NetSherpa Journal

Over the past few months, I’ve gotten myself more and more connected with the world at large through the internet, and anyone who’s gotten into feeds and blogs would know that it’s easy to be overwhelmed and it’s easy for all this information gathering to go to waste.

I recently put together a list of downloads and tools for some friends and most people seem astounded at the ease of implementation and had they known, they would be able to stay up to the minute with news of any niche topic.

Snackr in a vertical marquee

First off, if you use Internet Explorer (Click the ‘e‘) or even Firefox 2.5 or earlier, I’d recommend upgrading to Firefox 3. It’s got an absolute ton of new features, most of the older extensions work with it; and the speed is noticeably quicker than any other browser I’ve used.
[Firefox 3]

Now, whenever you’re surfing a web site that has an RSS feed, a small orange icon will appear in the address bar, with three white waves on it. This is a sort of universal feed symbol. Any site with a feed has a single file somewhere on the server that is updated as posts are added and allow a ‘feed-reader’ to extrapolate either a snippet of the stories, or the entire content of each story to be displayed somewhere else (How about your desktop?)

Adobe recently released Adobe AIR, which according to their site, “The Adobe® AIR™ runtime lets developers use proven web technologies to build rich Internet applications that deploy to the desktop and run across operating systems.” What’s that mean? It means that developers can write small, lightweight software to interface with web technologies from a user’s desktop and alleviate the need to open up a web browser and manually gather the data.
[Adobe AIR]

Why would you want it? Well there’s a few reasons, and as far as I’m concerned, those reason’s are a few of the softwares developed for it.

Snackr is a feed reader that allows for you to import a list of feeds, or just add one by one as you come across them, that displays them in a click-able scrolling marquee that contains all of the recent stories from whatever sites you choose to be updated on.
[Snackr]

Another AIR application worth checking out is that of Doomi. I suck at getting stuff done, and this little to-do list application
has saved my ass more than enough times to warrant it’s mention. Simply
enter something you’ve gotta do, and if you choose, set an alarm to go
off to remind you. Worth a look.
[Doomi]

Doomi in action

As far as instant messaging goes, many people have diversified what networks they use on a regular basis to contact their friends. Most people just use what is used by the people they contact, but this is limiting in a sense, that for example, I have to stick with the AIM screen name I made in 5th grade if I want to avoid re-contacting everyone with an update, not to mention the fact that I still can’t communicate with people on ICQ, MSN, Facebook Chat, or Google Talk through a single client’s software.

Enter Digsby. Digsby is a networking application that connects to Facebook, ICQ, Gmail, Google Talk, Twitter, AIM, MSN, and a number of other services. This program has single handedly allowed me to keep in contact with everyone I know while not really ever leaving the individual networks or asking anyone else to change their service. Digsby’s won some awards, and the developers keep on top of any outage or service interruption usually within a few minutes (That’s fast.) I’d suggest checking Digsby out if you ever talk to anyone online… ever. (And yes it tells you of Facebook notifications in real time, which means you don’t have to just sit and surf it mindlessly all day.)
[Digsby] [Screenshots]

That’s it for now, stay tuned, and I’ll try and get some updates out there within the week.

Site note: Currently working on the second prototype of DeviceSherpa, and it’s looking pretty sleek, AJAX + a little CSS goes a long way.

If anyone has any questions or comments about these apps, feel free to drop a message below.

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