E-Utilities
Primadesk
If you, like me, have to manage personal Gmail and Yahoo mail accounts, Google Docs, and others, Primadesk could prove useful. Primadesk, in beta, offers a one-stop-shop service to access, view and manage your online content (email, photos, documents, etc.,) at one place.
It offers a free Web-based service, which lets you navigate easily between all your emails, folders, and photos. You can also back up and store them at the same time. Primadesk can connect you with up to 26 services and help manage them all, including Comcast Mail, Gmail, Facebook, Google Docs, Picasa, Hotmail, Photobucket, SugarSync, Flickr, Yahoo! Mail, and more.
Primadesk’s very useful search feature can help you to find what you are looking for, with options for specifying where to look with its date range. To know more visit www.primadesk.com
Instantbird
This desktop client helps to communicate through the many IM protocols and social media networks. Yes, there are many, but, Instantbird is a worthy addition to the flock of IMs as it is multi-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux), open source and offers support for a wide range of instant messaging platforms like AIM, Facebook Chat, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, Groupwise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, MySpaceIM, Netsoul, QQ, Simple, Twitter, XMPP and Yahoo.
Support for others can also be added via plugins. Instantbird is more akin to the popular Pidgin and presently ad-free. It is expected to emerge soon as a great alternative to the many of the instant messaging software deployed now. Visit www.instantbird.com. Please note Instandbird can be installed without administrator rights.
Capture what matters
Catch Notes is a great way to capture your thoughts, ideas, images, places, lists and keep them away from prying eyes. A free service, all you require to use Catch is a web browser.
It is easy to organise and you can use tags to filter, upload screen shots, email notes for posting into your Capture Notes account. You can also start a discussion without a care as Catch Notes website is secured with an encrypted SSL connection, affirm the developers.
Catch Notes can be installed as an add-on for Chrome and Firefox, and IE, making it even easier to keep track of your notes. More details at https://catch.com. Please do note that the extensions for browsers can access your data on all websites and even browsing history.
Tomboy
Tomboy, another note-taking application, is for desktops and has many features, which the cloud-based application CatchNotes lacks. For example, highlighting text, inline spell checking, auto-linking web and email addresses, undo/redo, editing features, font styling and sizing and bulleted lists.
Another Tomboy's great feature is its ability to relate notes and ideas together. Using a Wiki-like linking system, you can organise your ideas by merely typing a name. Branching off an idea off is also easy, links between your ideas do not break even while renaming and reorganising them. Tomboy stable version1.6.0 (April 4, 2011) can be downloaded at http://download.gnome.org/ sources/tomboy/1.6/tomboy-1.6.0.tar.bz2 (Windows) and http://download.gnome.org/binaries/mac/tomboy/1.6/Tomboy-1.6.0.zip (Mac).
