howto

So you've been having fun with Facebook's somewhat half-baked chat service for the last day now, but are you growing tired of having to first log-in, then pop-out the chat window? For those of you who want to chat without this two-step process, there's a nice little tweak discovered by Mozilla Links that lets you set Facebook chat to pop out in Firefox's side bar.

I'm not really a fan of sidebar driven applications (gDocsBar not included), but this implementation works out pretty well. It will load up your buddy list and work just like … Read more

Ramesh Srinivasan has clearly known the tensions of shared computing, especially the bickering over which mail app and browser to set as defaults when two or more users disagree.

Thanks to Srinivasan's two apps, DefaultMail and DefaultBrowser, families and roommates can cool it on the tug-of-war and continue clashing over important things, like drinking milk straight from the carton. The free apps smooth things over by linking default browser apps and e-mail clients to each user account.

Tune in to the video to see how the apps work, but forget typing those long URLs to download the apps. We'… Read more

Howcast is a great new how-to video service that launched back in early February. This morning I met with co-creator Sanjay Raman to talk about what they've been up to in those two months. The site already has a wonderful, and fast growing collection of videos that teach you how to do all manner of things in just a few minutes, and has some really great features just around the corner.

Part of the site's success is due to the novel approach to the somewhat tired medium of how-to videos. People can still throw up their 5-minute shaky cam footage of how to plug in speaker cables, or cut up onions the right way, but Howcast is doing something very different from the rest by building itself up as a platform for fledgling self-proclaimed experts or videographers who want to put together slick, professional looking videos that don't suck. It's also got some great video player technology that blows the competition away.

The crux of the service revolves around the directors program. Howcast provides reasonably credentialed enthusiasts with a zip file full of goodies to create how-to shorts that follow a certain format. Included are overlays, bumpers, templates for Apple's Final Cut Pro, and voiceovers. There's also a growing repository of over 100 tracks to use as background music. Directors get paid $50 a pop for the videos they create, and have the option for further revenue sharing if their clip gets over 40,000 views. Raman says no video has yet to reach that height yet, but that they'd be offering something similar to YouTube with the creators getting a fair percentage cut.

Going forward Raman alluded to moving away from Final Cut and giving people a way to create videos using alternate tools. My guess is that it's a Web based video editing tool the likes of JumpCut or EyeSpot. Such a feature would let people create content without the need to shell out a few thousand dollars on hardware and software. Raman said the feature was coming in the "near future."

The second component to Howcast is the video player, which has been designed like a DVD player with chapter markers to separate the steps. Users can skip back and forth between each steps, and read little tool tips that gives them a bird's-eye view of what they're about to see without actually having to watch it. Raman walked me through how content creators add and edit these markers in the video, and the process is dead simple. You can play around with it yourself with the video embedded in this post.

In addition to video content, Howcast has an integrated wiki. Right now there are more wiki posts than videos, but that's because they're far simpler to make. Every video starts out as a Wiki, and that the ones that go into production are fact-checked in house by a Howcast staff member and linked up to the video post. One big thing that differs from Quamut, which I checked out last week, is that these wiki guides are printer friendly, so you can take them with you when it's time for semi-complex tasks.

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A new service converts any well formed XML RSS feed to an iPhone-optimized version with the typical sliding style interface. For instance (if you're on an iPhone right now) here's the iPhone Atlas feed, and here's the Google News feed.

Jim Liddle, one of the creators of the service, told iPhone Atlas "You can book mark the generated site and use it to host your own content and reference it from your own site."

Feedback? info@iphoneatlas.com.

Bookseller Barnes & Noble launched a new how-to site this morning called Quamut. Like About.com, the aim is to provide simple instructional pieces about all subjects from barbecue to bourbon (currently the most popular tag on the site). Today there are more than 1,000 topics, but the goal is to add several hundred a month while updating items as time goes by.

Unlike Wikipedia, and other wiki-based how-to services the content is provided not by the crowds, but a small group of hand-picked human editors--similar to Mahalo.com. The guides are copy edited and fact checked, then categorized into one of five genres.

Despite all this automation, users aren't entirely left out. Articles can be tagged and bookmarked. There's also a Wiki-based sister site that lets users create their own how-to guides, although these aren't integrated into Quamut's content listings or search results.

To make money off Quamut, Barnes & Noble has gone with business model that combines ads and print media. There are regular ads that make their way next to the content, including links to (guess what) books for sale on each subject directly from Barnes & Noble. Users can also purchase a copy of the content for home use or reference as either a digital PDF copy or a laminated chart that details each step. Why you'd want these is pretty straight-forward: there's no print button, and articles are split up into over a dozen pages sometimes--keeping you from saving each article in its entirety as a PDF (unless you're patient). The PDFs are also in full color and pretty snazzy looking. You can check out today's example after the break.

In many ways Quamut reminds me a lot of About.com before it got cluttered up with too much advertising and a disjointed and overwhelming navigation system. This is a site I could send my mom to without worrying about her getting lost or overwhelmed--which is what I think the creators were going for.

See also: eHow

Related: Wired's HowTo Wiki, Mahalo How-to's, 5Min, Instructables.

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Dual-booting is an oft-used solution in the desktop realm, where users value the capability to boot multiple versions of an operating system from the same volume (e.g. Windows Vista and XP, Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard, Mac OS X and Windows on Intel-based Macs). Now a similar solution has been released for the iPhone, allowing users to boot multiple iPhone OS versions (e.g. 1.1.1 and 1.1.4) from the same device. This capability may come in handy when a future, SDK-compliant iPhone OS release (2.0) is released and users with to maintain compatibility … Read more

In a new Knowledge Base document, Apple encourages users who "experience unexpected results when tapping the Location button in Maps" to submit WiFi location information to Skyhook -- the service used by the iPhone's quasi-GPS function -- in the hope of establishing better accuracy.

Submitting an access point to Skyhook is easy. Navigate to this page, then enter the city you're in, or better yet the address and city, then click "Map It!" Refine the location to an exact point by dragging the marker. The latitude and longitude will be automatically generated. You then … Read more

Editor's note: This article, originally published by Brian Satterfield, was republished on 3/5/08.

These days, using only one antispyware program is like playing with fire: sooner or later, you're going to get burned. Since not all spyware-combat tools share identical databases, we recommend running as many tools as you can get your mitts on--and Spybot - Search & Destroy, a time-tested and free application, should be part of your arsenal. The program might not have as pretty a face as some of its competitors, but it's certainly adept at eradicating spyware. It also offers a wide variety of settings and tools for maintaining your security and privacy that might not be immediately obvious. Read on to get the lowdown on removing spyware with Spybot, and to get tips for using some of the program's most important features.

Step 1: Set it up Some antispyware programs aren't highly customizable, but Spybot caters to the user by offering a number of tweaks. The app's primary screen emphasizes scanning your machine for threats and updating spyware definitions. If you switch from the default to the advanced mode from the Mode menu, though, you open up a world of options. The unobtrusive Settings button, located way down in the lower-left corner of the advanced window, contains tons of ways to fine-tune Spybot's behavior. This screen may at first appear overwhelming, but the Settings window lets you customize the app so it works for you.… Read more

Getting contacts off your old mobile phone and onto the iPhone may or may not be a straightforward process. If you already have your contacts stored neatly in Outlook (Windows), Address Book (Mac) or a Yahoo! Address Book (Mac/Windows), the process is as simple as syncing via iTunes. If all you have is a set of contacts stored on an old Nokia, Samsung, Motorola or other phone, however, the process is a bit more involved.

Here are your options:

Go to an AT&T store (Mac and Windows) AT&T will copy contacts from your old phone'… Read more