I can’t even count the number of times I had to buy binders full of photocopies because a professor couldn’t find a text he liked enough to teach from. I should probably refrain from venting to Download Squad’s readers about the time a law professor stuck us with one of those binders at a cost of $75, but I think it illustrates the following point nicely: customizable digital textbooks are a very good thing. Even better, a DynamicBook looks like it will be 1/3 the cost of the equivalent paper textbook.

Fewer wasted trees? Check! A cost savings to students? Ding! No extraneous chapters that the professor won’t even assign? Booyah! Professors can even add their own media and supplemental reading. It almost makes me want to go get another useless advanced degree. Now, if only other textbook publishers would follow Macmillan’s lead …

[via After Dawn]

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Without importing, RSSOwl was going to have a tough time picking up new users. Now switching is easy, and it’s definitely worth giving RSSOwl a chance. The new search feature in RSSOwl 2 is the most powerful I’ve seen in an RSS app. It’s not just one field: you can filter by subscription, date, title, contents and more, to make sure you find exactly what you’re looking for. Even better, you can save searches, so new items that match your search will automatically be added to the search folder (created by saving the search). Depending on your needs, RSSOwl might give your current reader a run for its money.

[via Lifehacker]

If you spend a ton of time in your browser — and that browser happens to be Google Chrome, Chromium, or SRWare Iron — you might want to install the Chromodoro extension.

Once it’s active, just click the little tomato to start a 25-minute session. Best of all, the timer works across multiple windows, so you don’t have to worry about losing track when you tab between instances.

When your session is done, an alert window opens to remind you that it’s break time!

You’ll still need a pen and paper to jot down your tasks – there’s no note function built in to extension. It would, however, make an excellent addition…nudge nudge!

As far as I can tell, Thoughts wants to be the pretty girl at the party. They’re not trying to compete on features with the likes of Evernote, and they’re not trying to compete on speed with the likes of Notational Velocity. Instead, they’re taking the approach that note taking is more fun when it feels more like actually taking notes in a notebook.

The app is gorgeous, and very much a part of the delicious generation of software that puts a very high emphasis on aesthetics. You can create notebooks, add pages to notebooks, and even do some advanced formatting like adding tables to your pages. It also has wiki-like features allowing you to link to other pages within a notebook, to websites (of course), or even link to a message in Mail.

The fancy user interface includes animated page turns, and you can use mouse gestures to mimic the act of actually flipping pages. While this is a nice gimmick, it’s certainly not the fastest way to navigate.

With a substantial price tag of 24 Euros, Thoughts has some stiff competition from the free note taking app crowd. I can imagine that people who are transitioning to using a computer from writing their notes in notebooks might enjoy the familiar interface, though.

After Google purchased the collaborative text editing site EtherPad and subsequently screwed up by trying to turn off the ability to create new pads, many people have lost confidence in Google’s ability to effectively host their data on EtherPad. Google has been clear that it is their long-term plan to drop EtherPad as a service, but at the same time they have already begun open-sourcing the code for EtherPad so that others may make use of it.

PiratePad is a new site hosted by the Pirate Party using the EtherPad code to offer an alternative place to host your pads. Though the domain doesn’t instill all kinds of confidence (I mean, do you really want to rely on a service with the name “pirate” in the domain?), it’s nice to see what’s possible with EtherPad’s source code being opened up. And since the Pirate Party has not indicated any intention to shutter the service, it might be a way to ensure that you can keep consistently going back to the same service long after Google’s decided that EtherPad’s time has come.

I’d like to see someone come up with a very straightforward installer for EtherPad so that I can add the service’s functionality to my own site. Do you use EtherPad, and if so, for what? Can you see yourself using Wave in the future instead of EtherPad?

In fact, if I was to venture a guess, I’d say that I’m as fast typing on my phone as I am writing. It’s a revelation to me to be able to take notes digitally at the same speed as I used to be able to write them.

Phil Gyford was even more curious than me about input speed, so he set himself up a test between handwriting, an Apple Newton MessagePad, a Palm Vx, a Palm Treo, an iPhone, and a laptop, using each’s primary input method:

• Pen and paper
• The Apple Newton MessagePad 2100’s handwriting recognition (1997)
• The Palm Vx’s Graffiti (1999)
• The Palm Treo 650’s hardware QWERTY keyboard (2004)
• The Apple iPhone 3G’s software QWERTY keyboard (2009)
• A full-size QWERTY laptop keyboard

I’m particularly interested in the comparison between handwriting recognition and the iPhone’s software keyboard. The results (scroll down!) might surprise you, as they did me. Do they match up with your experiences?

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If you’re already using iCal’s built-in todo management, or Outlook’s tasks on a Windows machine, and you’re just looking for an iPhone app that can synchronize with what you’re already using, you should check out 2Do.

2Do is a very well-designed and pretty to-do list manager, with the ability to create multiple lists, set priorities and due dates, notes, URLs, and even default actions such as Call, SMS, Email, Browse, Visit, and Google. It’s a pleasure to use, with a very intuitive and pleasing interface.

2Do handles 2-way synchronizing with iCal’s basic to-do functionality with the help of an additional free Sync application for your Mac, or with Outlook’s tasks function with a free Windows Sync application.

I find iCal’s built-in to-do management to be clunky and awkward, which isn’t 2Do’s fault, but does work against it when I’m evaluating what task management app to use. However, if I was on Windows using Outlook, 2Do would be my first choice as a companion task management application for the iPhone.

2Do costs $6.99US [iTunes link], and a free Lite version is available that does not support synchronization and is limited to 3 lists with 25 tasks in each list.

Both of these extensions have existed in some form in Firefox for a while, but they have both recently been released for Chrome, and they’re worth investigating for either platform if you haven’t already.

A Bit Better RTM

Remember the Milk’s primary view is through its web app (though you can access it via email, mobile, Twitter, iPhone… the list goes on and on), and unfortunately the web app leaves a little to be desired. The layout is mostly fine, but the biggest problem I have with the site is the use of tabs across the top for your lists instead of a simple list down the side.

Heavy RTM users find they can easily have 20 or 30 lists, particularly when you include smart lists, and the tab metaphor does not scale well. A Bit Better RTM (Chrome / Firefox) solves this problem by changing the layout exactly as I described, adding the ability to reorder your lists, and adding some nice keyboard shortcuts for navigating your lists that match up well with the keyboard shortcuts you know from Gmail and Google Reader.

Remember the Milk for Gmail

Speaking of Gmail, if you’re a user of both Remember the Milk and Gmail, you need to drop everything and grab a copy of the official Remember the Milk for Gmail extension (auto-detects Chrome & Firefox), which was created by RTM themselves.

Though RTM does offer a Gmail gadget that will run in any browser, Remember the Milk for Gmail is much easier to use and more prominently displayed in your inbox. It allows you to do almost anything you’d want to do in your task list right from Gmail, and adds the ability to create new tasks from emails by either starring them or labeling them with a specific label that you can set in the settings.

This only scratches the surface of what Remember the Milk can do, and the many ways you can extend RTM. If you have any Remember the Milk tricks up your sleeve, please feel free to tell us in the comments.
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CloudPad is an open source note/task pad application that is elegantly simple to use and incredibly handy. Title a new note, set its priority, fill in all the necessary details, add some tags, and you’re done. You can also add tags in bulk via a pop-up window or by inputting a comma-separated list.

Two quick ways to view your notes are provided — the tag cloud (left) and the priority items view (right). A speedy and flexible search feature is also provided, and will no doubt come in handy once you’re saved a few dozen/hundred notes.

If you’re willing to overlook the required .Net 2.0 runtimes [Filehippo download], CloudPad can also be considered portable. It is for me, anyway, since all the machines I plan to use it on are running Windows 7 anyway.

You may find fuller-featured apps out there, but CloudPad certainly packs a big punch for such a small package.

If you’re a Gmail user and you’re finding yourself overwhelmed with trying to keep track of things in your inbox, but don’t really want yet another place to check on things, consider trying GTDInbox. GTDInbox is a Firefox Add-on that adds todo list functionality to Gmail that is far more functional than the pathetic Tasks functionality that is built in to Gmail.

The functionality of GTDInbox is impressive. It uses a set of pre-defined labels to track the tasks that are sourced from email messages. You can create new tasks that are not linked to email messages, and track them all in a very Getting Things Done compatible environment.

There are, however, a couple things to be aware of. First of all is the fact that GTDInbox currently relies on Firefox, since it’s implemented as a browser add-on. There are plans to release a Chrome version which will be nice from a performance improvement perspective, as well as to release a desktop version of Gmail+GTDInbox.

The second, and possibly more important one is that having a todo list rely on Gmail is a bit of a gamble; Google is often updating the code behind Gmail, and they do sometimes inadvertently break features that add-on software rely on. Then you’re in a waiting game, while either the add-on provider or Google themselves fix whatever was broken. When it’s your todo list that’s not working, this is a big problem. Luckily, all of the tasks in GTDInbox are represented by email messages that you can still see and interact with even if the add-on is not working. You just lose all of the automated goodness GTDInbox offers.