Use this simple trick to suppress the bodiless email dialog that pops up when you try to send an email without any body text in Gmail.

When you try to send an email without any body text using Gmail you’ll be prompted with a dialog that warns you about empty email body. Many times you might be intentionally sending emails without any body text if the message can be communicated on the subject line itself.

If you are annoyed with the dialog and wanted to bypass the dialog there is a simple trick that you can use. Just end the subject line of your email message with “(EOM)” (without quotes) and Gmail won’t show that nagging dialog.

Easily convert web pages into printer friendly pages with the PrintFriendly service.

In the pursuit to make web pages pretty we normally end up with web pages that doesn’t look good on print. One way I used to print the content is to copy/paste the text portion into a text editor and print it from there. Even that involves quite an overhead in formatting and removing the images and unwanted text etc.

Not any more! PrintFriendly is a simple service that converts web pages into printer friendly format. It does that by overlaying the converted page on top of the current page and gives some neat options to control what exactly you wanted to print. If you don’t have a printer connected to your computer you can also save the converted page as a PDF for later printing/reading.

There are 3 ways you can use PrintFriendly,

• Using the browser bookmarklet
• Using the PrintFriendly button on the websites  that have the button implemented
• Using their website where you can enter the URL of the page to make it printer friendly

Of these the simplest is the browser bookmarklet. Just drag the bookmarklet to your browser toolbar and you are all set to make any web page (literally) printer friendly.

Once you hit the bookmarklet you’ll presented with an overlay of the page that’s printer friendly. PrintFriendly will reformat the page, make the text more readable, realign the images on the page etc. to make it look more printable and readable. You’ll have the option to remove images from the overlay. You can also print the formatted page, convert it to PDF for later reading or printing. You can email the page or tweet about the formatted page.

Even more cool is the  way PrintFriendly allows you to trim the page. When you move your mouse over the formatted text it allows you to delete the section that you think is not a good fit for the print. You can trim off the images this way and reduce the final print output. That’s a pretty neat feature that make you feel you have the control of what’s getting printed.

If anything goes wrong while you try to trim the page you can undo the changes very easily. Finally when you are ready, you can print or convert the formatted page to a PDF or email the formatted page.

PrintFriendly also has a button which can be adopted by the website creators to let their readers print the page in a friendlier way.

If you don’t want to use the browser bookmarklet and if don’t see a PrintFriendly button on a web page you can use their website. Just key-in the URL of the page that you want to make it printer  friendly and PrintFriendly  will present you with the formatted page ready for print.

So far, on my usage I feel PrintFriendly is a really useful service and that makes me read more (especially with their PDF and email options). Having said that there are few more features that’s missing currently that would make this a really useful service.

• Allow us to format the page even better. Instead of deleting paragraph of text  it would be better if we can choose what precisely need to be trimmed off, like selecting a block of text in the middle of a paragraph etc.
• Allow us to specify the font that’s used on the formatted page.
• For registered users keep a history of what’s getting converted so we can easily get back, kind of like a Instapaper meets PrintFriendly.
• Offer some predefined print layouts. Not everyone has a sophisticated printer that can print double sides or booklets. This option would make the page itself formatted to those formats.

I’m sure the service would evolve with some nifty features to make it even more usable. As of what exists now, PrintFriendly is very usable and something that I keep invoking when I want to take some reading material from the web with me.

Give PrintFriendly a try.

Namechk can quickly let you know if a username is available across many of the social media sites.

Deciding on a business name but wanted to make sure the name is available across the major social media sites? Thinking off venturing into the social media websphere but don’t want to deal with multiple usernames? Well, NameChk is a simple answer.

Enter your preferred username and NameChk can easily let you know if the username is available across the major social media sites. The current list includes 72 services but I would certainly expect that to grow over time.

NameChk is a simple service that does one thing and does it well. Give it a try.

Revoke access to third-party Twitter apps from your Twitter account with this simple trick.

With the announcement of OAuth as the only authentication mechanism Twitter supports from now on, your Twitter password is not at risk anymore. But the third-party Twitter applications that you have granted access to can still do some damage to your Twitter stream. If you suspect a Twitter application to be misbehaving you can easily revoke access to the app by following this simple step.

Sign-in to your Twitter account and click on the “Settings” link.

Once the Twitter Settings page comes up click on the “Connections” tab. You should then be able to see all the apps that you have granted access to. Very handily you should also be able to see a “Revoke Access” link for each of those apps. Clicking on that link will revoke access for that app; the app would then need to ask you permission for further access.

It would be a wise thing to do to visit Twitter Connections tab once in a while to cleanup access to all these third-party apps. Believe me, it could grow into a mammoth list if you are curious in trying out a bunch of these apps.

I told you…it’s that easy!

Use these simple Gmail search queries to find all the unread emails in your Gmail Inbox.

Do you have hundreds of thousands of emails in your Gmail Inbox but a few of them, dated way back, are still unread? Going back one page at a time is not practical to locate those unread emails. Even worst if those unread emails are spread over a period of time. How do you get to those emails that are still unread?

Well, since Gmail is a product of the search giant Google you can obviously expect Gmail to support some nifty search features, didn’t you? Gmail has got some simple search query operators that can help you locate your emails a lot easier than you’ve thought.

To display only those emails that are still unread in your Inbox use the search query “label:unread in:inbox“. That would only display those emails that are still unread in your Gmail Inbox. You can substitute the word “label” in place of the word “in” to find all unread emails within a specific label.

That’s a quick tip to help you locate only those unread emails in Gmail.

Follow these simple steps to learn how to add rich text email signatures with images on to your Gmail messages.

With the announcement of Rich Text Signatures in Gmail Google has brought Gmail one step closer to the mainstream email clients. You can now have a custom email signature in Gmail with rich text and images.

Creating rich text signatures in Gmail is very simple and straight-forward. Just go into “Settings” and on the “General” tab scroll down to locate the “Signature” section. Choose the email account to which you want to add rich text signature.

Gmail will display the rich text editor and on that type the signature as you wish and format it using the toolbar buttons. If you would like to insert images to your Gmail signature you have to click on the little “Insert Image” icon that looks like a photo frame.

Currently Gmail only supports images from the web which means your image needs to be hosted somewhere and you need to provide Gmail with the URL to the image. Once done make sure to save changes.

Now, when you try to compile new email messages you should be able to see the rich text signature being added to your email message.

The ability to add images and rich text to Gmail messages is a really sought after feature. I hope Google improves on this to allow us to upload the images from our computers and help us define a custom size to the image being used  in the signature. In the mean time enjoy images and rich text in your Gmail messages.

Google Maps Labs has got some nice features that would certainly improve your Google Maps experience.

Google Maps has revolutionized the way JavaScript has been used in web development. Apart from the technicality improvements it certainly has improved the way we looked at maps and directions. Even though Google Maps currently has features that would make you use it comfortably without complaining too much there are certainly room for improvements.

Have you ever faced a situation where you zoomed into a map location a bit too much where it said “we don’t have imagery at this zoom level”? Instead of displaying that message to disappoint/annoy us how about if it zoomed only to a level where there are images available and stopped us zooming in any further? Wouldn’t that be a good thing?

That and many other features are what Google Maps team is working on and they have put out some of the features for the public to test on their Labs section. Some of these features that I handpicked would certainly improve the way you’ve used Google Maps.

Distance Measurement Tool

With this feature you can easily measure distance between two points on the map. You don’t have to get to the Directions tab anymore to find out about the distance between two places on the map. With the Distance Measurement Tool, just a simple drag and drop would give you the distance between the two places.

Short URL

Ever wanted to share a map with your friends and don’t want to send them that lengthy, garbage URL that you normally would? Try this feature and you can send a lot tiny URL that your friends can even remember (in most cases). This feature uses Google’s own URL shortener Goo.gl to shorten the URL.

Drag and Zoom

If you are annoyed with using the zoom sliders or double-clicking on the map forever to zoom in to a place in Google Maps you would love this feature which lets you zoom in to any section of the map with just a drag. Click on the Drag and Zoom button and start dragging and Google Maps will automatically zoom into the place without you doing much.

What’s Around Here?

If you are travelling to a place and ever wanted to know in advance what that place has to offer in terms of interesting places around that place? With What’s Around Here feature you can easily find out some of the interesting and useful places around any place in the map.

Smart Zoom

Many times when you zoom in too much into a place in Google Maps and when there are no images available Google Maps annoys you with the message that there are no images available at that zoom level. With Smart Zoom feature enabled you won’t get that message anymore instead you would only be able to zoom in to a level where images are available.

I’m sure you must have realized by now how much of a better experience you would get out of Google Maps when you enable these Labs features. Keep in mind that you would have to click on the “Labs” icon at the top right hand corner of the Google Maps page and then have to “Enable” the above features to make use of them.

NewsMap makes it a lot more interesting to see what’s breaking the news in the places of your interest.

Traditional news sites serve the purpose but most of the time the news, because of the way they present, become so boring that many times we tend to ignore. It’s the presentation that makes it less attractive to keep a tab on.

NewsMap is an Adobe Flash based website that tries to present the news with a slight twist. It presents the news headlines of your interest with big bold letters so you can visualize what’s happening in the news media.

When you visit NewsMap home page you are presented with a nice layout of top news of the day. The most breaking news are visually enlarged to make it stand out. The news are color coded based on various categories including World, National, Business, Technology, Sports, Entertainment and Health. Countries are listed along the top of the news page. The cool thing about NewsMap is the fact that most of these are customizable which means you see what you really wanted to see.

If you are just happy with the default settings, by all means, go for it. But if you prefer to preserve the custom settings just register your email and password with one of the simplest of the registration forms out there.

Once registered and signed in you can customize the way news is presented to you in NewsMap. Click on the “Settings” link at the top left side of the page. You can set a home view so when NewsMap starts it uses your home view to present you with the news that matters to you.

You can also customize fonts and colors. You can choose to hide the clicked articles which means more fresh content. You can also choose to preview popups.

You can also customize the sources of news that you want to show on your home view. Choose the countries you want to see the news from.

Once customized the home view news will be tailored to fit your needs. In my testing even though the tailored news approach was not much reliable it was working for the most part.

One of the best uses of NewsMap could be to present news on a big screen TV on a living room or reception or lobby halls. NewsMap can really make viewing the news more interesting.

Give NewsMap a try.

Use these simple tricks to base your search on different countries using Google, Bing and Yahoo.

It is a very simple and straight-forward thing to do search on the country you are in. In other words, by default, all the leading search engines try to present you with search results that are specific to the country you are in. But what if you wanted to search stuffs on different countries? What if you do those searches quite frequently and wanted to keep a shortcut to get to it quickly?

Here are some tricks that you can use on the 3 leading search engines, Google, Yahoo and Bing to base your search on different countries.

Google

There are 2 ways to do country specific search in Google. If you know the 2 letter country code you wanted to base your search on then you can use the URL hack to get to the results quickly.

Search as usual using Google.com. Once you are on the search results page you can append &gl= and the 2 letter country code to the URL to get to the country specific search results. Try to remember the parameter “gl” as “geo-location” and “&” is of course needed to append any parameters to the URL.

If you don’t know the country code you can use Google’s “Language Tools” link on the home page (next to the search box) to choose the country you wanted to base your search on. Here is the URL in case you couldn’t find it, http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en. Scroll down to the “Visit Google’s Site in Your Local Domain” section.

Bing

Again, there are 2 ways to do a country specific search on Bing.com. If you know the 2 letter country code you can append ?cc= to the home page URL to do a country specific search.

Visit Bing.com and append ?cc= to the URL along with the 2 letter country code. Try to remember “cc” as “country code” for example. Once you do the search you can notice a new option next to the search box like “Only from Australia” to include results only from Australia for example.

If you don’t know the country code you can click on the country link at the top of the Bing.com page. You’ll be presented with a list of countries Bing.com supports and you can easily choose from the list.

Yahoo

Yahoo does things slightly different. You have to use their “Advanced Search” options to search on a different country.

Do a Yahoo search as usual. On the search results page click on the “Options” button next to the “Search” button and choose “Advanced Search“.

Scroll down to locate the “Country” section and choose the country you want your search to be based on.

If you ever wonder what those 2 letter country codes that I’ve been talking about, here is a list of country codes http://www.iso.org/iso/english_country_names_and_code_elements.

As I said, these tricks would be really helpful if you do a fair amount search outside your country repeatedly. I hope you find it useful.

AlternativeTo can suggest you applications that you may not know otherwise.

Finding it hard to find some great applications for your Windows, Mac or Linux computers? AlternativeTo could be your answer.

AlternativeTo is a service that lists some of the best and useful softwares for your computer based on popularity. It uses a voting system similar to Digg to find out about the popularity of those applications. You can use AlternativeTo to find applications for all 3 of the major platforms, Windows, Mac and Linux. It also has a “Online” tab where you can find some useful web apps.

On the home page you can sort applications based on most viewed, most liked and recently added applications which gives you enough choices to drill-down the long list of applications.

You can click on the app name to see more details about the app including screenshots if available.

You can use the “Find alternatives to…” link to find applications of similar nature. The details would include a description, screenshots, delicious bookmarks about that app, statistics on how well the main app stack against some of those alternatives etc. These information would certainly give you an idea of whether the app is worth occupying your hard disk real-estate.

If you know an app that’s not listed at AlternativeTo, you can suggest applications to AlternativeTo so others can benefit out of.

I’ve discovered couple of useful applications using AlternativeTo, both for my Mac and Windows computers and thought of sharing it with you. I hope you find it useful as well.

Find new applications with AlternativeTo.

DomainTyper makes searching for a domain name a lot easier and fun.

There are many ways you can search for a domain name. We have even mentioned about a great service “Bust A Name” that makes it easier to find a domain. It allowed you to enter words and it mix-and-match for you to come up with a combination of domain names so you can pick and choose what you want.

DomainTyper‘s approach to this problem is slightly different. Apart from letting you know about the availability of a domain it lets you search for domain names with quite a lot of different extensions (TLDs). It also let you generate a list of Web 2.0 domain names which comes in handy if you are tired of searching for a meaningful domain name to find out that it’s long gone.

As with many other services, DomainTyper instantly finds out about the domain as you type it in. If the domain is available it allows you to register that domain with GoDaddy, Netfirms or 1&1. If the domain name is taken already it let you find out more information about the domain along with the website traffic level (provided by Statsaholic) and the PageRank.

If the three choices, .com, .net and .org are not enough for you then you can add extra extensions. There is a huge list of extensions that you can choose from.

If that’s not enough DomainTyper shows you domain hacks that are basically a combination of the domain names with different TLD’s in play. If you can’t find the major TLD’s like .com, .net etc you might be surprised to find a decent name with a different TLD. That’s very handy.

If you are searching for hundreds of domain names you might want to keep some of the interesting domains that you come across. You can use the favorites feature of DomainTyper (click on the star icon) to mark some of the domain names as your favorites.

If you still think that’s not enough DomainTyper let you generate some cool Web 2.0 domain names. Every time you hit the “Generate” button you’ll get a new list of some of the cool Web 2.0 domain names.

On top of everything else, DomainTyper also has a little iPhone app so you can search for a domain name on the go.

Overall, DomainTyper feels like a full-suite app to search for domain names. It covers pretty much all the aspects of domain search. Some of the features that I would like to see to make this my most favorite domain search tool would be to let us key in words and let DomainTyper find domain names that are a combination of those words. I would also like to see a more functional Domain Hacks section where not just DomainTyper notifies of the availability of a domain hack but also makes sure the domain hack can be registered as well.

Give DomainTyper a try and I’m sure you’ll also convert.

Twendly helps you find out who is tweeting about a certain topic on Twitter.

We all know that we can use Twitter’s (limited) search capability to search for a topic of interest on Twitter. We can use the #hashtags to keep up on a topic that we are interested or the topic that’s trending. But what if we wanted to find out just who is talking about the topic instead of the tweets on the topic itself?

The answer is Twendly. Twendly takes-in a keyword and let you know who is best at talking about that topic. The advantage of knowing who is talking about the topic is that you can follow the person and be updated with their tweets that would include the topic that you were initially interested in. It kind of gives you a nice way to find people on Twitter with the same interest on a topic as yours.

Twendly is a very simple service and so don’t expect complex steps to jump through. Simply type-in the keyword and you then get a list of people who are good at talking about that topic. You can then directly follow those people without jumping to a different app. It’s just that simple.

You can enter,

• a #hashtag
• a @handle
• any keyword of your interest, like mac, iphone, tennis etc.

The above picture gives you an idea of how you can leverage some of the supported search operators to get what you exactly want.

Search results are sorted based on relevancy and the number of tweets on the topic from the person.

Clicking on a search result will bring you a list of tweets related to the topic with so much extra information to give you an idea of how frequent the person is tweeting about that topic so you can make the right decision to follow the person or not.

You don’t need to sign-in to use the service. But you can optionally sign-in so Twendly can index you and the people you are following.

Overall, Twendly seems to be a useful service to to find out about people who are tweeting about a certain topic. Give it a try!

Themeleon, from ColourLovers, helps you pimp your Twitter layout with some nice patterns and really cool colors.

ColourLovers is famous for the fantastic collection of graphic palettes, color tiles and the many design elements that are presented in a much friendlier way. It has become an expectation that whatever ColourLovers touch would get the same light of quality and usability.

Well, they haven’t disappointed our expectations with their new product Themeleon. Themeleon is simple web app that helps you customize your Twitter profile layout on the fly.

It just takes 3 steps to customize your Twitter page. Login to your Twitter account through Themeleon page. Then choose the colors and background patterns you want to use on your Twitter page. Save your profile and your Twitter page should now have the new look.

When you login to your Twitter account you’ll be asked to give ColourLovers permission to access your Twitter profile. “Allow” access to ColourLovers.

Once you return back to the ColourLovers page you’ll see that your Twitter profile was mostly grayed out except for the “Design” tab. There are 2 sections on this page that’s of interest to us.

The top section sets your Twitter profile’s background picture. You can choose from a whole bunch of predefined templates or you can browse to your favorite pattern. When you choose a pattern and if you just don’t like certain colors you can use the color squares listed below the pattern to change individual colors. You can also use a picture as your Twitter background. If you like a pattern but don’t like the color combination then you can Themeleon’s “Shuffle Colors” button to shuffle the colors until you arrive at your favorite combination.

The next section allows you to set the color preferences for the text, links, sidebar, sidebar border etc. If you don’t want to go through the hassle of choosing individual colors you can also choose color palettes which comes with colors for all of those sections.

Themeleon packs a bunch of features which are very simple and straight-forward to use but at the same time they are powerful enough to deal with the important pieces of a Twitter profile layout. I’ve tried couple of others and I’m going to stick with this for a while. I hope you find it useful as well.

New Gmail Labs feature – Default Text Styling – allows you to choose the font that you want to use when you compose new emails.

Being everything cool with Gmail the one major feature that I always looked forward was a way to change the default font (Arial) that Gmail uses when you compose new email messages. Arial is a good font but when it comes to using it in emails it always lacked that readability compared to, let’s say, Verdana.

I think my wait is finally over. The awesome folks over at Gmail Labs just came up with a way to change the default font used when you compose new Gmail messages. To make use of it you need to enable the feature in Gmail Labs and choose the default font on Gmail Settings.

Visit the Gmail Labs page and scroll all the way down (in most cases) to locate “Default Text Styling“. Enable the feature and make sure to “Save Changes” at the bottom of the page.

Once enabled you have to now choose the font that you want to use as the default font. This time visit Gmail “Settings” page and locate “Default Text Style“. It’s pretty much self-explanatory afterwards. Choose the font, size, style and color and save the changes. Your Gmail page will reload and from now on when you compose new emails using Gmail the font you chose will be used as the default font.

I’m excited to see this feature at Gmail as I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. I’m sure you’ll also appreciate the usefulness of this feature. I hope this Labs feature make it to the core feature-set soon.

Best of the 11 online file storage services to store your file safe and secure.

These days there are plenty of online services where you can store your files either manually or can add the external storage location as another shared folder to your Finder/Explorer. As the technology matures the services make life easier by either offering more storage for cheaper price or can help keep all your devices synced.

Here are some 11 online storage services that offers a wide variety of different features,

Dropbox

Dropbox helps you store your files online with less hassle. It offers a way to integrate your Dropbox service location to your Mac Finder or Windows Explorer windows so you can just drag & drop files to your Dropbox. It offers 3 different plans, 2 GB for free, 50 GB for $9.99/month and 100 GB for $19.99/month.

Live Mesh

Live Mesh is Microsoft’s latest attempt on the online storage segment. It is an ambitious service that helps you keep many of your devices in sync with the files that you care. The devices list include Windows PCs, mobile devices and even Macs. So if you have a diverse computing environment then Live Mesh would be a service that could come in handy to keep all your important files in sync across all your devices. It offers 5 GB of free storage.

Carbonite

For $54.95 per year Carbonite offers unlimited online backup capacity. It is one of the more famous service that has a reliable name in the industry. Carbonite also allows you to remotely access your files from any computer.

Mozy

Compared to Carbonite, Mozy is slightly expensive but it is one of the most famous service when it comes to reliable online storage. You get 2 GB storage for free but when you pay $4.95 per month you get unlimited storage space.

Windows Live SkyDrive

SkyDrive offers 25 GB of free online storage for most of your files. You have to use its online interface to upload and download files. You can share files easily with anyone who has a Windows Live ID.

Humyo

Humyo offers 10 GB of free storage for all your files to be stored on a secured location. It offers paid plans for business as well as home users. You can easily share your stored files to anyone.

ADrive

ADrive is another service that offers reliable online storage up to 50 GB for free. It allows you to share files with anyone and also allows you to access it from anywhere. One advantage to using ADrive is that it allows you to FTP files into your storage account.

YouSendIt

Apart from storing your files safely online YouSendIt allows you to send large files to anyone. It’s a paid service for files more than 100 MB but if you really need to send/share really large files then you can turn to YouSendIt. There are 3 other paid plans to suite your needs.

FreeDrive

FreeDrive is a simple service that offers a mere 1 GB of of free storage. You can keep your uploaded files totally private or you can share it only with your friends or can share it publicly so anyone can see it.

FileQube

FileQube allows you to store up to 2 GB of free online storage. It allows you to share bigger files up to 150 MB for free. They offer a paid service to share files of bigger sizes. You can also upload up to 5 files concurrently.

MailBigFile

As the name implies MailBigFile allows you to send up to 200 MB file for free. They offer a Pro account that has many benefits including the ability to send bigger files, longer availability, faster uploads and encrypted transfer.

Google Public DNS helps you browse the internet safe and fast.

If you ever wonder what a DNS means, it is a service that helps resolve a domain name to an IP address. I know that’s a very high level definition. If you’d like to read more about what DNS means, you can read it from Wikipedia.

What happens when you request a website on your browser is that it reaches out to the many domain name servers out there to try to resolve the domain name to an IP address so that the web server can be located. When you have too many domain name servers to look things up it certainly adds a lot of overhead and that’s one reason that can slow down your internet connection (at least to a certain level). Having a single and powerful domain name server reduces the overhead to look for and also can impose certain rules so your browsing can be secure.

Earlier we’ve explained how Open DNS can speed up your internet connection. Even though it does truly help speed up the internet connection and make your internet activity a bit more secure, when the same service comes from Google I think it would make more sense to go with the monster given the massive infrastructure Google has.

Google Public DNS is a free DNS service from the mighty Google to help speed up your internet connection and make it more secure.

There is no download or software installation involved. All you have to do is to configure your computer to use Google Public DNS as its DNS provider. Configuring your computer to make use of Google Public DNS is simple enough if you follow these steps correctly. In this article we’ll see how we can configure a Windows 7 as well a Mac OSX based computer to route calls through Google Public DNS.

Configure a Windows 7 computer to make use of Google Public DNS

Launch Control Panel and click on the “Network and Internet” link.

Click on the “Network and Sharing Center” link.

Once in the Network and Sharing Center click on the “Wireless Network Connection” link if you are using a wireless connection. If not then choose the connection link appropriately.

When the “Wireless Network Connection Status” dialog pops-up click on the “Properties” button. You might be asked to authenticate.

Then on the “Wireless Network Connection Properties” dialog locate “Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4)” item and then click on the “Properties” button.

IPv4 Properties dialog pops up and here is where you have to key-in the Google Public DNS entries. Click on the “Use the following DNS server addresses” option and then type in “8.8.8.8” on the “Preferred DNS server” box and “8.8.4.4” on the “Alternate DNS server” box.

Dismiss all the open dialogs and visit, let’s say, Google.com and if everything looks good then bookmark the site, close the browser and relaunch and click on the bookmark to visit Google.com again. If everything looks good by now, congratulations, you’ve successfully configured your Windows 7 computer to make use of Google Public DNS.

Configure a Mac OSX based computer to make use of Google Public DNS

If you use a Mac then follow these instructions to configure your DNS settings to use Google Public DNS.

Launch “System Preferences” and click on the “Network” icon under “Internet & Network”.

Once on the Network Preferences dialog select the network connection that you wanted to configure. If you use a wireless connection choose the “Airport” option if not then choose the appropriate option from the list. Click on the “Advanced…” button.

When you see the “Airport” preferences dialog, in this case, click on the “DNS” tab. Clear whatever entries you see on the “DNS Servers” list and then add “8.8.8.8” and “8.8.4.4” to the list.

Dismiss all open dialogs and try to browse to, let’s say, Google.com. If you can successfully browse to it then try to bookmark Google.com and close the browser and try to browse to Google.com using the bookmark. If everything looks good by now, congratulations, you’ve successfully configured your Mac OSX based computer to make use of Google Public DNS.

If you are already happy with your current DNS provider, by all means, stick with them if you don’t want to mess with the settings (again). But if you ever think a Google backing would be much better then using Google Public DNS makes more sense. It really helps improve your internet connection speed and makes your internet activities a lot safer. I hope you are enjoying the improved speed of your internet connection by now. If you have any questions on this please let us know in comments.

Create screen mockups online for free with Mockingbird.

If you are a small development shop or a freelance developer who don’t have the budget to invest in a wire-framing tool then you’d love this free online mockup tool, Mockingbird.

Mockingbird helps you create screen mockups on the fly with its intuitive online interface. There is nothing to download or register, just navigate to Mockingbird and start mocking your UI needs. Once you are happy with your wireframe you can preview to print or can share it with your colleagues.

It has a huge collection of common controls and such to help you design the best UI that you want to mock. The controls they have are pretty diverse enough to cover most of your UI needs. Most of the controls scale pretty nice to fit to your needs.

Mockingbird also supports multiple pages and helps you link between those pages to give you a true wire-framing experience.

On top of all these, Mockingbird is not Flash based. It is based on the Cappuccino framework. For those of you who don’t know what Cappuccino is, it is an open source framework that makes it easy to build desktop-caliber applications that run on web browsers. It takes a minute to load the first time but once loaded every interaction is pretty snappy.

Here is a typical workflow of using Mockingbird,

Visit Mockingbird, the best free online screen mockup tool.

Set filters to let Windows Live Hotmail automatically sort your incoming emails to appropriate folders.

Gmail is famous for its Labels and Filters which helps you organize your emails without much human intervention. If you think Gmail is the only email app that supports this feature, you are wrong.

If you are a Windows Live Hotmail fan and envy the automatic email sorting capabilities of Gmail you’ll be surprised to hear that Hotmail also natively supports automatic email sorting. The only difference is that Gmail allows you to get organized based on Labels whereas Hotmail allows you to get organized using the traditional Folders.

To enable automatic email sorting, sign-in to your Windows Live Hotmail account and click on the “Options” menu at the top right side of the page and then click on the “More Options” link.

Beneath the “Customize your mail” section click on the “Automatically sort e-mail into folders” link.

Click on the “New Filter” button to create a new rule.

On the Edit Filter page you can create a filter by “From Address”, “From Name”, “Subject” or “To and CC lines”. Specify a filter by using an operator like “contains”, “ends with”, “equals” etc to check against the text that you specify.

Now you need to pick a folder where you want the message that meets the above criteria to be automatically sent to.

Hit the “Save” button to finish creating the filter and you should be able to see on the next page, the list of filters that you’ve created.

From now on, whenever an email arrives on your Windows Live Hotmail inbox it will be sorted out against the available filters and based on the filters would then be sent to the appropriate folders.

I hope you can make use of this simple technique to get organized with your Windows Live Hotmail.

Twitter List Widget can bring all Twitter updates from the list to your website.

When Twitter introduced Twitter Lists it was news everywhere on the web. Now with the many useful Twitter Lists created by the many enthusiastic Twitterers and Listorious the lists are becoming more and more useful to keep an eye on. Now Twitter has released a way to embed a Twitter list directly on to your website as a widget.

Here is how you can create and customize the Twitter Lists Widget,

Visit Twitter Lists Widget page. You should be able to see a blank widget template waiting for you to customize.

Widget Settings

Click on the “Settings” tab (if it wasn’t selected already). Start by entering the Twitter username to find the list. Here I’ve used the uber-famous Scobleizer who has some fantastic lists on various categories. Then choose the List Name for which you want to create the widget for. Give it a tile and a caption (the first and second line of the widget) and you are done with the main settings of your Twitter Lists Widget.

Widget Preferences

Click on the “Preferences” tab to set some of the widget preferences. You can set your preference to new results, to include scrollbar, load behavior, number of tweets to appear on the widget at a time along with either to show avatars, timestamps and hashtags. Choose the options that make more sense to you.

Widget Appearance

Move on to the “Appearance” tab to set some of the color preferences. Here you can set the shell background, shell text, tweet background, tweet text and link colors to your liking. I would recommend that you choose the colors to go nice with the color scheme of your website.

Widget Dimensions

Use the “Dimensions” tab to set the width and height of the widget. Or you can use the “auto width” feature and the widget will figure out the width and height and adjusts automatically.

Once everything is all done, click on the “Finish & Grab Code” button and grab the script code that you can then install on your website.

If you think a Twitter List update can add more value to your website visitors you can install Twitter Lists Widget on your website to keep on top of what’s happening on the list.

Gmail can remotely sign you out from all your signed in sessions.

Have you ever forgot to sign out of your Gmail account and realize it later? This would be a serious issue if you are using public computers. But Gmail has you covered. You can use Gmail’s capabilities to remotely sign-out from all your signed-in sessions.

On any Gmail page scroll down to the bottom of the page where you can see your account usage information in terms of size. Just below that you should be able to see your sign-in/sign-out activities as well. If you are signed into your Gmail account from multiple place you should be able to see a similar notification like above which tells you that the account is open in other locations as well. Click on the "Details" link to find out more information about the activities.

As you can see above, the dialog lists all concurrent sessions along with the last 5 activities. In between these 2 information you can find a button "Sign out all other sessions". You can use this button to sign out from all other signed-in sessions.

If you realize that you didn’t sign-out of your Gmail account you can sign-in again into your Gmail account and use the "Sign out all other sessions" button to sign-out from all the signed-in sessions. This would come in real handy when you realize that you forgot to sign out of your Gmail account from a public computer. Keep this information in mind. Who knows it might come in handy.

TwitterLists2RSS can help you keep an eye on your favorite Twitter Lists using your favorite feed reader.

Just a couple of days back Twitter made its Lists feature available to all the users. Since then there are way too many Twitter Lists that’s been created that comes-in real handy to follow a bunch of Twitter users without the hassle of finding them individually.

As with any new Twitter feature Twitter Lists are also getting to a point where dealing with them is a becoming a hassle. TwitterLists2RSS is a free service that asks you for a Twitter Lists URL and then gives you an RSS address which you can subscribe to using any of your favorite feed readers.

Start by keying in your Twitter Lists URL at TwitterLists2RSS. If you don’t have a Twitter List handy you can find a list using a service like Listorious.

Grab the RSS feed’s URL and plug it into any of your favorite feed reader. You should now be able to get updates from your favorite Twitter Lists on your favorite feed reader.

Windows Social site lets you see what people are saying about Windows 7 in real time.

With Windows 7 we are seeing Microsoft adopting the social media more and more. How about a web site to see what people are saying about Windows 7 in the mainstream social media? Well, Microsoft has that answered as well with Windows Social! They even made the URL sound social with www.microsoft.com/windows/social

Currently you can find out what people are saying about Windows 7 on Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, YouTube and Flickr. Of course, the frequency of Twitter updates seem to blow you away with more frequent updates that kind of makes it hard to read those updates. You can use the little slider that you see on the top left to slow down the frequency of updates.

Windows Social is a nice idea but I’m not sure if they fitler our any negative "mainstream social media" press as I haven’t seen much (any) negative updates on the stream. Of course, Windows 7 looks like a superior product and there might be really less negative press possible but I’m sure there might be some which was missing on those updates. Coincidence? Not sure!

See what people are saying about Windows 7 in the mainstream social media.

These not-so-famous web apps from Microsoft are free and useful.

Microsoft is not as famous as Google or Yahoo for their web apps. Of course, there are very few web apps from Microsoft that are useful but not as many or as famous as Google’s or Yahoo’s. Here are 5 free web apps from Microsoft that are known less to the public but are really useful indeed.

Live Mesh

These days we use many devices including your PC, Mac, Laptops, Mobile Phones etc. to get to the information we need. Often we find that these devices are not in-sync with each other and so we have to switch to a specific device to get to the information we need.

Live Mesh is a free service from Microsoft that allows you to sync, share and access your information across many devices. It can keep your files synchronized across your Windows or Mac based laptops, desktops and Windows Mobile based mobile phones.

Office Live

Office Live gives you free space of up to 5 GB for online storage that can be accessed from anywhere. It also allows you to share and collaborate on any Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. Office Live also gives you a free website and tools to build a quality website for free.

Windows Live Sync

Windows Live Sync does pretty much what Live Mesh does but it can only keep the files in sync between your computers. It can keep the files you identify synchronized between your Windows based or Mac based computers. Also, you can use Live Sync’s Shared Folders to share any file with your friends or coworkers.

Microsoft My Phone

My Phone service from Microsoft allows the information on your mobile phone be backed up to a space hosted and managed by Microsoft. In case you lose your phone or you upgrade to a different phone you can use the My Phone service to retrieve the information that you’ve backed up.

My Phone also allows you to share photos, taken on your phone, on Facebook, My Space, Flickr and Windows Live.

Silverlight Streaming

Silverlight Streaming is a free service provided by Microsoft so that Silverlight developers and designers can host up to 10 GB of Silverlight media files for free. Silverlight Streaming service also allows you to stream directly from that hosted space so you don’t have to worry about your own bandwidth. It’s a convenient service if you happen to need to host Silverlight media files.

If you know of any other lesser-known web apps from Microsoft that you find it useful please share with us in comments.

SpeedTest.net and PingTest.net can give you more accurate information about your internet connection.

There are many different type of internet connections available, dial-up, DSL, Cable Internet, Fiber Optic etc. All these type of internet connections have its own factors that could influence the reliability and speed of the connection. It would be a good idea to test your internet connection speed once in a while to see if you are getting the right speed that you deserve.

There are many services available on the web that can test your internet connection. Many of them are not reliable or accurate enough. SpeedTest.net is an exception. It is the best web-based internet connection speed checker available that’s even recommended by a major US telecommunications service provider.

SpeedTest.net determines the quality of your internet connection by running a download speed test, upload speed test and by doing a ping back and forth.

To start the test you need to pick a server that’s closest to you and hit the button to start the test.

Once the test is done, SpeedTest.net displays your download and upload speed results in terms of Mbps. It also displays a sampling data with which you can figure out how long it will take to download a 5 MB MP3 file, a 35 MB Video Clip and a 800 MB Movie. Those are pretty handy information.

Speedtest.net also has a free iPhone application with no advertising. Using the application you can test your download and upload speeds via WiFi, 3G or Edge from virtually anywhere. You can also refer back to your results anytime, anywhere.

If SpeedTest.net can give you information about your internet connection speed they provide another service, PingTest.net, which would give you information on any packet loss that you incur with your internet connection. Packet loss, minor or major, can make your online games or your Voice-over-IP services to perform sluggish.

With PingTest.net you can pretty much find out about any packet loss that you incur and then can take matters with your internet service provider.

The combination of SpeedTest.net and PingTest.net can help you easily identify issues with your internet connection speed. Beleive me, when a major US telecommunications giant advices you to use these services instead of their own versions there has got to be something that’s better than the other services out there.

Let us know in comments if you have any specific questions regarding this or if you use a internet connection speed checker that has some advantage over SpeedTest.net and PingTest.net.

Enable and make use of these 30 useful Gmail Labs features for a better Gmail experience.

I don’t know about you but I love Gmail more than any other email clients that I’ve tried, even when compared to any other desktop email clients. The one feature that makes me come back to use the Gmail web interface more and more is the Gmail Labs feature.

Gmail Labs is an experimental feature release by the Gmail team where they declare that these features are not tested thoroughly but would give you a better experience. Then you, as an informed user, can make the decision to give the feature a try or not.

Some of the Gmail Labs features are really useful while others are nice-to-have kind of. You might even find those nice-to-have features are really nice to have.

Here are some 30 of the most useful Gmail Labs features that can help you enjoy using Gmail’s web interface. Keep in mind that these are the feature-set as of this writing. As with the nature of Gmail Labs new features would get introduced every now and then but these are some of the features that you might find it useful to start with.

Offline Gmail

You can use Gmail while not connected to the internet if you enable Offline Gmail option. It uses Google Gears to keep an offline copy of your email inboxes so you can use those even when not connected to the internet. You won’t be able to physically send emails while offline but you can still send emails as usual and your emails will be delivered once you get an active internet connection. Read more about how to access Gmail offline.

Google Docs Preview in Gmail

When you receive any link to a Google Doc in your email this feature will allow you to preview the documents before really opening or downloading. Consider this as kind of a "quick preview".

Message Translation

If you normally receive emails in non-English languages and would like to view those emails in English or any other language of your choice you can use the "Message Translation" feature to let Gmail translate those emails to the language of your choice. Read more about how to translate emails to different languages.

Quick Links

Allows you to keep a repository of links that you use quite often, be it any important email messages or any frequent searches, you can dump those links in here for quick access. Quick Links will add a little box to the left column on your Gmail page with all those quick links.

Gmail Superstars

On of the advantage of using Gmail’s web interface is that it allows you to star your emails for quick reference. The default star capability of Gmail is very limited in nature. If you like to star your emails in many different ways then the "Superstars" Gmail Labs feature gives you ample choices to comfortable star your emails. Read more on how to reduce the email clutter by starring your Gmail emails.

Custom Keyboard Shortcuts

Gmail lets you get a lot done quickly if you use Gmail keyboard shortcuts. It might take a bit of an effort to learn these shortcuts but once you start using it you can get a lot done quickly with those shortcuts. If the default shortcuts are not enough for you then you can use "Custom keyboard shortcuts" feature to customize the keyboard shortcuts to your convenience.

Signature Tweaks

The default signature capability of Gmail is pretty basic in nature and can’t be tweaked much. With "Signature Tweaks" you can customize the behavior of your email signature a little bit.

Sender Time Zone

If you receive emails from friends across time zones and ever wonder if it would be an appropriate time to expect a response, "Sender Time Zone" is for you. It displays the sender’s time along with the time it’s there at the sender’s place. You make the judgement.

Right-side Chat

If your Google Chat contacts list is pretty lengthy you might want to consider moving the chat box to the right side of your Gmail window so it can pan down the page as much as the Gmail page can pan down. This would give you more room to see your Gmail Chat contacts.

Advanced IMAP Controls

The default IMAP control that Gmail supports is simple and straight-forward. It syncs all of your Gmail labels and expunges messages automatically. Get fine control of your IMAP settings with "Advanced IMAP Controls" Gmail Labs feature.

Default Reply to All

Major complaint about modern day email is that people quite often accidentally hit the "Reply" button instead of the "Reply to All" and leave out important people from the conversation. If you happen to reply to all of your contacts for the most part you can use "Default Reply to all" feature to make "Reply to All" button as the default button intead of the "Reply" button.

Quote Selected Text

If you don’t want to include that lengthy email on your response but would rather quote a portion of the email instead then "Quote Selected Text" can come to your rescue. Just highlight the quote you want to include in your response when you click on the "Reply" link and you’ll then only include your selected text in your response.

Forgotten Attachment Detector

This feature is a bit intelligent in the sense that if you mention any attachments in your email message and forget to attach those files this feature can remind you of attaching your attachments. Pretty neat!

Vacation Time!

Similar to Microsoft Outlook you can set automatic vacation responders in Gmail. With "Vacation Time" you can specify the start and end dates of your vacation and Gmail will take care of responding to your emails with a custom vacation responder email that you can customize with your own message. Read more about how to setup automatic vacation response message on Gmail.

Custom Label Colors

I use a lot of labels to organize my emails in Gmail. With the default behavior Gmail only gives you limited choice of label colors which I normally run out pretty quick. With "Custom Label Colors" you can specify your own custom colors for labels and that would give you enough choice when it comes to label colors.

Mark as Read Button

When you receive a lot of emails on your Gmail inbox it would be a nightmare to sort through each one of them and marking it as read by clicking on the "More Actions" dropdown and then marking it as read. Instead "Mark as Read Button" feature adds a convenient "Mark as read" button on to the toolbar itself for your convenience.

Multiple Inboxes

Often clicking on the "Starred" link or on any of the labels to get to see your important email messages? Not any more, with "Multiple Inboxes" feature you can add extra list of emails down below each other on to your Gmail home page so you can see them all in one place. Unbelivably useful!

Create a Document

With "Create a Document" feature you can convert any emails into a Google Document. You’ll love it if you use Google Docs a lot.

Send and Archive

As the name says this feauture adds a "Send & Receive" button to your "Compose" email page with which you can respond to an email and archive it at the same time.

Undo Send

Ever hit the "Send" button to realize that you should have read the message one more time? No problem, "Undo Send" feature gives you a chance to undo the send action. Keep in mind that you can only undo your send action for couple of seconds so you should the quick enough to realize your mistake. Read more about undoing a sent Gmail message.

Title Tweaks

Would like to know your unread Gmail count even when the window is minimized? "Title Tweaks" displays the unread email count first so it would be visible on your Task Bar. This applies mostly to Windows and Linux users.

Don’t Forget Bob

If you happen to email to a group of people you’ll love this feature. It automatically suggests the contacts that it thinks you must have missed. On my usage it pretty much was accurate enough to suggest me the correct recipients that I forgot to include. Great feature!

Got the Wrong Bob?

When people in your contacts list have same name it’s quite possible that we might accidentally pick the wrong person to send the email to. With "Got the wrong Bob?" feature Gmail alerts you if you intend to include those other contacts instead. Helps you avoid some embarrasment!

Hide Read Labels

With the limited screen real-estate we have on our computer screens it would be nice to show only relevant labels by default. "Hide Read Labels" hides those labels that are already been read.

Insert Images

As its name suggests, this feature helps you insert images directly into your email messages if those images are available online somewhere. Also, keep in mind that feature will not work if you’ve enabled the offline feature.

Hide Labels from Subjects

If you look at your email inbox and if all you see is those labels instead of your email subject line then it would time to hide those labels from the subject line. "Hide Labels from Subjects" feature helps you get rid of those labels from the subject line on your email inbox.

Google Calendar Gadget

If you use Google Calendar to organize your action items then you’ll love this feature which brings a little Google Calendar gadget to your Gmail sidebar. It displays some of your upcoming Google Calendar events.

Google Docs Gadget

Similar to Google Calendar gadget, Google Docs Gadget displays a little gadget on your Gmail sidebar with your recent docs, any docs that you’ve starred along with a quick search box.

Authenticated Senders

With "Authenticated Senders" feature you get a little icon next to the email sender indicating that these are verified senders. Currently you’ll be able to see the indicator icon next to PayPal and eBay senders but will be helpful if it gets expanded to include more senders. Read more about Authenticated Gmail Senders.

Custom Date Formats

If you live in a place where the date formats doesn’t match with the US date standard or if you prefer a different clock format than the default then "Custom Date Formats" feature can help you customize the date and time displayed on your email messages to your preferred format.

To make use of any of these Gmail Labs features, navigate to the Gmail Labs page where you see a long list of all the available features. For the features that you wanted to give a try click on the "Enable" button and make sure to hit the "Save Changes" button at the end of the page.

As with any "Labs"features things might not work as intended sometimes. If you happen to run into a situation where you’ve enabled the many Gmail Labs features to find that your Gmail Inbox doesn’t load then Gmail has a work around which effectively disables all Gmail Labs features. Just click on this URL to access your Gmail without any of the Labs features,

http://mail.google.com/mail/?labs=0

I’m sure you must have got convinced that Gmail is one of the best thing to happen to the email industry, particularly given the explosive use of some of the Gmail Labs features. If you are not currently using Gmail as your primary email client I’m hoping that these features at least gives you an insight of what’s possible with Gmail and Gmail Labs. Now, as informed as you are, you make the decision either to switch or not.

In the mean time I hope you found these 30 different Gmail Labs features useful. If you have any questions or comments regarding this please share with us in comments.

Tags: Gmail, How To, Gmail Labs

Bureau of Communication’s forms can add some humor to some unpleasant letters.

Many times in our life we end up in a situation where we need to send out an email or a letter either apologizing for our neglectful actions or showing gratitude or the many day-to-day events. Why not add some humor to these letters to make the receiving event more of a surprise?

Bureau of Communcations has some predefined forms for selected occasions where you can fill-in the blanks and can really add some nice humorous touch to those emails or letters.

Currently they provide letter templates for,

• Declaration of Romantic Intent
• Unsolicited Feedback
• Observance of Holiday
• Airing of Grievance
• Formal Apology
• Statement of Gratitude
• Official Invitation
• Acknowledgement of Occasion

And there are more letter templates on the works, like "Request for Compensation".

Once you pick a template you’ll be presented with a sample letter template with gaps left appropriately for you to fill-in. When you roll your mouse over those blank spaces you should be able to type-in your creative humor there. Once you are happy you can either email the form or can print a hard copy of the same.

They have a book in the works and would be launching soon at Amazon.com.

I know it’s not the next best thing to Facebook to get excited about but it surely can take some vent out and soften the mood if you fill-in the gaps creatively.

Visit Bureau of Communication.

Enjoy tweeting with these 30 free and useful Twitter applications.

If you use Twitter a lot I’m sure you’ll love these 30 free Twitter applications that can help improve your experience with Twitter.

TwitPaper helps you download cool Twitter Layouts and Backgrounds for free.

FileTwt brings file sharing to twitter. With FileTwt you can now easily upload and tweet about your files for free.

TweetPhoto helps you share photos instantly on Twitter and Facebook.

TBuzz helps you share the websites you visit on Twitter easily. TBuzz is a bookmarklet that posts the current page you are on to your Twitter timeline.

Tweepler helps you deal with your new Twitter followers in a more enjoyable way.

Vidly helps you easily share videos on Twitter.

FlickToTweet helps you upload photos to Flickr and helps you announce the upload on Twitter.

TwtJobs helps you post a job or post a resume to Twitter.

Twtvite is an event manager tool that helps you organize Tweetups and make meaningful connections through social media.

Twtlong allows you to share more than 140 chars text, photos, videos and maps on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed or on any other social media site.

TwitZap lets you slice Twitter into channels of stuff that matters to you. Once your channels are set they will update in real-time, all in a familiar interface.

Twickie fetches Twitter replies for you and gives you an easy way to view and export them.

Twitter Analyzer provides you with Twitter Statistics and helps you analyze the statistical information.

Topify notifies you by email of your new Twitter followers. You can follow back by just replying to the email.

TwitTrans helps you translate your tweet from any language to any language. Send your tweets to @twitrans like "en2sp". Supported languages are Arabic-ar, Chinese-zh, Dutch-nl, English-en, French-fr, German-de, Greek-el, Hebrew-he, Hindi-hi, Italian-it, Japanese-jp, Portuguese-pt, Russian-ru, Spanish-es.

TwitterFone allows you to tweet with your own voice. Register your mobile phone and call a local number to tweet what you say.

Tweetake allows you to backup your followers and tweets for just-in-case scenarios

Tweetree puts your Twitter stream in a tree so you can see the posts people are replying to in context.

Twilert lets you receive regular email updates of tweets containing your brand, product, service, well any keyword you like really.

HootSuite helps you do a lot more with your Twitter account using its clean web interface.

TwtPoll helps you to create and distribute polls/surveys on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed or on any other social media site.

Tweet3 supports grouping, Facebook, stats, multiple accounts, pretty pictures, trending topics and more.

TwTrip helps you share your travel plans, meet people and plan your next adventure on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed or on any other social media site.

Twitlet is a JavaScript bookmarklet that helps you tweet directly from your browser.

Tweepz helps you search, find and discover interesting people on Twitter.

TwitDir helps you find your friends and more on Twitter in a more simplistic way.

Twitly allows you to group your Twitter followers for your convenience.

Twesents allows you to send virtual gifts to your Twitter friends.

Twitster lets you display tweets on your own web site from everyone you follow in Twitter.

StockTwits helps you discover and share real-time investment ideas.

I hope you find something useful within this collection of free Twitter Apps.

In this article let’s see how we can make use of Twitter to easily send tweets and notes to our Evernote notebook.

Earlier I’ve walked you through on how to make use of Twitter Favorites to effectively use Twitter from your iPhone. In this article let’s see how we can make use of the more powerful Evernote service to tweet our favorite tweets into our Evernote Notebook so it can be used and managed in a lot better way than the simplistic interface that Twitter provides to manage our Twitter Favorites.

Get started by following @myEN. myEN is a Twitter account from Evernote that takes care of sending your tweets to your Evernote account.

Once you follow myEN it will send you a direct message to finish the last step of linking your Twitter account to your Evernote account. Follow the link on that direct message.

You’ll be prompted to login to your Evernote account, if you haven’t already, and as soon as you login you’ll be prompted to link your Twitter account with your Evernote account. Click on the "Link accounts" button.

Once linked, you’ll see a confirmation message. It’s important that you see the confirmation message. I ran into an issue without seeing the confirmation message.

Once done, you are all set to tweet to your Evernote account. Basically there are 3 ways you can tweet to your Evernote Notebook.

1. Send public tweets to Evernote

Sending a public tweet is the most straight-forward way. Just tweet as you normally do but make sure to mention @myEN anywhere on your tweet. Yes, that will reduce your twitting capability to 135 characters essentially but that’s a decent trade-off for the kind of advantage the Twitter and Evernote combination brings-in.

2. Send Direct Messages to Evernote

If you don’t want your note to be publicly visible you can direct message your tweet to Evernote. Go into the "Direct Message" view and choose "myEN" from the direct message list. Type-in your tweet and hit "Send". Your tweet won’t appear on your public timeline but will only show-up on your Evernote Notebook.

3. Send picture tweets to Evernote

If you’d like to send a picture to your Evernote Notebook tweet as usual, public or direct message, and make sure to mention the TwitPic URL on your tweet.

Once you tweet using any of these ways you’ll see that a new note gets added to your Evernote Notebook for each tweet.

That’s all to linking Twitter and Evernote together to send all your favorite tweets to your Evernote Notebook. Isn’t that fascinating to see such an useful service like this?

If you’d rather like to see it as a video instead, here is a video that sums these steps up pretty nice.

Twitter and Evernote combination seems to be a killer combo for the many who uses both the services. Instead of dumping all my favorite tweets with the limited-capability "Twitter Favorites" I can now dump all my Twitter favorites to Evernote and can make use of it in a lot better way.

If you find any other way of making use of Evernote as a Twitter hub please let us know in comments.

Tags: Twitter, Evernote, How To

Google Apps Status Dashboard can give you the status of major Google Apps.

If you are a heavy Google Apps user you must have faced the Gmail outage today. So when things like these happen how would you know if the service is really down or is it just you?

Google has put out a simple Apps Status Dashboard that shows the status of the various Google Apps services. Currently the list includes,

• Google Mail
• Google Calendar
• Google Talk
• Google Docs List
• Google Documents
• Google Spreadsheets
• Google Presentations
• Google Sites
• Google Video for Business
• Admin Control Panel

It tells you the status of,

• No Issues
• Service Disruption
• Service Outage
• Information Available

Visit Google Apps Status Dashboard.

Gmail now allows you to import emails and contacts from many other email providers.

These days with many of us having many different email addresses with many different email providers wouldn’t it be nice if all those can be viewed in one place than to switch between different email accounts?

If you use Gmail as your main email account (at least these days) you are in luck. Gmail now allows you import not just emails but contacts as well from any other email providers into Gmail. You can then label those emails so you can easily get to those emails. Isn’t that a cool thing to have on top of the many cool things Gmail provides?

Start by going into Gmail “Settings” page.

Click on the “Accounts and Import” tab. Then click on the “Import mail and contacts” button to start the import process.

Gmail will ask you to enter the email address from where to import the emails and contacts from. On the next page you have to enter the password of the email service you are importing from.

Choose the options to your preference. Keep in mind that this service is not a permanent solution out-of-the-box. It is indeed provided my Gmail to help you transition from other email providers to Gmail. That’s why you see the “Import new mail for 30 days” option. Label the email if you may wish so that you can get to those emails quickly.

Once you start the import process Gmail will confirm with the above page. Keep in mind that the complete import process might take up to 2 days.

If you’d like to know the status of the import process, you can go into the same “Accounts and Import” tab on Gmail Settings and can see the status from there.

Now you might wonder if your existing email provider is supported for the import. Here is a list of email providers supported for import into Gmail,

aol.com
aol.fr
clear.net.nz
cox.net
comcast.net
cs.com
earthlink.net
freenet.de
freeserve.co.uk
gmx.at
gmx.ch
gmx.de
gmx.net
hotmail.com
hotmail.co.uk
hotmail.de
hotmail.fr
Ihug.co.nz
juno.com
laposte.net
live.com
mail.ru
msn.com
netscape.com
netzero.com
neuf.fr
optonline.net
optusnet.com.au
orange.fr
orangehome.co.uk
orcon.net.nz
paradise.net.nz
rr.com
slingshot.co.nz
sprint.ca
sympatico.ca
tiscali.co.uk
verizon.net
voila.fr
wanadoo.co.uk
wanadoo.fr
web.de
worldnet.att.net
yahoo.com
yahoo.co.uk
yahoo.co.in
yandex.ru

I hope you find Gmail’s Mail and Contacts import useful (at least for every 30 days). If you have any questions/comments regarding this please share with us on comments.

Technorati Tags:
Gmail, How To, Gmail Import

YouTubeTweeter makes it easy to embed videos on your Twitter page.

Of course, you can use the many URL shortening services out there to shorten the YouTube video URL (for example) and can tweet about a video that you liked. The problem is that when your followers click on the link they’ll be taken to the corresponding video site and they can view the video only from there.

YouTubeTweeter is a service that helps you share videos on Twitter but with a twist. When you click on the video URL instead of navigating away from your Twitter page it keeps you in the same page and will embed the video as kind of like an overlay so you can watch the video without leaving the page. Once you are done watching the video and when you dismiss the overlay you’ll see your Twitter page where you left off. As I said, it’s not a service that makes a huge difference but certainly gives a tiny bit of better user experience to your followers, particularly when it comes to watching videos on Twitter.

Start by navigating to YouTubeTweeter.com and enter your Twitter name.

YouTubeTweeter will ask you to choose the video service from which you intend to share the video. Choose the service that you want to share the video from.

Once you choose the service, YouTubeTweeter will ask you to enter the URL of the video.

Once you enter it, it will do all the URL shortening and then will present you with a page where you get to see the shortened URL along with choices of testing it and/or tweeting it.

You can test the video to make sure you are not spamming your followers (accidentally!). Once you are happy you can tweet the video and your tweet will appear on your Twitter stream. Note: you might want to adjust the text of the tweet to fit your preference.

When anyone clicks on the URL on the tweet they’ll be presented with an overlay that embeds the video within the same page (instead of navigating away). Once you watch the video you can use any of the dismiss buttons to dismiss the overlay and get back to your Twitter page.

As I said, YouTubeTweeter is not a huge service that makes a huge difference in your Twitter experience but certainly can make it a bit easier to your followers to watch the videos that you tweet about.

Do you see any other use of the service? Please share with us on comments below.

Technorati Tags:
Twitter, YouTube, YouTubeTweeer

Google Reader’s Send To feature allows you to share your favorite Google Reader feed items to your favorite Social Media sites.

Google Reader team introduced a fantastic feature, “Send To”, which allows you to share your favorite Google Reader feed items across all your favorite Social Media sites. With just a single click you can now Tweet your favorite story, submit the story to StumbleUpon, share it with your friends at Facebook and you imagine the possibilities. This is one of the feature I was wishing for a long while now.

You don’t have to do much, except to enable it on the Google Reader Settings.

Sign-in to Google Reader and click on the “Settings” link at the top-right side of the page.

Click on the “Send To” tab. There you’ll see a pre-populated list of some of the Social Media websites. Check the ones that you want to send your favorite feed items to.

Once you do that and when you refresh your Google Reader page you’ll see a “Send To” option on each feed item. When you click on it you’ll see a dropdown list of the Social Media sites that you chose on the Settings page. You might have to disable your browser’s pop-up blocker to make use the “Send To” feature.

Clicking on an item on the “Send To” menu will do the appropriate action. Keep in mind that most of the actions will open up a new page for you to finish the action. I wish Google Reader team does enhance this to have us finish the action without navigating to a new page. That would be awesome.

Technorati Tags:
How To, Google Reader, Send To

You can use Google Image Search Options to filter the image search result.

Following the trend of Bing, that gave too many useful options on its image search to help you narrow down to what you are exactly looking for, Google’s Image Search now has Search Options. You can use Search Options to narrow down to a specific size of the image, a particular type of the image and also based on any color preferences.

Go to Google Image Search page and search for what you are looking for.

On the results page you should be able to notice a “Show Options…” link at the top.

Click on the “Show Options…” link to expand the search options pane. As you can see above you can filter the result-set based on the size of an image, the type of an image or based on the color of an image. Use the “Reset Options” link at the bottom of the pane to clear-out any filters and start fresh.

Google Image Search Options would be particularly helpful when you are looking for a specific image with some predefined criteria.

I hope you find it useful. If you have any questions or comments regarding this please let us know in comments.

Technorati Tags:
How To, Google, Google Image, Image Search

MyAllTop on your iPhone can help you manage your RSS feeds better.

According to AllTop,

Alltop is an “online magazine rack” of popular topics.

It’s true that AllTop has tremendous potential to help us keep up with the flood of online information that we breath, swallow and digest. AllTop organizes the RSS Feeds by Topics and that is insanely helpful to find the right RSS feed otherwise you might not even know that it exists.

Given the fact that AllTop tracks more than 650 topics it becomes quite cumbersome to manage all those topics, particularly if you are interested to read on many topics. MyAllTop can help you in this regard.

One of the most useful features of AllTop is MyAllTop, which gives you the ability to customize and keep track of the topics that you are primarily interested in. Even when filtering the topics down to your favorite list becomes daunting MyAllTop helps you arrange the topics based on your personal preference which is pretty cool.

If you have access to a computer then you’d be able to fully utilize the power of AllTop but what if you want to take that experience off-desktop and wanted to bring it to your mobile devices. AllTop can help you in this regard as well.

Let’s take a look at how we can bring MyAllTop to an iPhone so that you can read all your favorite RSS feeds from the comfort of your iPhone.

First visit AllTop.com and click on the “Create an Account” link and key-in the needed information to sign-up for an AllTop account.

Once you get the confirmation email follow the link on the email to get you account confirmed.

Once confirmed you can go to the AllTop.com home page and start exploring your favorite topics. The topics are arranged alphabetically given the fact that AllTop tracks more than 650 topics as of today.

Choose the topic of your interest, for example “Macintosh”. AllTop will show you all the feeds available for the chosen topic.

You should be able to see a “+” icon on the right side of each feed. Click on that “+” icon if you are interested to subscribe to that particular feed and have it accessible on your MyAllTop. Once you click on the “+” button it turns itself into a “tick” mark to indicate that it’s been added to MyAllTop. Similarly browse for more topics and add those feeds that interests you. Don’t worry about the order in which you choose topic or feeds, those can be customized to your need later.

Once you are done with your favorite topics and feeds click on the “Go to MyAllTop” link at the top right side of the page.

You’ll be presented with a page filled with all your favorite feeds across the topics you’ve chosen.

I’m sure you’ll gather quite a lot of your favorite feeds and things will become harder to see the right information. For example, your favorite feed might down below a bunch of feeds and you might think you have to scroll down every time to get to it.

Well, not really! MyAllTop allows you to move feeds around to your preference. Just click on the “Manage” link at the top right of your MyAllTop page and start organizing the feeds.

In the Manage mode you can move feeds around and you can also remove a feed from your MyAllTop list.

You can move feeds around by just dragging and moving the feed’s title to your preferred location. Make sure to save the changes before you move out of the Manage mode.

Once you are happy with the way your MyAllTop feeds look head over to your iPhone and navigate to “http://my.alltop.com/username“. Replace the “username” with your AllTop username, in this case it would be “http://my.alltop.com/demogeek“.

You’d see a mobile version of MyAllTop load on your iPhone with all your favorite feeds listed as per how you arranged on your MyAllTop page. The fonts look little big for readability but it serves the purpose of easily skimming through your favorite RSS feeds.

If you are interested on a feed item when you click on it the link will open in a new browser window on your iPhone so you can always get back to the MyAllTop page without navigating back and forth.

By default, MyAllTop on iPhone (on the web as well) displays only 5 items from each RSS feed. If you’d like to see more of it you use append “/RSS” to the URL, like “http://my.alltop.com/demogeek/rss” to see the top 100 feed items on a particular RSS feed.

If you’d like to share your MyAllTop items with your friends at Facebook or Twitter you can use the “Share this” button on the top of the page.

I’m sure you might be thinking you can do the same with Google Reader as well. The problem with Google Reader is that it doesn’t help you organize your RSS feeds based on the topic and there is no way to move feeds around so you can see your most preferred feeds at the top. AllTop nicely brings you the feeds based on the topics of your interest and can help you move feeds around to your personal preference.

I hope you find AllTop, particularly MyAllTop, more useful to sort through your pile of RSS feeds. If you find any other ways of making use of AllTop please share your thoughts in comments.

PS: Guy Kawasaki, the AllTop Guy, hinted this and I just elaborated on it.

Technorati Tags:
AllTop, MyAllTop, iPhone, iPhone Tips, iPhone Tricks, How To, RSS Feeds

Twitter Search Widget can keep your website or blog updated with the Twitter search keyword of your choice.

If you have a website or a blog then irrespective of if you use Twitter or not you’d find having a Twitter update widget on your sidebar (or wherever it is) very handy. There are many different ways to bring your Twitter updates to your website sidebar but if you’d rather want to keep an eye on Twitter for a keyword specific to your website or blog then Twitter Search Widget would come in really handy.

Twitter Search Widget allows you to embed a small widget (you can customize to your need) that keeps an eye on a keyword (specific to your website, may be) and brings updates to your website or blog’s sidebar.

Visit Twitter Search Widget page. You’d see 3 ways to customize your own Twitter Search Widget.

On the Settings tab you can enter the search query that you want Twitter Search Widget to keep an eye on. You can also enter a Title and a Caption (the top first and second lines on your widget) and can indicate if you want to loop the old results.

Apart from simple search queries you can also use Twitter’s advanced search queries, like for example, #dotnet for results containing the hash tag “dotnet”, @Askar for results that contains my name, near:Harrisburg within:15mi for results containing tweets sent within 15 miles of Harrisburg etc. You can read the full list of advanced Twitter search queries to get an understanding of the advanced search capabilities of Twitter.

On the Appearance tab you can customize the background colors for the widget, tweet, text and links to fit to your website’s look and feel.

On the Dimensions tab you can set the width and height of the widget to accommodate it within your sidebar or wherever you’d prefer to have it.

Once you are satisfied with the customization you can grab the code by clicking on the “Finish & Grab Code” button and can then place it on your website.

Twitter Search Widget is a great way of bringing in some interesting Twitter touch to your website or blog.

Of course, things could be lot improved on the widget and one of my most demanding feature request would be to help us search for multiple keywords. As the widget automatically scrolls with updates from Twitter it would be nice to keep an eye on multiple keywords rather than just one keyword per widget. And that’s just me! Let us know in comments how you find Twitter Search Widget useful and what feature-set that would like to see on the widget.

Technorati Tags:
Twitter, Twitter Search, Twitter Search widget, Widget

Twibbon is one of the easiest ways to promote your cause on Twitter.

If you have a cause that you wanted to promote, an obvious tool to promote that cause would be Twitter. It has taken over the web and is the frenzy these days. So why not make use of Twitter to promote the cause?

You can tweet all day about your cause but you might see your followers drop by drastic numbers the more you tweet the same stuff again and again. What would be a passive way of promoting your cause through Twitter? Twibbon.

Twibbon is a simple service that can helps you promote your cause by adding some unintrusive graphic on top of your Twitter avatar. Your followers, of course, see your Twitter profile image with your tweets and if you can make use of that space to promote your cause…a clever idea!

Navigate to Twibbon and you can either start a cause or you can participate in a cause by overlaying that cause’s graphic on top of your Twitter profile image.

To start a cause click on the “Start Something!” button.

Type-in your cause name, a brief description, an image to represent the cause, your Twitter login details and Twibbon will create the cause and will add to the more than 2100 causes available at this time.

To join a cause, you can either choose from the causes that are trending at Twibbon, most supported cause or recently created cause. Or you can use the Find tab to search for a cause.

Once you find a cause you can just click on it to join the cause and Twibbon will overlay your Twitter profile image with that picture of the cause. Keep in mind that Twibbon won’t be replacing your Twitter profile picture but rather would overlay the cause image on top of your Twitter profile picture.

Earlier we mentioned about Hey IT, a service that takes the IE6 upgrade to the corporate IT departments. And when I chose the Hey IT cause Twibbon showed me that it will overlay my Twitter profile picture with the above Hey IT cause image and have updated my Twitter profile with the above picture.

Twibbon seems to be a cool idea to make use of the Twitter frenzy to do something useful. If you find any other use of Twibbon please let us know in comments.

Technorati Tags:
Twitter, Twibbon, Twitter Cause

BingTweets allows you to see more relevant information about the hottest Twitter Trends.

Twitter was a phenomenon and Bing storm took over the web lately when Microsoft unveiled its latest search/decision engine. Twitter Trends gives you an idea of what’s hot on Twitter. So, how do we make use of the hottest Twitter Trends to find relevant information of the same on Bing.com?

BingTweets tries to answer that question. It’s a nicer marriage of Twitter Trends and its corresponding Bing search results. BingTweets allows you to see deeper, richer and more real-time information about the hottest topics on Twitter.

You just navigate to BingTweets.com and you’ll be invited with a bunch of activities that scrolls in front of you without you doing anything (that doesn’t mean you cannot do anything at BingTweets!).

You can use the Trending Topics box to keep an eye on what’s the hottest topic on Twitter. It’s divided into People, Places, Products and what’s generally popular.

Once you click on any of the trending topics, for example Windows 7 in this case, the Search Results box will do an automatic search on Bing.com and will display the results so you can see more information about the Twitter trending topic.

On to the left side of the Search Results box you can see a Tweets box where, of course, all the tweets about the trending topic will scroll in a reverse chronological order.

You can also tweet the search results directly on Twitter with a click of the “Tweet This” button or you share the results on your social networks.

All these days I used to take the trending topic to a search engine (of my choice) to find out more about the topic but with BingTweets all these can be done in a single page without jumping between different windows.

FYI, BingTweets is a partnership between Microsoft and Federated Media.

Technorati Tags:
Twitter, Bing, Bing.com, Twitter Trends, BingTweets

Gmail’s Verified Sender feature can help save you from phishing scams.

With all the phishing attempts out there you need protection everywhere to make sure you don’t fall into the trap. If you’ve been using emails for a while now you must have come across some flavor of phishing attempt. You get an email that exactly looks from the original sender when looked overall but you can only see that it’s from the phisher if you are eagle-eyed. Many people fall into this trap and end up giving their bank account details, credit card information and many other valuable information and end up paying heavy price for it.

If you use Gmail you have some cover with Gmail Labs’ Verified Sender feature.

With Verified Sender enabled you’ll see a yellow key icon next to the email address of the sender if the sender is a verified sender. Currently Gmail supports PayPal and eBay emails as verified and obviously it will be expanded to include more senders and businesses.

Navigate to Gmail Labs and scroll down locate “Authentication icon for verified sender“. Click on the “Enable” option and hit the “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the page.

Once enabled, whenever you get an email from the verified senders (currently PayPal and eBay) you’ll see an yellow key icon in front of the sender’s email address.

You can also see the Verified Sender indicator icon when you open an email message.

Gmail’s Verified Sender feature, when used appropriately, can help detect the phishing emails. I hope you make use of it and don’t fall for the phishing scams.

Technorati Tags:
Gmail, How To, Gmail Verified Sender, Security

You can now use Gmail to send emails in Indian languages.

I you live in India or hail from India and are more comfortable in reading/sending emails in Indian languages you can now send emails in some of the most popular Indian languages, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam. If your native language is not English or if you have friends and contacts in India who are more comfortable with their local language than reading emails on English then there is good news for you.

Gmail now supports Indian languages when you send emails. You have to enable the feature to start using it.

Navigate to Gmail “Settings“.

On the “General” tab check the option “Enable Transliteration” and scroll down to “Save Changes“.

Once enabled you can now start using any of those Indian languages to compose your Gmail email.

Just start typing the foreign language in English. For example, the word “vanakkam” in Tamil means “welcome” in English but we want Gmail to send the word “vanakkam” in Tamil instead.

So when we type the word “vanakkam” and press the space bar Gmail will transliterate the English version of the Tamil word to Tamil (using Unicode, of course). Similarly you can send an email in any of those Indian languages Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam.

I hope you find Gmail Transliteration an useful feature particularly if you have to (prefer to) send emails in any of those supported Indian languages.

Technorati Tags:
Gmail, How To, Gmail Transliteration, Gmail in Indian Languages

You can now read your Gmail or any other POP3 emails within Windows Live Hotmail.

Google introduced a while back its own version of importing emails from other POP3 email providers. Now it’s Microsoft’s turn to allow you to read all your Gmail or Yahoo Mail (Plus) or any other POP3 emails without leaving Windows Live Hotmail.

The steps are pretty straight-foward,

Add an email account option on Windows Live Hotmail

Login to your Windows Live Hotmail account and watch for a link on the left navigation bar that says “Add an e-mail account”. Click on that link to add a POP3 email to Windows Live Hotmail.

Add an email account page

Key-in the email address and the password for the account that you want to add to Windows Live Hotmail.

Advanced Options to give you better control

If you think you’d need fine control over the email account you are adding, click on the “Advanced Options” link and key-in the POP3 user name, Incoming mail server, Port number and SSL usage indication along with the email address and password.

Gmail on Windows Live Hotmail

Once finished you should be able to see a new link got added to the Windows Live Hotmail sidebar. Use that link to access email from that external email account.

Keep in mind that, adding an email account to Windows Live Hotmail requires that the email account that you are trying add supports POP3 access.

Not all email providers support POP3 access, for instance, the free Yahoo Mail version doesn’t support POP3 access and so if you try to add Yahoo Mail to Windows Live Hotmail you’d get an error like above. You’d need Yahoo Mail Plus! to gain access to POP3 support.

Make sure your external email account provider supports POP3 access and you’ll find external emails on Windows Live Hotmail really handy if you are avid user of Windows Live Hotmail.

Technorati Tags:
How To, Windows Live, Windows Live Hotmail

Code Snippet 2.0 helps you easily format source code with the correct style in WordPress.

If you use Windows Live Writer then this might not interest you much as WLW has a decent support for source code syntax highlighting. But if you use Mac and use one of those blogging clients then I’m sure you’d be struggling to get the source code formatted and highlighted properly. Since WordPress doesn’t support any source code formatting by default you need extra plugins to format the source code and make it syntax highlighted.

Out of the many plugins Code Snippet 2.0 stands out in its simplicity and the ease to get the code formatted appropriately. Code Snippet 2.0 uses GeSHi syntax highlighter engine which is a very flexible and easily extendable highlighter engine.

Also, Code Snippet 2.0 supports quite a spectrum of programming languages and so for the most part you should be covered if you use any of the languages below,

actionscript
ada
apache
applescript
asm
asp
bash
caddcl
cadlisp
c_mac
c
cpp
csharp
css-gen
css
delphi
diff
div
dos
d
eiffel
freebasic
gml
html4strict
ini
inno
java
javascript
lisp
lua
matlab
mpasm
nsis
objc
oobas
oracle8
pascal
perl
php-brief
php
python
qbasic
sdlbasic
smarty
sql
vbnet
vb
vhdl
visualfoxpro
xml

Usage is pretty simple,

Download the Code Snippet 2.0 plugin.

Extract the TAR file and copy the folder “codesnippet” to your local wp-content/plugins folder.

Upload the “codesnippet” folder to your hosts wp-content/plugins folder.

Enable the Code Snippet plugin on your WordPress Plugins page.

If you’d like to have the line numbers listed on the source code then, go into your WordPress “Settings” and then to “Code Highlighting” and click on the “Show line numbers” checkbox. You can also adjust the styling if you are familiar with tweaking CSS elements.

I personally find Code Snippet 2.0 very easy to use and it does the job pretty decent. It doesn’t have too many options and flexibility but if you are looking for a simple plugin that can get the job done then Code Snippet 2.0 would be worth checking out.

Technorati Tags:
How To, WordPress, WordPress Plugins

FutureTweets.com helps you schedule your Twitter tweets to deliver in the future automatically.

Will you be away for a while and wouldn’t have any possibility to tweet while you are away? If you fear that the Twitter world would come to an end without you tweeting then you can sleep better tonight.

FutureTweets.com is a very simple service that helps you schedule your Twitter tweets to get delivered in the future.

Sign-up for a free account at FutureTweets.com and validate your Twitter account.

Once validated you can schedule your tweets with their simple interface. All it asks for is your Twitter content, date and time your tweet has to be published, whether the tweet has to recur.

Once done, FutureTweets.com will list the list of tweets that are scheduled by you. And it will deliver the tweets right on time to keep the Twitter world safe.

Personally I feel FutureTweets.com is a nice extension of Twitter and should really be built into the many Twitter clients out there. Until then I’ll continue to use FutureTweets.com to keep my tweet stream going while I’m busy with other stuffs.

Do you find Future Tweets useful? Are you using any other similar services that you feel have more feature-set?

Technorati Tags:
How To, Web, Twitter, FutureTweets.com

Gmail allows you to reply by chat instead of by email.

The cool thing about Gmail, comparatively, is that it keeps introducing new features that are at times really handy. “Reply by Chat” is another neat feature that you’ll find it handy if you use Gmail’s web based interface.

The best part is, you don’t have to do anything. Just watch for a link towards the bottom of the email that says “Reply by chat…“. You’ll only see the link if the person who’ve sent you the email is online at that time.

When clicked Gmail will open up a regular chat window but will appropriately place the email subject on the chat window to give it some perspective.

Personally I find it useful to have a direct conversation rather than to email back and forth. And “Reply by chat” certainly makes it more useful. What are your thoughts?

Technorati Tags:
Google, Gmail, Google Chat

Quince, from Infragistics helps you explore some of the best user interface patterns.

If you are into Web development or into desktop applications development I’m sure you must have been craving for a library of samples for your user interface (to get influence, may be). Of course, there are plenty of websites that we tend to mock but to get an understanding of the user interface patterns there are not many obvious choices.

Quince from Infragistics fills that gap a little bit by exposing some of the most common user interface patterns in use.

At its home page Quince allows you to explore the different UI patterns by “User Tasks”, “Tag Relations”, “Wireframe” or you can explore “All Patterns”.

When you explore All Patterns, it neatly arranges the patterns by names such as Action Links, Breadcrumbs, Button Groups etc. There are a whole sleuth of patterns that you can explore on.

It also lists a wide range of filters to help you narrow down to the pattern that you are interested.

Once you click on a pattern to explore Quince brings up the details page with some image thumbnails so you can visually see it in action along with some descriptive text to help you understand the pattern.

Overall, it seems to a decent solution to find out about the various user interface patterns that’s in use in the everyday web/desktop. If you find any different usage of Quince please let us know in comments.

Visit Quince.

Technorati Tags:
User Interface, UI, How To, Patterns, Quince

Veesual allows you to search the web visually.

Google is the king of web search and Bing stole of a slice of it lately with some excellent results and presentation. If you’re bored with the text based search then Veesual gives you a fresh juice to it by previewing the search results with images.

Just visit Veesual.com and then type-in your search query.

Veesual will display the search results with page thumbnails. The positive thing about Veesual is that they’ve arrived at the correct thumbnail size. The thumbnails are very viewable at the search results page itself. The search is based on Google’s search and so the results are as credible as Google’s.

Veesual might be a different perspective to the boring text based search. Keep in mind that it’s in beta and so the web previews might not be perfect at times.

Technorati Tags:
Google, Seach Engine, Web

TweetTabs is a simple web based service that keeps an eye on Twitter trends.

There are so many desktop applications available for you to leave it on your 3rd monitor (if you have one) and keep watching on what’s happening on the Twitter world. What if you don’t have the luxury to install a client desktop application wherever you see fit?

Well TweetTabs has an answer for you. TweetTabs is a browser based web application that could be imagined like a giant wall of Twitter updates.

Start by typing-in the keyword that you want to keep track of on Twitter and hit the Enter key. TweetTabs will span a new tab with the search keyword as the tab title and will keep scrolling the updates as and when it happens.

As you can see above, TweetTabs lays its tabs horizontally and so if you are going to keep track of multiple keywords then expect to scroll horizontally a little bit. I know, it’s not one of the best user experience to scroll horizontally but that seems to be trend with Twitter Trackers these days.

Start tracking your interests on Twitter with TweetTabs.

Technorati Tags:
How To, Twitter, Twitter Trends, Web, TweetTabs

Use this simple technique to automatically post your blog posts to Facebook without any tweaks.

Obviously you wanted to spread the word out as much as possible when you post to your blog. There are so many channels to get traffic to your blog and one of the channel that’s hard to ignore is your Facebook profile.

If you have quite a lot of friends on Facebook just posting your blog posts to Facebook would help spread the word out. Doing it manually is not efficient and would be time consuming. No worries, Facebook has a built-in mechanism to import your blog posts without you doing any tweaks and plugins etc.

Login to your Facebook account and go to the “Profile” tab. Click on the “Settings” button and Facebook will come up with the sites that it can import automatically. Currently, Flickr, Digg, Picasa, Delicious, Yelp, Google Reader, YouTube, Last.fm, Pandora, Photobucket, Hulu, Kiva and Blog/RSS are supported. I’m sure they’ll expand on this list to accommodate more services.

Click on the service that you want Facebook to import and Facebook will ask you to enter the URL for the service and hit the “Import” button and Facebook will take care of the rest. For Blog/RSS service you should key-in the URL of your RSS Feed.

From now on, whenever there is an update on the corresponding service Facebook will import the update and will add it up to your Facebook Wall. Isn’t that pretty cool? Let us know if you have some other ways of doing it in much simpler way.

Technorati Tags:
How To, Web, Facebook

iFixit.com – Know what is inside your MacBook, iPod and iPhone, well explained with pictures.

One of the few disadvantages of Apple products is that it’s tough to upgrade by yourself. If you can dole out those $$$ to Apple Store then it’s a whole different story, but most of us can’t afford to do it for simple upgrades and fixes.

Obviously we don’t want to take the risk of opening up the product without knowing where and how those parts are organized. Honestly, I wanted to upgrade memory on my MacBook lately but since I wasn’t sure where and how to locate the memory compartment I was slacking on it for a while now.

Well, it looks like the wait might be over. iFixit.com is a simple website for Mac and iPod parts and upgrades.

They sell parts for your MacBooks and iPods and that’s their survival I guess, but they have an excellent Teardown section which is like an excellent guide to looking into those Apple products without taking the risk of damaging it by exploring it yourself.

The quality of the teardowns are just great. Each step is explained with multiple pictures and an explanation. The pictures are as clear as it is supposed to be and each and every step is well documented to boost your confidence that you can do this.

iFixit.com has become THE SITE that I go for if I run into any hardware issues with my MacBooks, iPods or iPhones if I’m out of warranty and don’t want to dole out those $$$ to Apple Care. I hope you like it too and I hope you find it handy when in need (of course, I wish that need never comes).

Technorati Tags:
How To, Mac, Web, iFixit.com, Apple

SimilarSites.com helps you find similar websites.

With the millions of websites out there we normally run into a gloomy space of not knowing what are the websites that are similar to a website we are looking at. It would be nice to have a list of websites that are similar in content.

SimilarSites.com can help you find websites that has similar content. Navigate to SimilarSites.com and key-in the website that you would like to find similar sites for, a good example would be www.DemoGeek.com.

When you hit the button to find similar sites it will take you to a page where it displays websites that are similar in content to the source site. Even though the search results seems to be not that much interesting (when you scroll down you might find some useful websites) it has the potential if done right.

If you don’t prefer the website to find similar websites then you can use their Firefox or Internet Explorer add-ons so that you achieve the same within your browser itself.

Visit SimilarSites.com

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Web

“What The Trend?” is a simple service that tells you what’s the latest trend on Twitter.

Twitter has become a phenom. From individuals to professionals to companies to anything you just name it wants a presence in Twitter. At times Twitter has broken the news even way before the main stream media breaks it. It is such an useful tool if you use it correct.

With so many things that happen at Twitter it would be nice to know what the hot topics are at Twitter and why is it hot. In sync with Twitter culture there is a web service, What The Trend?, that tracks Twitter for the hot trends and brings to you a nice list of the latest trends. The cool thing about “What The Trend?” is that it gives you a reason of why that topic is trending.

It even tells you when the trend was first spotted and when was it last spotted.

When you click on a trend it gives you further details about the Twitter trend by displaying the latest Tweets, News and Photos about the trend. As you must have realized some of the trends can’t be put in picture and in that case there won’t be pictures but when there can be “What The Trend?” nicely displays a pictures collection about the trend.

I find it nice to keep an eye on “What The Trend?” to see what’s trending on Twitter. I hope you find the same as well.

Visit What The Trend?

Follow “What The Trend?” on Twitter at @WhatTheTrend

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How To, Web, Twitter, What The Trend, Twitter Trends