Google Chrome gives you the option of creating virtual applications out of online applications.  In reality, it is pretty simple, Google Chrome will open an online app in its own window that has the forward, back, URL, and other standard browser buttons removed.  It makes online apps feel more like apps that live on your harddrive.

Here is how Chrome and Toodledo have collided to give me a more interesting and integrated todo option. Toodledo has a very clean interface for the iPhone but their standard interface leaves a little to be desired. The great thing about Toodledo’s iPhone interface is that you can access it in a standard browser on your PC or Mac.  Here is where my head exploded…

I opened the iPhone interface of Toodledo in Google Chrome and turned it into a virtual app.  The Chrome virtual apps remember how they were sized and where they were in the window when you last closed them.

Long story short, I now have a todo widget that lives on the far left part of my workspace that stays out of the way that is always synced on my iPhone.  In other words, it is possible to use chrome to create iPhone app widgets that have their own window and live on your computer.

WordPress has an update today that adds a new feature called Turbo. Turbo is WordPress’ brand name for its Google Gears integration. I just updated my software and noticed the new link in the top right-hand corner of my screen. When you click on Turbo, it opens a window that lets you know that you will need Google Gears in order to enable Turbo. I downloaded Gears and then enabled it.

The popup window also touted a speed increase after enabling Turbo. So far, I haven’t really noticed a speed increase, but to be fair I have only been using it for a few minutes.

Google Gears is Google’s app that allows users to take their computer offline and still be able to use their online apps. In other words, you can still get to your Gmail when you take your lappy on a plane with no wi-fi. Google Gears works in the background saving the necessary files to enable offline functionality.

Obviously, if a large portion of your page is pre-downloaded, you should see a speed boost. Again, so far… not so much, but it is still early.

Other Additions

A welcome addition to WordPress is the ability to see all the revisions that have been made to an entry. This is particularly handy if you share a blog with someone and you want to see what they have added to you entry.

Also, just under the Save and Publish buttons there is a new Word count feature that will let you know if you need to spend a little more time on your entry in order for it to get to an impressive, unreadable length that will convince your readers to skip your blog. Handy.

It is now possible to add a caption to images. This is an incredibly handy thing. Now if you have a somewhat cryptic image that needs a little explanation, you are in luck. Now you can put a caption at the bottom of the image and your readers will never be confused ever again…ever.

Another new feature of WordPress in 2.6 is a little, red speech bubble that now lives above the link to Plugins letting you know how many plugins you have installed. I have 13. Super.

It doesn’t just stop there, if you go into the plugins management area, it is now a lot easier to manage your plugins. The interface is now a lot more ajaxy and draggy and droppy which makes it much easier to manage the plugins that make your blog so special.

Since draggy and droppy is so cool, WordPress has updated its media gallery to allow drag and drop functionality allowing you to better manage the content uploaded to your blog.

And finally, keeping with the drag and drop theme I’ve got going, the Press it linklet has been updated to make quoting blogs and other websites much easier.

All in all, it isn’t quite the continental shift type of change that we saw with the release of 2.5, but this update does bring a lot of good functionality that will make your blogging a little easier.

I know there are a lot of storage options out there on the net, but Evernote is a lot more.  Since the Internet’s inception there has been a chasm between the electronic bits created on computers and the ideas, drawings, sketches, notes, and everything else that ends up on paper.  If you wanted those paper things to get stored on your computer, you had to recreate a lot of the work you had already done.  It is no fun to go back and type in the text of a brainstorming session.  Now, with Evernote you can easily upload the fruits of your brainstorm and keep them online for easy searchability and everywhere all the time accessibility.  As long as you can scan it or take a picture of it with your camera phone, you can store it on Evernote.

Once that picture is there, Evernote will attempt to do Optical Character Recognition or OCR on the picture.  As long as the writing is clear and the picture is good enough, Evernote does a pretty good job of finding the words and making them searchable.  Think about that.  You do a brainstorming session and you take a picture of the notes and upload them to Evernote.  After the Evernote servers have some time to do the crunching, you suddenly have the ability to do searches where Evernote shows you pictures that contain the word you are searching for…That is a game-changer.

If that weren’t good enough, Evernote also gives you the ability to run a client application on your computer that syncs with the Evernote website that gives you even more capability to manipulate and use your notes.  You can look at your notes and make changes, and those changes will be reflected on the Evernote website.

In addition to the desktop client, there is a microscopic client that can be downloaded to your smart phone which gives you the ability to create, upload, and search your Evernote notes right from your phone.  Having access to all your notes and ideas wherever you are can be very empowering.

I have only been using Evernote for a week so there are a lot of things the site can do that I haven’t discovered yet but even so I am falling in love with the functionality.

There is one improvement that Evernote needs to add in order to make their product an epic win and that is the ability to collaborate on notes. The notes are so versatile in how you can use them that they would make fantastic collaboration tools and yet I can’t find any way to share notes so that others can add information to the notes.

Other than that, Evernote is pretty close to perfect.

The interface is a lot cleaner and uses different shades of light blue for the different sections of the page. It is actually quite pleasant to look at. Obviously this is the first time I have used it so I can’t give a real review, but on first blush it is nice. I likes it a lot.

On another note, I am always a little scared when I upload a new version of WordPress to my server. You see, I no longer use a hosted blog service like blogger. If you use blogger, it is up to them to keep the backend working. If it screws up, you can relax knowing that there are Google engineers pulling their hair out trying to get everything fixed.

Now that I run my own blog software, if everything blows up, it is on me. To be honest it is kind of exhilarating, but it’s also scary. I have a lot of content that I have uploaded and written over the past 5 years. I would hate to lose it. Maybe I should back up more.

Cool New Features

One of the coolest new features is how this new version automates the updating of plugins.  In WordPress, you can augment the functionality of your blog by installing plugins.  I use one called Twitter Tools to post my tweets right here on my blog.  I have a ton of other plugins that I use to make it easier on me to use WordPress.  In this version of WordPress, updating out of date plugins is as simple as hitting a link on the dashboard.  Awesome.  To make it work, you have to put your FTP settings in a form that pops up the first time you click the update link.  After that it works.  Click the update link under the out of date plugin, then click the ‘Proceed’ button and boom it just works.  ROCK AND ROLL… I love it.

Bug Fixes?

There is one bug that annoys me and it hasn’t been addressed by WordPress. When you embed a video from Youtube or other video site, it works fine the first time you publish the post. If you go back to your post later and then republish, WordPress messes up the html and makes the video malfunction. I am about to test this new version of WordPress to see if it fixes that problem. I know I can’t be the only person to have experienced this problem.

—-Update—-

Hooray. It now works. The video embed bug is now dead! Hooray. Embed videos to your hearts content!!!

UPDATE:———————-

I just downloaded the Google Caledar updating tool, and it works great! It is extremely simple. You download it and it ends up in your system tray. Once it is there you can right-click on the icon and go into the options and specify how often you want it to check for updates.

I have been waiting a long time for this. I have a smart phone that doesn’t sync to Google, but I want to use Google calendar and now I can. Thank you Google!

There are a couple of things that I like about this theme. First, it appears that the main portion of the page is backlit with a soft blue light. Second, this theme is much cleaner than my last one. I think it will be easier to find old posts. Also, this theme is a two-column layout that is less confusing.

My blog is WordPress. WordPress makes it infinitely easy to change your look and feel. There are a ton of designers out there who put together layouts. There are literally thousands to choose from, but it is amazing how many suck. The real trick is to find one that looks pretty good.

This theme was pretty good right out of the box. I had to make some changes to the CSS to make the search area work correctly. Initially, the search button was too narrow to see the word ‘search’. I fixed that. I also created the banner up above and made some other CSS tweaks to get it just like I like it.

Let me know what you think, leave me a comment.

I have been using WordPress for the last 4 months and have been completely happy with the interface, but today, I was looking at Leo LaPorte’s Wakoopa software feed, and it said that he was using MarsEdit, a blog editing software package for the Mac, and it got me to wondering if there is software available for Windows, and lo and behold, here is software that integrates right into my favorite browser, Firefox.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Initially, it is small because it is brand new. It is still in alpha. Technically, it isn’t open to the public, but go by and kick the tires. We are waiting to get our 30th learning object. Once we get there, we will pronounce it open to the public. Until then, other than this blog post we are keeping it a secret.

Once we are fully up and running, we will be adding new functionality like search, tagging, user-ratings and more. Our hope is to build a community around the content.

Why GenoNow

So, you may be asking, “Why are you building this site?” That’s a great question, let me answer it like this. Let’s say you are the head of Human Resources in a company, and it’s your job to train your work force in their areas of deficiency. Before www.genonow.com, you had to rely in broadcast training. Here is what I mean. Let’s say that 20% of your people have real time-management problems. So, in order to address that problem, you fly in a time-management guru, and spend $20,000 to address a problem that only 20% of your people really suffer from.

What if you could train your staff in a way that is much more granular and focused? That is where GenoNow comes in. You could take that same $20,000 you invested in the time-management seminar and put that into credits for your whole staff. That way the 20% with time management problems could focus on learning objects devoted to effective time managment. The remaining 80% of your staff could seek training in their area of deficiency. That is a much more effective way to spend your training dollar.

Better Training for Less Money For Your Organization

Not to mention that, but we partner with companies to host their training objects. Through the partnership, companies have an easy effective way to broadcast their message to all their employees without having to invest in a distance learning environment. We do all the hard work.

Trainers Needed

We need trainers! We need people who can teach to offer up their training in return for the chance to make some money. The revenue sharing with content creators is very simple. If you sell your content for $20 on GenoNow then you will make $10. GenoNow splits the revenue 50-50 in return for hosting and marketing learning environment object.

Our long term goal is to be a long tail provider of corporate training. That means that you may be surprised at what we would deem as appropriate for the site. Another goal is to allow content owners and trainers to be able to upload and manage their own content. That is coming, but isn’t available yet. Our development team is hard at work creating the product. (Remember you are seeing it in an early stage, there is a lot more to come as far as functionality is concerned.)

If you are a trainer, or if you know a trainer, I want to talk to you. My email is mwilliams (at) sviworld (dot) com. (Please excuse the way I had to publish my email address, I am trying to avoid unwanted emails.)

At South by Southwest, the music come tech festival that is going on right now, the flavor of the te month is Twitter. Everyone is tracking each others every move through Twitter.

I have to admit that I don’t fully understand the value of Twitter, but it is fun. I just want you, my circle of friends to start using it so that I can see if it has some greater value.

If you have a Twitter ID, let me know. My Twitter handle is murdog777. Check it out, get an account, and add me. Who knows, it may be the next online craze, and you could be one of the early adopters…the adopterati.

I appreciate everyone being patient while my server problems were fixed. Well we are back to lightspeed, thank you Webbleyou.

If you are itching to have a delicious blog like mine, go to Webbleyou.com and they will hook you up for a very affordable price, $4.00 a month. Start blogging now.

Adobe’s CEO Bruce Chizen told CNET the plan was to have advertisements to pay for the online version of Photoshop.

I’ve said it before, but with every new app that appears on the net, the closer we get to a world where OS and computer make really becomes commodity. PC’s have been commodity for years, and as more and more apps find their way online, even Macs become less interesting.

For those few who were perceptive and quick on the uptake comes notoriety which is extraordinarily hard to replicate today in podcasting. There are names like Dawn and Drew, The Evil Genius Chronicles, SoccerGirl Inc. among others who started podcasts and captured attention early. I would posit that if these same people were to start a podcast now, they would languish in obscurity. Being the early bird definitely has its perks.

That means that it is very important to be ever vigilant for what’s next in the online scene. I think I have found a candidate and it is something that I am calling nanoblogs. Nanoblogs are quick little 1 or 2 phrase or sentence blogs that keep your friends up-to-date with where you are, and what you are doing. (I just did a search and it appears that Rafe Needleman has already coined this phrase and has an entry out there talking about nanoblogging. You will just have to take my word for it, I thought of this name on my own in parallel with Rafe.)

The first one I heard about nanoblogging on a podcast called Net-at-Nite. Leo LaPorte and Amber McArthur were talking about Twitter, a brand new service that allowed its users to write extraordinarily short blog entries and post them. Really what it amounted to was a moment by moment, blow by blow commentary on the minutia or the writers life. It is not uncommon for a Twitter user to post a passing thought, her current location, an annoyance, or whatever tiny tidbit crosses their mind.

I subscribed to Leo LaPorte’s twitter feed for a couple of days. I set it up so that the updates would come in through my cell phone. It was a strange couple of days of electronic voyeurism that was strangely interesting. I finally shut off the barrage of IMs when I discovered I was running through my small allotment of monthly SMS’s very quickly.

Another technology that I just heard about is a micro to nano blogging tool called www.tumblr.com. It is a new thing that is just like a regular blog only much, much lighter. In fact, the more I think about it, it is in the middle of nanoblogging and standard blogging. You can call it a microblog.

I don’t know if nanoblogging or microblogging will have the impact of podcasting, but it does seem to be the latest permutation of the RSS society that we are building. Who knows this could be a bridging technology to something yet unimagined. Whatever it is it seems to be the next thing for whatever it is worth.

By the way you can subscribe to my Twitter Feed right here.

Excerpt from email…

As soon as we are able to set up the new servers, we will start moving sites. We anticipate this taking about a week, which is much longer than we’d like, but is probably a realistic estimate given the steps that are involved.

In the meantime, the servers will continue to work, but with a delay of about 30 seconds between page loads. My sincerest apologies for this inconvenience. I understand how important it is to have your website up at all times, and I am working closely with our hardware specialists to resolve this issue as quickly as possible. Again, if you would like a refund for this month, please ask and one will be issued. Thank you for your business and patience.

As you can see, in about a week, we should be back to our zippy selves. Again, I want to say bravo to webbleyou.com for caring enough for its customers to just let us know. Transparency goes a long way to making us feel good about your service. Slowdowns and hiccups are a part of the Internet and are to be expected. One thing that has seemed to diminish over the past few years is customer service. It’s nice to see that webbleyou.com hasn’t succombed to that.

If you want a full-on blog that is hosted by good people, I suggest going to webbleyou.com and letting them set up a word press blog for you. I haven’t missed blogger.com one bit.

Once you venture into the crazy world portable media players and computer ownership, you will suddenly be faced with the problem of DRM. We have spent our whole lives under the misconception that when we pay for something, we own that product. In most cases, that’s true until it comes to media, more specifically DVDs or songs downloaded from online music services.

These services have made promises that they can protect the media they sell from pirates. They do that by encrypting the file and giving that password only to the person who purchased it and limiting where she can play it.

For instance, Carla purchases Yellow by Coldplay from the Apple music store. Carla owns an MP3 player made by Sanyo. Carla wants to put the file she purchased on her MP3 player. Something she has every right to do, after all she purchased the music file right…not according to the music industry. The music industry claims that Carla has only licensed the file and that license doesn’t protect her right to put her music on the player of her choice. DRM is the engine that breaks the usability of the Carla’s Coldplay track.

Many people have been looking for ways to protect content without breaking it with DRM. Techcrunch just published a story about a company that is trying to do something about it. The company is called Streamburst and they have come up with an interesting way to make a file less tradable online.

When you purchase a movie from Streamburst, the first 5 seconds of the video displays your full name as shown on the front of the credit card you used to purchase the file. Streamburst also removes a specific pattern of bits from the file which does nothing to the playability, but uniquely marks that file as yours. That way if the file finds its way onto the Internet, it is possible to track it back to its source. Other than those two things, there is no DRM on the file. That means it will play anywhere.

I don’t know if this will work but I applaud the effort to find ways to protect the content without breaking. The artist deserves to be paid for his work, and I, the consumer of the content, should be able to play where, when and how I want.

May DRM DIE! Streamburst, thanks for the effort if nothing else!

read more | digg story

A few days ago, I blogged about my new OpenID url, http://murray.williams.name which points to this blog. It was interesting to see that Digg will begin using OpenID. Maybe it will take off after all.

If you are a coder or some other mega-geek, I would love a better explanation.

But, it looks like a great way to get automated news searches ported to an RSS feed that you can then build a wicked cool site or something. This is definitely something.

You have to sign up and get a username and password, but after that, you can listen to great music to your hearts content. I know there are a ton of other online radio options out there, but Pandora has a great interface that lets you listen to your music for free. What a deal. Check it out!