I recently wrote a review of ShoeBox for iPhone, and I have to say it is a cool application for anyone who has a lot of old pictures that they want to bring to the digital age. Basically, ShoeBox allows you to use your iPhone’s camera to scan in your old photos, and bring them to the 21st century. Of course, once you scan in the pictures, you can share them via their app and on Facebook. Well, they have issued an update to their iPhone application, and it makes it even cooler than it already was.

What makes this update something special is that it is one of the first applications that allow users to plug things into the past on their Facebook Timeline. For example, if you had a photo of you as a baby from 1986, you could scan it into ShoeBox and post it, and it would show on your Timeline as occurring in 1986. Normally, the picture would show as the date you uploaded it, which breaks the Timeline feel and makes it a non accurate representation of your life.

In addition to going back in time, this update also allows you to tag photos from the application. They also elected to use Facebook’s Photos API, which forces users to manually add the date to pictures, but allows the photos to be posted in a bigger, more beautiful format.

This is an example of what makes Timeline cool. It shows that when done right, an app that works with Timeline can really enhance the users social experience, and not just say what movie you want to see or what song you just listened to. I hope other developers take a cue from ShoeBox and make a strong creative use of the Timeline.

iTunes Link

Source: Techcrunch

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There are an increasing number of people who love to use Tumblr as a blogging platform. As blogs go, Tumblr is flexible, stylish and easy to use. Many people use it simply as a light-hearted way to repost their favourite images, while others have taken to using Tumblr as more of a lifestream. Those people in the latter group may have noticed something annoying Tumblr did last year – they stopped letting you import RSS feeds to Tumblr.

In an attempt to ensure they could provide Tumblr’s core services to the massive number of users they have, Tumblr made a decision to cut RSS imports to new Tumblr blogs. Older blogs with RSS imports have mostly had the imports kept functional, but no new RSS imports can be added. That is, not without outside help – help in the form of TumblRSS.

Why On Earth Would I Import RSS Anyway?

Okay, so maybe you’re wondering why people would want to import RSS feeds to Tumblr in the first place. The lifestream example is the best one: some people just want a blog to share with friends and family which collects all the best things they do online into the one place.

For instance, collecting a few of their best photos from Flickr, book reviews from Goodreads, movie reviews from Flixter and blog posts from their WordPress blog. A Tumblr like this would be ideal to show relatives and friends who just want to see the equivalent of an online snapshot. But to do this, the user requires RSS feeds to be imported to Tumblr. They need TumblRSS.

Get Started With TumblRSS

Logging into TumblRSS is simple as you merely authenticate with your Tumblr account and allow TumblRSS to access your Tumblr blog. Don’t worry about it showing you just your primary Tumblr blog, since later you will be given the option to choose which blog to import RSS into.

When you first click on “Get Started” it will ask you to provide an email address so that you can be uniquely identified in the system. To avoid problems, ensure this matches the email address you use for Tumblr.

Importing An RSS Feed To Tumblr

The RSS import is straight forward to set up. All you need to do is choose which blog to import to, choose whether to import text or links and insert the RSS feed’s URL.

Limitations

• Any photos in the feed will be inserted as if part of a text post at this stage, however the developer hopes to add full support for photo feeds in the future.
• TumblRSS doesn’t yet support importing tags, but they hope to add this feature soon.
• RSS imports into Tumblr are limited to 100 posts per day. Currently the TumblRSS application is blocked for any user who reaches that limit, so it’s best to avoid hitting it.
• If you later change the Tumblr’s URL, the RSS import will be broken and you will need to set it up again. This is because TumblRSS sees the blog as an entirely different blog. There’s no unique identifier for Tumblr blogs other than their name.

Despite TumblRSS’s limitations, it still provides a useful service that Tumblr doesn’t currently provide. I look forward to the proposed improvements eagerly.

Do you import an RSS feed into Tumblr? Why? Do you think Tumblr should re-introduce the ability to import RSS or should it be left to developers like TumblRSS?

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Some people are just not quick witted. Coming up with things to talk about while with people can be a real chore for them. There is nothing worse than being in a social setting and drawing a complete blank on topics of conversation. This leads to awkward silence, and no one enjoys that moment of frantically trying to say something. When this happens, you can assume that whatever you come up with will probably be dumb, and will stand to make things even worse.

Thankfully, technology can help to rectify the situation. With these three iPhone conversation applications, you will be a conversation guru. They will come up with the topics for you. All you have to do is use your brain to keep the conversation flowing. If that does not work, you can just use the apps to find a new topic and start over from square one. If you still cannot make conversation, even with these apps, maybe you should just not communicate with others.

Hypotheticals

As the name implies, this application creates hypothetical situations for discussion. For example, would you rather kill your mom, or be killed by your mom? Another example is would you rather always feel like you have to pee, but really don’t have to, or never know when you have to go?

Obviously, these are extreme situations, but they make for some interesting conversation.

The free version of this application comes with two packs, the base pack and the WTF pack (the example about killing your mom is from the WTF pack). You can get a bonus pack by linking the application to your Facebook account. Linking the application also allows it to post hypothetical situations to your wall, which can make for some interesting comments from your friends.

To choose a set, simply click on it from the main screen. Once you are done with a situation, simply swipe your finger over it to move on to the next one.

If you see a situation you like, you can easily click the favorite button on the bottom right of the screen. These are accessible from the main screen of the application after all the different packs. There are numerous other packs available for purchase, if you want to expand your hypothetical fun.

What If?

This application is similar to Hypotheticals, but it is a little simpler. It simply asks you a question and you can hit random, next or previous in order to move on to a different question. An example of a question from What If? is: If you had to choose one of your friends as a bodyguard, who would you choose?

These types of questions make for some interesting conversation. That example of the friends as bodyguards could be funny if you were with those friends when using the app. A friend may think they are the toughest, but you might choose someone else.

While this app lacks some of the extra features of Hypotheticals, it still does the job of helping you come up with funny and interesting things to talk about, and that is what we are looking for.

Conversation Shaker

This application is a little more serious than the other two. Instead of being all about crazy situations, this app is about showing you some more normal topics of conversation. It is fun to talk about biting a cat or being bit by one, but in some situations that will not work.

This app organizes their topics into categories. The categories are generally based on where you would be having the conversation, such as on a date or at a dinner party. With the free version, each category has 10 topics, and there are 10 categories. A quick tabulation tells me that there are 100 conversation topics in the free version. If you are looking for more, you can pay $0.99 to upgrade to the premium version. This adds 900 more topics, spread across the various categories.

The app allows you to share any topic on Twitter, or via email. You can also store them in your favorites, so you can access them quickly if you are in a situation where you need a good topic. If you are looking for some more serious conversation starters, this app is the way to go.

Conclusion

If you are a little socially awkward, or maybe you just draw a blank sometimes, these application will help you out. Simply pretend you received an important message or email, pull up one of these apps, and become the king of conversation starting.

Have you tried these iPhone conversation apps? Are you the coolest of your friends? Let us know in the comments!

Image Credit: ShutterStock

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class="align-right" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/muo-hptp-kindle.jpg?323f2c" alt="" />It’s the tablet that wouldn’t die, the device that kept coming back for more, and despite HP’s dithering over whether they would continue to support webOS or not, the HP TouchPad has exceeded expectations thanks to various fire sales at popular online and offline retailers and its friendly user interface. However thanks to the lack of support from HP early on (it was decided that the company would discard the webOS platform soon after the TouchPad launched) there is a big hole in the number of official apps available for the webOS tablets.

One of these missing apps is Kindle. While you will easily find Amazon’s eBook reading app on the HP TouchPad in the USA, outside of the country (in places such as Europe and Australia) Kindle isn’t listed in the HP App Catalog. As tablets are popularly used for reading, this is clearly disappointing. Thankfully, however, there is a way of installing the webOS Kindle app on HP TouchPads in territories where the app is unavailable.

So Why Is the HP TouchPad Kindle App US-only?

style="margin-right: 20px; margin-top: 5px; margin-bottom: 5px;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/amazon-kindle-logo.jpg?323f2c" alt="" width="205" height="205" align="left" />Well, to begin with it depends on your definition of “US-only”. For many TouchPad users in North America, the Kindle app is an easy to use and enjoyable eBook reading experience. But these are the lucky ones. Thanks to some initial confusion or a problem with the app (the reason has never been made clear) the Amazon Kindle app was shipped with some first wave TouchPads but then removed from later devices, replaced with a placeholder “coming soon” app.

Fortunately, if your US-based TouchPad doesn’t have a working Kindle app, you can now find it via the HP App Catalog.

Preparing Your HP TouchPad

Before proceeding to install the Kindle app on your HP TouchPad, you will need to download a few tools (this method can be used on Windows and Mac OS X). The first thing you should do is head to href="http://hotfile.com/dl/128523150/76e47a4/com.palm.app.kindle_0.11.499820_all.ipk.html">this link and download the Kindle .ipk file. An .ipk is the installer file format used on webOS.

After doing this, download the webOS Quick Install software from href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2774158/WebOSQuickInstall-4.3.1.jar">here. This is a tool that allows the testing of unapproved applications on webOS devices such as the HP TouchPad, and requires you to have Java installed on your computer (available from href="http://www.java.com/getjava">here).

Next, connect your HP TouchPad to your computer using the supplied USB cable. The Connected dialogue box will appear, but you can select Close to continue – the USB Drive mode cannot be used for this process. You will then need to find Developer Mode, revealed by typing the following string into the search box: webos20090606

Tap the Developer Mode icon to proceed and then slide the switch in the top-right corner to activate; you may be prompted for a password, but click Submit to bypass this.

The next stage is to run the downloaded webOSQuickInstall-4.3.1.jar (you might have a different version) file and follow any prompts to download additional software (such as the Novacom driver for creating a stable connection between your computer and the tablet).

Installing The Kindle App

With all of the above installed and running, adding the Kindle app – which is in beta so might be slightly unreliable at times – is a simple task.

The webOS Quick Install application on your desktop computer will display a largely empty screen with a handful of buttons, including + and – on the right-hand side. Click the + button to browse for the previously downloaded Kindle .ipk, which will have a filename in the form of com.palm.app.kindle_0.11.499820_all.ipk (although the version number at the end may differ). Select this file and then click the Install button and wait a few moments.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/muo-hptp-kindle2.png?323f2c" alt="Sideloading the Kindle app onto your HP TouchPad" width="580" height="371" />

When the process is complete the .ipk file will no longer be listed in the Files to Install section of the webOS Quick Install application, so you will be free to close the software (it can be relaunched by running webOSQuickInstall-4.3.1.jar).

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/muo-hptp-kindle4.png?323f2c" alt="Signing into the Kindle app on the HP TouchPad" width="580" height="435" />

Next, double-tap the menu button on your HP TouchPad and go to the Downloads tab where you will find the Amazon Kindle app listed. Tap to launch and enter your credentials (or register) to continue.

A few moments later, the main screen of the app will appear. If you have used Kindle in the past,  your books will be listed; otherwise you will be prompted to visit the Amazon Kindle store, where you will find free and paid-for titles to download direct to your TouchPad.

Reading Books On Your TouchPad

Amazon’s Kindle app provides similar functionality to tablets and mobile phones as can be found on the popular dedicated eBook reader. Utilizing an Amazon account and providing access to the Kindle store, the app allows the user to download free out-of-copyright titles (such as the works of Shakespeare and Charles Dickens) as well as find the latest titles to download and read on their device.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/muo-hptp-kindle5.png?323f2c" alt="HP TouchPad Kindle app book library" width="580" height="435" />

With versions available for Mac, iOS, Android, Windows and Windows Phone, Kindle apps extend the functionality of the dedicated device to users of other hardware, often those for whom an Amazon Kindle app would be desirable if it didn’t mean carrying multiple devices. The HP TouchPad version of Kindle is just as good as the others and will allow you to download and enjoy books on your tablet wherever you are.

If you are a HP Touchpad owner, and you tried to download the Kindle app using this method, let us know if you were successful.  Or maybe you know of another way to install the Kindle app on the Touchpad?

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href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-essential-app-catalog-applications-hp-touchpad-webos/" rel="bookmark"> width="125" height="125" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/intro-150x150.jpg?323f2c" class="with-border wp-post-image" alt="intro" title="intro" style="width:125px;height:125px;" /> class="title">5 Essential App Cataloging Apps For Your HP TouchPad

href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/4-reasons-amazons-kindle-tablet-kick-butt/" rel="bookmark"> width="125" height="125" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/kindletabletthum-150x150.jpg?323f2c" class="with-border wp-post-image" alt="kindletabletthum" title="kindletabletthum" style="width:125px;height:125px;" /> class="title">4 Reasons Amazon’s Kindle Tablet Could Kick Butt

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class="align-right" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/free_2793883.jpg" alt="snowing desktop" />Nothing says “Christmas” more than snow, and if you’re sitting in front of your computer for long periods of time (like I do) then you probably aren’t seeing much of it. I have a solution for you, though.

href="http://www.softwareok.com/?seite=Freeware/DesktopSnowOK">DesktopSnowOK is an incredibly lightweight, portable, no-installation-required piece of software that can turn your Windows desktop or laptop from summer in Florida to winter in Colorado in just a second. Screensavers aren’t cool any more. We’re past the days of Christmas lights on your desktop screensaver or Bonzi-esque, Santa’s helper elf desktop “pets.” Let’s put you in the middle of a calm snowfall right at your desk.

href="http://www.softwareok.com/">SoftwareOK.com has released this little gem of software compatible with every single version of Windows. The href="http://www.softwareok.com/?Download=DesktopSnowOK">download is a whopping 52KB and “installation” is as easy as unzipping the archive onto your desktop. Better yet, why not toss this in your href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tags/dropbox/">Dropbox and have it sync with all of your devices?

After decompressing the archive, open the application.

class="aligncenter" style="border: 0pt none;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/desktopsnowok.png" alt="snowing desktop" width="534" height="303" />

Immediately, you’ll notice a lot of configurable options. You’re able to change the number of flakes, the transparency, speed, texture and size, and optional deactivation methods if you don’t want the snow bugging you while you’re browsing. The snowflakes show not only on your Windows desktop, but on every other window. You can even send the software to your tray by clicking the To-Tray button at the bottom.

The software uses under 7000 K in memory, but the faster and more snowflakes you begin to use, the more CPU usage you’ll have to dedicate towards the application. Here’s how the effect looks on a few different backgrounds and settings:

class="aligncenter" style="border: 0pt none;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/snowygoogle.png" alt="snow for desktop" width="580" height="340" />

class="aligncenter" style="border: 0pt none;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/snowydesktop.png" alt="snow for desktop" width="580" height="305" />

class="aligncenter" style="border: 0pt none;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/snowysoftwareok.png" alt="snowing desktop" width="580" height="224" />

Here’s a quick rundown on DesktopSnowOK’s key features for you to review:

• Portable application that requires no hard installation and is incredibly small in size
• Activate or deactivate snowflakes within the program itself
• Docking within the system tray
• Ability to define the speed, number of snowflakes, their texture, and their transparency
• Option to deactivate snow by mouse or keyboard movement

If you are interested in downloading and running this software, here’s a quick little tutorial on how to get everything going smoothly:

• Go to the href="http://www.softwareok.com/?seite=Freeware/DesktopSnowOK">DesktopSnowOK website
• Click on “ href="http://www.softwareok.com/?Download=DesktopSnowOK">Download (57 KB)“
• Download the .ZIP archive, which will contain all of the files necessary to run DesktopSnowOK
• Run the binary application file included in the archive

From there, personalize and tweak the software to your particular liking. If you leave the application altogether or allow it to dock in your system tray, you configuration will still remain the same. Remember, running a very high number of snowflakes or a very large texture graphic file can result in hardware performance issues. If you’re on an older laptop, let me just recommend that you do very few flakes and you keep them nice and small. An application like this shouldn’t be a performance risk so try to keep it simple.

If that’s not enough to kick your PC into Christmas mode, check out these href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/top-8-sites-to-listen-to-free-christmas-music-online/">eight sites to find free Christmas music. Still stuck on screensavers and other desktop animations? href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/6-cool-silly-christmas-theme-items-to-spruce-up-your-desktop/">We’ve covered those, too!

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class="align-right" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/gplus2.png" alt="" />Well, I finally caved in and adopted Google Plus. It wasn’t willingly – with most new fads, I like to wait it out to see if, like 90 percent of most new and exciting online phenomena, it fades away into the ether of cyberspace. In the case of Google Plus, I was instantly reminded of so many other failed projects in the past – href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/4-great-gadgets-to-spice-up-your-google-wave-experience/">Google Wave, href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/rise-fall-google-video-player-google-video/">Google Video Player, href="http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/google-notebook/">Google Notebook….the list goes on and on.

So, when Google Plus came out, I had the same trepidation as always. But as time passed, that has certainly changed.

Integrating Google Plus Into Your Blog

Over the past few days I’ve decided to take a closer look at Google Plus, and discovered that it is quickly becoming far more integrated throughout the Internet than many people probably realize. For that reason – it’s probably high time to assimilate with the Borg. After all, resistance is futile, right?

Now, we’ve covered quite a bit of Google Plus here. Mark started us off with href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/started-google/">an overview, Bakari described how Google Plus is href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/google-profile-blogger-blogs-news/">integrated into Blogger, and Matt released the news in July about href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/google-launches-1-websites-news/">+1 for websites.

Just like we did with href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/7-tools-to-integrate-twitter-with-your-wordpress-blog/">Twitter and href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/add-facebook-widgets-buttons-website/">Facebook, it’s time to go over the tools that are available to integrate Google Plus with your blog. First, create a new G+ page for your site in your Google Plus account by clicking on “Create a Google+ Page” in the right navigation pane.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter" style="border-width: 1px; border-color: black; border-style: solid;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/googleplus1.png" alt="" width="571" height="509" />

Creating a Google+ page for your blog or website is a critical part of establishing it in the social networking sphere of influence.

By the way – make your tagline count. Focus on topics that your blog or website covers so that people will find you. Pick a good, branded photo for your site and you’re good to go. Once your new page is up, just like on Facebook you can share your stories, post comments and anything else that you can do to start a conversation with your readers.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter" style="border-width: 1px; border-color: black; border-style: solid;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/googleplus2.png" alt="" width="579" height="473" />

The About page is important. Make sure that the top ribbon has a cool selection of photos that reflect the sort of content people will find at your site. Offer a good, strong, well-written introduction, contact information (this makes you look more professional), and of course the website link.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter" style="border-width: 1px; border-color: black; border-style: solid;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/googleplus3.png" alt="" width="577" height="473" />

Now that you’ve linked from a related Google+ page to your website, it’s time to integrate the Google+ tools to link in the other direction.

Adding A Google Plus Badge To Your Blog

The first thing you want to do is create a badge that links from your website or blog directly to your new Google Plus page for the site. You do this from your Google Plus page that you’ve just created. Click on the “Get Started” link in the left navigation pane, scroll down to “Connect Your Website” and click “Get the Badge“.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter" style="border-width: 1px; border-color: black; border-style: solid;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/googleplus4.png" alt="" width="580" height="543" />

This is easy enough, thanks to a fast Wizard that Google provides to complete the process. Just complete the URL that links to your new page, and then scroll down to set up what your direct-link “badge” will look like. Right now your choices are fairly limited, but there is a large G+ image that works pretty well for sidebars. In my case I want to put a medium one at the top of the site.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter" style="border-width: 1px; border-color: black; border-style: solid;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/googleplus5.png" alt="" width="579" height="582" />

You can have it print the name of your site, or just leave it as a plain button. The next step is just to highlight the “head” code and paste it somewhere inside the <head> tags. In WordPress this will likely be in your header.php file.

Next, paste the href link section inside the body of your page where you want the badge to show up. In my case, I’ve pasted it inside the main template of my site so that it’ll show up above all content on every page, like shown below.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter" style="border-width: 1px; border-color: black; border-style: solid;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/googleplus6.png" alt="" width="525" height="366" />

Adding The +1 Button To Your Site

Next up is adding the +1 button to every article page so people can share your posts with the world. Go to the same “Get Started” page in Google Plus as before, and scroll down to the link to add the +1 button to your site.

You’ll see a blue button that says “Go to Google+” and under that a link that reads “Get the Code“. Click on that link.  That takes you to the easy Wizard for configuring your button without any hassle.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter" style="border-width: 1px; border-color: black; border-style: solid;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/googleplus8.png" alt="" width="539" height="548" />

Choose the size of the icon and the width of the text/icon snippet that you want, and you’ll see the code in the field at the bottom. Again, just like you did above, place the <script> section of code into your header, and place the “g:plusone” line of code into your page where you want the button to exist.

Now, voila – people can click on the link to +1 your page. If you’re doing this on WordPress, make sure to edit the single.php file, or whatever php page provides content for individual posts – you want your +1 button to apply to individual articles.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter" style="border-width: 1px; border-color: black; border-style: solid;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/googleplus9.png" alt="" width="480" height="421" />

So, there you have it. You’ve just bought into the next big thing. You’ve just assimilated into the Borg, and your site traffic is going to reward you for it.

I honestly thought it would be a lot longer before I would let myself say it, but I actually think Google Plus is here to stay. Not only that, but it may very well be the next big thing to actually have a chance to compete with the Facebook monster. We’ll have to wait and see.

Did you find it easy enough to integrate G+ into your blog? How do you like the Google Pages for websites? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments section below.

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class="align-right" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/shutterstock_57059911-e1320768153557.jpg" alt="" />In a world of cell phones with href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/apple-officially-announces-iphone-4s-features-price-release-date-news/">8 megapixel digital cameras and regular cameras that take pictures in such high resolutions that they look better than in real life, the film camera is a dying breed. What if you used a film camera for years and you don’t want to lose all of those precious memories? After all, just because you have moved on to a new digital camera doesn’t mean that all those old pictures are irrelevant.

This is the exact reason why ShoeBox is available from the href="http://itunes.apple.com/app/shoebox-by-1000memories/id472126139"> iTunes App Store. It allows users to easily take their old pictures and scan them with their iPhone camera and have all those pictures stored safely in the cloud. Even if you don’t use this as a way to replace the physical photos, it is at least nice to know that if something terrible happens to them, you will have a safe digital version stored away.

One thing I need to mention is that the pictures on their site are public, so they will feature them in the app. If you are concerned with other people seeing your pictures, this may not be the app for you. If you want to show your pictures off to the world, then this app is perfect.

Installation & Set Up

ShoeBox is available for free from the iTunes App Store. Simply search for “ShoeBox” or click href="http://itunes.apple.com/app/shoebox-by-1000memories/id472126139">here to download the free application.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/ShoeBoxiPhone7-e1320768687384.jpg" alt="" width="386" height="580" />

Once you have the application installed, you have to make a ShoeBox account. Making an account couldn’t be easier. You can either make a new account with your name and email address, or sign up with your pre-existing Facebook account. Whichever way you choose, setting up your account is quick and painless.

Scanning Photos

Scanning photos in the application is very easy. Simply choose the scan option in the middle of the screen and set your photo down in a well lit area where there will not be any glare on the image. Hold your iPhone over the image and click the scan button. Make sure to have the image lined up properly before you take the shot.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/ShoeBoxiPhone5-e1320768733675.jpg" alt="" width="386" height="580" />

After you have taken the picture, the program will open up the crop part of the scan. This is where you remove any background from the image to make it as clean as possible. To crop the image you simply need to drag the box around the image. When you click on one of the cropping corners, the application will automatically show that part slightly zoomed in so you can get the cropping precise.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/ShoeBoxiPhone2-e1320768814640.jpg" alt="" width="386" height="580" />

After you finish cropping, you are given the option to rotate the image in increments of 45 degrees. This allows you keep the image wide if it was originally taken that way.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/ShoeBoxiPhone6-e1320768872279.jpg" alt="" width="386" height="580" />

The last step is sharing and giving a description to your image. You can enter the people in the image and the time and place the image came from. You can also share the image on Facebook and Twitter. As I said before, they may feature your image, so no matter what, it will be somewhat public.

Viewing Photos

The application keeps all your images for easy access later. On the bottom of the screen there is a section called “My Shoebox”.  In here, you will see any images you have scanned. You can sort the pictures by the people in them or the tags you attached to them when you created them.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/ShoeBoxiPhone1-e1320768916612.jpg" alt="" width="386" height="580" />

You can also look at the featured images page to see some of the best scans from other users. There are some cool pictures on there, so it is an interesting place to look around.

Conclusion

If you have many old photos that are sitting around collecting dust, or you want an easy way to put all your photos in the cloud so if anything terrible happens to the physical copies, ShoeBox is a cool app that is worth checking out. If you do not want others to be able to see your photos, this may not be the app for you, but if you don’t care, or even prefer to show your photos off, I recommend downloading this app.

Other great photography articles:

• href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/free-photography-apps-ipad-mac/" target="_top">Three Useful Free Photography Apps For The iPad [Mac]
• href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/6-digital-photography-websites-with-free-tutorials/" target="_top">6 Digital Photography Websites With Free Tutorials
• href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/3-easy-ways-to-add-borders-to-your-photos/" target="_top">3 Easy Ways To Add Borders To Your Photos

Image Credit: href="http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?lang=en&search_source=search_form&version=llv1&anyorall=all&safesearch=1&searchterm=old+photo+pile&search_group=&orient=&search_cat=&searchtermx=&photographer_name=&people_gender=&people_age=&people_ethnicity=&people_number=&commercial_ok=&color=&show_color_wheel=1#id=57059911&src=ad8d130ef7ebb20111533c8c832556c6-1-13" rel="nofollow">Shutterstock

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class="align-right" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/smartr.jpg" alt="social network news feed" />Does the iPad and iPhone need yet another magazine or newspaper style app? Well, despite the popularity and craftsmanship of similar apps like href="http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/flipboard-social-magazine/">Flipboard, href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/zite-ipad-rss-feed-contender/">Zite, and href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/pulse-free-visual-display-rss-news-reader-ipad/">Pulse, Factyle’s href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/smartr-news-for-ipad/id453281695?mt=8#">Smartr News, released last week, has its own unique features and approach to using your Twitter and Facebook feeds for downloading news and other content.

If your social network usage is like mine, most of your social feeds consist of links to web content rather than pure messages. Likewise, you probably post more links than you do messages. So it only makes sense to have an app exclusively devoted to using your social networks as news feed sources. Smartr News is similar to Flipboard, but it’s more streamlined.

Set Up Pages

Smartr News starts you off with a few Technology, Breaking News, and Trending RSS feeds of news stories, but adding your Twitter and Facebook accounts personalizes your Smartr News content. It actually downloads the links to articles on the timeline of your social networks and displays them read-only style stripped of ads and other obtrusive content.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/IMG_1052.jpg" alt="social network news feed" width="580" height="435" border="0" />

The two-column display includes your feeds on one side, and your selected linked content on the other.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/IMG_1057.jpg" alt="social news feed" width="435" height="580" />

If you have the right selection of Twitter and Facebook friends, their links also become a part of your news sources, providing you an abundant amount of content.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/IMG_1053.jpg" alt="social news feed" width="580" height="435" border="0" />

In addition, Smartr News comes with featured feeds for sports, “Long Reads” (long thoughtful articles), celebrity gossip, fashion, movies, trending, and the like.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/IMG_1059.jpg" alt="social news feed" width="580" height="579" border="0" />

A preview of your pages are displayed as squares, each with a headline and an image of leading stories. You can also add pages to this top list.

Sharing Content

Similar to other news apps in this genre, Smartr provides several ways to share stories and save them for later reading. Besides having your own posted links shared on your social networks, you can also save articles to your Instapaper or Read It Later service.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/IMG_1056.png" alt="social media news rss feed" width="580" height="351" border="0" />

If the links you post are really important to you and others, Smartr has a unique feature for creating blog pages based on your links.

After you add a new blog, you simply tap to add selected articles to it. Smartr creates an external blog page for you that can be subscribed to by others. The page design of Smartr blogs are very basic, but the intent is have a place where you can build a collection of selected articles to share with others.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/IMG_1063.jpg" alt="social media news rss feed" width="580" height="564" border="0" />

Unfortunately however, you have to view your blog outside of Smartr. It doesn’t download within the app itself.

Smartr Activity

Another way to get more news content in Smartr is by creating an Activity page that consists of selected friends with similar interests to yours that you can follow. Your Activity page will consist solely of their posts with their news links.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/IMG_1060.jpg" alt="social media news rss feed" width="535" height="580" />

Smartr also provides a list of “handpicked featured users” to get you started.

Other Features

Smartr’s other features include the ability to write and post directly to your Twitter and Facebook timelines, as well as to Tumblr and Posterous.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/IMG_10561.png" alt="social network news feed" width="580" height="351" border="0" />

You can also navigate the newsreader app really easily with a single finger gesture. In addition to tapping on individual stories in the timeline, you can swipe your finger on the right column to move to the previous or next story in the timeline. This makes for a really quick way to scan stories without a lot of hand movement across the screen.

So is Smartr a replacement for other newsreader apps? Well, it depends on what your needs are. If you get most of your news from your social networks, then yes, Smartr seems to be the best way to go. Let us know what you think.

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class="align-right" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/googleoffersthumb.jpg" alt="" />Well, it’s officially here. The href="https://market.android.com/details?id=com.google.android.apps.offers&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDEsImNvbS5nb29nbGUuYW5kcm9pZC5hcHBzLm9mZmVycyJd">Google Offers app, which was announced when the company unveiled Google Wallet, has been released on the href="http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/android-market-marketplace-for-android-apps/">Android market for anyone (in the United States) to download.

The href="http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/google-offers-discover-local-offers/">Offers website has been in beta since May and focused first on Portland, Oregon. In July, the beta expanded to New York and San Francisco. As of the release of this app, Offers supports 17 cities including Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia and Austin. As you’d expect, a large number of other cities are “coming soon”.

Using the app is easy. Once installed, you “subscribe” to your city, and the app is populated with offers. If you see an offer you like, you purchase it directly from the app. The number of people who can grab an offer is often limited by time or number of purchases, so you have to act fast.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/googleoffers.jpg" alt="" width="288" height="480" />

So far, the number of offers available is limited. I checked several cities and found that one or two options were available at each location. To be successful, the app will need to offer more, well, offers – but I have little doubt that more will become available over time.

In a bit of irony (or perhaps intentional ribbing) the release of this app coincides with Groupon’s IPO. Google tried to buy href="http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/groupon-group-buying/">Groupon for six billion dollars in 2010, and was snubbed. Will Google Offers be able to compete? That’s up for you to decide, so check it out and let us know what you think.

Source: rel="nofollow" href="http://www.androidguys.com/2011/11/03/google-officially-launches-google-offer-app-for-android">AndroidGuys

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class="align-right" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/2011-10-19-16h01_52.jpg" alt="evri ipad app" />Staying connected, something we all like to do these days, means reading e-mails everywhere, checking Facebook every hour, and also being on top of the latest news. Be it the big things happening in our area, some exciting Hollywood news or the release of a major update to our favorite app, we like to know about things when they happen.

There are some pretty attractive, fun and personalized href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/best-5-news-apps-ipad/">ways to read news on your iPad. However, many news apps, even the very best ones, tend to overwhelm me. Many of them are comprised of endless squares that I need to customize in order to not get immediately lost. href="http://itunes.apple.com/il/app/evri-for-ipad/id448520587?mt=8">Evri is a news reader for the href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tags/ipad/">iPad which makes it all a bit more organized. While not being very customizable, it makes it easy to zoom in directly on your favorite topics and still be able to broaden your interests whenever you feel like it.

Browsing, Reading & Sharing

Evri turns news, no matter what they are, into candy. The app is very well designed, and everything you look at just beckons you to read it. When you first load the app, you’ll see a top bar with some topics you can choose from (News, US & World, Entertainment, Sports, Business and Technology). Tapping any of these will show you a list of hot sub-topics on the left and some hot news on the main screen.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/image195.png" alt="evri ipad app" width="570" height="508" border="0" />

When you focus on one sub-topic, you get a glimpse of the very top news, a list of featured articles and some related topics. For each and every topic you browse, no matter how broad or how specific, there’s a “Follow” button. Tapping it will add the topic to your Now Following list, and you’ll be able to read everything under it easily as it’s published.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/2011-10-19-15h19_19.jpg" alt="evri news search" width="453" height="612" border="0" />

You can easily access your Now Following list from this notice or from the main app page. From there you can also delete topics you are not longer interested in.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/2011-10-19-15h13_20.jpg" alt="evri news search" width="260" height="208" border="0" />

Evri gathers news items from all over the Web. When browsing a topic, you’ll get a preview (or sometimes the full article, if it’s short) of all the hot stories from different sources. There are several things you can do with these:

• “Read” opens the full original article in the app’s internal browser.
• “Save” lets you save this article for later using href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/read-multiplatform-app-save-information-read/">Read It Later or href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/create-and-manage-your-bookmarks-better-with-instapaper/">Instapaper (requires login).
• “Share” allows you to share this piece of news with friends via Facebook & Twitter (requires login) or via e-mail. You can also use this button to open the article in href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tags/safari">Safari.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/2011-10-19-15h13_00.jpg" alt="evri news search" width="562" height="482" border="0" />

Finding & Learning

You might not be very interested in the somewhat limited topics Evri provides for quick browsing. But don’t worry, Evri provides a quick, live search for topics. No matter what page you’re on, tap the search box and start typing. Evri will immediately start loading a list of topics which might be a match for your word. It will not limit by broad topics, so a search for “Horse”, for example, yields the animal, a military person, a plant, a film and so on.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/2011-10-19-15h14_01.jpg" alt="evri news" width="475" height="481" border="0" />

When you’ve found your specific topic, simply tap on it and you’ll be taken to a page dedicated to everything that has to do with this topic. The connection can be somewhat loose, especially if your topic is a bit broad.

At any point when browsing, you can tap the “Info” icon to learn more about whatever it is you’re reading about. Evri provides an excerpt from Wikipedia with some important information, and a list of related topics, which can be very related or just somewhat related (George Clooney and Coffee?).

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/2011-10-19-15h15_02.jpg" alt="evri news" width="500" height="618" border="0" />

Another convenient thing you can do is go through your entire browsing history. On the top topics bar, scroll all the way to the right and look for the “History” tab. Here you’ll find a list, complete with times of the day, of all the topics you’ve browsed today, in the past week and in the past month. If you were browsing something really interesting and forgot to follow it, you can use the history to find it again.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/2011-10-19-15h14_37.jpg" alt="evri ipad app" width="479" height="587" border="0" />

Bottom Line

All in all, Evri provides a fun news-reading experience which you can use to find a specific news item, or to dive into the world of news and explore it deeply by jumping from link to link. The way Evri works, you’ll always get a list of related stories or related links, so you can pretty much go on browsing and reading news all day long.

I do wish they’d add some more ways to customize it, such as letting the user choose which topics appear on the left-side list, but even as it is, Evri is a polished iPad app and it helps you find your way through the news, instead of getting you lost.

Do you know of some more good news apps? What did you think of Evri? Share in the comments!

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class="align-right" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/linkedin-resume.jpg" alt="linkedin profile resume"/>I have already mentioned that LinkedIn has proved the href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/3-ways-meaningfully-visualize-linkedin-network/">most meaningful social media network for me for years: I have found that, because of its business focus, it is less vulnerable to spam than other social media networks, almost clutter-free and much more productive.

However LinkedIn isn’t only good for networking: those who maintain detailed LinkedIn profiles can turn them into informative online resumes to jump start their job search.

There are a few handy tools that will both allow you quickly import your LinkedIn professional summary, help make it look neat and professional and even let you href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/top-free-resume-hosting-websites/">host your resume for free.

Here are a couple of great options:

Resume Builder

href="http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/resume-builder-create-resume-from-linkedin/">Resume Builder is by far the quickest way to turn your LinkedIn profile into a professionally looking, minimalist resume. It was created as part of LinkedIn Labs and the whole process takes no more than a few minutes:

1. Start href="http://resume.linkedinlabs.com/home/index">here and sign into your LinkedIn profile;
2. Look over your professional summary and edit / delete any information you need;
3. Pick a resume template that best suits your style: clean, modern, business, gray, law and more.

class="aligncenter" style="border: 0pt none;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/linkedin-resume-04.jpg" alt="linkedin profile resume" width="540" height="322" />

Now you can download your resume as PDF, print it, share online (via email, Facebook or Twitter). Note that you will need to set the resume as public to be able to start sharing it.

You can also use the “outline” mode to change the look of your resume: just remove or drag-and-drop the sections you want to change:

class="aligncenter" style="border: 0pt none;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/linkedin-resume-05.jpg" alt="linkedin resume tips" width="540" height="322" />

2. DoYouBuzz

href="http://www.doyoubuzz.com/">DoYouBuzz is an excellent and very user-friendly website that lets you quickly build a detailed resume by fetching your professional information from your LinkedIn profile.

It has both free and paid plans (the latter has a few more appealing templates but I never needed them as the free version has proved absolutely complete).

The process is very well organized – you will be surprised how smoothly you are being moved from step to step until you have the resume ready:

class="aligncenter" style="border: 0pt none;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/linkedin-resume-01.jpg" alt="linkedin resume tips" width="540" height="264" />

1. Sign up for n account and conform your email;
2. Import your LinkedIn profile;
3. Edit / remove any sections that have been fetched from your LinkedIn profile (or add new sections)
4. Choose and customize your template (you can choose a design and then select your own color palette):

class="aligncenter" style="border: 0pt none;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/linkedin-resume-02.jpg" alt="linkedin resume tips" width="540" height="327" />

As a result you get a free online Linkedin profile resume that you can both link to or download to send to a potential employee:

class="aligncenter" style="border: 0pt none;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/linkedin-resume-03.jpg" alt="linkedin profile resume" width="540" height="324" />

Privacy settings and notes:

If you care about your privacy, there are a couple of notable things to mention here:

1. Your resume will have “nocache” header tag which will prevent Google from saving it in its href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/4-great-greasemonkey-scripts-easily-browse-scan-google-cache/">cache. This means that your future employees won’t be able to access the resume previous versions and will only be able to see the current one (this is a very smart feature by the way)
2. There are a few privacy settings inside that allow you to hide your resume from public view, exclude it from DoYouBuzz search results or hide it from everyone.

Note: There’s another similar tool called href="http://comoto.com/">Comoto but it is not that usable.

Are you aware of any other tools that make it easy to re-package your LinkedIn profile and turn it into the detailed resume? Please let us know in the comments!

Image Credit: title="2006-02-14 005" href="http://flickr.com/photos/nutt/99598330/">cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by href="http://flickr.com/people/nutt/">michaeln3

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class="align-right" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/gmail-reading-list.jpg?54167" alt="gmail to do list" />If you are often on class="vt-p" href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tags/gmail/">Gmail, you most likely know how many things you can actually do with it (apart from readings and sending mail). We have already shared quite a few tips on how class="vt-p" href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-organize-your-multitasking-in-gmail-part-1/">Gmail can be turned into a multitasking tool but it is still amazing how this great free email service can come in handy for various purposes.

This post covers another fun way to use your Gmail account – collecting and organizing your daily reading list using your Gmail inbox.

Easily Email Any Article To Yourself

Google Chrome : “Email This Page”

class="vt-p" href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dbeoemfhkdniadbojeencpkgmobndpai">Email this page lets you quickly compose an email by grabbing the page title and the text you have selected on the page. You can therefore highlight the main idea of the page and then easily remember why you decided to send this one to your reading list.

It can also be set up to always use the Gmail interface to compose a new message – even if you have another mail client by default.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/gmail-reading-list-01.jpg?54167" alt="gmail to do list" width="550" height="343" />

It’s an official extension by Google but it did seem to have some bugs. On some pages it refused to send me to the “compose mail” screen and just did nothing. I hope that’s just a temporal glitch.

FireFox : class="vt-p" href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/email-yourself/">Email Yourself!

This is an excellent addon just for these purposes. Unlike the Google Chrome extension, it won’t make you type in your own email address each time.

It allows you to email yourself the link, title, and selected text of the page you are viewing using Gmail. After having it installed, just click a toolbar icon or use the keyboard shortcut and a new Gmail message will be created with the page details.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/gmail-reading-list-02.jpg?54167" alt="gmail todo list" width="550" height="356" />

Keyboard Shortcuts

• For Windows and Linux Users: ALT+Windows+Tilde (~)
• For Mac Users: Options+Command+Tilde (~)

Before using the extension, you’ll need to edit the two preferences:

• Enter your gmail address.
• Enter a personal identification message (used as a suffix for your email subject). By default it’s set to “-Sent via Email Yourself!”. In our case, this might be “TO READ LATER” or something similar.

Alternative FireFox Addon: class="vt-p" href="http://f1.mozillamessaging.com/">Mozilla F1 (with Gmail support).

Any Browser : class="vt-p" href="http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/noteforlater-email-links/">Notes For Later

Notes For Later sends the highlighted text, link, and time you accessed the page to your email. It works via browser bookmarklet. Each bookmarklet is unique and can be generated for your browser separately after you register.

Once you click a bookmarklet, it will let you enter a short note or just send the article right away:

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/gmail-reading-list-03.jpg?54167" alt="gmail todo list" width="285" height="155" />

The app will send you the link together with details as well as the PDF of the page content (for class="vt-p" href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/save-complete-webpage-offline-reading/">offline reading).

Alternative App For Various Browsers (Including Mobile Browsers): class="vt-p" href="http://joliprint.com/bookmark-instructions/">JoliPrint

Organize Your Gmail Reading List

We receive lots of email messages daily, so how do you effectively organize your Gmail reading list? class="vt-p" href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/3-great-examples-gmail-filters-productivity/">Gmail filters work best for this!

First, create a new label called “READING LIST” and filter your emailed links to get labeled automatically (and probably skip the inbox to avoid any clutter).

For “Email this Page“- and “Email Yourself“-type of extensions (that let you email links to yourself), you’ll need to set up a filter for all mail coming from yourself to yourself:

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/gmail-reading-list-05.jpg?54167" alt="gmail todo list" width="511" height="197" />

For “Notes For Later“-types of tools (that email you from their official email accounts), filter all mail by their email address:

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/gmail-reading-list-06.jpg?54167" alt="Gmail reading list" width="488" height="194" />

Now just let all the filtered mail go to your new label while skipping the inbox:

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/gmail-reading-list-07.jpg?54167" alt="gmail to do list" width="410" height="318" />

Once you have read an item in your list, you can unstar the email to mark it as done.

Have you ever used your email as a reading list organizer? Please share your tips in the comments!

class="vt-p" rel="nofollow" href="http://flickr.com/photos/comedynose/4236355151/">comedy_nose

href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/turn-gmail-inbox-reading-todo-list/">How To Turn Your Gmail Inbox Into A Reading To-Do List is a post from: href="http://www.makeuseof.com">MakeUseOf

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class="align-right" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/0_friendstogmail.jpg" alt="import facebook contacts to gmail" /> class="vt-p" href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tags/gmail/">Gmail is where I spend a lot of time during a given day. Whether I’m answering a fresh round of emails or searching through a pile of old ones to find important information I had either forgotten or misplaced, Gmail usually helps me get the job done in a short amount of time. One thing I never find myself doing however, is adding contacts to my address book, because well, that just takes too much time. Besides, I would have to enter all of that information manually. Where would I even find the kind of information that goes along with my contacts’ names and email addresses?

Facebook. Most of the people I know who I would like to include in my Gmail contacts are already friends with me on class="vt-p" href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tags/facebook/">Facebook. So if I ever need to know where they currently live or work the chances are good I can just search for it there. But wouldn’t it be great if Facebook and Gmail played nicely together so I could have all of that information in one place?  Well, now they do, with a simple little web application called Friends to Gmail.

What Is Friends To Gmail?

class="vt-p" href="http://www.friendstogmail.com/">Friends to Gmail ( class="vt-p" href="http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/friendstogmail-import-facebook-contacts-to-gmail/">directory app) is a web application that you can use to convert your Facebook friends list into a nice, Gmail-compatible CSV file. Once created, you can import this file right into Gmail and all of your friends’ information, like names, locations, birthdays, bios, work history, and hometowns, will be added to your contacts for you. The app asks for permissions to retrieve this type of information from your Facebook account, but since all of the work is done within the browser, Friends to Gmail’s servers never actually “download” anything, which should alleviate any privacy concerns you may have about the app.

One thing to note is that Friends to Gmail does not download email addresses and phone numbers for your friends. This is because Facebook does not currently provide developers with a way to retrieve this type of data, and for good reason. After all, we already have enough class="vt-p" href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/download-unofficial-facebook-privacy-guide/">privacy concerns with Facebook. Friends to Gmail’s developer does claim to be working on a way around this for those of us that would welcome such an option.

As an added benefit, you will be able to add all of your friends’ birthdays to your class="vt-p" href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tags/google-calendar/">Google Calendar!

How Do I Use Friends To Gmail?

To get started importing your friends, just head over to Friends to Gmail’s class="vt-p" href="http://www.friendstogmail.com/">homepage and click the giant Connect with Facebook button. It will ask for your permission (as detailed above) and you will be able to download your CSV file.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/1_friendstogmail.png" alt="import facebook contacts to gmail" width="285" height="354" />

Then head over to your Gmail account and click Contacts.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/2_friendstogmail.png" alt="import facebook contacts" width="384" height="101" />

On the Contacts page, click on the More actions drop-down menu and select Import….

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/3_friendstogmail.png" alt="import facebook contacts" width="183" height="249" />

From there, a box will pop up that allows your to select a CSV file to upload. Choose the file that Friends to Gmail generated and you’re all set!

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/4_friendstogmail.png" alt="import facebook contacts to gmail" width="467" height="281" />

Conclusion

Personally, I think this app is a lifesaver. It finally gave me a good reason to want to keep my Gmail contact list up to date, which enables me to add friends that I hadn’t previously emailed to my outgoing messages, making Facebook’s information even more useful.

What do you think of Friends to Gmail? Do you find this app useful?

Read comments: href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/import-facebook-contacts-gmail-easy/#disqus_thread">Loved it? Hated it? Join discussion here …

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More articles about: href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tags/contacts/" title="contacts" rel="tag">contacts, href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tags/facebook/" title="Facebook" rel="tag">Facebook, href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tags/friends/" title="friends" rel="tag">friends, href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tags/gmail/" title="Gmail" rel="tag">Gmail />

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class="align-right" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/0_taskforceintro.jpg" alt="delegate gmail tasks" />How has your inbox been treating you? If you’re like me, the answer is, “Not good.” I get lots of email throughout a given day, and a lot of it is fairly important because they contain action items and things I will need to follow up on.

href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tags/gmail/">Gmail makes the whole process easier, of course, with its href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/4-ways-set-gmail-default-email-default-browser/">browser integration, href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/gmail-labs-introduces-automated-filtering-smart-labels-news/">smart labels, href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/quickly-find-email-attachments-gmail/">attachment search, and ability to href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/print-phone-gmail-mobile-google-cloud-print/">print from my mobile device, but in the end it’s all on me to stay on top of the mound of incoming emails I receive, and I, unlike Google, am merely human, after all. If only I had a task force to back me up….

What Is TaskForce?

Simply put, TaskForce is an extension available for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari that turns emails into tasks for you. With TaskForce, you can organize tasks into simple lists that you create yourself. It integrates with Gmail, but exists as an independent frame in the interface that can be dragged around and rearranged to suit your needs.

TaskForce’s mission is simple:

“Our mission is to increase your productivity, make your work life easier, and ultimately save you time and money. We strongly believe in building things that are incredibly useful, and we’re out to disrupt apps that aren’t.”

How Do I Start Using TaskForce?

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/1_taskforce.png" alt="delegate gmail tasks" width="446" height="218" />

To add TaskForce to your Gmail experience, just head over to their href="http://www.taskforceapp.com/">homepage and click the Add to Gmail button. If you use an email platform other than Gmail, you can opt to select that option instead.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/2_taskforce.png" alt="gmail tasks" width="302" height="215" />

Once you click the button, a prompt will appear asking for your email address. Enter it in the box and click the Signup to be taken to the download page. If you’re a Chrome user (like I am), you will be redirected to the Chrome Web Store to download the extension.

Once installed, TaskForce will appear when you next log into your Gmail account.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/3_taskforce.png" alt="gmail tasks" width="384" height="119" />

Now you can convert any of the emails in your inbox into tasks simply by clicking the Convert to New Task button directly under the email subject. You can set a date for the task and add it to an existing list of tasks if you like, or create a new list.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/5_taskforce.png" alt="" width="383" height="102" />

In addition to converting emails you open, you can also add tasks by clicking the plus sign on the TaskForce app. All of your tasks will be added to the “Current Task List” by default, but you can opt to add them to one of your other created lists. You can also add a description to your tasks to provide context. TaskForce will separate tasks by Active, Completed, and Delayed automatically.

class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/4_taskforce.png" alt="delegate gmail tasks" width="383" height="272" />

Another interesting feature of TaskForce is the ability to notify the sender that you’ve converted their email into a task. Once a task is completed, a notification is sent to the sender including a link so that the sender can add a comment to the task if they please. You can also invite people to collaborate on the task.

Conclusion

TaskForce has been a lifesaver for me. No longer to I have to star or label emails and try to remember them later. I can just refer to my task list for all of my action items and then work through them one by one. It’s also a good way to view everything that’s on your plate all at once, so you can maintain your focus.

If you’re into Gmail extensions I also recommend you check out href="http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/0boxer-organizing-your-gmail/">0boxer. It brings a level of competition to getting through your email load, especially if you get your other friends/coworkers involved to compete against. A little competition never hurt anybody.

Will you be giving TaskForce a try? What other href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/6-gmail-productivity-tips-you-need-to-know">Gmail productivity extensions can’t you live without? />
/> href="http://www.supertintin.com/">SuperTinTin – Skype Video Call Recorder /> Record and save your audio and video conversations on Skype or MSN. Easy to use.

/>

 

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style="border: 0px none;margin-left:20px;float:right;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/pdf.png" alt="embed a pdf document"/>MakeUseOf is no stranger to PDF documents as it’s home to a href="http://www.makeuseof.com/pages/downloads">myriad of guides for all kinds of topics, and plenty of href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tags/pdf/">articles on href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/a-quadruple-of-light-alternatives-to-adobe-reader/">PDF-reading and href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/use-pdfvue-to-fill-out-edit-pdf-files-for-free-online/">editing software (including href="http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/pdfescape/">online apps for href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/6-ways-to-convert-a-pdf-file-to-a-jpg-image/">conversions as well). There are also tips on href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/search-text-multiple-pdf-files-pdf-viewers-advanced-search/">how to search for specific text on PDF files and how to href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/calibre-ebook-management-synchronization-software-multi-os/">optimize them for better viewing on your portable devices.

Today, we’ll take a look at how you, the reader, can take your PDF documents and present them on your website without additional plugins, as all we will be using are embed codes. There’s a number of third-party websites that house your PDF files in their viewers. The most popular ones that have implemented improved features will be discussed after the jump.

id="more-63548">

href="http://viewer.zoho.com/home.do">Zoho Docs

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-63603" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/36.png" alt="embed a pdf document" width="580" height="196" />

Zoho is suite of superb office and productivity applications, among which is a web-based viewer that supports a lot more formats than Google Docs, including but not limited to Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, RTF (rich text format) files, as well as OpenDocument text, presentation and spreadsheet files. Unlike the Google Docs Viewer, the Zoho Docs Viewer lets you upload a file you own (which you can publish so it will have a short, shareable URL) or paste the URL in href="http://viewer.zoho.com/home.do">the main page. Once you’ve uploaded your file and are viewing it online, you can grab the embed code at the Embed tab. There’s no required sign-up process.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-63602" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/3.12.png" alt="embed pdf" width="568" height="482" />

This viewer doubles up as a handy conversion service, which allows you to convert any of the supported document files to other file types.

href="http://docs.google.com/viewer">Google Docs

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-63599" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/3.1.jpg" alt="embed pdf" width="580" height="481" />

For a simple web-based PDF viewer that can also display PowerPoint files, TIFF images, Microsoft Word documents, href="http://docs.google.com/viewer">Google Docs also offers a viewer. If all you’re looking for is the document viewer, you don’t even have to visit that page. You just need to have published your PDF document so you can get the URL of the stored document and append it to the Google Docs Viewer address at http://docs.google.com/viewer so it just becomes http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=yourURLhere. Since the path also accepts the embed parameter, you can also embed a PDF document viewer in your website with iframes. Just copy the href="http://docs.google.com/viewer">embed code on the Google Docs Viewer page.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-63600" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/35.png" alt="embed pdf" width="580" height="334" />

href="www.scribd.com">Scribd

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-63605" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/scribd.png" alt="how to embed pdf file in html" width="580" height="601" />

href="www.scribd.com">Scribd is a slightly different breed when it comes to sites that allow document embedding. It is actually a document-sharing website for authors that want to publish their works online. You need to sign up for an account in order to finish uploading documents to Scribd, but once you do, you’ll have a beautiful viewer for your piece. Scribd also allows you to import any documents from Google Docs, as well as to create a document from pasted text.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-63604" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/scribd.1.png" alt="how to embed pdf file in html" width="568" height="601" />

If you’re an author and have lots of works you’d like to share or sell, you can use Scribd and other popular document-sharing websites, such as href="http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/docstoc/">DocStoc, href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/websites-to-publish-share-your-pdfs-online/">Issuu, href="http://www.youpublish.com/">YouPublish, href="http://www.edocr.com/">edocr (the free account has href="http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/edocr-convert-docs-pdf-share/">limited functionality) and href="http://www.yudu.com/">YUDU, which really have a sharing focus so your documents can get as exposed as possible.

If you’d rather not use a third-party document viewer, href="http://flexpaper.devaldi.com/?ref=FlexPaper">FlexPaper will likely be the best option for you as a website owner.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-63606" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/8.png" alt="embed a pdf document" width="580" height="306" />

It is an open-source web-based document viewer that you can download for non-commercial purposes href="http://flexpaper.devaldi.com/?ref=FlexPaper">at this website and upload it to your site.

Did we miss any other free online document viewers? Let us know in the comments!

Photo credit: rel="nofollow" href="http://findicons.com/icon/71081/pdf?id=71081">Wendell Fernandes />
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class="align-left" style="border: 0px none; margin-left: 20px; margin-top: 5px; float: right;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/0-formulists-intro.png" alt="twitter follower sort" width="220" height="220" />Back when Twitter first introduced Lists as a feature, I thought it was a great idea. I started adding everybody I followed to a specific list, which made it easier to follow all their tweets in one of my class="vt-p" href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/twitter-clients-web-apps-desktops-apps/">Twitter clients. One thing I always wondered however, was how they could make this feature better.

Then I stumbled upon class="vt-p" href="http://formulists.com">Formulists and realized that this type of project was already underway. Formulists helps you organize groups of people on Twitter into smart, auto-updating Twitter lists. Imagine creating great lists and not ever having to update them by hand.

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What Is Formulists?

Formulists is a list creation and management tool that allows users to effortlessly generate dynamic and personalized Twitter lists that continuously self-update.

Formulists ( class="vt-p" href="http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/formulists-twitter-list-management-tool/">directory listing) offers a broad range of stock lists that can help users both manage and expand their Twitter network. When you sign up for Formulists, you will have the option to choose one or more of these stock lists, or to form a “custom list” that allows you to combine or filter existing Twitter lists you’ve created.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/2011-01-11_0830.png" alt="twitter follower sort" width="580" height="311" />

Furthermore, lists generated with Formulists can be viewed or deleted from any Twitter client and will continue to self-update without the need to return to Formulists to do it.

What Types of Lists Can I Create?

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/2011-01-11_0833.png" alt="formulists" width="580" height="304" />

As I mentioned, there are a lot of great stock lists in Formulists. You can filter and sort your followers, and network with people based on location, keywords in their Bio, twitter activity, number of followers, and more.

Here are some examples of the lists you can create in Formulists:

• The Filter My Following list is a simple way to quickly filter your timeline into groups that you care about. You can filter the people you follow based on all the things I mentioned above, like keywords, location, etc. You can also use advanced filters with multiple keywords and search operators (e.g. OR, AND).
• Filter your following into lists of people from the same city as you, your followers who have the biggest following, techies, etc.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/2011-01-11_0834_001.png" alt="twitter follower sort" width="580" height="314" />

• The Expand Your Network lists help you find the type of people you’re looking for because you can choose how you want to find them. Stick with the default settings or use your own filters to get different results.
• Other great stock lists include Recently Followed Me, Recently Unfollowed Me, and People I Talk To.

How Do I Start Creating Lists?

To quickly see how Formulists works, check out this short YouTube video:

classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="580" height="430" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"> name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /> name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /> name="src" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/v4uTc-Nf4IQ?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0&color1=0x5d1719&color2=0xcd311b" /> name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /> type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="580" height="430" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/v4uTc-Nf4IQ?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0&color1=0x5d1719&color2=0xcd311b" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true">

Conclusion

As soon as I got on Formulists, I instantly realized why everybody was using it. Creating lists like Who My Friends Talk To and People Like Me are not something you could genuinely pull off by hand, and the ability to dynamically generate them saves you a lot of time. In my opinion, Formulists will help make your time on Twitter more useful.

One thing to note is because Formulists is still technically in beta, they only let so many people sign up per day (around 50). This is expected to go up as they “ramp up” their system, but until then everyone who signs up is given 5 invites. Feel free to tweet these out to your followers or post them in the comments below. />
/>Got Questions? Ask Them Now FREE on href="http://www.makeuseof.com/answers/">MakeUseOf Answers! />
/>

 

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