All articles tagged , App Store, iPhone, iPod touch, Productivity, Reading, Tips, Utilities, Web Apps

We already told you about Instapaper, the magnificent bookmarking web app that you can use from your desktop browser or on your iPhone or iPod touch. As you browse the web and find content you don’t have time to read, but want to save it for reading later, you simply tap a bookmarklet to send it to your Instapaper account where it will be saved for easy access later. You can access all your saved items from any web browser making it easy to flag web pages from your desktop, then read them later when you’re on the go.
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If you do any social networking with your friends or colleagues online, then you know what a pain it is to check all the sites to monitor their activity. You have to go to each site, sign into your account, check the updates. This gets more and more tedious as you connect with more people using different social networks. You’ve got friends on YouTube, and some are on Facebook, your colleagues are on LinkedIn, he uses Digg, she uses Flickr, you get the idea. It’s getting to be a big distraction just to keep up, and your CPA (constant partial attention) is getting stretched to its limit.

Enter FriendFeed, a social media aggregator that combines activity from all of your social networks into a single stream. While FriendFeed does not currently have a mobile-friendly version of the service, there are other ways of using it on mobile Safari and we’ll tell you how after the jump.
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Those of you who follow Apple’s iPhone web applications list may have noticed a rather popular entertainment app known as Zinio. Released back in November, the Zinio Mobile Newsstand is just that: a collection of digitized real-world magazines all catalogued and each displayed front-page first for easy perusal. Last week, Zinio increased its selection by adding 20 new titles. Periodicals range from a variety of topics and include Popular Mechanics, Men’s Health, Elle, Macworld, and Reader’s Digest, among others.
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Not long ago, we introduced you to Evernote, a killer application that syncs your notes between your desktop and your iPhone without any Jailbreak or hacking required. This week, Evernote released a significant upgrade that transforms an already wonderful tool into a must-have for any iPhone or iPod touch owner. The iPhone’s lack of a decent notes application has left most of us scrambling for little workarounds or hacks just to get notes from our devices back to our computer. Evernote accomplishes this feat quite nicely, but honestly, it’s all the other features of Evernote that mitake it absolutely invaluable. We use Evernote every single day and depend heavily on it for the bulk of our writing and research. Evernote excels in the capturing and organization of ideas, and it works for desktop, web, and mobile. Unfortunately, the product is only available in a private beta, but the kind folks at Evernote have given us another pile of invites for our Touchtip readers. Read on to find out more about the newest features Evernote has to offer and how you can get your greedy little hands on an invite to the beta. And if you have already had the chance to try out Evernote, let us know how you like it so far.
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Last week we told you about the update to Google Reader that brings its iPhone interface closer to its desktop sibling. If you use Google Reader on the iPhone as much as we do, then you’ll probably like this really cool iPhone trick that lets you continue using the iPhone version of Google Reader while using your desktop browser. This fun little trick is great for keeping an eye on your RSS feeds while you continue to work or surf the web in your browser’s main window pane. After the jump, we’ll tell you how to set this up in Firefox since we’re big fans of that browser, although this trick should work in any web browser that has a sidebar feature.
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Google has updated its iPhone optimized version of Google Reader making it the absolute best way to read news feeds on the iPhone. You can expect a bevy of native RSS apps to flood the App Store in June, but we think they’ll have a tough time trumping Google’s web-based reader for the iPhone. This week’s update enables mobile users to star items for later reading, and browse large lists of items. These changes bring Google Reader for the iPhone much closer to its sibling app for the desktop web. One really nice new feature is the expanding list that shows you the entire news item within the context of the list so you don’t have to go back and forth between article content and the list view. The new features are still in beta which means users navigating to Google Reader will still see the old version unless you point to the URL to the beta below.

Google Reader for iPhone and iPod touch (beta)

www.google.com/reader/i/

Here at Touchtip, we truly appreciate beauty, like the sexy design of the iPhone, or the female form. Playboy magazine, the procurer of lovely airbrushed women, has been delivering the goods to us for over 50 years, starting with print, then on the web. And now Hef, never content to be late to the party because he is the party, brings his bunnies to the iPhone and iPod touch. Gone are the two-creased centerfolds and in their place are digital images of Playboy girls for your pinching pleasure on your touch screen interface. Playboy’s new iPhone-optimized web experience contains some interactive features that’ll keep your sweaty fingers tapping well into the night. Read on to find out what Hef and company have in store for you, including a link to download some tasty wallpapers for your iPhone and iPod touch.
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Wowio is must-have resource for any one that uses iPhone or iPod touch for reading. The library of free eBooks at Wowio is deep and every book in the database is available for downloading to your mobile device. Wowio’s free eBooks are all in PDF format and organized into popular categories. You can also search for specific books by title, author, ISBN, or keyword. Unlike reading books on Amazon’s Kindle, the PDF format preserves the visual richness of print books so you can really appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into a book’s typography, layout, and images. Wowio takes advantage of this by serving up one very impressive menu of free comic books and graphic novels that can be enjoyed on the iPhone or iPod touch’s high resolution displays. This is one of the major shortcomings of the Kindle. Getting free eBooks at Wowio only requires that you register, and registering at Wowio is a just a bit different from most sites but there’s a good reason for it. We’ll tell you why after the jump.
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