Apple rolled out iOS 5 to owners of iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices today. Among its most significant of its 200 new features is iCloud, which lets users wirelessly sync apps, music, contacts, calendars, photos and more across multiple Apple devices.
If you own more than one Apple device (or plan on it) and want to set up iCloud, here's how to get started.
This afternoon we wrote a short post about AJ Batac's handy little bookmarklet for posting any link you're visiting to Google Plus. People loved it - it's so simple! Simple enough that I thought to myself, "What about Topsy's new real-time search of Google Plus - couldn't we wiggle that first bookmarklet around a little and get another good one?" And so we did.
Drag this link ----> Plus Hunt up to your browser toolbar and click it whenever you're on a web page. You'll be able to see what people said on Google Plus about that page, thanks to Topsy. (And thanks to RWW's Resident Hacker Tyler Gillies, who helped me fix the javascript for that when I got stuck.)
Pinoy-Canadian web developer AJ Batac put together a drop dead simple javascript bookmarklet today that makes it easy to share any webpage you're visiting in Google Plus, along with a comment. The way it works is that your account publicly +1's the page, then gives you the option to share it with whatever Circles you choose.
Batac calls it "not beautiful, but simple - and it should work." Indeed it does, it works very well. It's evidence too that powerful, fun and useful things can be done in simple ways. Thanks for making this AJ!
After nine months of testing, a nifty tool called ifttt opened to the public last week. Don't worry; I'll save you the trouble. They tell me it's pronounced "Ift." Like "gift" with no G. Ifttt stands for "If this then that." It's a tool designed to "put the internet to work for you" by creating simple tasks using the Web's great services using the format "if this then that." It requires a simple yet fundamental kind of conditional thinking that can enable anyone to be programmer of sorts: "If I post a photo to Flickr, save it to my Dropbox." You can make that happen with ifttt.
Well, great! The possibilities are endless! I want to automate everything! Where to begin? How about with some tasks that are important, not merely nifty? For instance, does posting your whole life into the cloudy ether ever make you worry about losing your data? Read on to learn how ifttt can back that stuff up for you automatically from behind the scenes.
What is required to take your family on a cross-country move these days? With four kids, four adults and three vehicles, it isn't easy. You might need almost a full-time IT department to keep everything running, or at least a full-time mediator to broker who is going to get which electronic device. It is part Carmen Sandiego, part Matt Lauer, and all Robyn Tipps and family. Tippins is our community manager and she and her family are relocating from left to right coast this week.
With the proliferation of Internet-connected devices, it's getting easier to create or consume media on devices like smartphones, tablets and set-top boxes. However this multi-device world is still evolving and it's often not obvious which apps to use or even how to set them up. So in a series starting today, we're going to explore how to get off the computer and enjoy the Web.
I've always wanted to have an Instapaper-like service for videos, an application which would allow me to save videos so that I can watch them later. Preferably when I'm relaxing on the sofa at the end of a long work day. Because who has time to watch videos during the day? Indeed, maybe your work place forbids that. Earlier this month Internet TV service Boxee launched an iPad app, along with a bookmarklet to put your daily video finds in a queue to watch later. It takes a bit of setting up to get both working properly, but it's worth it. Here's what to do.
Tired of waiting for Google - you know, the search engine company? - to add a functional search feature to its new social network Google Plus? Yep, so were we. So we did a little Googling, and found a way to add it ourselves. No, it's not a browser extension. (There is one of those, of course, but it's filled with ads.)
Instead, this method (below) uses a feature in Google Chrome which lets you add custom search engines to your browser. In just a minute, we added both Google Plus Profile search and Google Plus Posts search to Chrome.
JailbreakMe.com, the easy-to-use browser-based jailbreaking tool for Apple mobile devices has just gone live with version 3.0. What this means is anyone can now jailbreak their iOS device running the 4.3 software (or below, in some cases), including the iPad 2. There is no software to download on your computer; nor does your phone, iPod Touch or iPad have to be physically connected to the computer for this to work. Instead, all the jailbreaking is done via the JailbreakMe.com website, thanks to a PDF-based exploit.
Waiting for a Google Plus invite? Google is rolling out the service in waves and you can expect it to become a ubiquitous social option in the coming months. We have been playing with the service since getting invites yesterday and there are a lot of things to like about Google's new social initiative.
Unlike Google's last big invite-only rollout of a social initiative - Google Wave - users will not be confounded on just what the heck you are supposed to with the service when signing up for the first time. From Friendster, Friendfeed, MySpace and Facebook, users are familiar with how a social platform is theoretically supposed to look. At its core level, Plus is not that much different. Yet, there is so much more. How do you get started with Google Plus? Let's break down the nuts and bolts.
Facebook may have recently reached the 750 million user mark, but not every single one of the social networking giant's members are necessarily in it for the long haul. Whether because of a concern about privacy, a need to tame their digital distractions or for some other reason, many users would prefer to leave the site and shut down their profile for good.
The trouble is, Facebook really, really doesn't want you to leave. Rather than providing users with an easily accessible "delete" button in their account settings, they instead offer the option to "deactivate" one's profile, which essentially makes it disappear until one log back in, at which point the profile is restored as though nothing ever happened.
