The chalk gives way to the mouse. The canvas to the screen. But essentially online whiteboards try to do the same thing that real world whiteboards used to do in our good ol’ school days. Online whiteboards though have gone a few steps beyond the mimicry.
Dabbleboard, a whiteboard application brings its own host of features to heighten the whiteboard feel. Call it a ‘thinking’ whiteboard.
For the uninitiated, let me just define virtual whiteboards. Whiteboards are software applications that allow for collaborative communication through writing or drawing, in fact all the attributes of a real world whiteboard (and more).
I know our usual topics include free software, webware and useful hacks, tips and guides. However considering the importance of the Windows OS to all of the above, I thought perhaps you would be interested in a small preview of what Windows 7 has to offer.
As you may be aware, Windows 7 build 6801 was handed out to 8000 PDC (Professional Developers Conference) attendees. A few days later I got hold of a copy myself.
I’m going to assume that for you the main issues you have with Vista are the following:
OtherInbox claims to be “the cure for email overload.” I’ve been part of the beta test for a few weeks now and I simply love it. Instead of giving you a single email address, OtherInbox gives you the ability to create multiple addresses in your own subdomain (myusername.otherinbox.com). These addresses can be used to sign up anywhere. The service officially supports Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and (for those of you stuck at work) Internet Explorer.
Example time:
Let’s say that I want to sign up for PossiblyShadySite.com but don’t want to give out my real email address, potentially passing it to spammers. Instead, I register with the address
In their quest to make everything searchable, Google is now starting to index what is being spoken in video clips, or to be more precise, what is being spoken in YouTube clips. This is done by using speech recognition technology to convert the audio into words which is then indexed into Google search. Then if you want to find a particular video clip or if you want to find out if someone has mentioned a particular subject in a video clip, you can enter keywords into the search engine and be taken to those clips right away (if they exist of course). This is being called Google Audio Indexing.
Zigtag is an awesome social networking, web tagging, digg-type site. The name should give most of it away - Zigtag - tagging being their main purpose. It essentially makes available all of the sites that people thought were cool.
Zigtag is currently in private BETA, yet the wonderful folks at Zigtag have given MakeUseOf readers exclusive BETA invites. The only other thing you need is their Firefox/Internet Explorer Add-On which allows you to add tags, share pages, etc. (You are also able to simply drag and drop a bookmarklet if you are unable to install the add-on.)
Are you sick of Mac OS X Front row, Windows Media Center or want a media center for Linux. Boxee is a new kind of media center that runs on Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux, it will also support Windows in the near future (meanwhile check out cool windows media center alternatives). The framework that Boxee is built off of is XBMC which is the best media center available for Xbox.
There’s a test version of the new Google customizable homepage (startpage), iGoogle, available to play with. When you start it up, the first thing you’ll notice are the pretty rounded corners on all your gadgets. The second thing you’ll notice are the tabs along the left side of the page, rather than across the top.
There are literally hundred of new Web 2.0 sites that appear every month and many of them sound interesting, but only a few actually get people excited and anxious to get their hands on the goods! Most of these sites start out in private beta, so only a few select people get to play around with them.
Here’s my list of some of the popular and most anticipated Web 2.0 sites that are still in private beta, but already have a pretty large following!
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