iPhone/iPod touch only: Amazon released a new mobile application for the iPhone and iPod touch today, ensuring that you can now get your online shopping fix no matter where you are. Not only does the Amazon app provide an excellent interface to search, buy, or add items to your wishlists, but if you’re an iPhone user, the application’s Amazon Remembers feature identifies any product you take a picture of—sort of like previously mentioned SnapTell. When you snap a pic, the app uploads the picture to Amazon, which looks for a match among its products. If it finds one (it can take anywhere between a couple minutes and 24 hours), it’ll send you an email and update the Amazon Remembers tab. So far it’s worked like a charm with all of the products I tested. I expected that my iPhone book might throw it for a loop, considering it has a picture of an iPhone on it, but even it was correctly identified within a few minutes.
YouTube is full of videos that don’t require singled-minded attention, but trying to keep a YouTube page visible in the background for passive watching isn’t easy. Digital Inspiration’s Amit Agarwal suggests two methods, though, that work great for browsing other sites or doing actual, you know, work, while keeping a video cornered and always on top. The first requires re-working a video link to its full-screen version and bookmarking it to load in Firefox’s sidebar—something we’ve covered before with other apps. The other method creates a mini-browser window that always stays on top using an AutoHotKey-coded app. Hit the link below for details on each idea, which should make burning through your favourite webisodes easier while still plucking away on your busy work. How to Watch YouTube Videos While Working on other Tasks [Digital Inspiration]
Windows only: Portable application Toucan backs up and syncs your data between two locations (like your hard drive and your USB drive). Weighing in at just over 4.10MB installed, Toucan offers several advanced backup and syncing settings, like incremental backup with compression (supporting 7-Zip format), portable drive variables, scripts and advanced rulesets. Similar to SyncBackSE but smaller and portable, Toucan is a nice option for making sure you’ve got everything on your thumb drive. Toucan is a free download for Windows only.
Toucan [PortableApps.com]Web site Windows 7 Centre reports that Microsoft’s forthcoming update to Vista, Windows 7, will release its first official beta on January 13, 2009—exciting news for anybody dying to test drive Windows 7′s awesome new features. On the other hand, if you’re not eager to upgrade, you can still enjoy some of Windows 7′s best features right now.
The All About Microsoft blog posts a seriously complete list of what’s going to be included in Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista, expected to be out in April 2009. Major items include the Vista Feature Pack for Wireless for easier/better connections, built-in Blu-Ray writing, and reduced resources required for sidebar gadgets. Nothing majorly huge, so it’s worth looking at Windows 7 features you can get in Vista.
Windows Live, intended to be a landing page for social activity and Microsoft’s cloud-connected apps, is rolling out a host of redesigns and upgrades, but none so exciting (to our eyes, anyways) as the anticipated jump of the SkyDrive online storage service to 25GB capacity. As the Digital Inspiration blog points out, SkyDrive seems to be a central part of the Redmond giant’s web ambitions, so it’s not likely to go away or shrink. Aside from the raw upload/download capabilities, having a SkyDrive account gives you a few other cool abilities, which we’ll detail below.
