I've been getting more and more frustrated with the fact that every time I load up Google Reader on my iPhone, I have to log in again. I tried it with and without my 1Password bookmarklet, checked my javascript and cookie settings, all to no avail. And it's not just Reader, everywhere I turn, I'm logging in again. It was with great relief that I discovered the cure.

iRemember is a lightweight hack that makes a few tweaks and tells you it's "safe to uninstall" before Installer even finishes cleaning up. Do you have a jailbroken iPhone or iPod touch with a foggy memory? Add http://repo.ispazio.net to your sources in Installer, refresh and search for iRemember. Your favorite web apps will give you a much warmer welcome.

[via Lifehacker]

Some things sound really cool -- until you actually have to step up and do them in real time. TUAW reader Gerald Buckley's story about traveling with his iPhone strikes me as belonging to this class.

When he approached the American Airlines counter to use his iPhone as a boarding pass, the coolness quotient for his entire trip got bumped up several notches. It seems that he navigated over to AA.com using Mobile Safari, signed in and displayed a PDF of his boarding pass on-screen. The American Airlines counter agent in San Antonio "humored" him and scanned the barcode as displayed on his iPhone. The scan worked, and Buckley proceeded with his travels (much to the envy and amazement of his fellow passengers, no doubt).

Here's the thing though. If it were me, this would have totally gone another way. First, while waiting on line, I would have had bad WiFi. It would have taken me about 20 minutes to type in my information and the people behind me on line would have been coughing *significantly* to get me to keep moving along with the line as I tried to type, move all my luggage and possibly keep three extremely rambunctious children in order. Finally, I would get to the gate agent and I would have gotten the snarky impatient version -- somehow I always do. Assuming that I could even get all the typing and navigation done, I know in my heart that the response would have been "you need a printed boarding pass, ma'am."

Of course, this is entirely academic because I have not been granted a boarding pass for the last 5 or 6 years due entirely, I'm sure, to my last name. It's always "You must check in at the counter" -- which is way easier than even a boarding pass because I just swipe my credit card.

All that having been said, TUAW congratulates Mr. Buckley's ingenuity and offers the example of his experience to speed you your travels in a uniquely geek fashion.

If you've got the travel bug (with or without your iPhone), be sure to visit our sister site Gadling for all things flight-related.

This morning, I Farked my way over to this story about British Tea Cakes. The tea cakes, which appear to be nothing more than British mallomars, have been re-categorized from biscuits to cake. Far be it from me to dispute the accumulated wisdom of the EU high courts, but from this American vantage point if it looks like a cookie and tastes like a cookie, perhaps the tea cake actually is a cookie -- and not a cake. I consulted TUAW's in-residence Britishness expert Nik, who threw up his hands and asked (justifiably) whether this was actually related to Apple or its products.

Being in a cookie-minded mode, I decided to respond to a reader who asked about issues on the iPhone in visiting mobile versions of sites that were less than accommodating upon revisits. Some mobile sites hide "log out and log in as another user" details in their mobile formats. (I would point the finger at FireEagle/Yahoo--but lately they've cleaned up those problems rather nicely.)

If this situation happens to you and you really need to access a site as if it were your first visit, let me recommend clearing your cookies. And yes, I can hear you groaning: "You want us to do...what?". Unfortunately, with Mobile Safari, cookie clearing is an all or nothing proposition. You can't just clear cookies associated with a single site. It's a clean sweep or nothing at all.

To do this, open Settings > Safari. Scroll down and select Clear Cookies. The iPhone throws up a pop-up confirmation. Tap Clear Cookies and quit from Settings. Your problem sites should now act as if it's your first visit.

And, as for that whole tea cake thing? If you serve cookies for supper, are they tea cakes rather than biscuits? British people feel free to expound in the comments.

We don't post about every website that comes up with an iPhone/iPod touch-optimized version -- if we did, we wouldn't have time for eating or sleeping -- but every now and then a couple of sites newly built for Mobile Safari rise above the pack. Today's launches for everyone's favorite "internet in your pants" browser include pro-social business networking site LinkedIn and collaborative calling tool TalkShoe.

LinkedIn's new iPhone beta version (at m.linkedin.com) allows you to view a list of your recent network updates, see your own profile (lest you forget your vital details) and search through your contact list. No editing options and no click-to-call or click-to-send buttons in this early version, but having the streamlined view is quite nice.

Meanwhile, over at TalkShoe (host site for the weekly TUAW live podcast) the team has released an iPhone version of the Talkshoe site at iphone.talkshoe.com. It does a nice job integrating the telephony component of the service with call selection and management. Using the new iPhone UI, you can quickly search for ongoing or upcoming calls, then single-click to call in and chat about your topic of choice. Naturally we have some suggestions.

There'll be a TalkShoe call tonight at 8 pm ET featuring our friends Victor Cajiao of the Typical Mac User podcast and Adam Christianson of the Maccast to discuss the new iPhone-optimized site. Should be fun.

via Macworld & iPhone Matters

Now here's a clever trick. Inventive Labs Gadgets has designed a Safari bookmarklet that adds "tabs" to your iPhone browsing experience. Just drag their bookmarklet into your Safari bookmarks bar, then sync your iPhone or iPod touch. (Make sure you've selected Info > Web browser > Sync Safari bookmarks in iTunes.)

Once synced, open a web page and then choose Tabulate from your iPhone bookmarks list. A small orange icon appears at the top-left of the screen. Next, tap on any link. The three-button control window shown here appears.

Tap on blue to open the link in the current tab, green to open the link in a new tab (i.e. a new Safari page, in iPhone terms), and orange to add the link to the list of flagged links to open later. The flagged items appear in orange at the top-left of the screen.

So how does it work? Not too badly. It's a little annoying opening the bookmarklet for each page and sometimes the javascript "took" better on some pages than others. That being said, I found it very useful to have around and it's staying in my permanent collection of iPhone javascript bookmarklets. Good job, Inventive Labs guys!

Thanks, Virginia. There really is a javascript clause.

Today the UK Register reports that Apple is preparing a WebApp catalog. WebApps are apparently already showing up in the recent downloads feed although the page they supposedly link to has not yet gone live. I downloaded the latest feeds page and did not personally find any reference to http://www.apple.com/webapps but maybe I just checked at the wrong time. If you find otherwise, let us know in the comments. An official Web 2.0 apps feed would be very nice indeed.

Thanks to Erwin Harte.

SPI Labs is claiming to have discovered a fairly significant threat to iPhone security due to MobileSafari's ability to dial phone numbers found on web pages. The feature can apparently be exploited in various ways, such as redirecting the actual call to a number other than what is viewed on the webpage, tracking calls placed by a site visitor, bypassing the confirmation dialog and forcing the call to continue and even preventing the phone from dialing calls altogether. Imagine clicking on a local number for a restaurant on a malicious website, only to discover you're actually calling an international number and, perhaps more importantly, paying international calling rates.

While SPI Labs has rightly chosen not to disclose the actual nature of the exploit and how to perform it, they do state that they have alerted Apple and are cooperating to plug these holes. If these security threats worry you, SPI Labs recommends that users simply don't use this feature for now. Ultimately, it is probably a safe bet that Apple is working quickly to plug security issues like this and other bugs for a future software update that will be delivered (hopefully) soon.

Thanks Eliot!