Blog from your phone, call for free or use your computer to make free phone calls. Google Voice isn’t the easiest Google service to explain to non-techies, partially because it can be used for so many different things. Find a short list of those things below.

Using only a phone to manage voicemail is old fashioned: Google Voice does a much better job. Manage your voicemail on your computer or phone, and enjoy unlimited free texting within the US and Canada. It’s a service no human should be without, but which is sadly (still) limited to humans who reside in the United States of America. Google, remedy this!

Find below just a few advanced Google Voice tricks. Know some more? Leave them in the comments below the article and share them with the world.

Blog From Your Phone

Imagine being able to blog by phone, from anywhere. It’s not farfetched: our very own Ryan devised a method of voice blogging. It’s not perfect, but it’s a great way to get in a quick blog post from the road.

Free Calls and Texts To Canada

Cell phone has no concept of long distance, provided I’m calling or texting a US number. It’s another matter when you call or text Canada: that costs extra. Good thing I have Google Voice: it allows you to call or text Canada for free.

You can do this one of two ways. The first is to call Google Voice number from my cell phone, then call Canada from that. It’s easy, but requires some extra dialing.

The second way requires some setup, but works very well: have your Canadian friend send a text message to your Google Voice number. Assuming you’ve set up Google Voice to forward texts to your phone, you will now have an American number you can use to reach your Canadian friend. Save this new number and you can call your friend as though it were a domestic call, anytime.

Free Calls From Your Browser

This isn’t exactly a secret, but many people don’t seem to realize it: you can make free phone calls from within Gmail, provided you’re calling a number inside the US or Canada.

Even cooler: if your Google Voice number is your primary phone number, you can pick up your phone calls in Gmail. You just need to turn on chat and install the Google video chat browser extension.

Another related but also lesser-known trick: you can add any phone number to a Google Plus Hangout, allowing you to include people without Internet access in your conversations.

Combine Google Voice and Skype

Skype is a very affordable way to make long distance phone calls, but there is one problem with it: unless you set up a call display number you appear as ‘unknown caller’ on the phone of the person you’re trying to reach. Many people will, assuming you’re a scam artist, and refuse to pick up.

You can buy a phone number from Skype to avoid this. Or, if you don’t want to spend money on a subscription, you can set up your Skype account to display your Google Voice number for call display. That way people you call will see a real phone number.

You might consider doing this even if you’ve paid Skype for an incoming number: people will call you back at your Google Voice number instead of your Skype number, meaning you’ll get the call on all of your phones instead of just Skype.

Add a Voicemail Feature To Your Blog

Want to hear from the people who read your blog? Add a voicemail button to it. This allows people to leave you a voicemail without telling the world your phone number. People who visit your site can enter their phone number and, in one click, connect their phone to your voicemail inbox.

Read the full instructions for setting up a voicemail feature on your blog here.

Other Cool Tricks

Of course, there are many more cool things you can do with Google Voice. Ryan outlined several of them in 2010, and his tricks still work very well. They are:

• Integrating Google Voice for all mobile calls
• Listening in to your voicemail in real time
• Automatic transcriptions of all voicemails
• Recording phone calls
• Custom greetings for different groups of people

(Via MakeUseOf.com.)

Magican AntiTrojan is a free antivirus app designed for protect Mac from Flashback Trojan attack. Besides helping users check the Flashback Trojan, it still could help delete the Flashback Trojan and all the infected files in your Mac. Still Magican AntiTrojan has an easy to use interface; users could only click a button to easily detect Trojan and a Delete button could helps delete all infected files.

Besides checking the complicated solutions on net, we strongly recommend to use Magican AntiTrojan easily protect your Mac.

I wasted half an hour yesterday morning looking for my cellphone, only to find it and spend another twenty minutes looking for my car keys, which I had in my hands while looking for the aforementioned cellphone. Needless to say, I was late, my boss gave me an earful, and I had a pretty crappy day.

If you can relate, then you’d also probably be interested in the U Grok It.

It has a weird name but a pretty neat purpose. Here’s how it works: you stick a tiny RFID tag on objects that you lose on a regular basis, add them to your list of items, and locate them using the U Grok It receiver when you need to find them.

The U Grok It has a range of about six to ten feet and signals just how close you are to finding whatever it is you’re looking for with beeping signals. The closer you are, the louder and faster the beeps will be.

U Grok It plans to conduct an initial test run with 1,000 units, with full-scale production scheduled for 2013. No prices have been announced yet, but the devices is said to be around $100(USD) while each RFID tag will be sold for $1.

(Via Technabob.)

If you’re looking for the cheapest prices in the U.S. or Canada, this free app can help you out. The app rewards users who report gas prices with a weekly giveaway of a $250 gift card.

Also available for iOS.

Price: FREE

No matter how intuitive and reportedly “trouble free” Macs are to run, believe me, several months after you add hundreds of files, applications, and download thousands of webpages, your shiny new iMac or MacBook Air is going to run slower than when you first booted it out the box. That’s because like any computer, digital junk files pile up in the hard drive; and eventually it just needs to get cleaned out.

CCleaner is one such application utility that can perform cleaning operations for you. It was recently released from its beta version for Mac users, and it can now be downloaded for free in the Mac App Store, or directly from the Piriform website. Windows PC users have been making use of CCleaner for a while, and now Mac users can finally take advantage of it. The interface is similar for both platforms, but the program is of course optimized to address the particular system clutter of OS X.

While CCleaner may not be as feature rich as say similar paid programs like MacKeeper , which is what I’ve been using, it is still a very powerful hard drive clean-up utility.

Back Up & Run

First off, if you’ve never used a program like this, I strongly urge you to back up your system hard drive (Carbon Copy Cleaner or Time Machine are two easy programs to use). This precaution applies to any program that could possibly wipe out important files or undermine the performance of your computer.

What Does CCleaner Do?

CCleaner scans your hard drive and cleans out junk files that have piled up over time and use. Many of its actions can be performed with default applications in your Mac, but CCleaner performs several operations within a single interface . For example, in Safari you can click the Reset Safari menu item and selectively clear out your browser history, remove webpage preview images and website icons, etc., which in turn might improve the performance of the browser if it’s running slow.

CCleaner performs similar functions for Safari and other web browsers you use, including Firefox and Google Chrome. You can select to have it clear the Internet Cache, browser and download histories, cookies, and application cache – all from within a single interface.

You can also select to have CCleaner empty your System Trash, repair permissions (which you normally do within the built-in Disk Utility application of OS X), and completely write over unused space on your hard drive or other disks, to prevent disk recovery applications from recovering deleted files that might still remain buried in your system.

Also, when you decide to trash applications on your hard drive that you no longer use, CCleaner will not only remove your selected applications, but also their related preferences files, caches and logs that otherwise will remain on your hard drive.

How To Use CCleaner

CCleaner only removes what you tell it to. So first off, if you’ve never used a utility like this, select and deselect only items that you understand how the program will affect. Before you run the cleaning action, click the Analyze button so that CCleaner will scan your hard drive and create a list of the number of files and their sizes that it will delete.

As you read over the report list, you can uncheck items that you don’t want to be a part of the CCleaner operations.

Under the Options pane, you can also tell CCleaner to retain cookies for only selected websites. Likewise, you can select which browsers you want CCleaner to perform cookie cleaning operations on.

As far as I can tell there is no software documentation installed with this first version of CCleaner for the Mac. Nor could I find documentation on the Piriform website. However, there is plenty of documentation for the PC version of the program, which should be useful in helping you understand more about CCleaner’s capabilities.

(Via MakeUseOf.com.)

(Via Tybee Guy.)

Do you get more email than you know what to do with? You’re not alone. I get multiple, daily corporate emails that I routinely delete without so much as opening. Or, at least, I did, until just now. I used Unsubscribr and stopped those messages from getting to me. You should too. This free tool lets you unsubscribe from the stuff you don’t care about without having to actually read any of the messages and look for the “Unsubscribe” link or instructions.

You know the emails I’m talking about. They’re not quite spam, but not really useful email either. Some people call it “Bacn”, and it’s an entire category of emails from companies and services you’ve used in the past. If they’ve added up to take up way too much of your mental space, it’s time to clean them out. This simple website can help.

Gmail’s priority inbox helps with this, but you still need to delete the unwanted emails every day. Not if you run Unsubscribr a couple of times though.

Stop Those Emails!

Head to Unsubscribr to get started. You’ll need to provide your email address; the service will then figure out how to access your email. If you’re using Gmail you’ll be asked for permission:

Other services provide other ways of getting at your data, so give it a shot. This is practically a brand new service, so every email scenario under the sun may not be covered. Let us know if yours is or isn’t in the comments below.

Once you get the service logged in, you’ll see your email folders. The free version of this service will scan your Inbox and your Trash.

Note that the service can only scan 30 days worth of email, but that should be more than enough to catch the worst offenders. When the service is done scanning you’ll see a list you can respond to:

Click the “Unsubscribe” button and one of two things will happen: you will be automatically unsubscribed or you will be directed to the page where you can unsubscribe yourself.

Security Concerns

Are you concerned about security? That makes sense. This is, after all, your email we’re talking about.

Be sure to check out the Unsubscribr FAQ, because this service is designed to be secure. Email access is, whenever possible, accomplished via OAuth, meaning the service never actually records your username and password. Also, all traffic between your email client and Unsubscribr is encrypted.

If you don’t use Gmail, OAuth can’t be used. Don’t worry though, your username and password will be quickly deleted from the Unsubscribr servers. Trusting the service or not is up to you, but they seem to have thought through security quite a bit.

Conclusion

I get enough email every day, so this service is awesome to me. It lets me lessen my daily email load without a lot of work on my part.

How many emails did this service manage to find for you? Did you unsubscribe? Let me know in the comments below, along with any recommended apps for cleaning out your inbox. Thanks!

(Via MakeUseOf.com.)

An In-Depth Look at OS X Mountain Lion: ”

Last Thursday, Apple caught us all a bit off guard with the announcement of OS X Mountain Lion, the next major version of OS X. Now that I’ve had a few days to sit down and take a look at it, I can confidently say that this is no small upgrade. Mountain Lion is a huge leap forward in the unification of iOS and OS X (Apple has officially dropped “Mac” from the name), bringing over many much-loved features including iMessages, Notification Center, AirPlay Mirror, and a whole host of new applications.

Follow along as we dive in and take a look at all of the great new features, updates and tweaks of your next operating system.

Mountain Lion is a huge leap forward for OS X

Notification Center

Notification Center is one of the biggest improvements in Mountain Lion

One of the most important new features in OS X Mountain Lion is Notification Center, which unifies notifications throughout the entire OS. If you’ve ever used an iOS 5 device, you should feel right at home using Notification Center. Right now only a few Apple created apps support the notifications, but from what I’ve seen, it does everything you’d expect.

Perhaps the most outstanding feature of Notification Center is the ability to have notifications pushed to you even when apps are not running. Make no mistake: this is a killer feature. Usually I have Twitter, Mail, and a Facebook Notifications app running at all times, but with Mountain Lion those can all be replaced by push notifications.

If you’d still like to use Growl notifications in Mountain Lion, check out Hiss, it integrates the user experience of Notification Center with the ubiquity of Growl Notifications.

Not only is this a huge benefit to your system’s performance, but it also goes a long way towards simplifying your OS X experience. Clicking the “dart” icon in the righthand corner of the menubar launches you into the Notification Center, which shares more than a passing resemblance to it’s iOS brethren, but Apple also went one step further by introducing a new finger gesture, a two finger swipe from the right of the touchpad.

This is the first OS X gesture to take advantage of where your fingers are on the touchpad, and it’s pretty intuitive. All things considered, Notification Center should make the switch to Mountain Lion worthwhile for almost any user, from beginners to professionals.

Notes

Notes is just about what you’d expect from an app called “Notes”

Notes has been a familiar face in the Apple world since the original iPhone, but for whatever reason Mountain Lion is the first time its been included on the Mac. Notes is essentially identical to what you’re used to on an iPhone or iPad, it has the same aesthetic, and the same basic feature-set.

In my opinion, this is a really nice stealth addition to OS X, it syncs seamlessly with all your other iCloud devices and I actually wrote a good part of this article within the app. Notes is also really lightweight, as a dedicated user of WunderKit (which takes almost 15 seconds to load), it’s nice to have an app just open an up in a split-second and get your thoughts written-out. It doesn’t do much, but thanks to the iCloud integration, I can see Notes becoming an integral part of my daily workflow.

Messages

Messages is really just a new skin on top of iChat with a little iMessage mixed in.

Messages is the most obvious addition to OS X Mountain Lion, finally allowing you to send and receive iMessages from your Mac. Sadly, right now it’s a just mess of good ideas that are poorly executed.

First off, Messages is really just a new skin on top of iChat, with some iMessage goodness mixed in. Right now, that’s not quite a winning combination. iMessages often failed to reach both my Mac and/or iOS Device, and when they did get delivered, the experience was too buggy to be useful.

In addition, FaceTime is still a separate app, which can be activated from within Messages. This really makes no sense, but that seems to be a reoccurring theme in this particular app. Messages is not doomed to fail, in fact, it has the potential to be an essential part of OS X, but in order for this to happen, Apple needs to clean up the interface and focus more on utility instead of aesthetics.

Game Center

Game Center’s interface is highly stylized, much like the iOS version of the service.

Apple is really pushing their online gaming platform, Game Center, and there seems to be no exception in Mountain Lion. Once again, if you are familiar with the iOS version of the service, the OS X version shouldn’t be too surprising.

Since Game Center is only currently available among developers, I couldn’t really try it out, but if it works as advertised you’ll be able to play against friends and strangers in a platform-agnostic experience.

In plain english; if you have a game on your Mac and your friend has it on iOS, you’ll be able to compete head-to-head. This might present some gameplay issues, but thats really up to developers to fix. It’s nice that Apple has included the ability to use Game Center, and it’s certainly a good sign for the future of gaming on OS X.

Twitter and Share Sheets

In OS X Mountain Lion, Apple has included their version of OS-wide sharing, aptly named “Share Sheets”. It works nearly anywhere with Twitter and Messages, and for photos and videos it supports Flickr and Vimeo, respectively.

You’ll probably notice that Facebook and Youtube are missing, among others. Apple is very picky about what services they’ll allow on their platform so I wouldn’t be surprised if this is intentional, but hopefully it’s just an oversight that will be eliminated when the OS is released.

While certainly not groundbreaking, Share Sheets should be a pleasant addition to your OS X experience, despite the fact that Apple seems to have been rather picky about which services to allow.

Airplay Mirroring

If you’ve ever used a PC with Intel’s Wireless Display technology, you probably understand how much Mac users are missing out on. Luckily, Apple’s own variation on the same idea of wirelessly extending your computer’s display onto your TV works just as well, if not better.

You’ll need an Apple TV to use AirPlay Mirroring, but at only $99 it’s not a hard purchase to justify. The ability to beam your music and video content to the TV wirelessly is just another amazing addition to Mountain Lion. Of course, since I was using a developer preview, the connection dropped occasionally, but Apple usually has these minor kinks worked out before the OS hits market, so I’m not worried. So if you’ve been holding out on an Apple TV, OS X Mountain Lion might just be enough reason to take the plunge.

Reminders

Reminders looks alot like its iOS counterpart.

Reminders is another app taken almost verbatim from iOS, and for most people, that’s a good thing. Functionally, it’s almost the same as the iOS app, allowing you to set reminders for yourself -and that’s it. You’ll lose the geo-fencing capability, but that’s probably just because your Mac doesn’t have GPS anyway, so we won’t shed to many tears over that lost feature.

In addition, you can export your reminders as Calendar events, which should be nice if you plan to take your task management full circle. Unfortunately, since Reminders is directly taken from iOS, it also includes a less-than-stellar interface which, in my opinion, looks a little childish. While some people may like it, i wish Apple would stick with classic UI elements instead of attempting to clone the physical world.

Security Settings (Gatekeeper)

Gatekeeper is perhaps the most controversial addition to OS X, as it locks down your Mac from potential security threats by preventing non-Apple approved apps from being installed. While this setting can be changed in System Preferences, it is symbolic of the shift towards an App-Store-centric universe.

If are a developer looking to make sure your app isn’t rejected by Gatekeeper, you’ll have to get a security certificate as part of the Mac Developer Program.

If you’re reading this article, you probably know a little about Macs, so Gatekeeper is probably more of an inconvenience than a feature, but from grandma’s point-of-view, it’s a lifesaver. Honestly, it’s not unrealistic to imagine that OS X 10.9 will do away with non-Apple approved apps altogether, but until that day comes, Gatekeeper is just one more setting for the true Mac geek to change when they set up their computers.

iCloud

If there is one thing I can say definitively about Apple’s strategy for the coming years, it’s that iCloud is really important. It’s everywhere now and Mountain Lion really pushes that concept.

For the first time, iCloud is beginning to dig deep into system level operations and that’s led to a far more robust user experience. When you first install the OS you are asked to set up iCloud and from that point on it is integrated into nearly every possible part of the experience; from syncing your notes to playing your music.

Although I found it to be considerably more useful than iCloud in Lion, there are still some glaring omissions. For example, “Documents in the Cloud,” isn’t really much better than it was in Lion. One notable addition is the ability to save files to iCloud directly from the “Save” dialog in some apps, but oddly enough though there’s no way browse those files you’ve uploaded. This particular feature might just need to be updated from within iWork, but I hope Apple addresses it before the OS is released; documents could use a little TLC. Otherwise iCloud in Mountain Lion is just plain useful; it works almost without fail in the background, and most users won’t even know it’s there.

Everything Else

Apple has integrated system updates with app updates through the App Store

Mountain Lion is really a huge update to OS X, and there are dozens of little tweaks you’ll likely notice. Below are the ones that stood out the most.

• Safari – The URL bar and search bar have been combined, Chrome style.
• Dashboard – For whatever reason, Apple hasn’t integrate the Dashboard into Notification Center, but they still seem interested in updating it. In Mountain Lion the interface to add and manage widgets is now similar to that of Launchpad, and the remove widgets feature has been updated for the 21st century. It looks like Apple still has a place in its heart for good ol’ Dashboard.
• Launchpad – You can now search in Launchpad. Why you’d want to do this instead of using Spotlight is really beyond me, but it’s there if you want it.
• Chinese Services – Since China is Apple’s fastest growing market, it makes sense that in OS X Mountain Lion they are integrating some popular Chinese services. Baidu now works in Safari and services like 126 and 163 are also included. I obviously didn’t test any of these, but they seem to really be Chinese extensions of Share Sheets.
• Software Update – Software Update is dead. In its place, Apple is managing system updates through the App Store. This is a pretty common sense move, and it works pretty well. It’s also a little zippier than what you’d expect from the old dedicated update app, so I’d imagine it will be a welcome change for most users.
• Mission Control – Hovering over fullscreen apps or spaces now shows you a zoom effect similar to the one in the dock. It’s not much, but at least it looks pretty.

Final Thoughts

Mountain Lion is a really impressive update to OS X. The sheer number of new apps and features is almost unbelievable for what Apple considers an incremental update. I’m excited, but I’m also more than a bit worried. Is this the end of OS X as we know it?

While I love many of the new features, the similarities to iOS are pretty outstanding. So one has to wonder, is Apple determined to unify their operating systems, at the expense of their power users? Sadly, that seems to be the way things are headed. Hopefully, though, that’s in a distant future; for now we can enjoy the massive improvements Mountain Lion brings to the operating system formally known as “Mac” OS X. Come this summer, Mountain Lion will be a must have update.

(Via Mac.AppStorm.)

(Via Tybee Guy.)

I mentioned in my first look of OS X Mountain Lion today that Apple was doing away with its messaging app iChat and replacing it with a new app called Messages.

With Messages you can chat with someone using their Apple ID or phone number, just like you can using iMessage on iOS. You can also use traditional chat services like AIM, Yahoo, Google Talk, and Jabber, so anyone that has your old iChat handle will still be able to contact you using that information.

Here’s the great thing about Messages. It keeps the conversations synced between devices.

Messages beta is available from Apple’s Web site.

Like many other tech nerds, I am often called upon to seize control of some system remotely and rescue its user from some evil manifestation of technology. This isn’t my job (I don’t do this “commercially”), so my free tool of choice is TeamViewer. It’s free for non-commercial use, fast, and very easy to use even for people who don’t know very much about computers. But when I heard Google released something called Chrome Remote Desktop, my curiosity was piqued, so I decided to give it a try. This add-on is interesting because you set it up within Chrome, but you can use it to control the entire computer remotely, not just the Chrome session.

For a Chrome add-on, Remote Desktop is positively huge – it’s a 20MB download, so if you don’t have a fast connection, it might take a minute or two. Just for comparison, the latest version of TeamViewer weighs in at 4MB, so Chrome Remote Desktop is five times as big. Once you’re done downloading it, the add-on appears as a new button on your New Tab page. Clicking this button shows a somewhat-scary “extra permission” authorization page. Not a big deal for users who know what they’re doing, but if you’re guiding someone through the setup process over the phone, this might be a little stressful. You basically need to hit the Continue button:

… and then the allow access button:

And that’s it. Now you’re set up to remote control the computer, or use it to control other computers. When I guided a user through this setup process remotely, the trickiest part was actually getting them to see the Chrome Remote Desktop button on the New Tab page:

The user was looking for a button for an add-on (by the address bar), so I had to guide them to the New Tab page. Other than that, it was a fairly smooth setup process.

You can now either Share This Computer or access another computer:

When you click Share This Computer, you will get a single 12-digit PIN code, which you can copy and paste into a chat session or even dictate over the phone:

This is a nice simplification over TeamViewer, which uses a system of two codes (a user ID and a session password). With Chrome Remote Desktop, you have just a single number. To gain control over the computer, the other party needs to click the “access a shared computer” link on their Chrome Remote Desktop, and enter the PIN code:

Once you click Connect, the remote desktop instantly materializes, and if the connection is fast enough, it even keeps Windows’ Aero interface on, with drop shadows and transparency:

There’s a positively huge “Close Remote Desktop BETA” window that is always set on top, so that both you and the user sitting in front of the remote computer can terminate the session at any time. In fact, the window is so very large, that it sometimes gets in the way and needs to be moved around.

Is It Better Than TeamViewer?

In a word – no. Chrome Remote Desktop is a larger download, and provides less options than TeamViewer (for example, it doesn’t support file transfer). But it does have two very important advantages that might make you use it instead of TeamViewer. The first is that it is entirely free, not just for non-commercial use, but for all use. The second key advantage is that it is fully cross-platform – it works on Windows, Linux, Mac, and even Chromebooks. In fact, I believe it is currently one of the only ways to remotely control a Chromebook computer.

As a beta and a tech experiment, it is certainly impressive. I usually tend to see the browser as a sandbox of sorts – i.e, what happens in the browser stays in the browser. Chrome Remote Desktop definitely breaks that perception, and shows that Chrome can reach deep into your system if you only let it.

(Via MakeUseOf.com.)

iOS users, if you haven’t got your free 50GB from Box.net yet, hurry up and do so. A couple of weeks ago, Box.net announced that any iOS user that logs into the Box app from an iOS device will get 50GB of storage, for life. The promotion will only last 50 days, and about 14 of those have already passed, so not much time left for getting this hefty amount of free storage.

Box.net is a cloud content management platform, similar to Dropbox, which lets you store, access and share content online and across devices. The company does offer a free option, which usually includes only 5GB of storage, with a 25MB limit on file size upload.

Here is what you have to do to get a free 50GB with Box.net:

• Download the Box app for iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch and install it.
• Log into your Box account from the app, or register for a new one from within the app.

And that’s it. After logging in you should see a message informing you about your free 50GB. On top of the free storage, you will also get an increased file size limit for uploads: 100MB instead of 25MB.

Will you create a Box.net account just because of this promotion? Or do you prefer other solutions and will not be tempted by this?

(Via MakeUseOf.com.)