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Sonar brings iOS style social discovery to Android

Sonar is riding a wave of social discovery apps that includes Banjo, Glancee and Highlight, but it isn't a newcomer. The New York based startup has made the rounds on iOS for the better part of a year, but today it's available in beta on Android to a handful of lucky readers.

Like others in the field, Sonar enables you to make meaningful connections with people around you -- people you wouldn't otherwise have known. It works by aggregating geolocation data across social networks and then creating relational correlations among individuals based on shared connections. So if … Read more

Who the heck are these people? Highlight's social overload

South by Southwest hasn't even started yet and already the friend-finder app Highlight

is being pegged as one of the most important new mobile apps of the show. It's a little app that alerts you when friends, and friends of friends, are in the same place as you at the same time.

Unlike Foursquare or Facebook, it works without requiring check-in, which is what makes it cool. The serendipity factor is just through the roof. It'll tell you if a person you know (that is, a Facebook friend) is in the coffee shop where you are standing … Read more

Highlight, the people discovery app that could change the world

Every year at the South by Southwest Interactive conference, hundreds of apps vie to do what Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, Beluga, and Group.me have done over the years: Dominate the conversation and springboard to huge success.

Each of those apps became the talk of Austin, Texas, during SXSW because they were total game-changers when it came to how people communicated with each other. And because SXSW is the confluence of all the movers and shakers in the interactive community, there's no better place to have an app blow up. Succeed there, and the community will yell out your app'… Read more

How to save your spot when reading in Chrome

Even if you love reading those longer articles on the Web, sometimes you have to pause to take care of other things--like going back to work from lunch. Because of reasons like this (and the large list of other interruptions you may encounter), a developer created an extension for Chrome that will let you mark the last line(s) you read. When you come back to the e-book, review, opinion article, or even research materials, you can pick up your reading from right where you left off.

Step 1: Get the youRhere extension.

Step 2: Once installed, head to a … Read more

Add highlighting or sticky notes to any Web page

If you're reading many different Web sites about one topic, it can sometimes be difficult to keep track of what materials you want on each site you visit. Instead of printing everything out before you've made solid decisions on what to use, just add some highlighting and sticky notes so you'll remember what you needed later. Here's how to get started with an easier way to do research in Chrome:

Step 1: Install Diigo: Bookmark, Archive, Highlight & Sticky-Note.

Step 2: Click on the Diigo icon in the Extensions Toolbar and select "Sign in" … Read more

Q&A: MacFixIt Answers

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which we answer questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week people wrote in with questions on text highlight color turning gray, memory running low on a Macbook system, an optical drive no longer reading some discs, and iTunes unable to locate original song files. We continually answer e-mail questions, and though we present answers here, we welcome alternative approaches and views from readers and encourage you to post your suggestions in the comments.

Question: Text highlight color turning gray MacFixIt reader Emory asks:

When I use the spell-checker, the words are highlighted by … Read more

Highlight text in Firefox with TextMarker

Millions of textbooks, library books, and documents are covered with yellow, pink, and blue streaks, the legacy of highlighter pens and their enthusiasts. Text highlighting is a proven memory aid, and multiple highlighter colors can help you organize the information you want to retain. Simon Shareef's TextMarker is a free Firefox add-on that enables text highlighting via the keyboard or context menu. You can customize the colors, and copy and save highlighted text.

We ran the download and restarted Firefox to activate the add-on, opened the add-ons manager, and clicked TextMarker's options button. The default color for all … Read more

Google search gets answer highlights and events

Google on Friday began rolling out an improved version of its search result highlighting and rich-snippet features.

Both improvements bring more visibility to kinds of data that would otherwise require clicking through to the source site. Google now does much of that work for users by bringing relevant, formatted data directly to its search results pages.

Between the two improvements, the highlighting one is the most interesting. It now highlights what Google calls "answers" within page summaries. These are matches to a user's query, so if a user looks up something like a math problem, or a … Read more

Word processing tool

Write Source provides users with a word processor for .txt documents that successfully imitates Word. In addition, the program offers an added feature that will help users search for words.

We felt instantly comfortable with this program's interface since it smoothly mimics Microsoft Word all the way down to its layout. The Help file's instructions were necessary to master some of the more complicated features, but basic writing was a snap. Our previous experience with word processors that save as .txt files had been disappointing since they always seemed to fall short of Word with their clumsy layouts … Read more