Resources from July Tech Talk

Guest speaker Mike Miller couldn't make it, but we still covered a few things at the July Tech Talk meeting. Here's the brief overview:

1. Picnik - web-based photo editing program that connects to Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, etc. Picnik isn't as full-featured as Photoshop, but even the free version can do basic editing tasks well. It's a great example of the web as platform--full-featured software residing on the web rather than on individual computers.
2. Awesome Highlighter - A Firefox extension that lets you highlight information on web pages and add sticky notes to them, then share the marked-up pages with others. When you turn it on and start highlighting, it saves a copy of the marked-up page on the Awesome Highlighter site and gives you a URL for the saved page. You can send that URL to others, who can view that page without an Awesome Highlighter account. Awesome Highlighter could be useful for virtual reference, to call a user's attention to relevant information on a page. It could also be useful for research, allowing you to highlight and annotate pages for future reference. Two caveats: a) The marked-up pages didn't display properly in Internet Explorer 7, and b) third-party services like Awesome Highlighter that host your data can go away at any time. I recommend using the service for research short-term, rather than counting on your marked-up pages being available for months or years.
3. Firefox 3 - I've been using the latest release of Firefox since the day it became available for download. According to most reviewers, the biggest improvements are on the back end: it has better security and anti-phishing features, runs faster, and uses fewer system resources than its predecessors. It also uses databases to manage bookmarks and web history, making these more easily searchable. Note: some extensions do not yet work with Firefox 3.