HTD Roundup: Snippets of Tech that I have been playing with

It’s been a while since my last post so I figured I would do yet another laundry list of things that I have been doing and technology I have been reviewing:

• Updated my Blog Theme to Redoable 1.2 – still a work in progress as there are some issues preventing me from showing what I had previously
• MAMP 1.6 – “Macintosh, Apache, MySQL and PHP” – this is a great app for testing out PHP/OpenSource applications. I use this a lot prior to actually installing on one of my sites
• Diigo – a new level of social bookmarking and markups. This browser-addin allows you to bookmark and put comments/sticky notes on sites. Great for reviewing content on sites. Includes group collaboration as well. Other notable competitors to this are JKN and Zotero, but I liked Diigo the best thus far.
• Particls – still in an invite-only beta, you can create news scrollers and pop-up alerts on RSS feeds. You can enter keywords that you want to get feed results on. Looks promising but I need to evaluate it a bit more.
• YuuGuu – application and screen sharing that is cross-platform (Mac/Win). Sort of a combination of Instant Messaging and Desktop Sharing. So far, this is what I find to be the best cross platform, “zero config” sharing tool.
• ReviewBasics – Flash-based document/image/site reviewer offering. Upload a document, assign reviewers and get in-line comments/reviews from your reviewers as an admin. I plan on writing this up in greater detail, based on an interview I had with one of the founders.
• WootWatcher – great little Firefox add-in for checking the daily Woot.
• Mon.itor.us – Web2.0 site monitoring tool. Looked really promising, but failed to deliver for me. Extremely slow with the AJAX implementation. It may have just been a bad week for them. Just checked it now and it seems to be running better. Will revisit later.
• Cozi – great web-based, application and Outlook plug-in for managing your family’s calendar. Good example of a Web 2.0 implementation. Using it with my family now.
• Access databases – spent a lot of time trying to create a complex access database with form entries, ref data lookups and other fun stuff…but hit a road-block…boy what a time suck!
• TrillianAstra – trying to find a way to be a beta-tester on this. One of the videos on their development blog really got me excited (cross-platform, flash-based application for universal instant messaging)
• ListPic – a Visual Craigs List browser. Say you are looking for a used car, you can browse pictures that appear within Craigs List. Neeto!
• FileHippo – sort of a “Windows Update” but for all of your other software. Just run this small app and you will get a list of your applications that are out of date according to FileHippo.

I have done a lot of other site and tool research since the last post as well…perhaps I will update this list later with another post.