You can buy the  LG Infinia 47LW6500 47-Inch Cinema 3D 1080p 240Hz LED-LCD HDTV with Smart TV and Four Pairs of 3D Glasses for $1084 with free shipping and no tax in most states right now.

Features

• LG’s Cinema 3D technology delivers flicker free, wide angle viewing through use of lightweight, inexpensive, battery free glasses (included: four pairs of glasses).
• Smart TV allows you to access limitless content, thousands of movies, downloadable apps, videos and the best of the web all organized in a simple to use interface.
• Enjoy your favorite 2D movies and shows in immersive 3D with LG’s 2D to 3D conversion feature.
• LG’s LED Plus backlight technology provides even greater control of brightness through local dimming that delivers better contrast.
• TruMotion 240Hz technology lets you see sports, video games and high-speed action with virtually no motion blur. Full HD 1080p gives it superior picture quality over standard HDTV.

Black Friday: LG Infinia 47LW6500 47-Inch Cinema 3D 1080p 240Hz LED-LCD HDTV Bundle $1084 - Originally published at ShanKrila.com on 2011/11/20 (RSS)

Hope you had a good Thanksgiving holidays if you are in the US. We sure did. We had a great time with a bunch of friends and a lot of good food.

Let’s look at a few Firefox extensions I came across since my last post.

• FireStatus: You can update your status messages in Twitter, Facebook & FriendFeed rigth from Firefox with this extension. Also displays status updates from these services in notification popups.
• UrlBarExt: Extends your Firefox Location bar to do other things such as : Make Tiny URL, Copy URL, Search site, Go up, Tag pages, Navigate sequential url’s, unblock filtered websites, surf anonymously, etc.
• autoHideStatusbar: Hides the status bar when you are not hovering over it to give you added real estate. You can also set it to show on page load, when hovering on links, or via a icon in the tool bar. [experimental add-on]
• Flash Game Maximizer: A god-send for any flash game addict. With this extension, you can resize any Flash content to full window size. You can even play your favorite Flash game in full-screen mode.  [experimental add-on]
• Lazarus Form Recovery: If you enter and submit a lot of forms everyday, you probably get annouyed when a form fails and you end up typing everything again. This extension saves everything you type and lets you restore all form data in one click should teh form crash on hitting the submit button. Could be a lifesaver for a few of us.
• Screen grab to WordPress!: A must-have for WordPress bloggers. It let’s you taek screenshots of any web page and upload it to your WordPress blog. Options include whole page, visible area or custom area and save as a local image or publish it to a WordPress blog.[experimental add-on]

I am looking forward to the final release of Firefox 3.1 beta 2 that will be released sometime this week.

Theme of the Week

This theme is for those who like the iTunes software look. iTunes Firefox theme trys to mimic just that look and it does a decent job at it.

Catch you all soon with another cool post. Don’t forget to check out our Top Firefox Extensions post that is the most comprehensive list of Firefox extensions neatly categorized to help you find the best ones.

Firefox Extensions: Picks of the Week 2008-12-03 - Originally published at ShanKrila.com on 2011/11/20 (RSS)

Originally posted 2009-05-05 08:32:33.

Microsoft Windows 7 has been creating a steady buzz with the release of beta. The Release Candidate has also been making the rounds in torrent trackers.

Microsoft has made an official Windows 7 RC available for download.

It looks like Microsoft took enough precautions to handle the load from a surge of beta downloaders wanting to try Windows 7 like the last time.

This download link is going to be available through July 2009 so you can opt to wait out the initial rush to download. Both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows 7 are available in five languages: English, French, German, Spanish and Japanese.

Sign in with your Windows Live ID and fill the form presented to download it. If you already did this for the beta you wouldn’t have to.

The license key you are presented with is valid until June 1 2010.

Download Windows 7 RC

I let the download begin at home this morning and will try to install it in a spare machine this evening. Good luck if you are trying the same.

Windows 7 Release Candidate – Official Download Link - Originally published at ShanKrila.com on 2011/11/20 (RSS)

Google has made search possible in a large number of international languages. I just found out today that Google has announced Google Labs India on our Independence Day on August 15. Google Labs India is to showcase their favorite ideas for Indian users.

Now, they have made it really easy to search in 14 Indian languages including my native tongue, Tamil without having a special keyboard or software. They have made special iGadgets available for iGoogle Homepage. Once added, I can compose queries in my native language and search for content in Google!

iGoogle gadgets are also available for Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sinhala and Telugu.

Google Indic Transliteration

Google has brought this feature over from Blogger. What you can do with this tool is pretty cool. You can type out the words in Hindi phonetically, with an English keyboard and Google converts it into the correct Hindi word. I tried it with my little Hindi knowledge and was surprised at the agility with which it converted most words correctly. For the ones that are wrong, Google lets you suggest the correct version and the algorithm learns as it goes. It is also available as an iGoogle Gadget.

Google has a powerful presence in India employing a lot of engineers and the availability of search in native languages will be welcomed by everyone around the world.

[via Google Blog]

Search Google in 14 Indian Languages - Originally published at ShanKrila.com on 2011/11/20 (RSS)

DRM advocates tend to argue that they add anti-piracy protection to keep users honest with paying for the software or product.

Machinarium is an amazing point and click adventure game playable on Windows, Mac or Linux.

In an effort to prove a point, Machinarium developers – Amanita Design from Czech released the game without any DRM restrictions. You can install the game without any serial numbers or online authentication.

This makes the game so easy to copy and be pirated.

Sadly, the game developer is saying that Machinarium has only 5-15% of players who actually paid for the game.

Amanita Design in an attempt to give a second chance for those 85-95% of players who haven’t paid for the game has announced a ‘Pirate Amnesty’ sale.

Machinarium and its soundtrack is available for a mere $5 with 75% off from its original price of $20 until August 12. They are hoping the game pirates will make amends buy purchasing it at this low price.

However, this amnesty sale doesn’t apply to just who already have a copy but also to anyone interested in this game.

I played the online free demo and was totally amazed by the creativity behind this point and click adventure game. $5 for such an amazing experience is nothing, IMHO.

Try Machinarium

{ via Ars Technica }

Machinarium’s Experience With Non-DRM/Piracy, Offers Amnesty - Originally published at ShanKrila.com on 2011/11/20 (RSS)

DISH Network is celebrating their 30 years in business by giving their 7 premium Starz movie channels for FREE until Feb 2012!

We just switched to DISH and couldn’t be happier with this offer!

Just go to channel 349 to see this on the screen.

We’re celebrating 30 years in business….
to say thanks, we’re giving you 7 Starz premium movie channels and Encore East at no additional cost until February 2012
Starz channels 350 to 356 and Encore channel 340

If you are a DISH customer, enjoy the free movies for a year!

DISH Network Offers 7 FREE Starz Channels Until Feb 2012 - Originally published at ShanKrila.com on 2011/11/20 (RSS)

Google Reader is probably my second most visited site in a day after Gmail.

As much as RSS readers have and RSS feeds have gained popularity, a vast majority of people don’t want to take the pains of setting up their Google Reader account with the sites they want to follow.

Google Reader has released a cool experimental feature where a new user can browse through popular feeds as a slideshow in an attractive interface without curating their own Google reader account.

Current Google Reader users can use this new feature to browse through their own RSS feeds in a new unique way.

Google Reader Play is Google’s latest attempt at making Google Reader a fun web app to use for new and existing users.

In Google Reader Play, items are presented one at a time, and each item is big and full-screen. After you’ve read an item, just click the next arrow to move to the next one, or click any item on the filmstrip below to fast-forward. Of course, you can click the title or image of any item to go to the original version. And since so much of the good stuff online is visual, we automatically enlarge images and auto-play videos full-screen.

Plus, Reader Play has the smarts to adapt to your taste based on stuff you enjoy by clicking the like button. Kind of a StumbleUpon for RSS feeds. You can also choose categories and stream news from it.

If you already use Google Reader, you are probably familiar with Recommended Items section. Reader Play basically feeds off of the same technology to show you news in a different view.

Even if you don’t have a Google account, you can try out Google Reader Play. Of course, you can save feeds you like, star it, like it, etc., with a Google account.

I found it to be a little slow to load but it could be because Google just rolled it out. But, this could be a fun way of browsing for news just like how Feedly makes for a great Google Reader alternative interface.

Try Google Reader Play

Oh, you could also customize your Google Reader experience with Google Reader Greasemonkey sctipts.

Forget Curating Your Own Google Reader - Originally published at ShanKrila.com on 2011/11/20 (RSS)

I came across this new web based RSS Reader through Lifehacker and bookmarked it to try it out later. I got around to trying it today and here are my impressions on it.

What readers have I tried?

I am a RSS feed junkie fan. I have tried desktop and web based readers. And I have settled down with the portable version of GreatNews. Google Reader was everything I wanted until I tried the slick interface of Netvibes. The tabs and the collapsible boxes with feed headlines was so cool when you have a couple hundred feeds. Then, I got bolder and tried out a couple of desktop clients but wanted the agility of a portable RSS reader and found GreatNews. With my ever shortening attention span for web tools, the fact that I have stuck with GreatNews for months now should say something about it. Few others I have tried are Omea Reader, Bloglines, etc.

What is Fastladder?

Fastladder is a brand spanking new (read probable bugs) web based RSS reader. I think they got tired of the short comings of Google Reader and just wrote a fast and slick reader themselves.

Quick facts:

• Register for a free account to use the service.
• First time you login, you can either import an OPML file or point to a location in the web.
• Import: I had about 230 feeds in around 20 groups/folders and the import took about 4 minutes. It preserved all folder structures and the feeds. Not bad!
• Rating: You can rate the blogs. But, I am not sure how I would end up using this feature. It’ll probably useful when trying out new blogs to rate their content and once in a while delete all the poorly rated ones or the ones I haven’t rated at all which probably means I never read that feed. Might as well delete it.
• Search: One thing that stands out is the Integrated Search! I can’t believe Google Reader doesn’t have it yet but if Fastladder was counting on just this feature to compete with the big G, I think they will be history faster than you can say ‘fast’. I am sure Google is working on all 4-billion cylinders to bring search to GReader.
• Sorting: It trumps GReader here as well with additional sorting options. You can sort by rating, title or number of subscribers, which itself will be useful only after Fastladder goes mainstream.
• Favicons: This is the little icon you see by the name of the site and it is very helpful to quickly zoom into a feed than scanning down a long list of feeds you have.
• Bookmarklet: Use this bookmarklet to easily add site feeds to Fastladder.
• Options: There are plenty of options to change the font size, number of feeds per page, number of feeds fetched, etc.

Should I ditch Google Reader?

I wouldn’t. But, if any of the above features that are missing in GReader but available here, it is definitely worth a try for e.g., searching feeds for specific words. But, with the ability to set up a new account and import your feeds all in a few minutes, you have nothing to lose in trying out this new service.

Mind you, the service was just released on July 3 and it already has beaten GReader to the punch in a few key areas. I have to appreciate the team’s effort on that and hope they will be able to stay ahead of the curve.

[via Lifehacker]

Bored with Google Reader? Try Fastladder - Originally published at ShanKrila.com on 2011/11/20 (RSS)

HTML 5 is gaining steam so fast that a lot of folks are interested in getting on board this fast moving train.

If you have been looking for a HTML5 editor, here is a quality free one.

Aloha Editor is a free downloadable browser based HTML 5 editor that is designed to be lightweight and easy to use.

You just install Aloha Editor in your web server as this editor is also built on HTML 5. Having been built on HTML 5 has its own advantages as you get context menus, easy table creation and text editing without markups. The WYSIWYG capability of AloHa Editor is supposedly 80% faster than TinyMCE (used in WordPress admin) and CKEditor in performance tests.

It gives the WYSIWYG capability for editing content dynamically in accordions, sliders, tickers, captions or descriptions of images in slideshows. It is touted as the world’s first full featured editor that lets you edit content in place!

Once you start editing you don’t have to reload the browser to see the changes. With Aloha you are working on the final document.

Are you still using tables? With Aloha you can inset tables very easily. Hitting tab key will jump you cell to cell and hitting tab in the last cell will add another row.

Aloha produces clean HTML5 code and you can even integrate it into your own application.

I am really interested in integrating this somehow in my WordPress blogs so I can make live changes (as long as I am logged in to the site that is) on the site with this editor.

Any talented WordPress plugin authors want to take up this challenge?

Try Aloha Editor

Free HTML5 Online Editor: Aloha Editor - Originally published at ShanKrila.com on 2011/11/20 (RSS)

Google has enjoyed a nice and solid slice of the web search industry. They were good at indexing the whole Internet and providing relevant results.

However, the web is changing. More and more people are searching for real-time news and the web is getting richer and richer.

Microsoft has seen some really good success with their new search offering – Bing.

Google, naturally, has been working on making it’s own bread and butter business – web search – better. And today they announced the completion of a new web indexing system codenamed Caffeine.

So why did we build a new search indexing system? Content on the web is blossoming. It’s growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average webpage is richer and more complex. In addition, people’s expectations for search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.

According to Google. they were indexing the web in layers and each layer were updated with web pages at various rates. This means some parts of the web could wait to be indexed for days even.

With Caffeine, Google can index web pages on an enormous scale. How enormous?

* If Caffeine were a pile of paper – it would grow 3 miles taller every second.

* Takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database.

* Will take up 625,000 of the largest iPods

* Stacked end to end it would go for more than 40 miles.

With Facebook and Twitter delivering real time results and news, Google is looking to provide more relevant and real time results in their web search as well.

If you are a webmaster and wonder how this new indexing might affect your search rankings, Matt Cuts discussed about this back in August 2009 – a bit dated but still relevant about Caffeine.

we’re not looking to make huge changes in ranking with this new infrastructure. Some rankings will change, but that’s not the main thrust of the infrastructure.

It is good to see competition brewing innovation and it’s great to see the place i turn to to search anything on the web is constantly evolving. For the better.

[via Google blog]

Shot of Caffeine for Google Search - Originally published at ShanKrila.com on 2011/11/20 (RSS)

Originally posted 2009-12-17 08:00:45.

Google recently introduced Google Public DNS service. Last week, I wrote about what Google Public DNS actually means to you. If you are not aware of what it is I recommend reading that post before reading this further.

With a couple of different options with DNS Servers now between your ISP’s default DNS server, the time tested OpenDNS project and the new Google Public DNS server, you might be wondering which one of these should you be using.

Namebench is a free tool that’s here to answer just that question for you.

It runs a bunch of tests and finds the fastest DNS server available for you. It runs a pretty exhaustive bechmarking by using your web browser history, tcpdump output or even standardized datasets to give a personalized recommendation.

Namebench is a free download and works on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X. It sports both a GUI (graphical user interface) and a command line interface.

It does not install anything in your computer but just runs standalone. Here is a sample Namebench result after a run.

You can choose to use this DNS settings and you may be able to realize faster browsing speed.

Download Namebench

Which DNS Service Should You Use? - Originally published at ShanKrila.com on 2011/11/20 (RSS)

Ubuntu Unity 11.04 is out for everyone now.

The Unity interface is a huge overhaul and has a ton of new features and keyboard shortcuts. If you are a power user or want to be one, knowing keyboard shortcuts (or atleast having them close by) is a surefire way to that.

AskUbuntu has created a nice wallpaper with the Ubuntu Unity keyboard shortcuts.

You can download the wall paper that has an overlay of all the keyboard shortcuts over the default Ubuntu wallpaper.

Download wallpaper

Check out this thread for text version of these shortcuts and other wallpaper options. I hope to have more such tips and tricks in the Linux section in the coming weeks.

Ubuntu Unity Keyboard Shortcuts Wallpaper - Originally published at ShanKrila.com on 2011/11/20 (RSS)

Google announced their second phone – Nexus S recently with some impressive specs.

It has an awesome 4” contour display, 1Hz Hummingbird processor and comes loaded with the latest Android 2.3 Gingerbread version.

Google’s own phone- Nexus One is popular among techies as they provide a pure, unadulterated Google Android experience. And I am sure this one is going to sell quite a bit too.

Starting today, you can buy an unlocked Nexus S either in-store in Best Buy or online at Best Buy’s website. The unlocked phone goes for $529. Or you could sign-up for a T-mobile contract and get it subsidized for $199.

Google Nexus S Available in Best Buy Today - Originally published at ShanKrila.com on 2011/11/20 (RSS)

Raise your hands if you use or have used Yahoo Photos. Even though I have been using Flickr, Picasa Web Albums & Photobucket for various needs lately, I still have a lot of my pictures left in Yahoo Photos.

You might have read it here or elsewhere about Yahoo’s decision to shutdown Yahoo Photos. For those who haven’t, Yahoo bought Flickr a while back and is already one of the top players in this segment. Yahoo has decided to concentrate all its efforts in one application, which is wise.

Now, it is official that they closing down on September 20, 2007. They are offering an opportunity to move your pictures to a smattering of services like Flickr, Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly, Snapfish and Photobucket. Here is an image from their help page announcing this closure.

One thing to note here is that this deadline holds good for US Yahoo Photos users and international users have some more time until Yahoo phases them in.

So, you have an optio to either move your photos to another service that is supported, or to download the pictures at full resolution, or you could buy an archive CD ($6.95 for 700MB of pics).

Moving to Flickr

Since Yahoo Photos and Flickr are owned by Yahoo, this move is the easiest of all. Once you click on this URL, you will be presented with all 3 options. If you choose to move your pictures to Flickr, you could either sign up for a new Flickr screen name or Yahoo will detect your existing Flickr account. You will be shown a screen with a couple of photos from Yahoo and a message saying that the import process has started and that you will be notified when the import is complete!

If you new to Flickr, give it a whirl and you will love the tagging, geotagging and commenting abilities which are definitely an upgrade from Yahoo Photos. But, that is just a peek into all Flickr has to offer. Have fun!

Yahoo Photos closing deadline announced - Originally published at ShanKrila.com on 2011/11/20 (RSS)

I play games on my phone when I am bored or if I am travelling or if I am killing time between aisles while my wife is shopping! But, the little keys in the little keypad aren’t kind to my digits. I can feel its impact on my poor fingers for hours later and most of those cell phone games are mindless anyways! But, I don’t have to anymore!

I just came across Wattpad.com on Lifehacker! They provide an app to read books on your cell phone. Well, here are the quick facts!

• It’s FREE.
• Install the jar file on your phone either through your phone’s browser or you can transfer to your phone from your pc. I prefer the pc transfer as I don’t have the data plan on my phone.
• Now, download the jar files from Wattpad and install them on phone.
• Open the application and voila! you have a book to read!!
• If you have a data plan on your phone, you could get books easily through your phone browser.
• Or you could send an sms/email to your phone with a link to download the book from Wattpad.com.
• How about the books collection? It is a community-built library of whatever you can think of.. novels, jokes, essays, poems, etc. If you have some, you can upload it too..
• At present I am reading my favorite, Godfather by Mario Puzo and I like the way it scrolls at a reading speed.
• Wattpad.com offers an intuitive web 2.0 styled interface and I like the tag cloud to look for books.
• I don’t think this is going to alter my book reading habits, but it will be a nice way to kill time if you are stuck at some place with nothing but your cell phone.

I am yet to look closely at the selection the community has to offer. But, I see a few titles i like to start using it right away.

Read books on your phone – Wattpad.com - Originally published at ShanKrila.com on 2011/11/20 (RSS)

Originally posted 2009-09-14 09:42:37.

Dropbox is my favorite file sync software and one of its major advantages over others in the file sync area is their incredible web access to all your stored files and folders.

Dropbox Web just got prettier. Not only, did it get a nice UI redesign but they also added some very useful features to it

• Multi-select on file browser
• True bulk operations (with progress bar for large file operations)
• The ability to download zip files of arbitrary sets of files/folders
• Search on the file browser
• Significant improvements to navigation
• GMail style keyboard shortcuts (!)
• Mobile optimized version of the site (for non iphone users) – iPhone version of Dropbox web has been available for a while.
• Countless UI/usability improvements
• New Getting Started tab (check it out for a surprise!)

The ‘Getting Started Tab‘ does indeed have a nice surprise waiting. So, don’t miss clicking it!

Also, DropBox team has posted a nice background on how new features are added to Dropbox within their team in their blog post. It’s a good read if you like behind the scenes view of development.

Dropbox iPhone app has been submitted to Apple for approval and I am eagerly waiting for its arrival!

Try Dropbox Professional

DropBox Web – Redesigned with Bulk Operations - Originally published at ShanKrila.com on 2011/11/20 (RSS)

Xmarks – a browser based bookmark sync service has finally found a new home in LastPass.

Xmarks service faced the threat of shutdown as they couldn’t monetize their excellent bookmark syncing service. However, they opened up a pledge to see if their users wanted to support them.

This gave them enough publicity that few more parties were interested in buying them. Now, LastPass has acquired them.

Xmarks couldn’t have found a better home than LastPass as LastPass is a leading cross-platform password manager. Xmarks will stay free for us but they are moving to a freemium business model.

The browser add-on and the vast majority of what users have enjoyed remains free. Users can then opt to purchase Xmarks Premium for $12 per year, which includes new enhanced features like Android and iPhone mobile phone apps, priority support, and more. The Xmarks and LastPass Premium offerings are also available bundled together at a reduced subscription rate of $20 per year. For those of you who pledged your financial support, you can make good on your pledge today and upgrade.

With LastPass acquiring Xmarks, we should hopefully see new features and updates soon. However, it looks like the 2 products will stay separate and we may not see any integration between the two for a while.

I am so glad that Xmarks is now shutting down! Are you?

{ via Xmarks blog }

Xmarks Finds a New Home in LastPass - Originally published at ShanKrila.com on 2011/11/20 (RSS)

One of the primary gripes about Gmail is the lack of HTML support in email signatures. And it sticks out like a sore thumb.

Obviously, Google has heard this complaint for a long time from it’s huge user base especially from the power users. And they haven’t still addressed this user request despite making other useful changes and incorporating some popular Greasemonkey scripts right inside Gmail such as the Label Colors.

Some of us have been relying on Greasemonkey scripts for Gmail to get HTML signatures and other features like Folders4Gmail, Gmail Macros, etc. But, it wasn’t very straight forward or user-friendly enough for widespread adoption.

Black Canvas’ Gmail Signatures Firefox extension is set to change all that. As soon as I tried it, I bid farewell to the Greasemonkey script I was using.In fact, this extension was born out of a previous Greasemonkey script.

Let’s see what Gmail Signatures can do for us:

• Automatically inserts HTML signatures into your Gmail messages – works on Compose, Reply & Forward
• If you use multiple Gmail address, create up to four signatures per email address
• It can detect which address you are sending from and automatically add the respective signature
• Real-time signature preview while editing the signature HTML (great for those unsure of html code)
• Option to choose to have the signature inserted above or below the quoted text
• Option to custom label four signatures for each email address
• Support for special characters
• Available in multiple languages

Here are some useful resources put together by the helpful author of this add-on Jerome Dane.

• Getting started – with pictures
• HTML tutorials – won’t help you learn HTML completely, but will help you enough to create a signature
• Templates – a few samples that you could use to create your own HTML signature
• Forums – if you had further questions, issues or even suggestions, visit the forums.

I would really like to see an export/import option for this useful Firefox extension so I can set this up and once and just import the settings into my other computers. I use 2 at work and 2 at home!

Something that was just used by power users who were comfortable with editing Greasemonkey script files, etc is now in reach of everyone who can take a few minutes to create a HTML signature.

Go ahead and try it. If you need help in creating one, let me know in the comments.

If you are a blogger and make use of FeedBurner, now you can even make use of Feedburner’s new Email Signature headline animator in your HTML signature that will show off your recent posts.

Completely Revised Top Firefox Extensions

As you may have noticed in the footer in the site, Top Firefox Extensions is the most popular post here. I took the much needed time last week to add some new categories and update with some of the best Firefox add-ons out there.

Of course, this list will be only as useful as you see it and I will appreciate it if you could take a moment to look over and suggest add-ons that you consider the best and something you can’t live without.

Let’s make it better and something you could come back to anytime when you need find some of the Top Firefox extensions.

Create Custom HTML Signatures in Gmail – Black Canvas - Originally published at ShanKrila.com on 2011/11/20 (RSS)

Foxmarks is one of the best Firefox extensions out there. Foxmarks lets you create a profile at Foxmarks.com and syncs your bookmarks across any number of Firefox browsers on various computers you use.

This means you can seamlessly bookmark in one computer at work and come home to find it and go to the site you want. In fact, you can even create different profiles for work, home, etc and see just those bookmarks depending on where you are.

Foxmarks is now available for Internet Explorer as well as Safari. But, it does not offer password syncing in IE & Safari, just bookmarks. And if you used your own server to store bookmarks & passwords with Foxmarks, you can’t do that either in IE/Safari.

iPhone users get sync for Mac Safari.

I tried this out in Internet Explorer and found it to work seamlessly!

[via Lifehacker]

Foxmarks Bookmark Sync for IE & Safari - Originally published at ShanKrila.com on 2011/11/20 (RSS)

I am a fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) way of accomplishing tasks. In my quest for increased productivity, I have tried and used many online to-do lists, task managers, tiddlywikis and I review some of them here time to time.

I stumbled across a groovy online task manager application, Voo2do, that has a web 2.0 ajaxy interface combined with a cool domain name! I wonder if they developed it to keep track of their voodoos. Voo2do’s logo, on the otherhand, isn’t for the faint hearted.

Voo2do is not your ordinary to-do list app. It is a free, mature, full featured project/time management tool and has been around since atleast early 2006. It stands out from rest of the crowd in the time management feature and uses Joel Spolsky’s Painless Software Scheduling method. In their words,

Voo2do lets you track each task with project, description, due date, priority, and time estimates. Just click and type to edit.

Let’s take a quick look at the features it has to offer.

Quick Facts about Voo2Do

• Tasks: The ajax laced web interface lets you add tasks easily without page loads and allows setting up of various properties like priority, notes, deadline, duration, etc. You can even add tasks by email.
• Projects: Tasks can be organized by Projects. Projects can be inactivated. A nice feature in creating a new project is that it lets you copy tasks in an existing project. This is nice if you work on projects that have similar tasks and will save time in having to recreate all the tasks every time you start a new project. A Huge time saver!

• Contexts: Contexts let’s you group projects by, obviously context. Your context could be like projects for home, work, own business, etc., so you can focus on just the tasks at hand rather than seeing all your tasks together.
• Collaboration: Voo2do let’s you create Collaborative Contexts where you can track tasks assigned to your teammates but it is still in its infancy. It lacks the ability to actually share tasks with another Voo2do user.
• Notes: You can add notes for your tasks, if you’d like.
• Public Task List: You can make a project or context public and you can password protect it, if needed. You’ll get a URL like http://voo2do/pub/NAME – where NAME is what you enter and attach a note for the viewer so they know what you have published.
• Time Management: This is one feature I haven’t seen in many online task management tools. Voo2do lets you assign duration for a task and let’s you track time spent on each task and the remaining time. It sports a cool timer with the task so you can start and pause the time as you work on a task!
  This feature could be vital for a freelancer to keep track of their time spent on various projects they are working on for various clients.
• Dashboard: Dashboard view, in my opinion, is a very crucial part of a task manager. At the start of a day you can take it all in a quick, easily-digestible form from the Dashboard based on the context. It lets you collapse the context you don’t want to see. It also sports a history view to look at past completed tasks.

Opinion

Voo2do is a capable online task manager. As I dug through their site and blog while writing this post, I found that there hasn’t been much activity in their blog since early this year. Their last post was in March’07 and I am not sure if it’s just the blog that has been idle or the development itself.

I wonder if the creator, Shimon Rura, has discontinued development for this cool app. He developed it for his own use and has made it free for anyone to use.

I have emailed Shimon and waiting for reply as I post this and will update the post as soon as I hear from the creator. With the online task management field crowded with so many other players, the future of this app will definitely be crucial if I was to start using it.

As is, Voo2do is a well designed, easy to use task management application that stays away from endless lists and lets you group and view tasks by contexts and projects.

Voo2do is a strong candidate and I would definitely recommend to someone looking for some of the unique features it has to offer. For the rest of you, Remember the Milk (RTM) is a great alternative that I am very fond of. Browse through the archives or search for it to find my posts about RTM.

I would love to hear about other GTD tools that you know of, or use. I am sure other readers would too.

Groovy Online Task Manager – voo2do - Originally published at ShanKrila.com on 2011/11/20 (RSS)