News: Diigo finally updated to version 4

[Paul Keith]

Sorry if this was posted before but I didn't see any hint that it was.

Anyways, it's still no longer my main annotation tool after mwang alerted me to Scrapbook+ but nevertheless:

http://blog.diigo.com/2009/09/28/highlight-annotate-archive-search-share-diigo-the-best-online-research-tool-just-gets-even-better-diigo-v4-is-live-now/

The improvements seem minor (compared to the level of improvements expected of Diigo), but the aesthetics of the interface feels comfortable again. (If you weren't a fan of v3 and felt it was too confusing.)

Downside is the forum/group seems much harder to differentiate between bookmarks and posts (but I'm not seeing many complaints in their forum so it's probably tolerable) but the upside is that the toolbar now has a button where you can hide the toolbar and that the highlights are much easier to read again because they aren't black texts on white backgrounds with a thin layer of line to denote a box... but instead are actual snippets of gray background.

Main noticeable feature is the highlight pen which is a menu that pops up in a highlight so you could easily switch colors, add inline sticky notes and delete the highlight without clicking on a drop down arrow but just hovering your mouse over it.

[sri]

Is it possible to have Scrapebook data to be uploaded online and have sync features like in Xmarks?

[Paul Keith]

From a newb techie perspective, I don't think there's an easy way unless you have a Dropbox account and use it for that.

Even then you have limited storage and it's not really easy switching accounts.

The closest and most popular alternative is Evernote but outside of PDF support for the pro version, it doesn't compare with the quality of Scrapbook's highlighting. (unless you just use one color)

[mwang]

Thanks for the heads-up, Paul. I haven't visited diigo for ages, however, and don't plan to. Bookmarking and saving things online are just too slow, after getting used to doing those things locally.

[Paul Keith]

I know. My main issue with local saving though is that I'm still looking for a frugal but secure way of backing up these things.

Right now in my position, I feel much safer if my data is online but is also in a free service that doesn't need monitoring.

Of course the downside is that if the site goes down, I'm dead in the water. Still, I myself haven't completely switched to Diigo but I'm still left without any similar web clipper + highlights + annotation app that has an online sync for free but with the same ease as Scrapbook+ and Diigo.