If you ever felt lost when trying to save snippets of information from various sources, this is the tool you should have a look at. Whether writing a blog or your thesis, doing research on the web, or just collecting info for your next trip, this tool lets you mark and save exactly those pieces of info that you want to keep at hand.
The developers of Candy claim that you’ll be able too work with the collected information as freely and flexibly as you do when playing around with ideas in your mind. The app is currently in beta, it runs only in Chrome and only on your desktop computer, but is already worth a try. Sync across devices is promised to be coming very soon.
A really cool-looking mark/Quote/Share app for Chrome
The first thing we really liked when we found the app, was its design. Who would not love to understand more of the world, and who would not love to share their discoveries with the loved ones. We have to admit that we could not stop staring at the starts and campfire on the website of Candy.
You can download the app from the Chrome Web Store, it will install Candy as an extension in your browser.
How It Works
The Candy app’s main operator is a floating menu at the bottom-right corner of your browser. You can open and hide a sidebar there and can also start saving a webpage there. For saving those snippets of information from websites, however, you only have to highlight whatever you want to save, e.g. a sentence in an article, click the ‘Quote’ button, and the sidebar will open up showing you a card with your selection plus source information on it. You can have multiple selections from one article or from one website saved on one card, just select and click ‘Quote’ multiple times on one site before finalizing your card with the Save button on the card.
A card is called a Candy. As the developers say “your sweet spots on the web”.
In the background, the app records the whole content of that article, and lets you also search in it later.
The really exciting part comes thereafter. You can select any of those Candy cards and create a Storyline in which you can see the selected cards together and can arrange their order with drag-and-drop. It’s like arranging post it notes on a board. Candy presents four very different areas of use in their blog which are worth having a glimpse.
Why Better, When bBetter
As the developers claim, most beta users currently are journalists, bloggers, students and analysts, but they are designing Candy for everyone who from time to time tries to make use of information they come across on the web. So practically all of us. If you are copying texts into Word or Google documents from the web for any purpose today, you should have a look at Candy. If you read a lot on the web, and you’re not satisfied with bookmarking links or saving articles with read later apps than it’s worth a try. If you’ve tried Evernote’s webclipper, but found it too complex to make use of your clippings, have a look. If you’re not comfortable with having a hundred tabs open in your browser, Candy may work better for you.
We think it is a great strength of the app that you can mark and save selected texts really easily, and you don’t have to re-read longer texts again to find whatever was important to you when you read it. Few of us have time to read through articles again-and-again.We very much like also the drag-and-drop card-arranging solution.
What we miss is the share function that the developers claim to introduce in the coming weeks. We could immediately make use of it in sharing ideas within the team instead of sending links and copy-pasted texts in emails as we do it today.
Another feature that is still to come is sync across devices. At the moment you can access your saved stuff only on the computer where you saved them – the good news is that you can do it also when working offline. The developers aim to introduce synchronization also on the coming weeks.
So if you like the beta version, stay tuned.