Google launches Orkut App for iPhone

Orkut, a Google-owned social network, has had little luck challenging MySpace, hi5, Tagged or Facebook —the undisputed social networking leader (some people even liken Orkut to a poor man’s Facebook).

Nevertheless, Orkut is still popular in India and Brazil, where more than 80 percent of its 66 million active users come from, as of October 2011. Today, the search company released a native Orkut client for iPhone. It is available free of charge on the App Store and comes with the usual assortment of features, ranging from updating your status and checking your scraps and messages to browsing your friends’ profiles and uploading photographs. It is interesting that Google chose to release the app just as Facebook has finally managed to beat Orkut in Brazil, per latest comScore metrics. 

Orkut for iOS

Your favorite social network just arrived to your iPhone or iPod! The official Orkut app for iOS connects you to your friends and family. Now you can send scraps, see your friends updates, upload photos and browse your friends albums anywhere you go. Never miss a conversation again because you are not in front of your computer: get the free Orkut app and stay connected.

- Update your status
- Check your scraps and messages
- Reply to your friends birthdays
- Check your friends updates
- Browse your friends profiles, scraps and photos
- Take new photos and upload them directly to your Orkut albums
- Share your life anywhere, anytime with the people you care about

iPhone Apps Every Blogger should have

As mobile high speed internet connections become faster and more reliable, we can expect blogging to become more mobile as well. Typing out a full blog post including images and media on an iPhone used to be a chore. Nowadays, blogging from your iPhone is relatively painless and hassle-free with the use of a few handy applications from the iTunes Store. Here are 8 of the best blogging apps on the market today for the iPhone platform.

WordPress

When most people think of blogging, they think Wordpress. The Wordpress iPhone App gives anybody the ability to update their Wordpress-based or hosted blog quickly and easily. Featuring an intuitive and responsive interface and support for nearly every capability baked into Wordpress, the official iPhone app is all you need to blog on the go. Just make sure you have Wordpress 2.9.2 or above installed, and this application will fit your work flow perfectly. 

Blogger

Believe it or not, many people still use Blogger to publish content on the web; quite a few people, in fact. While many have moved on to Wordpress, Tumblr, Typepad, and other platforms, Blogger remains popular. That's why the Blogger application is such a big draw at the iTunes Store. It does exactly what you'd expect, without a lot of fuss or confusing options to muddle through. If you're looking for a simple way to post to your Blogger blog, this is the application for you.

Tumblr

It seems like all the cool kids are using Tumblr nowadays. The Tumblr app for the iOS platform is basically the same thing as the Wordpress application, but with a greater focus on media and quick blogging. Many Tumblr users tend to publish shorter posts, and that's reflected in the user interface. If you just want to dash off a quick blurb to your Tumblr blog, this is the best way to do it.

EverNote

Sometimes, keeping sources and information well-organized and at arm's reach is of paramount importance when you're running a well-read, high traffic blog. When inspiration for your next killer post strikes or you just want to share something with a friend or colleague, the EverNote iPhone app is your best friend. Whether it's a great photo, quote, or video clip that you want to access later, Evernote is the best way to archive things on your iPhone.

Byline

In a nutshell, Byline is basically just a feed aggregator for your favorite RSS streams, news websites, and blogs. What sets Byline apart is its refined UI, snappy responsiveness, and ease of configuration. You can set up your news streams any which way you like, and it also utilizes local storage to intelligently cache feeds in case you lose your high speed Internet connection while you're on the go.

Adobe Photoshop Express

Most people wouldn't think that you'd be able to accomplish a lot of photo manipulation on a smart phone. They clearly haven't met Adobe Photoshop Express, a nifty application that allows anyone with an iPhone to perform a number of different operations on images and photographs. Whether you need to crop a snapshot, apply a filter, or use special effects, Photoshop Express has you covered.

Air Sharing

You have to hand it to Apple, they make sharing and transferring files easy, as long as you're using Apple products, of course. Air Sharing makes it a simple task to compose drafts on your iPhone and then quickly transfer them to your computer at home or at the office for a final review before you publish your work. If you're a Mac user who blogs, Air Sharing belongs on whatever mobile device you use.

Analytics App

The name of this application pretty much says it all. Analytics App is focused on giving users the ability to interact with their Google Analytics account and get information about web traffic on the go. It allows you to customize your data and results any way you see fit. Now that Google Analytics delivers real-time results on web traffic, any blogger with a popular website can't afford to not have an analytics application on their smart phone.

The long and short of it

Ultimately, it's tough to make up for the lack of screen real estate that a laptop or even a tablet can provide. But you can still be a productive and effective mobile blogger with the help of a few handy applications such as the ones listed above. Thanks to a little innovative software, location and hardware constrictions don't have to curtail your ability to blog when you're away from home.

SkyDrive Available for iOS

 Windows Live SkyDrive Available for iOS, Offering 25GB of Cloud Storage for Your iPhone

Microsoft's popular Windows Live SkyDrive file storage service in the cloud is now available for iOS, allowing users to easily access files in their SkyDrive directly from their iDevices. (If you don't have a SkyDrive account, you can get a free account that comes with 25GB of storage.) The new app works like most cloud storage apps on iOS, in that you have access to all your files and can save any directly to the device if you wish. Like the SkyDrive service, the app is available for free. You can download it right now from the iTunes App Store.

SkyDrive | iTunes App Store 

SkyDrive Available for iOS

 Windows Live SkyDrive Available for iOS, Offering 25GB of Cloud Storage for Your iPhone

Microsoft's popular Windows Live SkyDrive file storage service in the cloud is now available for iOS, allowing users to easily access files in their SkyDrive directly from their iDevices. (If you don't have a SkyDrive account, you can get a free account that comes with 25GB of storage.) The new app works like most cloud storage apps on iOS, in that you have access to all your files and can save any directly to the device if you wish. Like the SkyDrive service, the app is available for free. You can download it right now from the iTunes App Store.

SkyDrive | iTunes App Store 

What Dropbox Automator Do?

Use Dropbox Automator to Easily Process Synced Files

This app turns Dropbox into a cloud storage hub for batch photo processing, document editing and uploading data to other cloud services.

By design, Dropbox automates file management. It uploads our data to the cloud and send its right back down to all of our connected devices, dancing around the need for flash drives and USB syncing when it comes to small transfers. A one-man startup called Dropbox Automator adds a whole slew of functionality on top of that basic syncing using Dropbox's open API. It can resize photos, convert documents to PDFs, and upload data to Facebook, Twitter or Google Docs automatically.


After connecting the app to your Dropbox account, you choose an action. Then Dropbox Automator works its magic.

Dropbox Automator may be overwhelmed with new users because the automation process is currently taking several minutes.

Dropbox Automator runs on a system called Wappwolf that specializes in automating everyday computing tasks like rotating and resizing pictures. Automator adds a simple list of actions and will set up a folder to perform the same task over and over every time it receives a new file. Since the app and its list of features is brand new, some of the options are barebones or unexplained. For example, there's no information describing "Stamp a map on the image," but the more straightforward options like "Upload to Google Docs" make Dropbox an automated hub for handling files.
The Automator takes a few seconds to check a Dropbox folder for new files, then takes more time to process those files. It supports multiple actions per folder, so you could potentially use the same folder to downscale photographs, convert documents to PDFs and upload everything to an FTP server. Processed files will be split into two subfolders that the service automatically creates called "processed" and "results."

Dropbox Automator may currently be overwhelmed with new users--it launched at the very end of December--because the automation process is currently taking several minutes. It's definitely a service to keep your eye on, though; here's a full list of the actions Dropbox Automator can perform.

Documents

• Convert to PDF
• Summarize
• Translate
• PDF to TXT
• Upload to Google Docs
• Upload to Slideshare
• Sign PDF (electronic signature)

Pictures

• Upload to Facebook
• Upload to Flickr
• Downscale
• Rotate image
• Write text on image
• Photo effect
• Stamp a logo on the image
• Stamp a map on the image
• Stamp a "dislike" on the image

Any file

• e-mail
• Zip file
• Save it to another Dropbox-folder
• Rename
• Upload to FTP-Server
• Encrypt file
• Decrypt file

Send info

• Tweet
• Set Facebook status