Scroll to the top of any lengthy page on iPhone with one tap.

You must have noticed that when you use your iPhone to browse/read any lengthy pages and wanted to get back to the top of the page you might be scrolling page by page to get to the top.

Not anymore, you can just tap at the iPhone Title Bar to scroll all the way to the top of the page.

The scrolling is really quick and is a pretty handy thing to remember around if you normally read lengthy pages on your iPhone.

Technorati Tags:
iPhone, iPhone How To, iPhone Tips

Use this simple trick to move the application icons around on your iPhone.

You must be familiar with this screen on your iPhone. With those many app icons and with a potential of 11 pages of icons (maximum 9 pages on pre-OS 3.0 phones) you’ll certainly prefer to move icons around to fit your needs.

It’s very simple to customize the icons on each pages. Just press and hold any icon on your iPhone for couple of seconds. All those icons will start shivering (not out-of-fear but by design).

Move (press and drag) the icons around to where ever you want. You can even move those app icons to other pages also. Exercise extra caution as things might be very sensitive when you move icons and so it might take couple of attempts to get it right.

You must have noticed that there is an “x” mark placed on to the top left of those icons when they are shivering. You must have also noticed that those “x” marks are not on all icons but rather on icons for the apps that you’ve downloaded (custom installed). It doesn’t show those “x” marks on the icons (apps) that comes with the iPhone.

So what does that mean? You must have guessed by now, those “x” marks are meant to delete or uninstall an application from your iPhone.

I’m sure you’ll find customizing your iPhone’s icon layout a very handy feature. Exercise a bit of caution when moving things (icons) around and you’ll be customizing your iPhone icon layout more and more as you download and use as many apps.

Technorati Tags:
iPhone, iPhone Customize, iPhone How To, iPhone Tips

Use this simple trick to change the default search engine on IE6.

TechCrunch reported earlier that Bing.com is being forced on to Windows users, particularly the ones who use Internet Explorer 6. Any attempts to change the default search engine results in an error.

Even though Bing.com seems to perform better in terms of search it still is the young kid in the town and it has to be time tested before you might trust it with all your searches.

Until then, if you still wanted to continue using Google as your default search provider on Internet Explorer 6 then all you have to do is to go into,

Tools > Internet Options > Security > Restricted Sites tab. Then add “bing.com” (and “www.bing.com”) to the list of restricted sites.

Now Internet Explorer 6 can get rid of the forced-upon Bing.com and can use Google as the default search engine.

Technorati Tags:
How To, Windows, Internet Explorer, Bing.com

By default Twitter puts you on the public outline and what that means is that all your Twitter updates will be seen by anyone who follows you. If you’d prefer to keep your Twitter updates private to yourself or to show only to the followers whom you approve then you have to set your preference on Twitter Settings. Follow these simple steps to keep your Twitter updates private,

Step-1: Navigate to Twitter Settings

Sign-in to Twitter and click on the “Settings” link at the top right.

Step-2: Click on “Protect my updates” option

Scroll down to the bottom of the page where you can see “Protect my updates” check box. Make sure to check the “Protect my updates” check box and hit the “Save” button.

Once your settings are saved you’ll see a section “Your updates are now private” that tells you that your Twitter updates are not available to the public.

If you normally twit quite a lot of private messages that you don’t want all your followers to receive then this would be a simple trick to keep your Twitter updates private. If you have any questions/comments regarding this please make sure to let us know in comments.

One of the initial thing that grabbed my attention with Google Chrome was its simple installation process. Before I even got to experience the browser I was impressed with the simple installation process. So when it was time for me to upgrade Chrome to the latest version I was pretty sure there has got to be a simple upgrade process than to download and install again.

Google Chrome didn’t disappoint me on this as well…follow these simple steps to upgrade your browser as simple as clicking a button and restarting the browser,

Step-1:

Click on the “Tools” icon on the top right side of the browser window and then click on the “About Google Chrome” menu option.

Step-2:

b

Chrome will display its About dialog and there you can see that it would check for latest version and will enable the “Update Now” button. Once you click on the “Update Now” button you should be able to see that Google Chrome would change the status message to “Checking for updates…” and then to “Installing new version…”. Wait till it installs the new version.

Step-3:

Once done you should be able to see a status message of “Google Chrome has been updated”.

Also at the same time Chrome will inform you to close all the open Chrome windows and restart Chrome to make use of the latest version. Click on the OK button to dismiss all dialogs.

Step-4:

Close all the open instances of Google Chrome and restart Chrome again. This time go into the same “About Google Chrome” dialog (“Tools” >> “About Google Chrome” menu option). You should be able to see “Google Chrome is up to date (version number…currently at 0.4.154.25)”.

That’s all….your Google Chrome browser should be up to date now. So what’s new with this 0.4 version update?

New Features

• Bookmark manager with import/export.
  Use the ‘Customize and control Google Chrome’ (wrench) menu to open the Bookmark manager. You can search bookmarks, create folders, and drag and drop bookmarks to new locations. The Bookmark Manager’s Tools menu lets you export or import bookmarks.
• Privacy section in Options.
  We grouped together all of the configuration options for features that might send data to another service. Open the wrench menu, click Options, and select the Under the Hood tab.
• New blocked pop-up notification.
  The pop-up blocker formerly just minimized pop-up windows to the lower right corner of the browser window, create one ‘constrained’ window for each pop-up. Now, Google Chrome displays one small notification in the corner that shows the number of blocked pop-ups. A menu on the notification lets you open a specific pop-up, if needed.

Known Issues

• Sites that use Gears to synchronize offline data may occasionally hang. You should disable offline access for sites until a fix is released. (We’re working on it and hope to have the update later this week.)

Security Issues

• This release fixes an issue with downloaded HTML files being able to read other files on your computer and send them to sites on the Internet. We now prevent local files from connection to the network with XMLHttpRequest() and also prompt you to confirm a download if it is an HTML file.
  Severity: Moderate. If a user could be enticed to open a downloaded HTML file, this flaw could be exploited to send arbitrary files to an attacker.

[Source: Google Chrome Releases]

They even brought back the much dreaded “Reload” menu option on the right click context menu! It was missing on those earlier versions and was a bit annoying. Thank you, Chrome team, for sticking with some Windows standards!

I hope this article is useful to you. If you have any questions regarding this please make sure to ask in comments.

If your regular Gmail doesn’t work for some reason then you can try these alternative Gmail URL’s to get access to your Gmail account. This would be particularly helpful when Gmail is blocked at your corporate network or when Gmail team was doing some maintenance work and Gmail becomes unstable.

Safe mode – http://mail.google.com/mail/?labs=0. It disables the experimental features from Gmail Labs, just in case some of them are buggy. You can remove some of the features from Gmail’s settings page.

Secure mode - https://mail.google.com/. It encrypts the traffic between your computer and Gmail’s servers. Use it from public computers, Wi-Fi networks or to bypass some proxies and web accelerators. There’s a Gmail setting that redirects the standard version to the secure mode ("Always use https").

Older version - http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=1. This version has been replaced in October 2007 by a re-architectured Gmail, but the old version is a little bit faster.

Basic mode - http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html. It’s the version that doesn’t use JavaScript, so it loads faster and it works well with older browsers. Unfortunately, many Gmail features are missing (contacts auto-complete, chat, spell checker, rich formatting) and each click loads a new page. If you like this version, click on "Set basic HTML as default view" at the top of the page.

Mobile mode - http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=mobile or http://m.gmail.com. This is a simplified Gmail interface for mobile phones that has even less feature than the basic mode. Use it if no other Gmail mode works for you.

iPhone mode - http://mail.google.com/mail/x/gdlakb-/gp/. A more user-friendly mobile version for iPhone and other mobile phones that use WebKit-based browsers.

iGoogle gadget - http://www.google.com/ig/gmailmax. This is the canvas view for the updated Gmail gadget which can be found in the new iGoogle. Some people found that this interface bypasses most corporate filters that prevent them from accessing Gmail at work.
"No browser checking" mode – http://mail.google.com/mail?nocheckbrowser. If you use a cutting-edge new browser and Gmail serves you the basic HTML mode, try this URL to bypass browser detection.

[via Google OS]

Windows Vista comes with a built-in memory check tool that at times might come-in handy to diagnose any of the known memory issues with your computer. If you ever hack with your BIOS settings or when you suspect that that your computer’s memory could be the culprit for the problems that you have, it wouldn’t hurt to run this free built-in Windows Vista tool to make sure that your computer’s memory is sound and solid.

Keep in mind that this requires a computer restart and so be prepared.

Follow these steps to diagnose your computer’s memory issues,

Step-1:

Click on the “Start” button and type-in “Memory” on the Search box.

Vista will filter down to “Memory Diagnostics Tool” and click on the “Memory Diagnostics Tool”.

Step-2:

Vista will launch the “Windows Memory Diagnostics Tool” dialog. There are 2 options that you can choose on that dialog. If you’d like to restart the computer now and do a memory check click on the “Restart now and check for problems” link. If not then click on the “Check for problems the next time I start my computer” option.

Step-3:

When Windows Vista restarts it will run the Memory Diagnostics Tool and will check for any issues with your computer’s memory. Let it finish the test and once done will boot your computer the normal way.

Step-4:

Once you login, if you see a tooltip like above then your computer’s memory is sound and solid. Otherwise Vista will notify you of any known memory issues with your computer.

Hope this helps. If you have any questions regarding this please make sure to ask in comments.

Another cool feature of Windows Vista is that it has a built in screenshot tool that you can easily make use of to capture screenshots. Follow these steps to enable and make use of Windows Vista’s Snipping Tool,

Step-1:

Click on the “Start” button and then click on the “Control Panel”.

Step-2:

Click on the “Turn Windows features on or off” option under “Programs and Features” section.

Step-3:

Click thru the UAC prompt and on the “Windows Features” dialog scroll down to locate the “Tablet PC Optional Components” option and make sure to have a check mark in front. Click the “OK” button to dismiss the dialog.

Step-4:

Click on the “Start” button and type-in “Snipping” on the Search box. Windows Vista will display “Snipping Tool” at the top of the Programs list. Click on the “Snipping Tool”.

Step-5:

Vista might ask you if you’d like to add Snipping Tool to the Quick Launch Bar for easy access. Choose the option you prefer.

Step-6:

Vista will gray out the screen and will ask you to select the area of screen that you want to capture as a screenshot. Just choose the area of the screen that you’d like to capture and Vista will make a screenshot of that area and will have it copied to the Snipping Tool application.

Once the screenshot is in the Snipping Tool you can use the toolbar buttons to handwrite text on the screenshot, highlight a portion of the screenshot etc.

I hope you make use of this built-in Windows Vista feature to take screenshots easily. If you have any questions regarding this please make sure to ask in comments.

Update: Sorry for not updating DemoGeek.com for the past 2 days…gotten a bad cold and couldn’t do much…I still have cold but wanted to get these to you. I hope you understand.

Gotten tired of holding the Control (Ctrl) key down while selecting multiple files in Windows Explorer? Would rather prefer a simple way of selecting multiple files in Windows Explorer? Follow these steps to use checkboxes to select multiple files in Windows Explorer,

Step-1:

Launch Windows Explorer (press Windows key and “E” key) and click on the “Organize” menu and then click on the “Folder and Search Options…”.

Step-2:

On the “Folder Options” dialog click on the “View” tab and then on the “Advanced Settings” section check the “Use check boxes to select items” option.

Step-3:

Click on the “OK” button and now you should be able to see a check box infront of the file name when you roll your mouse over the file name. You can check the boxes to select those files.

I hope it helps you have a better experience with Windows Vista. This is just one of the many cool features that Windows Vista has. If you have any questions regarding this please make sure to ask in comments.

Got tired of the look and feel of the default Gmail page? Have been using hacks like Greasemonkey Scripts to spruce up the Gmail page? Not any more. Gmail now officially has Themes support. It looks like they are rolling out this feature only for certain accounts so if you are lucky to be on that list give this a try. Follow these steps to enable themes on Gmail,

Step-1:

Click on the “Settings” link at the top of the Gmail page.

Step-2:

If you can see a “Themes” tab then you are one of those few. Click on the “Themes” tab and you should be able to see a bunch of (31 at the time of writing this) themes listed. Choose the one you like and your Gmail page will reload with the new theme.

Enjoy the new look of your Gmail.

If you have any questions please make sure to ask in comments.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have your upcoming Google Calendar appointments show up on your Gmail sidebar? Wouldn’t it be a convenience than to open up another window/tab to check your Google Calendar agenda. Follow these steps to bring your Google Calendar appointments to Gmail sidebar,

Step-1:

Continue to add your appointments in Google Calendar. Keep in mind that it is just a convenience to have those Google Calendar appointments show up in Gmail’s sidebar.

Step-2:

Log-in to your Gmail account and click on the “Settings” link at the top right side.

Step-3:

Click on the “Labs” tab.

Step-4:

Scroll down to locate the “Google Calendar Gadget” section towards the bottom of the page. You might have “Disable” selected. Select “Enable” and hit the “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the page.

Step-5:

Your Gmail window gets refreshed automatically and once loaded you should be able to see a new gadget “Google Calendar” show up on the sidebar. It will list your agenda from Google Calendar.

I hope you make use of this feature and not miss out on any appointments.

If you have any questions regarding this please make sure to ask us in comments.

Windows Vista has this cool Preview Pane on Windows Explorer that helps you preview a file without opening the file. This would be extremely helpful if you have bunch of files and wasn’t sure which one to open. Instead of opening each file and waiting for it to open and close, you can utilize Windows Vista’s Preview Pane to give you a sneak preview of what the file is and display its content on the Preview Pane.

To enable Windows Vista’s Preview Pane follow these steps,

Step-1:

Launch Windows Explorer (“Windows E” or right click on the Start button and choose “Explore” or Start >> All Programs >> Accessories >> Windows Explorer) and navigate into the folder which you want to preview.

Step-2:

Click on the “Organize” menu and then click on “Layout” and then choose “Preview Pane”.

Step-3:

Windows Vista will enable its Preview Pane (on the extreme right side of Windows Explorer) and when you choose the file you want to preview, Vista will render the content of the file on its Preview Pane. On the screenshot above, you can see a .TTF font file getting rendered on the Preview Pane. If you open up the file you’ll see the same exact content.

Windows Vista’s Preview Pane greatly helps you quickly swift thru the piles of files you have, if you have. Make use it when needed and it really comes-in handy.

If you have any questions regarding this please make sure to ask us in comments.

Gmail has so many cool features and one of the many that I like is the “Vacation Auto Responder”. Just enable the “Vacation Auto Responder” in Gmail and it will respond for you with a predefined message every time you receive a message while you are away. So, how do you enable Vacation Auto Responder in Gmail? Follow these steps,

Step-1:

Sign-in to your Gmail account and click on the “Settings” link at the top right side.

Step-2:

On the General tab scroll down to the “Vacation responder:” section. Click on the “Vacation responder on” option.

Step-3:

Type-in a subject and the message that you want your contacts to know about you being not able to respond back right away. Check the “Only send a response to people in my Contacts” option if you just want to notify the persons you have on your contacts list. It would be a good idea to not let everyone who emails you to know that you are on vacation. So, I would recommend to check this option if you manage your Gmail contacts well. Once you are done click on the “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the page.

Step-4:

Once your preferences are saved, Gmail will display a header bar at the top of your Gmail page to get your attention that your Vacation Auto Responder is on. Your contacts will now receive a message that you’ve entered on the “Message” box on Step-3 until you end this auto responder. You can end the Vacation Auto Responder by clicking on the “End now” link or going into the “Vacation Settings” and then choosing “Vacation responder off” option.

Use it wisely and your contacts will appreciate it.

When SQL Server Management Studio starts it displays a splash screen and sits there doing something in the background. If you don’t want that splash screen to distract you then here are some quick tips that you can follow to get rid of that splash screen when SQL Server starts.

Step-1:

Right click somewhere on your desktop and click “New” and on the submenu click “Shortcut”.

Step-2:

Click the “Browse…” button and navigate to the “SQLWB.exe” file. It must mostly be under “C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Binn\VSShell\Common7\IDE\Sqlwb.exe”. Notice the Binn spelling.

Step-3:

Type-in –nospalsh after the full path and after the end quote. Make sure to have a space between the end quote on the path and the “–nosplash” word.

Step-4:

Click Next and give a name to the shortcut and click the Finish button.

Windows will create a shortcut on your desktop with the name that you’ve given on the above step.

The next time you want to launch SQL Server use this shortcut and you won’t get the splash screen anymore.

Gmail finally got Emoticons (or Smiley’s, if you prefer that word). No more emoticon keyboard shortcuts (it continues to support those shortcuts, of course). You can now insert around 79 different email emoticons and around 69 chat emoticons when you click on the “Insert Emoticon” button on the Compose Mail window. Even though the size of those emoticons are not that great to see it clearly it definitely is a start on the right direction. A tooltip on those smiley expressions would also come in handy. I’m sure those are “work-in-progress”.

If you have to find the versions of .NET Framework installed on your computer,

Step-1:

Click the "Start” button and click on the “Control Panel”.

Step-2:

Click on the “Programs” option then click on the “Programs and Features” option.

Step-3:

Scroll down to locate Microsoft .NET Framework entry and the version number would be listed there.

If you are using Windows XP, go into the Control Panel and then click on the “Add/Remove Programs” and scroll down the list to locate Microsoft .NET Framework.

Windows uses different file extensions to identify the different files that it handles. Ever wonder what those file types are and what they are associated with? Here are some of the most common file extensions in Windows,

The above listed extensions are the most common Windows file extensions and there are thousands of file extensions that Windows deals with. For a list of all file extensions you can visit one of these web sites,

• FileFormat.info
• Dot What?
• FileIno.net

Note: This quick tip is applicable only to those who use Google Calendar to keep up with your schedule. For those of you who don’t use Google Calendar you sure should check out Google Calendar. It is a decent online tool to keep up with your schedule.

When you launch Google Calendar it goes into a default view (day or week view). If you happen to switch the view every time you launch Google Calendar then you might want to use this trick to set a default view to your Google Calendar.

Step-1:

Launch Google Calendar.

Step-2:

Click the Settings link in the upper right corner of the page.

Step-3:

On the General tab, use the Default view dropdown list to select the desired view. There are 5 choices: Day, Week, Month, Custom View and Agenda.

If you select Custom View, use the Custom View dropdown list to select the desired value (choices are Next 2 Days thru Next 7 Days, Next 2 weeks, 3 weeks or 4 weeks).

Step-4:

Click on the Save button.

From, now on when you launch Google Calendar it will launch with the view that you’ve selected.

Ever wonder how to write comments within an aspx file? <!– Some Comment –> won’t cut it as it gets processed on the server side and the resulting HTML will contain the commented code as processed. Enter, <%– –%>. There are 2 ways you can truly comment on an aspx file.

If you prefer to type then use the <%- some comment –%> tags to enclose comments like below,

<%–

Anything within this block will not be parsed/handled by ASP.NET.

<asp:TextBox runat=”server”></asp:TextBox>

–%>

If you prefer to click then here is the visual way of doing the same,

On top of taking your search queries, that little Google.com textbox can do much more. One of that is to find time locally as well as for other cities. Here is an example, type-in “time” without the quotes on the Google textbox and hit the Search button. Here is what I’ve got for my time zone along with other time zones.

You can get time for specific cities as well, just type-in “time in los angeles” without the quotes and you’ll get this.

You can type-in a country, like for example “time in Australia” without the quotes and here is what you’ll get,

To use Google’s built-in calculator function, simply enter the expression you’d like evaluated in the search box and hit the Enter key or click the Google Search button. The calculator can evaluate mathematical expressions involving basic arithmetic 5+2*2 or more complicated math (sine(30 degrees) or e^(i pi)+1), units of measure and conversions (100 miles in kilometers or 160 pounds * 4000 feet in Calories), and physical constants (1 a.u./c or G*mass of earth/radius of earth^2). You can also experiment with other numbering systems, including hexadecimal and binary.

These sample queries demonstrate the utility and power of this new feature:

• 56*78
• half a cup in teaspoons
• (G * mass of earth) / (radius of earth ^ 2)
• 1.21 GW / 88 mph

There is a common practice with some development teams that they prefix any user defined stored procs with “sp_”. It’s a bad practice in a way that it was a recipe for disaster when you strike the bulb.

What I mean is that, the system stored procs in SQL Server are named starting with “sp_”. Now, when you try to name your user-defined stored procs starting with “sp_” what happens is that in addition to bringing down the performance it might give you a “gotcha” moment.

Here is how SQL Server looks for a stored proc starting with “sp_” in this hierarchy of databases,

1. Master DB
2. The stored procedure based on the fully qualified name provided
3. The stored procedure using dbo as the owner, if one is not specified

So, when you’ve named your user-defined stored proc starting with “sp_” in a database other than Master database, the Master database is always checked first when you explicitly don’t specify the database name and so when you’ve accidentally named your user-defined stored proc similar in name as the system stored proc then the user-defined stored proc will never get executed.

For example, let’s say you’ve accidentally named your user-defined stored proc as “sp_help” with the definition,

create proc sp_help
as
select * from dbo.login

Now, when you try to execute the above created proc using the

Exec sp_help

you’d be surprised to see that the sp_help under Master database has got executed than from your database.

To deal with this it is a best practice to use “usp_” rather than “sp_”. At least that’s what I prefer to use.

Step-1: Launch Windows Explorer and navigate into the folder where you see the file on the right side pane on Windows Explorer.

Step-2: Left click to select the file.

Step-3: Press the “Shift” key and while keeping it pressed right click on top of the filename.

Windows Vista will include a “Copy as Path” option on that context menu. Click on “Copy as Path’” to copy the filename along with the path.

One of the many improvements on Windows Vista is its breadcrumb style navigation on Windows Explorer. It’s pretty cool than those colons and backslashes.

But how to do you copy the folder path? Pretty simple, just click on the breadcrumb style navigation on Windows Explorer and it changes to the old Windows XP style navigation. Copy the path (right click on it and click “Copy” or press Ctrl C buttons).