From The Tips Box: iOS Cover Flow, Facebook Events, Unread Mail

Lifehacker readers offer their best tips for getting rid of cover flow on iOS, searching for old Facebook events, and jumping right to your unread email.

Every day we receive boatloads of great reader tips. From the Tips Box is where we round up some of our favourites. Got a tip of your own to share? Add it in the comments or send it using the contact tab on the right.

Ditch Cover Flow with a Jailbreak Tweak in iOS

Tom shares a handy tweak for iOS users that don’t like cover flow:

If you dislike the default music app’s coverflow view, which of course it moves into when your device is in landscape orientation, you may want to check out this new jailbreak tweak by Ryan Petrich. It’s titled ‘NoCoverFlow’ and it does just that, takes away the coverflow view for the music application, and instead implements horizontal viewing of the music application as simple as any other application.

Check out the video above to see it in action. If you want to add it, you’ll need to first add the http://rpetri.ch/repo repository to your package sources in Cydia, then NoCoverFlow should pop up. Check out Tom’s post at Jailbreak Nation for more info.

Find Past Events on Facebook with the Activity Log

Googeling navigates his way through Facebook’s new, less-than-intuitive interface:

My brother was searching for past events he was invited to on Facebook and it was a little frustrating. We thought we had to scroll through the months one by one until we found a Timeline feature that was slightly hidden. On your profile page:

Activity Log > Activity Log dropdown menu > Events > Past Events

Voilà! All the past events you’ve been invited to before! Might be obvious to some users but it can be hard to find.

Open Outlook Directly to Unread Mail

MsCassLopez focuses on the most important thing in her inbox:

You can have Outlook web mail open at the unread mail page by selecting View: Unread and bookmarking that page or setting it as your home page.

If you’re a Gmail user, you can do something similar just by clicking the arrow next to “Inbox” in the sidebar, and setting it to “Unread First”.

Automatically Filter Email Receipts for Archival Purposes

Jvanderh shares a useful Gmail filter:

I was able to set up a Gmail filter so that emails from Amazon are automatically marked as read. I like having them to refer to, but not being distracted by them when I open my inbox.

This isn’t a particularly new or complicated filter, but it is just a good idea if you don’t like all those order receipts. You could even set them to automatically archive. My one issue is that I’d want to tailor it to only filter the word “receipt”, so that shipping notifications would still come through (since I like to know when my stuff has shipped).