Personal information products

COMPUTERS AND allied technologies are used for numerous professional/personal activities - creating e-documents instead of paper documents, storing budget computations using spreadsheets, collecting and compiling information from the Net and filing e-mail messages from clients/friends. Would you not need a single interface to organise and easily access these Net- based and locally generated and stored products? If the answer is yes, please read on...

OneSpace

Enfish OneSpace is a free utility (6 MB) that lets you access the local and Net contents through a single interface. To access a file in one of your hard-disk folders or access a web site, you do not have to invoke the Windows Explorer or Net-browser, with this all-in one interface, which has the necessary features to shoulder these responsibilities. To use this utility, first you have to download the small set-up program from the site www.enfish.com and later run this program on-line. Once the program is successfully installed and invoked, you will get the OneSpace navigation interface. The software generates a master index of the various information products available in your machine such as your files, e-mails and web bookmarks and presents a neat interface (customisable) that provides hassle- free access to such information.

The navigation pane on the left of the window contains links to the various resources that lie in your machine and the Net. You can view your email or the links to visited web pages through this interface. To access the local content, click at the 'My computer ' folder (from the Navigation pane) and immediately you get the directory tree with all the files and folders listed in it.

The product comes with many built-in pages that contain many tabs that can be used to access web pages, make quick notes or add contact information. These pages can be considered your personal portal that lets you access the Net and local content. The product allows you to create your own customised `OneSpace pages' and the facility can be used to weave your personal portal page. To create a page, click at the `Create' button and the rest of the procedure is obvious. Once you create a new page, it will appear in the left navigation pane under 'Special Pages'. If you want, you can e-mail this customised portal page to a friend. To do this, right-click at the page's icon and access the option 'Send Page via Email' .

A talking-web assistant

Are you looking for a utility that automatically scans your mailbox periodically and displays a message heralding the arrival of a mail? Here is a utility, named CyberBuddy, that not only displays the `you have mail' message but also reads out the announcement for you. And this is just one of its multiple features. The program can be used to make important reminders to yourself; to periodically bring important news headlines on various subjects of interest to you while connected to the Net; for instant messaging with your friends who are also CyberBuddy users; for Net speed reporting; to monitor and report changes in specified site contents. The program can also be used to read clipboard contents and documents.

The utility can be configured by clicking the program icon available at the system tray. For instance, if you want the program to scan your POP3 mail boxes, right-click at the CyberBuddy icon and access the `Main program' option. Now, from the menu, click at the `e-mail' option, enter the details such as, mail server and user name into the appropriate box and click at the `Add' button - this way the program can be configured to access fifty POP3 email addresses. This free utility (1.4MB) can be downloaded from the site: http://yeayou.com/CyberBuddy/.

As the program is based on Microsoft Agents, CyberBuddy will download and install it also for you automatically, of course only if it is not already available in your machine. Microsoft Agent is a freely downloadable utility that helps programmers incorporate speech and animation features into their programs - for instance, if a web site author wants to introduce this feature, s/he can use a script to access the agent object. If you want to know how this is done, try out the site at: http://agent.microsoft.com/agent2/sdk/samples/html/jello.htm - readers who are not familiar with web designing techniques are cautioned not to attempt this.

Web snippets

All of us browse the Net with a specific objective and generally most sites contain information on many other subjects, which can distract us from our main focus. To make web browsing efficient, we need some mechanism that helps us steer clear of this information noise and lets us filter the information we prefer. Basically we need a tool that can collect the relevant information from a site and deliver it to us. The service Snippets.com does exactly this! Snippets collects the relevant information from various web sites (web snippets) and pushes them right into your desktop and automatically updates and alerts you on the changes that take place on the monitored information.

The program presents the selected snippets' icons at the bottom edge of the desktop. When you click at the icon, a small window filled with the information carried by the snippet pops up. The program has features that help you select your own snippets (from the available snippets) and group them (these groups are called drawers) according to some appropriate criteria (such as technology news snippets or stock snippets). To configure the snippets, right-click at the Snippets icon available at the tray- icon. The free Internet version of Snippets.com (1.7MB) can be downloaded from the site www.snippets.com.

J. Murali

(The author can be contacted at: murali27@satyam.net.in)

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Science & Tech
Next     : Question corner