Tag: services

30 Boxes solves calendaring

http://30boxes.com is a brand new webservices. The public beta was launched last Sunday.

The purpose of the site is to solve the surprisingly difficult problem of calendaring. What’s wrong with calendaring, you might ask? Well, lots of things. Existing calendaring applications are complicated and clumsy, unpractical for sharing and social interactions, and, well, “traditional”.

http://30boxes.com chose a fresh approach. They have totally and completely minimized and simplified the user interface.

Entering events can be done with as little as filling in one single text field. Application understands human language like “tomorrow”, “yesterday”, and “next week”. You can have “buddies” which is just their term for contacts. All you have to do to add a contact is specify email address. You buddies can have calendars of their own, you can share calendars and even use the system to send invitations and confirmations/denies for events. You can track a lot more information about your buddies too – Flickr photos, LiveJournal entries, MySpace blog, and any other RSS feed. When there are new items – you get a small icon on the appropriate day of the calendar and can quickly check what they are up to.

The interface looks very clean and works pretty fast. It’s also based on AJAX technology which allows you to see updates without refreshing the page – feels nice.

Check it out – it costs nothing, and can do a lot for your organized life!

My Stickies – the missing piece of your browser

By pure luck I cam across a new service, which is still currently in beta, – My Stickies. Within the first second I realized that it was something that I waited for a long time now.

In essence, My Stickies allows you to attach yellow sticky notes to websites. You can have as many of these notes attached to as many websites as you want. Whenever you come back to the website, you will see all your notes at the same place and of the same size as you left them.

My Stickies

Not only this functionality alone is great news, but there is more. You can even see your notes from a different place. This is great, because you can add notes to sites at home, and than see them later on in the office – no synchronizations are needed.

You can also see all your notes at their website. You can tag them, search them, and use notes as a sort of bookmarks.

Getting all this is easy too. All you have to do is register at My Stickies and install the Firefox extension. The service is free and works exactly as expected. Check it out.

Pandora – the music box

Listening to Raven’n’Blues show from BFBS I learned about Pandora.

Pandora is a result of Music Genome Project. Basically, what they do is analyze a lot of music for rythms, instruments, vocals, and a whole lot of other criterias and then help you find the music that you like.

Excellent science project with perfect end user appliance. You get a single box to fill in – write the band or album that you like and you’ll get a whole bunch of music that matches your taste. I’ve been playing around it for half a day only and I have to say that it works out great. Maybe my taste is too simple though. But anyway, I’ve heard many songs that I’ve heard before as well as a lot of new stuff.

You don’t even have to register to try it out for an hour or so. If you’ll listen for longer, it will ask you to create an account, which is as simple as giving your email address, adding a password, and specifying your birth year (you can lie, ma). They also aks for a ZIP code, which is USA specific, but you can always use the Beverly Hills’ 90210.

Enjoy! Let it be my Christmas present to all of you.

Update: You can also save your favourites to a list, share your stations, and do a lot of other cool stuff. My favourites page is here.

Daily del.icio.us bookmarks

If you’ve been looking for an RSS reader, today is your lucky day.

Continue reading Daily del.icio.us bookmarks

On spending money

My Linux Weekly News expires in a couple of days. I’ve been supporting the publication for the last two or three years and I still find it to be a great source of good journalism. But I realized that I haven’t been using it that much in a last year. Sometimes it were weeks between my visits to LWN. It just doesn’t matter that much to me anymore. And I think this is a good reason to stop renewing my account.

With all those extra money I feel like I have to find a new place to spend them. The problem is that I don’t use that many web services anymore.

Most of the stuff I do on the web is connected to my site in this or that way. So I was considering donating to WordPress at first. But they say that time is the best thing I can give to them, not money. And I do promote WordPress as much as I can both on this website and when I talk to people.

Than I thought about Gallery. But I figured that I am not that happy with it yet and I’ve only just started using it. I am not sure yet that I will stay with it for a long time.

By this time, I was practically out of alternatives. And than it hit me – Flickr. I don’t use it much yet, but it bugs me all the time. Flickr is an excellent service and I want to find the way to use it. And maybe I will. Currently, I am just backing up some of the most important images there, but I think it’s that monthly bandwidth limitation that stops me from working with it seriously.

Another point that made me consider Flickr more than anything else is that by paying them money, I won’t be just donating. I will get a FlickrPro account that will increase the monthly bandwidth limit from 20 MBytes to 2 GBytes and provide me with a bunch of other useful functionality.

I haven’t yet made my mind though. I am still thinking about it. If you have any suggestions on which other services or product I might be interested in, let me know.