Firefox

Heads up to our Live team - this would be one to work over Christmas on to gain some big kudos. Just blow the dust of OnFolio and webbify it??

Je m’inquiétais un peu car Windows Live Writer est un outil très bien foutu et le silence de près de six mois chez Microsoft pouvait laisser entendre un abandon du logiciel. L’équipe qui s’en charge est donc toujours là. Une partie provient de l’acquisition d’OnFolio (mars 2006) ce qui est une bonne nouvelle.

Today I had the pleasure of sitting down and talking with Charles Teague, who is a principal development lead on the Windows Live Writer Team. Charles was part of the original group of folks who came over from Onfolio when Microsoft acquired the company a few years ago. That same group of people lead by Charles and J.J. Allaire who worked on Writer at Onfolio are still working on Windows Live Writer today.

Though not directly geared at academia, Microsoft has a comparable offering called Onfolio for Windows Live Toolbar. Onfolio, originally started by Coldfusion inventor JJ Allaire, was acquired by Microsoft last year. There is an advanced bookmarking feature and you can save partial or complete web sites. You can organize your research collections in an Explorer like experience and you can search this. There are also collaboration features.

I don't know of any mechanism to search my RSS feeds within IE 7. Does anyone know how? It bothers me to no end. My solution is to export and bring it into Onfolio (I had Onfolio before Microsoft purchased). I wish Microsoft would have just used Onfolio as it's RSS mechanism embedded in IE 7. Instead it will wilt on the vine.

La culture d’innovation reste forte dans les équipes techniques de ces deux sociétés mais cela ne se voit pas toujours très bien. Plus les équipes sont concentrées sur les améliorations incrémentales des produits majeurs, moins l’innovation est perceptible. Surtout quand dans le même temps, les innovations des produits “mineurs” ne sont pas bien marketés et que nombre de nouveautés sont le résultat d’acquisitions comme chez Google. Pas mal de petits produits sont cachés et mal marketés chez Microsoft comme Onfolio, acheté en mars 2006, un très bon lecteur de flux RSS, mais utilisable seulement à partir de la Windows Live Toolbar. Et donc… passé aux oubliettes.

But how about Windows Live Writer? I found this Harrison Hoffman LiveSide podcast interview with J.J. Allaire, the architect of Windows Live Writer and founder of Onfolio. So I learned that Live Writer came with Microsoft’s acquisition of Onfolio. They had already started developing Writer as a web publishing tool to compliment their other products prior to the acquisition. J.J. explains that their vision was to extend Onfolio from collecting and acquiring information in to publishing.

I have been using Onfolio blog reader since I installed MSN Live toolbar sometime ago; its nothing special but does the job. The biggest problem for me is that onfolio stores state offline so when I read a blog at work (during lunch of course!) it gets marked as read but then when I go home I have to mark it as read again....bit of a pain but at the time I had a look at Google reader and didn't like it so stuck it out with Onfolio.

It wasn't until I was driving away that evening that the last piece of the puzzle clicked in my head. Windows Live Writer was created by the same team that brought us Onfolio. This team of hungry developers was acquired from the "outside".

The good thing about the project is that they are trying to create a platform of sorts - people can write their own plug-ins. The API is already published. What this leads to is a kind of social networking where you contribute info and get info back ... really cool stuff and the extensibility makes it even more cooler!! Now only if there was deeper integration between Onfolio, CB, Live and some of the other services ... And not just MS ones, think integration with Blogger, Orkut, Flickr, del.ici.ous ... now if each of these services could start exposing APIs, there would be a huge market for clients that would give an aggregated experience across these services.

The other feature I really like is having an RSS Feed feature. It works much better and faster than previous builds. I might be tempted to give up Onfolio to have my RSS data in Outlook. The one missing feature is the ability to mark all the sub folders as read. If you subscribe to alot of feeds and have trouble staying caught up from time to time, you know how valuable a global “Mark All As Read” can be. I use that feature a lot in Onfolio ( now a part of the Live Toolbar ).

Don works at Microsoft. He's 100% working with companies that could become the next big thing, and lists 32 of them. I've personally only heard of three that he mentions: Akimbo, Newsgator and Onfolio (Don - didn't we just buy them??). I need to find out more about Adesso Systems ('WinFS today'), Digipede (gridware) and Fractal Edge (data visualization).

We have released the Windows Live Toolbar beta which adds some really cool technology from Onfolio, a company we just acquired. Onfolio grabs scraps of web pages to be shared or viewed later, which is my favorite part. Also, it allows you to collect and read feed collections via a great reader that is integrated into IE so you can read all your feeds in one place. This is a great tool to help organize information that you find on the web.

Microsoft buys Onfolio. Robert Scoble points me to this. I have used Onfolio a lot before, i.e. in late 2004 and early 2005. I have written about in in my previous blog. It is a great product and I am sure Microsoft and it's users will get a lot of value out of it when they integrate it within the toolbars of Microsoft Live. Will it interesting to see in what software will they integrate this tool if they do. To check out what Onfolio has to offer, check out this tour of it's features.

RSS feed discussion. What do you use for RSS to stay mobile? Did you know that you can even read RSS feeds on Windows Media Center? We discuss Onfolio, Bloglines, GreatNews, FeedDemon, NewsGator and more.

The first bit of software I use on a regular basis is Onfolio. This software is basically a collection tool. It has an integrated RSS feed reader (which is my main use for it) and the ability to create (and publish) ‘collections’ - this allows you to create a collection of files, notes and web snippets - either in a briefcase idea, or as a web research tool.

I was going mad ... until I remembered s.th. about Onfolio...

Tonight when I logged on to my favorite RSS aggregator-reader I was presented with their Going Out of Business notice. Ouch! I am a beta tester for Searchfox and just love it. Techcrunch sent me their way, and I fell in love with after I finally understood it. It took about 3 weeks for SF to learn my reading habits, and from then on it served up my favorite subjects at the top of my list. There is no other information. Their last official blog post was in November. Before SF I used Onfolio and Blogbridge. What do you recommend I use now?

Carnage4Life has some info about the MetaWeblog APIs for MSN spaces. This allows you to post to your Spaces blog using many different tools, like W.Bloggar, Blogjet (which is fast becomming my favourite blogging tool!), Ecto ,Zoundry Qumana, Onfolio, Elicit ,PostXING, Pocket Blogger and Diarist - PocketPC. Very cool stuff! There are also tips on how to post to Spaces using W.Blogger here and BlogJet here.

Onfolio Support: When I tried to access feeds last night, every single one of them gave me the red x icon, even the feed for this support forum. [later] I opened IE to see what was up with that program, and it told me that it was working "offline". When I told it to work online, it showed me that I had a proxy set up, and the proxy was not working properly (since I'm back at home). When I had checked the proxy information in Firefox, all was correct, i.e., no proxy.

I’ve been using reader.Google.com as of late. Its not perfect but it has several things going for it. 1) its online, so it will keep track of items I’ve already read from wherever I access it. 2) its free. I had been using Onfolio with Firefox as my RSS reader. Onfolio is made by the guys who made Cold Fusion, so I have a natural desire to see them do well. Its a good product. It is probably the best RSS reader out there. However, it costs $30 and it only works on one computer. Google reader is good enough and with the cost and online advantages, it makes it hard to beat.

We just updated the OPML parser in order to accept exported OPML files from FeedDemon and Onfolio.

Onfolio - easily capture and organize content (html, email, documents, etc.) as well as manage rss feeds (could not live without this)

I've been trying out Onfolio 2.0 for the past week or so and so far I really like it. I've been collecting files and webpages for afew years now on various things I'm interested in. So I've been copying files and links into Onfolio to have as a knowledge base/electronic brain. I especially like the fact that I'm not dependent on other program's file structure like how Firefox keeps the bookmarks in one folder and files in My documents with pictures, music and videos in the appropriate folders. For instance, I have a folder in My Documents labeled InuYasha, one of my favorite anime shows(how does one pluralize anime as in meaning one of many shows?). In it I have some archived fanfics I like and want to be able to read offline. In My Pictures I have two folders related to InuYasha images, one is Fanart which covers the small images from official and fanartists I like and another one is Wallpapers. In My Videos I have around 15-16 amv's (anime music videos-clips from a show or game set to music) In Firefox I have links to fanfics, fansites, the official site, links to AMV's I want to download, etc. In Onfolio I have have copies of the files and links all in one folder. I'm not dependent on desktop search to help me find all my things, although I'm going to keep using Copernic Desktop search as sometimes I'm not exactly sure where I saw something.

One of the best news aggregators available today is Onfolio v2.0. What separates Onfolio from most aggregators is that it is built into your web browser. Usually, the personal edition is $29.95, but O'Reilly (the company that makes many of the best computer books) is celebrating the opening of it's new site, Annoyances Central, by giving away registered copies of Onfolio here until August 8th. Go get it while it's free!

So far, so good. I just upgraded to the latest beta of FeedDemon since they were acquired by NewsGator. And beta 2 is rumoured to be following soon. The syncronization rocks and I like the little tweaks made here and there to the look and feel of the interface. I think Nick is doing great things with this product. I haven't had the slightest desire to go back to Onfolio or Pluck!

You can send either the e-mail itself (as an Outlook file) or the message text (as a snippet) to your collection. You cannot use the add-in to capture just a portion of the text however. It also doesn’t like the NewsGator “Post” items (which use the newsgroup post format rather than standard e-mail). This is not such a big deal with the built-in RSS reader in Onfolio but if you elect to use NewsGator, Blogbot, or even bring standard newsgroup information (NNTP) into Outlook, you won’t be able to add it to your collections using the add-in. All of these data objects can be captured using Onfolio’s clipboard capture however - just copy the selected text and then choose the global “paste to Onfolio” keyboard command (Ctrl + Shift + F11).

This Evening, I stumbled across this beauty: Onfolio (found on scobleizer here). And holy hell, it's amazing. Not only does it give you the awesome syndication features of Thunderbird, but the Onfolio Newspaper View is amazing. It has a firefox extension that is very well done (and an IE one, but if you're using an RSS aggregator, you probably aren't browsing in IE6). I'd say that I'll post more when i figure out how to work more of it's features, but i'd just be lying, as i'm pretty lazy.

…so it seems that yet another web annotation and social bookmarking service has been getting some traction…i’ve already taken long hard looks at furl (read the interview with mike giles) and spurl (read that interview with hjalli gislason too) and also caught up with shimon, the guy behind frassle …but this is a different angle completely…this is about a company that already makes installation software, similar in spirit to netsnippets (best of the lot by far, and now offering a free version) and the oft-maligned onfolio (like nancy wilson from heart before the gastric bypass)…the company is pluck and what they’re offering is shadows…

This morning I tried to sync the RSS Feeds I read through Onfolio on my laptop and desktop, which got me thinking about back when I asked Jesse what good dev Blogs/resources I should be reading. He sent me a big pile of urls, most of which had rss feeds I could load into Thunderbird, then Onfolio. Here's the List : Opml (as much for my benifit, as for the 2 people who read this blog).

Finally looks halfway decent. I found that OnFolio was exporting the OPML file incorrectly. I was able to render the OPML to HTML using this tool I found at Inès' Crib

The news reader that I use is called RSS Bandit, but there are many out there. Some are simply web-based (Bloglines), some are stand-alone apps ( RSS Bandit, FeedDemon) some are browser plug-ins (OnFolio, Pluck) and some are integrated into Outlook.

A few people have asked me for links to some blogging resources, so voilà! — here’s a link to my Onfolio collection of blogging resources:

In fact, paper is nearly impossible to search without a great filing system. Aaah, another one of my pet peeves — the inability to organize and locate information! Why is the company Google so successful? Why do I see information manager after information manager? (From Evernote to Onfolio to Backpackit to Mindmanager) — its incredible how many gizmos exist to help us organize our minds.) Why do I wish I could buy books in electronic format (not so I can pirate them, but so that I can search for things and find information more easily)?? [Will someone ever solve the problem of DRM?]

In investigating OnFolio (thanks to Spike's comment), I found that I could give it a URL to a web service. In OnFolio, you can specify your blogger settings. It supports standard blogging environments like blogspot, or, it can take a custom command.

I created a web service that in turn calls SharePoint's Lists web service to create a new item in a SharePoint list (my 'Blog' list, in this case). I did this because the lists web service takes some fairly complex parameters in its "UpdateListItems" method.

My web service simply accepts a Title, Body and URL. It then formulates the correct parameters for the UpdateListItems method and calls the method on the proper WebService.

I've been testing out a great new product called Onfolio 2.0 for about a month now - these guys have done some terrific work.

Onfolio lets you capture website links (like IE favorites), save web content (for offline or permanent reference) and includes a top notch RSS reader. Onfolio integrates with IE and firefox - and is very effective for consolidating web research and staying on top of industry developments.

I have feeds from Blogdigger, IceRocket, MSN, Technorati, PubSub, Feedster, Yahoo News, as well as feeds from our customer forums. I read every single one of the posts that come into these feeds. If you forced me to stop using Onfolio (or any other feed reader), this is what I would miss more than anything. Interestingly, these are also the feeds that generate the most junk for me (ads in some, 30% junk rate, etc...). I can live with that to be notified when someone writes something about Onfolio, though!

More discussion about 'river of news,' this time coming from Nick Bradbury, author of FeedDemon. Looks like the new surfer view has the goodness of the 'river of news' and the some of the interactivity of the Onfolio Newspaper (and it looks nice too). Nice!

Northwest VC has a lengthy post on his blog about the tool Onfolio and how he finds it indispensable.

“Onfolio is a PC application for reading RSS news feeds, collecting and organizing online content, and publishing to email, weblogs and web sites.”

I really like the ability to search cached pages. I’ve been using Onfolio for a few weeks to save Web pages to my hard drive, which I’ve been trying to use as a replacement to paper print outs (much more portable). I’ve been double saving to both Onfolio and Yahoo! My Web for the past few days and I have to say, both are equally cumbersome – it’s enough of a pain to click on numerous windows to save that I started doing it less and less. But that’s just me – others may find it a fair trade-off.

After looking into BlogBridge … later that same day … I stumbled onto Onfolio, a web research program I had used years ago. I must say, I am impressed with Onfolio’s evolution, even with its $79 price tag for the professional edition. Aside from handy web research collection tools (which I have not tried yet), Onfolio includes a pretty good and easy to use news feed and blog aggregator, and this may be the killer part of the app. Not only can I collect data along the way during web research, but I can also monitor blogs...

I remain a fan of Onfolio, which began life as kind of a personal knowledge manager for Web-based content, but has evolved to also handle RSS feeds and provide more publishing capabilities. I have used it for quite a while now to maintain my eForms Resources page, and am currently using the new version, 2.0, which supports Firefox, which is now my primary browser.

I installed Onfolio 2.0 yesterday and the program messed up my system.

Onfolio 2.0 is advertised as a cohesive research assistant akin to Furl It and another big selling point for the program is an embedded RSS reader.

Onfolio 2.0 is supposed to be a ground-breaking way to store and manage information.

Onfolio 2.0 does not work with my standard Firefox 1.03 installation.

The Onfolio 2.0 RSS feeds take forever to load at the default installation setting.

I thought I would share some insights on the number of collections I have put together since I started using Onfolio, how many are the most oftenly used, and also some data on how big those collections are.

I started using Onfolio back in October of 2003 when I joined the team here. You could guess that we were pretty heavy users of Onfolio internally before it was released even while a lot of it was still being put together. Since that time I have accumulated about 18 collections that contain pretty much all of "my stuff." Inside of those 18 collections is a subset of about 7 collections that I use most often. Here is the collection names and a brief description of those:

A while ago, I started using Onfolio on my PC, which is a very nifty RSS reader/information organiser, that had one major flaw for me - it didn't sync with either NewsGator Online, or Bloglines - both of which I use to read feeds on my Mac. Now, thanks to Onfolio developer Joe Cheng, Onfolio can now sync with Bloglines. I'll give this a test spin later on.

I've been a Bloglines user for over a year now (recently bought by Ask Jeeves), and have been generally happy with the experience of a web based blog reading service. A new udpate by Onfolio, of Onfolio 2.0, caught my eye yesterday and so I downloaded the application after having tried version 1.0 over a year ago. It's got great new features, including the ability to save entire web sites, organize and annotate comments on things...

However, I wish there were a web-based version of this product, or at the very least the ability to share and sync my Onfolio with other Onfolio on secondary PCs. I tend to do my work across multiple desktops and laptops (both windows and Mac), so I tend to be partial to apps that are stored on the web. This way I can access the same stuff, with the latest updates, off any machine that I'm on.

I have been continuing to use Onfolio and liking it, but have come up with one snag - performance. At home I have been trying it on my AMD Athlon 64 computer with 1GB of RAM - no problem (well you would hope not with that machine spec!!).

However when I tried it on my computer at work I had to uninstall it, the machine just became too slow. Certainly too slow to leave Onfolio running in the background collecting feeds. My machine at work is a P4 with 512MB of RAM, a reasonable computer, average for a mid-range office machine.

I’m a developer at Onfolio- just wanted to check if you had tried the Preview release of Onfolio yet. We have had a lof of positive feedback about its performance compared to Beta 1, so if you haven’t checked it out yet, it may make performance on your home computer a lot more acceptable. If you’re already using it and its still not working for you performance wise, thats good for us to know as well- we’ll keep trying to make it faster!

Ars Technica has a great review of several desktop search software packages available currently. It really goes through good enough detail to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each software and matched my experience as well. The only ones here I haven't tested are Copernic and Ask Jeeves. But the winner is my choice as well: MSN Desktop Search. This has consistently stayed on my desktop and laptop and I use it several times a day....

Hmmm, are you sure your Onfolio collections are getting indexed by MSN? This isn't possible as far as I know (yet... but we're working on it).

Posted by: Joe Cheng | April 5, 2005 07:39 PM

Well, it's not ideal, but they are indexed. I'm using Onfolio Publisher to publish my collection to a local directory. Since this is essentially an HTML file, it's indexed completely. When I search in MSN, I get index.htm (Main Collection) as a result, thus I know it's in Onfolio. That's the best I have so far.

Ideally, you should have an iFilter for .cfs files. Then, MSN will automatically search and index them. Although, I'll still get a Main Collection.cfs as a result that opens up in Onfolio.

Onfolio- I use Onfolio all day long and my data and RSS feeds are important to backup. The data "collections" are stored under the My Documents tree by default so as long as you haven't changed that you will be OK by simply backing up the My Documents tree. The RSS feeds are another matter, and unfortunately Onfolio chooses to store them in another hidden folder by default. If you don't back up the correct folder specifically you lose all your feeds and history information, which for me numbers in the hundreds. Be sure and back up your feed information in the following default folder (after making it visible in the properties):

C:\Documents and Settings\YourUserName\Application Data\Onfolio

I’ve become totally smitten with Onfolio 2.0 as my news aggregator. I used to use Bloglines, and still recommend it to anyone new to the world of Blogs and RSS, but the ability to download my aggregated feeds and read them offline (a la FeedDemon) combined with the ability to clip and save entire websites has really changed my browsing habits. Best of all, for now it’s...

Onfolio recently released its Onfolio 2.0 Release Candidate. For new news aggregator users, this is my second recommendation after Bloglines. Bloglines is easier, but Onfolio is much more powerful and, because it stores everything on your hard drive, opens up new scenarios (like you can read and search your feeds even when on a plane unconnected from the Internet).

3) Built in the browser. OnFolio 2.0 adds onto IE or Firefox. Optimal Access adds onto IE. The Mozilla team offers Sage for Firefox users. Pluck adds onto any browser. My favorite here is OnFolio. Pluck is pretty good too.

On a happier note, I use Onfolio every single day! I am still very much in love with this program.

We are very happy to announce that the Release Candidate (Beta 3) of Onfolio 2.0 is available for immediate download. To read about some of the changes that have gone into Onfolio 2.0 since the Preview Release and Beta 1, please look through the Relea

We are very happy to announce that the Release Candidate (Beta 3) of Onfolio 2.0 is available for immediate download. To read about some of the changes that have gone into Onfolio 2.0 since the Preview Release and Beta 1, please look through the Relea

I LOVE Onfolio and immediately downloaded the latest release.

I LOVE Onfolio and immediately downloaded the latest release.

Many of you have probably noticed that when you send an item from Onfolio to Outlook, the message that comes up on your screen is modal, meaning you can't do anything else until you have completed that message. I find this really annoying because I often want to look up and add some other information before sending the message, but I can't do anything until the message is sent. The way I get around this now is by hitting the "Save" button on the message. This puts it into my Inbox where I can open it later, add the information I want and then send it. Since it took me about 6 months to figure this out, I thought I would share it on the off chance that someone else was in the same boat.

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Onfolio Tip: Better way to email items from Onfolio :

We are very happy to announce that the Release Candidate (Beta 3) of Onfolio 2.0 is available for immediate download. To read about some of the changes that have gone into Onfolio 2.0 since the Preview Release and Beta 1, please look through the Release Notes. At this point, all planned work is complete for the 2.0 release and the only changes that will be made between now and the final release will be to address stability issues that come up as people use the Release Candidate. Once again, we thank you for all that you?ve done to help us get Onfolio 2.0 to this point. To download the Release Candidate, go to: http://www.onfolio.com/download

Paula Hane has written an excellent overview of two new releases in the web information management space. In her article: Two New Web Information Managers Debut at DEMO@15, Hane takes a look at Pluck 1.0 and OnFolio 2.0. A summary in this post.

Onfolio, Inc., an independent software company committed to helping professionals conduct research and manage Web information, has unveiled Onfolio 2.0. Onfolio 2.0 is a PC solution that's built into the browser with integrated tools for reading RSS news feeds, collecting and organizing online content, and publishing to email, weblogs, and Web sites.

Brightcove Inc. closed $5.5 million in January, becoming the latest Boston-area company to launch a business for delivering video over the Internet.

Jeremy Allaire incorporated the Cambridge company last August under the name Video Marketplace. Cambridge-based General Catalyst Partners LLC and Accel Partners of California are backing Brightcove.

"Web research has emerged as an essential component of scientific and academic research, and EndNote users rely increasingly on RSS feeds to stay abreast of changes in their fields," said David Kochalko, President of Thomson ResearchSoft. "After evaluating many offerings, we found Onfolio to be the only complete web information manager on the market, making it the ideal solution to tightly integrate with EndNote."

"We designed Onfolio to give researchers the ability to apply the same rigor to their web research that they have always applied to their literature research and primary research. Onfolio's integration with EndNote is a key part of this design, helping researchers track online information from the point of discovery to the time when they need to cite it in their own work," said JJ Allaire, CEO of Onfolio. "Partnering with ResearchSoft for sales and marketing gives us the best opportunity to reach the academic and professional researchers, students, librarians and professors who will benefit from this solution."