Earlier this year Google announced Google Latitude, a service that lets you and your friends share your locations with each other. You control who gets to see your location and where on the map you appear to others. Today, Google is releasing Google Latitude for iPhone and iPod touch, available in the Safari browser.

Visit google.com/latitude from your device to start using Latitude. Add a bookmark to your home screen to quickly launch Latitude. Just open Latitude in Safari and tap the + icon > Add to Home Screen > Add. For more details, check out the Google Mobile Blog.

Even the iPhone isn’t perfect. Here are the top ten iPhone annoyances and what you can do about them.

Even the greatest gadgets have flaws, and the iPhone is certainly no exception. Praise it all you want, but the “Jesus phone” has plenty of little annoyances or nuisances that get under a user’s skin. Fortunately, technology is all about workarounds to common problems. So we’ve not only put together a Top 10 list of iPhone annoyances to vent about, we’re also offering solutions (where we can) to fix those pesky iPhone problems we hate so much.

10. Default Apps Can’t Be Hidden

The iPhone’s start screen is filled with shortcuts to prepackaged applactions that come with your iPhone whether you want them or not–for example, an app for checking stocks whose shortcut can’t be removed from the iPhone interface. Despite Apple’s insistence, not everyone wants to check the Dow Jones Industrial Average or for that matter the weather, or even use the iPhone’s calculator. That the iPhone’s prepackaged apps can’t be hidden, deleted, or otherwise customized speaks to the stubborn rigidity of Apple.

Ideally: If Apple wanted to fix this annoyance, it would have an “Appearance” option in the Settings menu that would allow users to make unwanted apps disappear without actually deleting them.

The workaround: Isolate undesirable apps on your last home page–that’s the quick and dirty method. A more elaborate trick, detailed at Macenstein, stashes apps on a hidden overflow page, though this works only until the iPhone is turned off. Jailbreakers will seek out programs such as Sbsettings or Poof.

9. You Can’t Run Pandora or Other Apps in the Background

One of the iPhone’s greatest assets is the ability to stream Internet radio stations such as Pandora and Slacker from anywhere with a 3G or Wi-Fi connection. Too bad you can’t listen to that music while checking e-mail or playing games.

Ideally: In a perfect world, Apple would allow certain apps to run at the same time as others. We understand that Apple’s trying to keep the smartphone running smoothly, but if the iPod app can play music in the background, the iPhone’s audio apps should be able to do the same.

The workaround: Sadly, you’ll have to use your get-out-of-jail-free card. Jailbreakers can download Gaizin’s Backgrounder app for full multitasking glory.

(more…)

Since I’m in the rock mood today here is a nifty application for those of us that loves to play guitar.

The norm usually is that you have to get you guitar tabs / chords from sites like www.ultimate-guitar.com and www.911tabs.com to play along to your favorite songs. Wouln’t it be cool to just see the tabs while you play your favourite song in winamp? Well now you can do just that.

A friend of mine recentry wrote this nifty web plugin for winamp called Pikkipowpow which enables you to view guitar tabs of the current playing song.

You’ll need WinAmp 5.5 or greater for this plugin to work.

1. In WinAmp op up the Media Library (Alt+L)
2. In the bar on the left, go to online services.
3. Type “pikkipowpow” in the searchbar and click “bookmark this plugin”.
4. While pikkipowpow is open in the media library, just play a song and the tab&chords will automatically display if found.
5. If not, you can click on “search guitartabs.cc” to quickly find it or you can add your own variation of the tab.

For more details or to just view the tabs in your browser visit Pikkipowpow

Yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on July 20th, 1969. To celebrate this Google released Moon in Google Earth, which allows users to explore lunar images and lunar content all from the comfort of their own home.

Anousheh Ansari, the first female private space explorer said: “Moon in Google Earth enables you to explore lunar imagery as well as informational content about the Apollo landing sites, panoramic images shot by the Apollo astronauts, narrated tours and much more. I believe that this educational tool is a critical step into the future, a way to both develop the dreams of young people globally, and inspire new audacious goals.”

Other extra-terestrial layers include Sky, Mars and even an Ocean layer to be launched in February 2010 with the release of Google Earth 5.0

Moon in Google Earth details all of the Apollo landing missions, and offers lunar surface panoramas in Google’s Street View format. So far, there have been no privacy complaints.

Get the best out of your multimedia content by installing the latest version of the open-source multimedia framework and player.

VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.
It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.
It doesn’t need any external codec or program to work.

You can download VLC 1.0 for Windows here or for other operating systems gou have a look here.