A great new tool Mozilla is working on is called Prism, and it gives you the ability to create an application for your desktop out of any web service. Great examples are Gmail, Google Docs, Remember the Milk, but you can do it for any web page really.

Essentially it is a sort of browser that opens up a page, but does so outside you normal environment, making everything browser free. This means that you can focus more on a specific page, which may lead to productivity, but it also means that there will be no data loss if Firefox or IE crashes. It also enables you to keep your email app or other page open all the time easily.

You can create an application out of any page using a simple dialog, just type the URL and the name you want to give it. Simply clicking ok will create a one-time app, but you can save it to the desktop later. Saving it to the desktop (or creating a shortcut) means you will be able to launch your app any time from the place you saved it to.

I simply love Prism because it is a very simple, yet very useful and productive program to use. It is badly missing the feature to minimize to tray though, I think the point of Prism is that you can have Gmail or a calendar app open at all times, independently from your browser. Because of this it would be awesome to be able to minimize the window to the tray, maybe even binding a universal shortcut to it to be able to call it up whenever you need it.

There seems to be some buzz around browsing Wikipedia differently nowadays and I found a site that I would actually recommend to those of you using Wikipedia info often. Lexisum uses some AJAX goodness to give you Wikipedia results as you type.

The really cool thing about it is that it’s blindingly fast. I mean when I search for stuff, I usually know what I want, so getting results for “guita” when I’m trying to get at “guitar” is not a huge help. The speed at which I actually get something when I finish typing (almost instantly) is great though. There is of course a link to the full article, which takes you straight to the Wikipedia page, and one other unique feature is the ability to create prints in different page sizes.

That’s about it to this webpage, but overall it’s a very handy, speedy tool to use when browsing for info, take a look!

I just found an application called IndyWiki that enables you to browse Wikipedia in a very different way than you’re used to. You search for a term, and it will show you a multitude of related things, like pics, links, sections and so on.

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Although the interface is very intuitive, I think it needs a considerable facelift. It’s stark, and uses a gray interface reminiscent of 1997 applications. Despite this, the application is easily usable and is actually useful, it will increase your productivity by bypassing browsers and only showing you related info.

If you enter a term it will display pictures related to that term and the related article (if there is no disambiguation), plus related links, leading to other articles. I found it refreshing that you don’t see the whole article, you see only the first section. You can view other parts by using the contents navigation pane to the left. I love this because many times the info I want is in the middle of an article, but I don’t exactly know at which section. I can click on a section and take a look, if not there I just click on another one, no need to go back to the top.

If you enter a term like “GTD” you can see that the term refers to two different items. In the links section, you can choose which of the two you want, in this case we are looking for Getting Things Done of course.

Overall I think this may be a useful application, but there are some speed issues, as well as navigation and looks. It’s at 0.9.7, so I’m guessing the features they are looking for initially are implemented, and maybe for 1.0 they will develop a better interface.