Gmail interface tweaks tend to be all or nothing: you either keep the standard Gmail interface with all its bells, whistles and distractions, or you hide all the links and sidebar doodads at once. The Minimalist Gmail Chrome extension is different: it gives you control over 40+ individual elements of the Gmail interface, from the top bar all the way down to the footer. Minimalist Gmail is ... Read more »

If you own a Palm Pre or Pixi and you like to change your wallpaper on a regular basis, InterfaceLift for webOS is a must-have app. It's a slick mobile interface to the uber-popular eye candy site InterfaceLift.com, which boasts thousands of gorgeous background images. You can browse or search images by creator or tag, or just flip through all the available images sorted by date, downloads, or ... Read more »

At long last, Google has finally connected one of its apps to the much-anticipated Google Cloud Print service. You can now print from any mobile phone -- as long as it's Android 2.1 or iOS 3 or later -- to any printer that you have successfully connected to your Google Cloud Print account. The service only works via the Gmail mobile website for now -- just visit www.gmail.com on your phone -- ... Read more »

When you've got an itty-bitty touch-screen and need to pound out a quick email, the last thing you're going to want to do is type. I mean, tapping out a text message is fine every now and then, but when you're forced to type more than a couple of lines when you're on the go, sliding is definitely the way to go. Sliding keyboards utilize the fact that each word, as it is typed, tends to create ... Read more »

Sony has announced the immediate availability of Music Unlimited powered by Qriocity, its subscription streaming music service, in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. The service has been available in the UK since December, and it offers two subscription plans. The Basic subscription costs £3.99 per month in the UK and €3.99 in the four other countries, and gives you a virtual radio ... Read more »

Theming on iOS really depends on whether you've jailbroken your device or not. If not, then changing your wallpaper is about as far as customization goes. If you have chosen to step into the 'dark side', then there are many more options for making your iPhone stand out in the crowd. However, up until today, finding worthwhile themes involved searching for them in the Cydia app store, and that ... Read more »

A 20-line patch looks set to cut Firefox's start-up time in half. The fix, which works by preloading Firefox's XUL library, could land in nightly builds as early as tonight. Unfortunately, the speed-up will only affect Windows users. To be honest, it's a little odd that preloading DLLs hadn't been tried before. Prior to this fix, the XUL DLL was slowly loaded in 32KB bits, which really ground ... Read more »

Canonical demonstrated Ubuntu 10.10's multitouch functionality a few months back. If you haven't felt compelled to play with it before, a new app called Touchégg might provide a little extra incentive. It's an open source project which lets you define custom actions and execute them with a touch gesture. Canonical's uTouch gesture library is required, but it should already be installed if ... Read more »

We knew it was coming, but now Apple has announced that a British woman, Gail Davis from Kent, downloaded Paper Glider to take the Cupertino-based company over the 10 billion threshold. That's 10 billion app downloads, in two and a half years, to more than 160 million iDevices worldwide. A significant milestone indeed, and to celebrate, Apple gave away a $10,000 iTunes Gift card to the lucky ... Read more »

Using Songbird on your desktop or laptop to listen to your cavernous collection of digital music? Good news -- the Songbird team has been working in "super seekrit" (their words, not ours) on bringing you a pocket-sized version for your Android device. Even better, they've announced the availability of the first public beta of Songbird for Android -- and we took it for a spin. Here's the quick ... Read more »

Vuze is a solid torrent downloader, especially for less-savvy users. Its built-in media streaming and transcoding features make it a nice start-to-finish app for downloading and playing videos on just about any device. With the release of version 4.6, Vuze has added even more playback kung-fu, as well as one very important piece of bittorrent support. Both the free and plus versions of Vuze ... Read more »

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine uses open source software to search archived webpages going back to the days of the dotcom boom, and it just got a lot more useful with the addition of a new beta version. The beta includes more archived webpages than ever before, as well as a new calendar view that makes it easy to find the specific version of a page you're looking for. The Internet ... Read more »

Sony had promised an Android companion app for its eBook store in January 2011, and it's delivered. You can now find Sony Reader in the Android Market, ready to pocket-size your digital tomes previously purchased from the Reader Store. Like other eBook apps, Sony Reader allows you to adjust the font size and brightness, and supports bookmarking and highlighting. Tap the bottom of the reading ... Read more »

TestFlight is a new service that aims to fix a lot of the problems with iPhone app testing. If you've ever developed an iPhone app or served as a tester for an unreleased one, you know how much of a pain it is: collecting the UDIDs for the testers' phones, distributing .ipa files, and then distributing new .ipa files every time something changes ... yuck! TestFlight streamlines the process, ... Read more »

Homegroups make sharing files and folders easy on Windows 7, but Windows XP and Vista users have to do things a little differently. Fortunately, there are dead-simple ways to share files on both XP and Vista, too. Microsoft offers a very detailed step-by-step guide for those of you looking for an exhaustive walkthrough, but here's the short version for Windows XP users: click Start > ... Read more »