search box, you need to type "/f" before entering your query.
Is Chandler kind of useful? Sure. Is it an Outlook killer? Maybe. Was it worth a six year wait? Maybe not. But now that it's here, Kapor says it's up to the open source community to continue developing the project. And I've learned never to understimate the open source community. If there's a will, there's a way, and this application could be the future of collaborative task management. On the other hand, it's not entirely clear if there's a will at the moment.

What do you think? Is Chandler the wave of the future, or should Kapor have given up on it years ago?

Wuala is a social file storage application that we first looked at back in February. At the time, Wuala was in private beta, but starting today anyone can sign up for an account.

Unlike other file storage/sharing services, Wuala doesn't provide you with web space. Rather, your files are encrypted and then stored on the computers of other Wuala users. While this might sound a bit scary, the upshot is that you can store large amounts of data. The more space you allocate for Wuala on your hard drive, the more online space you can access. And your files are duplicated on multiple computers so that you shouldn't have problems accessing your files even if some of the folks in your network have turned their machines off for the night.

Wuala has a desktop client for Windows, Mac, and Linux that you can use to upload and download files. Or you can access a web interface. The service is still in beta, so nobody's promising that all the kinks have been worked out. But as of today, Wuala is in public beta, not private.

A few months back, Download Squad's Danny Mendez wrote about Yahoo!'s acquisition of popular Safari InputManager Inquisitor. At the time, Danny was worried that Yahoo's purchase would make the tool unusable with other search engines, but those fears were unfounded, and Inquisitor continues to work well with either Google OR Yahoo.

Inquisitor is cool because it adds Spotlight-like functionality to the default Safari search box (it's kind of like the Awesome Bar for Firefox 3), along with easy access to other search results from places like Flickr or IMDB or Wikipedia. The design is also utterly kick-ass.

In the new release, users who choose to use Yahoo! search engine will see much, much faster results, thanks to integration with Yahoo's new BOSS platform. Like, instantaneously fast. Like, fast enough to make me consider changing my default search engine fast.

Inquisitor now supports eight languages in addition to English: Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and German.

The interface has also become more streamlined and looks really, really great.

Inquisitor is free and available for Mac's running OS X 10.4 and up.

Despite its seriously flawed name, Coccinella, the open source IM client, has some interesting features that might make you do a double take. The idea of chatting and having the ability to draw on a whiteboard, as well as play chess during a chat session sounds like fun, so I decided to give it a spin.

I learned from the process that Coccinella is the Latin name for ladybug. It is not, as I had thought originally, a bacteria found in pond scum. I continued my pursuit, preferring to focus on the cute little ladybug in the logo and ignore the unfortunate "ella" associations with the name.

Coccinella is a free download for Windows, Linux and Mac. After downloading the application, the set up assistant leads you to select from a list of servers to open a new account on. Although Coccinella can connect to any Jabber/XMPP instant messaging server including Google Talk, AOL, MSN and ICQ, you have to dig for information to find out how. The set up assistant leads you to select from various servers and so I created an account with Jabber.org. I was happy I did.

If you use iPhoto, and you have a Flickr account, but you don't have a way of getting your pictures from one to the other, you might want to give FFXporter a look. It's a free iPhoto plugin that -- just as the name would indicate -- exports files from your iPhoto library to Flickr. Although there are other ways of getting this done, I have yet to find another free one that works as well.

FFXporter preserves a lot of the data that iPhoto and Flickr can both use, like keywords (tags on Flickr) and EXIF info. Since it's a plugin, you won't have to open another app to get the job done, you can upload pictures right from iPhoto. Probably the most useful feature is set support, so you can batch upload a bunch of photos at once, and add them all to the same set on Flickr.

I have to admit, this is probably the most self-indulgent Time Waster ever (and we can be pretty self-indulgent), but as a huge fan of the too-quickly canceled "Arrested Development," I could not resist.

ADchoose is a stand alone Mac application (though it is written in Python so porting it would just be a matter of compiling against a different binary) that does exactly one thing: it recommends what episode of "Arrested Development" you should watch. That's it. I know, I know, it sounds pretty one-note.

Here's why this has potential:
A) Genius idea -- as GOB would say, "Come on!"
B) The developer already has a poll asking what users would like to see in the next version, and one of those choices is direct Hulu links. THAT makes a one-note application instantly more useful.

If you are a big fan of the Bluth Company, give ADchoose a try...with club sauce!

If you're anything like me, you're probably at least a little bit addicted to your internet connection. The first thing I do when I wake up is check my email and RSS feeds, and it's also the last thing I do before going to sleep. But that addiction can sometimes be a problem.

Staying on-task these days is not easy, particularly if you work at an internet-connected computer. The possible distractions are virtually limitless. So what is a geek to do? One option is to simply pull the plug. The network plug, that is.

But of course, these days almost all computers have wireless capabilities, so turning off your internet connection isn't quite as simply as just pulling the plug. If you're on a Mac, you can use Freedom.

Freedom will turn off all of your Mac's wireless and ethernet networking for a set amount of time. So if you need to put your head down for an hour and get some work done, you can set Freedom to an hour, and know that you won't be tempted by any distractions.

If you absolutely need to get back online before the chosen duration is up, the only way to do so is to reboot your computer.

This is one of those apps that will be a life saver for some people, and seem totally ridiculous to others. Which are you?

Dino Run is an online flash-based time waster with a great classic arcade feel. You play the part of a small dinosaur, and you run. And run.

The premise of the game is that you are running from a "pyroclastic wall of doom", while trying to find power-ups like eggs, super eggs, bones, critters, birds, and plants. Each of these things help you in different ways, such as earning you DNA which allows you to evolve your dinosaur with additional abilities.

The wall of doom is actually a pretty novel way to introduce an extra level of suspense to the game. When you're well ahead of it, you don't really have any indicator just how far ahead you are. So while you have time to slow down and attempt to get some of the more powerful power-ups, every moment that you waste feels like an eternity. When the wall of doom catches up to you, the screen darkens and it starts to envelop you like a wave. You can actually continue to play as it covers over you, so much so that you can't even see your dinosaur, and it's possible to run your way out of trouble. In fact, if you do this, you actually earn risk points.

The graphics and music are all deliciously reminiscent of 8-bit gaming days of yore. Dino Run is what I wish my Commodore 64 games were like.

I'm pretty bad about remembering to pull out our video camera to record our family's adventures. I think the thought of a bunch of raw, unedited footage piling up just makes me anxious. Of course, something that feels like work can instantly be turned into fun if you throw in a bit of technology, particularly software, right?

My first exposure to Seero was when my dad sent along a link to a video clip of the classic chase scene from the Steve McQueen classic movie Bullitt. Someone had taken the time to painstakingly geo-tag each scene of the movie so that as you watch the scene you can also watch a map of downtown San Francisco showing just where McQueen was during each scene. It's oddly compelling.

It turns out that the Seero site, while well suited to this particular use, is intended for users to record their own adventures with geo-tagging so that others can see just where they were when they saw what they saw.

So, now instead of just having to edit a pile of raw footage, I'll have to edit, then geo-tag it. But depending on what we're recording, the resulting mashup just might be worth it.