Happens all the time — the need to take notes while reading email, accessing your calendar, or performing other actions.  Taking notes is usually “too much work” unless they can be accessed instantly, auto-saved, and hidden when done.

Quick virtual note taking is included FREE with all LuxSci accounts … via LuxSci’s Notepad Widget.  Here is how it works.

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LuxSci has introduced several new features this week that enhance the usability of parts of its web interface.  These include:

• Right-Click Context Menus in WebAides: All WebAides (i.e. address books, calendars, tasks, etc.) now support right clicking on list entries and on the WebAides themselves to bring up a context menu of useful options — like “Delete WebAide”, “Subscribe to WebAide”, “Tag Entry”, etc.  This makes WebAide use simpler and more natural.  The WebMail interface already supports right-click context menus.
• “Full Screen Mode” Tool Bar Option: Users can now choose to add a tool bar command for toggling on and off “Full Screen Mode” — the mode of viewing WebMail and WebAides which hides the page headers and footers to give maximal screen space for working in these tools.  This tool bar command can be added in users’ Preferences area.
• Task List Widgets: LuxSci’s Task List Widgets have a new optional setting where you can hide tasks from display until they are near or past their due date.  If you have many tasks and many of them are for the future, your task list Widget can be configured to show you only what is “due soon”, and you can specify what “soon” means.  Use the “Properties” of your Task List Widget to configure this new setting.
• Dates and Times: When forwarding, replying, or annotating an email message, the “date” that is included in the text of the email to indicate when this was done now includes the time and timezone.  For example, instead of  “On April 15th, 2010, XYZ said”, it will now say “On April 15th 2010 12:15:16 EDT, XYZ said”.  This provides both additional accuracy and eliminates confusion when people are working in different time zones.

LuxSci has added a new Widget to its inventory of pre-defined Widgets available to all users — the “Multi-Feed” Widget.

With the Multi-Feed widget, you can specify an arbitrary collection of news feeds from diverse sources and have them be all downloaded, sorted together by date, and displayed to you as an aggregate list of news items in your Workspace.

The Multi-Feed Widget supports:

• RSS Feeds
• Twitter update feeds (showing the tweets of everyone that you follow on Twitter)
• LuxSci WebAide Blogs

In the future, other feed sources will also be supported, such as facebook.

LuxSci has added many new features to the email folder display widget.  The email folder widget is available to all LuxSci customers whose email is hosted with LuxSci.  This widgets can be added to any workspace so that the contents of any email folders, even shared ones, can be viewed and managed along side other information such as address books, calendars, notes, file storage areas, blogs, custom widgets, etc.

The email folder widget has been updated to include:

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LuxSci has released a new Widget which displays the contents of a selected email folder on any Workspace.  Some of the features of this widget include:

• Displays all messages in the folder or only those tagged with a certain tag.
• Displays pages of messages at a time.
• Display is auto-updated every 2 minutes so that you quickly see new messages, deleted messages, and changes to message tags and status.

The Email Folders Widget can be added to any Workspace by any user with email services at LuxSci.

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LuxSci had made several improvements to its Widgets:

• Users can now make new entries in Blog widgets using either plain text or HTML editor modes.  Which should be used is now configurable as a Blog Widget property.
• WebAide-based Widgets and RSS feeds now all have an optional “maximum height” property.  Use this if you would rather the widget have an internal scroll bar and be shorter, rather than not scrolling and showing all applicable entries.
• The Email “Quick Check” widget now auto-checks the subscribed email folders every 2 minutes and updates the display of how many new and unread messages are in each of these folders.

LuxSci has released some updates to its WebAide Widgets.  These include:

• Search your address books quickly right from your Address Book Widgets using new integrated AJAX-based search functionality.
• Create new Blog entries right from your Blog widgets.
• Blog widgets now support automatic updates and paging through all of the entries in the blog.
• Custom HTML Widgets now contain a “notes” field where you can save information on where you get the custom HTML and how to edit/update it later.

Widgets keep getting more flexible.  Soon to come:  creation and sharing of additional Widget workspaces!

LuxSci has added a “Documents” widget to the portfolio of widgets available to users for customizing their use and access of LuxSci.  The Documents Widget:

• Allows access to any document storage WebAide that you have access to — even shared ones.
• Allows viewing and downloading documents
• Allows uploading new documents to the WebAide storage location
• Allows deleting of unwanted documents.
• Allows you to specify how many documents to display at once and permits paging through all of the documents if there are many
• Color codes the documents by tag and uses icons to indicate the file types
• Allows showing only documents that are tagged with specific tags.
• The document list auto-updates to show changes to the underlying list of files.

File storage at LuxSci just got much quicker and easier.  Using custom hot keys, users can access their documents instantly from any page of LuxSci’s web site.  Documents are also now available in Mobile Mode via this new widget.

LuxSci’s Widgets just got better.  With this latest release, users can now access shared and/or personal calendars, address books, and tasks as widgets in any page of LuxSci, via custom hotkeys, and via their phone in our “Mobile Mode“.

All of these WebAide Widgets now support:

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LuxSci has given its Task List widgets a complete overhaul, improving their usefulness as well as their usability.   The Task List Widgets provide a simplified and very slick window on your underlying Tasks WebAides, available to anyone with a WebAides license. Like all widgets, they can be included in any workspace, like the Welcome page or the Account Administration page.  They can also be accessed via user-specified hot keys from any page in LuxSci’s site.

Some of the enhancements to the Task List Widget, all of which operate using AJAX, include:

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