There a standard formats for the things we use everyday, such as email, music, calendars, and photos, and this is so that they can easily be manipulated and shared through different programs and operating system; however, although there are many note-taking tools out there, there is no one standard format, and as such, our note data becomes fragmented through incompatible mediums. It would be much easier for developers and end users to have a single format that everyone used when developing note applications.

I’ve tried to come up with a basic, open framework for notes that anybody can use, and it can be easily extensible so third party features can be coded in. It also provides version IDs and author information, so developers can provide functions to sync and share notes. I think that it’s important not to define too much information in a notes format because a lot of things should be handled by the client, and so therefore they can all intergrate it into their own clients.

I’ve published my initial idea to Google Docs, but I’d like lots of feedback so I can develop it further, so feel free to give me your input & criticisms; the first draft is very rough and I’d like to improve it a lot in the future. Anyone’s welcome to use it and build upon it but please link back to me if you do, and I’ll give you a mention on my blog.

[https://docs.google.com/View?id=ah7rdrmx7vm4_60hrpdxwct]
Photo: [http://www.flickr.com/photos/yggg/130617196/]

Yeah, I know I go on about Google Gears a lot, but Lifehacker’s wget tutorial makes me think of a simple, powerful, and portable solution to back up your online data for offline use. Now you can access your important websites offline, even ones that don’t support Google Gears.

What’s wget?

a free software package for retrieving files using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP

Basically, it’s a tool that can download files and webpages. How is this different from a normal browser?
wget can selectively download parts of a webpage. You want all links to be downloaded? No problem. You want images to be dropped? That can be done too. wget provides an advanced level of customisation for getting your files.
[http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/]

The guide, written by Lifehacker, will walk you through advanced ways to download content from del.icio.us, Digg, and Goolge Notebook, but if you read the comments you will find user tips and strategies, which you could just as easily implement into other uses of wget,

[http://lifehacker.com/software/download-managers/geek-to-live--wget-local-copies-of-your-online-research-delicious-digg-or-google-notebook-200360.php]

I blog on WordPress. I worship Google Gears.
So what happened when the two fused?

Unfortunately, there’s no offline blog access.
However, WordPress makes an intriguing use of Gears that hasn’t been done before.

It downloads dashboard components to the Gears storage, speeding up access to them, so general admin & posting on the blog is faster. It’s better than native caching because it won’t get cleared on browser exit.

Hopefully, this will see the creation of a plethora of unique uses for Gears.

[http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2008/07/02/gears/]

As the name suggests, GearPad is infused with the power of Google Gears.

The no-nonsense site allows you to store plain text notes and access them from anywhere – as a bonus, you can sync ‘em offline.
If only Google build this into Google Notebook, that would be really useful.

It’s opensource – if you want to run and serve your own you can.

[http://aaronboodman.com/gearpad/]
[http://code.google.com/apis/gears/sample.html] Source

If you’ve tried out Windows Live Mail, or Outlook Connector, you’ll notice that something called “DeltaSync” is used to connect and synchronise Hotmail email, contacts, calendars, and notes. Great! But I don’t want to use Outlook or Windows Live Mail – after a bit of digging, I found the DeltaSync URL.

http://mail.services.live.com/DeltaSync_v1.0.0/sync.aspx

Now what? Open Outlook Express/Mail.app, add a new HTTP account, and punch in this URL.
Simple yeah? Wrong.

It seems that DeltaSync will reject any clients that haven’t been pre-aproved by Microsoft, and at the moment, this list isn’t very big. DeltaSync should be made open, as I’m sure there are plenty of Mac users who want to access their Hotmail in Mail.app or Thunderbird.

Google Browser Sync is a gem. Google has the power and means to expand it, making it a complete sync system.

• Google desktop indexes files, right?
  So save the index online (possibly to the users GMail account) and sync specified parts of the index. If a file is requested – providing the ‘master’ computer is switched on and connected, it should be able to transfer over.
• In addition to the above, there should be a way to sync settings from one computer to another. This could cause a little hiccough on a Windows & Mac infrastructure, but it doesn’t need to be perfect.
• GMail iMap can be used to sync other email accounts, applying labels and rules to keep it out of regular GMail. Contacts can also be sent to GMail to be stored for syncing.
• iCal and Outlook could both be synchronised via Google Calendar. Notes could possibly be exported and converted to Google Notebook.
• Browser sync could be expanded to include FireFox extensions and settings. Once again, these could be stored by Gmail.

A lot more things could be done. Essentially, you just need to store files using GMail, or text-based items using Google Docs. If anybody wants to work on this idea, feel free, just post in the comments when you’re done. Failing that, I hope Google reads this!

We all know about the ‘web as desktop’, and companies have brought your webapps to your desktop, with technologies such as Prism.

However, these tools – while useful, lack ‘fluid’; they don’t integrate tightly with the OS, being essentially individual web browsers for a specific site. Fluid fixes this by recognising features in the webapp, and coding them into the desktop application. For example, if you use Fluid with Gmail, it will use the formatting features of OS X.
Commercially, you have tools like Mailplane (for Gmail), which are not as broad as Fluid, but work heavily on making it a ‘proper’ email client.

Available for Mac OS X. Currently in Beta.
[http://fluidapp.com/]

Chulian has made a cool GreaseMonkey script that removes ads and gives a fullscreen view to each manga scan, preloading them and allowing navigation with arrow keys. Ace, I love it.

Firefox users, click below to install it.
[http://chulian1819.googlepages.com/fullimagesonemanga.user.js]

Remember I posted about maintaining application consistency? DocSyncer is a tool that I would say does just that.

It uploads your Microsoft Office documents to Google Docs automatically, so you can work with them in either medium, then synchronises the change back. This could work very well for cross platform work, or for using a range of different computers (including a public terminal) to work on some files.

DocSyncer is still in beta, but Open Source fans among us will be glad to see that OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs does exactly the same with OpenOffice files.

[http://www.docsyncer.com/]
[http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/ooo2gd]

This years MacHeist has come around again.

Get free Mac Apps that would usually cost by working through the missions on the site. I’ve just completed the first one, and my favorite piece of software from the bundle is encryption program BitClamp, although I had to use the forums to get a hint for the mission.
See if you can do better than me; we could all do with getting something gratis once in a while.

[http://www.macheist.com/]