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Google's 'Memory' feature could turn Assistant into an Android organizer
Google is working on a new feature for Assistant on Android called "Memory" that could transform it into into a handy organizer.
Sinch takes aim at headphone tangles, we go hands-on
The Sinch is not much to look at, we'll give you that, but it is rather an interesting little thing. Intended to keep your headphone cable a little more tidy, it's just a couple of slender magnets encased in a rubber band with a hole punched on one end. It's a remarkably simple design, and a surprisingly effective one, too. We got a chance to wrap our cables around one, so read on for some quick impressions. %Gallery-133151%
Firefox Tab Candy groups your tabs, but that's just for starters (video)
Although Firefox already has a strong selection of tab management helpers like TooManyTabs, which gives you extra rows and memory-preserving options, or Tree Style Tab, which shifts things to a tree-based vertical menu, Mozilla has rolled up its scaly sleeves and decided to rethink the whole thing. Tab Candy starts off much like Safari's TabExposé, by showing you all the tabs you currently have open in thumbnail form, but from there it allows you to organize them into separate groups (with sub-groups promised for the future), which then act in very much the same way as opening a new Firefox window. Yes, it's folders within the browser, and it's all based on good old fashioned HTML, CSS and JavaScript, so no pesky additional downloads will be required once this Alpha-stage code gets added to Firefox's official release. If you want to give it an early spin, hit the source link below, but don't neglect the video after the break to see what else Mozilla is thinking of cooking up with Tab Candy.
Telstra's landlocked T-Hub tablet phone launches in Australia (update)
A few years back, Telstra -- synonymous in Australia with "communication" -- told Apple it had no business making a cellphone. Look how that turned out. To make a long story short, the company has since repented, and is on the verge of releasing an app-filled touchscreen phone of their own, the Telstra T-Hub, on April 20th. Thing is, this tablet stays plugged into your wall. Marketed as a "family organizer," the T-Hub stores contacts, surfs Facebook, plays YouTube, displays photos, accesses personal bank accounts and even sends text messages like a smartphone, but does it all while connected to a landline telephone jack. While existing Telstra customers can get the device for $300 AUD, the company would of course prefer you get it for $35 with a 24-month service agreement... for a minimum total cost of about $1980 AUD with 2GB data per month. We're not Australian, but compared to US iPhone pricing, that doesn't sound terribly fair. Update: Telstra spokesman Craig Middleton tells us the T-Hub isn't permanently tethered to your wall. While the phone's base station does connect to a landline telephone jack, the tablet assembly itself is a portable cordless phone with WiFi for web-connected apps. He also adds that the aforementioned 2GB data plan isn't just for the T-Hub, but rather your entire home internet connection.
First Look: Neat Receipts Origami Organizer
The Neat Company is best known for their diminutive scanner and powerful scanning software. You'll remember that we gave away a few of their Neat Receipts scanners a while back. Well, their innovations continue with the announcement of the Neat Receipts Origami Organizer. (Sorry about the use of the Windows Vista screenshot below; their Mac version isn't available yet...but has been announced). This new device and software not only perform the same organizational tasks as the original Neat Receipts, but now also provide the added functionality of turning your receipts into beautiful works of art. Simply touching the new Origami button on the Neat scanner (below) scans and folds your receipt, turning the receipt into useful data and either a swan, elephant, sea lion, or hummingbird. The Windows version ships today, April 1; Neatco announced that they'll be shipping Neat Receipts Origami Organizer for Mac coincident with the June 30th ship date for Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard". You can view a video of the Origami Organizer in action on the Neatco website; it really is amazing!
Diary Girl reminds us why we have no friends
We love the idea of a DS-based organizer and diary (and yes, we're aware that DS Organize exists) but we aren't sure about the rest of the content in Diary Girl. To be blunt, we find the art style off-putting, but then we aren't little girls. We would rather not stare into the faces of those Bratz-like characters as we confess our feelings to the touchscreen.When you're not diarizing, you can keep up a to-do list, customize your horrifying avatar, check your horoscope, and play this little quiz game. If answering honestly, we'd have to pick option 2 here, which is why we're going to make a point to add "stop being a self-centered jerk" to our to-do list.
Diary Girl delayed, we are unable to note the new date
You may not care about Konami's Diary Girl, but we do, a little. At least in that it's a novel idea with some neat features, like voice chat, horoscopes, and password-protected journal entries. Sure, DSOrganize does personal organizing stuff, but there's room for a retail solution, we think. We don't necessarily know how we feel about the girly branding; is it appropriate or insulting? And should we wait for Diary Dude? In any case, the core software seems vaguely interesting.It was listed for December on that massive Nintendo release schedule a couple of months back, and now it ... isn't. Amazon has the "game" releasing on March 4, and Konami's own Diary Girl page says February. If only we had ... some kind of personal organizer that we could carry around with us to keep track of these dates. Maybe something that went along with a device we already carry around. Somebody should invent something like that.
yFlicks: the 'iPhoto for your movies' is 40% off at MacZOT today only
Geeze, those MacZOT guys either have strangely coincidental timing, or I need to consider changing the locks on my house. This is either the second or third time that I discovered and thoroughly enjoyed an app, only to find it go on sale at MacZOT the next day (i.e. - I'm buying a license as I type this). The app in question is yFlicks, which we wrote about back in January (and I probably missed because of all the Macworld craziness). yFlicks is more or less a really cool 'iPhoto for your movies,' allowing you to organize and rate your movie files, as well as update the metadata associated with them. This is a great thing if, like me, you're switching from iPhoto to Aperture, because one drawback of the latter is that it doesn't import or organize movies shot with a digital camera.But yFlicks does some great stuff I've never seen in a full-on movie organizer before: it offers live video previews when you mouse over the thumbnail (so you don't have to open each movie just to get a look at it), complete support for the Apple Remote, a bookmarklet for downloading movies from popular communities like YouTube, Daily Motion and College Humor, and even a great temporary folder system that doesn't simply copy every movie into your movies folder when playing it, allowing you to pick and chose which movies you actually keep and catalog. The great thing about yFlicks is that the cleverness doesn't stop there; its developer, Peter Maurer - who Mat Lu pointed out in January has developed a ton of other great Mac apps, has sprinkled all sorts of handy magic throughout yFlicks, from a simple rotate button for movies that were shot with the camera rotated to Smart Folders for organizing your flicks and even one-click access to viewing your movie file in its location in the Finder. In fact, I'm so happy with yFlicks, I'm still buying it straight from Mr. Maurer. If you want to save some cash though, yFlicks is on a 40% sale today at MacZOT: its U.S. price is typically $20, but today-only it's just $11.95. That's a killer deal on one of the best darn movie organizing apps I've ever seen.Of course, before you decide, you can grab a demo from Many Tricks, Peter Maurer's software company, and take it for a spin before throwing down your cash.
Widget Watch: Stikkit widget
Last week, Mat Lu found a Quicksilver plugin that plays well with Stikkit, the online personal info organizer that thinks so you don't have to, but there's also another method for all you Dashboard junkies out there: a full-on widget from James Adam. This widget, like its Quicksilver plugin cousin, is great for getting your stuff into Stikkit, but it also has the advantage of being a compact window into your Stikkit world. You can create or edit any number of Stikkits and sync them when you want, making this widget a sort of offline, syncing client for Stikkit.Adam is providing this widget free of charge, and you can grab your copy from his interblah.net site (love the domain Adam!).[via Stikkit's Values of n Blog]
Hayate Cross Blade USB-powered talking organizer
Most of the absurdly superfluous USB accessories we've seen merely add camp value to your cubicle, but here's one that might actually be useful. If you tend to drop the ball on meetings, tasks, and to-dos, you can soon employ a Hayate Cross Blade figurine to remind you of your responsibilities -- in her own signature voice to boot. Just connect the pint-sized Kurogane Hayate unit via USB, install the included software, and voila! -- your very own desktop anime secretary. It's not clear if or how the software works with other languages, so good luck if you don't speak Japanese. The talking organizer will run you ¥4,343 (about $37) and is scheduled to be released later this month. She ain't no Nabaztag, but for a fraction of the price, this could be a worthwhile substitute for cheapskates.
Chronos replaces StickyBrain with SOHO Notes 5.5
StickyBrain, one of the leading 'digital junk drawer' apps that recently entered a 4.1 beta testing phase, has been officially discontinued by Chronos in favor of SOHO Notes 5.5. Current registered users of StickyBrain 4.0 will receive an upgrade to SOHO Notes for free, while users who own licenses for any previous StickyBrain versions (1.x, 2.x and 3.x) can upgrade to SOHO Notes 5.5 for a mere $25, the price offered in the past for upgrading from StickyBrain 3.x to 4.x.Why is StickyBrain being dissolved in favor of SOHO Notes, you ask? Chronos has published an announcement and FAQ explaining the decision, but here's the short version: SOHO Notes is basically the big brother of StickyBrain; they're almost the same app, derived from the same codebase, except SOHO Notes included three key features that Chronos used to charge extra for: SOHO Notes can synchronize notes between multiple computers using a .Mac account (seamlessly, in the background). SOHO Notes can access multiple note databases simultaneously. SOHO Notes is multi-user capable which means users can share notes with others over a network using the product's client/server technology. Now, with SOHO Notes taking the helm, its price has dropped to $39.99 to keep it more in-line with StickyBrain's previous price, as well as the competition like Yojimbo and DEVONthink. Feature-wise, this new version of SOHO Notes 5.5 offers some powerful new goodies, such as the ability to import and catalog almost any kind of file, send notes to your blog, a DockNote that makes it easy to get info both in and out, audio recording notes, full-screen editing of notes, a Daily Journal/Diary category that can automatically date/time stamp notes and much more.Whether you love your hate StickyBrain SOHO Notes, this should be good news for the 'digital junk drawer' market, as this price drop and the new features should help keep everyone's innovative juices flowing.
VoodooPad 3.0 - Serious Mojo
Oh so sweet. My favorite catch-all notepad and organizer, VoodooPad, has been updated to version 3.0 today. I fell in love with VoodooPad about two years ago when I started a new job and needed to start keeping track of a huge variety of different kinds of information. I started dumping everything I could into the program--scraps of technical support information, dates and details of computer repairs, website URL's, coworkers' phone extensions, serial numbers. I didn't really know right away if VoodooPad was going to help keep all this stuff organized, but after awhile I noticed that I started to rely on the software to track down that information that otherwise would have been misplaced. I also started to notice connections between information that I might not have otherwise made.VoodooPad sports a number of new features including tabs, searching improvements, support for big documents, and new filetype embedding. There's also support for Mac OS X's PDF framework so you can print a PDF straight into VoodooPad.VoodooPad Pro is a new edition to the family that has several advanced options for power-users such as encryption, triggers, metadata inclusion, and a built-in web server to facilitate collaboration between VoodooPad users.Other programs, like Yojimbo, have popped up recently to serve as the same kind of catch-all, but I remain faithful to VoodooPad, my first love. It saved me from the growing rat's nest that was StickyBrain. Mojo, indeed.
OmniOutliner, OmniOutliner Pro 3.6 released
The Omni Group has finalized version 3.6 of OmniOutliner and OmniOutliner Pro, their "amazingly flexible program for creating, collecting, and organizing information." The final version itself doesn't usher in any mind-blowing new features aside from the built-in help being fully localized, but check out their release notes for all the new features they rolled out in previous 3.6 beta releases if you haven't been keeping up.Version 3.6 is a free upgrade for existing 3.0 customers, and is available from the Omni Group's site.
Yojimbo updated to 1.1
We're a little late on this one, but Yojimbo, a very functional yet simple information collection tool, has been updated to version 1.1. Among the decent list of additions, changes and bugfixes are new features like: opening a bookmark in a preferred browser (not necessarily the default) applescript-ability search field improvements including toolbar statistics like iTunes and Mail improvements to dragging items to the collections list removing backgrounds when printing web archives .Mac syncing no longer requires Yojimbo to be running I started finding all sorts of great uses for Yojimbo and actually decided to buy it last night, so I highly recommend checking it out if you've been looking for a better way to get organized.
DS homebrew gets organized
Proving that it can boost productivity as well as destroying it, the homebrew scene has churned out a DS organizer suite for us to download and arrange our overly complicated work schedules with. Cleverly entitled DSOrganize, the software boasts a calendar, an address book with vCard support, a day planner, multiple languages, a file browser and rudimentary handwriting recognition. The latter part is excellent news, what with my handwriting being so very rudimentary indeed.Now, presented with this homebrew creation, you may recall a rumor about Nintendo filing a patent for something called V-Pocket, supposedly stemming from them licensing the Palm operating system for the DS. However, unless we missed something, it doesn't look like anything ever came of that. Given its stylus-based interface and Wi-Fi capabilities, the DS seems like it could be an ideal (and cheap) alternative to other handheld organizers, with an added benefit of playing some stellar games. With web browsing taken care of, would you be interested in an official organizer package for the DS?[Thanks mandarin!]
