Category: Resources

Lifehacker brings us news of two apps for downloading, converting, and adding YouTube content to your iPod: one for Mac, one for Windows. Adam writes:

“If you’re using PodTube (Mac), you need to browse YouTube in Safari, but one click will download the video, encode it for your iPod, and add it to your iTunes library ready for syncing (the whole process took me less than the time it took for the 54 second video I chose to finish playing). Using iTube on Windows, you paste the YouTube URL into iTube, at which point is also downloads, converts, and adds the file to your iTunes library. These programs are similar to previously-mentioned shareware app TubeSock, except they’re totally free (as in beer). iTube requires .NET.”

[Via Michael Berneis reBlog]

Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools e-zine had an item about a free Web-based phone backup service called Zyb. The Cool Tool reviewer (Roar Nilsen, not Kevin Kelly) writes:

“Here’s a cool tool that I stumbled upon. It’s called ZYB (quite uninformative name, but typical web 2.0 lingo I guess)… Quite impressive what you can do on that site — back up contacts, etc. and actually it’s a bit strange that they even can get the backup to work over the mobile’s GPRS connection. I’ve used it for a month now and I’m impressed that it’s even possible to make a backup of your mobile that way. I don’t know how they do it or why it hasn’t been done before!”

I checked it out an it looks pretty nifty. Haven’t tried actually backing up my data yet. Has anyone here used Zyb?

I’ve always been a huge fan of the “pocket guide,” the little reference book that boils down the essentials of a technology to charts, graphs, tables, glossaries, tips sheets, etc. When I was a printer, I was never far from my Pocket Pal. Then there’s the indispensible Pocket Ref, a must for engineers, do-it-yourselfers, and builders of all kinds, and the Pocket PC Ref and Electronics Pocket Handbook for computer and electronics work.

Given this interest, I’m also a fan of the O’Reilly Pocket Guide series, which sort of takes their Hacks books and squeezes even more fat out of them (and crams more data in). O’Reilly is now offering this series as PDF downloads for only US$5.00 each. Being a PDF sort of ruins the whole handy pocket format, but it adds other features, like hyperlinked table of contents and index and full searchability. And, of course, since most of these titles deal with software, you’re likely using the guides at your desk anyway. Certainly can’t beat the price for the amount of useful info you’re getting.

[Let me bore you with a little story about pocket guides. In the mid-90s, Sean Carton and I came up with the bright idea (we thought) of writing an Internet Survival Guide, a little pocket ref that would cram most of what you needed to know to get on the Net, and use tools such as HTTP, HTML, FTP, Gopher, and the like. It would be designed like an outdoor survival guide. We even thought of having a fold-out map in the back that would show all of the navigation tools you needed in charts around a map of the global Internet. We envisioned it in a display box that bookstores could have at the checkout counter. We approached a publisher who loved the idea. Then they started changing it. We needed to cover Mac, PC, and Linux, we should add tutorials along with the summaries of tools, we should review specific tools. It should have a CD of apps in the back. With each new addition, the book grew in size. By the time we were done, our handy little pocket guide was the 1,175-page Internet Power Toolkit and it weighed as much as a small child. So much for lean and mean. Years later, another publisher came along with a Net book done like an outdoor survival guide that was sold via a display on checkout counters. It sold like crazy and became a best seller. Oh well, you can’t win ’em all.]

Those who are excited by (or are pushing) mouse-over content previewing, pre-fetching, and other strategies for so-called “click-free” or “clickless” navigation, claim that it’s the future of Web navigation. I don’t know about click-free, but I’m definitely down for some click less. The two tools on the forefront of this tech are Browster and Cooliris, both browser plug-ins. Both work with IE and Firefox. Cooliris works in Safari too.

Rafe Needleman of CNet recently talked with execs from both companies, about how their products work, and how they differ.

Think of it as BitTorrent for books, or a free, dead-tree answer to Netflix. BookMooch is a community book exchange service where people send their unwanted books, real books, not electronic ones, to other BookMooch members. You can keep the books you receive, send them along to others, whatever you want. The books are free, but you have to pay for postage, and you have to be willing to give away some of your own books.

Unlike Lala (for CDs), PeerFlix (DVDs), and other services for exchanging unwanted media for wanted media, BookMooch does not charge for the transactions. The service itself is free. It IS a reputation system and there’s a maximum 5:1 ratio of books received to books sent out. The service just recently started and there are already some 1,500 registered members and 10,000 books in the community “library.”

[Via The Inquirer]

Workfriendly.net offers the latest tool for professional office-slackers: Office (as in Microsoft Office). If you want to surf the Big Muddy of Cyberspace, but don’t want the boss, or Edward that stoolie in Accounting, to catch you, just enter the URL of the site where you’d like to go for a little cultural enrichment. Workfriendly ports the page through a stylesheet, re-formating the Web content to look like an MS Word file (with a PC interface). There’s even a “boss key,” in the otherwise non-functional Word toolbar, that switches the content to something more “Word-like” and that hides the URL of the site you’re visiting.

[Thanks, Jay!]

The fine blokes over at the Inquirer are all gushy about Super, a Windows GUI that’s been laid over ffmpeg, the popular command-like graphics converter program. Other popular command-line conversion apps are bundled under the Super GUI, too. As the INQ sums it up:

“The result is described, pardon the redundancy, as ‘A simple GUI to ffmpeg, mencoder, mplayer, x264, mppenc, ffmpeg2theora & the theora/vorbis RealProducer plugIn.’

“Translated to English, this means you can convert back and forth between AVI, WMV, ASF, Realvideo, Quicktime, OGG Theora, -even the latest video file formats like .3gp used on mobile phones from Nokia/NEC/Siemens/Sony Ericsson etc. All this is done with just a few clicks, as the GUI launches the requested open sauce in the background. And everything for free, to boot.”

As expected, Mozilla.org released Firefox 2 Beta 1 earlier today. You can download it here. Some of the feature set includes:

* Built in Phishing Protection.
* Search suggestions now appear with search history in the search box for Google, Yahoo! and Answers.com
* Changes to tabbed browsing behavior
* Ability to re-open accidentally closed tabs
* Better support for previewing and subscribing to web feeds
* Inline spell checking in text boxes
* Search plugin manager for removing and re-ordering search engines
* New microsummaries feature for bookmarks
* Automatic restoration of your browsing session if there is a crash
* New combined and improved Add-Ons manager for extensions and themes
* New Windows installer based on Nullsoft Scriptable Install System
* Support for JavaScript 1.7
* Extended search plugin format
* Updates to the extension system to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions

Firefox 2.0 is expected to show up at any moment now. Yesterday, Ars Technia posted a review of the beta version of 2. Their conclusions? Good, but nothing Earth shattering. The coolest feature is a spell-checker for Web forms. Subjectively, they found it maybe faster and more stable, but did no benchmarking. The browser also has a built-in anti-phishing feature.

You got your Digg in my MacUpdate! You got your MacUpdate in my Digg! That’s sorta the idea behind IUseThis, a sort of Digg recommendation engine for Mac apps. Registered users “vote” on the apps you use and like, raising them in the queue (and you can comment on them as well). Eventually, the site will recommend new apps for you to try based on the apps you use and recommend to others.

[Via TUAW]