Invisible Hand is a Firefox extension that observes products you are looking at online, and unobstrusively, recommends another site that is selling the same product for a lower price. It will tell you how much you would be saving by shopping at the cheapest option it could find, and offers other online retailers that are selling the same product (in case you know.. you don’t think Best Buy is just awesome…). This is a really useful extension, that has minimal impact on your browsing experience, and can help save you money on those impulse buys, or times when you didn’t realize that you could have saved some money by just going to Amazon instead. (Found on Lifehacker)
These days most people have at least two digital cameras if not more. You probably have a nice small compact point-and-shoot, one on your phone, and some people have digital SLR as well. Beyond this, you might even have a digital media reader in your printer, monitor, or connected to a USB port. And you most likely, if you’re reading this, have a iPod or a Zune where you may or may not keep some of your photos. With all these different devices that store your photos, it’s not neccessary that everytime you connect it to your Mac you want to do the same thing. You might want to use Adobe’s Lightroom or Apple’s Aperature for your dSLR, iPhoto for your point-and-shoot and digital media reader, iTunes for your iPod, and Mac’s built-in Image Capture for your phone. Flexibits’ free Cameras is then the tool for you. It allows you to easily set up what your Mac does when you connect each of your devices, from opening it in a particular program, to doing nothing at all. And did I say it was free? (Found on TUAW)
Glue is a plugin for Firefox and Internet Explorer that learns what music, books and movies you like, and based on that provides recommendations about stuff you are looking at or suggestions about stuff that you may like based on your preferences and what your friends like and what is popular on Glue. It dynamically renders a bar at the bottom of your browser that shows various movies, TV shows, books etc, and what friends like them. Glue already supports a bunch of the major sites, so that is encouraging (biggest failure is when a cool product is announced but it doesn’t work on any site). (Found on TechCrunch)
Springpad is an interesting solution to the typical note-taking, contact-managing, to-do list tracking web solution. Instead of modifying how you keep track of information to meet the web application’s standards, Springpad allows for multiple different types of “notepads” that are customized to different functions. So you can have a Contacts notepad, and a Restaurants-You-Want-To-Check-Out notepad, and a Meal Tracker notepad. It’s quite versatile, and an interesting solution to one of the problems with organizing your life online. I’m still playing around with it, but why don’t you guys give it a shot as well?
Google Wave was announced a while back at the Google I/O Conference (haven’t heard of it? Check out the video introducing it from the Conference). At that time, it was released in a sandbox environment to 6,000 developers. Now however, Google has announced that come September, it will be launching it’s wave.google.com portal, and providing 100,000 individuals accounts. Some of these will be more developers, but some of these will be people who signed up on their website. Predictions are invites will be as coveted as they were for Gmail (if not more). (Found on Digg)
I can’t emphasize how LONG I have been waiting for facial recognition to be added to Facebook. Manually tagging photos is so 2005. With iPhoto, Picasa Web, and even Like.com (back in 2006) doing facial and text recognition in photos, it was surprising that Facebook never took the next step to add facial recognition to the billions of photos it was storing. I hate going through all my photos, and manually tagging sometimes 20 people in a single photo, across multiple photos. Finally, there is a solution! Face.com has released into alpha a web application called PhotoTagger that uses Facebook Connect to find all your friends, all your albums, and then match up all the people in an album to your friends list automatically, right from the start. It doesn’t even need to group photos and ask who this is to start! A simply amazing app, it’s sad that it took a 3rd party to come out with this before Facebook got around to it. I really really like this application. Best of all, once tagged, you can then save it to Facebook. If you own the album, the people are automatically tagged, and if not, a tag request (as per norm with Facebook) is sent out to the album owner. While in private alpha and thus closed to public sign up, there are a couple sites (Geek.com, TechCrunch, etc) who have some invites to give out… I’ve got just a couple to give out, so leave a comment if you want an account. (Found on TechCrunch)
The Mac OS X already is already pretty good at what you can do with just drag and drop, but Dropzone extends that even further. While I can already drag files to applications on my Dock, Dropzone adds the ability to upload it straight to Flickr, or Zip and Email them, or Move them to another folder. Even cooler, you can drag .DMG files to it, and it will automatically mount the installation, find the application and copy it to Applications, unmount the file, and then trash it. Small, useful, but unfortunately not free. Nevertheless worth checking out. (Found on DownloadSquad)
Blu is a new (to me) Twitter client designed by thirteen23 (who have some other really cool looking applications that I need to try out) for Windows Vista and Windows 7 users. It looks absolutely gorgeous and runs on .NET 3.5 (and not Adobe Air like TweetDeck and Seesmic). I’ve been using it for the past hour or two, and it is amazing how beautiful it looks, and how elegantly designed some of the functionality is. The opacity control with the thin white light that trails around the edge during a refresh are just some of the detailed touches that make this my current favourite twitter application, and a mighty fine contender to Tweetie on my Mac. Oh, and it’s free! (Honestly I can’t remember the last time I saw something this nice for Windows that was free).
Working on Windows, I end up having various files, folders and shortcuts on my Windows Desktop. I try to keep it organized to the best of my ability, but the fact that I can’t pin a certain set of folders to one location and leave the remaining items sorted by Last Modified becomes a problem. That was until I discovered Fences. A small application by Stardock, Fences allows me to organize my desktop into different sections (Games, Frequent Programs, and so forth). It’s a great tool, with a relatively small memory footprint. Oh, and it’s FREE>
Google has unveiled a new feature for Google Maps. While it’s great tool to find directions from one place to another, or the nearest grocery store or mechanic to a certain location, it isn’t so great when you are trying to figure out what else is in a certain area. Let’s say you are visiting a new city, you want to be able to find out what else is in the area you are going to. Till now, you would have had to check other sites, or try different keywords in Google Maps. Now you can just right click on a location in Google Maps, and select What’s Here?. While still in it’s infancy (when I checked near my apartment, the only thing it returned was a restaurant 4 blocks away, ignoring at least 30 other restaurants and bars, my apartment building itself, and countless stores), it returns a list of major locations in the area (which are sure to grow rapidly). (Found on TechCrunch)
