Archive for the ‘Idea’ Category

Google’s next trick

Friday, October 13th, 2006

The “next” bookmarklet feature of Google Reader is an interesting one. You never need visit your feed aggregator with it. Just hit it everytime you want to read the latest unread item in your RSS reading list and it will take you straight to the referenced page.

I think it can be improved though. For a lot of my reading list it is pretty useless. I click next, have to wait for the page to load, see if I like the page and then hit next again. Hundreds of times on a busy day. Part of the point of an aggregator is letting you quickly skim over hundreds of items looking for interesting ones to read further on.

But some feeds I know I want to read each item. e.g. a Flickr photo stream or a GMail feed. So why not let me specify a folder that the next feature works off of exclusively. Or let me create a custom next bookmarklet attached to a couple of feeds, or to a tag.

Posted in AAA, Atom, Feed, Google Reader, Idea, Request, aggregator, feature, feeds, next, rss | Comments

Site browsers

Friday, September 22nd, 2006

The more I come to rely on web-applications the more I think site tailored browsers are a good idea. The idea is best explained with an example; I have GMail open in a Firefox tab for most of the day. It is all too easy to inadvertently close that tab when it is lost amongst 30 others. I also have to swap to the tab every now and then to check if I have email (I can’t use the GMail notifier because I am running hosted Google on my own domain.) Starting a new email means clicking on the tab and hitting compose. I could open it in its own Firefox window but then it is part of the Firefox window list and gets closed when I close Firefox. It doesn’t have a distinct icon in the dock/taskbar either. The list goes on. At the end of it though you realise that what you are frustrated with are all the things having separate desktop apps solve.

But I still want to use the web-app and not a desktop app.

So imagine if you will a customised instance of Firefox that on start loads up my GMail URL, provides a distinct dock icon as well as a “new mail” indicator and right-click “new message” functionality. It runs separatley from my other Firefox instances too.

It need not get too complicated. It shouldn’t end up being a bloated desktop app and it shouldn’t be hard to use it on multiple computers. Really it is just a single-tabbed Firefox instance wrapped around the web-app.

This isn’t my idea though. Matt Brindley is making a living from selling site-specific browsers. He hasn’t done a GMail one yet but I’ll bet there are plenty of people willing to shell out a few bucks for one.

Posted in AAA, Browser, Firefox, Gmail, Idea, Matt Brindley, apps, campfire, desktop, site specific browser, ssb | Comments

AA USB

Thursday, September 21st, 2006

What a brilliant idea. Eminently practical and useful. Rechargeable AA batteries via USB.

Posted in AAA, Brilliant, Idea, aa, batteries, battery, charge, recharge, rechargeable, usb | Comments

Delicious full text search

Sunday, August 20th, 2006

A friend has a really good idea. Allow users to do a full-text search across the sites they have bookmarked. Wether that be your Firefox/IE bookmarks or your del.icio.us/Blinklist links. With systems such as Rollyo this would not be hard to do.

Rollyo is a good idea but I never use it as the link between the sites I visit and value and the sites in my custom Rollyo search engine is not automatically updated. If Rollyo would monitor my Blinklist links adding sites as I blink them I’d have good reason to use Rollyo. Integration into Firefox(through the search textbox top right) or Blinklist would be ideal.

(Rollyo does have a “bookmark importer” tool but it isn’t automatic and only works with your Firefox bookmarks, not del.icio.us and co.)

Posted in BlinkList, Delicious, Idea, Links, Shog9, full text, lixb, rollyo, search | Comments

Google Calendar event adder

Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006

A Google Calendar event-adder system would be dead handy. An example:

Scale With Rails has three events. New York, California and Frankfurt. All on different days and in different locations. I want to go to the Frankfurt event. To add it to my Google Calendar requires more work than I should have to do, even with the natural-language feature of GCal. Plus I am prone to typos and may enter the wrong date or be in a rush and forget to add the location. What should happen is that next to each event is a link saying “Add to calendar.” I click it and it adds the event with the correct details to my Google Calendar.

What with the Google Calendar API this shouldn’t be hard to implement. A middle-man website could handle it all. There would have to be some authentication of course. Event organisers can setup events on this website and be given an URI that they can put on their website. We could even suck data out of Upcoming and the other event websites that already exist.

All we need is the Event to Calendar link.

Posted in Calendar, Google, Idea | Comments