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Windows/Mac/Linux (Adobe Air): Desktop to-do application App For The Milk puts your Remember the Milk tasks into a stand-alone Adobe AIR window, with both offline and online support.

Once you’ve installed the application and entered your credentials, you’ll be prompted to authorize the application with your Remember the Milk account and synchronize your tasks down to the desktop client. As long as you are connected to the internet, the client will operate in “online” mode, adding or updating your to-do items immediately, but when you go offline you’ll be able to use the cached set of items and they will synchronize again the next time you are online.

The application is still a little rough around the edges, and not everything is supported—the noticeable lack of smart list support will keep me from using it, but it’s a very promising new tool for keeping yourself organized with Remember the Milk. App for the Milk is a free download for all platforms, requires Adobe AIR.

Originally posted 2009-09-29 18:25:28. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Windows only: Fans of TweetDeck with a preference for open source will love MahTweets, a plugin-based Twitter client that also integrates with Facebook, Flickr, Twitpic, and more, and offers all kinds of handy customizations.

The first thing you do upon opening MahTweets is choose what plugins you want to install. Right now it’s only got a few, but they give you the opportunity to choose what networks you want integrated (including Facebook, Twitter, and RSS) and where you want to upload pictures (Facebook, Flickr, or services like TwitPic or yFrog). It then navigates you through the rest of the preferences, in which you can enable notifications, automatic translation, a screensaver based on your networks, and tweak a bunch of performance-based options.

After you’re done with the initial setup, you’ll see the client itself. It starts off with only one column (shown above), but you can add as many as you want, with all sorts of different kinds of filters in each to keep your groups organized (like TweetDeck). In addition to the basic features for updating your status, sending direct messages, and re-tweeting, you can also take webcam snapshots, upload pictures to Facebook or Flickr, and view links to pictures inline—no more clicking on links to open images in your browser.

MahTweets is a free download, Windows only.

Originally posted 2009-10-20 18:25:18. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Windows/Linux: Whether you want to produce an amateur news segment, deliver a teleprompted speech, or just record a video message without a lot of “ums”, free, open-source application TeleKast is a solid desktop teleprompter worth checking out.

Over at cool-stuff blog Cool Tools, former TV commercial director and producer Jeff Bragg gives TeleKast a runthrough in the video below:

TeleKast if a free download for Windows and Linux only. It’s currently an alpha release, so you might expect a little bugginess—but it worked like a charm in my tests. If you’d prefer a little teleprompter action without installing an application, check out previously mentioned CuePrompter.

Android: Got an Android phone? Got contacts on AOL Instant Messenger, or chatty friends on Facebook? AIM now has an official chat client in the Android Market, one that can run in the background and connect to Facebook and Twitter too.

There’s not all that much more to say about AIM for Android—it asks for your login credentials, and if you head into the settings, you can feed it your Facebook login as well, and it will send and accept chats across both fronts. If you want, AIM can hit you with your friends’ status updates, update your own at the same time as your AIM status message, and even post to Twitter, too—though there are certainly better dedicated clients for that purpose.

It’s likely the most guaranteed means of keeping a connection across AIM’s servers, and since AIM can run silently and ping you on new messages, it makes good sense as an Android app.

AIM for Android is a free download for Android phones only. AIM’s product page hasn’t updated to announce it yet, but should soon.

Android: There’s no built-in means of syncing bookmarks to your Android phone, unless you open and enter each one. Interactive bookmarklets, too, are generally a no-go. With the MyBookmarks app installed, you can sync bookmarks and install (most) bookmarklets in Android’s browser.

To put it simply, you download MyBookmarks from the Android Market to your phone, then run it. You’ll get a long string of numbers as your unique ID, and have the option to wipe out all your existing Android bookmarks. Before you hit another button on your phone, export all your bookmarks from your desktop browser to an HTML file, enter in that numeric code your received on your phone, then upload that file to MyBookmarks’ webapp in your desktop browser. You can, of course, edit and remove unnecessary bookmarks from the HTML file, provided you’re handy with the syntax.

On your phone, you can now hit “Import your bookmarks from RerWare.com,” and it looks for the latest HTML file uploaded under your ID number. When it matches up, you can import them all at once, or approve each bookmark, one by one. When you’re done, you’re done—all your approved bookmarks and bookmarklets are loaded in your browser.

As far as which bookmarklets work and which don’t, those that mostly pass information between sites—Evernote, Readability/Instapaper, and translation tools—seem to work, while those that activate the browser’s pop-up input window seem stuck in the mud. Still, something is better than nothing, since Android’s browser doesn’t let you natively save bookmarks without some kind of http:// at the front, and most bookmarklets start with just javascript:.

MyBookmarks is a free download for Android systems, and it’s made by the same crew as the MyBackup tools, so it doesn’t seem like an attempt to steal your private bookmark data. Still, go ahead and edit out any bookmarks out of your export file that you don’t feel like making semi-public.

Know of a more elegant bookmark syncing solution for Android phones? Tell us about it in the comments.

Chrome: If you’ve ever wanted to see what people are saying about a web page you’re visiting beyond the site’s own comments, Chrome extension Twitter Reactions will show you the most recent tweets that are talking about the page.

The idea isn’t unlike other universal commenting systems, like Google Sidewiki—but instead of just seeing the comments of Google Toolbar users, you can see what the entire Twitterverse is saying about the page that you’re on. It takes a bit of filtering with all the retweets or simple linking going on on Twitter, but it’s definitely interesting to see what people are saying beyond the site’s integrated comments and who’s linking to it—especially if it’s your own site or blog (you might be surprised how many people have linked to you on Twitter!).

Twitter Reactions is a free download, works wherever Google Chrome does (Note that you need to be on the beta channel for Linux or the dev channel on OS X for extension support). Thanks, Chris!

Windows only: Distraction-eliminating application CinemaDrape covers your desktop with a black screen except for the application you’re currently working in, so you can eliminate background distractions and help yourself focus on getting something done.

The application is provided in both the installable and portable varieties, but the installed version is easier to use—you can simply use the Ctrl+F12 shortcut key combination to launch the dark screen effect for the current window under the mouse. If you were using the portable variety instead of the installed version, your best bet would be to setup a shortcut and assign the shortcut key manually.

Once you’ve switched into distraction-free mode, you can easily resize the dark screen area, use the Esc key to close out of the dark screen, or you can also right-click anywhere in the dark area to access the options menu, where you can setup pre-defined areas or change the other options like opacity and colors. CinemaDrape is a free download for Windows users only.

iPhone: We can’t think of a person who couldn’t use a little help with everyday planning, research, and chores, but unfortunately we can’t all afford a personal assistant. Siri is a smart voice-recognition virtual assistant for your iPhone.

Give the video above a look for an idea of how Siri works. Essentially, you speak your bidding, it interprets what you say, and it goes hunting for what it is that you want. Ask it to look up movie showtimes, make reservations, get a taxi, fetch flight info, set up reminders, or just get the weather forecast. Granted, you can find plenty of tools to do these things separately, but Siri culls all these tasks into one smart, voice-activated app.

Siri is a free download from the iTunes App Store, so if you’re interested, there’s no harm in trying it out. Thanks Bryce!

Android: Got a blog? Got a Droid, Nexus One, or other Android-powered phone? Now you can write, edit, moderate comments, and preview your posts and pages with WordPress’ own Android application.

The app’s exceedingly similar to what’s available on the iPhone, except, well, you use “long presses” instead of sideways swipes to act on posts, comments, and pages. You’ll need to enable XML-RPC under the “Remote Publishing” section of your Writing settings at your WordPress blog, but it’s just a single checkmark to tick.

Here’s the app in action, courtesy of WordPress:

WordPress for Android is a free download for (you guessed it!) Android phones, available in the Android Market.

Windows: If you checked out the Mac-only Ommwriter and were disappointed that there wasn’t an equivalent tool for Windows, you’re in luck. CreaWriter is a distraction free writing tool that lets you customize your writing experience.

Click on the image above for a closer look.

CreaWriter is a free Windows download that creates a distraction free writing zone. The screenshot above is the entire screen, no toolbars, alerts, or widgets visible. In fact the icons you see in the upper right corner are only there when the mouse is passed over them—they allow you to create a new document, save your document, and make minor changes like increasing or decreasing the font size for ease of use. You can save your work as a TXT, RTF, and DOC, compatible with nearly every word processor around if you want to important it for post-editing.

CreaWriter has both a background image and background ambient noise enabled. You can disable them all together and just have a white writing space, but we customized ours—we liked the RainyMood site so much that we shared with you last week, we made our background noise a rainstorm and found a picture similar to the background image of RainyMood. If you want an in-depth look at all the features you can check out the overview at How-To Geek or jump right to the author’s site below to download the application.

CreaWriter is freeware, Windows only.