Add email, calendar updates, RSS feeds, and more to your “Slide to unlock” home screen with IntelliScreen, a free application for jailbroken iPhones and iPod touches. Similar to the widgets of Windows Mobile’s “Today” screen, the app lets you order and customise what info, and how much of it, you see on your wake-up screen, including new SMS messages and local weather conditions. Better still, you can bring up that email message or check out that feed item in Safari by swiping over the widget and pressing the button that pops up. The app’s makers warn that IntelliScreen has run into restoration-required conflicts with a few other third-party apps, so back up anything you can’t afford to wipe clean. Intrigued enough to try unlocking your iPhone/touch? Check out our guide to unlocking with ZiPhone. IntelliScreen [via Just Another iPhone Blog]
In the age of social bookmarking and blogs, old fashioned browser bookmarks (or “Favourites,” as Internet Explorer refers to them) are teetering on the edge of obsolete. When you can save a bookmark at, say, del.icio.us, tag it, and have it accessible from any computer, storing a link in your browser seems almost archaic. Adam uses Gmail to save and search his bookmarks; I use Firefox’s toolbar for bookmarklets and I’m partial to Firefox keyword bookmarks that turn the address bar into a command line. What about you? Is your bookmarks manager stuffed full of links, or has bookmarking URLs become a thing of the past? Fess up your bookmarking habits after the jump. Photo by WordRidden.
Windows only: Want to direct your non-torrent-savvy friends or relatives to a download they really need to check out? Free web utility Torrent2Exe takes torrent download links—the kind you’d normally pass to your favourite BitTorrent client—and creates tiny .exe programs that do all the download work for whoever double-clicks them. You can also grab a link to post on your own site (or Twitter stream) that lets others download the same self-running torrent grabber. Great for distributing your own files to a select group of downloaders, or helping Linux-curious friends grab the right disk images. Torrent2Exe’s downloaders are for Windows systems only. Torrent2Exe [via Download Squad]
Windows/Mac/Linux (Adobe AIR): Free, open source application ReadAir syncs your Google Reader feeds to the comfort of your desktop. ReadAir—whose three-pane interface looks and feels much more like a desktop newsreader than Reader—also retains a lot of Google Reader features, like starring items and adding and tagging feeds. The biggest missing feature in ReadAir is its lack of keyboard shortcuts; you won’t be j/k-ing your way through your unread items in ReadAir the same way you can on the web—at least not in this version. That said, the app’s to-do list includes offline mode and keyboard shortcuts, so if you’d prefer Reader had that desktop look and feel plus a killer web interface when you need it, ReadAir is a great option. ReadAir is free, all platforms, requires Adobe AIR. Thanks StevieB!
ReadAir [Google Code]Since most of you said you’ve stuck to Google Docs over Zoho Suite because you already have a Google account, Zoho Suite added the ability to log on with your existing Google or Yahoo account. You can even import your contacts from Google or Yahoo into Zoho.
Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): Brief, an in-browser RSS reader for Firefox, adds a clean Google Reader-type feed reading interface to your browser, and makes Firefox’s default “Live Bookmarks” system far more useful. The stand-out feature for GReader users is the starring system that lets you tag posts for later viewing, but I also like the “X” boxes put on each post—instead of marking a post “read” and scrolling past it, you can actually remove it from your view. It’s a lot like Sage, but with a more robust set of features and customisation. Brief is a free download and works wherever Firefox 2 and 3 beta do.
Brief [via gHacks]Linux only: Free IP-filtering application IPlist protects your BitTorrent downloads from third-party snoopers and blockers by controlling which IP addresses can and cannot connect to your system. The default blacklist installed with IPlist is a pretty good start to protecting your torrent privacy, and an “Update” button adds the latest known addresses with bad juju behind them, but the app also lets you add ranges, specific addresses, and other kinds of traffic to allow and block. Simply fire up IPlist before running your BitTorrent client, and the app will do its work. IPlist is a free download for Linux systems; hit the link below for prerequisites and installation help with Debian/Ubuntu and Fedora systems. IPlist
The first alpha release Thunderbird 3 (for extremely early adopters) is now available, and it’s got tabs! T-bird 3 can open several messages in tabs rather than popping new windows—great news for your clean desktop.
Google Documents rolls out two features that make collaboration easy, even amongst friends and co-workers that don’t have Google accounts. Spreadsheets now have an “Anyone can edit this document without logging in” option in their share tab, turning your document into a wiki that tracks changes in real time and can email you a summary. Also, those who dig the custom input forms can now embed them on any web page, and users who don’t like your choices can submit their own answers with a new option. Great tools for those who want to collect opinions and data, but don’t want to spend a lot of time setting up the web pages to do so.
Embed Your Forms [via Google Operating System]
