1) I just got my invite to join the private beta of Evernote - a supercool personal tagging application: You take pictures of things, and it scans them for meaning and indexes them: Take a picture of a business card, and the text is readable. Take a picture of a page of notes (handwritten) and it's all searchable. Take a picture of a bottle of wine, then you can add comments to the picture, and search for it later.
What's best is that it's completely server-based, so you can do it all via iPhone, or your desktop, or a borrowed PC - it doesn't matter - you can always get at your "external brain".
I recommend checking out the demo video at www.evernote.com It starts slowly, but if by the end you're not completely amazed, I'll give you your money back*.
2) I'm trying some Mandarin software from Fluenz which is really pretty revolutionary: It's not that any one part hasn't been done by someone else, but the whole look and feel is very clean, and the instructor is very engaging. I do have some complaints - there don't seem to be many keyboard shortcuts so there is a lot of mousing around, which is annoying when every single tone mark (of which every word in Mandarin has one) is a mouseclick instead of a keystroke... but we'll see if I can get beyond that.
So far, 4 lessons in, I feel it's "better" than Rosetta Stone, which I'm 21 lessons into for Swedish now... but these are both early impressions, and I'll reserve judgement until the end of both sessions... we'll see which one gave me a better command of the language. One trick of Rosetta Stone is to really figure out which of the 14 different exercises per lesson is best for you: After a lot of trying, I've figured out two that help things stick for me, while the rest don't really help do anything but exercise my multiple choice skillz.
*regarding the money back guarantee: not really.
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