faster.better.smarter

Twitter is not exactly the most productive web app out there, but there are some good reasons to use. Sometimes you want to post more than what you are up to at the moment though, maybe that recent blog post that you found interesting. If you use Google reader to follow your RSS feeds then this handy little Greasemonkey script will help you do just that. Simply install the script and when you log in to Google Reader you will see a little Share on Twitter link. Click it and a window will pop up and ask for your twitter username and password. Once you get past that log in to your Twitter account and there at the top of your timeline will be the article that you posted.

Google Reader + Twitter

Happy Twittering!

Some of the posts in the near future will be old news. I hope you’ll forgive me but some cool things have popped up since I last posted. Anyway….

I was very excited when I woke up on one Wednesday morning about a month ago. The day I had been waiting for had finally arrived. Google had allowed calendar syncing directly with the Blackberry calendar. This development gets me one step closer to mot having to plug my Blackberry into my computer to synch my info. Fortunately the only remaining feature that I need is contact syncing and my contact data doesn’t change all that often.

Anyway, if you carry a blackberry and have been longing to sync your Google Calendar directly and over the air, head over to Google and download this great little app and start getting in sync. click on this link on your Blackberry browser: mobile.google.com and then select Google sync.

Hopefully contact sync won’t be far behind. Once I have over the air sync of contacts, I’ll have the perfect poor man’s Blackberry Enterprise Server. With Gmail’s super fast delivery to the Blackberry, it’s nearly the same level of service, seriously.

 Note: I just discovered that I never published this, so here you go.

One of my favorite web apps, Google Notebook, recently added a mobile version of its website. Google Notebook is great because it allows you to save web content and other text in an easily searchable personal website. There is a nice Firefox extension that allows to copy info directly into the site. The mobile version doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that the full version does, but it’s huge that you can now keep all of your notes (to-do lists and reference data) on your mobile phone.

To check it out go to http://www.google.com/notebook/m on your mobile device.

via Lifehacker

Google Blogoscoped points out some helpful features that Google is testing in Google Labs. I’m especially impressed by the keyboard shortcuts “experiment”.

Check it out here.

I’ve recently reinstalled a great little app to help me control iTunes, without actually switching to iTunes and thereby distracting me for the next 30 minutes. It’s called Bytecontroller.

Bytecontroller lives in your menu bar and has a very simple, three button interface. You have back, play/pause, and next, which is fine for simple tasks. But there are other features under the hood.

The General preferences are just about as general as you can get. You have a launch at startup option and a space-saving show only when iTunes is open.

The Hot Keys panel allows you to setup hotkeys that allow you control iTunes without moving your hands from the keyboard, including increasing the volume.

The appearance panel allows you to change what the controls look like in the menu bar. It also seems to allow you to add your own “themes” but it’s unclear where you would get these from. It’s a great little app and you can get for free here.

I really like T-mobile despite the fact that I work for one of its competitors. In fact, I recently decided that I would check to see if I could save money by using the employee rate plan that I am entitled to by my employer, but after I added my Blackberry data plan and a sizable text messaging package, it wasn’t worth the few cents I would save to cancel my contract. Well today I started thinking about a service I signed up for recently, but haven’t used much yet. GrandCentral (recently acquired by Google) is a service that gives you number that can then be forwarded to a number of different places (home, cell, work, etc.). I signed up for the beta awhile back and haven’t really played with it that much since, but today it occurred to me that since all of these numbers presumably come from the same “number” perhaps I could add it as one of “my five” and all of those calls would be included in myFaves. I haven’t tested it yet, but after looking around to see if anyone else had he same idea, it seems that this will work.

Let me know in the comments if this is working for you.

Since I set up iChat to work with my Google Talk account recently, I have been using iChat more. Today I ran across an app that was recommended to me some time ago, but that I never tried because, frankly, I never used iChat. Well today I downloaded Chax, a plugin for iChat, that allows a number of new features. First on my list is tabbed chat window, which is great because you don’t end up with a screen full of chat windows. Growl integration is alo a nice feature. It’s definitely worth installing and best of all its free! Oh, but unfortunately, its not yet compatible with Leopard.

Chax

I like to use the integrated software in Mac whenever I can, but I resisted using Mail to take care of my gmail account for quite awhile. I like Mailplane, which offers great integration with OS X, but there a few things about t that i don’t likeabout it.

When Google announce that they were adding IMAP support for Gmail and it became available for my accounts, I immediately set up Mail as my email app. My exerience so far has been great but some things have been a little…wierd. Not everything seemed to be in sync and that is really the whole point of IMAP.

LAst night I started searching for the answer to the problems I was having. I found an article that solves the problems I was having, by using Mail’s Sent, Drafts, Trash, and Junk folders to corespond with Gmail’s default folders. This seems to have cleared up the out of sync issues that I was having.

5thirtyone.com

I really like the idea of iChat for video conferencing, but I don’t use .Mac and I don’t really know anyone that still uses AIM. But I do know a hand full of Mac users that have MacBooks with iChat that use Google Talk, so a few days ago I started loking for a way to hack Google Talk into iChat. Well if I had just paid attention when I was first setting iChat up I would have noticed that it has Jabber support built in. Once I noticed that, it was a just a quick search for how to set up Google Talk through Jabber in iChat, which yielded a great how-to in Googles Help section.

Setup is a breeze. Within about 5 minutes I had set up my computer and my spouse’s computer with our Google accounts and we were able to use iChat with our Google accounts.

I heard a rumor somewhere recently that Google is going to allow users of MSN, AIM, and Yahoo to chat through Google Talk (which can already be down with a bit of work on your part) and that will make iChat the best chat client around.

Happy Chatting

I hate screensavers. I usually just have the screen turn itself of if I haven’t done anything in the last few minutes. But I ran across one the other day that actually has a purpose. It turns your computer screen into a large clock. And not just any clock, the old school flip style alarm clock.

Download it here for Windows or Mac

I have been neglecting my Facebook account lately. That is, until yesterday when facebook and RIM released a Facebook app for the blackberry. You can download it here. I really like it so far, though it could integrate a little more with blackberry’s applications. Enjoy!

I would have sworn that I had installed this and tried it out in the past, but maybe I’m thinking of something else. At any rate, Windows Live Search is available now and I think it’s a nice free product for the blackberry. Once you tell the app what city you are in, it will give you directions, maps, movie times and other information. It’s not quite as good as Google maps or Beyond 411, but it’s pretty good. Try it by visiting wls.live.com on your blackberry.

Windows Live Search via Blackberry Cool

I recently ran across Beamberry, which allows you to save various types of attachments that you receive via email, for later viewing and/or printing via bluetooth. My printer does not have bluetooth, but this is shaping up to be a great app for the blackberry.

There is an OTA download available, just visit http://beamberry.com/download on your blackberry browser.

Play Hourly Newscasts is a great AppleScript that detects when there is a new version of four different podcasts from news networks and plays it in between your normal music listening. Obviously, this is Mac only as Windows doesn’t support AppleScript. Very good way of listening to music and keeping with the news at the same time.

Download it and others at Doug’s AppleScripts.

I have tried a lot of software on my blackberry over the years, but the first thing I install when I get a new blackberry is Berry 411. It’s a great peice of software that allows you to do multiple types of searches with opening the browser and going to Google or Yahoo. It also allows you to do a search for a type of business and when you find it, you can call or add the contact info directly to your address book.

One of my favorite features is the option to add 9 custom plugins for search types, including the ability to create your own. I use the standard Weather, Shopping and IMDB plugins that I found on the site, but I created my own netflix mobile plugin that allows me to search directly from the app and then it opens the results in the blackberry browser. Then I can simply add the dvd to my queue. It’s great for searching while on the go.