Blogging

Phone ahead.

If you’re driving to a meeting and realize you’re going to be late, what do you do? Pick up the phone and call ahead, right? But this means, possibly, trying to find the number for the person you’re meeting with, which can be dangerous if you’re in motion. And possibly illegal.

Mobile app Oops I’m Late does the calling for you. It runs on GPS-equipped Windows smartphones. If you start the app and give it access to your calendar so it knows where and when your next appointment is, it will automatically fire off text messages to the contacts in a meeting when it detects that you can’t possibly make it in time. Optionally, it can also tell people how far away you are and your ETA.

The new version works with Twitter and Facebook to send both public and private messages.

There are free and paid versions. No word of iPhone support, and I have not put my hands on this product to try it. Love the idea, though.

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‘Oops I’m Late’ phones ahead for you

(Credit: CNET Networks)

A great deal of Web companies have long since converted their iPhone-optimized sites into native iPhone apps, but not Yahoo’s Flickr. Instead, Flickr is just getting around to tweaking its mobile site, m.flickr.com–in beta–specifically for iPhones. It may be behind the curve on iPhone-optimized viewing, but the results are crisp, streamlined, and satisfying nevertheless.

Flickr has made a big design effort to highlight activities you’ll actually use and to make controls readily available. For instance, Flickr for iPhone puts your mobile e-mail-upload address front and center, so you don’t have to dig around to find it. Your comments, contacts, and activities are also given a share of the limelight with clear top-screen navigation, to much the same effect.

You’ll also notice that photos are automatically scaled to fit the screen, though you won’t be able to explore multiple photos sizes as you can from Flickr.com. We like that pages load without needing a complete Safari refresh, and that photo sets are more efficient to browse, thanks to the arrow-topped thumbnails of the next and previous photos that sit right next to the image and serve as back and forth controls.

Quickly scrolling through photo sets is as close as you’ll get to slideshows and videos, however. Since iPhone 3G still doesn’t support Flash, it is predictable (but nonetheless regrettable) that these features are missing. Despite that, Flickr’s good-looking mobile site is one every Flickr user should bookmark.

More here:
Flickr’s iPhone-friendly (beta) redesign

There’s nothing worse than trying to print a two-page article from on the Web and have it print out in a half-inch column across 37 sheets of paper. It happens all the time, and if the site you’re on doesn’t have a special printer friendly option your only other method was to use special software, or attempt to save the page as a PDF then print it out later.

A service called PrintWhatYouLike takes all the work out of this, and does you one better by letting you select only the parts of the page you want to print, leaving things like large Flash ads, site menus, and other clutter off of your precious bathroom reading.

To do this you just plug in the page’s URL. You then have the options of simply clicking parts of the page you want, as well as getting rid of things like the site’s background and images. There are also some handy tools to change the text size, along with a font changer in case you’re printing something off a page that insists on using undersized, illegible fonts.

The service is completely free and worth bookmarking. Power users will want to make use of the bookmarklet, which lets you print any page you’re looking at without having to jump back and forth. Just one click and it brings up the special PrintWhatYouLIke interface.

Related: Extra page killer Green Print

[via Lifehacker]

When you run a URL through PrintWhatYouLike it's simply a matter of picking what you actually want to print from the page. (click to enlarge)

(Credit: CNET Networks)

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PrintWhatYouLike makes any site printer friendly

Google video site YouTube is planning to host on November 22 a San Francisco gathering its active users called YouTube Live–”part concert, part variety show, and part party.”

The event is scheduled to take place in front of an audience at the Herbst Pavilion in Fort Mason Center and streamed live on the Web, as well as in the air, on the planes of sponsor Virgin America.

This is notable because YouTube doesn’t offer live-streaming technology.

YouTube co-founder Steve Chen announced earlier this year that live video would be coming to YouTube later in 2008, but several months later, there were scattered rumors that those plans had been scrapped.

An event like YouTube Live would indicate that live streaming is indeed still on track–though the company has not yet said anything about further live-video plans or whether the streaming will be handled through a partnership with one of the many start-ups that specialize in it.

Performers at the San Francisco event will include Web-birthed “celebrities” such as rapper Soulja Boy Tell’em, Tay “Chocolate Rain” Zonday, LisaNova, and William Sledd, as well as a few mainstream acts, such as Akon and Will.i.am, the Black Eyed Peas frontman whose Barack Obama-supporting “Yes We Can” music video was a wild success on YouTube. Will.i.am will also be unveiling a new “awareness” video created from user-generated contributions.

Read more here:
YouTube to host live-streamed event in SF

Once of Google’s 10th birthday gifts to the world is its re-release of a 2001 version of the search index. (The FAQ says there are “various technical reasons” for not displaying results back to Google birth year of 1998.) On it you can see what the service knew about any topic back then. Like you. Go ahead.

You know you want to.

Pages that are not still live (which is a depressingly large proportion of them) may be served by the Internet Archive, but many old pages are offline for good. Google also notes that this index is not actually a perfect reproduction of the real 2001 index; some index entries have been removed for various reasons over time.

I found the index entertaining, but the lack of historical access to the early Web is distressing. And I fear that even with the Internet Archive up and running, we’ll be in the same spot 10 years from now, due to a general lack of archiving procedures among site publishers, the predictable failures of businesses that hold online data (see Stallman: Cloud computing is ’stupidity’), and the inability of archive engines to pick up the content that’s not on the open Web.

See also: Google launches 10th anniversary site, help-the-world project.

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Who were you in 2001? Check Google’s old index