Running Commentary

The two local storage mechanisms in HTML5 , 'LocalStorage' and 'SessionStorage' are really nifty when you need to store the data temporarily but don't want to involve any server side interaction. I wanted to create a small HTML-form page which would allow user to enter data in various fields and on submitting the form, just show the data submitted in a text-format (easy for copy-paste). And if needed allow the data to be edited by repopulating the data in the fields. Something like this: On submitting, the entered data shows up like this: On reloading the page, once again we get the first page with data populated in the fields. Pretty cool eh? I decided to use sessionStorage for this. Idea is very simple (and you will notice that implementation is as simple!). Before starting with sessionStorage or JS code, let's take a look at the form HTML code: <form id="bct" > < label>Problem Description/Current Behavior: < /l...

Before you start mocking me for using Yahoo! Mail, let me explain that this is NOT my primary mail account and I use Gmail and Outlook.com for my daily use. Yes, this Yahoo! account was once my daily haunt but that was during college days and those days are long gone. I don't use Yahoo! Mail much but still there are some group subscriptions and I just log in once in a while to see what's happening in those forgotten groups. And due to this reason, I have always kept track of changes in Yahoo! Mail and the fact is that you can blame them for everything but not really lack of trying. Though most of those tries just ended up cluttering the UI and adding somewhat needless features. However, now we hear that new CEO Marissa Mayer is focusing once again on the mail and first major product to come out is Yahoo! Mail app for Windows 8. So how is it? The Login screen is pretty neat and purple background with an envelope watermark is very pleasing, very Yahoo!. However why ...

Larry Dignan made a good point about innovation in this post: Do your part: Visit an alternative search engine by ZDNet 's Larry Dignan -- Charles S. Knight has compiled a handy list of the top 100 alternative search engines on Read/Write Web. The one problem: No one has time to check them out. Indeed, Knight notes that people use the four main search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com) for 99.9% of their searches. That fact leads to another [...] So I decided to give a try to atleast a couple of search engines mentioned in that blog. I tried Fazzle.com and then I tried to compare the relevance of results (put more simply, I tried to check if I am able to find what I want to, on first page) with Big Daddy of them all, Google. Honestly speaking my faith on Google was somewhat shaken: Fazzle was showing better results! But Google obviously has its strengths so now though Fazzle is my default search engine in IE7, Google Desktop's floating bar is also present on my desktop....

If you have been singing praises of Google for Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets and Google Calendar, I would recommend that you test other options as well. 30boxes.com : Hailed by Kiko.com (First online calendar service, that went out of business and ultimately put itself for sale on Amazon, and hence created more news than they ever did while still in business!) as the reason they were outdone. It may not be 'your life', but still a good for everything service. You can add entries, search through them, share with your friends ('buddies'), subscribe in Google, Yahoo etc. There is even a 'webtop' (looks pretty much same as the Goowy webtop) BillMonk.com : Ah, this is something I am in real love with! If you are sharing flat with other roommates, or sharing the expenses of your sunday dinner with 5 other colleagues or have been exchanging novels with friends and find it a little incovenient to keep a track of who-has-to-pay-how-much-to-whom and who-spent-how-much...

If you remember Google Calendar that was released some time back, and if you have read my review to that, you will recall that I said that there is nothing so special about this apart from the power of sharing your calendar with your friends. Now the new crop of online word-processors comes armed with this concept. Sharing! So now you don’t have to save any file in your online briefcase or mail it to yourself or your friend to keep it safe and accessible from anywhere. This is more or less similar to what del.icio.us did in the area of managing and saving bookmarks. No dependence or boundation to a single system! I have still not been able to use Writely, now acquired by Google, and as usual there is a wait period involved. But I got to lay my hands on another free online word-processor http://Writeboard.com! Writeboard allows you to create any file (called writeboard) and associate a password to it. Now you can invite your friends to collaborate on this writeboard through ‘Invite Frie...