Bookmarks

Xmarks may live on, in paid form

Earlier this week, free and cross-platform bookmark sync tool Xmarks announced it would be closing up shop come January of next year, but there may be some life left in it yet.

This morning, on the Xmarks company blog, CEO James Joaquin said that the company is "revisiting the idea of Xmarks as a premium service"--something it has never offered, and one of the factors that led to the company failing to turn a profit.

To gauge interest in that idea, Joaquin and the other Xmarks founders have set up a page on Pledgebank where they're … Read more

Evernote launches a bookmarking tool for sites

Personal internet archiving service Evernote is taking a new approach to expanding its user base and bookmarking functionality with a tool for publishers and blog owners called Site Memory. In short, it lets users save Web content for reading later, while helping to promote some of the most heavily saved content with Evernote users at large.

Blogs that add the new Site Memory button to their posts (or any page for that matter) let users bookmark and save that content to their Evernote account. Akin to Web bookmarking services like Instapaper and Read it Later, this lets them absorb the … Read more

Your bookmarks anywhere and a unique labyrinth game: iPhone apps of the week

With a virtual flood of new apps and updates coming in to the iTunes App Store every day, a few are bound to slip through the approval process that maybe should not have--or at least would not have passed muster with Apple guidelines. I personally don't think Apple needs to filter apps (as long as they work), but, at the same time, if they have a family-friendly vision of the App Store, I have no problem with that.

Two days ago an app that slipped by the App overseers was a real winner, but probably made a few too many people in high places angry. The app in question is called MiTube, formerly available to jailbroken iPhones only, that lets you easily search for and download YouTube videos. A couple of us here heard about MiTube (free) Wednesday morning, downloaded the app, then noticed later that it got pulled by Apple at around 7 p.m. By 5 p.m., MiTube was already No. 11 on the top-free-apps list.

I guess we all know why something like this usually doesn't get accepted. YouTube wants page views, submitters want to make money, and letting people download videos to local drives (like the iPhone) defeats their business purposes. It's sad, really, because as much as I'd like to recommend MiTube, it's no longer available.

Do you think Apple/YouTube/Google should let these apps get posted and not worry or do you think they have every right to keep these apps under wraps? Let me know in the comments.

This week's apps--both 99 cents--are a utility to bring your desktop browser bookmarks to your iPhone and a surprisingly fun and challenging labyrinth game sequel.… Read more

Link locker

Although many people are devoted users of a single browser, many others find themselves switching back and forth between different browsers, depending on what they're doing. We tend to favor Firefox, for example, but we often find ourselves testing add-ons for Chrome and Internet Explorer and then--in the case of Chrome, anyway--hanging around in that browser for a while. This gets to be a problem when we want to visit a site we have bookmarked, only to find that we never bookmarked the site in the browser we're using. Link Commander Lite is a simple solution to this … Read more

Sync with Weave

There are several excellent bookmark-syncing extensions for Firefox, but Weave is the first one designed by Mozilla. As you might expect from the company that produces Firefox itself, the appeal of Weave is that it synchronizes more than just bookmarks, and also supports syncing open tabs, history, passwords, preferences, and Firefox 3's advanced Location Bar data.

The add-on lives in your Tools menu and in your Options menu. From there you can check your syncing log, create a user account and password, and toggle sync settings. The default is to sync all. But in practice, Weave has had a … Read more

Bookmark manager

Delicious Bookmarks is an add-on for Firefox that functions as a virtual filing cabinet for your bookmarks. If you love surfing the Internet, this tool will help you organize your bookmarks and discover new sites of interest.

Delicious Bookmarks shows its value as soon as we installed it. Since we weren't familiar with Delicious Bookmarks, we went to the About section of the product's Web site and found what we needed to get started, plus plenty of other great information. To use Delicious Bookmarks, you need an account with Delicious, which is part of Yahoo, so if you … Read more

Firefox note-taking add-ons are Web supersavers

Web pages aren't getting any smaller, but there are usually not more than a few paragraphs or a couple of images of particular interest on any given page. Firefox add-ons ICyte (also available for IE), Wired-Marker, and Trails let you save all or sections of Web pages and share your snippets with others.

ICyte makes sharing easy Most of the time, sharing Web content means sending someone a link via e-mail, chat, or phone. The ICyte add-on for Firefox and Internet Explorer lets you highlight the important content on the page before you share it, or you can save and send portions of the page rather than the whole enchilada.

You must provide your name and e-mail address to use the service. After you download the add-on and restart Firefox, two buttons are added to the left of the address bar. Click the left button to create a Cyte for a new or existing "project." Here you can assign tags or a note to the Cyte. Click the button on the right to open your Cytes in the sidebar.

The Cyte entries in the sidebar show a thumbnail of the page, its name, the name of the project, and its comments and tags. When you click a Cyte to reopen it, a banner appears at the top of the main browser window showing the same information along with the date it was saved and a Live View button that returns to the original page. You can hide this banner to view more of the page itself.

Click the gear icon that appears when you hover over a Cyte in the sidebar to open its drop-down menu with options for editing the Cyte name and other data (but not the page itself), creating a copy, deleting the Cyte, sending it to someone via e-mail, or embedding it in a Web page. You can also share the sites you designate as public with others via RSS, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks, though I didn't try these features.

… Read more

Online function recorder

DejaClick provides a neat tool for automatically handling some of the more redundant aspects of surfing the Web. With a familiar layout and fantastic results, this exciting program is a huge time saver.

The program's interface is modeled after a video recorder; in fact, it feels much like operating a simple DVR embedded within Firefox. The commands are so simple and intuitive we never felt lost or in need of instructions. This utility is most useful for automating long, complex log-in processes or redundant programs that need to be opened frequently. You simply click the Record button to record … Read more

Make a shortcut to your unread Gmail

One thing about e-mail, no matter how much more convenient it is over opening a letter and reading a piece of paper, we always want to make it easier. Here's a trick for making a shortcut to your unread e-mail in Gmail in Firefox.

Gmail makes it easy to bookmark different parts of itself. For instance: you can book mark your in-box at mail.google.com/mail/#inbox. That keyword after the pound sign is the key. Change that to #sent and you can book mark your sent e-mail.

Unread mail doesn't have a nifty keyword like that. … Read more