Page2RSS – Create an RSS feed for any web page

                

If you publish content, then you need to provide an RSS feed for your audience, and that’s pretty much all there is to it. In fact, RSS has become so prevalent that if some of your potential readers can’t find a feed for your content, then they’ll probably ignore what you have to offer. I’m not at this point just yet, but I will say that I’m both surprised and disappointed when I find a regularly updated resource that lacks an appropriate feed. I just don’t see how content publishers can ignore this vital step. As a reader, when you find a site that doesn’t syndicate, you can use Page2RSS to create a custom feed for that Web page. 

 

                Just type in the URL, click the button, and you’re done. All that’s left to do is subscribe to the feed by copying the RSS or Atom feed into your feed reader. The page will then be monitored for updates, and you’ll receive all of them in your familiar aggregator. For example, the custom feed for the sparsely populated Google home page will notify you whenever a new text blurb or logo makes it to the front page. Try the example on Page2RSS to see what I’m talking about. A Page2RSS bookmarklet is also available to help simplify the creation of these feeds.

Apple Kills Jailbreaking in New iPhone 3GS

Apple plays what its CEO Steve Jobs once likened to a game of "cat and mouse" with iPhone unlockers and jailbreakers. Jailbreakers, like the iPhone Dev Team, try to release the iPhone from being limited to the official iTunes app store and other firmware restrictions, while unlockers, such as George Hotz, use the jailbreaks and other techniques to unlock the phone, allowing it to run on any hardware-supported network.

Usually the unlockers/jailbreakers seize the day, but occasionally Apple will win a round. Apple has tried many approaches -- everything from "bricking" unlocked iPhones to denying jailbroken iPhones access to the iTunes store -- to halt the spread of unlocking in the U.S. and force people to use AT&T, despite the hardware being capable of working on other carriers such as T-Mobile.

Now, Apple has managed to gain an upper hand over the persistent hackers according to iClarified, thanks to the release of a new bootrom, iBoot-359.3.2. The phone firmware, which shipped on new iPhone 3GSs starting this week, closes previously used doors to exploits.

PhotoshopStar Birthday Bash (Free Giveaway)

PhotoshopStar are giving away some amazing prizes to the visitors who comment on the post as well as to bloggers who link them to the post and to their sponsors. So Comment & link back to their post today and win the cool prizes.

Prizes for leaving comments

Simply leave a comment below and get the chance to win one of the following:

• 2 x one-year deviantART subscriptions
• 2 x three-month deviantART subscriptions
• 1 x one-year subscription to GameWallpapers
• 1 x one-year subscription to CGWallpapers
• 3 month free hosting with Host Gator (Hatchling package)
• 2 x copies of Killer Domains e-book by Daily Blog Tips

Prizes for linking back

If you want the chance to win one of these prizes, then please link back to this post from your blog; all you have to do is link to this post and our sponsors.

• 1 x one-page coding job by PSD2HTML.com ($211 value!)
• 2 x Developer Licenses to Blubs WordPress theme ($198 value)
  
• 3 months advertising on PhotoshopStar ($150 value)

Sponsors

Many thanks to our sponsors who donated prizes:

• Blog Perfume and WebAppers (Blubs theme)
• PSD2HTML.com (free coding)
• The University Kid (one-year dA subscription)
• Daily Blog Tips (e-books)
• India Photoblog (GameWallpapers subscription)
• OIOpublisher (CGWallpapers subscription)
• Prizes that aren’t accounted for are donated by PhotoshopStar

Pepsi Apologizes For iPhone App That Gets Girls

US soft drink giant PepsiCo has apologized for a free iPhone application crafted to help men seduce women and keep records of conquests but the program remained available on Tuesday.Pepsi's "AMP Up Before You Score" iPhone application categorizes women into 24 types and then uses the Apple smartphone's Internet capabilities to link users to information about them and what they like.
AMP is an energy drink made by PepsiCo.
"Let's say you meet a girl who is way into being green and you need a vegan restaurant stat; we've got you covered," a voice-over maintained on Tuesday in an online Pepsi video about the AMP at YouTube.
"If you are anticipating a successful night, the Before You Score app gives you up to the minute information, feeds, lines and much more to help you amp up and talk to 24 different types of ladies."
Types of women listed in the application include punk rocker, bookworm, aspiring actress, artist, and sorority girl.

WordPress 2.6

Now you can start downloading Wordpress Version 2.6 “Tyner”. WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in Wordpress version 2.5. Here is a brief video tour of 2.6, if you have 3 minutes and 29 seconds to spare, it’s worth a watch: 
 

Here are some of the smaller features and improvements in 2.6:

• Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
• Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
• Bulk management of plugins.
• A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
• Plugin update notification bubble.
• Customizable default avatars.
• You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
• Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
• Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
• You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
• Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.
• Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
• Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.

Free iPhone GUI PSD 3.0

Apple’s official release of the new iPhone 3.0 software came a number of new graphic elements. the iPhone GUI PSD holding off updating the Photoshop file, Apple’s SDK is amazing, but when we need to mock up something quickly for a pitch we turn to this.

Some of the changes and additions in the 3.0 PSD include:
• Map and map elements including curl
• Copy and paste elements
• Timeline bar editor
• Horizontal iPhone
• Horizontal Panels bars and keyboards

Features Planned for WordPress 2.7

It has been only a couple of weeks since WordPress 2.6 has released and there is already talk about a much more feature rich version in the making. WordPress 2.7 has several exciting features planned/proposed as discussed in informal meetings on IRC and the feature votes being posted on the Codex. Though there are very few hints hint of a release date, I expect it to be released by the end of 2008.

Here is a list of features that will be introduced into WordPress 2.7:

• Comments API – This according to me is the most exciting feature, it will allow developers to create offline integration of comments management, where users could use desktop clients to manage comments (moderate, edit, reply, delete, spam, unspam).
• Keyboard shortcuts for comment moderation – This feature will help users to quickly moderate comments using keyboard shortcuts, so you can expect key combinations like Ctrl + S to spam a comment, Ctrl + A to approve and so on.
• Theme Update API – WordPress 2.5 and above have really made plugin management quite easy, you automatically receive notices when a new update to a plugin is available and can upgrade it without having to manually upload it to your FTP server. With this addition WordPress aims to bridge the gap between theme developers and the users for publishing updates to themes.
• One Click Plugin Installs – Installing a plugin will be much easier with One click plugin installs. A plugin with similar features called One Click Plugin was the winner of the Plugin Competition last year.
• WordPress core updates – This is a feature many users have been waiting for, with core updates you can easily upgrade your WordPress versions. The WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin performs the same task.
• Default Sitemaps – WordPress 2.7 will include a default sitemap creator, which will create Google XML sitemaps for your blog. Google Sitemaps Generator plugin is the best option available right now for creating XML sitemaps.
• Admin Panel Comment Replies – This plugin will help administrators to reply to comments using the admin panel. There are several plugins which allow you to do so right now, including WP AJax Edit Comments, Better Comments Manager and Absolute Comments.
• Comment Threading – This feature will allow users to reply to other commentators in a threaded manner, where replied comments will display below the actual comment, WordPress already has the ability to scale to accommodate threaded comments, without requiring database changes. Brian’s Threaded Comments is a does the job of allowing users to reply to comments.
• Subscribe to Comments – The WordPress team is also planning to include a option to allow commentators to subscribe to follow up comments, but this is marked as a question, so it may not actually make it into WordPress 2.7. The Subscribe to Comments plugin does the job to notify commentators on follow up comments.
• Widgets for Dashboard and Write Box – This feature will allow users to re-arrange the widgets on the dashboard and write page to suit their preferences.
• Batch Editing of Posts – This feature will allow users to batch edit their posts. Though there is not much information available about this right now, and I could not really find more from my research on the topic.

With WordPress 2.7, we may see many popular plugins retire because of direct integration into WordPress core but we should have better functionality and easier management of daily blogging tasks from within the vanilla WordPress install.

There are several other interesting features, you can take a look at them by visiting WordPress codex. Thanks to QuickOnlineTips for drawing my attention to the new features.

China: Wi-Fi-free iPhone Officially Lands!

It could be the Year of the iPhone in China, as Apple officially started selling its iconic smartphone in the world's largest mobile market Friday night.

While China saw nothing near the frenzy of the first iPhone launch day here in the U.S., crowds there did honor the tradition of lining up for the phone many hours in advance at several locations. A few hundred people queued up in the rain and cold outside The Place shopping center in Beijing, for example. There, Zhi Xianzhong became the first person to get the iPhone from Apple partner China Unicom after waiting 7 hours and 40 minutes, according to China Daily.

As expected, China Unicom, the country's second largest telecom operator after China Mobile, is selling two versions of the iPhone in China under a three-year deal with Apple. But cost could prove to be a deterrent. Prices range from 4,999 yuan (about $732) for the 8GB 3G model to 6,999 yuan (about $1,025) for the 32GB 3GS phone (sans contract).

How To Remove FeedJit and MyBlogLog Footer

For those who runs their own Wordpress or blog, here is a excellent tips on how to remove FeedJit, Advertlets and MyBlogLog Footer. You can do this by customizing the CSS in your theme folder, which is called "styles.css"This tips was provide by NoktahHitam.
 
To remove FeedJit footer, paste these lines in your CSS. This will remove both the footer and header.
 

.FJ_Heading {display: none;}
.FJ_TrafFoot {display: none;}

To remove MyBlogLog logo, Use this.
 

.mbl_fo_hidden {display: none;}
.mbl_h {display: none;}

Free iPhone App: Turns Your iPhone Into A Halloween Scream Machine

OT: The Halloween Scream Machine (App Store link) is a free iPhone app for Halloween.
It plays back creepy sounds and soundtracks, and it also lets you record and play back custom samples.

Download Manager for Mozilla FireFox (Extension/Plugin)

DownThemAll is a great download manager / accelerator extension for Mozilla Firefox. It’s a powerful and easy to use Mozilla Firefox extension that can pause and restart downloads at any time, without losing data, and enables users to quickly download all the links, images or embedded object contained in a web page from a single click. 

With DownThemAll, you can download all the links / images in a website and much more with the ability to refine those downloads by fully customizable criteria. This download manager for Mozilla Firefox supports both HTTP and FTP protocols. 

Another great thing about this download manager is that it features an advanced accelerator that increases speed up to 400% and allows you to pause and resume downloads at any time and, last but not least, it’s fully integrated into Firefox.

Features:-

• Complete integration with Mozilla Firefox
• Have your page spidered with a single click
• Have all the files you want with just one click
• Filtering has never been easier
• Advanced auto-renaming options
• Increase your download speed up to 400%
• Pause and resume your downloads
• In case a file already exists, you can choose whether your downloads have to be renamed, overwritten or aborted just by setting a default behavior.
• You can customize time-out interval, as well as the maximum number of simultaneous downloads.
• Customize notifications, choosing between Firefox sidebox alerts, alert boxes, or simply nothing at all.
• If you want it, dTa can close the source tab when the download starts.
• You can choose to close dTa automatically when all downloads are completed.

Official Website | Install It

Free iPhone Apps to Make Money More Easily Thanks to Apple

Apple said Thursday that it will let iPhone application developers offer their users the option to buy additional content or features within a free app on its App Store.

App developers said they received an email notice from Apple informing them that the in-app purchase feature was now available for free apps and that it would “simplify your development by creating a single version of your app that uses in App Purchase to unlock additional functionality, eliminating the need to create Lite versions of your app.” A spokeswoman for Apple confirmed the news.

The in-app purchase feature, which was first introduced in March, allows developers to offer fresh content for purchase within an app such as new levels in a game, additional books in an e-book app, or expanded capability in productivity apps. The caveat, however, was that the feature was only available for paid apps, which meant that developers had to charge at least 99 cents.

Developers say that the latest announcement helps in two ways. First, it makes it much easier for them to make a business out of free apps. Until now, developers sold ads within their free apps or tried to convert users to a paid version with more content.

10 Firefox Extensions for Google Services

Here is a list of Extensions for Firefox to exploit the best Google services:-

• Better Gmail 2 0.6: Add useful extra features and skins to Gmail, like hierarchical labels, macros, file attachment icons, and more.
• CustomizeGoogle: It is a Firefox extension that enhances Google search results by adding extra information (like links to Yahoo, Ask.com, MSN etc) and removing unwanted information (like ads and spam).
• GBookmarks: Creates a menu to access Google bookmarks from any computer. Needs Google Account to use this extension.
• Gmail Notifier: Adds on a status bar to indicate the arrival of a new mail.
• Google Calendar Notifier: This extension provides robust notifications and display of your Google Calendars for today, as well as showing any upcoming all day events
• GooglePreview: Inserts preview images (thumbnails) of web sites into the Google and Yahoo search results pages.
• Google Reader Notifier: This Firefox extension shows you how many unread items you have in your Google Reader account.
• Gspace: This extension allows you to use your Gmail Space (4.1 GB and growing) for file storage. It acts as an online drive, so you can upload files from your hard drive and access them from every Internet capable system.
• GTranslate: With gTranslate you can translate any text in a webpage just by selecting and right-clicking over it. The extension uses the Google translation services to translate the text.
• Locator: Locate highlighted address on Google map and simply highlight the address, right click with mouse, select ‘Locate on Google Map’ in popup menu and your place will be shown on Google map.

Start Your Car from Anywhere with Viper SmartStart iPhone App

t is probably a safe bet to assume anyone with a car and an iPhone has said, “man, I wish this thing could start my car.” Maybe you’ve been walking to your car on a frigid night or a scorching day, but you’ve wondered about it, haven’t you? Maybe you remember this early post from your favorite remote control blog. Viper, a leader in car security and remote starters, must have been paying attention — because they just turned that spoof into reality with Viper SmartStart for the iPhone.

SmartStart is a free iPhone app that allows you to start your car from basically anywhere via your wireless service. Now hold your horses (or Vipers) — it’s not just going to magically start your car. There is the $300 Viper SmartStart Module that you are going to have to have professionally installed in your car, as well as an annual $30 subscription to get that gear on the cell network. The first year of the service is free, so I suppose that helps. Kind of reminds me of OnStar.

Pricing aside, the SmartStart system seems pretty cool. It’s certainly the most impressive remote start system I’ve seen. First, the app can be used to start any of your cars that have the module installed — which has to be pretty helpful for car collectors and large families. You can also unlock any of your cars — from anywhere — which would definitely come in handy if you were to, say, locking yourself out of the car when you are away from home.

Top 10 Popular Wordpress Plugins

If you are running your blog from your own hosted website, most likely you will be using WordPress Platform. WordPress is great by itself, the majority of WordPress’ usefulness comes from its plugins and themes. Some of the best and most creative features come from plugins, and because plugins are so easy to create and install, there are literally thousands of WordPress plugins. 

If you’re new to WordPress Platform, you will have difficulties in finding the appropriate plugin . Sometimes there are ten plugins doing the same thing, which makes it difficult to find the plugin which works the best. Or, you just simply don’t know that a plugin exists. That’s why I’m here to help. Here is the list of Top 10 Popular Wordpress Plugins for your site.

• All in One SEO Pack – Automatically optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).
• cformsII – contact form – cforms II is the most customizable, flexible & powerful ajax supporting contact form plugin (& comment form).
• WordPress.com Stats – You can have simple, concise stats with no additional load on your server by plugging into WordPress.com’s stat system.
• Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog.
• Akismet – Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.
• WP Super Cache – A very fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static html files.
• Wordpress Automatic upgrade – Wordpress automatic upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the Wordpress installation to the latest one.
• WP-PageNavi – Adds a more advanced paging navigation your WordPress blog.
• WP Ajax Edit Comments – Allows users and admin’s to edit comments on a post. Users can edit their own comments for a limited time, while admin’s can edit all comments.
• WP-PostRatings – Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page.

eBay Made $400 Million This Year From Its Free iPhone App

According to eBay CEO John Donahoe, shoppers have already spent about $400 million on the popular commerce site using the company’s free iPhone application.

The number pales in comparison with eBay’s total sales figure ($59.7 billion last year), but it’s fairly significant considering the fact that the iPhone has a relatively small market share – about 15% of the smartphone segment – and mobile payment transactions are still new to many. Who would have predicted around half a billion dollar in sales a year would be recorded through the eBay iPhone app when it debuted on the App Store last year?

According to this report by the Financial Times, some wealthy people have used the mobile app to buy a Lamborghini, a Bentley and a $150,000 boat. And if Mobile Marketer heard Donahoe right when he talked numbers at a summit in Las Vegas, the Lamborghini went for $350,000. Talk about being at ease with making purchases from mobile devices.

Most likely, these are the high-profile exceptions to the rule and most people use the app to buy books, clothing and electronics much like regular eBay shoppers do. In total, approximately 4.6 million iPhone owners have downloaded and installed the app to date.

Win a free iPhone business app worth £5,000

The iPhone has taken the business world by storm. And as more and more business iPhone apps hit the Apple app store, Real Business brings you an exclusive offer: a free iPhone app, developed bespoke for your company.
Real Business has teamed up with smartphone app developers Mubaloo to offer one lucky reader a unique iPhone app for their business. There's no catch. All you have to do is dream up your ideal business app, describe it in 200 words or less, and the lovely people at Mubaloo will choose the winning entry and create the app - FREE.
If you want to give your business a boost, give some thought to an app that could drive users to your website, extend your brand or simply bring in some much-needed cash. You never know, your app could get made.
For every business, there is an iPhone app. What's yours?
To enter, go to the Mubaloo/Real Business competition page.

Wordpress Plugin : Liz Strauss Comment Counter

Do you want to place a comment counter on your blog? Now you can do so with Liz Strauss Comment Counter. It is a Wordpress Plugin. It is a highly configurable “Internet badge” that shows the number of comments your WordPress blog has. Use it either to show off how social your blog is, as an incentive for commenter’s to be part of it, or just because it’s fun. Apart from it’s easy to configure colors, typeface, and text to show.

Features:-

• Performance: the plugin generates a static image every time a comment is left (or an admin moderates one). The benefit is that, when showing the badge, nothing dynamic is generated on the fly by the webserver. 
  
• Failover: if for some reason your server was not able to generate a static image (write permissions or whatever) the plugin falls back to generating the badge on the fly, so you always have something to show.
• Minimal overhead: state of the art code that loads only when needed, and the plugin adds a grand total of zero extra database query.
• Compatibility: the admin interface either runs as a widget (with no extra “Settings” page created) or as a traditional plugin.
• Flexibility: just like your Feedburner badge, except there’s more options!
• Neat interface: one click color presets, killer Farbtastic color picker, and cute FamFamFam icons
• Ready for translation: polyglots, a .pot file is included. If you happen to translate the plugin, be sure to send me your work so I can include it in the archive! (Please send your .mo and .po files to ozh at planetozh dot com)
• Fun: well yes, it’s just fun to show how many comments you have.

Screenshots of the admin interface
General view of the interface:

 

Super hot color picker :

 

Color presets if you’re not sure what colors to start with:

How to make $900+ a day with Free iPhone Apps

Some free iPhone apps rake in far more revenue than their paid counterparts. Take Inedible Software’s Shotgun, a free app that lets you load and fire a virtual shotgun by tilting your device accordingly, sort of like you’d wield the real thing. Thanks to in-game ads, this app rakes in $900+ in daily revenue, none of which is shared with Apple. While Shotgun fights for shelf space and your attention in the App Store alongside thousands of other free iPhone apps, it pairs the concept of free with an eyebrow-raising idea to raise above the mediocrity of junky $0.99 offerings.

Developers are taking notice of ad-supported apps.

Drawing from the nation’s obsession with guns, the app reproduces the loading and firing sounds of a shotgun. The twist: the app taps the iPhone’s accelerometer sensor to simulate the loading and firing. For example, in order to cock the on-screen shotgun, hold your device vertically and tilt it rapidly down then up. Do this right and you’ll hear a recognizable sound of a shell being chambered. From there, simply align your device horizontally and tilt it up sharply to fire the gun. That’s all there is to it, really.

Unlike most entertainment apps fitting a similar description, such as fart machines and steam generators, Shotgun is provided free of charge in exchange for putting up with small 300×50 pixel adds that rotate at the UI bottom, courtesy of the Palo Alto startup dubbed MobClix. Hailed as the largest mobile ad exchange network, MobClix connects iPhone developers to thousands of advertisers who buy ad slots in mobile apps.

TwitterFox (Extension/Plugin)

Recently I have found a brand new Firefox Extension, to shout in Twitter. TwitterFox is a Firefox browser extension that allows you to post twitter notifications from right within your browser. If you spend most of your time in Firefox this extension would be best extension to Tweet in Twitter. It not only enables you to post twitter notifications but it also checks your Twitter account for your friend’s tweets and updates. This extension adds a tiny icon on the status bar that notifies you when your friends update their tweets. Also it has a small text input field to update your tweets.

New feature of Version 1.6.1:-

• Fixed conflict with Organize Status Bar extension.
• Remove cookie preference. Twitter no longer supports same cookie of browser and API client.
• Enabled spell checker spell candidate menu.
• Added cs-CZ locale

Free The iPhone! Latest iPhone Version Gets Jailbreaked Again

Apple's hardware team can't seem to keep their close platform closed

Apple has a big headache. That headache is iPhone unlockers and jailbreakers. With iPhone jailbreaking, the powerful handsets are no longer constrained to only run the apps that Apple allows. And with unlocking, users can jump onto other networks, leaving Apple's partner AT&T and its patchy 3G network behind.

Apple has long and unsuccessfully waged war with the unlockers. It has tried to brick their iPhones. It has tried to release new firmware versions to try to lock them out. But ultimately, time and time again, Apple's best hardware and software engineers are finding themselves outwitted and befuddled by the persistent hackers.

Leading the crew is George Hotz, a 20-year-old New Jersey native who goes by the aliases geohot, million75, or mil online. When he was just a teen, he became the first to develop a procedure to jailbreak the iPhone allowing its use on other networks. The move netted him a hot car, extra iPhones, money, and fame. Now slightly older and a month out of his teenage years, Hotz continues to be among the most prolific iPhone unlockers, consistently outsmarting Apple.

Now Hotz has released his latest masterpiece, blacksn0w, a free unlocking utility that works with the latest iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS hardware (the latest 05.11.07 baseband, which locked out previous hacks). The unlock works with a new version of Hotz's popular purplera1n jailbreak hack, dubbed blackra1n. Together the hacks can both free the phone from the AT&T network and Apple's app restrictions.

Beautiful and free social website icons

 

Here is a set of Beautiful and free icon set of the most popular social websites on Internet. This Icon set consists of 10 icons which is StumbleUpon.com, Ma.gnolia.com, Technorati.com, del.icio.us, DesignFloat.com, Digg.com, RSS, Twitter.com, Facebook.com, Reddit.com. Each icon is produced in the following sizes: 80×80, 64×64, 32×32. These icons are not meant for commercial usage and these free icons are intended only for your personal or educational use. These icons set are exclusively designed for you guys by Templates.com. If you are so curious about the icon design, you can learn more about the icon creation process Here. You may download it absolutely free of charge and the download link is below.

Jailbroken iPhones Get Rickrolled by Worm

Worm is first known iPhone worm, originated in Australia, may be spreading overseas

Rick Astley, an English singer-songwriter and musician, first became famous for his 1987 hit "Never Gonna Give You Up". The music industry in the 1990s gave up on Astley, but Astley didn't give up on it. He managed to recapture attention in 2007 thanks to one of the most infamous viral video crazes. Links popped up all around the internet to Astley's hit and the term "rickrolling", originally referring to tricking people into watching the video, became a common colloquialism.

Now an internet worm is achieving what Apple has been unable to do -- punish those with jailbroken iPhones (phones freed of Apple's app restrictions). Sophos, a leading security firm, appears to be the first to have investigated the amusing virus. The virus, which "rickrolls" users, changing their wallpaper to an image of Rick Astley. It appears to do little else other than spreading to other jailbroken iPhones in the user's contact list.

The worm can infect any jailbroken iPhone with SSH installed and an unchanged default password. The password on jailbroken iPhones defaults to "alpine". Users can change this by installing the MobileTerminal app, available from the Cydia undergound app store, and typing the command passwd.

Wordpress Plugin : JP Admin Stylish Blue

WordPress 2.5 introduces two new color schemes to your admin area: Classic and Fresh – If you dislike both, try JP Admin Stylish Blue. This plugin adds the additional color scheme "Stylish Blue" to your admin area. The custom style bases on the classic WordPress color scheme and was pimped up a little bit for more style, clearness and readability. 

Screenshots 

Login Page

The Dashboard

Write Post

Manage Comments

General Settings

Adobe Gets Aggressive With iPhone Flash Failure Message

Company hopes that Apple's customers will voice their frustrations and demand Flash

Adobe's Flash supports a large portion of the internet's rich content. And it will soon be coming to almost all smart phones, opening a world of internet possibilities. All the smart phones, that is, except one of the most popular smart phones on the market -- Apple's iPhone.

Apple remains cold and aloof about the topic of Flash. While the iPhone could easily support hardware-accelerated Flash, CEO Steve Jobs has stated in interviews that Flash is irrelevant and not something that iPhone customers have demanded. He insists the iPhone is the perfect internet phone -- even if it can't run Flash.

Adobe seems to be hoping to push Apple's customers to demand the feature with a new humorously passive aggressive browser failure message.

On the iPhone customers trying to use Flash now get a message stating:

Apple restricts the use of technologies required by products like Flash Player. Until Apple eliminates these restrictions, Adobe cannot provide Flash Player for the iPhone or iPod Touch.

Before the message merely read:

To view this content upgrade your browser and flash plug-in.

Will the new message inspire users to complain to Apple, or will it merely annoy iPhone users, making Adobe look bad? It should be interesting to see how Apple's customers react to the new, more pointed error message.

30 Google Chrome Tips, Tricks and Shortcuts

Just few days after Google Chrome was released, Paul Douglas from TechRader has provided 30 Tips, Tricks and Shortcuts for Google Chrome.

1. Create desktop and Start menu shortcuts to web apps such as Gmail – go to Gmail.com and then select Create application shortcuts… from the Page Control menu (in the top-right corner of your browser – it looks like a page with the corner folded over). Now choose where you want to place your shortcut. This works for other Google apps such as Calendar and Documents, and other services such as Windows Live Hotmail.

2. Control + Shift + N open an ‘incognito’ window – sites you view in this window won’t appear in your history and cookies served by sites in this window will be deleted when the window is closed.

3. You can open a link in an incognito window by right-clicking the link and selecting Open link in incognito window.

4. Alt + Home loads your Google Chrome home page, with thumbnails of your most visited sites shown in the active tabbed window.

5. Control + T opens a new tab. You can drag tabs around to change their order or drag a tab out of the window into its own window.

6. Control + Shift + T opens your most recently closed tab. Press the key combination again to open the tab closed before that one. Google Chrome remembers the last 10 tabs you’ve closed.

7. Jump to different open tabs using Control + 1, Control + 2, Control + 3, etc. Control + 9 takes you to the last tab.

8. Control + Tab lets you cycle through your open tabs in order.

9. Control + Shift + Tab cycles through your tabs in the opposite order.

10. As with Firefox 3, you can drag a link onto a tab to open it in that tab, or drop it between two tabs to open a new tab in that position.

11. To bookmark a site click the star on the left of the address bar and then select a folder to add it to.

12. Control +B hides the Google Chrome bookmarks bar. Press Control + B to bring it back again.

13. Right-click or hold down the back button and you’ll get a drop-down list of sites to go back through. Show Full History, at the bottom of the list, opens a new tab with your full browser history.

14. Control + H is a faster way to bring up the History page.

15. You can delete history for chosen days by scrolling to the day you want to delete and clicking Delete history for this day on the right-hand side of the window.

16. Control + J brings up your Downloads page.

17. To clear an item from your Downloads page, right-click an entry and select Remove.

18. Press Control + K or Control + E to search from the address bar. Once pressed, you’ll see a ? Symbol appear in the address bar and you can simply enter your search query and hit Return.

19. Right-click the top of the browser window and select Task manager to see how much memory different tabs and plug-ins are using. Highlight one and click End process to stop it running.

20. Shift + Escape is a quicker way to bring up the Google Chrome Task manager.

21. To see what plug-ins are installed, type about:plugins into the address window.

22. You can also type the following commands into the Google Chrome address window: about:stats, about:network, about:histograms, about:memory, about:cache, about:dns.

23. Type about:crash to see what a crashed tab looks like.

24. A three-second diversion: type about:internets. (Only works in Windows XP.)

25. Edit any web page – right-click a page and select Inspect element. Now edit the HTML source code and hit Return to view the changes.

26. To make Google Chrome your default browser, click the Tools button (in the right-hand corner of the browser window – a spanner icon). Select Options, click the Basics tab and then click the Make Google Chrome my default browser button.

27. To delete cookies, go to Tools > Options > Under the Hood. Scroll down to the Security section, and click Show cookies. Now you can click Remove all or remove individual cookies.

28. To clear more data such as the Google Chrome browsing history and cache, click the Tools icon and select Clear browsing data…

29. To clear the most visited web sites that appear on your Google Chrome start page, you must clear your browsing history using the method above.

30. Clearing your Google Chrome browser history will also stop matches from previously browsed sites appearing as suggestions in your address bar.

Shazam Limits Free iPhone App, Adds $5 App

Shazam, which names songs by listening to a clip that’s playing on the radio or stereo, is one of the most popular cellphone applications to date — and one of the rare few to turn a profit. It’s been downloaded more than 10 million times and has sold out its inventory of advertising space, according to maker Shazam Entertainment. After listening to and identifying the song that’s playing, Shazam also links to iTunes, taking a cut from the fee people pay to download songs from Apple.

However, Shazam says it makes most of its money by selling the app to paying customers, such as on BlackBerry smart phones or through deals with carriers such as Verizon , chief executive Andrew Fisher said.

“When we started, we charged for the product,” he said, adding that the free iPhone version was a “departure.”

Shazam had hoped that mobile advertising and iTunes downloads would sustain the free app, but with the recession, that has not happened. The company is now fixing that detour by tacking on a $5 charge (like all paid app downloads from its App Store, Apple keeps 30% of the charge). Mr. Fisher says mobile advertising was one of the first victims of the recession, and he doesn’t expect ad rates to bounce to levels to sustain free apps for at least two years.

A free version of Shazam will still remain on the iPhone, but it will only name up to five songs a month. To get more, customers will have to cough up for the premium edition. Existing Shazam users, however, can keep using their free, unlimited versions.

“Historically, people have been conditioned to pay for applications,” Mr. Fisher said. He said he doesn’t know how many people will download the premium version. It adds music recommendations, top-hits charts and a search feature to look up a song by name or artist.

I ♥ twitterkeys

Recently Twitter has redesigned its Micro Blogging Platform site. Along with that, the guy at the Next Web has created TwitterKeys. It is a browser bookmarklet that pulls up expressive characters for easy copy & paste of all those crazy Unicode symbols that people love to include in their emails and blog posts. The TwitterKeys are divided into 3 Pages. See the link below to add TwitterKeys to you Twitter. 

TwitterKeys | Part 1

TwitterKeys | Part 2

TwitterKeys | Part 3

iPhone App Developer Quits The Facebook App Project

“My decision to stop iPhone development has had everything to do with Apple’s policies.” – Joe Hewitt

In the early days of social networking, the dominant player was MySpace. As time went by, MySpace was joined by other players like Facebook and Twitter. MySpace has since lost the top position in the social networking world to Facebook.

In October, traffic numbers for September 2009 for social networking sites came in and Facebook had over 300 million users, pushing MySpace to second place in user numbers. One of the things that Facebook users on the iPhone enjoy and that contributed to the user numbers is the Facebook iPhone app, which is the most popular app on the App Store.

The developer that built the Facebook app for the iPhone has quit development for the iPhone and passed the app off to another engineer at Facebook. TechCrunch reports that Facebook App developer Joe Hewitt is still at Facebook and is simply working on new projects.

Exactly what projects the Hewitt is working on are unknown. As for the reason why the developer stopped developing for the iPhone, the reason is clear. Hewitt said, "My decision to stop iPhone development has had everything to do with Apple’s policies." Hewitt says that he is "philosophically opposed" to the existence of a review process and that he is worried Apple's policy might be implemented by other companies seeking to mimic Apple's App store success.

Apple has been under increasing scrutiny for its practices of approving and disapproving apps that are seemingly haphazardly enforced. Apple has found itself in hot water with the FCC after the FCC asked AT&T and Apple to explain why they rejected Google Voice from the App Store.

Restore the old Facebook Layout

Recently Facebook has rolled out its new interface to all the Facebook users. But some of them finds the new design complicated and they find the new layout are not user friendly. But Sizlopedia has provided a great technique on how to restore back the old Facebook Layout. This technique will help for those who finds the new interface complicated. There are two method involves to restore the old interface. 

 

Method#1 involved two steps: 
 
1. Add the Developer application from here.
2. After adding that application, click the link below to get the old Facebook back.
    http://apps.new.facebook.com/?fbnew_opt_out=1

Method#2 involves making use of a Greasemonkey script which can be downloaded from here. For those of you who don’t know, Greasemonkey is a browser extension for Firefox that allows you to install custom scripts for enhanced functionality on various web services.

Dropbox Launches Free iPhone App

Dropbox released a free iPhone app! The app is of course free, and offers access to your Dropbox while you’re on-the-go. Access, view and download your files right from your iPhone for offline viewing. Take new photos or videos and sync them to your Dropbox… Or even share links to files in your Dropbox, all from the convenience of your iPhone.

In case you’ve never heard of Dropbox before, here’s the official skinny:

Dropbox is software that syncs your files online and across your computers.

Put your files into your Dropbox on one computer, and they’ll be instantly available on any of your other computers that you’ve installed Dropbox on (Windows, Mac, and Linux too!) Because a copy of your files are stored on Dropbox’s secure servers, you can also access them from any computer or mobile device using the Dropbox website.

HelloTXT Status Manager

Are you having trouble on managing your social network and microblogging status? This is where HelloTXT helps you. With HelloTxt you can post your status once and have it appear automatically on all of your networks, allowing you to keep all of your friends up to date with ease. It also lets you read your friends’ updates from main microblogging and social networks all at once. Below are the features of HelloTXT:-

• Multiple Social Service management. Allows you to have one personal and one professional Twitter account.
• New media management. This feature makes it easier to enrich your status with pics or video.
• Added advanced status. You can add a title to your status for the social services that allow it, like Tumblr.
• Post your pics directly on Tumblr. Soon available also for Facebook and other socials that have pic management.
• Improved Account Page here, you can manage your LifeStream.
• Added comment on your Pics or Video and also Status update.
• Fully compatible with IE6 and IE7, Opera 9.x and of course FireFox, Safari and Chrome.
• There are other new features that you can discover directly on HelloTxt.

HelloTXT | Home
HelloTXT | Register

Free iPhone App Detects Bad Breath

Though OraBrush doesn't say exactly how its app detects bad breath, this piece of software will definitely be a conversation piece when out with friends. Plus, you can "easily post the hilarious responses of any breath test on Facebook or Twitter for other friends to enjoy." Video after the break.

Wordpress Plugin : Social Networking Plugins

There are alot of social networking plugins for Wordpress CMS. But here are my top 5 favorite Social WordPress Plugins…

1. SimpleTwitter – It allows Wordpress blog owners to add Twitter messages to their templates. Once installed, the plug-in is used by adding the following call in a template.
2. ShareThis – This WordPress plugin provides a quick, simple to use, and unobtrusive way for users to add your post to many social bookmarking sites, or to send your post link via email, AIM, Facebook, MySpace and more.
3. Stumble Reviews – Add the reviews that appear on StumbleUpon for a given page to be displayed on that page.
4. Digg Digg – Integrate Digg Button into Wordpress Content, Setup screen provided to let user choose where user want to display Digg button.
5. Social Bookmarking RELOADED – Add the social bookmarks service’s icons to your articles in your blogs in order to submit them easily. Plugin based on Apostolos Dountsis one.

10 Firefox Extension for Handy Blogging!

Mozilla Firefox works great on its own browser, but it’s the thousands of extensions that make it shine. I have pulled together about 10 add-ons which provide a quick access to handy blogging tools.

• Wordpress.com Sidebar – Adds a quick access sidebar to get to your WordPress.com account.
  
• Firefox Universal Uploader – Universal program for uploading to sites such as Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, and Facebook.
• FireFTP – It is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.
• Adsense Notifier – Displays your current earnings from Google Adsense in the status bar.
• ShrinkThisLink Link Shrinker – Use the ShrinkThisLink service without leaving the page.
• StumbleUpon – StumbleUpon discovers web sites based on your interests, learns what you like and brings you more.
• ScribeFire Blog Editor – ScribeFire is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog.
• SEOpen – Provides some basic tools to help with search engine optimization. Including google backlinks, yahoo backlinks, PageRank check, http header viewer, and more.
• PayPerPost Opps Hider – Doesn’t it annoy you that PayPerPost opportunities can’t be hidden? There are tons that you can’t post or don’t want to take. With this extension you can easily hide PayPerPost opportunities by clicking a small checkbox.
• coComment – This extension allows you to activate coComment! from the right-click context menu and reduces your onscreen movement time so that you don’t have to move all the way from the comment text box to the Bookmarks and then back to the Submit

New iPhone Worm is Very Malicious

Jailbroken iPhone users with SSH and a default password are the target

The iPhone is one of the most popular smartphones on the market. By most accounts, the iPhone is the most likely of all smartphones to be used on the internet to access files on the go. There are also a growing number of iPhone users who are jailbreaking the devices to use unauthorized Apple software or to use the devices on other carrier networks.

Over the last few weeks, a worm targeted specifically at iPhones which are jailbroken and have SSH installed with the default password was found. The original worm was nothing more than an irritation and would change the background image of the iPhone to a picture of washed up pop star Rick Astley. Embarrassing for sure, but hardly what most would consider malicious.

A similar worm targeting jailbroken iPhones with SSH and the default password -- alpine -- is making its rounds in the Netherlands. The new worm is different from the first in that the latest is clearly malicious and has a financial motive behind it for the worm maker. BBC News reports that security firm F-Secure discovered the worm and that it targets users of Dutch online bank ING. The worm infects the iPhone and redirects the user to a fake login page.

Mikko Hypponen from F-Secure told BBC News, "It's the second iPhone worm ever and the first that's clearly malicious - there's a clear financial motive behind it."

Customize your Facebook Layout | PageRage

Are you bored of your current Facebook Design and are looking to customize your Facebook profile page? Now you can customize your Facebook Profile with PageRage. You can simply change the background layout/design on your Facebook Profile.

 

First of all you need to add the PageRage Super Profile (Facebook Application) and you can choose your preferred Layout/Design. There is a lot of skin to dress your Facebook Profile. The problem of this application is your friends need Yontoo Layers (Firefox Extension/IE Add-ons) to view your layout/design.  

 

So this means your friends are only able to view your layout/design on Browser which they installed Yontoo Layer. Yontoo Layers currently works with Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2.x on Windows XP and Vista, as well as Firefox 2.x on Mac OS X. If your friend doesn’t have Yontoo Layers, then they will be viewing the default Facebook design

iPhone 3G Speeds Tested & Compared, City by City

As wireless users know all too well, not all 3G networks are created equal. PC World recently put Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T to a multi-city test to determine which best delivers speed and reliability.

The magazine took a snapshot of the performance of those three major networks in 13 markets during March and early April (specifically, 5443 individual tests from 283 testing locations). Weather, time of day, and other variable factors not withstanding, the magazine found that Verizon had an average download speed of 951 kbps, and produced uninterrupted speeds in 89.8 percent of tests.

For its part, Sprint's 3G network delivered solid connections in 90.5 percent of cities tested, with average download speeds of 808 kbps across 13 cities, while the AT&T network's average download speed clocked in at 812 kbps. But where reliability was concerned, AT&T delivered only 68 percent of the time.

Using Twitter, Find Free iPhone Apps Which Were Paid

Twitter and the iPhone. They’re both pretty love-it-or-hate-it subjects — but put them together in the right way, and they’re wonderful.

Because everyone loves getting stuff for free that they’d normally have to pay for, 148Apps has thrown together a Twitterbot that monitors for premium apps that have dropped down to the gratis zone. Sure, they’re not always the best apps the store has to offer - but they’re free apps you’d otherwise have to pay for, and they’re finding dozens a day. What have you got to lose?

How to Make a free iPhone Ringtone from a Song

If you have a song that you want to turn into a ringtone, there's no need to shell out money for something you've paid for already. Making a free iPhone ringtone from a song just takes a few simple steps to complete.
These steps have been tested with iTunes 8.2.0.23 on an iPhone 3GS. If you are having trouble getting a song to show up on your iPhone after converting it to a ringtone and syncing, it might have DRM. These steps only work on songs not protected by DRM.
How to make a free iPhone ringtone from a song in iTunes

1. Locate the song you want to convert in iTunes.
2. Right click the song and choose Get Info.
3. Click on the Options tab.
4. Right down the Stop Time or copy it to the clipboard and paste it in notepad.
5. You'll have to modify the Start Time and Stop Time to choose only a 30 second (or less) clip for your ringtone. If you just want the first 30 seconds, just type "0:30" in the Stop Time. Make sure both are checked. Click OK when done.
6. Right click the song and choose Create ACC Version. You'll see it create a new song with the same name and a Time of 30 seconds.
7. Now, before you forget about it, right click the original song and reset the Start Time and Stop Time back to what it originally set to.
8. This is where it gets tricky. You will need to browse to your music folder. In Vista, this is as simple as clicking the Computer icon and choosing Music. In Windows XP, it is the My Music folder under My Documents. From here, you'll need to go into iTunes and iTunes Music and then browse to the particular song. These folders are arranged by artist and then album, so it should be easy to find.
9. Once you locate the song file, you'll need to figure out which version is correct. Hover the mouse pointer over the song and you'll see the size of the files. The one that is much smaller is the newly created file. (Remember, 934 KB is smaller than 2.54 MB.)
10. You need to copy this file to your desktop. You can do this by dragging it to the desktop, or by right clicking the file and choosing copy then right clicking the desktop and choosing paste.
11. Once it is on your desktop, go back to iTunes and delete the newly created song.
12. Now we need to set the right extension, so right click the file, choose rename and change the extension from ".m4a" to ".m4r".
13. To get it into iTunes, you should be able to just double click on the file. If that doesn't work, just drag it to where it says "Library" on the right menu in iTunes. If you don't already have a Ringtones section, it will create one at this time.
14. Once you verify it is in iTunes, you can delete the file from your desktop.
15. The last step is to sync your iPhone. Clcik on your iPhone under Devices, choose the Ringtones tab and either sync all ringtones or make sure the new ringtone has a check mark next to it if you sync only selected ringtones. Hit sync, and you are done.

Having trouble getting a song to convert? The most common problem is that the iTunes import settings aren't set to use the ACC Encoder. Got to Edit->Preferences in iTunes and on the first (general) tab click on Import Settings. Make sure it says Import Using ACC Encoder and then click OK.
If you are still having problems, try a different song. As I mentioned above, some songs, especially those with DRM, simply won't convert to a ringtone.

30 Best Free iPhone Photo & Video Applications

Editing, enhancing or having fun with photos in your iPhone is not a dream anymore as the latest 3Gs iPhone is now furnished with an auto-focus mechanism taking 3 megapixel images. A look around the internet will show you rather decent photos taken by iPhone as people quit printing photos – who will when with a few taps, they can share theirs instantly.
Plenty of photography apps are available for that cause, be it subtle enhancements or quirky modifications – It’s time to put your new iPhone on play and show off to your friends! In this article, we put together 20 Free Photography Apps and recommendation of some good paid apps. On top of that, we’ve also included 10 best Free Video Applications. Free apps after jump.

Photography Apps

Free Photo Filters
Free photo filters app provides filters include Lomography Filter, Poloarizing Filter, Black and White Filter, Retro Effect Filter and more.
SP Photo Fix Lite
You can fix your photo (brightness, contrast, sharpness, hue, saturation) before sending it by email directly on your iPhone.

PhotoBox
PhotoBox is the all in one solution for the weekend warrior photographer, giving you a large range of photo filters and effects.

Free iPhone Music - Only if Spotify is Allowed on the AppStore

"If Spotify has its way, iPhone owners will no longer be slaves to iTunes, song-by-song payments or finite disk capacity," Adam Taylor reports for TIME Magazine.

"Last week the Swedish company behind Spotify's streaming music provider announced plans to release a free iPhone application that will let users listen to songs played directly off of its online service, with no need to download," Taylor reports. "That would give iPhone users instant access to any of Spotify's 6 million songs, without taking up precious memory space — way more than the maximum 7,000 tracks that a 32GB iPhone can hold."

Taylor reports, "Songs can also be temporarily stored, or cached, ready to play during those moments when web connection drops, like when you're going through a tunnel or underground. Spotify's new application could change the way iPhone users listen to music. But first, it has to get the okay from Apple."

"Spotify's new application won't be available to everyone, only those who opt for the premium service, which costs $15 a month for unlimited streams... access to pre-releases and better audio quality than the free service, which forces users to listen to ads after every few songs," Taylor reports. "Spotify hopes to have its new application available on the iPhone within the next few weeks. The trick is getting Apple to approve an application that some observers see as a potential challenger to Apple's own iTunes."