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iCyte: Capture Web Pages And Highlight Text In A Flash

Dean Sherwin — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 20:00:11 +0000

At some point, many of us will have to do some research, trawl through dozens of websites or like me; write an article. Have you ever found yourself with about fifteen tabs opened in your browser; all of which containing snippets of information that you hope to compile into something useful? Just keeping track of all those tabs is difficult enough – and printing them all off? Forget about that.

iCyte is a browser add-on that allows you to capture web pages, highlight text and save it to your account.

First, go to iCyte.com and click the big ‘Create an Account button’. Then, ignoring the option to create an account, select your browser from the left side of the screen. It is supported by Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 & 8. Sadly, there is no Chrome option available.

When the download begins, you’ll be asked to close all browser windows. You have to do this in order for the installation to complete.

When it has done so, re-open the browser. It should automatically take you to the iCyte website where you’ll be asked to create an account. If it doesn’t automatically bring you their, go to the ‘Create an Account’ page where you first downloaded the add-on and create an account there. As you can see from the screenshot, it only needs a few pieces of information to capture web pages and there is no confirmation e-mail that needs to be retrieved. Once you have done this, you can begin using iCyte.

Go to the web page you would like to save. If there is text on the page of particular relevant to you then highlight it using the mouse as you would if your were going to Copy & Paste. While the text is highlighted, click the iCyte button along the top of the browser in the iCyte toolbar. A window will open.

Using this window, enter in the name of the project. So for example, if you’re researching flight prices enter in ‘Holiday Planning’ or if you’re researching an essay, enter in the title of said essay. If you already have an existing project you want to add to, click the arrow to the side of the text entry bar and select the appropriate project. After that, you can enter in tags and notes about the web page you are saving. When you’re happy with everything, click ‘Save’ and you’ve captured the web page.

To view the web pages and highlighted text you have saved, click on the ’View Cytes’ button in the iCyte toolbar. This will open up a sidebar in the browser with a list of all your different projects and ‘Cytes’. They’re easily recognisable because of the screenshots but you can use the search bar to find one quickly. In the screenshot, you can see that I have saved a Cyte of the MakeUseOf.com homepage and a couple of my personal blog.

By clicking on one of these ‘Cytes’, the browser will load the Cyte in its full form. The quality is amazing and it looks just as it does when you viewing the actual web page. All of the links and buttons in the Cyte are fully clickable and will load their respective pages in a new tab. Along the top of the Cyte, there is an option to ‘View Live’. This will bring you to the original page of the Cyte.

All in all, iCyte is a great tool for those who research a lot and need somewhere to store all their information without printing off reams of pages. Do you know a similar tool? Cyte it in the comments!

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Sync and Share All Your Online Notes with 3Banana

David Pierce — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 17:00:39 +0000

The more I pay attention to it, the more I realize that one of the most useful things to have on the Web is a central place for your stuff. We’ve all got favorite web pages, notes we need to take, things we need to do, pictures we download, and so on and so forth. Particularly for the mobile person constantly struck by ideas, capturing them instantly and having one spot to keep and organize them all is critical.

The Web offers a bunch of options for this type of application – personally, I’ve been a fan and user of Evernote for a fairly long time now. Many others use Google Notebook, or any of a number of applications that let you capture and organize everything in your head and your life.

3Banana is another application that’s in essentially the same realm – letting you take, sync, and store all your notes online. It’s got a couple of unique features, though, that make it worth a look even among the more established and popular choices.

The coolness, as I see it, starts from the very beginning: you can sign into 3Banana with your Google account. No new credentials to remember (or forget), just sign in with Google.

Once you’re signed in, start adding notes to 3Banana. Adding notes is as simple as you might think – type or paste something into the box, and click “Save Note”. What’s cool about 3Banana is that it accepts all kinds of tags and text – it’ll recognize phone numbers as phone numbers, links as links, and even supports embedded codes so you can watch movies within 3Banana.

There are a bunch of ways to add a note to 3Banana, and they’re all simple and easy. There’s a bookmarklet for adding notes from other websites, as well as an iPhone app and an Android app. They’re all free, all simple, and all support the same great features as the regular 3Banana interface.

One of my favorite features of 3Banana is the sharing – it’s great at letting you create and share everything from a single note to your whole notebook. At the bottom of every note, there are links to share it in a huge number of ways – email, Facebook, Twitter, or even just by a link. This makes 3Banana perfect for sharing information with friends, colleagues and anyone else in your life.

One other thing I like is the tagging system. Instead of tagging individual notes by dragging and dropping or manually adding tags, 3Banana uses something like Twitter’s hashtags. At the end of a note, if it’s a task, typing “#task” adds it to that category and makes it searchable under the “tasks” category.

3Banana isn’t the only application that does what it does, but it offers enough new features that it’s worth a look. The ability to recognize and use HTML code to create something of a rich website within every note, and to easily share the notes you want, are only a couple of the great reasons to check out the super-portable, super-simple 3Banana.

What’s your favorite note-taking app? Share your wisdom in the comments.

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Web Annotation For Students or Professionals From WebNotes (+100 Invites)

David Pierce — Sat, 30 May 2009 21:00:20 +0000

WebNotes is a company I’ve covered before here at MakeUseOf, and one I’m a big fan of – it’s an application that lets you highlight, annotate, and save web pages to make your research easier. No more digging through pages to find the six words you needed – you can save it as a highlighted page, or just save the highlights themselves. There’s notes taking, sharing, and much more, all within the WebNotes service.

Last week, WebNotes released a new product called “WebNotes Pro.” It may not be the most cleverly-titled project ever, but WebNotes Pro offers some fantastic new features for a whole new demographic of users.

Whereas the original WebNotes (which still exists, is free, and works great) was designed for a more social group, allowing you to share annotations and use WebNotes as something of a social-bookmarking service, WebNotes Pro is geared more toward the professional user.

As WebNotes sees it, the professional or student doesn’t need to share notes and highlights, they just need to be able to find and access them again, quickly and easily. To that end, you can create multi-colored highlights (fantastic if you’re cross-researching or stumble across something interesting but unrelated), as well as add sticky notes to pages.

Notes and highlights are automatically saved to your WebNotes account as you go – no saving or refreshing necessary. From your WebNotes box, you can view the original web page, the page with your annotations on top, or just your notes and highlights. If you don’t want to highlight anything, WebNotes can just be a bookmarking service.

Once you’ve got a bunch of annotations and notes, WebNotes lets you easily compile them into a document that you can share with your friends or colleagues – it creates a nice, simple page that you can email or distribute.

But I’ve saved the best feature for last – PDF markup. For students or professionals, reading PDF is an all-too-frequent occurrence. Memos, books, and the like all seem to come in the ubiquitous PDF format, leaving you with two options – either waste the paper printing, or go without any highlighting or markup. In order to do either of those things on a PDF, you’d need Adobe Acrobat, which isn’t exactly cheap.

With WebNotes Pro, you can now mark up PDF files to your heart’s content, in exactly the same way as you would any other Web page. PDFs are saved to your organizer, which creates for a browsable, annotation-friendly interface for all your PDF documents.

WebNotes Pro comes in one of two formats – either a toolbar (for Firefox or Internet Explorer) or a bookmarklet (which works with most browsers). Either one is simple to install, and makes annotating and saving pages much easier.

For me as a student, WebNotes Pro is a fantastic tool – it’s great for taking notes on reading, doing research, and keeping all my relevant material in one place that’s accessible from anywhere. As a professional, it’s nice to have a way to organize and mark up the PDF documents and websites that are relevant to what I do. WebNotes has brought me even closer to being totally paperless, and is saving me tons of time daily.

WebNotes Pro costs $9.99/month (again, there’s still the great free product), and there’s a two-week free trial. Students with a .edu email address get an automatic 50% discount.

And YOU, as a MUO reader, get an even better discount – we’ve got 100 invites for 3 free months of WebNotes Pro. Try it out, decide how you feel, and either sign up or drop back to the free option.

The first hundred people to click this link, will be taken to the WebNotes website, where you can activate your 3-month subscription, courtesy of your friends at MakeUseOf!

What do you think? Are you sold or are you sticking with Evernote? Share with us in the comments.

Photo: Megapixel Eyes

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3 Dead-simple Apps For Note Taking & List Making

Tina — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:01:07 +0000

When you want to jot down a thought or make a list, the last thing you need is a tool with tons of pomp that will lag you down.

So what do you do? Do you write on a piece of paper? Or do you open a text editor and save the note or list to your desktop? I find both alternatives anything but optimal.

Personally, I have worked with digital post-it notes in the past. They ended up cluttering my screen which got really annoying because I prefer a very cleaned up, empty desktop.

Here are the alternative free note taking applications that work for me.

Note Taking with NoteScraps (Windows)

NoteScraps is a most simple but extraordinarily easy to use and handy tool for Windows XP and Vista. Notes are centrally stored within the program window (see screenshot below) and the program resides in the Windows tray.

With the free version you can create up to 10 notes. I found no limitations as to the length of each note. You can type 14 lines of text, after that the note retains its maximum size and a scrollbar is introduced for more. URLs are recognized and active, however you cannot add images. Furthermore, you cannot format text.

As strange as it may seem, you can neither delete notes nor change their order. A note is deleted when it’s empty. And the last note you created or edited is the first one in the list. The best thing is that you can search your notes. All notes that contain the keyword remain visible, while all others vanish for the moment.

So this tool really keeps its promise. It’s simple and elegant.

List Making with Printable Checklist (online)

Printable Checklist is a website that lets you create reader- and printer-friendly lists. It’s super simple and easy to use. The screenshot below should not require any further comments.

But just in case…

Apparently you click “Add item” in the bottom left to add a line, you click “OK” to finish editing an item and when you scroll over an item with the mouse a red cross appears which you click to remove that item from the list.

Karl did a review on the site a few weeks back, see A No-Nonsense Online Checklist Creator.

If these tools were way too simple for you, maybe the next one is what you’re looking for.

Note Taking and List Making with Gubb (online)

This last online tool is more complex, but offers a lot more options and room for creativity. Gubb works very intuitively, only that notes are called lists. Of course you can add items to your list and edit them, additionally you can add a comment, a due date, rate each item or move it to another list.

The screenshot reveals even more features. Obviously you can print, email and even text your lists to someone. Beyond that you can share selected lists with other users or take a list off your “homepage” (main page), i.e. hide it. Through the Lists tab at the top of the screen you can view your hidden lists and un-hide them.

Which tool appeals to you the most? Do you still prefer pen and paper and why? Or can you recommend a different tool? We appreciate your feedback!

Image credits: bizior from fotolia

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