Filed under: Internet Tools

Syphir first attracted my attention when they announced that they were using OAuth for Gmail (meaning that you did not have to provide your login information to Syphir in order to use it). They have a $3 iPhone app that receives push notifications, but it will work without the app or even if you -- gasp! -- don't have an "iDevice."

Note: I'll refer to this as "Gmail," but it works equally well for Google Apps. I'll also refer to sending the iPhone notifications, but it works just as well on the iPad. The app is mostly just there to receive the notifications, so you'll probably never notice the pixel doubling.

What does Syphir do? It lets you create "Rules," which are like filters in Gmail, but Syphir has some extra features that Gmail doesn't offer. After setting certain criteria for the Rule, you can have Syphir archive, mark as read, star, delete, apply a label, remove a label, alert the iPhone, or delay the email.

Read on for more details...

Evernote announced a new extension to their platform today, Trunk. It's essentially an App Store for Evernote, highlighting applications, hardware and platforms created by third parties which integrate with Evernote in various ways. Trunk offers easy access to new tech for users, as well as a means for third-party developers to capitalize on their work.

Evernote has been a shining example of making good on the "Freemium" business model, where you offer a basic service for free and provide an upgrade path to paid plans (in Evernote's case, a $5 per month Premium plan). It's a very common business model on the 'net, but not everyone manages to turn a profit on it to the extent that Evernote has. The announcement of the Evernote Trunk includes the promise of an App-Store-esque model for developers to make money and share in profits.

Among the developers featured on the Trunk and in today's press conference were Egretlist, Voice2Note, SAP StreamWork and social application Seesmic. The latest version of the Evernote Mac client has a button in the top toolbar for Trunk, where you can see services, mobile and desktop apps and hardware which can be added to Evernote to expand its functionality. Some services are free, some are premium. Voice2Note, for example, adds search to voice notes and the ability to add notes via your phone. 5 transcriptions per month are free, but you pay about $30 a year for unlimited transcriptions plus the ability to tag notes by adding "tag with..." to the end of an audio note.

Social notebooks from the likes of BlackBook and Make Magazine are now available through Trunk as well. Evernote also mentions potential future enhancements such suggestions (similar to SpringPad, I assume) and semantic analysis.

Notable, but not part of any press coverage today, is a change in the tag display of the new Mac client. Selecting View > Show Unassigned Tags will trim the visible tags in the sidebar down to just tags related to the current search or selected note. It's a major improvement to usability and one I'd been hoping would show up for quite some time.

Evernote is a free service which can be upgraded to transfer 500MB per month and store any type of file for $5US per month or $45US per year. The desktop client for Mac is free, and so are the iPhone and iPad versions (the iPad app is especially cool). Take a look, and check out the Trunk to see what functionality you might want to add to Evernote.

Quickr is a $0.99US iPhone app to take pictures and quickly post them to your Tumblr account. Here's the simplest explanation I can give for how Quickr lives up to its name:

Steps necessary to take a picture and post it through the Tumblr app:

1. launch Tumblr app
2. tap post (assuming you have the dashboard shown by default)
3. tap photo
4. tap "take new photo"
5. take picture

Steps necessary to email a picture to Tumblr from the iPhone camera app:

1. launch camera
2. take picture
3. tap button to see photo library
4. tap arrow at bottom left
5. tap "email photo" (wait for Mail to launch)
6. tap 'to'
7. fill in email address for your Tumblr

Steps to post a picture using Quickr

1. launch Quickr
2. take picture

Quickr will let you decide if you want to store the picture in your iPhone's library or not (you can set a default yes/no and then change very easily it for individual pictures from inside the app). As of v.1.0 posting to "sub-Tumblrs" is not supported, but I spoke with the developer and he is planning to include support for that in the future. He also mentioned that a bug exists in 1.0 which prevents the app from running on an iPad. A fix has already been submitted to the App Store. (Even though the iPad doesn't have a camera, Quickr will eventually allow you to upload pictures from your photo library on the iPad.)

The bulk of the pictures that my wife and I take with our iPhones are intended to be posted to Tumblr, so Quickr is going to get a lot of use in our house.

In the Network Settings pane of your System Preferences, you may have noticed that you can manually set the DNS servers your connection will use. There are a few reasons for doing this, namely speeding up the time it takes to look up any given website, but also to bypass some annoyances in your ISP's (or IT department's) default name server. Such annoyances could include domain blocking, censorship and other things you may or may not know are even happening. For the most part, though, you'd change your DNS settings to make sure you were using the fastest possible server from your current location. Read on to find out how!

If you have ClickToFlash installed, you may have seen a note telling you that you have an old version of Flash and encouraging you to upgrade.

As you might expect, you don't need to upgrade Flash, but you do need to upgrade ClickToFlash. The current version is ClickToFlash-1.6b7-upload1.zip, but you may have go to the Github page for ClickToFlash to download it.

Jonathan Rentzsch explained that he hasn't been able to update it himself due to illness. However, given that it is open-source, four others (identified as ndfred, Justin, ssp and lapcat) identified the problem and a solution, and Rentzsch merged it back into the main branch of the code.

That's pretty awesome, if you ask me.

So if you've run into this problem at YouTube, take a few minutes, download the new version, quit Safari, and run the installer. Voilà!

Every year there is a torrent made to let listeners download most of the music for SXSW. This year's torrent has recently been posted (previous years' are also available at the same site). I don't usually use Bittorent, so I asked around for client suggestions; Transmission seems to be a favorite among several of my TUAW colleagues.

I also remembered a tip from my friend Guillermo Esteves (who did the awesome Star Wars crawl using only HTML and CSS), about using Dropbox to start torrents remotely. Guillermo provides some detailed instructions for Transmission and µTorrent to set them up to "watch" a folder for new .torrent files, with an important caveat to make sure that you don't download the files to your Dropbox.

One additional Transmission tip: be sure that you un-check the box next to "Display 'adding transfer' options window" so that files will automatically be added, and be sure to check the box next to the "Start transfers when added" option. Guillermo shows both of those settings in his screenshots, but it took me a few minutes to figure out that I had them set incorrectly.

Then I asked myself: "How can I be even lazier?" and I remembered Hazel, a program for automatically moving files from one folder to another based on a set of predefined rules. So I added a Hazel rule for ~/Downloads/ which will move any file where "Kind is BitTorrent Document" to my ~/Dropbox/Torrents/ folder. I repeated this on both my iMac and my MacBook Pro. Now I can be on my MacBook Pro and download a torrent file to ~/Downloads/ and have it moved to my Torrents folder, and have the torrent automatically start downloading on my iMac. So when I'm done with my MacBook Pro I can just close it without having to worry about interrupting any of my downloads.

You may have noticed that we're big Dropbox fans around here. We use it for syncing Things or instead of a USB sync cable or keeping our notes with us or sharing screenshots, along with any number of other uses. Do you know of any other unusual uses for Dropbox? Let us know in the comments.