Productivity

Text entry on mobile devices has always been a bit of a conundrum. Hardware keyboards take up an awful lot of space on cellphones and PDAs, and they’re kind of hard to use unless you’ve spent some time working out your thumbs. On-screen keyboards usually require a stylus or incredibly small fingers, and require you to poke out the letters one at a time.

While there are a few applications that do a pretty good job of speeding up text entry using predictive text and innovative keyboard layouts, there are plenty of other applications that seem like a good idea until you try them and realize that they really don’t save you much time. We’re not quite ready to throw SlideIt into either camp. But we’re not entirely convinced that you save a ton of time by dragging your stylus across the screen instead of picking it up to move it a fraction of an inch.

The concept is pretty simple. SlideIT presents you with a small on-screen keyboard, and you can make words by dragging the stylus from one letter to the next without picking it up. Theoretically you’ll be able to remember the shapes of words you write frequently, allowing you to draw them faster. For characters that aren’t included on the keyboard, you can use the Graffiti box next to the keyboard. And for long words, SlideIt offers predictive text suggestions.

There’s a free demo available for Windows Mobile 2003 and newer devices. A full license will cost you $40.

[via MobilitySite]

Ever wonder what your email behavior looks like on a graph? Because if you have, we’ve good news for some of you — well, those of you that use Gmail. Google coder Mihai Parparita just released a Python program called Mail Trends, which can show you various graphs of data extracted from your email account. You can examine your email behavior from various angles:

• Distribution of messages by year, month, day, day of week and time of day
• Distribution of messages by size and your top 40 largest messages
• The top senders, recipients and mailing lists you’re on.
• Distributions of senders, recipients and mailing lists over time
• The distribution of thread lengths and the lists and people that result in the longest threads

If you don’t use Gmail, fear not. The plan is to eventually release a version that works with other email services, though it is unknown when that version will see the light of day.

[via Googlified]

Fireworks, parades, unicorns made of ice cream, pleasant leprechauns doing amusing jigs; these things are fun. Backing up files is not. If you disagree with this you may be a loser. Check that, you are a loser. Or a network admin. Wait, that should read AND a network admin. Boring network geeks aside, backing up files is important. Much like prostate exams. Important, but painful. If you’re not backing up files at home, here’s a free tool that you can use to get on board the fun bus.

AutoVer is about as straight forward as it gets. Easy to install and use, and does everything you’ll need it to do. Plus some advanced features sure to keep the die-hards interested, such as version controlling. It’s obviously not really something you’d want to use in a large scale work environment, but if you’re to forgetful/lazy/narcoleptic to manually back up files on your home computer, it’s worth a look at. Once you have it set up, it runs pretty well on it’s own, and handles errors smoothly. It doesn’t explode if your back up drive fails, or any of that fun stuff, and works with flash drives and the like. And the price is perfect. Mmmmfree.

Cayra is a mind mapping and concept-planning application for Windows that lets you create graphical representations of thought processes and ideas like brainstorms, family trees, and product-release schedules.

The program lets you label link paths and change the colors of links and nodes. You can also add images, hyperlinks, dates, and yes/no fields to nodes. FreeMind and MindManager file imports are supported.

The Cayra team is working on a web-based Flash version of their product that can be used on any platform and will support map exchanging. The current Windows version requires .NET framework 3.0.

For mind mapping on Mac OS X, try MindNode.

[Thanks commenter upsilamba!]

RapidoWrite is a free Mac application that lets you quickly enter passages of text by typing a shortcut. Similar to TextExpander (but without the $30 price tag), RapidoWrite lets you enter a list of shortcut texts and corresponding replacement text.

When you type shortcut text in a Mac program, a small popup will display the replacement text for that shortcut. Pressing “Enter” will replace the shortcut with the longer text. Formatting is supported, so if you bold text in the RapidoWrite replacement text, it will be bolded when you use it in another program.

You can import replacements from a text file (or RapidoWrite 2 or 3), and you can export to a text file or RapidoWrite 3 file. The program installs as a service, so you don’t have to manually open a program for the functionality to be available.

[Via i use this]

For many, desktop Linux has been like a magic elixir that brings old hardware to life. Indeed, this very article is being written on a Dell Latitude c640, a computer that is generally considered outdated an obsolete, and yet it runs Ubuntu 7.10 like a dream.

However, there are many people who aim to run Ubuntu on even older hardware, or specialized tiny hardware such as the Asus Eee PC. With cramped ram requirements and less robust processors to run on, Ubuntu starts to lag just like anything else. Thankfully, there are ways to minimize this. Linux.com has published a great feature on lightweight web browsers, file manages, music players, and more, all that can be installed with a single click in the Synaptic Package Manager.

The author of the article embarked on a hours-long journey across the Internet in search of low-fat software when his girlfriend brought over her Mini-PC running Ubuntu. While there are plenty of Distributions targeted to this kind of hardware, he wanted to stick with Ubuntu. We think that there are plenty of people who like the author, would rather stick with the distro they already have. Plus, it’s just plain fun to try new software, and that’s what Linux is all about.

Like any normal human being with a computer, you probably use your USB jacks, and according to OS market-share statistics, you’re machine is probably some flavor of Windows. So you’re probably familiar with having to click that annoying little icon to bring up the SRH (Safely Remove Hardware) dialog box when you need to disconnect a USB device, but it’s possible to make the disconnect process a little easier.

In order to create a shortcut/hotkey combo to pull up the SRH box, right click anywhere on the desktop and go to “New” then “Shortcut”. Paste the text below into the box asking you, “what item you would like to create a shortcut for?”

RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll

That shortcut will open the SRH box. At this point, you can place the shortcut anywhere — including the quick-launch bar.In order to create a hotkey set for the shortcut, right click on its icon and go to properties. Choose the “Shortcut” tab.

Add in a hotkey set for the shortcut and it’s done. Every time you press key combination, it’ll open the safely remove hardware dialog box.

There’s another way to go about this, though it only works for USB disks (flash and HDD). The program is the USB Disk Ejector, which runs on both XP and Vista. It’s also free like this tutorial.

DockDrop is a simple Mac OS X application that lets you easily and quickly upload files to an FTP, WebDAV, or SCP server, with added support for Flickr uploads.

When DockDrop is open, it resides quietly on your dock (hence the name). When you want to upload a file or folder, simply drop the item onto the Dockdrop icon (see again why the name is so apt?). Dockdrop will prompt you for the upload method of your choice, upload the file, and put a URL for your upload on the clipboard, ready for pasting into an email, chat program or website.

Dockdrop offers set-it-and-forget-it functionality: once you enter in your server credentials, Dockdrop will store the settings, so you won’t have to enter them again.

One of the added bonuses of DockDrop (besides its simplicity and ease of use) is the Flickr integration. After a simple authentication process, you can drag and drop your images onto DockDrop and they upload seamlessly to your Flickr account.

Dockdrop is free, and requires an Intel Mac with 10.4 or 10.5.

[via AppScout]

Google today released a piece of software that may just be the holy grail of calendar synchronization. Well, if you use Windows and Outlook, anyway. Google Calendar Sync is a utility that automatically synchronizes your Outlook and Google Calendar appointments.

You can configure Google Calendar Sync for 2 way sync, meaning that any time you update either calendar, the changes will be copied to the other. Or you can choose a 1-way sync which will only copy changes made from one calendar to the other and not vice versa.

What’s really exciting about Google Calendar Sync is it gives you a way to synchronize your calendar across multiple devices easily. Just install Google Calendar Sync on multiple computers and now when you update your laptop calendar it will automatically sync with Google Calendar, which will automatically sync with your desktop PC, which will sync with your Windows Mobile PDA. Pretty cool, huh?

Google Calendar Sync is hardly the first tool for synchronizing Outlook and Google Calendar, but it’s free and it performs automatic synchronization at regularly scheduled interviews while most other programs cost money and/or require you to activate them manually.

Now if Google would just release a version that works with Thunderbird (with the Lightning extension) and iCal.

[via Official Google Blog]

Officially it’s “five days of exciting panel content and amazing parties”, unofficially it’s the biggest event of the software geek calendar. SXSW Interactive starts Friday in Austin, Texas and we’ll be hitting the ground tomorrow like some sort of invading army.

We’ve already managed to book plenty of interviews with tech luminaries, and we’re sure to stumble across more. We’ll also be doing some live blogging, taking lots of photos and video, and posting to Twitter.

Keep checking Download Squad for all the SXSW happenings, or if you’re more of a river of news kind of person, we’ve got this SXSW 2008 RSS feed you can use to make sure you don’t miss a thing.