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How the New Particls Sidebar Changed my Life

By Nick Hodge | July 25, 2007

I think Particls just changed my life. I’ve replaced my Microsoft Win­dows Vista Side­bar with this new ver­sion of Particls. Hav­ing Particls watch the web for me keeps me on-the-ball, more than caf­feine. Well, almost.

Hav­ing inter­viewed Chris and Ash­ley from Particls, and vis­ited their lair in Bris­ve­gas, I knew these guys where onto something.

Upon return­ing from my 2 weeks off work on hol­i­day, I had a couple of thou­sand feed items all demand­ing my instant atten­tion. Hol­i­days are a mech­an­ism for adjust­ing your per­sonal APML. Along with two cats and a bag full of wash­ing: it was dif­fi­cult to pri­or­it­ize what was/was not important.

Chris Saad let me into their secret: a new Sidebar-focused ver­sion of Particls

Feed­ing the moun­tain through Particls, the import­ant stuff popped onto the top.

Liv­ing my work­ing life online in the intar­webs, it is way too easy to lose those nug­gets and jew­els in the streams and tubes.

Why turn off the Vista Side­bar? On my laptop, screen real-estate is pre­cious, and what is most import­ant needs to be flow­ing in front of me to grab my atten­tion. My eyes move focus to move­ment (think hunter, not gatherer) — and with Particls ‘mov­ing’ items as they flow in, it grabs my attention.

Gad­gets that I have used in Vista have been static inform­a­tion; or at least some­thing that I am happy to view once per hour or so.

So, these static pieces of inform­a­tion can stay in Inter­net Explorer as favour­ites, Win­dows Live, and there­fore in online services.

Particls is no gad­get. It is now a must-have desktop applic­a­tion with the screen space it deserves.

Tech­nor­ati Tags:

Topics: particls, technology, web2.0 | 4 Comments »

4 Responses to “How the New Particls Sidebar Changed my Life”

  1. Lachlan Hardy Says:
    July 25th, 2007 at 11:26 am

    Gah! I’ve stripped all noti­fic­a­tions sys­tems. I don’t want to know now. I want to know later, when I have time, in context.

    I loved being ‘on top’ of everything. Fin­ger on the pulse etc. But I can’t get stuff done that way. My life is ori­ented towards ded­ic­ated chunks of focus now. Noti­fic­a­tions sys­tems are teh evil!

  2. hodgenick Says:
    July 25th, 2007 at 3:57 pm

    Dude– dif­fer­ent jobs, dif­fer­ent tools. I like how I can tune this Paricls into the “themes of the week” –Nick

  3. Lachlan Hardy Says:
    July 26th, 2007 at 12:21 am

    Oh, for sure. I just hate silly expres­sions like YMMV. I pretty much con­sider that self-evident

  4. lexia Says:
    July 28th, 2007 at 10:05 pm

    The Par­cils tool­bar seems quite cool. I like the idea of con­tent just flow­ing through a tool­bar. I’ll give a try.

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