And that’s exactly what it does. A fantastic new product from evernote that offers you the opportunity to offload your brain of all those ideas/clippings/musings. Basically this thing is the kitchen sink of organizers….and it does OCR to boot.

So head over to evernote.com and sign up for an invite, download whatever method of interface you want/need (webbased/OSX/Windows) and start clipping and organizing your life/brain. One of coolest thing about evernote is that you can feed the elephant anything (sound/image/text) and it will make it searchable. In the case of an image for example, you can shoot your buddies business card using your cellphone, send it to your evernote account and it will automagically OCR the card content and make it searchable. Same with handwritten notes, memos, doodles, stickies. All this works in Windows/OSX and on the Web……very nice.

Now if they could add a bit of RSS import/export goodness to it, I think it would make the perfect central hub application for all your social interfaces (blog/twit/flick/wiki/etc….).

Today Microsoft finally released their flash competitor, Silverlight. I have to admit that they actually have a catchy name, but that’s not really why you’re reading this….right? I downloaded and installed the app on my MBP and it installed flawlessly under OSX 10.4.10. So far so good, next I restarted safari and visited the silverlight site. First impressions are good, it loads relatively fast and looks decent. Then I proceded to hsn.tv (one of the featured sites) and that’s where my gripes start. You see I (along with many other geeks) have this theory that MS has never really gotten a product right until at least version 3. Silverlight 1.o, at this point really feels like a rushed product. I admit that it works (at least the install and simple stuff), but the hsn.tv streaming site stopped multiple times (to rebuffer I assume) and the whole computer interface over the live video feels forced (reminds me of coding HTML for MSNTV or WebTV….YUCK).

I then tried another site, WWE. Again the plugin loaded fine but that’s where it stopped, small video screen that reminded me of Real Video 3.0 (remember them), running inside a larger background (now the background did have the video blended inside it….kinda pedestrian). I then proceded to try some of their community picked apps and had to really stop. I have to admit that I’ve seen widgets (mac, yahoo, konfabulator) that looked/felt better than these apps.

Anyways, with all the talk about MS now going after Adobe/flash and google/ajax and the general online apps movement, I have to say….Dream on. Oh and BTW goodluck uninstalling it from your MAC….Format C:\ anyone? Now I’m interested in your comments, so blast away. I want to hear from MS fanboys/girls, google fanboys/girls, flash fanboys/girls and anyone else for that matter.

If you’re travelling in the near future you really should take a look at Farecast.com. It’s a little bit like kayak.com in that it queries multiple other travel sites and presents a ajaxy interface to you to narrow your search down. Unique to farecast is their new Hotels search that is basically a web2.0 app with a mapping interface. Farecast also has a neat utility that can roughly tell you when to fly (in the next 30 days), so you can get the lowest fares. It’s free so give it a try and bookmark it now.

So today I had a choice to make. You see I had to draw a small diagram and needed a editor. Now I know visio is the end-all-be-all of editors, but I needed something fast and simple. Oh and I really didn’t want to go down to the office to pick up the install disks for visio (on vacation). That’s where web2.0 came to rescue again. After a short google search I found two online services that allow you to edit/share Diagrams right in your browser:

Gliffy Online: Gliffy allows you to create many types of diagrams such as Flowcharts, UI wireframes, Floor plans, Network diagrams, UML diagrams, or any other simple drawing or diagram. Gliffy Online brings you a familiar desktop application feel in a web browser. Features such as copy,paste and undo are all a part of this advanced web application.

Gliffy Online has two ways to make document sharing simple. Collaboration enables others to see and edit your work by simply entering their email address. Publishing creates a read-only, or public, image of your diagram that you can easily embed in a wiki, blog, or other type of web software.

Best4c: Best4c(Best for chart) is a Web-based, online diagram tool that allows you to create, edit and share charts anytime, anywhere. It allows you to create many types of diagrams such as Flowcharts, Floor plans, Network diagrams, or any other simple drawing or diagram.

I’ll leave it to you to decide, for me personally Gliffy is more polished and has a better feel. Try them both (they are free) and let us know.

Did you ever use google maps to get direction from point A to B, only to have to give up and do some manual adjustments, because you wanted to make a pit stop at location C? Did you ever want to get google maps (or any other mapping program for that matter) to take you through a different route, because you knew for a fact that some road along your route was under construction? Well I have and usually I end up having to pick a arbitary point somewhere to force the mapping engine to take a certain street/highway that I want.

Well those crafty engineers at google have solved the problem for all of us. You can now input your source and destination and if you don’t like the route, just move your mouse along the outline and move the outline (through the magic of AJAX) and force it to go through another path. All this is done in realtime and the mapping engine does all the calculations while you’re moving the route points.

Well, maybe. If there is one feature I like about spreadsheets, it is that you can use formulas, have them lookup other static field/colums and have the spreadsheet engine fill down an entire column automatically by reference. We’ve all done this and marvelled at the simplicity of the concept. Another feature that I like is that you can modify portions of a spreadsheet and have it recalculate related field. Well, Google docs and spreadsheet has taken that concept to the next level. Imagine having active spreadsheets that update their fields using google data. In the above picture I lined up a bunch of Baseball players names and created two columns using the following “formulas”:

• Date of Birth field: =GoogleLookup(A2 ; “Date Of Birth”)
• RBI field: =GoogleLookup(A2 ; “RBI”)

then I used the copy function to copy the field, selected the rest of that column and did a paste. After google digested the data, all fields were automatically filled in using google lookups. Now the neat thing about this is that if the data changes, the appropriate spreadsheet field will automatically update. You can see the power of something like this in creating simple worksheets that keep track of stock prices, auction prices, etc. The basic syntax is in the format of =GoogleLookup(“entity”; “attribute”), where “entity” represents the name of the entity that you want to access, like Kuala Lumpur, Audrey Hepburn, or oxygen, and “attribute” is the type of information that you want to retrieve.

Just came across this site Fauxto.com (read it like it’s french…..Phau-to….ie: photo). Anyways, great web 2.0 application. It has all your standard photo application funtions/features (including layers for all you PS guys). Maybe it’s just me, but a couple more applications like this and well, we won’t need the OS anymore (be it OSX, WinXP, Linux, etc…). Google (and others) already do word processing, spread sheets, presentation (ie: powepoint)….add photo editing to it and you’ve got a pretty good arsenal of applications that are truly platform agnostic. TIC TOC…TIC TOC…TIC TOC…I wonder if the OS guys are listening….

iPhone, aka. Apple Inc.’s Achilles Heel. Well, just about everyone was waiting for a SDK for the bloody thing. They wanted to rush to the AT&T store on June 29, buy a iPhone and start developing real software for it. You know, the kind of software that is actually useful. Well Apple’s idea of software development is this:

“You don’t touch our phone, you just use AJAX and HTML and design webpages that can be loaded (using wireless) on the phone”. Now I have no idea how this qualifies as a Application development platform, but according to Apple it does.

Well, here is my prediction after digesting most of the content that came out of G-Day. Google Gears will soon make MS Office (and for that matter most “installed” applications) obsolete. Google’s Gears homepage explains that Gears is …

<<... an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs:

– Store and serve application resources locally
- Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
- Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness>>

Google in a press release states that Gears “marks an important step in the evolution of web applications because it addresses a major user concern: availability of data and applications when there’s no Internet connection available, or when a connection is slow or unreliable.” They go on to say that making the browser environment more powerful is increasingly important (Google snatched up a couple of Firefox developers – this makes even more sense in the light of this announcement).

Well I guess at this point we can just wait and see. Let’s just hope google doesn’t turn into the next MS when they get to the top.