Too many times I have changed computers and have lost all my favourite bookmarks. Very popular now are social bookmarking programs where you'll never lose your bookmarks (unless the provider's server and backup crash) and you can share them with your friends.

I have tried several and honestly, I can't stand the damn hassle of having to sign up, wait for the verification email, login, add bookmarks (yes, even with a bookmarklet). There must be a simpler method of maintaining bookmarks.

Portable Bookmarks is a portable bookmark manager (bug-free, says my Norton) that sits in your computer. It works online as well as offline for you to organise and store your bookmarks and it syncs with your Firefox, IE, and other browser bookmarks to compile them all into an integrated bookmark store called a Collection.

I finally got my bookmarks organised using Portable Bookmarks, collecting not only my old IE ones, but also the new ones in Firefox. It was that pretty, easy, and fun to use. Here's what it looks like:


Image credit: Portable Bookmarks
Here's what I love about it:

* Beautiful, usable interface design. What is a pleasure to look at will entice you to use it more. The top navigational buttons are logical, eye-catching, and functional. It comes with a whole bunch of skins! No need to download if you're itching to dress it up.

* Fast to use - no lag whatsoever compared to browser managers. Plus, it allows batch link addage to folders. No folder? It'll create one for you. How cool is that?

* State of the art Search. You can search live via text (as you type in the words), date, and by verification, which leads me to...

* Ability to verify links. Useful when you need to sift out the old to make space for the new.

* It can store multiple Collections. This is especially ideal when you want to sort work, project, and personal bookmarks.

* Logically functional. Launches when you start computer and you can click links directly to appear in your preferred browser, an option you can choose to disable if you please.

All in all, customisable and very usable. A great add to any browsing experience. Download and try it out today.

Technorati: Portable Bookmarks, bookmarks

Yes, the one and only Trillian. An all-in-one instant messenger that logs into your Yahoo Messenger, MSN, ICQ, IRC, and AIM accounts simultaneously (it is only missing the Gmail messenger which is buggy at best). The interface is pretty and it can be skinned.

There are many useful security settings, including selecting only certain IMs to login and others not, blocking, invisible mode, and logging. There's tabbed chatting, file transfers, and most of all the nitty gritty IM stuff the other programs offer.

The best thing is it is free and autoinstalls updates.

I have been using it for years now with nary a glitch. The loading time may be slower than a stand-alone but it sure is better than opening 5 different IMs.

Forget about single stand-alone IMs. Get Trillian today.

At a glance:

The good: Integrated, email notification, attractive interface, notifications, tabbed browsing. security, autoupdates.

The bad: Slow loading of program.

Technorati: trillian, instant messenger, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, IRC, integrated messenger

Did I already tell you how much I love widgets? If you haven't heard it, here it is again. This from a girl who 5 years ago would have told you that having more than 2 Javascripts in your webpage is a huge usability no-no. But with connection and computer speeds exponentially faster now, it would almost be a bad user experience if you didn't have a useful widget or two on your blog.

The keyword here is useful.

A weather widget is useful, especially if you pore through your visitor logs to see where most of them (repeat visitors in particular) come from regularly and then provide useful and relevant weather information for them. For this blog, most visitors to date come from Washington DC.

Currently providing weather data on the US and Canada only, the iBegin weather widget is lightweight (script-wise) and elegant in design, customisable, and fundamentally useful. 10 points for usability.

Here it is in action:


Get one for yourself here.

Technorati: widget, weather widget, cool widgets, useful widgets