Mozilla Prism, previously known as WebRunner, is a great application that splits the web applications from the browser and lets you run them from your desktop. Although in it’s infancy, Prism is already very useful for me and I use it for a variety of web applications that I need open throughout the day.

If you are new to Prism, you could read my brief Prism review. Here are a few links that can help you get started with Prism:

• What is Mozilla Prism? - a short review
  (with instructions to run from behind a proxy)
• Google Gadget for Mac/Linux with Prism

Prism probably won’t be all things to all people, but if your browsing style mimics remotely to my style you are probably already nodding your head. Prism lets me keep my usual web applications open or atleast be available on my desktop when I need to get to them. I don’t have to worry about signing back into every one of them when I have to restart my Firefox browser multiple times a day.

I have found in the past that when I share my ideas or the way I do things, most often, I usually receive better ones from you. In the same spirit, I am going to share the list of web applications I have started using on my Desktop. I am hoping to spur a discussion in the comments to find what other web applications would be best suited.

Top Prism Applications

• Google Reader - Although I miss the Greasemonkey scripts that add functionality, it is very convenient to open and close Google Reader like a desktop application.
• Remember the Milk - I use the Remember the Milk for Google Gadget url with Prism to get a desktop app that’s very functional and easy to access. Use this url to access Remember the Milk to get the Google gadget version. http://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/modules/googleig/ . You could even try the mobile version or the regular website interface of that’s your thing.
• Google Talk Gadget - I prefer the Google Talk gadget over the GChat option available within Gmail. If you have a preferred IM like Digsby, then you won’t need this. But, if you are stuck on a linux machine like me with the usual IM client’s proxy setting not working, then you’ll love this option.
• Evernote/Google Notebook - Evernote is one of my recent addition to Prism web apps. I like to have this running in a separate window so I can just copy and paste any notes into it. If you haven’t seen it yet, I have written a short Evernote review last week. If you are a Google Notebook user, you could use that in Prism too.
• Passpack: Passpack is an excellent online password manager and is a great candidate for me to run on Prism. I do miss the use of the PassPack bookmarklet when I run it in Prism but the convenience of having atleast the passwords anytime I need it is heavenly.
• Google Calendar: If you are a Google Calendar user, you can run the full version of it in Prism. Or, you could use the url from the Mini Google Calendar that you may be running in your sidebar.
• Mint: Mint is a personal finance application that can aggregate transactions from all your bank accounts and credit card accounts and show you in an easy to digest format. I find it another great tool to have it in my desktop check at various times of the day.
• Any Google app: Google has a suite of useful web applications available and you can create a Prism application for any of them and access them as if they were a desktop application.

As you can see depending on what web applications you use, you can create Prism application for it. The sky is the limit.

Prism, built on our favorite Firefox technology, doesn’t support installing extensions at the moment even though it is coming soon. I have found blog posts indicating that some folks have successfully installed some Firefox extensions in Prism but I haven’t been able to yet.

Why is Gmail missing in the list?

The moment you can add Firefox extensions like Greasemonkey to Prism, the range of web applications I can see myself using is increasing two-fold. That is exactly why you’ll find Gmail missing in this list. I have gotten too addicted with the Stylish script Gmail redesigned, that I have decided to keep it in my browser for now.

I am looking forward to suggestions and ideas for web applications best suited for Prism from you and very interested to hear what you run on Prism.

Hello newcomer, did I say welcome to ShanKri-la yet? Before you move on, just wanted to thank you for visiting and we hope you come back and see us again!

Last week, I reviewed a cool file sharing web application in private beta - DropBox. I have had a chance to get a sneak peek at another cool web application, Evernote, in the last few weeks. It’s quickly replacing my need for Google Notebook and I find it worth the hassle to login to yet another web application.

Evernote

Evernote, currently in private beta, is definitely Google Notebook done better. Way better.

I have used and liked Google Notebook for a long time. It is very easy to use and is very handy to store things I come across on the web. It helps me store information in different notebooks, with titles and labels so I can easily find what I need at a later time. The Google Notebook Firefox extension made it super easy to add notes without opening up a webpage right from my browser.

Recently, I read about Evernote and signed up for their private beta and have been using it for a few weeks and I am ready to share my findings with you.

Yes, I like being the guinea pig with these new web applications so you can sit back and read my posts and see if you want to try it yourself.

Lets look at what Evernote has to offer:

• Evernote is a note taking application with a motto of making your notes available anywhere.
• Evernote is available as a web application, a Windows application, a Mac application as well as a Windows Mobile application. Can you see the common thread with DropBox?
• All your notes in Evernote are always synchronized across all your devices!
• You can create new notes with desktop/web or mobile versions of Evernote
• Create snaphots using camera phone or webcam
• Clip whole webpages, screenshots or portions of web pages - I like the ability to tag and file a clip as I am clipping.
• Desktop clients for Mac & Windows even allow drag and drop
• With the account, you get an ultra-personalized (read: obsure looking) email address that you could use to send notes to Evernote by email!
• You are supposed to be able to record audio as well and listen to it whenever you want. Haven’t tried this one yet.
• You get to save your searches and this is a great feature that’ll come handy as your notes volume increases.

In fact, on my linux machine this makes a great web application for Mozilla Prism and it works great as a standalone app! See how the green matches so well with my desktop background.

I have tried everything except the audio part and they all work great. So far, I can hardly tell that it’s a beta product. Either it’s really good or I have been lucky to avoid the bugs. I am thinking it’s just that good.

Evernote is a Freemium product which means it is free while in beta and will stay so after going stable. But, there will be a paid subscription level in the future and the exact feature split is unknown at this time. I hope it will something like Remember the Milk where you get all the features in the free account but you pay for support and out of good will.

Take the Tour

If you’d like to see some of these features in action, take the tour and see it in video.

Beta Invites

My private beta account has 10 invitations in it and as always I would like to share it with my readers. Just leave a comment and the first 10 of you to leave a comment will receive it in their email.

I do have a request to those receiving invites. Since your account will probably come with 10 invites, if each of you could a spare a couple for our readers requesting invites after you, that’ll make it 20 more invites available.

If you’d like to share the good will, mention that in the comment (with number of invites you’d like to share) and I will send you the emails you can share your invites.

In fact, if you have any DropBox invites and would like to share, there are a lot of folks looking for one as I’ve exhausted mine, please visit this post or contact me and I’ll hook you up with folks who want one.

Popular in search engines: Who called us?

Here I go with another one of my favorite web applications. This one is a cross-over web/desktop application. Read on to find out why:

Anyone with multiple computers like a desktop, personal laptop and a work laptop would know the pains to find the right file you need for a task at hand from one of those computers.

It just adds to the complexity if you are sharing some of those documents with someone else. You probably find yourself continuously uploading, downloading files, syncing you folders with an online storage solution.

I have had the privilege of using DropBox (still in private beta) for the last few weeks and I am definitely amazed by the thoughtfulness of the developers. It is designed to be completely painless to use while consuming reasonable amount of resources - cpu & bandwidth.

DropBox

You just need to install the DropBox software (7 MB file) in your computer and it integrates with the file explorer and runs in the background. From your online account, you link your web account with the desktop software. From then on, anything you drop in the ‘My DropBox’ folder gets sync’ed with your online account.

• Access files in your home computer from anywhere via Internet in a web browser
• Synchronizes multiple computers if you linked them all with the same account instantly.
• Dropbox saves your previous revisions as backups online and you can revert to an older version very easily
• Delete a file by mistake? Restore a copy from online.
• No software interface to learn. Seamlessly integrates with your Windows/Mac native environment
• Share files with friends and family by sharing a folder with them.
• Sync is almost instantaneous. File changes are detected as incremental changes instead of uploading/downloading whole changed files.
• Blue icon on a file/folder indicates that the sync on that particular item is pending and green means it’s in sync.
• 5GB of free online storage while in private beta
• Even when you are away from your computer, just upload files (25MB max) to your online account and when you go home, it’ll be in your home computer. Ready for you.
• If all this isn’t enough, if you’d like to download a large folder from your online account, there is an option to download the contents of the folder as a zip file saving you precious time.
• You can share a url to your photos folder with friends and family. No more choosing photos to upload to special service.
• Works right now on Windows & Mac but a Linux version is promised in the future.
• Works seamlessly through proxies as well.

The real beauty of this solution is in the simplicity and how transparent it is to you once you start using. Since it’s in beta, it is free for 5GB but the developers have plans to add paid plans in the future. For such a cool service, I really wouldn’t mind paying as I have already been contemplating a reliable online storage system like Amazon S3.

I would love to see more features like profiles for different computers. It would be nice not to sync my personal files like Music, Photos, etc. to my work laptop. With the service in closed beta, I am sure there will be more features coming up before the public release.

Here are some screenshots for you to enjoy:

Green = In sync; Blue = Sync-ing

Online interface to your files/folders

Revisions of a file I was working on

I have a few invites for Dropbox. If you’d like to try it, leave me a comment and I’ll send it to your email.

What do you think of this service? How much is the comfort this service offers worth to you?

It’s no secret GTalk client is for Windows only. Linux and Mac users have so far sought out other IM alternatives thanks to GTalk using Jabber protocol for their IM client. I use openSuSE 10.3 as my primary desktop and have had trouble getting some of the excellent IM clients like Pidgin to work behind a proxy.

Thanks to GChat in Gmail, I have been able to use IM even if it has to be within Gmail. I even used a Greasemonkey script for Gmail 2.0 to alert me with the tab flashing when there is a new IM. However, I did find this a little annoying to keep going back to Gmail to check on IM messages. Because, everytime I go into Gmail to see IM messages, I would also end up checking my Inbox and before I know 20-30 minutes would have vanished. This kind of goes against my goal of trying to increase productivity with all these web apps and hacks.

So, I started to run Google Talk gadget in my browser sidebar with a browser bookmarklet. This freed me up from using GChat in Gmail to GTalk in my browser sidebar.

You’d think I’d be content at this point. Not.

Run Google Talk (GTalk) gadget with Mozilla Prism

Mozilla Prism released their 0.9 version last week and I am smitten by the usefulness of it. If you haven’t heard of it, check out my Mozilla Prism review. In that post, I also show how you can run it from behind a proxy at work or school. Since it’s a beta version and a work in progress, they don’t have a straightforward setting for proxy in it’s options yet.

If you don’t want to click over, Prism is a prototype from Mozilla Labs which lets you split your web applications from the web and run it in your desktop as a standalone application. They even allow separate profiles for each Prism app which means you can have multiple Gmail accounts open in different Prism web apps in your desktop.

I have taken this idea and created a Prism web app for the Google Talk gadget and now I have a GTalk client like app running standalone in my desktop!

Here’s how you do it:

1. Install Mozilla Prism - Windows, Mac & Linux installers (v0.9 at the time of writing)
2. Create a new web app with url https://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/client
3. Give it a name and choose to save it on desktop
4. You are done!

If you are a Mac or a Linux user, you can now run GTalk standalone in your computer with Mozilla Prism. If you are already using Firefox 3, with this Prism Firefox extension you can just open this url (or any other web app) in Firefox 3 and then directly create a desktop application for GTalk right from your browser.

I see that Prism has an option to install extensions. It doesn’t look like it’ll accept Firefox extensions as it complains that they are not compatible. I even tried turning off compatibility checking but didn’t have much success. I would love to hear if someone has succeeded installing extensions with Prism as that would open up a whole new world of options to these Prism web apps. I am sure it will be obvious in the coming releases. But, I want to make it work today!

GTalk makes it the fourth web app I run in my Linux desktop with Prism after Gmail, Google Reader and Remember the Milk.

What other web application do you see yourself running on your desktop with Mozilla Prism?

If you are a web application lover, you probably have accounts everywhere in different web services such as Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us, etc. And it could be incredibly hard to remember which service has something you saved or marked as a favorite or bookmarked or dugg or shared via RSS feed. The information you need is with you but spread around in various services with no real structure.

Sometimes, it might be easier to search in Google than finding it from your own favorites beating the whole purpose of saving it in the first place. In other times, you may not get so lucky to remember the right search phrase to land on the exact you link you need.

SecondBrain aims at combining all your social networking web accounts and bring all the data together in one place. It works by pulling data from your various accounts into your SecondBrain account. It will become your repository of data from various web services pulled together so you can organize them, share them and search them to find what you need.

How does it work?

A lot of the social networking sites and web applications provide public API’s or atleast provide RSS feeds for a user’s content so that someone interested can follow the feeds or interact with the data from elsewhere.
SecondBrain works with public API’s where possible and uses RSS feeds to pull in updated content for an user in other cases. Once added, SecondBrain will keep your account synchronized automatically. Some of the popular services it can aggregate content from at the time of writing this post are:

• Blogger
• Delicious
• Digg
• Flickr
• Google Docs
• Google Reader
• Picasa
• Twitter
• WordPress
• YouTube
• ZohoDocs

After importing your content, you can mark them private or public. Plus, SecondBrain can import tags from various services like Flickr, YouTube etc and you can organize your entire content by tags and collections.

Some thoughts

I like some of the integration such as with Twitter where it imports your content as well as let you post to Twitter from SecondBrain. You could also bookmark urls you come across directly in SecondBrain or via a browser bookmarklet. (added to my favorite browser bookmarklets)

I would like to see some more of my favorite sites integrated into SecondBrain like StumbleUpon, Facebook, PhotoBucket, etc. I am sure they are on to it as I am probably not the first one to request this either.

I like the idea of having an Internet content repository from all my favorite services so I can go back find what I am looking for easily. Plus, I can share all my content with everyone from one place instead of having to find and share with my friends in every service. You can find your friends from your Gmail contacts or invite them easily. One think they have improve on is to tell us in advance that we can only invite 10 people at a time. I can understand why they do this but I just quit with the inviting out of frustration as I spent a good 15 minutes going through long list of contacts and selecting the folks I wanted to invite only to find that I can’t invite more than 10 people at the same time! Atleast I am able to warn you about that.

If you sign up for a SecondBrain account, you can follow my updates at Karthik’s SecondBrain page.

Mozilla Prism is an open source initiative from Mozilla Labs which attempts to bring web applications from the browser to run directly from your desktop. In Mozilla’s words,

Prism is an open source cross-platform prototype of functionality that lets users split web applications out of the browser and run them directly on the desktop.

Web applications like Gmail, Google Reader, etc. are more and more mimicking the functionality we have gotten used to in desktop applications such as right click contxt menu, drag and drop interface, etc. But, you still need to fire up a browser, go to the website and login to use the web application. It does give you the flexibility to access from anywhere with a browser but takes a bit of time if you are using a desktop day in and day out to go through all these steps to get to your favorite web applications.

Mozilla Prism attempts to bridge that gap and splits the web application from the browser and lets you run a web application like Gmail straight from your desktop. It helps web applications act like desktop applications with the benefit of being on the web without the web application developer having to do anything to offer that to an user, you.

Prism is cross-platform and is availble for Windows, Linux and Mac. You will have the option of having a location bar, status bar or the location bar in the web application window. I just include the status bar alone to see the links when I am hovering and hide the other 2 to maximize my screen real estate.

New Features in Prism 0.9

Prism 0.9 was just released last week with some major updates and new features. A few of those are:

• Simpler installation and desktop integration capabilities
• Browser integration with Firefox 3 through an extension Prism for Firefox 3. This extension lets you split a web application you are on directly out of Firefox without installing and maintaining Prism as a separate application. You will get a ‘Convert Website to Application’ option in the Tools menu with this extension.
• Ability to pick an icon to represent the desktop application (or pick it from the web by default)
• Run each webapp in its own profile - in other words, you can have 2 desktop Gmail webapps for 2 accounts simultaneously (link to old post)

If you’d like to learn more about it, check out the Mozilla Prism Wiki. Here is a screenshot of creating a web application for my favorite online task manager.

Running Prism from behind a Proxy

At work, I was first unable to run it from behind our proxy and found a helpful tip in Ubuntu forums on how to do this. Here is what I did to get Prism working from behind the proxy. This involves editing a all.js file in the Prism installation.

1. Open the <install-directory>/prism/xulrunner/greprefs.js in your favorite editor
2. Find and edit this line from:
   pref(”network.proxy.type”, 5);
   to
   pref(”network.proxy.type”, 1);
3. Then add your proxy information in the following lines: (enter your own ip & port there)
   pref(”network.proxy.http”, “127.0.0.10″);
   pref(”network.proxy.http_port”, 80);
   pref(”network.proxy.ssl”, “127.0.0.10″);
   pref(”network.proxy.ssl_port”, 443);
4. That’s it!

I am already running my favorite web apps like Gmail, Google Reader, Remember the Milk via Prism from my desktop. One downside right now is that I am missing my Greasemonkey scripts for Gmail & Google Reader. But, with Prism being built on Mozilla’s platform, I wonder if there will support for Firefox extensions. If I find out how or if it’s even possible, I will write another post soon.

Also, I am yet to see how it affects cpu & memory usage by running multiple Prism applications. Although I am getting rather spoiled with our new addition of 2GB memory to our Windows XP desktop making it a 3GB RAM! Firefox can consume a gig of ram as fas as I am concerned and I can test even more extensions to share with you without affecting it’s performance.

I use Craigslist a lot. I have found free boxes for moving, a couch, a car vacuum and many more things from my local sellers through Craigslist. In fact, my wife even finds some freelance web development/WordPress work through Craigslist.

Craigslist operates with the less is more motto. No web 2.0 graphics. No ajax. No poncy logo. They have managed to stay in the 90s with their looks but you cannot beat the power this simple site offers. It probably owes its popularity by making it easy to use for even the not-so web savvy folks as well. That’s a good thing.

Crgslst comes to offer an alternative interface to Craigslist users. I for one welcome Crgslst with open hands for the excellent features it offers to the goldmine of Craiglist data.

Crgslst Quick Look

• A simple Ajax interface with the search form to the left
• A way to save your favorite locations and keep them visible for easy access - very useful for me as I tend to search different locations for different things. For eg: when I am looking for a furniture I will be looking for something close for easy transportation and when my wife is looking for some freelance gig, distance wouldn’t matter
• It also shows your past searches - great for quickly searching the same item day after day. There’s a clear button if the list gets too long or if you don’t want it
• The search results are neatly displayed sorted by the date of posting and the actual title of a Craigslist post.
• Another great feature I like is that you can ‘remember’ the results you like for easy access later. Right now it shows a serial number for the post in the items that remembers and it’ll be helpful to see atleast the first few words of a title instead. I also like that it highlights a whole listing in yellow if you have already saved it to ‘remember’.

Crgslst is in beta and are saying that they are adding more features soon. I am really looking forward to seeing those but I will be content with just the functionality they have given already. It just has made my Craigslist surfing 100x faster.

There have been a couple of attempts such as this in the past but were shutdown because they were burdening Craigslist’s servers. I am not sure how the earlier attempts worked but Crgslst say they are working off of existing Craigslist feeds to show us the information and they don’t serve multiple city search at the same time so they don’t bring down Craigslist’s servers.

When you click on a Crgslst result, you still see the original post in Craigslist so I don’t see the harm of this new service to Craigslist.

What do you think of Craigslist alternative, Crgslst? Can you think of a reason why Craigslist might get pissed off by this new service?

[via Download Squad]