To a lot of people, snobbery has negative connotations, but there are some places on the web that could use a bit more of it. The best example? YouTube comments. A lot of the commentary on YouTube videos lacks substance, proper grammar, and semblance of constructive criticism. That's where YouTube Comment Snob comes in.
YouTube Comment Snob is a Firefox extension that gets rid of a good majority of the spam and drivel by applying some simple grammatical rules. You can customize it to filter out comments by using your favorite combination of the following: too many spelling mistakes (using Firefox's spellchecker), too much capitalization, no capitalization, swearing, profanity or excessive punctuation (!!!???!). The only problem with YouTube Comment Snob is that it hasn't yet been applied to the whole Internet.
Outlawdesignblog did a great job compiling an interesting collection of free downloadable grunge fonts to help you get that nice, dirty, raw edge you might be craving on your graphics. Of course, whether or not grunge fonts convey edgy anymore is debatable since they are all over this year's back to school fashions which school kids are wearing with the appropriate bad ass attitude.
I don't know about you but when grunge becomes the fashion statement for school kids, it might not be the edge you're looking for in your design project. In any event, whether or not grunge has become a cliche - you're still in charge of what you create and now you'll have more grunge fonts to help inspire your work or, perhaps not.
Check out some of my favorites from the collection after the jump.
Document-sharing site Scribd and online self-publishing service Luluhave teamed up to offer Lulu's free ebooks in Scribd's iPaper format. iPaper is designed to be a versatile cross-platform means of displaying different document types online. Key draws include the ability to embed docs in any webpage, including your manuscript in Scribd's library, and adding ads to your document.
Lulu is a popular self-publishing site, handling print versions and ebook versions of manuscripts, so getting them to start rolling out iPaper is a big win for Scribd. It's not going to be available for all Lulu books at first, just the most popular free ones. If this catches on, though, the two companies will have all the publishing bases covered, from printed books to iPaper ebooks.
It may seem illogical to tie Meebo to a desktop app, but that's exactly what's going on here. Meebone uses Adobe AIR to bring Meebo's services to your desktop through a dedicated app, but it's still in beta. So if you're down to try it, keep in mind that you'll probably encounter some problems... just like we did.
When attempting to login to AIM, Meebone was confused by a space in one of our user names. Other IM clients and services -- even Meebo itself -- aren't usually bothered by spaces. But that was our only major issue with the AIR-based app. And we're hoping it will be fixed before Meebone graduates from beta.
We tested the app with Google Talk and AIM accounts. Each logged-in successfully, brought up buddy lists, etc, etc. In other words, it introduced a basic Meebo set-up to our desktop, and we liked it. Just barely, but we did like it even though it sort of defeats the purpose of Meebo itself.
One of the longest ongoing debates in the productivity/Getting Things Done crowd is about which app works best for keeping tasks in order. Different factions support everything from power tools like OmniFocus to good old pen and paper. Apparently, though, some people miss classic command-line productivity apps like Lotus Agenda. If you're running a Unix-like OS, and you need a solid GTD system, you might find Beeswax, a free, Agenda-inspired app, worth a look.
It's a little tricky to explain how this works, so you might need to check it out for yourself, but we'll do our best. Basically, you have to-do items, and you have categories. If you assign sub-items to an item -- you know, something that takes multiple steps to do -- it's treated like a category. Items can be assigned to multiple categories, so everything is flexible. If you're someone who hates anything that requires a mouse, this is right up your alley.
A mind map is a graphical representation of words or ideas that are linked around a central theme. Putting down your ideas on a mind map really helps to concentrate your efforts to ensure you stay focus. But while mind maps are generally helpful, assembling one on your computer may require a map of its own.
Instead of figuring out how to put one together yourself, text2mindmap has developed a site where you can enter in your ideas in an outline format and Text2mindmap will generate a fully interactive map. You can move the segments of the map around to see how each word or idea is connected to another.
The site is in beta and configuration options are limited to font, color and sizing. What would be nice for future updates, is the ability to download your map to some sort of self contained application that will allow you to retain all the interactive aspects of the map instead of the static image download option currently available.
A lot of digital cameras are great for taking photos, but pretty shoddy for naming files. Sure, it's alright to have them listed by date and time -- at least that keeps them in order -- but we think it's a lot nicer to rename a batch of photos so you remember what they're actually of. That's where NameChanger comes in. It's a lightweight renaming app for OS X, with a focus on images.
NameChanger can append, prepend, replace, or rename all kinds of files with whatever input you give it, but it really shines when it comes to pictures. Drag a batch into the image browser, switch to sequence mode, and "DCP_16739" becomes "Hawaii01," or whatever you want it to be. Let NameChanger keep the numbers straight for you. And, at a tiny 1.9mb, you probably have pictures that take up more disk space than this useful little app.
Do you often repeat the same HTML code, form emails, or text? jfSnips might be up your alley then. With jfSnips you can manage all of the text you regularly paste over and over again, as well as re-use everything you've copied in a clipboard, much like Windows does. Except this is for all of you Mac OS X lovers out there.
You can place clips of text in whatever categories you like, so you could have one for PHP code, Javascript, HTML, or whatever tickles your fancy. Just don't tell us about your fancy tickling, that's way TMI.
Keyboard shortcuts make it even easier to insert text wherever you like. A simple SHIFT-CTRL-V pops open the jfSnips drop-down that sits up in your menu bar. Easy.
So if you repeat multiple email signatures that go a little something like "Sincerely, Thurston Howell IV" over and over and over, then give jfSnips a whirl. You can download it and give it a 15 day try or pay $15 for a full license. If you're looking for a free option, or a commercial utility with a different feature set, check out our recent rundown of clipboard applications for OS X.
As Google Docs slowly begins to take form as a legitimate office replacement, there are still a few glaring feature absences. One of those is the inability to add custom-formatted page numbers or dates to your documents.
If you don't mind rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands a little dirty, Google Operating System tells us how to add page numbers and other information to your document's header or footer. This involves a little HTML editing, so consider yourself warned.
Note: If you simply want page numbers added to your Google Doc, and you don't need to customize them by adding color, size, or scheme, then you're better off exporting the document as a PDF and selecting the bullet that adds page numbers to your document. In other words, the following method is useful only if you want more customization than Google Docs by default provides.
In order to add a header that displays, for example, "Page (current page number) of (total number of pages)", open your Google Doc, click on "Edit HTML" (right next to the Revisions tab), and add this code at the very beginning of the code:
<div style="text-align: right;" class="google_header">Page <span class="google_pagenumber">1</span> of <span class="google_pagecount">1</span></div>
To add the same information to the footer, add this code to the bottom of the document:
<div style="text-align: right;" class="google_footer" id="google_footer">Page <span class="google_pagenumber">1</span> of <span class="google_pagecount">1</span></div>
Now that the code is in, you can customize it any way you desire.
Simkl is a web service that saves your instant message history to its servers so that you can access that searchable history from any computer with Internet access. You'll need a Simkl account and some money (1 month of archiving is $2.99 and one year is $24.99). You'll also have to change a setting in your IM client to use Simkl as a proxy (so that it can save your messages).
If the thought of a third party (besides the actual service provider) archiving your instant messages doesn't bother you, you can try out the service for a week for free. The history viewer is web-based, and you can do full-text searches on your IM history.
Simkl supports most of the popular IM clients including Yahoo, MSN, AIM, Pidgin, iChat, ICQ, Trillian, and Adium. Keep in mind that many of these IM clients like Pidgin and Trillian can log your chats individually, but if you use multiple computers with different IM clients, Simkl can unify your IM logging.
Online office suites are gaining some serious steam, and Zoho Office (along with Google Docs) remains one of the innovators in the market. Today, Zoho has released an update to Zoho Writer, their online word processing application.
The biggest highlight of the update is the added support for Microsoft's OOXML file format, mercifully titled DocX. In case you didn't know, whenever you save a Word document, PowerPoint file, Excel spreadsheet, etc...in Office 2007 (or 2008 on a Mac), the default format is DocX.
Zoho Writer now allows you to export your documents as a DocX file – though it looks like importing a DocX file is still a short time away.
Other notable feature updates include:
Thesaurus (available in ten languages)
Groups: Share documents with multiple people without having to enter in multiple email addresses each time you share a document.
Enhanced support for endnotes, footnotes, headers, and footers.
It looks like the line between online word processing and desktop word processing just got a little thinner. How about you, constant reader? Have you made the leap to online word processing? Sound off below.
Looking for a powerful text editor for all your writing and coding needs? Look no further than TotalEdit 4.1, a multi-featured text editing tool created by Independence Software.
TotalEdit offers a wealth of programming features, including syntax-coloring, code-folding, line-numbering, and many other hyphenated features. TotalEdit also includes a number of one-click edits, so you can quickly switch upper case to lower case or swap tabs to spaces.
And yes, for those of us who never even placed in our school spelling bee, there is a spell checker.
The newly released version 4.1 adds the ability to install TotalEdit on a portable USB key for use across multiple machines and cleans up some character rendering bugs. To open TotalEdit from the USB key, simply double-click on TEditStd.exe, and away you go.
Total Edit 4.1 is free, as in air, and Windows only.
MacVim is a port of the popular open-source text editor Vim for Mac OS X. It supports tabs, full-screen editing, and transparent backgrounds. The toolbar is also helpful as it provides easy access to save files, run vim scripts, make a project, save/load sessions, and undo editing.
MacVim also has handy syntax highlighting to make editing/reading text files easier on the eyes. If you need to edit remote files, you can use the --remote switch.
Vim is basically an enhanced version of the vi editor that comes on UNIX systems. If you'd like a quick lesson on vi/vim syntax, check out this University of Hawaii tutorial.
In this day and age, who has time for reading? You don't -- obviously. There's this site out there called PimpMyNews and it reads blogs aloud for you using text-to-speech software. You can even listen to the stories on an iPhone or iPod Touch through the site, and the service will even let you transfer stories onto your regular ol' iPod.
Despite being perfect for those too busy (lazy?) to read blogs, the site could also work in favor of the blind and others unable to read regular text. And for the skeptics: the text-to-speech software does a surprisingly decent job at being very understandable and comfortable enough to listen to, but others may be annoyed by the non-human elements in the the voice.
You know how it is, you're animated, have a point but inevitably even though you can't wait to say it, brain fog creeps in and you forgot your factoid. Don't you hate that? It's on the tip of your tongue, and you do remember it, but just not when you really need to access it.
AskMeNow is a text service where you type in 27563 on your mobile (which translates to ASKME) and then type in a question like "Who won the World Series in 1908?" and it texts you back an SMS answer. (Chicago Cubs). Like many q&a sites, such as Yahoo Answers, Ask Metafilter, Fluther, etc., that rely on the online community for answers, AskMeNow differentiates itself by using algorithms to provide answers to mobile users.
Besides providing answers to your most pressing questions, you can also download AskMeNow's web based mobile app directly onto your mobile device. From there you can access information such as the following:
AskTheOperator - 411 Search
Directions & Maps
Reuters News Feeds
Stock Quotes
Local Weather Forecasts
Horoscopes
Movie Times
Flight Information
Hotel Availabilities
While there is no charge from AskMeNow, standard messaging and data fees do apply from the various carriers. AskMeNow is headquartered in Irvine, CA.
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