Quix is an extensible bookmarklet. What’s that? It’s a bookmarklet (another one!) that allows you quick access to common internet commands and also allows you to extend it, adding in commands that you use often. So using Quix i remove many of the bookmarklets that I use day to day and access them via keyboard shortcuts. So how does it work.

At the most simple level, visit the Quix website, drag the Quix bookmarklet to your browser bar and your good to go. Want to do a google search for IMAX glasgow. Launch Quix and type:

g imax glasgow

Boom. A google search for IMAX and Glasgow will be run. I see that Avatar is on. To get some info Quix can help again

imdb Avatar

I now have the IMDB page for Avatar. This time I ran the search with a space in front of the command. This opened the search in a new tab in Safari. I want to save that page for reading later. Open Quix and type

evernote

The current page is saved into Evernote. The list of commands on the Quix site shows a full list of all the sites and services supported. It’s extensive and ever growing. One awkward step is launching the Quix bookmarklet. Having to select it with a mouse and then typing feels a bit sluggish. On Safari, there is a keyboard shortcut to launch shortcuts on the bookmark bar, so clicking CMD+1 will launch Quix if it’s the first bookmark in the bar. Very nice. Chrome and Firefox via an extension allow for shortcuts to launch Quix as well – see the Quix website on how to setup each browser.

So far so good. It’s easy to see what a time and space saver Quix can be. The feature I like the most though is the ability to add your own commands. The syntax page details how to add your commands but basically you create a text file that is hosted somewhere – Dropbox, MobileMe or your own webspace for example. You then add commands in the format “shortcut executable description”. The executable can make use of the following replacement tokens:

%s Replaced by any search terms that were entered after the command and / or any text that was selected when the command was issued. There’s a special case of this: %s_, this does the same except that it replaces spaces with underscores ( _ ) instead of plus signs, this is used in the Wikipedia command in the example file.
%r Replaced by the URL you were on when the command was issued.%rsReplaced by a bit.ly shortened version of the URL you were on when the command was issued.
%d Replaced by the domain you were on when the command was issued.
%t Replaced by the title of the page you were on when the command was issued.

So its very easy to add commands. Before you can use the commands you need to create a new bookmarklet that calls your custom file – visit the extend page to create the new bookmarklet. That’s it – your good to go. One issue I did have is that it can take a while for the bookmarklet to pick up new commands added to your custom file. To get around this open Quix and type ‘debug’ which clears the cache and reloads the custom file.

If your interested in my custom command, it can be found on Github. This is a fork of Merlin Mann’s original file which contained some very useful commands.

Hopefully you’ll read this an install Quix as it is incredibly useful especially when you start to customise what it can do. if your still in doubt, watch the screencast below demoing Quix from the developer himself.

An introduction to Quix from Joost de Valk on Vimeo.

Readability is a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you are reading.

To setup Readability, visit the website and select a Style, Size and Margin. Then drag the bookmarklet to your browser bar. When your on a website and the clutter is distracting click on Readability. Take this TUAW article for example.

Small text, distractions in the right hand column. One click with Readability and it’s clutter be gone.

I now have a clear distraction free article with images preserved. Much easier to read. The buttons to the left hand side allow me to swap back to the true website view of the article, and taking advantage of the cleaner page, I can print the article or e-mail the article on to friends and colleagues without the normal distracting content being e-mailed at the same time.

Another use of Readability is when it comes to note taking. I capture a lot of web content in Evernote for future reference. By default the snippet tool can capture a whole page or selected text. I prefer to use a bookmarklet that first sets up a Readability view of a web page and then invokes the Evernote web clipper to capture the article and sync it to my Evernote account. The result is a far cleaner set of notes.

If you want a bookmarklet to do both then take a look at this Evernote forum post. I hope you find Readability as useful as I do – certainly makes for a more readable web.

DNS takes the meaningful domain names that you type in your browser and turns that into a numerical identifier that computers understand. An analogy that is often made is DNS is the phone book for the internet. Wikipedia has more if you want to delve deeper. With that out the way onto some testing. My current ISP is O2 but I actually use OpenDNS for DNS lookups. They’ve proven to be faster than my previous two ISP’s but I was interested in comparing O2, OpenDNS and Google Public DNS. To do that I followed the advice on TechSutra and ran the following code:


for i in "rememberthemilk.com" "digitaloutbox.com" "apple.com" "google.com" "flickr.com" "bbc.co.uk" "iand.net" "twitter.com" "digitalspy.co.uk"
do
for j in "87.194.0.51" "8.8.8.8" "208.67.222.222"
do
echo $j $i `dig @$j $i | grep Query | awk -F ":" '{print $2}'`
done
done

This basically compared the lookup time for the three DNS providers for a variety of sites that I used daily. The results of the test can be seen in the table below:

As can be seen OpenDNS provided by far the best speeds out of the three I tested. I ran the test a few times and took average times to rule out any issues but the results were fairly consistent. Another method of testing is to try Namebench. This is a Google 20% app for Mac, PC and Linux. It compares a list of known DNS providers against your current DNS provider and provides a set of graphs and charts allowing you to benchmark any potential gains. It’s very slick.

My findings which seem to be backed up by others is that OpenDNS, for UK users, is a better option for speed than Google Public DNS. Do remember though that OpenDNS does redirect certain sites to protect from malware and domain misspellings, serving up adverts at the same time. In comparison Google offers no redirects at all which many people prefer.

The speed differences you do see may look small but remember that every little bit helps to improve your browsing experience and switching to a fast and reliable DNS provider can make a noticeable difference in your day to day usage.

So did you change your DNS after testing? We’d love to hear who you switched to and your findings – leave a comment below.

Spotify are really stepping up and offering something different to the current digital music stores. Stream for free in lower quality with ad’s or pay for great quality music that you can access from anywhere, offline or online. Not only that but with the addition this week of PayPal as a payment option they are making it easier than ever to subscribe to their service. Couple that to 4 million tracks available via search and many great playlists available online and you’ve got a very compelling service. It’s enough to keep me subscribing for another month after the launch of their iPhone app a few weeks ago. Over to you Apple?

What makes life even easier is that Tripit can automatically scan your confirmation e-mails for details of flight times, confirmation numbers etc. All you need to do is forward your e-mail to plans@tripit.com and the details will be automatically added to your trip. I had my doubts about how reliable this would be but it’s been fantastic – reliable and makes the whole trip entry painless. You can edit the imported trip if there’s an error and you can flag the error to Tripit so they can improve their import algorithms.

I’ve already mentioned the iPhone app but you can also share out your trip’s vis RSS, iCal feed, blog badge and also by adding friends. Yes, Tripit also has it’s own social network. See where your colleagues and friends are at any time. There’s also a league table to see who’s been doing the most travelling, something I don’t want to be winning. Tripit has a pro option costing $69 a year which will track various travel point and loyalty schemes, send you alerts if your flight times change and includes an inner circle feature which will give automatic access to your trips to everyone in your circle.

Finally, Tripit is supported by many other applications and websites which make it easier to create and share your Trips. Overall it’s hard to find Tripit – a free and useful service for the frequent traveller.

Dropbox is a brilliant and extremely useful online storage service. Online storage services aren’t anything new and what makes Dropbox special is it’s ease of use, speed and how it seamlessly integrates with your host operating system.

Basic account registration is free and you get an instant 2GB storage. Invite your friends and every friend that joins earns you (and your friend) an extra 250MB up to a maximum of 3GB in addition to your initial 2GB.

Pro 50 account provides 50GB storage and costs $9.99 per month or $99 annually. Pro 100 account provides 100GB storage at a cost of $19.99 monthly or $199 annually.

The service can be used as a simple online storage tool via a web browser, to upload files from one computer and then access those files via a browser from another computer. But Dropbox is much more than that – it can be used to share files/folders with other people, keep your data synchronised between multiple computers and easily create online photo albums.

The best way to use it is to install it on your computer, where it seamlessly integrates with Finder/Explorer. Once installed, it can be used just like a regular folder and you can add sub-folders and files to it. When a file is added, it instantly starts to synchronise with the online service, freeing the user to carry on working on other tasks. This is a brilliant tool for users with multiple computers, who want to keep certain data files synched. Store such files in your Dropbox folder and you don’t have to concern yourself with uploading files from one computer and then downloading to another. It all happens automatically without any user intervention.

Files added to the special Public sub-folder can be shared with others – just right-click on the file, copy the public URL and send the link to whoever you want to share the file with.

If you’re working on a project, create a shared folder for storing documents and invite collaborators to share this folder. Uploaded changes are instantly visible to other project members. As soon as one collaborator modifies the contents of the shared folder, the changes are automatically pushed to other collaborators’ Dropbox folders instantly, brilliant! Accidentally deleted files can be easily recovered.

Another really nice feature is that any images added to the special Photos folder are automatically created in to simple photo albums, with public URLs available for sending to friends and families.

Have a look at the tour for full details and explanation of the service. There is also a screencast available which clearly shows all the major features.

DNS requests are made every day from your home connection. E-mails, web surfing, online gaming etc all make use of DNS. DNS turns real addresses (http://www.apple.com) into an IP address for the physical computer you want to connect to. It makes it easier to surf and also means an address can stay fixed while the computer changes in the background (to a different IP address). Usually you make use of your own ISP’s DNS server which in general works OK but from time to time can have issues. Speed, lack of redundancy and update issues are ones I’ve seen over the years.

OpenDNS provides a free DNS service that promises to resolve addresses quickly and also a few unique services that I certainly don’t get from my current ISP. Firstly there are anti-phishing features in place so that you will be warned and the phishing site intercepted should you be lead to one. There’s also spelling correction where OpenDNS will look at the URL you’ve typed and if it detects a typo it will redirect you to the correct site. Finally if you look up a site that cannot be resolved OpenDNS will display a page with alternatives.

What’s great about OpenDNS is that it’s simple to set-up and has helpful configuration page’s for a wide range of routers and computers. These take you through each step of logging in to the router, making the changes required and then checking that OpenDNS is set-up for your internet connection. There’s also other features like shortcut’s which you can take advantage off. Enter a shortcut name and the page that should be looked up if typed. For example, type blog to visit your blog without typing in the address, news to visit BBC News – the possibilities are endless. The nice thing about shortcuts is they apply across all your network so aren’t set up on a per machine basis.

The OpenNDS website also provides some stats about the number of requests, top domains and gives you the ability to block domains if you want finer control of the content that can be accessed on your network.

Although better performance can’t be guaranteed and in some cases will be very small I’ve always made a point of checking every few months to make sure that OpenDNS is a better option than my current ISP. With both O2 and Virgin Media, swapping to OpenDNS made quite a difference and in the case of my neighbours just over a week ago the difference to their OneTel connection was remarkable. Give it a try – nothing to lose and possibly a nice speed bump with enhanced security to gain.