Last year, Apps We Love featured a Firefox extension called Read It Later. The add-on offered a convenient way to save web articles and pages for future reading without cluttering up your permanent bookmarks. One of the main draws was that you could sync your reading list across computers, allowing you to catch up on work reading from home or vice-versa. But what happens if you've got some time to kill but don't have a computer nearby?
This April, a solution materialized: a Read It Later application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It syncs with the Firefox add-on and allows you to add articles via your desktop as well as your iPhone. iPod Touch owners will especially love Read It Later for its offline reading capabilities; you can download articles when you have a wireless connection, and then read articles on the go in both the original website design and as resizable plain text.
What's especially nice about Read It Later is its plain text conversion feature, which is generally pretty good at extracting the right text from a website; it also has a neat fallback option should the app grab the wrong snippet. The Pro version adds a few extra features, such as a feature that locks the screen orientation and a full-screen viewing option. None of the Pro features are essential, but if you're a heavy user, they do make the reading experience a bit more pleasant. Either way, Read It Later is a great way to take your online reading with you wherever you go.
There are so many branches of the Google tree that it's hard to keep track of all the web applications the search engine giant operates. One humble Google offering has chugged along happily with few modifications for years: Google Translate, a site that translates websites and blocks of text into different languages. Google search is now available via a wide variety of access points such as in-browser search fields and desktop widgets, but amazingly, despite the obvious utility, Translate remains largely stuck behind a somewhat outdated web interface.
Nice Translator, a Firefox extension based on the website of the same name, offers an alternative that's easier and quicker to use. Instead of copying text to the clipboard, loading the Translate site, pasting the text and selecting your language options from a drop-down, Nice Translator displays a handy pop-up window with the selected text already displayed. All you have to do is select the destination language, and Nice Translator loads the translated text automatically.
There are two minor issues. It's not obvious from the interface that you're supposed to select the destination language, not the source. It's also not yet able to automatically translate an entire page, making it useful only for snippets of text. In a way, though, that limitation fits Nice Translator perfectly; it's precisely when you only need to translate a phrase that going to the trouble of loading Google Translate will grate the most. For whole-page translations, stick to Translate, but for short phrases, Nice Translator is your new best friend.
Every laptop–and nearly every desktop–has a tendency to nap when no one's looking. Most of the time, if a computer is asleep, it's because no one's around to do anything with it. But computers only register activity through keyboard and mouse actions; this means passive activities like watching a movie or listening to music don't count, and you'll have to keep your system from sleeping on the job with a flick of the mouse.
Enter Caffeine, a miniscule one-trick pony of a utility for Macs. When active, Caffeine sticks a coffee cup icon in your system tray. The cup acts like a switch: when it's empty, your system acts as normal. Click the icon to pour your computer a cup of coffee, keeping it awake for as long as you like. You can set Caffeine to keep your system awake until you deactivate it manually or until a set amount of time has passed.
Caffeine is not without flaws. The preference menu only responds to a Command-click, not a simple right-click; this is only a problem if you're used to two-button mice, of course. More seriously, Caffeine doesn't prevent your laptop from going to sleep if you close the lid; that's fine for watching movies, but not so great if you want to treat your laptop like a giant MP3 player or leave it on overnight to download a big file. Still, Caffeine is a very useful application to have handy for the next time you run into a particularly long YouTube video.
