Widgets and desktop enhancements

The iPhone finally gets proper Web widgets

Despite the iPhone app store being weeks away from launch, developer Intelliborn has just released a stellar application for users with jailbroken iPhones. Switchers from Windows Mobile phones who missed the "today" screen that lists a gathering of small bits of information on one screen essentially get the same thing with this app, which will compile weather, e-mail, SMS messages, and even RSS feeds on your phone's screen every time you hit a button to wake your phone up.

You can successfully have about four of the small, single use widgets on the screen at once, and … Read more

Stunning panoramics made easy with MagToo

MagToo is a service for creating really simple slide shows and interactive panoramic photos you can share on your blog or social-networking profile or by e-mail. To help put what you share into context, MagToo also throws in geotagging, letting you stamp any of the content you've added with a specific place where it was taken. Other users can then browse through the items on a large world map like they would photos and videos on Flickr.

Of all the tools my favorite is the panorama maker. While I couldn't get any of the three tests I did … Read more

Artsy side of search: Designers, pop stars create iGoogle themes

If you thought Google's capacity for high design didn't go far beyond its primary-colored logo, think again.

The iGoogle personalized home pages have been graced with new flair thanks to the introduction of iGoogle Artist Themes, a way for Google members to do digital interior decoration.

It may not help Mountain View on its quest to organize all the world's information, but it can make some of that information look a little prettier. Microsoft did something like this with Zune Originals, trendy designs for its music players.

"We've collaborated with almost 70 artists from around … Read more

Netvibes to open-source its widget platform

Netvibes, a developer of customizable start pages, plans to make its widget platform, application programming interfaces, and iPhone version open source, according to CEO Tariq Krim.

"We want to compete with Google widgets," Krim said. "Our container supports Google widgets and every other platform. If we release our code, people will leverage it and grow the reach of our platform."

Krim hopes that supporting a broad range of platforms, including Windows Vista and Windows Live, Mac OS X, Opera, Yahoo, and Google, will inspire the developer community to adopt and innovate on the Netvibes platform.

Netvibes … Read more

Widgetbox launches portable widget directory for iPhone users

One of Apple's biggest blunders in creating its own directory of iPhone Web apps was to make the site suited for desktop users instead of people on the portable handset.

While the company has since made it easy for people to bookmark Web apps onto their home screens by adding a quick link from inside of Safari Mobile, the "official" directory of Web apps continues to be unapproachable for iPhone users unless they're on a speedy Wi-Fi connection. Widget directory Widgetbox has come up with its own solution and launched a directory of iPhone-friendly widgets that … Read more

Pageflakes enters the LiveUniverse

LiveUniverse has acquired Pageflakes, a personalized home page service that had been rumored to be in need of a buyer. Pageflakes competes with the giants--Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and AOL, as well as Netvibes. It's no wonder that the company was looking for an exit. The acquisition was first reported by Techcrunch.

LiveUniverse was founded by Brad Greenspan, a founder of MySpace, and claims 55 million monthly unique users for its more than 30 entertainment sites, which include LiveVideo, LyricsDownload and TuneBlast. Initially, Pageflakes will be used to create "My LiveVideo" personalized pages.

Pageflakes CEO Dan Cohen, who … Read more

Meetro team launches Lefora, free hosted forums

The team behind location-based instant-messaging service Meetro is launching a free hosted forum service this morning called Lefora. CEO Paul Bragiel came in to give me a demo of it in action last week and I came away impressed. It's a wonderfully easy way to set up good-looking forums without a lot of hassle. Bragiel said that the idea came after looking at many of the popular forum tools out there and getting frustrated with "antiquated" systems that involved knowledge of coding languages, or having to host everything on your own dime. Most of all, Bragiel said … Read more

Gadgets comes to Google Docs

Google on Wednesday unveiled Gadgets for Spreadsheets in Google Docs, allowing people to create graphical representations of data in spreadsheets and publish them on Web sites.

For consumers, this means they have a dozen or so new ways to look at data in their spreadsheets. Google has put up a gallery of specialty gadgets to choose from. They include gadgets to display data on a pie chart, map, time chart, funnel chart, Gantt chart, pivot table, and on a heat map if it's geographical data. You can even create interactive charts like those used by Google Finance and for … Read more

Killer Download: Top apps to track bandwidth

Just about everybody who uses the Internet these days has broadband access. Whether it's DSL, cable, or a direct high-speed LAN connection, most people choose a faster connection to make files download faster, videos stream smoother, and online gaming much more enjoyable. But what if something is eating up bandwidth that you don't know about? Particularly when you have a superfast connection or Wi-Fi, how do you know there isn't something or someone leeching off your bandwidth when everything seems to be working smoothly?

Though I have my Big Three security apps running on every Windows machine … Read more

Twhirl minimizes time spent on microblogging

I'm a big fan of microblogging services like Twitter, Pownce, and Jaiku, but a number of solutions that have popped up to help you make the influx of information more bearable can also be overwhelming.

To help sort through some of that chaos is Twirl, an Adobe Air-based communications application for Twitter that sits on your desktop and monitors the traffic flow of your friends. Sure, there are similar apps that do this, like Snitter, Spaz and Tweetr, but none of those let you post to services besides Twitter.

The latest build of Twirl is nice enough to let you plug in your log-ins from Jaiku and Pownce (two popular competitors) in order to cross-post whatever you're Tweeting about. Yes, there were ways to do this before, but this involves no such RSS hackery, and lets you tweak either of those two external accounts in one place. And for those of you who have more than one Twitter account, you can add in as many as you'd like (I successfully added six).

As an app, Twhirl feels very similar to Snitter, although I found the selection of skins to be a little more robust. There are a dozen to choose from, and none of them are tied to the size and style of text, or the shape of the window. It's also got several handy features that the Web front end for Twitter doesn't have, like a built-in tool to shorten URLs from two different services (Snurl and is.gd), and message notifications that can be tweaked right down to how much speaker volume you want to give them.

The one crucial thing that's missing (and such a tease) is the inability to pull in feeds from the other two services. While it's nice to send out your message to three places at the same time, it's a one-way street. It's also worth noting that Pownce and Jaiku differ distinctively from Twitter in making replies from other users more of a public experience, which might get a little hairy when all three are getting the same message from you.

Twhirl's been kicking around since mid-November of last year, and you'll need the latest version of Adobe' AIR runtime to have it work on your system. Screenshots after the break.

Related: The many flavors of Twitter