Friday, February 6, 2009

EmailThis Adds Instant Email Bookmarklet To Your Toolbar

11:30PM Jason Fitzpatrick | EmailThis is a simple bookmarklet that opens a window to email anybody a link to the page you’re looking at, with no email access or login required. Clicking on the EmailThis bookmarklet summons up a basic email dialogue box, familiar to anyone who’s clicked an “Email this” link on a newspaper or magazine site. In fact, the bookmarklet comes from the folks at Clickability, an emailing service that powers many of the web’s mail-this-page links. Fill in your email, the recipient’s email, and a not, and your link and notes are sent out. The no-login feature is convenient when you just want to zip a link out to someone without having to log into your webmail or fire up Outlook. Although it isn’t necessary, you can get an account with Clickability that allows you to save frequent contacts and basic settings between sessions. If you’re a Gmail user—and would like to route all your emailed snippets through your regular mail server instead of a third party—make sure to check out our very own Supercharged Gmail Bookmarklet to gain the same functionality of EmailThis, plus some Google-fied extras. EmailThis is a free tool and should work with any browser that supports JavaScript. EmailThis [via Freeware Genius] More »

Google Puts Free Books On iPhones, Androids

11:00PM Kevin Purdy | Google has opened up its entire archive of 1.5 million books to mobile iPhone and Android browsers, and converted all their page scans to text for much easier reading. The works, almost all in the public domain realm, can be accessed by heading to books.google.com/m in an Android or iPhone/iPod touch browser. Those outside the U.S. get access to just over half a million books, for various copyright reasons. Every page went through Google’s specialised Optical Character Recognition (OCR) scan, the same type of process your scanner uses to create Word documents. If you discover a bit of gobbledy-gook in extracted text, tap the text and the original page image will load for source checking. 1.5 million books in your pocket [Inside Google Book Search] More »

Colour Study Suggests Red Aids Recall, Blue Boosts Creativity

10:30PM Kevin Purdy | If you’re in the market for a new desktop look or office paint, consider red or blue—they might just give a background boost to your creativity or attention to detail. A New York Times piece looks at the most recent study on “colour effects,” which try to determine whether performance is helped, hurt, or unaffected by colours—primarily red and blue, as those two shades have shown up again and again in previous studies. Take it with a grain of salt, but University of British Columbia researchers found that, in cognitive tests of 600 people: Red groups did better on tests of recall and attention to detail, like remembering words or checking spelling and punctuation. Blue groups did better on tests requiring imagination, like inventing creative uses for a brick or creating toys from shapes. The article goes on to list a number of studies in which blue and red have made people appear more attractive, dominant, work more creatively, and so on. Reinvent Wheel? Blue Room. Defusing a Bomb? Red Room. [New York Times] More »

Google Redesigned Updates, Adds GReader Redesigned

9:30PM Kevin Purdy | The crafty skinners at Globex Designs have officially released Google Redesigned 0.2, a Firefox extension that gives a whole-cloth new look to Gmail, Google Calendar, and, new to this release, Google Reader. More »

Five Things To Do This Weekend

5:48PM Angus Kidman | There’s more to life than escaping the weather! Get in tip-top tech shape with these tips from the last week on Lifehacker: Play around with the Ubiquity Firefox interface Try and sort out your finances with ANZ Money Manager Upgrade to the final version of Skype 4.0 Find some new iTunes music with I Like B-Sides Customise your AutoPlay dialog in Vista More »

Don’t Try Booking Jetstar This Weekend

12:55PM Angus Kidman | Just a brief note if you’re planning some flight booking this weekend: Jetstar is doing a system-wide upgrade which means that its site will be out of commission from 5pm on Friday February 6 until the morning of Monday February 8. Jetstar is aiming for a 4am restart, but experience suggests there might be some last-minute glitches. The upgrade is meant to improve capacity, which hopefully will mean better odds of getting a cheap seat during the budget airline’s regular Friday sales. More »

So You Think You Can Charge?

12:00PM Angus Kidman | Apparently, the idea of offering content on mobile phones for free hasn’t entirely managed to stick at Network Ten. While the channel is offering free content from The Biggest Loser for 3 subscribers, it hasn’t got such a good offer for So You Think You Can Dance Australia, which is backed by Optus. While recaps from each show are available to Optus mobile subscribers, the big push is on extra content (including exit interviews, dance tips and a pre-performance shows), for which you have to pay either 75 cents per clip or $12.99 for a “season pass”. Maybe the difference is the lack of obvious corporate sponsors for a dance show; maybe it’s just a money grab. But at Lifehacker we’ve always favoured free content over stuff you get charged for. More »

Gmail Labs Adds Multiple Inboxes

11:18AM Adam Pash | Gmail Labs adds a new Multiple Inboxes feature today that allows you to keep an eye on multiple buckets at once while you’re viewing your inbox. Just head to the Labs tab in your Gmail account to enable the new feature. Once enabled, you’ll get a new Multiple inboxes tab in your Gmail settings. From there, you can choose up to five different panes to display to the right of your Gmail inbox, above your inbox, or below it. For label and filter junkies, the Multiple Inboxes feature is a must. When setting up your multiple inboxes, you can use any of Gmail’s supported search operators to create any sort of search you want. For example, good choices for your multiple inboxes might include searches like: is:starred is:unread has:attachment Let’s hear which labels or search operators you’re keeping an eye on in the comments. New in Labs: Multiple Inboxes [Official Gmail Blog] More »