Scrible

Modern research platform for school and work

  • FEATURES
  • EDU
    • For Students
    • For Educators
    • For Administrators
  • GOOGLE
  • ABOUT
  • TESTIMONIALS
    • Students
    • Educators
    • Administrators
  • PLANS
  • BLOG
  • TOOLS
  • SIGN IN

February 4, 2012 By scrible

Stickier sticky notes

We had some reports that our sticky notes were out of control. That they were wandering off wherever they wanted to be, hanging out with the wrong crowd, and generally being a nuisance to society. Well we had a long, stern talk with them and they should be straightening up and flying right. Now when you place it a note, it takes notice. It will remember where you put it, and it will try its darnedest to get back to where it was when you reload that page. And if it can’t, it’ll politely excuse itself to the margin of the page. How’s that for a paragon of proper page placement?

Hopefully this update makes notes behave closer to what you would expect from their physical analogs. Let us know what you think, love or hate it, so we can keep improving scrible and making it better than ever!

Filed Under: Bug Fixes, Product

January 28, 2012 By scrible

scrible for iPad

For those of you who missed scrible at CES (we don’t blame you, there were TVs there bigger than our booth!) may not have noticed that we now have an iPad optimized version of the toolbar and library. There’s no app to install, just a bookmarklet like the desktop version. All you have to do is point your web browser to scrible, and we’ll take care of the rest.

We reworked the toolbar to make it more finger-friendly with bigger buttons and a condensed interface. We also made it scale and move with the viewport, so it’s always the right size right where you left it. You’ll notice a few buttons have been consolidated, but don’t worry, everything is still there.  Pressing the scrible logo will reveal the undo, redo, min/max notes, and remove toolbar buttons. A long press on the text styles button will reveal bold, underline, italic, and strikethrough buttons.

The library has also been streamlined and given a cleaner interface for the iPad. All of your articles saved from the desktop are available, and vice-versa.  You can search and filter through your entire library, just like the desktop version. Not a fan? Well, scroll to the bottom and there’s an option to switch over to the full desktop version as well.

Also, check out these awesome people that were nice enough to write us up during CES:

http://legallyeasy.rocketlawyer.com/ces-shouts-eureka-94321
http://www.actualidadipad.com/almacena-paginas-webs-con-anotaciones-en-la-nube-con-scrible/
http://www.columbusalive.com/content/stories/2012/01/19/gadgets-reviews.html
http://www.wga.org/content/default.aspx?id=4802
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/tag/scrible/
http://www.elpais.com/articulo/tecnologia/Eureka/Park/semilla/futuro/elpeputec/20120113elpeputec_2/Tes

Filed Under: New Features, Press Mentions, Product

January 23, 2012 By scrible

scrible shares better

You’ve probably noticed that scrible’s had some major changes lately.  We’ve been hard at work implementing improvements based on your feedback.  Here’s a list of the changes, followed by the details:

  • Publicly sharable URLs
  • Permalinks
  • Share multiple pages
  • Shortcuts

Publicly sharable URLs:  One big thing we heard from you was that you wanted to share your saved pages more freely (via blogs, Facebook and Twitter).  Previously, if you copied the URL of a saved page from your Library into a Tweet or Facebook or blog post, no one else could view it because they weren’t logged in as you.  The URL of the saved page was private and limited to you.  Now, such URLs are open and accessible so they’re more easily sharable.  Dont’ worry; they’re not discoverable.  So, unless you explicitly provide the URL of the saved page, no one should be able to find it.

Permalinks:  We’ve added a permalink option so you can easily generate and copy a permalink to the page.  Just look for the following Permalink Button in the scrible Toolbar:

When you click it, the system’ll work for a moment and then display the following Permalink Window with a permalink you can copy and paste into a blog or Facebook post or Tweet:

Share multiple pages:  You can now share multiple pages at once from your Library.  Just select the pages you want to share and then click the Share Button atop the Library.

Shortcuts:  Encounter an interesting scribled page you’d like to keep tabs on?  Add a shortcut to it in your Library by selecting the Create Shortcut option under the Save Menu.

You can assign your own Page Name, Comments, and Tags for this page and you’ll be able to find it in searches of your Library just like any page you’ve saved.  When someone shares a page with via scrible, a Shortcut to that page will automatically be added to your Library.  Shortcuts don’t use any of your storage quota.

Filed Under: Enhancements, New Features, Product

January 21, 2012 By scrible

scrible gets context

Hello scrible users! If you’ve done some annotating lately, you’ve likely come across a new feature – the Context Menu. Before, if you hovered over an annotation, a red X would show up at the top left corner of the annotation so that you could delete that annotation.

Now, there will be an icon representing the current annotation instead of the red X. So for a yellow highlight, it will look like this:

Clicking this icon will reveal our new feature, the Context Menu. This Menu is where you’ll now find the delete option, as well as other useful features. For instance, you can now change the color of a highlight, note, or text-color annotation from this menu. Or, if you want to add some additional info, you can anchor a new note to the annotation.

As we continue to add features to scrible, this Menu will give you a quick and convenient way to interact with your annotations and get the most out of your curated content. If you haven’t checked this feature out yet, go give it a whirl! If you’ve already played with it, we would love to hear your feedback so we can continue to improve way the world interacts with the web.

Filed Under: Enhancements, New Features, Product

December 17, 2011 By scrible

Smarter searching

English: It's a simple picture of a magnifying...
Photo credit: Wikipedia

We’ve enhanced our search capabilities to help you find what you’re looking for quicker than ever. Here’s a breakdown of all the advanced features you can take advantage of:

  • ?  –  Single character wild card
    Using a question mark will match any single character at that position. For example, searching with “te?t” would match the words text, test and tent in any pages you’ve saved.
  • *  –  Multiple character wild card
    Using an asterisk will match 0 or more characters at that position. For example, “test*” would match the words test, tests, testing and testers.
  • “word1  word2″~#  –  Proximity search
    Ending a two term quoted phrase with a tilde and a number will find those two words within the given distance of each other. If you were looking for pages about Amazon’s Kindle, you could use “amazon kindle”~5 to find pages where amazon and kindle are within 5 words of one another. This way you would find an article with Amazon’s tablet, the Kindle, but not an article with how to kindle a fire in the great jungle known as the Amazon.
  • ^#  –  Raising term priority
    Using the caret character followed by a number will give a word a higher priority in the search. If you want to bring up all your saved pages about books, but want to focus on the sci-fi ones, you could use a search like “books sci-fi^5” to give 5 times greater weight to sci-fi. The default weight is 1.  So, anything above that will add weight to the importance of a word.
  • AND  –  Including both terms
    Use “AND” when you want to ensure search results have both terms you’ve used. For instance, searching for “hotel AND 5-star” would only bring back pages that have the words hotel and 5-star in them; one or the other isn’t good enough.
  • OR  –  Including either term
    Use OR to broaden a search between terms. If you were looking at pets, a search for ” “corgi OR husky” puppy” would bring back results that mention corgi puppy or husky puppy, or both corgi puppy and husky puppy.
  • +  –  Requiring a term
    Begin a word with a plus to make it required in the results. All the results for a search of “tesla +roadster” would mention roadster, but not necessarily tesla. This would exclude any articles about Nikola Tesla (unless he happened to drive a roadster) while returning pages about roadsters, particularly the Tesla Roadster.
  • ( )  –  Grouping terms
    If your queries are getting complicated, you can group terms together with parentheses to make it clear which terms are getting paired. Revisiting the earlier pet example from above, the search could have also been written as “(corgi OR husky) puppy” and it would have returned the same results.
  •   –  Escaping characters
    What if you want to look for your favorite Atari game, Q*bert? Earlier, we said the asterisk character acts as a multi-character wildcard.  So, searching with “Q*bert” would potentially match all kinds of crazy words. You’ll need to do what’s called “escaping” the asterisk with a backslash. If you want an asterisk to just be an asterisk, put a backslash in front of it. So, to search for Q*bert, you would enter “Q*bert” into the search box. The same goes for the question mark (?), tilde (~), caret (^), parentheses((, )), or plus sign (+) when you don’t want to activate any special search behavior.

That’s the quick overview of the search syntax.  If you want a technical explanation of what’s going on behind the scenes you can check out the documentation for our search engine here.

Filed Under: Enhancements, New Features, Product

November 10, 2011 By scrible

New e-mail preferences

We’ve created a granular settings page so that you can manage your e-mail preferences and only get the notices that you want. You can access the new page from the Settings Page by clicking the “Manage e-mail preferences” link.

You’ll then be brought to the E-mail Settings Page, where you’ll be presented with your options for e-mail notifications. This way, you can opt in and out of the different types of e-mails so that you only get information you care about.

Here’s a breakdown of the categories:

  • User Notifications: These are the e-mails sent because of another user’s actions, such as sharing a page with you.
  • Critical Updates: Any important information about scrible would be sent out as a Critical Update email. This includes things like service downtime and changes or major updates.
  • Product Announcements: Information regarding updates, upgrades and new features introduced to scrible.
  • Marketing Announcements: News about scrible, such as partnering with another product or awards and press mentions we’ve earned.  Also, news aboutevents we host or attend as well as special offers provided directly by us.
  • Partner News: News and offers about and from any partners that we work with.

Filed Under: New Features, Product

September 23, 2011 By scrible

Streamlined sign up

We’ve launched an enhancement to the scrible sign up process. With this change, accounts no longer have to be verified before they can be used to start annotating and saving web pages. Now you can get into our service and get to work faster than ever before. The only caveat is that you won’t be able to take actions that generate e-mails until you’ve verified the email address associated with your account. One example of this is sharing pages via email. This is our effort to streamline the experience while still fighting against spam and abuse of the service.  Here’s the new sign up confirmation window:

If you can think of other places and ways that we can streamline the process of getting started with scrible, please let us know at our feedback page.  We’d love to know!

Filed Under: Enhancements, Product

June 29, 2011 By scrible

Not so fast, storage quota

A user recently reported to us that they felt their quota was being used too quickly.  We investigated and – lo and behold – it was true.

We had a problem with how the quota usage was calculated, which caused pages saved multiple times to be counted multiple times instead of just once.  This has been fixed now.  So, everyone should have more room to organize their saved pages.

As you can see we really do listen to your feedback!  Please let us know if you see anything you don’t like or if something seems wrong.

Filed Under: Bug Fixes, Product

June 12, 2011 By scrible

Do you speak □□□□□?

mojibake as art
mojibake as art (Photo credit: TR4NSLATOR)

One of our users pointed out to us that when he saved a page with traditional Chinese characters in his notes, when he retrieved the page, he got back Mojibake inside the notes instead of comprehensible notes because the characters got turned into garbage like □□□□.

We had recently switched to a new library on our servers which assumed a latin 1 character set instead of UTF-8.  After some remedial language lessons, our system is back to speaking the languages of the world.  If you happen to find someplace where it isn’t working though, please let us know so we can send the system back to a refresher course 😉

Filed Under: Bug Fixes, Enhancements, Product

May 4, 2011 By scrible

scrible Launches!

We launched into public beta this morning!  Simultaneously, we announced that the National Science Foundation has awarded scrible with a $500,000 SBIR Phase II Grant.
We’ve been blessed to have our big news day covered by three titans of the startup and technology blogosphere: Robert Scoble, VentureBeat and TechCrunch.  Check out their posts below.  Robert’s post contains a ~10 minutes interview of our Co-Founder Vic and a demo of scrible.  How fun!

.



First look: Scrible, cool new web research, curation, collection tool

.


Scrible gets $500k check from National Science Foundation to fix Web research


.


Scrible Launches Rich Web Annotation App To The Public


We would love for you to spread the word to folks you know who would benefit from using scrible.  The more folks that know about us, the more we can help!  Thanks and have a great day!

Filed Under: Press Mentions

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • …
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • Next Page »
  • View scrible’s profile on Facebook
  • View scrible’s profile on Twitter
  • View scrible’s profile on YouTube

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Recent Posts

  • Tip Tuesday: How to Rename the Title of a Source
  • Introducing Scrible Tip Tuesday
  • Announcing Scrible® for iPad!
  • Scrible Gets a New Look and Layout
  • Scrible Launches Revamped Assignment Management System

Categories

  • Awards
  • Bug Fixes
  • Enhancements
  • Events
  • New Features
  • Press Mentions
  • Product
  • Tip Tuesday
  • Training and Support
  • Uncategorized
  • Urgent Announcement

Archives

Search

Facebook Twitter LinkedIn YouTube
Mobile Analytics

Copyright © 2023 Scrible | Home | Help | FAQ | Terms | Privacy | Contact

Supported by the National Science Foundation National Science Foundation.