A few months ago, we wrote about five ways to increase your productivity using text expansion software. With text expansion software, you create snippets of text, and then set up abbreviations to trigger the typing of those snippets. TextExpander is our favorite text expansion app on the Mac, because of its ability to sync via Dropbox with Breevy, a Windows text expansion app. If you don’t want to cook up your own snippets, or are just looking for some inspiration for snippets, then TE-Snippets has you covered.
It’s been two days now since iOS 5 officially landed — and it’s a hit. There are always a few hiccups, of course, and there are things that could be better and worse, but it’s pretty much the biggest update that iOS has seen since Copy and Paste. In fact, the update was so anticipated that the amount of people trying to get it all at once overloaded Apple’s servers and, ironically, left a lot of customers with an unfortunate upgrade experience. The error 3200 problem seems to be resolved now, however (I had no issues last night), so feel free to jump on in!
Before I upgraded, one of the biggest questions on my mind was how apps and services would be able to integrate into some of the cooler features — like the new notification centre. I was extremely pleased to see that the Springpad team is, as usual, at the head of the curve. They’ve already turned the notification centre into something that will not only make your life easier, but it’ll make things easier for your iOS-using friends as well.
I’m talking about Springpad’s new send to phone feature. With a single click, you can send something from the Springpad web app directly to your iPhone’s notification centre, where you can then open it up in the mobile app with a touch. This makes for a fantastic way to work with something you might need to map on the go, like a restaurant, gift-location, or whatever/wherever you’re on your way to. It makes planning a breeze, and can even be used as a creative way to get an organized reading list onto your phone or iPad, so you can continue researching whatever you were up to on your desktop before you went out.
The coolest feature os Springpad’s send to phone, though, is that you can add in multiple devices. This allows you to not only send things to all of your own iOS devices, but you can add a family member or friend as well, and share recipes, directions, product ideas, bookmarks, note-reminders, and whatever else you think might be useful to them.
Take a look at the video below to see Springpad send to phone for iOS 5 in action:
Oh — and if you haven’t heard, Springpad is doing better than ever before. In the last six months, they’ve grown another million users, which puts them up over the 2 million mark. These users have created over 5 million notebooks (about 3.5 notebooks per person), and have become 150% more engaged due to integration of check-ins and likes into Facebook.
Are you using Springpad for iOS? If so, tell us how you like the new send to phone feature for iOS 5!
We once pondered whether Google was the devil. One of the issues that we raised was one of privacy. If you’re worried that Google is tracking your searches by cookie ID or by IP address, you have some options to thwart Google. One of those options is Scroogle.
In our previous looks at Markdown, we focused on a couple of free apps (one Windows, one Mac) that have native Markdown support. If you have a favorite text editor, though, and want to bring Markdown to it, then check out Marked. (For a discussion about why you should care about Markdown, head on over to our post about why you should bother with Markdown).
This is a sponsored post written by the sponsor, Glyde. Please click here for more information on sponsored posts on 40Tech.
For those of us out there trying to decide if our current iPhones are good enough in the shadow of the iPhone 4S, the cost of upgrading is usually a big factor. One way to take the sting out of this transaction is to trade-in or sell your old phone. The decision to trade-in or sell is similar to when you are getting a new car. Trading-in is easy, but you get a rock bottom price. Selling in an existing marketplace like eBay or Craigslist will get you more money, but is a hassle. Bridging this gap for potential sellers is Glyde, an online marketplace with an incredibly simple interface which takes the hassle out of selling, and offers the highest price possible.
