mind42.com is a web based mindmapping tool that recently came out of beta. I find their web interface intuitive and easy to use. Features include the ability to collaborate with others and to publish your maps via a direct link, or embedded in web pages.

Stanza, currently in beta, is an electronic book reading application for Mac OS which also allows you to export content for use on a variety of portable devices. It features the ability to customize the display of text in multiple column layouts or in full screen mode. Scrolling can be set to advance automatically, like a teleprompter, based on your reading speed, or manually. You can import content from a variety of sources including directly from the Project Gutenberg site. It also provides for the ability to export content to mobile devices such as the iPhone and the Amazon Kindle.

I spent some time this morning playing with Stanza and went to the Project Gutenberg site and found the listing for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. I copied the url for the full text version and used the Open Location feature in Stanza to download and display the book. Stanza went out and got the file and displayed the book in the default view. I then used the export feature to create versions for my iPhone and for my Kindle.

The export to the iPhone is accomplished by converting the content to a .plist file (bookmarklet file) and then importing the bookmarklet into Safari. Once imported the content is transfered to your phone on your next sync. Once it is on your iPhone you can customize the reading experience including the ability to auto-scroll the text at various rates of speed based on your reading speed. As noted in their FAQ, very large books, or documents can slow down your the iPhone browser when initially opening the document.

I tried to use the open location feature to display a print friendly article from the New York Times, but ran into an issue with authenticating on the Times site. I worked around this by displaying the print friendly version of the article and then selecting and copying the text of the article. Stanza has an import form clipboard command that then imported and displayed the article.

Stanza is an interesting way to display and read text on your Mac. It’s ability to export in various mobile formats makes it a great tool for getting content on your mobile devices.

Technorati Tags: ebook, ebooks, iphone, kindle, Stanza

Cabel Sasser is a software developer and one of the founders of Panic Software, the folks that make Transmit along with some other nice web development tools. Transmit is a great FTP utility for the Mac and a tool that I find myself using just about everyday. Cabel also does some other coding and his weblog, cabel.name is a good read for folks who like to keep up with smart independent software developers. (If you are interested in software design, his talk from C4 is very informative and entertaining…)

This morning, David Warlick pointed to a nice little piece of Javascript that Cabel wrote that produces a nice visual effect when viewing images that have been posted to your web site. He calls it FancyZoom. Basically when a thumbnail link is clicked a larger version of the image appears as a call out. A very nice effect. Below is an example. Click the image to see the effect.