faster.better.smarter

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