How to Use Twitlet from the iPhone

Every now and then when I am browsing through websites on my iPhone, I have felt like Tweeting the website or the webpage link in a Twitter post. Its very easy to do this from your desktop via numerous tools - TweetDeck, Twitter website, etc. But on the phone, the only way to send a link to Twitter has been via SMS. But with no cut/paste in the iPhone (at least so far), I just didn't know of a way to send a link to Twitter without using SMS.

On the desktop, I have found the Twitlet bookmarklet to be the fastest way to tweet a link. But I tried it on the iPhone - it works like a champ. I didn't know earlier (and many probably still don't know) that some bookmarklets work on the iPhone browser too.

So try the Twitlet bookmarklet on the iPhone. 

Follow the following steps:

1. Create a Twitlet Bookmarklet with your Twitter account info in your Safari browser on your laptop/desktop computer which you use to sync your iPhone. 
2. In iTunes, in your Device page, under the Info tab, select Sync bookmarks with Safari.
3. Sync your iPhone. 
4. Now, when you are browsing on the iPhone, and you come across a webpage you want to tweet, simply open your bookmarks and select the Twitlet bookmark. 
5. A popup will show where you can tweet the page using the Twitlet. Even the #this syntax works to include the URL 

For your convenience I am including a screenshot of the Twitlet bookmarklet in action in the iPhone. 

Readability Bookmarklet Makes Reading a Clean Experience

If you are like me, you find your favorite websites or blogs more and more cluttered each day. I usually find articles and news items in websites like CNN, or blogs in a slender column on the left of the browser page, with a smattering of ads, links, flash widgets, Google ads, and other such annoyances all over the body of the article and to the right of the article. 

The Readability Bookmarklet has taken care of this headache for me. Save this bookmarklet in your browser link bar and click it when you want your reading to be a "clean" experience. It simply removes the clutter around the main body text you want to read, changes to font to a larger, easily readable one, and provides a clean white background. I am not kidding, it makes a world of a difference. And not to forget, its a much cleaner format should you decide to print the article too. (Added benefit, you might save some trees by not printing the random junk a.k.a. ads, and banners etc)

You can customize your bookmarklet to show you your article in any of the following formats: Newspaper, eBook, Novel, and Terminal. It allows you to select your text size, and the margin widths. I suggest you check out the Readability experiment website, the video within, and follow through to the bookmarklet setup page. You wont regret it. 

And now to show you an example, I am uploading a screen shot of the browser with a news article open on CNN.com. The first picture is the regular webpage. The second one shows what the Readability Bookmarklet does to enhance your reading experience. 

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Staple Free Stapler: No more "Where are the staples now!?"

I will add this to the list of things I don't need but I badly want.
As with the other stuff on my list of things I don't need, I didn't know such a device existed. Remember the Ginsu knife that can cut through a shoe? Well, now add this to the collection. A stapler than staples up to 5 sheets of paper without staples. We might as well call this the Stapleless Stapler, or better yet, Stapleless-er!
ThinkGeek :: Staple Free Stapler

Fast Company hops onto the Social Bus

Not sure why I browsed over to FastCompany.com but once there, I was pleasantly surprised by the new features. Fast Company has gone social. It pitches the idea of becoming a part of the business community, exchanging ideas with other readers on business issues, and engaging in activities like blogging, discussing in forums, answering posted questions etc. Its interesting to see how user based content is getting more and more adopted by websites as a strategy for making websites sticky. My take on this is: its a cross between Blogger/Wordpress, LinkedIn, a business magazine, discussion forum, and slow servers to host the applications.
Well, give it a try and see for yourself if you see the value. Its still quite new, and my test blog there "What's That Again?" showed up in the Featured Blogs section within minutes. It will be quite interesting to see how this latest social effort is faring in a few months. More updates on this coming soon.

ShrinkMyTunes - more music on your iPod, MP3 player or mobile phone

Calling out to all those iPod Nano 2GB users - if you are pissed off at not being able to fill up your iPod with more music, here's a way to get 4x more music (that's 8GB for you 2GB-weak-in-math-Nano-user). Try the ShrinkMyTunes software. I have not tried it since I am still 10GB away from using up my 30GB iPod, but give it a try before you cry about less music in the tiny flash drive your music player has. $39.99 does not sound like much if you are going to save all that money by not upgrading to a gazillion-GB iPod!
ShrinkMyTunes - more music on your iPod, MP3 player or mobile phone

Save paper, stop printing junk! Click2Zap Bookmarklet 1.1

Have you ever pulled up driving directions on Mapquest, then wanted to print it, only to find you end up with three pages because it prints out the three maps (which you didn't care about in the first place) and then prints out the adverts for low mortgage rate (or any other irrelevant-to-you ad). This not only wastes your toner/ink, it also wastes paper. So why not be able to get rid of all that junk and print only the relevant material -- enter click2zap. It's a bookmarklet for your browser that lets you remove elements from the webpage you are on, so you have a clean webpage remaining in the browser window waiting to be printed. I know, some would argue, selecting text and printing only the selection can work too, but what if you want to select several portions and print those out -- click2zap makes that easy. Try it out for yourself. mrclay.org » Blog Archive » Click2Zap Bookmarklet 1.1

Another alternative for removing elements in Firefox is an extension called "Nuke Anything" which adds a "Remove this Object" to the right-click context.

Whatever you end up using, I'd like to remind you to recycle materials, both paper and toner/ink cartridges!