There are a lot of wonderful webapps and they all have a number of ways in which you can interact with them. Generally it happens via a bookmarklet, which is essentially a piece of javascript giving your browser a group of instructions on how to perform a sequence of activities like adding a bookmark, posting a tweet or a blog post, and so on.

I still remember the first time I installed one of them: the Delicious bookmarklet. Wonderful: I am surfing the web, I find an interesting website, I press the bookmarklet and “wow! The magic happens”… without leaving the page, I see a smaller window prefilled with the page url, the page title and the possibility to add some words of description and some tags as well. In no time my bookmark collection grew to more than 500 entries. And, by the way, I still use it!

Since then, I subscribed to other great services, and practically each one of them has its bookmarklet to help you perform the core actions of the webservice itself (to name a few: twine, diigo, wordpress, posterous, remember the milk, …). Too bad, the bookmarks bar soon became so crowded that I had to create a “share” folder in which I placed all the bookmarklets with the result that one of their main benefits (one-click access to some features) was frustrated.

A couple of days ago I discovered Quix, a new little app that basically acts like a meta-bookmarklet. All you have to do is installing the bookmarklet (by dragging it on the bookmarks bar) and you are all set.

Clicking on the Quix button you are presented with a small window in which you can perform a number of actions. For example you can perform a google search typing g and the word you want to search, or you can invoke the delicious bookmarklet by typing db (while on the page you want to bookmark), or you can post the page on posterous by typing p (while on the page you want to post).

You have to learn a little bit of lingo, because you can interact with many web services and each one of them will have its dedicated key, but typing “help” in the box will bring you to a page with a listing of the commands you can use. One of the coolest thing is that you can integrate it with your browser of choice and assign a shortcut to invoke the Quix app directly from the keyboard.

And obviously, for the geeks out there, you can create your bookmarklet. All you have to do is learning a bit of syntax and add it to the Quix code using the extend page.

Ain’t it cool?

When I (happily) switched to Mac some months ago, I had to find a proper replacement to the set of software tools I used to rely on in a Windows environment. It has not been painful but I must say that I missed very much FastStone, the freeware screen capture tool that I also reviewed in a previous article.

Recently, while I was looking for a wireframing tool for a web project I am involved in, I had the chance to test a lovely piece of software named Skitch, an image sharing and screen capture utility, that really impressed me for its user friendliness and pack of features.

If you want to test it (highly recommended) you have to sign up for an account on the Skitch’s website, and download the desktop client. The application consists of a small resizable window and all the tools you will need are placed on its borders under the form of buttons and toolbars.

You can load an image into Skitch via the menu or simply by dragging and dropping it into the main window. The image can then be annotated, edited, saved and shared with your friends via the Skitch’s website or through another webservice (like Twitter, Mobile Me or Flickr), a discussion forum, an email message, an instant message and so on.

But where Skitch really rocks is when you need to take screenshots.

Using your mouse and the command, option and shift keys you can easily snap the entire screen or a portion of it, a window or the Skitch’s window itself. You can also take snapshots through your webcam and then save the image locally or on your Skitch web account in the desired format (jpg, png, gif, bmp, svg, tif, …).

The images and screenshots can be easily resized simply by dragging one of the main window’s corners and cropped by dragging the image’s borders. Clicking on the “drag me” tab placed on the lower border of the application window you can drag the image and drop it practically everywhere: in a mail message, in a chat window, in an open document, on the desktop, ….

Your Skitch account can be easily configured to post images directly to other web services like Twitter and Flickr and you will also have a maildrop address in order to post images by any device that can send an email. The images can be sent directly to your Twitter account (with the image URL automatically converted in a tiny URL) if you send them to maildrop_address+twitter @ skitch.com (read here for more details).

Through the history button you can access directly the images and screenshots you saved both on your hard disk and web space.

Skitch is developed by a team of smart people led by Cris Pearson and Keith Lang two of the original founders of Plasq (the company that developed Comic Life), and it’s Mac only software. If you want a freeware screen capture tool that can work in a Windows environment you can try FastStone or, for a set of features similar to Skitch, Jing (Windows and Mac).

For deeper feeling of Skitch’s look and feel and feature-pack or simply to see it in action, take a look at the introductory video.

Are you looking for a fast, easy and reliable screen capture freeware tool? You will like FastStone Capture.

The first name that comes to mind in this field is SnagIt. It’s very powerful and packed with interesting features. But it’s not free, you have to pay 39.95$ for a licensed version, which is quite a high price if you are not planning to use all of them.

Recently, the guys at TechSmith made available the download of a full-licensed previous version (7.2.5) for free (with the possibility of upgrading to the latest version at half the price), but the offer expired on Jan 7th. Too bad!

The latest version (5.9) of FastStone Capture is now shareware (30 day free-trial and 19.95$ for a lifetime license), but you still can find easily the freeware version (5.3). I’ve been using this tool for several weeks and I must say I’m really satisfied. It’s easy and reliable and I’m seriously considering an upgrade to the paid version.

Let’s take a quick look at its features.

First of all the download size is minimal (only 1.3 Mbs) and it will run on systems equipped with every version of Windows, at least (!) 256 Mbs of RAM, 5 Mbs of hard disk space and a mouse.

When you run the executable you will see a floating Capture Panel (that will hide itself automatically when you enter in screen capture mode) with a collection of icons.

The meaning of the icons is very intuitive: you can capture the active window (Shift+PrtSc is the hotkey), a window or an object (Alt+PrtSc), a rectangular region (Ctrl+PrtSc), a freehand region (Shift+Ctrl+PrtSc), the entire screen (PrtSc) or an entire scrolling window (Ctrl+Alt+PrtSc). The hotkeys provided are the default ones, but you can customize them (as well as many other things) in the settings window.

I found particularly useful the Scroll Refresh Time option. Increasing this value (the default is 50 milliseconds) will be of help when capturing an entire scrolling window if you notice that the capture engine cannot keep up with the scrolling speed (blank lines in the screenshot).

As you can see below, another interesting feature is that you can easily define from the Capture Panel where the screenshot you are taking will be sent, as well as other things like the possibility of defining a caption, an edge or a watermark image or if you want to include the mouse pointer in the screenshot itself.

The included image editor is fast and useful for basic image editing purposes.

When FastStone Capture is minimized in the tray area, it will use very few resources (only 480kb) and you can always access its features from the menu that will be opened with a right-click on the tray icon.

From the same menu you can launch the Screen Magnifier and the Screen Color Picker that can also be added to the Capture Panel via the Settings window.

As I was saying before, FastStone Capture is no longer available as freeware software starting from version 5.4 but the features I showed in this article are all included in the freeware version.

The shareware version offers a number of enhancements like more edge effects, an enhanced screen magnifier, the possibility to send the screenshots directly to Word and Powerpoint, the possibility of capturing multiple windows and objects as well as multi-level menus, and a lot more. But if you are looking for a screen capture freeware tool the 5.3 freeware version will do a great job.

Highly recommended!

(and just in case you are wondering …no, WorthaWow is not affiliated with FastStone, TechSmith or any other website cited in this article, meaning that if you download this software we will not make money).

I’ve tried this little Gmail Login Switcher tool this morning and I must confess that it really made me happy. It allows you to instantly switch among all your Gmail accounts without having to log out from the account you’re logged in and then re-log in to the other account (very annoying if, for any reason, you have to check your email frequently).

Actually what this script does is replacing the “Sign Out” link located in the upper-right corner of the Google services with a drop-down menu. From that menu you can select one of your alternate Google accounts, and it will immediately logout and login to the other without any other user intervention.

Even if, once installed and configured, using the tool doesn’t require any particular ability, the installation process can put in little troubles the average internet user. Then, let’s show it in details.

Gmail Login Switcher Requirements

First of all, you must have all the following things in place:

Firefox. Sorry, the tool only works on Firefox. If you are still following the Explorer, listen to me …leave it alone, join the Fox crew and don’t look back: it’s free, smarter …and you won’t regret it!

The new version of Gmail. If you are still using the old version, you will have to switch to the new one. It’s easy: login to Gmail and click on the “Newer version” link on the upper-right corner of the page. Then logout and repeat this operation for each of your Gmail accounts.

Greasemonkey extension installed. This will probably sounds a little exotic for most of you. Don’t worry: Greasemonkey is a Firefox add-on that “allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript” – just to use their own words. Well, install it and forget it! Go to the Greasemonkey homepage , click on the ‘install’ button, confirm that you want to install the add-on and restart Firefox.

At this point you will see a little monkey face on the status bar (lower-right corner of your Firefox window) If the monkey looks sad and grey , click once on the icon to activate.

Installing the Gmail Account Multi-Login script

Now that everything is in place, you can install and configure the script itself. Go to the script homepage and click on the black button on the right. Once again, Firefox will warn you, but go on. Done!

Configuring the Gmail Login etc.

Now that you have the script installed, login to one of your Gmail accounts and manually add all the Gmail accounts among which you want to be able to switch. To help you to do that, I’ve uploaded a short instructional video on YouTube. Hope this help…

Once finished with adding all your accounts to this Gmail login tool, you will be able to switch from an account to another simply selecting them from the drop menu.

Enjoy!