Nilai has quickly morphed from being a simple list of links to many lists of links each with their own purpose. Using Smart Labels, which are getting smarter with each release, members of Nilai can save links into these lists with a single click.

Sometimes the purpose of saving these links is to watch a video, listen to a bit of audio, or save a link to do something with at a later time. Starting today it is easier than ever to accomplish some of these tasks without ever having to leave Nilai. Previews make it simple to preview links to video, audio, photos, products, or even code. By simply saving a bookmark to the more than 12 supported services Nilai will automatically identify what the link is to and prepare a preview for you.

Let me give you some examples. The most obvious example is video. If you’re like me you don’t have time during your work day to watch YouTube videos that are being circulated throughout the web via Twitter or from my friends via instant messages. So I save these bookmarks to Nilai to watch later. Now, with Previews, Nilai will let me watch the video on my iPad, iPhone, or my Mac without needing to open the YouTube application or website. It looks like this.

For me audio works much the same way. Sometimes I have time to listen to a bit of audio – like on my 90-mile drive to work. For those occasions I prefer to subscribe to a podcast powered by Huffduffer. But, what if I want to listen to a bit of audio in a few hours on my computer or perhaps on my iPad at night in bed? Using Previews Nilai makes it possible to listen to audio from services like Huffduffer and others without needing to subscribe to a podcast or sync with iTunes. Quick, simple.

Video, audio, and photos is just the beginning. Here is a list of the services that Previews supports today: YouTube, Viddler, Flickr, Vimeo, Speaker Deck, Dribbble, Instagram, Twitpic, Skitch, Github’s Gists, Huffduffer. With many, many more on the way. In fact, I’ll tell you straight away that all of the popular recipe sites are next.

I hope you enjoy the new site and Previews.

His example shows an easy way to grab all of your Delicious bookmarks off of the service. Only, if you are a Terminal newb you may not have any idea what just happened after you run his suggested command.

So, my suggestion is to run the following command. First, open Terminal by opening the ~/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app or simply type Terminal into Spotlight and hit Enter. Then, run this command.

curl https://username:password@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all -o "delicious.xml"

That -o flag, or option, tells curl that you’d like to save the file. The filename that you’d like to use is in the quotes. Now, you’ll have a single XML file saved in your Home directory called delicious.xml with all of your Delicious Bookmarks.

What you do with that is up to you. Just about any text editor will allow you to read the .xml file.

Oh, and like Mr. Keith I’ll be posting all of my links back onto Delicious as well. I just have to write a quick plugin for WordPress. I’m sure I’ll find time for that sometime in 2011. I’ve never thought of doing that (no idea why) but I am going to start. I don’t know what the future holds for Delicious but either way it is fun and easy to “dual post” the links.

A few days ago I updated to the latest nightly build of Chromium, something I do every few days using TechCrunch’s Chrome-Up application, and was elated to discover that Chromium finally has a Bookmark Manager. Up until this release I was unable to edit any of the bookmarks that I had imported from Safari into Chromium. It was frustrating.

I’ve now finally been able to update, sort and delete my bookmarks (which are automatically synced with my Google Account). Something I wasn’t able to do for months and has taken my already fairly bubbly adoration of Chromium and taken it to the next level. A clean browser is a happy browser.

I was surprised, though, at the overall design and implementation of the Bookmark Manager in Chromium. It feels very rushed. Even though I use a nightly build, which is as cutting-edge as you can possibly get, I expected to see a very different approach than what is pictured above.

Chromium’s New Tab, History, Downloads and Extensions pages are very different from what we see in most other browsers. The New Tab page, as an example, is much more like Safari’s Top Sites page (although not nearly as cool). The Downloads page I find particularly useful. It shows up like a Web page and shows you everything that you downloaded recently, by day, with a link back to the page it originated from, a link to the file itself on your own system, etc. Functionally it is very much the same as Safari and Firefox’s Downloads pop-up window but Chrome’s is altogether nicer, in my opinion, because it shows up in a tab.

I expected Chromium to have the same sort of “Web page” feeling to its Bookmark Manager. Maybe this is a case of ‘don’t fix it if it ain’t broken’ but I think there is huge potential for browsers to reinvent the way bookmarks are managed. Why not plug into some social bookmarking sites? (I know there are Firefox plugins that do stuff like this) Why not give us an unlimited amount of metadata to attribute to a bookmark? I remember when Firefox implemented shortcodes for bookmarks, like ‘gr’ for Google Reader as an example, and you could just type ‘gr’ + Enter and off you went to that bookmark. I would love to see that in Chromium (and Safari).

And what about the plus, minus, and eye buttons on the toolbar? I have never, ever, ever seen anything like those on any operating system. Perhaps I’m looking too far into what are basically alpha level builds. Maybe what will end up being released with Chrome for Mac will be vastly different than what is appearing currently in Chromium (I hope so).

And don’t get me wrong, I’m extremely happy to finally be able to edit my bookmarks in Chromium and I always look forward to the next nightly update.

However, more and more data is being stored “in the cloud” and so Spotlight sometimes needs to learn new tricks to keep up with the times.  Google Docs is a perfect example of cloud computing/storage.  I use it for personal documents that I need to collaborate with people on and Viddler uses it every single day.

Google’s Precipitate “… lets you search for and launch the information you have stored in the cloud from within Spotlight or Google Desktop for Mac”.  Essentially it does something I’ve always wanted to do; create a simple file and link it to the Web.  Spotlight indexes the file’s information, but the link opens a browser ((Now I just need to force Spotlight to open these links in Fluid.app and I’d be all set.)).

Give it a spin!

Source: precipitate – Google Code.

As it stands I post what I’m currently doing to Twitter, I am testing out Pownce with mobile blogging, events, links, and files, I post mobile phone photos to Flickr (as well as the occasional screenshot), videos go on Viddler, bookmarks end up on Ma.gnolia, tasting notes end up on Cork’d, and my thoughts on Apple products find their way to TUG.n.

It is exhausting, and starting to become a little bit of a headache.

There are definitely many pros to using each of these services, as I believe each and every one is built very well for their purpose, and each have their own thriving community of users that make you feel right at home. Services like Viddler and Flickr also make sharing videos and photos extremely cost effective. Even with these benefits I always feel as though I’m spreading myself out too wide, so I think I’m going to start pulling all of these bits together here on my site in some fashion.

As it stands, I use my front page as the main way to show the latest activity on each of these services. This has been fine for a while but I now would like to change from aggregating everything to storing everything here, and perhaps pushing updates to the services, rather than the other way around. This isn’t going to be an easy thing to accomplish at first, but once I get everything setup, I think I’ll be much happier and have much more control of what and how I share.

There are a few other benefits to this change, at least for me. Cutting down on distraction is always a goal of mine and my most recent try at this has been to remove a huge portion of my Twitter and Flickr “friends” so that I cut down on a lot of the noise. I’ve also switched the Twitter notices preference to not include @replies from people I am not following, and this has really cut down on the chatter that I’m not even part of. I believe I went from seeing hundreds of Tweets per day to now only seeing a few an hour. Actually, I’m not even seeing that many since I’ve now decided to keep Twitterrific hidden in the background until I need it. I’ll still see @cdevroe messages, so that will still be a valuable way to communicate, but will also cut down on distractions. A win-win.

I’m going to begin working on one service at a time, slowly bringing it all together, and giving each a home here on my site. I’ll try my best to keep a log of my experiences doing each of these, jotting down why I’m handling it the way that I am, and asking for feedback as I find the best solution for me as I go forward. Of course, I’ll be using WordPress as my backbone for this – as I’ve always found it to be extremely flexible and powerful enough for me to do just about everything I want to do.

I’m looking at this as both a fun project and an experiment. Have you ever thought of doing this, or can you point me to some good examples of those who have?

The first is “related posts”. There are countless related posts plugins out there and all of them work fairly well but since I already use the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for my tagging efforts, and it has a function for related posts, I’m using a slightly tweaked version of that. When WordPress 2.3 is released, and tags are included by default along with a way to import all of my UTW tags, I may need to adjust the way I handle related posts. Until then, these seem to work well enough.

The second was I’ve always wanted to utilized my Ma.gnolia bookmarks better. Bookmarks seem to come and go and rarely are they ever used as a really valueable resource. I think the way I am using them now will add a lot of value to bookmarks that I’ve stored on Ma.gnolia, even if I had saved them there a very long time ago*. What’s more is that I’m adding value to my posts too!

The way I am using my bookmarks is through “related links” which can be found just to the right of the related posts on the bottom of every post on my site. I’m using Ma.gnolia’s API to search my Ma.gnolia account for bookmarks tagged with the same tags as the current post and constructing a list of the latest five of those. I’ll be working on extending this somehow to show every applicable bookmark but I’ve found that five should provide enough of a resource in most cases.

So come to the site, take a look, and let me know what you think. I’ll be releasing this new “Ma.gnolia Related” plugin after I’ve let it run on my site for a little while and I’m able to clean up the code a little. Oh, and it uses an as yet unreleased method argument of Ma.gnolia’s API – so I may need to wait until the next version of their API is officially released. (And to those that will probably wonder, yes I’m caching requests. Expertly, I may add. )

The first thing I’m going to tackle is Safari (though I believe that Safari should be updated as a separate application and not part of the OS). I’ll try to focus my thoughts from fixes, to actual bugs, to feature requests.

Fixes

The following are not “bugs” in the traditional sense. I believe that most of the following was done intentionally, I just do not think they should have been done.

Setting your default browser is currently held within Safari’s preference panel. This “feature” definitely gets on the nerves of many and really I can’t figure out why this resides in here. In order to switch from Safari to Firefox you’d need to first open Safari and tell it you want Firefox to be the default browser.

This isn’t to say that Firefox (and other browsers) do not ask if you’d like to use them as the default browser on your system – but this does not mean that this is the proper location for this preference. What if I uninstalled Safari?

The blue RSS button at the top of the browser is fairly misleading. Apple is attempting to “brand” a doc-spec. In other words, they are saying that all “feeds” are RSS. Obviously this is not true. I do not want that icon to change from RSS to ATOM to “WHATEVER” when it applies, I’d much rather see Apple use the unified feed icons to go along with the unified feed theory (another post I have to bring over to my local site soon).

Multiple feeds detection kinda goes along with the above. I suppose this could be filed under a new feature request – but I feel like they might have kept it simple on purpose. I wouldn’t mind seeing a short list pop up with the available feeds for that site. Obviously this would only be useful if web masters actually listed these feeds in their documents.

Feature requests

Safari is definitely a browser for the average user, but I’d like to see a few of the “not so elementary” features from other browsers find their way into the Leopard release of Safari. Why? Because I’d much rather use Safari than Firefox if it only had the following.

Bookmark keywords (click to zoom)

Bookmark keywords is something I use heavily in Firefox. I am not sure how widely used this feature actually is, since even browsers like Flock do not currently have this feature built in (and Flock is built off of the same engine and core as Firefox). Side note: I’ve been told that Flock 1.0 (due out sooner than later) will have these features as it will be built off of the Firefox 2.0 release.

To explain really quick, for those that are not familiar with this feature – Bookmark keywords allow you to setup shortcuts for your bookmarks. Let’s say that you had a rather long URL that you visited often, and you didn’t want to traverse your long list of bookmarks in order to get to that page without typing in the name manually, you can setup a shorter keyword for that. (see screenshot) You type in that keyword, and poof, you’re there.

Searchable history is not something I use every day, but when you need it – you find it very handy. I suppose I could liken a searchable history to Spotlight. Before Spotlight was introduced we never knew how much of a pain it was to find things on our local system. But, after having Spotlight for awhile now, I find it indispensable. Such is the case with searchable history. Safari’s history menu is crude – and needs a significant update.

Update: As Nathan pointed out the history in Safari is indeed searchable. But I would have never found it if he hadn’t told me where it was. So the UI needs to be adjusted to make this much more accessible.

Final thoughts

Really my requests for Safari are very light and don’t hold a ton of water when it comes to my decision to use Firefox instead of Safari. There are other, underlying, reasons why I use Firefox that are much more “under the hood” type of reasons. For instance, many WYSIWYG editors inside of various web applications do not function properly within Safari. Hopefully, with the very latest version of Web kit no doubt being included in the upcoming release of Safari, we’ll see some of this functionality made available.

I remember the first day I wanted to jump ship from Safari to Firefox. I wanted to use Google Calendar and couldn’t because Safari was not a supported browser. But now that I rarely use any online web applications – I may switch back and deal with my little niggles mentioned above until they become available (hopefully) in the next release.

Note: Be sure to check out other parts of my Leopard wish list listed below:

1. Part one: Safari
2. Part two: Mail
3. Part three: iChat
4. Part three: Finder

[tags]leopard, mac os x, osx, macintosh, apple, safari, wish list, browsers, flock, firefox, bookmarks, history, rss, feeds, atom[/tags]
[slug]leopard-wishes-pt1-safari[/slug]

Flickr provides me with a great way to share photos with friends and family, and it has some useful tools for me to tag (categorize) as well as geotag (or note where I took the photo), and it lets me connect with different sets of people by using Flickr’s groups. These are all great. However the data that I put into Flickr is not mine and without using the API I will never be able to benefit too greatly from putting in the time it takes to utilize all of Flickr’s tools.

Del.icio.us is a great way to post your favorite URLs, tag (categorize) them, and make some small notes. Obviously there is the entire community aspect too though I’ve never taken full advantage of any of them. Also I do not use del.icio.us (boy is that annoying to type everytime) as my bookmark storage solution.

So I don’t fully utilize the two major web services that I would otherwise really like to — so perhaps something else could be done to openly share data and yet reap the most benefit from the time I put into cataloging it. I think my personal site is the perfect platform for this, and I’m going to start making both dramatic and subtle changes to the site and its architecture in order to do this.

Please “stand by” while I make some adjustments (which will probably take a total of two or three weeks to make, though you should start seeing some of these changes within the next few days).

[tags]cdevroe.com, updates, flickr, delicious, bookmarks, photos, sharing, web services, api[/tags]