Topic Archive: Mash Note

Mash Note: Ninjawords online dictionary

Brian Dillard, Tuesday, January 8, 2008 @ 12:24 pm

In keeping with my new year's resolution to laud as many good Ajax apps as I trash bad ones, please allow me to celebrate the simplicity, beauty and utility of Ninjawords. An online dictionary developed by Phil Crosby, Ninjawords offers a fast, minimal Ajax interface built on the Ruby on Rails and Mootools frameworks.

When you visit the Ninjawords homepage for the first time, you see nothing but a Google-esque single-field search form and two buttons. When you type a word into the text field and click the "look up" button, a single definition for that word appears almost instantly. Most definitions come from the open-source Wiktionary; these definitions are linked to their respective Wiktionary pages and may also include a list of synonyms. For words not covered by Wiktionary, Ninjawords defaults to the Princeton Wordnet dictionary, which doesn't offer synonyms or linkable pages.

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Mash Note: Foxmarks bookmark synchronizer

Brian Dillard, Friday, October 12, 2007 @ 5:30 am

All bookmark sync utilities are not created equal. Plenty of browser add-ons promise to keep your favorites in sync across computers, while Del.icio.us and its ilk host your links up in the cloud. For my money, though, if you're a Firefox user with a serious bookmark habit, nothing beats the free browser extension Foxmarks.

I'm the first to admit that I've got a problem with my bookmarks - all 3,000 of them (and counting). I do tons of research for this site and my other writing gigs. When I come across something useful, I hit Command-D automatically. (I'm just as bad with clippings in my RSS reader.) Every once in a while, I do a clean sweep: reading, filing, purging. But until I've extracted whatever piece of knowledge I need from a particular link, I want access to it from all of my workstations and Internet devices.

That's where Foxmarks comes in. When you set up an account and install this free Firefox extension on multiple computers, it keeps the bookmarks in sync across machines and backs them up to the Foxmarks server. When you bookmark something at home, then want to refer back to it the next day at the office, you're golden. And when you're away from your own workstations - say, in an internet cafe or on a mobile device - you can hit My Foxmarks, the webapp version of the service.

The Foxmarks browser add-on gives you some fairly coarse-grained control over how and when syncing occurs. If you set your preferences to sync manually, or only on shutdown, you may get stuck answering a series of dialogs as the server parses your changes. My recommendation: Enable automatic synchronization in the background. In earlier versions of the service, the sync dialogue would hijack your browser and hog your CPU, especially if you were digging around the browser's "Organize Bookmarks" screen. Such performance problems have now been reduced, if not eliminated.

As for My Foxmarks, it, too, has improved over time. The current interface uses the YUI and Ext libraries for a seamless, desktop-like Ajax experience. The UI offers both a folder-tree view and a paged grid view; you can access individual bookmarks' details from either view. There's even an iframed preview pane that can show you the target of a bookmark without leaving the Foxmarks site. And, of course, there's a scaled-down mobile version. All in all, it's a slick, well-designed experience.

Of course, there's always room for improvement. I find the built-in Firefox bookmark manager cumbersome, buggy and annoying. I'd love to see the Foxmarks team position My Foxmarks as a powerful, intuitive web-based replacement. To get there, they'd probably need to add inline editing, a more customizable interface, and perhaps integrated tagging. A trash bin for deleted bookmarks would also be pretty cool, as would the ability to batch-delete bookmarks without constant confirmation dialogs. Most browsers' internal bookmark managers - and most social bookmarking services - don't offer a very efficient or useful UI. It would be great to see somebody get it right.

I have no idea whether such features are in the cards, but Foxmarks's developers aren't resting on their laurels. Just yesterday, they announced a beta of Foxmarks 2.0, which promises to offer:

• Major changes on the server side, including much more efficient syncing.
• A nice tweak to the syncing process so that it preserves favicons across computers.

Pretty sweet!

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• bookmarks
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• YUI
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Mash note: Remember the Milk

Brian Dillard, Wednesday, August 8, 2007 @ 5:30 am

You've got to love a Web 2.0 startup manned by a dev team of 2 that manages to add every feature on your wish list just before said feature's omission really starts to bug you. That's the case with me and Remember the Milk, a to-do-list webapp developed by an Australian company and supplemented by awesome new features with astonishing regularity.

Although they're a commercial entity, they've got a beta API that's allowed the development of a handful of really cool mash-ups. They've had iCal integration and a gCal plug-in for ages. They got on the Twitter bandwagon really early. They were one of the first non-Google companies to port their application offline with Gears. Last but not least, they've got a powerful (though still not perfect) user interface. (More on that later.)

A little background: I've been an obsessive to-do-lister since high school. GTD is my mantra. During my years at Microsoft-centric companies, I used Outlook to manage my entire life. But these days I find myself on Windows, 'nix and OS X machines in disparate locations for hours or days at a time. A webapp is clearly the only way to go for my to-do needs. But after years as an Outlook power user, I need something that will slice and dice my many lists (work, play, home, shopping, whatever) with exacting precision.

I gave Apple's iCal a shot, but its list functionality was way too primitive. I need multiple lists, categories, tags, flexible sort criteria - you get the picture. Ta-Da Lists from 37signals was even more stripped-down than iCal - plus I found its interface surprisingly clunky for something developed by a well-regarded Ajax shop. I thought about todo.txt, but I'm not enough of a command-line purist to completely abandon the GUI - even after years of suffering through Outlook's hideous hidden menus. Then, about a year ago, I stumbled on Frank Gruber's Do More: Online To Do Lists Compared. I didn't agree with his conclusions, but at least he gave me several more options to explore. Luckily for me, Remember the Milk was the first one I tried.

There's a lot to love about RTM, especially its UI, so just let me gush for a minute.

• Flexible organization: You can create multiple tabbed lists, apply arbitrary tags to your tasks, and create saved searches based on any criteria.
• Keyboard navigation: Except for a few advanced functions, such as moving items from one list to another, you can do almost anything from the keyboard. Create tasks, set priorities and due dates, apply tags, edit multiple items ... most functions take only a single keystroke.
• Natural language entry: You can set due dates and repeat intervals using some pretty flexible natural language. It ain't perfect, but with a little training the syntax becomes second nature.
• SMS, IM and email reminders: The service can nag you quite effectively via a wide range of communication protocols.
• Email, gCal, Atom and Twitter integration: You can create tasks or lists of tasks using a special email address; add or edit tasks directly from gCal and Yahoo plug-ins; and use Twitter or Atom as syndication services. The public API means that mash-ups and cross-pollination will only proliferate.
• Built-in collaboration capabilities: There are a host of features dedicated to assigning, sharing and collaborating on tasks.
• Serious accessibility: The main app is fast, powerful Ajax all the way, but the mobile version works just as well in a variety of more specialized user-agents.

There are a few things to hate:

• Poor multi-list view: The main Overview page list all of your tasks that are due, overdue or due tomorrow regardless of which list they're on. But it separates the Today, Tomorrow and Overdue tasks into separate tabs. The gCal plug-in does a much better job of showing all of your most important uncompleted tasks in a single, unified view.
• Recurring task weirdness: Delete a completed instance of a recurring task, and you've just deleted the master version of that task. After any previously spawned instances are completed, the task will no longer recur. This is a very strange user experience, especially for folks who like to purge their completed tasks every once in a while.
• Poor sortability: Tasks are sorted by their priority. Period. This shortcoming doesn't account for the fact that a low-priority task that's a week overdue is probably a high-priority task by now.

See the strikethrough text above to see exactly what I meant about the RTM team rolling out your must-have features before the lack thereof becomes too annoying. I've been dying for flexible sortability on RTM since I started using it. But no sooner did I start this post than I noticed an RTM blog post announcing just such a feature. It would be nice if you could set your sort preference globally as well as one list at a time, but that's a minor quibble.

So what can we learn from my ramblings, besides the fact that I really, really love this platform? I think there are a few powerful lessons for developers of any RIA:

• You don't have to sacrifice brawn for the sake of simplicity: Pleasing power users doesn't mean hopelessly confusing everybody else - at least not with smart UxD. (Apple could stand to learn that lesson, but I digress.)
• You don't have to sacrifice accessibility in the name of Ajax: Let your mobile app function as your accessible app, too.
• You don't have to fear Web 2.0 trendiness: Rapid adoption of emerging protocols such as Twitter can only help you differentiate your product and find new users.
• You don't have to lock your app down, even if you're a commercial enterprise: Public APIs - and the cross-pollination they enable - can only strengthen your foothold in the marketplace. In our Googlized world, this one's kind of a *duh*, but it bears repeating.
• You don't have to hide from your users: An active blog and well-maintained user forums are far more powerful marketing tools than terse release notes on Google Code.

I can only speculate as to the future of GTD's business model or exit strategy. Their logo carries the ubiquitous "Beta" tag, and their pages carry no ads. Where's the funding? It seems like somebody's waiting to get snapped up by a big player....

Lord knows it would be nice to have the old  Outlook/Palm OS quintet of email, calendar, contacts, notes and to-do lists available on a single web-based platform; personally, I would prefer that platform to be Google, though I can't really see them acquiring a start-up just for this one capability. Still, it would be a shame if a product as solid as Remember the Milk got lost in the shuffle or edged out by inferior offerings from bigger players. Only time will tell....

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