bouncingboomergirlgeek: fyi & fwiw

New & Neat, No.2

My "New & Neat" Nominee this week is Clip2Net, a (free) little Windows utility I seem to be using constantly.

Clip2Net does one simple thing: screenshots. But it does it with such quick, fluid ease, I find myself getting much more visual in everything I write because what used to take a half dozen steps to snip, save and share now takes only two or three moves from me. It's a dream date for visual thinkers who like to show as much as tell.

Clip2Net does two things: (a) it turns your cursor into a temporary marquee to grab any part of what you see on screen and (b) saves that image to clipboard or disk or to a private online bin with its own URL that you can share anywhere. If you register your copy you also get control panel management of all your uploads, including a download counter and a generous hunk of storage space. You can also tag your uploads for how long you wish to keep them.

Consider the effect of simply putting the C2N logo at the head of this post. You instantly see if you already know what I'm talking about, and if so, you keep surfing. Or you have your interest piqued and decide to keep reading. So you, the viewer, can maximize the ROI on your time, while I, the author, can add visual impact, and the developers of C2N can reap more eyeballs if you decide to use it too.

That's the kind of thing I am talking about when I mention the "Win-Win Web" which is what all of Web 2.0 is rapidly coming to mean to me. But more about that in the next post and back to this handy little utility. Read on to find out more about what Clip2Net.can do.

1.2 Yahoo Buried My Arrows

from the cranky girlgeek dept./ theme: useability

Some brains, like mine, are especially sensitive to the perception of extra effort around small things such as pointing and clicking. In a hyperspeedy world, we even hate wasting nanos of time. When we sit at our screens creating things, the difference in one extra click, or one extra glance, is not insignificant.

So here's my latest beef in the ease of use department: Yahoo Mail  recently changed the menus in the toolbar of the online composing editor to make one pivotal move more cumbersome. It used to be the html editor had a 1-push button for indents; now it has a drop-down menu in which indent is stacked above outdent. (Follow the story jump to see more screen shots.)

This may sound less than trivial, but it's not if your eye-to-hand auto-routines work like mine.