Cool Tools

[Ellen Kanner]

What cool tools have you come across recently for making things (somewhat) easier.
Check the Del.icio.us bookmarks too!

[Ellen Kanner]

Social bookmarking - pretty cool and simple: http://addthis.com/

[Ellen Kanner]

Check out http://www.yammer.com/

It's Twitter for organizations, where you can share what you're working on or questions with colleagues. Thayer School is using it for internal updates within IT and Communications.

Find and follow Dartmouth colleagues. Must have a Dartmouth email address to participate.

[Stew Stryker]

Ellen,

I saw in your bookmarks that you said the library is using Twiki. Can you tell me what they're using it for and maybe a contact person? I tried using it about 5 years ago and really struggled.

Thanks,

Stew

[Ellen Kanner]

Hi Stew - You can contact Jennifer Kortfelt at the library about software dev there and stuff like the twiki.

[Stew Stryker]

Okay, here's a real contribution of a Cool Tool - Evernote

It's a tool for snipping, searching and sharing snippets from websites (especially), email, even images and documents. The basic version is free and works great. The cool part is that it's everywhere you have a computer, on the web as well as a local program to install on your Mac, PC or iPhone. So when you find that great new website you want to remember later, you just select the text on the page you want to capture, click a button on your FireFox browser and it's captured. Then you can edit the contents, add tags and move it to the appropriate notebook (which can be public or private).

Whatever you snip at your desktop is automatically synced to Evernote's site, so you can search your notes just using a web browser. Then create a notebook with stuff you want to share with others (here's an example of one of mine).

Searching is really powerful, and Evernote will even index text that's in photos and graphics you upload. How cool is that? Amazing that it's free for most people.

[Ellen Kanner]

I've been using evernote and LOVE IT. On the iphone or desktop. handy.
also check out getdropbox.com which i've been using for quite awhile now. and love it's quick syncing and it's been very stable (using it for about a year).
dropbox saved our trip to germany last year when i left the papers for reservations for hotels at home, but was able to go to my drop box and print them out from a internet cafe computer

ellen

[Stew Stryker]

Thanks for the tip about dropbox. I just found out about it recently. I've been using Microsoft's Mesh tool for the same functionality. It's in beta and free (so far). It also lets you remote control your remote machine (if you allow it). I also like that, unlike dropbox, it doesn't force you to change your existing directory structure. You just select which existing folders you want as part of your mesh and it syncs it for you.

Stew

[Stew Stryker]

Jing desktop video capture tool
http://www.jingproject.com

by TechSmith- used for short demo screencasts
Limited to 5 minutes
Downloadable, free, Mac or Windows
Same company as Camtasia

Mentioned by Barbara Knauff at Dweb forum meeting 4/23/09

[Stew Stryker]

MindManager mindmapping software, from MindJet, Inc.

It's a very powerful tool for organizing and filtering information.

It's great for brainstorming, meeting notes, project planning, anything with large amounts of information that would benefit from a visual organization. It also works well with Microsoft Office tools, communicating with Word, Excel, Project and PowerPoint, even Access!

They offer both Windows and Mac versions, but the Mac version isn't as powerful or as well supported. They also have an online version so you can access it just using a browser and they promote it for collaboration.

I mentioned that the College has a site license for that, but I could be mistaken. We did have one, but I remember hearing last year that they raised the price tremendously and we were just going to get a license for our department. As I said, it's very powerful, and it's priced accordingly.

I've attached a mindmap our meeting notes in interactive PDF format, if you want to check it out. Acrobat Viewer will give a security check, please say "Okay to view".
Meeting Dweb Forum 4-22-09.pdf

[Ellen Kanner]

Tools from today's discussion on Handcrafted CSS and more.