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Ever since the first iPhone, there has been a “Notes” application. However, the ability to save and manage notes has always been fairly minimal. Now, with iOS4, Gmail users can easily manage their notes, even across multiple Gmail accounts.
One of the apps that is seemingly unchanged from the very first iPhone release is the Notes app. While it fulfills the basic functions of a notepad, many users want more functionality. Specifically, people want a good way to save and manage their notes. Up until recently, your only options were emailing directly from the Notes app, or syncing with iTunes.
iOS4 users who have Gmail accounts will notice a few new settings. Amongst those is the ability to individually toggle mail, calendar, and notes syncing. If you turn on notes syncing, all of your notes will automatically be copied to your Gmail account. Once they are synced however, they may be difficult to find.
To find notes inside Gmail, look for a “Notes” label on the left side of the sceen. If it is not visible, the label may be hidden. Click on the link that says “X Number more” (in the above screen shot it indicates “3 more”) to pull up the list of all labels. Once you click on the “Notes” label, you should see all of your notes copied over from your device. The synchronization is done over-the-air, meaning it does not require an iTunes sync to copy them to Gmail.
From here you can organize your notes, add labels and delete them. The one limitation is you cannot add anything to the notes, or edit them in any way. While this may seem like a flaw in the design, it’s because Gmail is treating the notes as an email message. You cannot edit the notes just as you cannot edit past emails.
While not a perfect solution, this added functionality is a welcome improvement.
(from appadvice)
Expensify is an application developed with the premise that the process of creating accurate expense reports doesn’t have to be nearly as difficult as most people make it. Rather than letting receipts pile up and manually typing each item you’ve purchased into a massive spreadsheet, Expensify lets you import expenses directly from your credit card without any typing, photocopying, or calculator usage required. Although the application is aimed at employees, accountants, freelancers, contractors, and students, it could really be used by anyone at all who needs to keep track of expenses for tax purposes or to receive reimbursement from work.
To start creating expense reports with Expensify, create an account with your Gmail, Google Apps, or Yahoo! login. The application also integrates with FreshBooks, QuickBooks, and SalesForce, which means people who already use these services can input even less information before getting started. To begin creating expense reports, add your credit card or online banking information, and watch as Expensify begins populating the page with all of your most recent transactions. Click on any purchases that were business-related, and Expensify will automatically gather and save the e-receipt for that purchase. If an e-receipt isn’t available for the transaction, then Expensify will prompt you to scan the original receipt to be saved and archived as a PDF file. Once all of your receipts have been uploaded, Expensify will handle everything and produce an accurate, complete expense report without any math required.
In addition to handling basic expense reports, Expensify also offers a number of advanced features such as mileage logs, time trackers, and mobile applications that let you input expenses directly at the time of purchase. For managers who are responsible for reimbursing employee expenses, the application lets you approve expense reports online and reimburse via credit card or direct deposit. Now that paper receipts are increasingly becoming a relic of the past, Expensify is positioned to become the new way that expense reporting is done at businesses across the country.
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(via appvita)
Two days ago I upgraded to iOS4 (jailbreak) and I am a happy man.
Folders: I used to have 7 or 8 screens, now I have only 1.
All inboxes in 1: I keep my inboxes to zero messages. I love to see all the incoming email in a single place, from any of my email accounts. Now you have subtile improvements such as highlighting stuff like telephone numbers, addresses, dates, so you can take action.
Bed mode: When you double click there is now an icon to block the screen so it doesn’t rotate. Great for reading in bed.
Tap to focus in videos: Great. The Zoom for photos not that great, but handy. Camera seems to be faster when shooting.
Multitasking: is it a joke? True that there are not many apps making use of multitasking but the fact of having all the apps down in the dock when double clicking home and when you click on any of them is just like opening like before, makes it a joke. Where is skype? IMs? I guess it will improve in the future, but today, it just sucks. The only app I use regularly that uses multitasking is Evernote, and it is not that great the implementation they did. I read you can record a note and do other stuff but…
ibooks: ibooks app rocks. Far sexier and better than kindle. Bookmarks sync with iPad and books look great, but… who read books in an iPhone? I prefer a trillion times to listen to books, put the iPhone in my pocket and listen.
Tip for ibooks: they use .epub extension, so if you have any .epub books, just drag them to your iTunes and you’ll have them in your iPhone. Just great.
I am sure a lot of people is going to be asking this question. What else do you get? A better display? A better camera? Maybe the killer feature for the switch is facetime, but I still don’t know how it works. Do you have to start a regular call before starting? If so, it is now worth it for me. The other end cannot be a computer and I don’t know anybody with an iPhone 4.
Now if you have to make a call, lets suppose my mum in Spain buys an iPhone 4, then I have to spend a lot of money to call her first to Spain from a Swiss phone. If you can start the call over wifi (no need to make a call) then it is a different story. It might be a good thing.
By the way, is Fring or Skype going to support the front camera? if that is the case, then yes…
Well, two days ago iOS4 was out. Two days later dev-team has released Pwnage Tool 4.01 to jailbrake your iPhone 3GS.
First make sure that:
This is what you have to do:
If you have gone to the 10 steps you should have an iPhone 3GS with iOS4 and after more than an hour (in my cases) the same you had before.
Now you go to Cydia and install AptBackup, click on restore and voila, all your Cydia apps.
I had a problem though. My iPhone had a safe mode due to a problem with an app in Cydia. The app in question was MyFi. I had to remove it and now everything is OK.
A group of designers living and working in Barcelona for Herraiz Soto & Co created a family of stickers to personalize the Apple logo on the MacBook with some hair. Clearly, these designers are not business types. If you’re a Mac user (like me) you may relate. The collection is called Stick With Me Baby. I don’t care if you think mustaches are out, these decals are in.
Anthropomorphic design is nothing new, but these furniture objects are quite literally made of people. A cross between art photography,performance artand home furniture design, these strange shots show us a surreal artistic perspective on everyday household objects. These photographs may not be safe for work … nor are the creations they depict safe, and they do not really work.
From stacked human shelves to place settings set on structural bodies, arched figures holding entertainment systems to a lamp-headed person, these images shot by photographer David Blazquez feel almost uncomfortably raw and personal.
The feeling of discomfort is augmented, of course, by the nudity of the posed figures – but is also tied to the surreal depictions of familiar forms. The composite ‘people furniture’ seems at once stable and solid yet also simultaneously soft and poised to collapse.
Sensual or sexist? Simplistic or sublime? It is said of the best and most controversial artists in history that they were masters of their craft before they broke away from mainstream techniques, materials or approaches. Likewise, Peter Rolfe did not simply start by making suggestive and erotic pieces of furniture – he began by becoming a master of fine wood furniture design and construction.
These forms may come as a shock to moral sensibilities – or might not, depending upon the cultural context of the viewer. Either way, however, the layered, carved and polished wooden forms are incredibly well-made despite the complexities involved with having opening and closing doors, drawers and other moving elements.
Whether sublime, sexy or something else entirely, each part is carved with incredible delicacy and precision – from the human forms themselves to the props with which they interact – such as the supporting object above designed to look the part of an remarkably life-like cloth draped over a dresser.
Before you begin to wonder whether this work is more sexist than sexual, it is worth noting that he has crafted male forms as well as female ones.
Still, some of the women are modeled with arguably unrealistically ‘perfect’ curves by societal standards – and the locations of some of the drawer openingsand storage spaces do leave open questions about just how erotic these pieces truly are. But perhaps that is their purpose, or at least part of the point: to create conversations, spark controversy and question our avoidance of sexually suggestive forms in contemporary furniture design.
If you have found yourself like I recently have – stuck with video on an iPhone and a netbook, but no real way to edit it – then fret no more, because YouTube has added an editor.
While the YouTube Video Editor is certainly nothing to compete with the likes of Final Cut Pro or Premiere, it has the basic functionality needed to finally make it possible for those living the ultra-mobile, ultra-lightweight lifestyle to put their videos online without having to leave all the unwieldy odds and ends.
The editor is simple and intuitive, with a drag-and-drop interface showing a full thumbnail inventory of all of your videos. Editing a video consists of setting a starting and stopping point for each clip, so if you want to select multiple clips from the same video, you simply drag that video to the bar below and repeat the process for each clip. In much the same way, different videos, or clips from those videos, can be spliced together.
Of course, rough editing like this can leave some interesting audio, so YouTube also provides you with audio tracks to overlay over the entire video from its AudioSwap library. Two caveats come with using the audio overlay – adding an audio track from the AudioSwap library will permanently erase the audio track on the mashed-up video and YouTube says that it may display advertisements on videos using these audio tracks.
Memeo, the company behind a host of backup, sharing and synchronization tools and mobile applications, has just launched Memeo Connect 2.0, an updated version of its earlier desktop-to-cloud synchronization service for Google Docs.
Like its progenitor, Memeo Connect still offers drag-and-drop uploads, but in the latest release, the application’s operating system integration has been dramatically improved. Most notably, your Google Docs folder now appears as a virtual drive that Memeo labels “GDrive”, and, according to company representatives, the name is being used with Google’s blessing.
To Internet early adopters, the name “GDrive” rings more than a few bells. It’s referring to the long-rumored cloud storage service that Google has yet to launch. In its imagined state, Google’s GDrive would have been a lot like Microsoft’s SkyDrive: several gigabytes of free storage available on the Web for all your files. On the theoretical GDrive, however, files could be in any format, of any size and there would be easy ways to sync them or move them back and forth between your computer and the cloud. Office files would open with Google’s Docs service, an online counterpart to desktop programs like Microsoft Office, and some even imagined that GDrive would further integrate with other Google properties, like Picasa for photos or YouTube for videos.
Google never fully realized everyone’s GDrive dreams, but its Google Docs service is functional enough for most. It allows for the upload of any file type while multiple third-party services offer decent options for keeping files in sync between your computers and cloud. These include Memeo competitors like Box.net, Dropbox, Syncplicity, SugarSync, OfficeSync, Gladinet and more.
There are few programs that actually offer the full virtual drive functionality that Memeo now does, though. The company worked closely with Google to build this latest version of its Connect software and when Google engineers found out Memeo was calling the virtual folder it creates “GDrive,” they had a good laugh.
Sorry, Internet, Google isn’t designing its own GDrive service anytime soon, but it’s well aware of the rumors.
Google actually prefers that, when it comes to GDrive-type offerings, third parties do it for them. The closest thing we’ll see to a Google-branded tool of any sort is a desktop uploader application now being built, sources tell us. But it’s no GDrive, based on what we’ve heard.
In Memeo’s case, version 2.0 of its software continues to offer drag-and-drop uploads (even folders!) and automatic synchronization. But it goes further with a combination of features that make using its so-called GDrive a more viable option. For example, you can save files from your desktop-based applications like Microsoft Office directly to Google Docs via GDrive, and you can open GDrive-hosted files with its associated native desktop program. In other words, it blurs the line between the cloud and the desktop, just as Google’s mythical GDrive would have supposedly done. And for that reason, we don’t at all begrudge Memeo the name “theft.”
Memeo Connect‘s other new features include the ability to select multiple files at once for deletion (from the cloud), filter files by type or category, download all Google Docs with a click, view folders shared with you via Google Docs and more.
And let’s not forget one of the most exciting new features: full text search for documents, another benefit of the in-depth collaboration between Memeo and Google when building this new version of Connect. To truly transition to cloud-hosted files, this feature is considered a must-have for many users.
Memeo Connect is more business-focused than it is a consumer tool. It’s not available as a “freemium” offering, as some would expect. Surprisingly, that’s not Memeo’s decision, but rather Google’s. Google restricts its API usage for these types of synchronization services so that they only work with those who have business-level accounts.
As far as pricing goes, for Google Premier users, it’s $9 a year per user and for non-Premier users, it’s $59 a year per user, which includes a new Google Apps Premier Account in addition to the sync service.
Memeo Connect 2.0 is available for free evaluation from here. Both Mac and PC versions are available.
Flowdock is a web based project management tool that helps you keep your team organized and up-to-date with no effort. Similiar tools include yammer, Google wave or SociaWwork.
Flowdock is similar to google wave, with strong focus on tagging. The best way for you to understand how it works it to watch their video:
Most people of my generation still prefer the smell of a book to an iPad or a Kindle. Well I am not like my generation. I strongly believe that an ebook reader is the future, not just because it can hold all your books, but because it can offer endless things that you can not even imagine, such as syncronizing your bookmark across different platforms, or search the dictionary, or highlight text, play video, or…
Check out what Kevin Rose, the founder and CEO of Digg has to say on how to improve the iPad:
Mac OS X 10.6.4 is out and with it, Mail 4.3 which breaks GrowlMail, Letterbox, Letter Opener and DockStar. All but DockStar fixed though.
Download a pre-patched GrowlMail.bundle and drop it in your ~/Library/Mail/Bundles/ directory. If you want it available to multiple users on your system, use /Library/Mail/Bundles/
Download: GrowlMail.mailbundle
Close the mail application. In finder go to Macintosh HD /Library/Mail/Bundles (Disabled)
Copy OMiC.mailbundle to Bundles
Replace the old info.plist (located inside contents folder) for this one: Info.plist
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