Widgetmania and my new assistant, Enso
Posted by Matt Williamson on January 16th, 2008 technology Add comments
Widgets are a hot topic, we have covered them here on Technology Story (search: widget), and it seems like the momentum is only growing. I am excited about seeing the new J.J. Abrams movie Cloverfield, so I hit the site this morning and noticed right away that they are using my favorite form of viral marketing, the widget. This particular widget is built on the Clearspring platform and allows you to post the Cloverfield countdown ticker on your blog, you site or your widget-ready start page, like Yahoo!, iGoogle or Netvibes.
Widgets have invaded Facebook in the name of Facebook apps and are sneaking into your subconscious thoughts ads for movies and television programming alike. The real power of widgets may be just around the corner though with portable, platform independent widgets that maintain the same look and feel whether on your iPhone, your desktop or your favorite web site.
To the right you can see a few of the widgets I keep on all of my desktops, at home and in the office. I like the Yahoo! Widget platform a lot, and it is no surprise either, as it is the Konfabulator system I loved in the Linux world years ago. One widget that would go a long way is a widget that knows my widget use and keeps my desktops in sync. Regardless of which operating system I am working in, I would like to have my preferred widgets travel with me.
Google’s OpenSocial holds some promise for me on the standardization front, but they are really just Google Gadgets that are aware of the OpenSocial API. While there is merit there, I am waiting to see someone like Yahoo! Widgets or even IBM or Sun get into the swing of things with some development tools for the common developer.
Before real development can be accomplished by enterprise IT shops around the world, a unified widget engine is desperately needed. Writing once and allowing your message to be disseminated across the Internet, there is real power in that. Today we have a few standards out there already; Google, Yahoo!, Fox Interactive’s SpringWidgets, the NBC partner Clearspring and more - too many. The W3 has released a working draft of widget standards and I hope all of the players are trying to build to the minimum, I never mind over engineering, but so far this is the Wild West and the sheriff is in the bunk sleeping.
Enso is Wickedly Simple
I happened across this application today and was instantly satisfied. Enso Launcher, from Humanized, is a tool that you can install in minutes on your Windows XP or Vista operating system. (Yes, I am still on Windows, please don’t tell Scott.) Enso downloads in seconds and once installed you activate it by holding down the Caps Lock key for a few seconds. Enso shows up at the top of your screen in a translucent green modal display, shown below in the image.
I was happy to see I could highlight any word or phrase and almost instantly pumpo it into Google search. I played around a bit with some simple macros for converting text case form lower to upper and back again, I can’t tell you how many times I need that one. Enso is a sweet little calculator too. Just highlight and mathematical equation and let Enso give you an answer. Watch this demo here.
Enso is sexy in a way that most people don’t immediately equate with sexiness: speed. Enso take a tiny bit of my processor and opens up a huge amount of data and functionality to me in ways that would have required a multiple mouse clicks just a few moments ago. Now when I want to research something I just need to highlight is and pound the caps lock key a moment, type ‘goo’ for Google and release the caps lock key.
There are a variety of Enso addons too:
- Enso Word, a universal spell checker, word counter, thesaurus and dictionary all in one
- Enso Map Anywhere lets you embed a Google Map into anything you can imagine
- Enso Translate Anywhere does what you think it does…
The team at Humanized have stated they are working on a release for both the Mac and Linux platforms, so take heart, Enso is coming to a MacBook Pro near you soon.
I wonder if this thing can blog too?
Matt
Tags: Apple, Clearspring, enso, Facebook, gadget, Google, Humanized, iGoogle, iPhone, Netvibes, OpenSocial, widget, YahooRelated posts
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