highlight

Notepad is a survivor. Built into Windows for ages, it's still doing yeoman service as a fast, lightweight, easy-to-use text editor. Notepad2 from Flo's Freeware is a Scintilla-based text editor with syntax highlighting. It's called Notepad2 because it follows the original Notepad's principles. It's compact and lightweight: The entire program folder is about 766KB. This makes it fast: Notepad2 loads quickly. But Notepad2 does a whole lot more than Notepad. Despite their many similarities, there really is no comparison: Notepad2 is a far more capable tool than Notepad for any text document. But for those … Read more

The Internet is a valuable tool in today's research for papers and other projects. However, bookmarking endless Web pages is not the most efficient way to keep track of the information you need. Sure, it points you to the source where you found useful information, but you still have to go digging through the Web page to find it again.

Instead of adding to your endless bookmark collection, you should try using a service like Annotary. This service is dedicated to helping you do online research more efficiently, and it's free for individual users. If you want to … Read more

Facebook is developing a standalone application to help users find their friends in real life, according to a new report, marking the company's entry into a field that has plenty of competitors but has yet to yield a mainstream success.

Bloomberg reports that the app, which so far does not have a name, is expected to be released next month in time for South by Southwest. The app would track your location in the background, even when it hadn't been recently opened, and share that location with nearby friends.

Facebook has not responded to a request for comment.… Read more

It's hard to listen to Paul Davison and not get swept up in his enthusiasm, hard not to want to buy into his grand vision for the app his small company built.

Davison is the high-energy CEO of Highlight, a people discovery app for iPhone that came out last January, and that was widely predicted to start its world domination tour at the 2012 South by Southwest Interactive festival in much the same way that Twitter did in 2007 and Foursquare did in 2009.

Looking back, it's clear that much of the reason so many people expected so … Read more

Thursday's top stories will fill you up on patent spats, better maps and creepy apps:

There's a laughable twist in the never-ending global patent battle between Apple and Samsung. A U.K. judge (the same judge that said Samsung's tablets were "not as cool" as the iPad) ruled that Samsung did not copy the iPad's design. But the judge also ordered Apple to publish a notice of this fact on its U.K. website and in British newspaper ads for six months. Awkward.

Nokia has promised "something amazing" to be announced Sept. … Read more

"What are the odds," Highlight CEO Paul Davison asks, "that you'll have a connection with some random person sitting next to you in a coffee shop?"

He says that he's done the math and knows the answer: "The odds are pretty good." Especially with his app.

Highlight, which had its big coming-out party at SxSW this year, is all about helping people make connections based on common interests, activities, or social proximity. Pegged as the big deal app of SxSW before the show kicked off, it ended up not having … Read more

Most Web sites changes frequently, and it's sometimes useful to know what these changes consist of. SiteDelta is an extension for Firefox that can identify changes made to a Web page since your last visit and even tell you what the previous version of the page said.

Like most Firefox extensions, SiteDelta requires a browser restart to finish installation. Once installed, the extension appeared as a delta symbol (a triangle) in Firefox's status bar. Click the icon and the extension will scan the page; come back later, click it again, and SiteDelta will highlight all changes that have … Read more

Don't have 112 minutes to watch the video of Apple's Monday presentation from the WWDC? While we all wait for someone to compile the one-minute version of the press conference, CNET has put together some of the big highlights from the show.

We've crunched it down to 30 photos of big features and products shown off during the presentation, which opened WWDC. That includes Apple's new notebooks, last minute Mountain Lion features, and the unveiling of iOS 6.

Of course if you want a complete rundown of what happened yesterday, you can get that from us here. … Read more

LOS ANGELES--As E3 2012 shuts its doors, we're not entirely sure we ever want them to open up again. Scott and Jeff spent a day going to press conferences and two full days on the show floor. It wasn't pretty and what follows is a brutally honest take on the show.… Read more