Xoopit - for when you receive a shitload of media

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richard
2 months, 1 week ago
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As you may have gathered from my rather telling title, Xoopit is a plugin that helps you manage all the media you receive or send by email.
So what exactly does Xoopit do? It lets you install an add-on for Firefox, and once you’ve installed the addon (and given them your GMail credentials), they start scanning your inbox contents. When they are all done scanning, they display little links to your images, videos and files, allowing you to open up pages filled with pretty thumbnails of your media, including a nice search option.

But, and this is for all the skeptics who say that it’s actually a lot easier to just search for whatever you’ve got in your inbox by using the powerful built-in Google search, this is not it! Because Xoopit not only displays the images and videos currently residing in your inbox, but also takes all the links to images and videos and creates thumbnails of those.

Which means that you won’t have to sift through scores of links to find that one image of a cute little kitten dressed up as Yoda, because Xoopit has already created a thumbnail for it and you can simply click it. Phew!

For the visually inclined, a screenshot of a GMail inbox with collected images displayed:
Xoopit Inbox

Right now Xoopit is available in private beta only. Which means you probably won’t get in and will have to rely on my judgment. Which is exactly the way I like it!

Oh my Goosh!

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richard
2 months, 3 weeks ago
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Here’s something to keep you occupied for a while. If you’re a geek and command-line fanatic, that is.
Because goosh.org has created something that’s both extremely helpful and, well, extremely cool. What is that tool of tools, you may ask? A Google command-line of course.

Check this out: typing a query displays four results, hitting enter again shows four more, and so on. It’s very basic, but blazingly fast! And typing “help”, “h” or “man” produces all the shortcuts for the various Google services or to other stuff (like our beloved Wikipedia).

Command-line specifics are included as well, like using the cursor keys to access previously entered queries. Typing go and the number of the search result takes you there, so no need for a mouse anymore. And since it’s a command-line, when it gets all too crowded, just type “clear” or “c”, and you’ve got a blank page with a blinking cursor all over again.

Here’s a picture, in case you actually don’t have a clue what I’m rambling on about here:

Goosh, the Google command line

PS: You can even add goosh as a search engine to the Firefox search form. Awesome!

Google Reader adds Notes

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richard
3 months, 3 weeks ago
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Google Reader, by all accounts the most superior feed-reader on the web, has just become even more useful.

What’s the addition that’s making me all excited? It is, of course, notes! Now, this may not sound like a big deal, but in a little way, it is!

See, Google Reader not only provides a nice interface for you to enjoy your daily aggregator-run, it also lets you share certain items with friends or the world (which, if you’re Scoble, is the same thing). Up until now, you needed to be subscribed to the whole feed in order to share single items. But with the notes bookmarklet, whenever you add any posting or website you stumble upon by appending a note, you can also share that item.

For people like me, who not only use the sharing function, but also add their shared items via the feed to their tumblelog, this is a fantastic way to consolidate something I would usually have to either add manually or facilitate via the usage of yet another imported feed. If you know what I’m talking about.

In addition to the notes function, the GReader team has also added three additional themes to style the page that displays your public shared item. The offered themes are a bit, well, off, so I guess they are more a proof of concept than anything else. But see for yourself, in this announcement on the official Google Reader blog (which is the easy way out for someone who just can’t be bothered to actually take screenshots).

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