Fragmented Tech

OmniFocus ($19.99) - The powerful (and expensive) to-do list. Makes good use of the iPhone location feature to show you what tasks are closest to where you currently are. Also syncs with the desktop version of OmniFocus.

Truveo - Search and watch videos from a ton of different websites (YouTube, DailyMotion, CNN, Revision3, and a lot more). Try the web version here.

BoxOffice - Get movie times and RottenTomatoes ratings for the latest movies. Easier to use than Movies.app and trailer links are coming soon

Tomatoes - Search RottenTomatoes for movie reviews. Currently a bit light on features, just has search and doesn’t show any of the reviews.

Save Benjis - Price search on the iPhone. Searches dozens of stores, gives you product description and reviews.

Shazam - Hold the iPhone up to some music to identify the artist, album and track. The service is free for a limited time.

Midomi - Identify artist, album and track by either singing into the iPhone or holding it up to a speaker. Doesn’t seem to be as accurate as Shazam.

Last.fm, Pandora, AOL Radio - Stream music to your iPhone, as long as it’s in the foreground.

Twitterific - Interface is a bit laggy, but offers some neat features. Includes a mini-browser so clicking links keeps you in Twitterific. Also has a cool posting interface. Wish the location feature could be disabled, posts your exact longitude and latitude. I’m sticking with m.twitter.com

WeatherBug - The only free weather app, and it works pretty good. Radar is overlayed on Google Maps so you can zoom and move exactly where you want, but it isn’t animated.

Facebook - Includes chat, but without background processes it’s not as useful. Also doesn’t display all the information that the iPhone web version does.

Enigmo ($9.99) - Excellent iPhone game. Challenging, but not impossible.

Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D ($9.99) - Nice kart racing game with 12 tracks and 8 weapons

Super Monkey Ball ($9.99) - 100 levels of over-sensitive controls

AquaForest ($7.99) - Play with water, fire, explosives and more. Confusing interface and kind of laggy

iMaze, Spinner - Maze games controlled by accelerometer

Tap Tap Revenge - Guitar Hero on your iPhone

Other Apps - Banner Free (scrolling LED banner), Blip Solitaire (one-person Pong), Morocco (Othello), Light, NearPics (pictures near you), RotaryDial, PhoneSaber, AIM, LifeGame

Am I missing any great apps? What are your favorites?

I just found a new Firefox extension called CyberSearch. This extension allows you to get Google search results (and site search results) in the Firefox 3 Awesome Bar (aka address bar). After typing your query into the address bar, you’ll see the first set of results from your history and bookmarks, but below will be live search results from Google.

CyberSearch Screenshot

The other way the extension can be used is through keywords. When using keywords, the extension will search Google, other Google products, or search Google but limit it to a specific domain.

For example, starting your entry with ‘goog’ will search just Google and hide any results from your history or bookmarks. Or start with ‘wiki’ and the extension searches just pages from en.wikipedia.org. You can set up multiple keywords that can even search multiple domains.

You can also page through results by adding a number on the end of your query (’goog bill clinton #2′ shows the 2nd page of results, ‘goog bill clinton #3′ shows the third, etc)

Check out their video demonstration:

[from Google System]

TrackThis is a small project that has been in my notebook of ideas for awhile, and I finally started working on it during the past couple weekends. It’s a simple Twitter service that allows you to track FedEx/UPS/USPS/DHL over Twitter.

After following the @trackthis bot, send it a direct message with the tracking code and a nickname for the package (ex. 123456789123 Macbook Air). Then any time your package changes location the bot will send you a direct message like:

Depending on how your account is set up, you can get the updates over email, IM or SMS (IM and SMS both have a “Direct Messages only” option). For the complete instructions (there isn’t really more to it) head over here. If there’s any problems/questions just contact me.

I’ve seen a lot of new Twitter services being brought to my attention in the past couple of days. Three of them seemed very interesting, since they all help with gathering information through the Twitter network.

ChaCha Launches Twitter Service

ChaCha, a service where humans answer your questions via SMS, also operates on Twitter. Send your question to @ChaCha and a human guide will respond with an answer and URL. ChaCha is best for finding out small factoids, scores of a game, etc. If you’re looking for some user feedback or recommendations, the next two services will be more useful. This service seems most useful for information on the go, since a quick Google search is probably faster. Read more info about the service.

@Answerme, It’s Like Yahoo Answers for Twitter

I first saw @answerme mentioned a couple days ago and is similar to an idea that I was working on. The tool provides a way for you to ask a question to a larger audience than just your followers. After sending a message to @answerme the question will be posted on the website, and re-tweeted on the account. Any Twitter user can reply to your question by sending a message like “@answerme @pb30 The Mac is superior.” The person who asked the question can then pick a winner. See the complete instructions for more.

PollDaddy Launches Twitter Polls

PollDaddy recently launched Twitter Polls, an easy way to create a poll and post it to your Twitter account. There’s no real special functionality here. But all the configuration is on one page and it doesn’t require a PollDaddy account.

I often hear that the power of Twitter is the ability to find high quality information fast. However this often comes from the A-listers who have thousands of followers. It’s nice to see some tools to even out the playing field.

I’m currently subscribed to around 70 RSS feeds, which can definitely get overwhelming. One tool that has helped fend off the information overload is AideRSS. This is a great service that filters out the less important or less popular stories from any blog feed. It has really changed a lot of my RSS feeds, especially for big, active sites.

AideRSS looks at a given RSS feed and ranks each of their posts. It looks at the amount of attention a post is getting and compares it to other posts from the same blog. Each post is assigned a number, known as PostRank. The PostRank is calculated by looking at comments on the post, if it was posted to Digg or del.icio.us and how many other blogs link to that post. AideRSS then gives you five options for new feeds: All posts, Good posts (any post that scored over a 3), Great posts (over 5), Best posts (over 6) and the Top 20.

AideRSS works best with larger sites where users are commenting and other blogs are linking to them. Smaller sites will just have a very low PostRank for each post and may be slightly skewed by a bunch of spam comments or other factors. The one downside of the service that I’ve found is that it delivery of new items can be a bit delayed. So if you check your RSS frequently expect to get AideRSS feeds in chunks rather than a slow trickle.

They also recently announced an AideRSS Firefox Extension that integrates with Google Reader (currently in private beta). The extension adds the PostRank score to each blog post as well as some of social statistics for each post. Check out their video for more:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdJKA2o1tww]

I’d definitely recommend trying out AideRSS on some of your feeds. If you start using it (or some other filtering system) let me know what you think in the comments.

Like this post? Be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed to get more like it! I’ll be posting more of my favorite tools over the next couple weeks.