Webware

This alternative browser looks to be built on Internet Explorer, combining a robust notepad with diminished Web browsing. Freeware Student Pad splits the browser and notepad horizontally, so that the top half of window is for taking notes and the bottom half is for surfing the web. It sounds like an interesting project, but the execution of it as it is now shows that there's room for improvement. There's also no documentation on the browser's source, although it uses Favorites so I'm assuming it's based on IE.

It's a good idea, with an execution that is clearly still in development and more novelty than anything else. There are some nifty student-based needs addressed here. There's a built-in calculator with square-root functionality, calendar, bibliography template, e-mail client with Gmail and Hotmail hooks, MDI editor, and a basic spate of browsing features. The notepad lives on top of the browser, emphasizing both workflow and feature set.

The browser is really what stops Student Pad from joining the workforce as a tolerable alternative browser. You can change your font, adjust the text and background colors, mark favorites, and view the source code. A helpful icon--the sheets of paper--copies and pastes the URL you're looking at directly into the notepad.

However, the browser itself doesn't work as smoothly as it should. It's slow to load pages, sluggish when scrolling, and reluctantly lets you jump into other programs. A lack of tooltips makes getting acclimated a struggle. Modern browsing features such as tabs and a download manager are not supported, and advanced security enhancements are present only in a "web security indicator" that doesn't seem to work.

There are some interesting tweaks here, including rolling most features under the Tools menu. Perhaps the program will become significantly better in the next major update, planned for April 10. For right now, Student Pad remains an interesting curiosity--but nothing more.

Yahoo Search Pad lets you keep track of pages uncovered dearing what Yahoo technology determines is a research session. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: Yahoo)

As part of its effort to invigorate its search engine, Yahoo has begun testing a new project called Search Pad designed to detect when you've begun in-depth research and help you keep track of your results.

Yahoo Search Pad keeps track of search query terms used at the site and, when it detects a trend, offers to save the result in an online document. If you take its advice, it shows you a page already populated with the Web sites you've visited on the subject.

Through the Web-based application, you can annotate results, delete pages you don't like, and reorder the ones you do. And when you copy text in from other Web sites you didn't reach through Yahoo search, the application automatically looks up their Web address and adds it in.

"It's our hope that the people doing research with Yahoo are able to be more effective. That may drive more engagement or drive them to come back more often," said Larry Cornett, vice president for product for Yahoo Search.

Yahoo has begun publicly testing the service, but only with a small, randomly-selected fraction of its users, the company said, and the service should be enabled for all users in coming months.

When Yahoo's technology thinks you're conducting relatively in-depth research, it will suggest you begin a Search Pad on the subject.

(Credit: Yahoo)

On Monday, Evernote, a good triple-platform note-taking service for Windows, Mac, the Web, and (multiple) mobile platforms (see all), updated its application for Windows Mobile phones (download).

Speed is the main story here, with text, photos, and audio notes uploading faster than before. Of course, depending on your carrier and the phone's capabilities, this still may not be as rapid as it is on the highest-end Windows phones.

The Evernote for Windows Mobile 3.0.0.172 also improves the interface, a spare but attractive app consisting of four actions to take various notes or upload a file from the phone's folder, in addition to two soft-key buttons.

One key lets you view and search notes created on the desktop, Web site, or your phone. Thumbnail images and the ability to search notes directly from Evernote are two additions--previous versions rebounded you to the Web to view search results. From Evernote's menu, you can click to view recent notes, settings, and, now, your saved search results.

(Credit: CNET)

Evernote never worked as well on Windows Mobile phones as it did on the desktop, Web, and iPhone, but this effort is the publisher's new personal best for the platform. Much more can be accomplished without leaving the application, but there's still room for growth.

For example, playing back a voice note requires you to download the audio first. That's a more time-consuming and space-sapping event than viewing an image or text note, especially if you created the recording from your phone in the first place and have simply used Evernote as a holding pen. I'd love to see Evernote host an instant-playback feature that can optionally just play the file without saving it.

Evernote's applications and basic 40MB bandwidth-per-month membership are free. A premium membership offering 500MB per month rings in at $5 per month or $45 for the year.

GeoGraffiti is a geolocation service that centers on little voice notes users can leave all over the world. Before having a native iPhone application it was a voice service you could call into and leave a note that would be associated with whatever ZIP code or telephone number entered through your phone's keypad. It wasn't the most exact system, and to remedy that parent company Slingpost has been working on a native iPhone application that makes use of the handset's GPS to make the voice notes a little more precise.

In its pocket form GeoGraffiti is now quite a bit smarter. You can use it to browse "voicemarks," which are other users' recorded messages from wherever you are. It doesn't say how close or far the radius is, but I'm assuming it's only about one to two miles--if that. Since I'm in the middle of San Francisco I found two nearby voicemarks, both with fairly precise geographic information, including addresses. These are the same voicemarks that have been created on phones as well as on an accompanying Google Maps mashup. The app does not make the distinction as to which platform they originate from.

The app will constantly ping for your location, and if you're on the move it will update every few minutes. If you're driving your car, you can set it to "hands free" mode, which will call your phone and transmit any new, local voicemarks via a telephone call. It would be nice if you could just have it funnel through the app to save voice minutes, but it's almost like a radar detector for messages.

This app reminds me of some of the local note applications that I've seen getting buzz on the app store (see Graffitio, NearPics, and Zintin). There's a certain human fascination with scribbled graffiti and notes written in guest books. This is a smart play on that. I wouldn't be surprised to see people take advantage of something like this to create their own scavenger hunt or to leave messages for friends, making it a platform of its own. Adding some things like special password-protected drop boxes or easter eggs would definitely take it to the next level.

To see a demo of the service in action I've embedded an early look below. Just note it was produced before the creators got their hands on the new hardware.

Soon enough, you will be able to voice chat using instant messenger on an iPhone.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET Networks)

Global IP Solutions, a company well recognized for its media-processing expertise in IP communications, announced on Monday its SDK, which enables Voice over IP applications to be made for Apple's iPhone.

This means that developers can now use GIPS' VoiceEngine Mobile, to create real-time VoIP applications, such as games, social-networking applications, and, of course, applications for making calls to regular phone lines over the Internet. Soon enough, you will be able to use instant messenger to voice chat with friends on the iPhone, just like you've been doing on your computer for ages now.

Though this is exciting news indeed, GIPS VoiceEngine Mobile will only work with iPhone's Wi-Fi connection and will not take advantage of the new iPhone's 3G connection. This is because Apple has always blocked the use of VoIP on the carriers' data connection; and AT&T, understandably, wouldn't be too happy about supporting something that potentially costs them long distance phone business. We can only hope this will change in the future. For now, in my experience, AT&T's 3G coverage is still too patchy and unreliable to be a platform for VoIP calls, anyway.

Being the inventors of the popular iLBC codec standard (which got approved by IETF in late 2004 and is currently implemented in the iPhone), GIPS' decision today seems a natural move, considering the popularity of the iPhone. According to Apple, more than one million iPhone 3Gs were purchased over the launch weekend; and exactly one month later--today--you can still find people waiting in line outside some Apple stores for the device.

So far, GIPS claims that its voice engines have been downloaded and used more widely than any other voice engine worldwide. GIPS' voice engines enable consumers and businesses to enjoy affordable, high-quality, IP-based communications, even under adverse network conditions.

Today, Evernote 3.0 (download), the note-taking application I raved about in March, opens to the public for Windows and Mac users. I highly recommend this product. It's functional and useful, and beyond that its architecture is also interesting. It's a true three-platform play: it works very well, and somewhat differently, on desktop computers, mobile phones, and over the Web.

On a PC, Evernote is a good note-taking application. The current version also fixes some issues I had with earlier betas, and I'm seriously considering finally dumping OneNote, the note-taking application I use now, for this new product.

If you have the Evernote application running on your camera phone, it will automatically upload your snapshots to the Evernote server, creating a useful archive of them. But the killer feature is that it also does OCR (optical character recognition) on your images so you can find them later by searching for text in them. Use this tool to snap pictures of products you see in stores and want to remember, to grab whiteboards in meetings, and to take pictures of people with name tags at conferences. I haven't yet lived with this product but I've tried it enough to know that it works, and it's one of those utilities that might just change your life.

Evernote makes short work of blending notes from your PC and browser, and pictures snapped with your mobile. (Web version shown.)

Finally, everything you do on your phone and on your computer gets synchronized to your Evernote account on the Web, so you can always get to your info. And if you want to run the desktop application on a second computer (or if you ever need to re-install it on your current machine), as soon as you log in it automatically grabs all your data, since everything you do on the platform is always synced. Update: I should have caught this earlier: The Web-based text editor isn't keystroke compatible with the PC-based editor. It makes switching between the two experiences confusing.

There's a free version of Evernote with a 40MB a month upload allowance and unpredictable OCR performance. For $45 a year you get a 500MB a month allowance, priority OCR, better security features, and support.

I like the way Evernote blends local software with Web-based utility, and how it keeps all your devices in sync. The price for the premium service is reasonable. I continue to recommend this product.

See also:
Apple launches Web 2.0 infrastructure: MobileMe
Live Mesh consumer app is a work in progress

On Monday at Supernova, Google's Joe Kraus gave a hypothetical example of how online shopping could become more social. On Wednesday, I saw the real thing: a new widget from PopularMedia that makes shopping sites a bit more personal.

Unlike other sharing widgets, SocialNotes sets up a back channel.

(Credit: PopularMedia)

When recipients open the page they get from a SocialNotes e-mail, they'll see an embedded note and feedback form in it.

(Credit: PopularMedia)

The SocialNotes product is a widget reminiscent of ShareThis and AddThis; it's code that publishers can drop in to their sites that makes it easy for visitors to send pages off to friends or to embed them in social-network profile pages or blogs. The SocialNotes widget is somewhat more interesting because when the e-mail recipients of a notification go to the site in question, they get a little message box on the page with a personal note from the sender, as well as a way to enter a reply, which is then e-mailed back.

Implementing SocialNotes will require publishers to do a bit of coding, since they have to define where the message boxes will appear when e-mail recipients click through to the pages. The base service will be free; PopularMedia will try to up-sell users to its "advanced social-media marketing solutions, priced on a subscription basis," CEO Jim Calhoun told me.

The full, two-way version of SocialNotes will launch next month. If you want an early look, e-mail beta@popularmedia.com and ask nicely.

See also: ActiveWeave Stickis.

Postica has to be one of the more single-serving Web apps I've seen in a long time. The service lets you create a slew of tiny sticky notes that can be maneuvered around the confines of your browser with ajaxian flair. They don't hover over pages you're looking at like Diigo or Fleck; instead it's all about your personal note space. Whatever notes you create are saved, and can be accessed from wherever. You can also share them with others, and they can send notes to your workspace, too.

Each note is confined to just 140 characters, the same length as an SMS text message or a note on Twitter. You can also add a single file to each note. I managed to get a few image files that were over 5MB in size, but it choked on the 50MB video file I tried. There's no documentation on what the size limit is, or if you'll run into any sort of cap on total storage so I'd stick to small files like PDFs, pictures, and office docs.

I'm still wary to recommend Postica over something like Shifd, a similar Web-based sticky note service that does a much better job integrating URLs, addresses, and letting you access and sync up your notes on both desktops and mobile phones. The one area where Postica has the leg up is file sharing, but you've got to be patient for each upload to make its way there.

Little post-its made easy, but that's about all you can do with Postica.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

I'm not kidding when I say Penzu is the most realistic re-creation of paper I've seen on the Web. The service has a serious leg up on its pulp-born competition with a slick looking college-rule that holds all your thoughts (intelligent or not) and saves them to the cloud. When it comes time to print them, they'll come out just like they look like on the page, sans rulings of course.

One thing Penzu does a little better than other Web-based note takers is structure your docs like a diary, and stack each entry as its own page. You can hop back and forth between them with relative ease, and Penzu is smart enough to put the most-recently created docs on top. Also integrated are images, which you can upload from your computer at up to 5MB a pop. They'll sit in the margin and out of the way of the text. A simple mouse-over will let you see them in full resolution.

Up until a week ago I would have found this little service to have a nice leg up on Google Docs, which I usually use to jot down notes when I'm in meetings or interviews with start-ups. In those situations I'm usually not in need of Google's more advanced editing features, and want something that will simply retain my notes in case of hardware catastrophe.

However, if you're looking for some really basic necessities like indentation, hyperlinks, and a way to search through your past work, you might want to stick with one of the more complex tools like Gdocs or Zoho Writer.

(Via Ehub)

Write simple journal or diary entries with Penzu. Whatever you jot down it will save in the cloud for later retrieval.

(Credit: CNET Networks)