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Digital Inspiration

Digital Inspiration is your guide to all things related to software, technology and Internet.

Selecting a Safe Password Manager for Storing your Secret PasswordsToday

With almost every web application requiring a password and adoption of universal login services like OpenID or Google Accounts still a distant dream, it is ultimately your memory that acts as the safest password manager for storing all those complex and secret passwords.

Too Many Passwords to Remember?

The memory, though a safe hideout, is not a very scalable solution especially when you have accounts across dozen different websites and you don’t use the same password everywhere. That’s where Password Managers enter the scene - these tools (often free) store your passwords in encrypted form and you just have to remember a single password for retrieving any other password.

There are three kinds of Password Managers - desktop based (offline), web based (your passwords remain accessible from all computers) or portable (carry your passwords on a USB stick).

Desktop based Password Manager

KeePass is a popular desktop based password manager that’s available for all operating systems and even some mobile devices. It stores all your logins and passwor

Live Documents Releases Offline Presentation Editor; Drops Office 2007 SkinToday

Some of you may remember Live Documents, an online office suite that was launched by Sabeer Bhatia (of Hotmail fame) more than a year ago. Live Documents, like Google Docs, would run completely inside the browser and the user interface was an exact clone of Office 2007.

Not sure if the legal team at Microsoft has a role to play here but InstaColl, the company that is developing Live Documents, has completely shed the Office 2007 skin and launched their first product called Live Presentations.

Live Presentations is a web based presentation creator with all the standard features but they also provide an Adobe AIR app to help you create presentations on the desktop even whi

Add Keynote Transitions to your Presentations without MacToday

Apple recently demonstrated a new version of Keynote software as part of the iWorks ‘09 office productivity suite. Among other enhancements, Keynote ‘09 includes an array of new animations and transitions effects that you can add between slides.

Now Keynote ‘09 is available for Mac only but if you are on Windows or use another program like Microsoft PowerPoint to create presentations, SlideRocket is coming up with something that may interest you.

SlideRocket has taken some of the new transition effects that were introduced in Keynote ‘09 and added them to their own web presentation software. That means you can upload your existing PowerPoint slides on to SlideRocket and apply transitions that were otherwise only available in Keynote.

You can view the new Keynote transitions in SlideRocket through the above presentation but these are probably not live for everyone yet. This demo will give you some more idea about the capabilities and features of SlideRocket.

SlideRocket founder Mitch Grasso

Create Graphs Online with Google Chart MakerYesterday

I earlier recommended the Google Charts API for embedding charts in web pages. It’s very powerful but the only problem with Charts API is that it look slightly complicated to most users.

Google Charts - Live Images

If you no geek but still need to create, or rather generate, charts using the Google Charts API, what you need is Chart Maker - its a nice GUI interface for the Google Charts API that hides a complex part. Just pick a chart type, specify the data and your Google Chart is ready.

You can either save the chart image on to your hard drive or hotlink the image by using the direct URL of the graph - I have used the latter style to embed the above pie and bar charts.

Google allows you to make 250,000 direct image requests a day, but you may exceed this limit by mailing them a request.

Create Graphs Online with Google Chart Maker - Digital Inspiration

Some Interesting Styles of BloggingYesterday

Here are some unique styles of blogging that you may find interesting.

1. Techcrunch – If there’s news about company X launching a new product called Y, most tech blogs would simply publish that news with their own commentary but it’s not that easy for Arrington. His interns will first create new entries for both company X and product Y on CrunchBase and then the news would go live on the main TechCrunch site with the company or person’s name often linking back to the CrunchBase entry instead of the official website.

2. Jason Calacanis – Most people think that Mahalo founder Jason has quit blogging but it’s not true. The only difference is that Jason now uses an email editor to write his blog post instead of some blog editor – his email messages still get published as blog entries (see example) and can be read via feeds.

3. Daring Fireball – Apple guru John Gruber has an extremely unique blogging style. The title of his blog articles do not point to the permalink of that post but instead they link to the main story that John is commenting upon. Subscribe to his feed and you’ll definitely fall in love with this style of linking.

4. John Battelle - While most bloggers (A-list crowd included) worry a