Tumblr apps for iPhone and Android get revamped Dashboard originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 04 Nov 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

In the words of MotoDiary's creator, a blog is not a journal. Sometimes you need a secure, quiet location to jot down your notes.

MotoDiary is an attempt to provide you with just such a place. It's HTML5-powered, but it feels very minimalistic - even austere. Your notes are encrypted locally using your browser's power (even if you're writing from a mobile device), and then uploaded to the server.

There isn't any sort of advertising at this point; the creator says he tried to replicate the blankness of pen and paper as best as he could, and as you can see in the screenshot, it is indeed quite plain.

A large part of the appeal here is how cross-browser it is. It doesn't work with Firefox 3.6x, but it does work with Chrome and Safari, so you can start a note on your commute home using your mobile device, and complete it later from the PC at home.

Sadly, one thing which did not work well for me is right-to-left text entry; Android's native support for RTL is quite decent, but somehow this application didn't play nice when I tried writing Hebrew. The screen scrolled all the way to the right, but my text was entered at the left side (incorrectly). So I couldn't actually see what I was writing.

As long as your language of choice flows from left to right, though, MotoDiary is a viable option to check out.

MotoDiary is a cross-device encrypted personal journal originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 10 Oct 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Download Squad welcomes two new writers! originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 06 Oct 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Letters of Note is a fantastic personal project by Shaun Usher. It's a clean looking blog with some extraordinary content: historical letters by people like Franz Kafka, Ray Bradbury, Jochen Rindt (the only posthumous Formula One World Champion), and other celebrities.

It's not all celebrities, though. The letter in the screenshot, for instance, was written by a bank manager from Hiroshima on May 22, 1950, and it's addressed to an American safe maker. The bank manager praises the quality of the safe, since it survived Little Boy's atomic blast. Today's letter is an extremely long diatribe by none other than Franz Kafka.

Each letter comes with an original high-resolution scan, a meticulous transcript (in the original language), and a very readable translation. The transcript includes any and all mistakes in the original - double spaces and all.

I find it remarkable that Shaun can get all of these collectors to send him letters. Each letter I've read so far has been illuminating, fascinating, and highly personal. These were obviously not meant as public PR statements, and they give a rare glimpse into the writer's personality and the circumstances in which they were written. I, for one, hope that Letters of Note survives far into the future.

Letters of Note showcases historically significant letters originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 28 Sep 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Microsoft has just announced that it's teaming up with WordPress on Live Spaces blogs. According to Microsoft, Windows Live Spaces has 30 million active users -- so this is a significant boost for the WordPress.com platform.

Some of the highlights of the migration:

• Microsoft will redirect all Spaces URLs to WordPress.com, so users won't lose any visitors.
• Spaces is going to be shut down in March.
• Migration should be almost painless -- posts, media, comments, and links will all be moved automatically.

Personally, I think it's very nice to see Microsoft teaming up with another company like this. This is a fairly major move, and it does require some guts -- though it now allows Microsoft to focus on software for blogging (Live Writer) instead of worrying about maintaining a blog platform.

Microsoft migrating 30 million Live Spaces blogs to WordPress.com originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 27 Sep 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Internet Explorer 9 interface streamlined, brings unified address and search bar, speed dial originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 15 Sep 2010 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

After 9/30, if you've migrated your blog to TypePad, any OpenID requests to your blog will have authentication delegated to TypePad.

TypePad is also an OpenID provider, so the mechanism of delegation that we're using is perfect for that.

Vox shuts down, users can migrate to TypePad, Posterous or Wordpress originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 03 Sep 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

NewsBlur is a very beautiful feed reader that's laden with tons of JavaScript, but it utterly lacks any form of documentation.

It's an open source project by the talented Samuel Clay, who has been working on it for 15 months now. He's currently working on an iPhone version, but the regular version is very impressive in itself.

The sources are hosted over on GitHub, and the project uses the Django Web framework for Python. This means that you can probably install it on your own server and break free from the big G. But unlike Fever, which is another server-based reader, NewsBlur has built-in multi-user support, and it's free. So, you don't have to install it on your own server to use it; you can just go to the NewsBlur site and open an account.

NewsBlur lets you import your current feeds from Google Reader. It lets you vote articles up and down, and it uses your input to figure out what you might like to read in the future. It then marks articles appropriately so that you can (hopefully) read just the stuff that you're interested in out of the sea of RSS feeds that you've been reading.

To really see if the intelligence works, you have to use it for a while, which is something I haven't done. This is a very impressive project, but I feel that the lack of documentation (not even an About page) is holding it back. I would have given you a complete screenshot tour of it, but it's very difficult when you don't know what anything does.

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NewsBlur is a slick, impressive, undocumented RSS reader originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 23 Aug 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

WordPress.com can now tap Zemanta's magic photoifying, taggy and related linky juice originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 19 Aug 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Thxthxthx was brought to my attention by commenter Vitor when I wrote about Dear Meat.

There are distinct similarities, but these are two different beasts. While Dear Meat is an open (if curated) forum, thxthxthx is one woman's quest to express her gratitude for one thing per day. That woman is Leah Dietrich, an LA-based creative director/writer.

The project seems to have a bit of a history; it's not very new (tell me in the comments exactly when she started it - it doesn't say on the site).

I've learned several things from this site:

• A personal blog can work, as long as it has a point and is unique.
• Shorter texts are better than longer ones.
• If it's art, it doesn't have to be searchable.
• If you have a personal message but still want to get a bit of recognition, you have to persist, persist, persist. I'm sure that her 5,678 "Likes" on Facebook did not all come in one day.

I'm not saying that she does it for the recognition, of course. But I do find it interesting to take such a blog and try to dissect it a little bit in order to see what makes it work. (Apparently, Seth Godin agrees, but I couldn't find where he linked to thxthxthx.)

Comment follow-up: thxthxthx is one woman's quest to be thankful originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 18 Aug 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading WordPress for Android is the smoothest and most functional smartphone app I've ever used

WordPress for Android is the smoothest and most functional smartphone app I've ever used originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 13 Aug 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Happy SysAdmin day! originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 30 Jul 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Download Squad tips its hat: Speed Dial for Google Chrome originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 24 Jul 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Posterous can now import from Blogger: let the exodus begin! originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 06 Jul 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

We first covered Glass back at SXSW, with a video interview. Glass is a very aesthetic and tight combo of website plus Firefox add-on; it allows you to place notes ("Post-it" style) over any website, and then share those notes in a Tumblr-like stream so that your friends can see them (and comment).

Glass is very social; you can send a note to your friends, and you have a "feed" that shows whatever you or your friends have commented on. The feed only shows the text of each note; you don't get a thumbnail of the website that you commented on. That's not very convenient, but they might fix it by the official release. Generally, the "beta" label is warranted, but not because it crashes; it's just that there are some rough spots, in terms of interface and usability, that still need some TLC.

Your feed feels like a micro-blog, but it's not. For one thing, it doesn't output an RSS feed. So, it's aimed at groups of users who all use the site together in order to share and comment about things they find on the Web.

As I've already said, one of Glass's strongest points is how good it looks. It's far from being the only "sticky-note" service, but Glass is definitely the nicest-looking one I've seen. That's why I decided to give you a screenshot tour of the beta, which you can see after the fold.

[UPDATE: We now have an invite code for everyone! Just type in DLSquad and you're good to go!]

Continue reading DLS review and tour: slick Web-sharing tool Glass

DLS review and tour: slick Web-sharing tool Glass originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 18 Jun 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Continue reading Wordpress 3.0 arrives, with multi-blog support and new default theme

Wordpress 3.0 arrives, with multi-blog support and new default theme originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 18 Jun 2010 08:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

For some people and in some situations, using a regular RSS reader is not feasible. Sometimes you may want to, or have to, listen to your feeds, rather than read them.

BlogRadio is one possible free solution for such a use case. It's an AIR application, which purportedly uses a "natural voice". Excited, I downloaded it to marvel at what new text-to-speech technology they may have cooked up; I was disappointed to find extremely synthesized and mechanical voices, which are a far cry from the top of the line in current text-to-speech technology (pun definitely intended, and I hope it brightened up your day; I'm here all week). [I don't get it... -Ed]

What's good about the application is that it's free and cross-platform, and that it correctly parses RSS feeds (obviously, since this is all it does). So perhaps it is a better solution that using a generic screen reader with a regular feed reader, because it is context-aware and does not read any extraneous information off the blog, but just the content of the post you're currently reading.

It's not something I would use on a routine basis, but as I said, it may come in handy under certain circumstances. I just hope they do something about that text-to-speech engine ...

BlogRadio is a text-to-speech RSS feed reader originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 07 Jun 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Posterous blogging platform gets static pages, customizable from your browser originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 06 Jun 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Screenpresso, my favorite free utility for taking screenshots, has just updated to version 1.1.

The most notable change in this version is that Screenpresso can now "clean" transparent title bars in screenshots; this means that even if you take a screenshot of a window in front of another window, it would still come out crispy-clean.

This was one of the major features which "Goliath" Snagit had over "David" Screenpresso in my extensive Snagit 10 review. In fact, you can see a comparison of two screenshots (clean vs. "regular") in the review itself.

Screenpresso 1.1 also boasts some added sharing features. While Twitter sharing is still present, it has been joined by E-Mail, Gmail, Flickr, Evernote, Facebook and FTP sharing. That's a pretty impressive array of options. I didn't test sharing too much, so If you're more social than I am let me know how these work for you in the comments. It would also be nice if I could "share" to a local folder, because I do put screenshots in my Dropbox every now and then. Alas, this option does not currently exist.

Screenpresso's free version is pretty close to perfect now. One annoyance that remains is that the program insists naming the screenshots folder "screenshots," even if you explicitly set a different path. It just goes ahead and sets up a "screenshots" folder under that path, which is obviously not what you want it to do when you specify a path manually. The good news is that the Screenpresso guys assure me this is being worked on.

Screenpresso updates to 1.1, adds background cleaning originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 03 Jun 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

InfoWorld takes misguided jabs at Microsoft over MSE updates originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 03 Jun 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.