OmniFocus and Things come with beautiful and useful mobile applications for iPhone and iPad, but sometimes you just want to have more control over how tasks are added to their databases. Or maybe you can’t afford paying for multiple mobile versions of the same app and you just use the desktop application.

But you’re a great Dropbox fan, and we’ve shown you many creative uses of Dropbox in the past. You can use the service to sync bookmarks and passwords across devices and computers, store music libraries, even control your Mac using Applescript and Folder Actions. Today, thanks to the efforts of our good friend Gianni Rondini (@giannivt), we’re featuring an interesting way to add tasks (with optional notes) to Things and OmniFocus for Mac using Dropbox and HogBay Software’s PlainText, inspired by Elastic Thread’s method to control your Mac using Dropbox.

Check out the instructions and download links after the break. (more…)

Who said you can’t ‘multitask’ on an iPad (without installing the iOS developer beta)? Geeky Gadgets has a tutorial for a DIY HUD adapter/dock that holds your iPhone on top of your iPad. View media on your iPhone and surf the web on your iPad at the same time. (more…)

Geohot’s limera1n jailbreak came out two days ago with a huge drama over Twitter: the guy announced his “retirement” months ago, he didn’t tell anyone about his exploit and jailbreak tool, he released it a day earlier than expected leaving the Chronic Dev Team and iPhone Dev Team wondering what they should do with GreenPo1son, their own (and much anticipated) jailbreak tool based on the SHAtter exploit.

The Dev Team decided to save SHAtter for a future release of iOS, a not-so-popular but smart move looking forward. In this post we’ll show you how you can easily jailbreak your iPhone (or iPod Touch) running iOS 4.1 using limera1n and install your first Cydia apps on it. We’ll also take a look at the apps that are already working on 4.1, and which ones need an update. So wait no more, jump after the break! (more…)

WebP is a new image format announced by Google last week which aims at making the web faster by providing the tools to use high-quality, yet lightweight, images. While preserving quality and resolution, Google’s engineers figured out a way to compress images so to make them even smaller than usual .JPEG files. About the technical details:

WebP uses predictive coding to encode an image, the same methodology used by the VP8 video codec to compress keyframes in videos. Predictive coding uses the values in neighboring blocks of pixels to predict the values in a block, and then encodes only the difference (residual) between the actual values and the prediction. The residuals typically contain many zero values, which can be compressed much more effectively. The residuals are then transformed, quantized and entropy-coded as usual. WebP also uses variable block sizes.

Being a new file format, it’s not officially supported in browsers yet. Maybe it’ll be very soon, but right now it’s just a cool developer preview that shows what it’s possible to do with Google’s technology. Here’s how you can enable WebP in your Mac browser right now. (more…)

As you may know, I moved my primary work mail to Gmail using the Google Apps engine. I’ve always been a huge fan of Gmail’s web UI, but when Google announced Priority Inbox and the new accounts for Google Apps users (they’re basically just like personal accounts now, but they run on Apps) I thought it was the right time to switch. I haven’t looked back: Gmail is powerful and the Priority Inbox makes navigating through hundreds of messages a day a better experience.

Gmail comes with free online storage space. You can basically store as many emails as you want and forget about deleting attachments because the email provider requires so. So I thought: wouldn’t be great to be able to store files on Gmail and easily retrieve them from any device? It’s still normal email, with my files in it. Follow the instructions below to see how you can upload files from your Mac’s Finder to Gmail with just one click. (more…)

This is for all you old school Sega Dreamcast users – a hardware mod to use your old Virtual Memory Unit (VMU) as a handy-dandy sixth generation iPod Nano case. Just open the VMU unit, place the Nano inside the case, fit the headphone wire (with some work) and put it back together. Not only does this destroy Apple’s minimal design principles but it gives your Nano a protective beige case – but isn’t it cool? Pictures and video goodness below. (more…)

If you have just updated to iTunes 10.0.1, you might have noticed that Ping now comes with a sidebar and a dropdown menu to let you like and posts directly from your music library. While I appreciate this feature, some of you may be annoyed by the presence of that dropdown menu in the library, so jump after the break to find out how to remove that menu from iTunes 10.0.1. (more…)

Coming home upon the professor’s early dismissal of class, I decided that the thirty minute drive between headquarters and the college campus should be appropriately followed up with a bit of app updating, Instapaper goodness, a podcast or two, and a well deserved nap. Hastily stripping off my dress shirt, I slipped into the comfort of my couch, propped the iPad against a knee, and immediately ventured into the iPod app. And immediately I was disappointed that I didn’t have the latest podcasts downloaded yet. Oh, the inconvenience of it all!

Aching knees still intact after climbing no less than six flights of stairs just forty five minutes earlier, I hobbled into the office and fumbled for that connect-cable-thing we still get with Apple mobile devices. In five minutes, my iPad had launched iTunes, backed up its wares and slurped down the latest podcasts through only the prettiest cable cluttering my shelf space. Yes, the cable saved the day, but consider me lazy: I shouldn’t even need the cable.

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Perhaps you’re visiting this article because you’re strongly interested in applying Fever as your RSS client, or you’ve read our previous review of Fever and Ashes here on MacStories. We understand you may be a little weary of tackling such a project. Installing Fever can admittedly be intimidating for non-geeks, an audience Fever was clearly not intended for. But we have you covered. In ten minutes, you (anyone) can have Fever up and running, provided you’re prepared for the following:

1.) There is no trial of Fever available. It’s $30 with no refunds. Be ready to pay when prompted via Paypal.

2.) We’re suggesting a cheap hosting solution you’ll have to pay monthly for. At minimum, about a dollar a month. You will not need to purchase a domain name.

3.) You’ll need to have a SFTP client available so you can upload Fever to the host. We will use Forklift Beta 2, free to download (Mac only). However, you can use any client you want. You just need to use it once.

4.) These instructions should work as of July 14th, 2010. We can’t promise Fever or the host we choose will change the installation process – if they do we’ll gladly update this article when we can.

If you’re ready to tackle the tedious installation process, then let’s get started.

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iOS 4 came out yesterday, and right after iTunes finished to install it on our iPhones we all wondered whether jailbreak was still possible. Yes, it is. Using an unofficial build of Pwangetool by Criminal90 floating around on the internet (UPDATE: official PwnageTool for iOS 4 is out) and a couple of tricks, I managed to jailbreak my iPhone 3GS and install Cydia on it. Check out the full tutorial after the break.

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While they aren’t necessarily secrets, they are rather hidden features of the browsers that casual users might not even discover or need to explore. Though once revealed, they can be incredibly helpful. Macworld has posted four Safari 5 secrets that you might be interested in if you’re wanting the most out of Apple’s new web browser.

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