Yahoo!’s local branch Yahoo!7 has rolled out a bunch of new features for its email, including a “smarter” inbox that prioritises messages from existing contacts. There’s also the promise of 1GB of storage (for sharing files — email storage is counted separately) and automatic updates from your friends, though that isn’t set to appear until 2009. Those options have also been made available to US customers; apparently Australia is the first non-US market to get the features. 1GB might not seem like much compared to Gmail’s ever-growing inbox or Hotmail’s tie-in to 25GB of SkyDrive, but as several of my colleagues have pointed out recently, Yahoo! can be a useful friendly alternative for people who don’t like Gmail’s threaded conversation approach. Yahoo! had de-activated my email account so I haven’t checked out the new features in depth: if you want to praise them to the skies or shoot them down in flames, let’s hear it all in the comments. Yahoo!7
Getting Things Done enthusiast and Lifehacker reader Patrick Ng was inspired by Merlin Mann’s hipster PDA but wanted to create a more comprehensive and personalised GTD tool. The result: mind.Depositor. The small and attractive mind.Depositor is a GTD machine, complete with custom 4×6 index card templates with boxes for Next Actions, Projects, Wait for, and Someday/maybe tasks and a ton of additional custom tweaks. Be sure to check the bottom of the post for the full list of materials or head to the mind.Depositor Flickr set to get a closer look at the finished product.
mind.Depositor by ScriptionGoogle Chrome may have exited beta, but it doesn’t seem to have entered the hearts of too many Australians yet. Fran Foo at AustralianIT reports that Nielsen Online figures show that only 1% of visitors to major news sites are using Chrome. Internet Explorer remains the champ, with 70% of the market. Unsurprisingly, the figures are rather different here at Lifehacker: 52% of our readers use Firefox, with just under 30% on IE, just under 9% on Safari, and 5% on Chrome. Chrome fails to shine [AustralianIT]
Windows only: Like the look of OS X Leopard’s Stacks feature—which provides attractive, quick shortcuts to any folder on your desktop—but you’re on a Windows PC? Free application StandaloneStack brings Leopard-like stacks to your quick launch toolbar.
Author David Allen’s follow-up to his best-selling productivity bible Getting Things Done is called Making It All Work. Due out this month, it’s all about how to become a better self-manager.
According to the MozillaLinks weblog, the latest development release of Firefox 3.1 now includes support for system sounds in Windows for menu pop-up and selections. If you want more control and more sounds, check out previously mentioned experimental extension Noise.
Lavasoft—makers of the popular spyware/adware detection and removal tool Ad-Aware—have just released a new antivirus app called Helix. You can try it for 30 days free, costs $US24 for a year. If you’re not satisfied with the five best antivirus apps already available and you’re a fan of Ad-Aware, Helix could be worth a test-run. We haven’t put it through the gamut, so check CNET’s positive review for more details.
Time to hit Software Update on your Mac: the OS X 10.5.6 update is now available, and promises improved reliability and stability throughout. Listed as a 190MB download (on my MacBook Pro at least), here’s the full rundown of what you get in 10.5.6.
Popular user-edited online encyclopedia Wikipedia has released a mobile-friendly version of the web site at mobile.wikipedia.org. The site offers a trimmed down version of Wikipedia proper, supports 14 languages, and even has a mysterious Spoken Wikipedia setting that—though currently not enabled, may presumably one day read Wikipedia articles to you.
Like Firefox, the open source media player Songbird is a pretty neat alternative to a big-name competitor on its own, but the ability to extend it through add-ons is what really makes it boss.
We considered the release candidate of the potential “iTunes killer”—Songbird a sloppy mess, then backed up a bit when it’s 1.0 release was official. Now we’re geeked to show you a few add-ons that make Songbird a great place to organize your MP3s, iTunes purchases, iPods and whatever else you listen to.
