Webware

Oh yes, I did just go there. Hands-down, without a skerrick of doubt, AutoCopy is the best Firefox extension. It may also be the best Firefox extension you've never heard of. Here's what it does, and then I'll tell you what makes it so great.

The top image shows text being highlighted, while the bottom displays the AutoCopy copying options box that pops up immediately afterward.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Developed at Mozilla, AutoCopy is a lightweight, single-feature add-on that copies any text you highlight to your clipboard. No more hitting CTRL+C, or using the context menu. That in and of itself is not so revolutionary. The feature has been around for a while in other programs. What makes it the must-have extension is that there's practically no other reason to highlight text on a Web page except to copy it to your clipboard.

Sure, highlighting can be used to reveal hidden words or perhaps make poorly-colored text stand out from a background, but those instances are few and far between. If they're not, you're spending too much time looking at badly designed sites. To do either of those when using AutoCopy, just hold down the CTRL key as you highlight and it won't copy it to the clipboard.

Once you've highlighted anything from a single letter to entire multipage New Yorker articles, the add-on opens a small options box where your cursor is. Through the extension options, you can configure how long that box appears for, or turn it off.

AutoCopy's add-on settings box offers a reasonable amount of configuration.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

If you choose to use it, the post-copy options box offers a couple of useful choices. You can undo the copy, or access up to 10 previous clipboards and bring them back as the active clipboard. You can also paste to the location bar or the search bar, search from your default provider using the clipboard text as the search term, or open the text in a new tab. This doesn't use the "feeling lucky" search, so it only works for URLs or FTP sites. The last option copies the URL to the clipboard.

Options to configure add-on behavior include toggling a status bar icon for the add-on options, paste on middle click, deselecting after you highlight, toggling AutoCopy in text boxes, blinking to notify you when it copies, and copying plain text. That last one requires an additional extension, and I found it to be more than I needed.

Back in 2007, my colleague Peter Butler thought that Tab Mix Plus was the best Firefox extension, and I agree that it's still an excellent one. If you're using the pre-release version of Firefox 3.5, you can grab a beta of the updated Tab Mix Plus here. Tab Mix Plus isn't for everybody--as he says, not everyone needs to make all of their tabbed browsing dreams come true. Not everybody cares about in-page ad-blocking, either. Copying text, though, is something everybody does in-browser, and it'd be great to see this functionality eventually built into Firefox or one of the other top browsers.

Installing Internet Explorer 8--photos

Internet Explorer 8 is now ready to download. We installed the final build of Microsoft's latest browser, and captured the (looong) download process and our first impressions of some of the featured highlights in pictures.

If that's not enough (it never is,) CNET's Ina Fried has the full story of Microsoft's launch of IE 8 at Redmond's MIX 09 conference, and some details about a version of the browser for Windows 7. Also stay tuned to Download.com for our forthcoming video review and an in-depth look at the features and faults we find with Internet Explorer's latest iteration--and how IE compares with browsers Firefox, Google Chrome, and Opera.

Netflix said on Wednesday that the next version of Silverlight shows some promise in helping ease recent issues that some users have had while trying to stream videos on lower-end computers.

"There are test configurations in our lab where we are seeing an improvement," said Kevin McEntee, vice president of Web development for Netflix. McEntee told CNET News that the company went out and bought computers such as an Asus Netbook that users had said were causing problems. In some cases, the low-end machines weren't able to keep up with the video and were dropping frames, McEntee said.

The next version of Silverlight holds promise, McEntee said, by allowing the load to be shared by the graphics and main processors, whereas the current version puts all the strain on the CPU.

"There was a significant improvement using Silverlight 3," McEntee said. "We think we can run on a wide range of lower-end machines that we don't run (well) on today."

However, those experiencing problems will have to wait a bit. Silverlight 3 just entered beta, with a final release not expected until sometime before the end of the year. A Silverlight 3-based Netflix player would come sometime after that, he said.

"I don't anticipate we would do it until Silverlight 3 is released as a final (version)," he said.

McEntee said that Netflix originally planned to use Silverlight only to create a Mac version of its streaming player, but decided to shift entirely to Silverlight because it lets them offer a single player that works on multiple platforms and on multiple browsers.

The biggest downside, he said, is that many people still don't have Silverlight, meaning customers have to download the program before they can watch their first movie.

"We're waiting for Silverlight to have more and more penetration," McEntee said. "We would love to be able to have (customers) push the blue play button and it just plays."

For now, Netflix is focused on offering streaming video for the PC and television rather than actively working on an option that would also get the content onto cell phones and iPods.

"We don't have any imminent plans for phones or iPods or anything with a smaller screen," said company spokesman Steve Swasey. "At some point--and we haven't said when--we would be interested in getting into other devices."

Microsoft has had a mixed track record with big-name customers for Silverlight. NBC used Silverlight to offer on-demand and live video from the Beijing Olympics. On Wednesday, NBC's Perkins Miller announced at Mix that the network would also be using Microsoft's technology for the 2010 winter games in Vancouver.

Major League Baseball, meanwhile, recently said it was dropping Silverlight for its video service and going with Adobe's Flash.

An example of the Microsoft Translator widget, which allows Web developers to offer users a way to translate a site into multiple languages without leaving the page.

(Credit: Microsoft)

The company said a tech preview version of the Microsoft Translator widget is available for download, allowing developers to offer users a pull-down menu to translate a Web page in multiple languages.

The main benefit of the widget is it allows users to translate the page without having to leave a site, unlike other approaches which require a user to go to another Web site first.

Microsoft announced the translation widget at the Mix 09 event here.

Dying companies should take note of Mixwit's strategy to preserve user data. The now-dead mix tape-sharing service, which closed its doors in late December, is now offering users a way to save their mixes and tape designs for reuse elsewhere.

Former Mixwit users received an e-mail early Wednesday detailing how to download a permanent archive of their mix tape data which includes both a track list and the design of their virtual cassette tape. This data will continue to be hosted on Mixwit-is-dead.com through April, giving users about a month to make a back up.

While Mixwit is no longer hosting the tools that let you build these tapes, or the players that can be embedded in social-networking profiles and blogs, the good news is that the idea behind the site is still very much alive. The project has moved on to Mixwidget.org, which lets you accomplish a similar feat by hosting everything on your own server. This isn't as user friendly, or mass market as Mixwit was, but should be a healthy alternative to the Opentape.fm project.

Users still looking to get their hosted mix tape jones can always use services like GrooveShark, 8Tracks, and Blip.fm.

Former Mixwit users now have the option to download the contents of their old mix tapes--except for the music tracks that is.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

MixMatchMusic allows musicians to find other artists whose guitar, drum, keyboard or other riffs complement their own for the creation of complete songs. Once mixed and matched, the songs can be published and the independent artists can earn money from them.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET Networks)

SAN DIEGO--There are millions of musicians in the world who are talented but haven't gotten lucky enough to get a record contract.

These days, the Internet makes it easier for these artists to find an audience, but there are still countless numbers of musicians who have some skills, but perhaps not all the ones--such as drumming--that might be necessary to finish a song that could make them money.

That's where a company called MixMatchMusic comes into play. It has built a system that it thinks will help these artists find the collaborators and the audience that will result in finished songs they can make money with.

For example, if a guitarist writes a nice riff that could make the basis of a commercial song, but doesn't have a band to play the rest of the instruments the song needs, MixMatchMusic is a community site where that artist could find the other pieces of music that could complete the song.

Of course, this relies on a critical mass of content being uploaded to the community, but assuming that happens, this is a nice idea.

The guitarist in the example could then find a piece of keyboard music that matches the riff and then a piece of drum music that complements the other two.

The system's editor mixes the different pieces together and allows the artist to edit them into a complete song. Once it's done, he or she can publish it.

That's interesting enough in and of itself, but the system also makes sure that any artist who contributed part or all of a song gets credit--and therefore payment--for the song if and when it sells any copies.

Once published, the song becomes publicly available for downloading, including for purchase, and if money starts to come in, the artists share 85 percent of each dollar earned.

Additionally, once a song is published, each contributing artist is alerted that their music has been used, letting them know that they may have some money coming in, or at least letting them know that someone has utilized their contribution in a complete song.

From the fan side, there's a nice component to MixMatchMusic, as well, because it allows end-users to take the songs on the site and create easy mashups with them. And this, too, gives artists a way to get their music out there, especially to community of music lovers who like independent tunes and who like to play with that music for their own needs.

New music search tool Mix Turtle is a very simple and elegant way to search for hosted music tracks. It provides search-as-you-type suggestions and a playlist creation tool that lets you add any search result to your mix just by clicking the big plus button next to it.

Like other music search engines, Mix Turtle provides variations on results if there are multiple sources. You can shuffle between each of these in succession and it will automatically jump to whichever one is still online since being indexed. It's not as elegant as mix tape creator MixWit's track surfer (which blends Seeqpod and Skreemr), but you can very quickly scour results and find what you're looking for.

Unfortunately, there are no real player controls that let you tweak things like a volume level or advance to a different part of the track, but you can simply pause it or jump to another track on your list with just a single click. Your playlist also stays with you from search to search, but remains out of sight. It can be summoned with a right click on your mouse.

Mix Turtle's database houses more than 2 million tracks. I was able to find some basic tracks from big bands with ease, including live tracks and remixes. For indie stuff you might be better off perusing eMusic's catalog.

See also: Songza, SeeqPod, Deezer, TinySong, and SkreemR.

Search for songs and add them to your playlist on the fly with Mix Turtle.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

While Microsoft eventually hopes its Live Mesh effort will be a way for people to share data across all of their devices, the service that launches next week will be limited in several ways, CNET News.com has learned.

Next week, Microsoft will launch a pre-beta "technology preview" open to about 10,000 testers in the U.S., according to a source familiar with the company's plans.

File synchronization is an important component of Mesh, but not its only feature, the source said. Developers will be able to write their own applications for Live Mesh, with the idea that applications written for Mesh can then be accessed by a number of different devices.

Another key aspiration for Live Mesh is that it work with more than just Microsoft products. Out of the gate it will work with "multiple browsers," the source said. Initially it will be limited to XP and Vista PCs as well as Windows Mobile phones, however Microsoft wants to add Mac support as well more types of phones and even other devices, such as MP3 players.

Live Mesh is also not just a space for linking one's own devices and information. Users will be able to invite friends to share parts of their Mesh.

Ray Ozzie first talked about Mesh in a speech at last month's Mix '08 event in Las Vegas.

"Just imagine the possibilities of unified application management across the device mesh, centralized, Web-based deployment of device-based applications," he said. "Imagine an app platform that's cognizant of all of your devices. Now, as it so happens, we've had a team at Microsoft working on this specific scenario for some time, starting with the PC and focused on the question of how we might make life so much easier for individuals if we just brought together all your PCs into a seamless mesh, for users, for developers, using the Web as a hub."

The company will have more to say at Web 2.0 Expo next week, as well as at an April 24 event, both taking place in San Francisco. A Microsoft representative said the company did not have any comment ahead of its events next week.

Let's get this out of the way before I go any further. Poodz is a terrible name for a start-up, but I'm willing to give the founders a break since the more understandable Podz.com is parked, and the developers are French--so maybe there's something lost in translation. The default brown on brown color scheme, however, might be in poor taste.

The service is best described as a Twitter that adds photos, videos, and sound clips. This can be managed over the Web or on your mobile phone. Any combination of content can be sent via MMS, which includes whatever videos or photos you've captured on your mobile device. The entire operation is similar to Pownce, in throwing mixed-media sharing together into one big pool and seeing what happens.

While the site is entirely in French, once you've registered you can swap back and forth between French and English localizations; however, users of both languages are kept in the same pool, which can result to some trips to Google Translate or simply ignoring responses or messages you don't understand.

Poodz lets you pick what type of content you want to microblog. In this case it's video.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Poodz does a few things better than the competition. For one, it's got tags and a robust search engine. While the search engine is limited to users and channels (more on those later), the tags are really well implemented and let you dig through posts you've made quickly and easily. It's also very good about separating your post types, by placing little photo, video, text, and audio icons to the left of each of your posts. Each of these also constitutes a specific RSS feed, so if you felt like only subscribing to a friend's video feed, you could skip the other message types entirely. You can also take any audio or video recorded on the site and embed it elsewhere. Twitter-a-holics can even plug in their login and cross-post messages to the service every time they tweet.

The other key differentiator is the integrated social discussion network called channels. It's the equivalent of e-mail newsgroups, but it uses the same system as the content posting, letting members post whatever they want as long as it has to do with the channel theme. Each channel can have casual observers, or full on moderators who get to treat the channel content like posts on their own accounts--editing and deleting at their discretion. It's an interesting concept, and something that's been a requested feature from Twitter users for a long time now.

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