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BBC iPlayer favourites now sync across your devices
BBC iPlayer is a capable streaming service, but until now there's been little incentive to create an account. Setting up a BBC iD lets you "favourite" shows and save featured music with BBC Playlister, but there the benefits quickly dry up. Now, the BBC is trying to make its account system a little more useful and feature-rich. For starters, it's updating its iPlayer apps with the option to sync favourites between devices. So if you're digging the latest Louis Theroux documentary, you can bookmark it on your laptop and easily find the latest episodes on your smartphone. It's a small step for iPlayer, but one that hopefully primes the platform for other requested features, such as seamless cross-device playback.
Google Stars leak reveals a new way to share and search your bookmarks
Google+ expert Florian Kiersch recently revealed that Google's testing a bookmarking app called "Stars," and just posted a video (embedded below) showing how it might work. The initial leak exposed certain features, like "starring" web pages from Chrome's address bar, organizing them by folder and searching content within the pages. Those searches would use suggestions and auto-complete like Chrome, displaying the results in an "image-rich grid." Now, a splash screen (above) has confirmed much of that. Kirsch's demo shows how you'd organize folders and set them to "public" for anyone to see or keep them confined to your Google+ Circles. Stars may arrive in the future as an app or extension on Chrome and would probably be embedded in other Google apps too -- assuming it survives the beta.
My favorite Mac apps: Giles' picks
Everyone else has had just three choice Mac apps, but I'm going to claim four because two of my choices live in the Menu Bar, and are therefore very small. Only you and I need to keep count, though, eh? Bean This marvelous little rich text editor is an excellent tool for writing to word counts, something I have to do very often. Bean packs in a lot of great features, and the developer is responsive to feedback and suggestions. Either TextMate or BBEdit When I'm not writing to word counts, I'm usually using Markdown to write for the web. Until last week I'd been using TextMate for this, exclusively, for a couple of years. Now, with the release of BBEdit 9.0, I'm wavering between the two. Both are wonderful, and writing with Markdown just isn't the same without one of them to help me out. I Love Stars I'm one of those weirdos who likes to keep the Dock out of sight most of the time. I don't use it for launching or switching apps, and I don't use it to keep minimised windows in either. But there are some functions that I like to have in easy reach from anywhere, and that's why I'm a big fan of Menu Bar applications. That said, there's not a lot of Menu Bar to be had on a little MacBook screen, so I'm very picky about which ones get the honor of a place up there. I Love Stars earns a spot. It does nothing but let me assign ratings to songs, but in my opinion it does it very well and, most importantly, sits in the best place for doing it. Jumpcut Another one from the Menu Bar, and this time it's a clipboard history utility that saves my backside 27 times every week. At least. It only saves text, but that's fine for me because that's what matters most in my line of work. With Jumpcut running (and it's always running), I can merrily copy umpteen things from a dozen different places and be sure of pasting them easily, and in the correct places, in the text document I'm writing at the time (see Bean and BBMate raves above). OK, that was five. Sorry.
