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Are you an absolute sports junkie who needs to keep up with everything happening with your favorite team? There's no shame in that, as plenty of people love their favorite sports. There are plenty of websites out there that help you keep up with your favorite players and teams, but what if having to go to a website is not enough for you? What if you need your sports scores in your face at all moments of the day?
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In the past two hours, how many times have you glanced at your phone's screen? Twice? Five times? I wouldn't be surprised to hear if the number's even higher (do tell me in the comments). Some people view this as an unhealthy addiction, but that's a matter for another post. The fact remains we're looking at that small screen all the time, making it an ideal location for noting things for later.
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A lot of people monitor their favorite sites using RSS feeds or just regularly monitoring a long list of bookmarks, but if you get really busy, checking your feed reader or visiting all of your bookmarks to search for new changes on your favorite sites isn't always easy. So, I'm very happy to introduce a very cool Firefox plugin for Firefox users called AlertBox, a really convenient notification box in your browser window.
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I don’t know about you, but I’m getting increasingly used to being notified instantly about anything that happens. A new text message? I get a pop up and a sound. A new email or Facebook update? I get a red badge. A new update is available? I get an icon in my phone’s notification center. No matter how small the change is, I’m notified about it one way or the other. Unless, of course, this happens on my computer.
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We've previously covered different ways to create automatic workflows that separate important tidbits of information from the mundane. This article is about how you receive the information. The most obvious (and often also the easiest) choice is to keep notified via email. A relatively simple way to separate one from the other is to reroute selective notifications to a personal 'notifications' RSS feed.
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One thing that has managed to turn me away from Spotify for quite a long time is its limited support in hotkeys and media keys. Spotify works great with a select few Logitech keyboards, but not so much with hundreds of others. For years, I've been a loyal user of Winamp Lite because of the awesome support for global hotkeys. Spotify has yet to improve in this area, but luckily enough there are third-party developers who are willing to pick up that slack for them.
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If you are a fan of the online automation service site, If This Then That (IFTTT), you might be interested to know about the recent posting of two new Gmail actions which add to the growing collection of actions on the site. The two new actions consist of an "Any new mail" trigger which fires every time any new email arrives, and another Gmail automation, "New starred email," triggered anytime you star a specified type of email.
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These days, we're constantly barraged with email updates, system alerts, and annoying texts from hypothetical neighbors named Brad about how he got his pet chinchilla stuck in the dryer vent again. But for some reason, techsters tend to play the victim by saying they have to have their notifications turned on whether it for their Mac, PC, iPhone, or Android mobile. "Oh, but I may miss something..." "Oh, but I need to be available at all times"...yeah right.
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If you are spending too much time on Facebook, digging through updates you don't really care about, only to randomly discover what you are really interested in, and while feeling overwhelmed or guilty for wasting so much time, it is time to start managing your Facebook friends like a pro. Facebook offers several features that allow you to group your friends and manage what (likely) appears on your Facebook homepage.
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It's a lot easier to pin down specifics about a product when it's already out there. The Internet makes it incredibly easy to find dependable ratings and reviews for movies, music, games and literature, and consumer reviews are available for most popular consumer technology. Finding information about something that's yet to be released is a wee bit harder to do.
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Nowadays, my cellphone performs a more essential role to me as a PDA than a communications device. When I'm heading out, my smartphone manages my appointments (synchronised with Google Calendar), ensures I've got access to essential documents (through Google Docs and Dropbox), and gives me access to the Internet as an inexhaustible pool of reference material.
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Obsessively keep track of when your packages will arrive. Delivery Status is a widget for the Mac dashboard that’s actually useful – it tracks as many packages as you’d like from delivery services all over the world. With this simple widget you’ll always be up-to-date about when you should expect a knock on the door. [...]
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Notifications might be important to you, but do you need them in your email inbox? Probably not. Do yourself a favor - find all of the notification settings for all of your social networks in one place, then turn them off. NotifyMeNot is a simple webpage you can use to fight the flood of useless social emails filling your inbox so you can instead use email to read messages from other humans.
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Tweak the notification center in Mountain Lion to be somewhat useful, by adding notifications from the programs you care about to it. With a few tweaks you can add every Growl program to the notifications center, along with content from your favorite web sites and apps. You can even add all of your favorite TV show listings. My friend and co-host James outlined 8 tips for making great use of the notification center, and they're all solid.
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From experience, not an awful lot of people seem to realise it but the iPhone has support for custom vibrations. It might not be the most groundbreaking of features, but if you’re hard of hearing or just a sucker for silent mode then custom vibrations are a nice feature to have access to. In addition to the selection of inbuilt vibration patterns to choose from, there is also the option of creating your own from scratch.
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