heap

Apr 27 2009

Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarks are the way to surf the freshest waves on the ‘net.
Hot trends are bookmarked and tagged by other surfers, and in a click you can see what’s heating up the web.

There are a heap of different sites that host social bookmarks. You pick might be influenced by the complementary software, or the site’s unique features. Here’s the best…

del.icio.us

The leader of the pack, delicious relies on a minimal interface and boosts a large number of users. There are plenty of free applications to make delicious all the more tasty to Mac users.

mu Social BookmarkingCocoalicious

Access and post bookmarks to your del.icio.us account. This free application will even load bookmarked pages in a preview pane.

mu Social BookmarkingDelibar

Rather access your del.icio.us bookmarks from the menubar? Delibar’s your choice. Just don’t ask me about the icon.

Firefox users will be happy to know there’s two extensions for integrating del.icio.us into the browser. delicious lets you manage your del.icio.us bookmarks in a sidebar, and post to your account from a contextual menu.

Foxylicious brings your del.icio.us bookmarks right into your browser bookmarks. You can set it to sync from your account daily.

Grease Monkey users will be interested in these user scripts. Safari users, don’t despair, delicious2safari will get your del.icio.us bookmarks into Safari.

Spurl

Spurl offers a sidebar for saving and searching your bookmarks through their free service. It supports about every browser out there.

The Firefox spurlbar extension adds toolbar buttons and contextual menu items to add bookmarks.

StumbleUpon

This social bookmarks manager has the most straightforward interface. You can browse and rate bookmarks from like minded surfers from the StumbleUpon toolbar.

You can post to StumbleUpon (as well as Spurl, del.icio.us and more) from Firefox with the Slogger extension.

Not enough for you? There’s Furl, Blogmarks and Simpy. Prefer to roll your own? You can install Scuttle or the code behind de.lirio.us on your own server for antisocial bookmarks.

Now, grab a wave and share the surf. Goodness knows there are plenty of choices.

Brian

mu Social BookmarkingDownloads provided by MacUpdate

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Apr 27 2009

Best Freeware of 2007

Free got better this year, here’s how:

Best on the Web: Safari 3 beta/MobileSafari/Safari for Windows beta

Its always a slug-fest for king of the browser heap. This year, we went with a browser that has expanded its reach to Windows and into your pocket. in 2007 Safari saw a promising beta (with features like contextual search and spell check), moved to Windows and best of all, debuted on the iPhone. Screenshot shows Safari 3 beta with excellent SafariStand add-on.

safari3bstand Best Freeware of 2007

Honorable mention goes to the fast and streamlined Opera 9.5 beta and the maturing social browser Flock.

Freeware Classic: NCX

In the year of the iPhone, it is only fitting to recognize Apple’s gone-but-not-forgotten handheld, the Newton. Kept alive by an active community, the free utility NCX is the OS X reincarnation of the old Newton desktop sync utility NCU. NCX is evidence of longevity off the Apple community.

NCX Best Freeware of 2007

It is also worth mentioning that past freeware classic winner OpenOffice.org released its first native OS X alpha version this year. So next year is already looking good.

Best App Killed by Apple: Virtue Desktop

No emails, we’re just having fun here. Not quite as bad as Tiger’s Dashboard/Konfabulator ruckus, it is fair to say that the ever-useful Virtue Desktop may have seen its day.

Back to my Mac will probably ding Chicken of the VNC, another great free utility.

Best System Extension: Think

think1 Best Freeware of 2007

This year was big on distraction-free computing. Think is a great screen-dimmer that looks cool and forces distractions into the background.

Honorable mention goes to Google Desktop Search for coming to the Mac (although it is debatable how much we needed it) and RCDefault a great little app for managing file associations.

Best Mac-only: Skitch

I don’t see how any windows user could not drool over this one. Skitch has a great interface, easy to use tools and flexible sharing options.

Honorable mention goes to xPad, a great free text editor and Bean, a free and slick word processor.

Best Technical Performance: MacFUSE

This gem came out of nowhere to add NTFS, WebDAV, SSH and FTP support for mounting remote file systems. MacFusion makes this new feature easy to use. Check it out.

iPhone App: AppSnap’s jailbreakme.com

It could not have been more simple or clever: free your iPhone or iPod touch by simply loading a webpage. Oh, and lets fix a major vulnerability while we’re at it. Genius!

Look for more in this space as 3rd party apps go legit in 2008!

Lifetime Achievement Award: ImageWell

imagewell2 Best Freeware of 2007

We first featured ImageWell in 2003 and it has tacked on features ever since. It was the first and remains among the best quick image editors and has since spawned a whole new category of Mac app.

Another great year! Be sure to check back with us in 2008 for more great Mac and iPhone freeware.

Brian

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May 20 2005

Widgitopia

Tiger may still be a cub, but there’s already a heap of third-party Dashboard Widgets. That’s not all, there’s even a free utility that lets Panther users enjoy Widgets too.

Join me this week for my much anticipated look at the first bunch of great free widgets and widget utilities. It’s in this week’s episode of Freeloader Friday.

Note:

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