Ministry of Intrigue

A few weeks ago I was having drinks with my good friend Greg, and the topic of social bookmarking came up. I was discussing some of my ideal features in a service, before we got back to the more serious business of catching up. A few days later, Greg sent me a link to Diigo, as it seemed to match a lot of what we were discussing at the time. I took a look at Diigo and was pretty impressed with what I saw, and I decided to give it a go. I’ve been using it full-time for about a week now, and feel comfortable giving you all a review of what I have found.

To begin with, Diigo is an extremely powerful social bookmarking site. Obviously, Diigo does all the things you would expect of this type of service: you can save bookmarks, assign tags to them, and search the site for bookmarks that are also tagged with those terms or find people who have saved the same bookmark. Diigo also allows you to construct “Lists” of links. Lists are another way of structuring your data that you can use in conjunction with tags. Each List can be made up of any group of links that you can sort in whatever order you desire via a drag and drop interface. This is really nice to see a service that still understands that tags are not the end-all be-all of organizing content.

Diigo also allows you to import bookmarks from variety of sources, including Delicious, Magnolia, Simpy, Blinklist, Furl, Connotea, RawSugar and of course, your own browser. The import function worked well for me importing from Magnolia, although Diigo replaced the spaces in my multi-word tags with underscores. Diigo does allow multi-word tags if you encase them in quotation marks, so this was a quick fix, if a little annoying. When will people see the light and do away with space-seperated tags? Just let me use a comma-separated list. Diigo also exports all your bookmarks quite effectively in a variety of formats including RSS, CSV, Delicious format, as well as in formats for both Internet Explorer and Netscape bookmarks.

However, Diigo doesn’t just want to be a bookmarking service, they aim to be a flexible research tool, and allow you to highlight and annotate web pages to provide more directed commentary on what you are bookmarking. These notes can be private for your reference only, or publicly visible to any user. This immediately brings up comparisons to Clipmarks, except that this is very different. Whereas Clipmarks just takes your highlighted content and loads it into their service, Diigo also leaves those annotations in place in the form of highlights and sticky notes that are visible only to Diigo users. This allows you to not only share those annotations on Diigo itself, but also to visit the originating site and see those comments in context of the surrounding content.

This annotation feature is particularly powerful when used in conjunction with Diigo’s social features. Diigo allows you to create groups which can be public, private or semi-private, allowing you to collaborate on research through the use of links and annotation. Diigo also allows you to attach notes and comments that are visible only to the group, which is an extremely useful feature when sharing the link both publicly, as well as in a group context.

In addition to collaboration, Diigo’s social side is excellent for content discovery. The service can provide recommended bookmarks from other members based off of the links you have saved in the past, as well as recommending other users whose bookmarking habits seem to match yours. Diigo takes the “social” in social bookmarking very seriously, and provides very effective tools for finding friends on the service, as well as finding new people who have interests similar to your own. Friending another user doesn’t mean just making them a contact, it enables you to generate buddy lists, allowing you to organize sharing of bookmarks with friends, as well as providing a messaging system. Whereas in many other bookmarking services the sharing and social features seem to occur more as a byproduct of the sharing process, Diigo puts those social networking features front and center. However, Diigo’s interface is very content focused as well, making it clear that this isn’t a social network as much as it is a social tool.

Saving content to Diigo is done primarily one of two ways: you can either install the toolbar application, which is available for Firefox, Flock and Internet Explorer, or you can use Diigolet, which is a bookmarklet they provide that should work with almost every major browser.

The Diigolet is a surprisingly powerful bookmarklet, revealing sticky notes and annotations, as well as providing all the basic functionality a user needs. However, even with my hatred of adding additional rows to my browser window, the Diigo toolbar has won me over and become my tool of choice to interact with the service. Both tools will provide tag suggestions and assist with group functions, as well as the ability to send the link via email, however the toolbar goes even further. When using the toolbar, you also have the option of cross-posting your links to other bookmarking services, or even Twitter if you require. You can save simultaneously to Diigo, Delicious, Magnolia and Simpy, as well as to your own browser’s local bookmarks. Bookmarking to other services seems to work well, and saving to local bookmarks is a particularly awesome experience when using one of the latest betas of Firefox, which will attempt to auto-complete based on both history and bookmarks. It even correctly applies tags in the Firefox Places storage system, which is great but makes me wonder why the toolbar bothers to also build a hierarchal folder system inside Firefox as well, as the tags do that job already.

Another powerful feature that the toolbar adds is the Diigo sidebar:

As you can see in the above image, the Diigo sidebar allows me to search and browse both my bookmarks and the bookmarks my friends have posted. In addition it allows me to get current information about the page I am viewing via the “This URL” tab. I can access public bookmarks and annotations, and lists of Diigo users who like the site. Diigo also can provide quick metrics about a site that I am visiting via the main toolbar. Using the “About This URL” menu option will provide a overall popularity score for the site, including a breakdown of the number of links to the site from Diigo, as well as from Google, Delicious, Yahoo myweb, Bloglines, Technorati, and Digg. Diigo also provides a calculation of the site’s Google PageRank, which is a really awesome bonus feature that I just discovered today.

Diigo supports OpenID logins, which makes me smile. It would be nice if Diigo allowed you to sign up using just your OpenID, however you need to create a standard account and then associate an OpenID with it. This isn’t a big deal, but it would be a nice enhancement to see in the future.

My only real complaint about Diigo is the lack of an API for developers. I did send them an email regarding this, and was pleasantly surprised to receive email directly from the founders. They indicated that an API is in the works, and were receptive to some of my suggestions in that regard. As I have browsed through the user forums, this seems to be a common practice for the people behind Diigo to actively engage with their users for ideas, and respond constructively to critiques. Diigo does provide RSS for bookmarks, as well as blog widgets, but those weren’t sufficient for my needs. I’ve been able to work around the lack of API by using the toolbar for cross-posting to Magnolia and continuing to use that service for loading bookmarks into my site. However, I am eager for Diigo’s API because this workaround doesn’t allow me to take full advantage of the annotation features when loading the bookmarks into my link blog.

However, when it comes down to it I feel Diigo is really head and shoulders above the majority of competing social bookmarking services in terms of features, and the site itself is certainly more responsive than my beloved Magnolia, which is a wonderful service in itself, but runs slow as molasses. Based on this glowing review, it may come to surprise you I approached Diigo skeptically, even prepared to be antagonistic, but the service managed to win me over. I was unprepared for the seamless integration of Diigo’s social features, as well as the flexibility of the service, which strikes out like a fist of features into the collective nuts of their competition. If the forthcoming API meets the rest of the site’s high standards, you can expect me to be a happy Diigo user for quite some time to come.

If you are a reader of tech blogs, you will have no doubt noticed the thorough savaging that the Amazon Kindle has been receiving at the hands of many prominent technology pundits like Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble, as well as podcasts, including the crew at TWiT and Buzz Out Loud.

There’s a small minority of tech folks who seem really into the device, for example you can read Andy Inahtko’s gushing review for the Chicago Sun-Times, and Cali Lewis, who appeared on the TWiT episode linked above, also seems to like the device. With them is a slowly growing cult of Kindle users who breathlessly defend every detail of the product’s design, in part because they like the device and partially in backlash to the initial negative reviews (often without having first-hand experience with the device) that surrounded the launch.

I was one of those people who ordered the device the day it was released, not because I’m usually an early adopter of hardware (this might be one of the first times I’ve bought a first generation device), but because of its link to Amazon, it has such potential to be a game changer. If I intended to provide any kind of commentary on the Kindle, I would need to live with one for a few weeks.

Doubtless you have heard the basics of Kindle functionality, that it utilizes an e-ink screen for crisp readable text, an expandable memory slot, free EVDO access to the Kindle book store as well as the internet, audiobook support (via Audible, and a USB 2.0 interface (you don’t need a computer to use it, but you can plug it in and access it like a mass storage device). Some of those features, like the audiobook/mp3 support seem a little tacked on and better suited to a dedicated music player than an eBook reader, but the main thing that differentiates the Kindle from other eBook readers on the market is the free EVDO access to one of the largest (if not the largest) retailer online. That’s huge, because it means that any book in Amazon’s eBook library (currently 90,000 titles and growing) is available in less than a minute. This becomes a great vehicle for book discovery, as Amazon allows you to download a free sample chapter of any eBook, which has already resulted in my buying enjoyable books that I may not have tried out otherwise.

Now, I love books. I have bookshelves in every room full of them. I’m actually out of space and have to prioritize what goes on the bookshelves and what I box up for storage at any given time of the year. However, I have noticed that with my Kindle, while I still read the books on my shelves, I’m actually reading more in general because it is so easy and comfortable to get new content quickly. Also, whereas I usually have two or three books with bookmarks stacked on my bedside table, I now have some books, but also my Kindle with multiple books loaded that I can take with me anywhere. This allows me to read whichever book I feel like at the moment when I actually get some free time to do so. Because I have a tendency to carry it around most of the time, it’s important that the battery lasts, which it does. With wireless off the majority of the time I can go about a week before the battery starts getting low.

The experience of reading on the Kindle is actually pretty good. All e-ink screens have a slight delay and flash when turning a page, but honestly, after the first few pages I find I don’t notice it much. I’m probably just adapting my timing of page turns to sync with my eye movement to the top of the screen, but I’m not that aware of it. When holding the Kindle in its cover, it is very comfortable to read sitting up, although when laying down I tend to take it out of the cover and use the keyboard as a handle. The buttons on the side of the device control the page turns, and they are a bit oversensitive. This is the biggest issue when you are handling the Kindle outside of the cover, and it will be something that needs to be addressed in further iterations of this product.

As to the display, the text is very crisp and it is reminiscent to ink on paper. Illustrations are displayed well on the device although photos look about as well as you would expect with only 600x800 resolution with 167 ppi and gray scale. This is definitely a text-based device, so obviously the Kindle’s experimental web browser also performs best when pointed to text-based sites.

File formats and DRM are a big issue surrounding the Kindle. Currently it supports the aforementioned audio file types, Amazon’s proprietary AZW eBook format, unprotected mobi files and text. According to Neil Gaiman, the Kindle also originally supported PDF documents , “although not terribly well — it was one of the things I told them about, many of which they fixed — so they may have pulled it until they get the bugs out.” While it’s relatively simple to perform conversions, either via the Kindle service (for free via your email, or for $0.10 via wireless delivery) or by using free Mobipocket desktop software, it seems silly not to natively support more formats, or at least provide a conversion utility in the Kindle firmware itself. This is especially true for Apple users, who must use the Kindle service because the Mobipocket creator program is only designed for Windows. Linux users can run the command-line tool mobigen.exe via Wine, which works very well for me with the Project Gutenberg html eBooks. Apple users running OSX might have similar luck, but I haven’t seen any attempts as of yet. Regardless, this is an issue that needs to be rectified as soon as possible in the next firmware update, which from the looks of the device will be done over the EVDO connection.

DRM is a touchy issue with all digital media and in general I’m against it, as it primarily serves to inconvenience the end user, while at the same time failing in its advertised purpose of combating piracy. I’m certainly not as incensed as some are about it, and I think eventually DRM will go the way of the dodo, as customers get frustrated and publishers get over their terror of the digital marketplace. Honestly, as the Kindle is my only eBook reader, the DRM doesn’t really get in my way, although I’d prefer a more open model based around trust in your users.

How could I possibly review the Kindle without commenting on its price? The $399 on the tag is certainly steep for a device, especially for the average consumer (if there is such a thing). If Amazon wants the Kindle to take off they are going to need to lower that initial cost as soon as they can afford it. Once they get a handle of how much incidental EVDO use is going to cost and get a chance to recoup some R&D expenses, this needs to be brought down to at most a flat $300. Ideally, I’d like to see this device end up somewhere in the $200 range, which is justified considering the wireless capabilities.

My Kindle wishlist also contains feature requests for the Kindle Store. I’d love to see the ability to buy eBooks as gifts for friends who have Kindles, and maybe a way for my Kindle to communicate with another Kindle, such as sending the sample chapter of a book I own to a friend as a recommendation tool. Okay, I stole that last idea from DHP, but it is a wonderful notion. I’d also love to see the option to do bundle purchases, for example buying a physical book and getting the eBook for a nominal fee.

Here’s the deal: I like my Kindle. It has a simple and intuitive user interface, it is very easy to learn to use, and performs its designed task very well. I really enjoy reading on it, and I love the portability. The display is excellent for reading, especially when compared with other species of mobile devices. (If you think I’ll ever regularly read books on a tiny backlit cell phone screen you are very wrong.) That being said, this product is definitely first generation and has its flaws. Hopefully, Amazon will recognize them and correct issues through firmware updates and future iterations of the hardware. On the whole though, I find it to be a very satisfying device, and honestly, I find that some of aspects of the device that the tech community takes issue with are laughable. I predict, someday in the future, the cure for cancer will be released, and the tech community will be up in arms because the cure will lack a touchscreen and will not have a built-in social network. 

That being said, the device is pricey, so consider the features and what they mean to you. Perhaps right now, the Kindle isn’t a good fit for you, and that’s your call as an informed consumer, you don’t have to buy one. However, I selfishly hope you will because the coolest thing about the Kindle is that when you use it , you can see where the future of eBooks is, and exactly how to get there from here, so I’m hoping that it becomes a success.

Here’s to the future of eBooks, wherever it takes us.

How many times have you googled yourself? Too embarrassed to say? Same here.

I suppose just about everyone with a connection to the Internet has been guilty of a little ego-surfing once in a while. Over the course of your searching, more than likely you have found sites that either contain somewhat embarrassing information about yourself, falsehoods, or contain a ton of information about someone else who shares the same name as you. The latter is not as common in my case, although you would be surprised at the number of Andrliks out there. Besides the obvious fun that can be had at your expense by your friends looking at the search results for your name and say, donkeys, what’s the big deal?

Well for starters, more and more employers are using the almighty search powers of Google during the application review process. Also, more and more well-connected folks will spend some time doing searches on their prospective dates, just to verify that they didn’t just agree to a dinner with a potential psycho. Perhaps that online racist blogger or recently convicted sex offender that shares your name would be a bad page for them to find and associate with you. Or any number of other unfortunate number of sites they could mistake as related to you. You obviously cannot stop search engines from bringing up that data, or even people from impersonating you online, so how do you minimize the damage?

This is where claimID comes in. claimID is a service that allows you to claim the pages links that actually are related to you and contextualize them. Essentially, you post to your account (usually via a convenient bookmarklet) any pages you find that actually refer to you and categorize them in order to create a “resume” of links representing your online identity. You can specify whether the information on the site is written by you or someone else, whether it is about you or something else that you were connected to, or define your own custom relationship either in plain text or using the rel tag, just like in the XFN. You can also enter the year the page was written or at the events it refers to occurred, as well as a full text description if you feel so inclined.

For example:

This is the web-based database application I designed at my last consulting job.

Or:

Yes, this is a picture of me in full goth regalia, but I was only 17 at the time and going through a phase.

Another option is to create a category for links that are definitely not you, such as the more horrific possibilities suggested above, or if there is someone actively impersonating you online, like the moron posing as Leo Laporte on MySpace even though he was outed several months ago on This Week In Tech.

Admittedly, someone like myself could just create and maintain a page like that on my own site, but not everyone has their own domain, even though they might have a significant presence online via social networking sites like MySpace, LiveJournal, Last.fm, or other sites. For those types of users, a service like claimID can be invaluable as a resource, as our digital and analog lives continue to converge. In fact, I would argue that this type of service has a great deal of value for those of us who do have our own sites, as claimID provides a way to standardize the data. Just include a link on your site, homepage in another networking site, or even on your resume to your claimID user page in order to provide readers with a sort of executive summary of your online identity. Also, by linking to your user page, and by using your legal name for your claimID username you will increase the search rankings of your “link resume” which helps get people to your page faster.

The service is in closed beta right now while they test their ability to scale, but you can request an invitation be sent to you in order to be placed on the waiting list. While the developers pledge that their will always be a free account option, upon the full release upgraded accounts will be available for $5 a year. Currently it is not clear what the difference between the two accounts will be, however users who participate in the beta test will receive a free upgraded membership as a thank you for their help in feedback, which is nice.

The service supports the now standard Web 2.0 fare, including tagging of entries and RSS syndication for your links page. In addition it also automatically calculates and supports MicroIDs, which is a standards-based identifier whose age is measured in months. Keeping up with the buzz, the site was developed in about five months using Ruby on Rails, the new development framework that is causing much hoopla in programming circles.

Okay, I’ve talked about a lot of the good things, but there are some inherent problems at this stage. To begin with, and this is the big question, is any of this any use without identity verification? The developers state in their FAQ that they do not intend the service to validate identity, but rather to be part of the network of your online identity, a “web of trust” if you will, that will validate itself by context. It isn’t meant to be definitive, with the exception of when you personally provide the address to your link page, but rather a stop along the way during a reader’s search. This calls into question the effectiveness of authoritatively claiming your links, unless you link to it directly from your own clearly validated domain. The support of microformats helps in this regard, but MicroIDs, while opaque, are transmitted as a meta tag in your page header, which means that they can be spoofed, so while they help you assert your identity, they don’t necessary prevent any impersonation. Whether the combination of referrals and MicroIDs will ultimately provide a satisfactory method of personal validation will only be answered as we see the service in practice. I see great potential for malicious spammers here if the claimID folks are not exceptionally diligent.

In addition, some of the features seem to be unnecessary. For example, I’m not sure why anyone would want to use RSS syndication for their links, unless they felt like stalking another claimID user. That being said, I felt much the same way about del.icio.us feeds until I underwent my true social networking conversion a few months ago. Now I track several del.icio.us feeds along with all my blog subscriptions.

Tagging is another example of a feature I’m not sure about here. If the user is already being expected to group their links into categories, why add the additional complication of assigning tags to the entries? Possibly this is linked with a future feature to come, but it seems like Web 2.0 overkill. I know users have grown accustomed to having this feature, but is it really useful? How many links will the average user actually accumulate? Online celebrities could definitely have use for this additional layer of specification, and perhaps as more and more of our lives move onto the Internet this will become a really useful feature for everyone. Maybe this is a really forward-thinking addition to the service, but only time will tell.

Regardless, I see a lot of potential in this service, and I will be very interested to see how it develops.

claimID Site

My claimID Page

Inside The Net Interview with the developers, which contains a no-invitation registration link to get an instant account.

Against my better judgment, I went to go see the movie adaptation of Silent Hill this weekend. While I’ll agree with the guys at Penny Arcade that I should not pretend this was a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, I will say that I enjoyed it. In fact, even with its sad, pathetic little script and the horrible acting inflicted on the audience by star Rahda Mitchell (of Pitch Black fame), I was really enjoying it up until the end.

The movie is just so bizarre and fucked up I couldn’t help but get caught up in its nightmarish vision. It is bizarre, creepy and downright fun, which while I have never played the original game seems to measure up with my friends’ accounts of the experience. Unfortunately, near the end they try to tie it all together with one long monologue of exposition (sin among sins!), which is my most hated cinematic cheap trick. Afterwards the movie just goes completely over the top, which unfortunately ruined the whole atmospheric vibe and resulted in me being less engaged in the movie.

If you liked the game, this movie is definately worth seeing. Otherwise, I wouldn’t pay more than matinee price for it, if that. However, it is a lot of fun if you are into the freaky stuff.

As I stated in the title, this really isn’t a review of the movie, because quite simply the best review for it has already been written. Check out Vern’s review as posted by Moriarty on Aint It Cool News, and it will lay it all out for you.

It hardly seems worth it to write a review of Google Calendar this late into the game does it? After all, with a Google product I’m sure everyone who is interested has already jumped onto the link to create their own account and see for themselves what it is like. So, this will be a very brief review.

Google Calendar: I like it.

I’ve been looking for a good online calendaring option ever since I retired my Palm Pilot four years ago. I wanted to be able to access my events from anywhere without carrying yet another mobile device. At the time, online calendaring services were pretty weak and I wasn’t so hot on logging into a website just to access my appointments. I wanted something more integrated. So, for a long time I just made do with my disorganized mess of handwritten notes, mental reminders and the use of the Microsoft Exchange Server Web Access for my work related appointments. I tried numerous desktop solutions, Sunbird, Korganizer, Evolution, but in the end it all left me feeling unimpressed. I couldn’t really access those events from elsewhere without an remote desktop connection or unless I used a WebDAV service, all of which were somewhat lackluster.

Then a few months ago I started looking into some of the new AJAX powered calendars as I saw potential to have the desktop functionality I craved in a web page. In particular I was impressed with the interface design of 30 Boxes, but the integration with email just wasn’t there. By that time, rumblings of Google Calendar had begun and as a faithful Gmail user, I decided to wait.

When I first started playing with Google Calendar it actually seemed a little too simple at first. It had the trademark clean and quiet interface, with a lot of the AJAX magic that made Gmail so popular, but I began to fear I had waited for nothing. However, as I began to dig into the features of GC I discovered that it was quite a powerful program. With this program you can create multiple calendars, which you can view all at once or seperatedly, each with separate sharing rules if you wish. Sharing can either by done at the public level or be restricted to particular users. Those of you who have used any flavor of groupware before will recognize and appreciate this feature. GC also allows you to add predefined calendars such as the holidays for your nation or religion, which will then be displayed on your calendar. You can also view your friends’ calendars if they elect to share them with you, which makes for fun social programming and event organization.

If you really want, GC also provides private URLs so that you can access your data from desktop calendaring applications either via XML syndication or iCal, which is a nice feature for those of you in love with a particular application and just want a convenient way to access your data away from home.

Of course, GC also serves up the meat and potatoes of any calendar program with full support for event recurrence, automatic guest invitations, event-specific sharing rules and of course location information. Google Calendar will even offer to use Google Maps to display the location of the event.

Google Calendar also can do the ever important event reminders, either by a JavaScript alert when you are viewing the page, email reminders, text messages to your cell phone or all three at once. Which brings us to the most important feature, which really wasn’t totally operational until today: email integration. Your calendar is smoothly integrated with Gmail allowing you to send and receive invitations with other Google users and build events based off of email conversations. This is a really cool feature. Gmail will automatically detect when a conversation seems to be dealing with a specific event and will provide a link to create an event for your calendar based off of the details. Sweet!

Honestly, I’ve been digging hard looking for something not to like in this service and I’ve come up with very little. My only wish is that there was a way to view my calendar over an https connection, similar to what you can optionally use in Gmail. It suits my security-conscious, (some might say paranoid) tendencies.

If you are one of the few who haven’t checked this out yet, I highly recommend that you do. Play with it for a few days, and I think I can safely say you won’t go back to your old system.

Tried Google Calendar? Agree/Disagree? Think I am full of it? Leave a comment!

I cannot remember how I initially heard about Krugle, but I’m glad that I did.

For those of you who haven’t heard of this service (which may be many of you), Krugle is a service that aims to be the search engine for developers, and it appears to be well on its way. Now, before you blow this off as yet another search company just waiting to be crushed by Google or Yahoo!, let me assure you that this particular service is very different. What’s the difference, you ask? Why should developers care about another search engine?

Simple: Krugle doesn’t index web pages; it indexes source code.

Open source code, naturally. Krugle’s search engine crawls through online directories such as Sourceforge, Apache.org and many others gathering data on the countless numbers of open source projects held in those repositories. User can then search either by project content, or within the source code itself for particular tokens. As OSS continues to play an increasingly important influence in the world of software development, Krugle gives programmers a greater ability to take advantage of it. On their about page, the company explains the reasoning behind the product:

While the development world has changed, the tools that developers use haven’t kept up. Developers spend from 20-25 percent of their time looking for code and code related information: a frustrating situation for programmers, and an expensive problem for companies.

Current search engines are okay for finding web pages, but they don’t crawl or find source code, whether in open repositories or within source code control systems (SCCS). They also don’t leverage the inherent structure of code to support the types of searches programmers need.

I certainly haven’t done any surveys to verify their assertion regarding the amount of time developers spend searching through code, but I can say from my personal experience and from anecdotal evidence that their estimate is pretty close to the mark. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been writing code and thought to myself, “You know, this thing I’m making is starting to look suspiciously like a wheel…” You can imagine my excitement when I found out about this site.

At the time I discovered it, the product was in late alpha testing and was not available to the public. So I signed up for the waiting list and anxiously waited to hear about the release. Apparently so did 40,000 other people.

As they are swamped with tester requests, Krugle has been slowly giving people access as beta testers in increments of a 1000 users at a time as they open the system to their waiting list. I just got my access last night.

Krugle has a really impressive interface, heavily inspired by Web 2.0 technologies, especially AJAX. Rather than using links to open multiple browser windows, or send you on a goose chase, each search you perform is placed in dynamically generated tabs, with snippets of the code underneath the link heading. You can search by content, source code, code language or all three. When you click on a search result, another tab is generated displaying the entirety of the referenced files source code, complete with syntax highlighting. On the right of your screen, you are also provided with an outline view of the file’s originating project, which allows you to see how the file you are viewing relates in its project hierarchy. You can then click any other file in that outline to view it in a separate tab. The outline pane can also show you a tree view of which repository it is coming from.



If you note the bottom of the page, you will see there are controls for creating personal Krugle bookmarks, tags and annotations to files that you can keep to yourself or share with other Krugle users. :)

Do I have any complaints? Just one tiny little thing. As this is a new technology, programmers haven’t necessarily always put their licensing information in the file that Krugle will point you to. I really wish Krugle would also index the software license at the project level and then display that prominently in the search results so that no one can miss them. While we’re at it, why not include the software licenses as a searchable field?

All in all though, this is a great service and I’m excited that it has arrived.