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Month: August 2009 (page 1 of 4)

Screw You iPhone! Stop Stealing All Our (Windows Mobile) Apps…

Screaming Kid, Broken IphoneIn the beginning of August, Microsoft released a detailed case study intended to help developers actually port their iPhone apps over to the Windows Mobile platform, a move that has many Windows Mobile customers, myself included, a bit giddy with hope. We have been turning various shades of green over the past two years, watching those fancy iPhone types with their super-slick apps and their great (by comparison) user interface; not to mention the low prices that they pay for the software. In fact, it has been driving us crazy for some time now that, due to the overwhelming popularity of the iPhone, every new and cool or old and still awesome service out there has bent its mind to the task of creating an iPhone app — leaving Windows Mobile on the backburner, or in the dust completely, regardless of the much larger size of the Windows Mobile user-base.

This new announcement provides some small amount of hope that the Windows Mobile App store (Windows Marketplace for Mobile) will bring with it some of the better iPhone apps when it launches this fall. To that end, I have made up a short list of iPhone apps that I have always wanted to see properly ported to the Windows Mobile platform. Some are already there, in some semblance or other, but could use a better design and more robust functionality. Check them out below:

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40Tech Posterous Digest – Gmail Signature Boost, Firefox Tab Enhancements, and More

40techposterous It is time for another digest of recent content on 40Tech’s Posterous site, where we post content that is too brief for this site, but too long for Twitter.  Since the last digest, our Posterous site has taken a look at the following items:

Set Up Tiny, Permanent Tabs in Firefox – how to set up permanent, reduced-sized tabs of selected sites in Firefox.

If a Browser Is Released in a Forest and Nobody is Around to Hear It . . . – the Opera 10 Release Candidate is out, with the final release just around the corner, but will anybody notice?

Favicon Alerts for Google Voice – a Greasemonkey script to put a count of the number of unlistened Google Voice messages into the favicon of your Google Voice tab in Firefox.

WIndows 7’s "Problem Steps Recorder" – a tool to record and annotate problems you have in Windows 7.

Multiple Gmail Signatures in Firefox Using "Blank Canvas"
– a Firefox plugin that allows you to have multiple HTML-compatible Gmail signatures that can be tied to particular sending and receiving addresses.

 

 If any of those headlines interest you, check out the 40Tech Posterous site.


Google Reader Basics – Share, Like, and Add Star

Google Reader logo RSS Readers are a convenient way to stay on top of many web sites, without having to visit the sites directly.  One reader, Google Reader, stands head and shoulders above other readers in terms of popularity.  That doesn’t mean Google Reader is easy to understand, though.  Many users (including me, until recently) either don’t use or don’t understand three of Google Reader’s features – the ability to "Star," "Share," and "Like" an item.  Here we take a look at those three features of Google Reader.

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Getting Things Done (GTD) in Evernote with Only One Notebook

Getting Things Done in Evernote with One Notebook A while back, I was working a job that required much more effort and responsibility than was reflected in my pay grade — familiar story? Well, combined with multiple side-projects, keeping up with my wife, newborn daughter, two dogs and a plethora of other things that required my time and energy, I was drowning. I started researching ways to get things done more efficiently. That’s how I first came across the cultural phenomena (some would just say cult…) that is GTD. A friend of mine who was “in the know” about such things was nice enough to lend me an audio version of a GTD seminar by David Allen. After about 2 weeks of listening (on the train, before bed, whenever I could), and an attempted implementation, I realized that I needed a system that was less file cabinets and paper and more suited to my digital life.

Enter Evernote

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Google Voice – A Primer

Telephone Google Voice, Google’s free service to help you make and receive calls, is currently open only to former GrandCentral subscribers.  Soon, though, Google will make Voice more widely available.  Between free U.S. calls, call filtering, multiple telephone ringing, and call transcription, Voice offers many enticing features.  Google Voice is so different from traditional telephone service, though, that it can be difficult to comprehend exactly how the service works.  Today we take a look at the basics of Google Voice.

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