Aviary

The new tools are Falcon and Talon – Talon is a Firefox browser plugin for capturing images, and Falcon is the image markup tool that lets you add shapes, lines, arrows and crop, resize and flip images.  If you’re not using Firefox, you can open Talon by either using an image from  your computer or take one from the web.  If you want to capture an entire web page just put aviary.com before the web page’s URL and the entire web page is scraped into Falcon.

Aviary’s claim of being fast was well justified in our testing.  After clipping an image with the Talon extension, it immediately opened in Falcon for editing.  You can also store the image directly on your desktop or host it on their servers.

It’s a very slick tool and can be useful if you want to capture images from the web and then either scale the image or markup it up for clarification.  I normally use and like Snagit, a $49.95 screen capture and manipulation tool, but for simple captures in the future, I expect to be using Falcon.  The plugin for capture is  especially useful if Firefox is one of the browsers you use.

The other tools in the Aviary suite include an image editor, a color editor, an effects editor and a vector editor.

Visit aviary.com to try it out.

If you one of those people who procrastinate and only get things done under pressure, maybe Forcedo.com is right for you.  It’s a free web service-To Do list, not unlike Gmail Tasks or Remember the Milk.  Forcedo  has a little extra punch in that it allows you to set a duration for how long you think a task should take.  When you start the task, you click a countdown timer and then try to beat the clock.

It’s cute, if a little gimmicky.  I find it difficult to believe anyone will use it for very long, but it could be useful to try a couple of tasks with the timer to see whether it helps, or how far off is your ability to estimate the time it takes to perform a task.

It took me 24 minutes to write this post, but I stopped and read my email, tut, tut, Dan.

[via webworkerdaily.com]

A bright new feature has been added to Google Docs.  They call it Insert Drawing because, well, you use it to insert a drawing in a Google Doc. 

It works in documents, presentations and spreadsheets and is simple enough for the supremely graphics challenged to use (read me).  You create art objects within the drawing made up of free hand scribbles, text labels and shapes that can be resized, rotated and adjusted and then further customized.

You can create a drawing by yourself or collaborate with a friend.  The tool is found in the Google doc menu, fittingly, under Insert.

For those of you that keep track of such things, Insert Drawings came from an acquisition Google did in 2007 of a startup called Tonic Systems.

They say more features will be added over time which is the Google way.

Read Google’s blog entry.

My attempt at art using Google Insert Drawing.

Let’s look at two of them.

To do’s, which they call “tasks”, can be nested.  I like this because it causes an outline effect which I like to use when I try to organize a list.

Lists can be shared -  That, of course, makes sense in a work group but think about your most basic workgroup, your family.  I see this as a great way to create a shared “honey do” list with your mate and kids.  I know we’re going to give it a try.

Sign up for CheckVist [via DOWNLOADSQUAD]

The idea of paying for stuff can be difficult — my father firmly believed that there was one thing real men never did — pay for parking.  He was from NYC, when we went there for visits, he was willing to park the car in another borough (or probably another state) and take the subway to our hotel before he would be exposed to the embarrassment of being seen “paying for parking”.

On this site, I encourage the use of free web services, freeware and open source software as substitutes for much commercial software, but sometimes I pay for it — I thought it might be interesting to look at what services for which I’m willing to pay and how I feel about them.  Let’s call this disclosure.

Evernote - I pay $5 a month for unlimited bandwidth and storage.  Evernote is my primary means of syncing information between computers and storing information.  The service is free for a generous amount of storage and bandwidth.

Audible - Audible is a service that allows you to download “audible”, get it, books.  They have most bestsellers and a pretty good selection of classics, history, bios, business and meditation books.  Since recorded books themselves tend to almost as pricey as their paper counterparts, I subscribe for $22.95 per month, I can download two books.  Perfect for dog and baby walking, downloaded to my iPod.

Tivo - I have two Tivos, for timeshifting Letterman and old movies, for one I pay $12 a month for service, the other has a lifetime plan so doesn’t cost anything.

Cable – I use Comcast for video and Internet.  The download speed is actually very close to the 16MB they advertise.  Other than a 250 GB a month cap, I have no comlaints.

Mobile Phone – I use Tmobile and have since 2003.  I have a grandfathered 5000-minutes-a-month for $99 plan which is too good to ever give up.  I use a G1 Android phone which at the moment is only available on Tmobile.  Their customer support answers immediately and has always been very helpful.

Web Hosting – I pay HostGator $35 for a reseller account and host more than 20 websites for my various businesses and still have more than enough resources for the forseeable future.

Wufoo -  This one may be a little geeky but it’s one of the coolest products I use.  Wufoo is a service that creates beautiful forms for web pages as well as collecting information the information that is entered.  If you do any web development and don’t use Wufoo, best check them out.

Increased Storage for Gmail and Picassa Web Albums – I pay $25 a year for extra storage for my much used Gmail account.  I’ve been using Gmail constantly, archiving pratically everything, since 2004 and have used 4.9GBs of storage.

Flickr - I pay $25 a year for a Pro account which pretty much allows me unlimited uploads and storage.

That’s it.  I’m quite satisified with all of them.  What are you willing to pay for?

A good idea might be to occasionally benchmark your service to get an idea for what you’re paying.

Speed.io is a free website that checks your download speed, upload speed, also the number of connections per minute and pings which are how long it takes you to get to the Internet.

Go ahead you might be surprised.

Speed.io [via Life Rock 2.0]

My connection results which are pretty good, thanks Comcast.