As you can see from the screenshot above, the interface is very polished. Creating a new plan and adding polls, location and description about the events is a no-brainer and can be done very quickly. You can see that I created a plan for my birthday party and have added a poll and a location.

You can then invite your friends to have a look at your plan and vote, comment or take any other action like adding the event to their Google Calendar/iCal/Outlook.

Each plan has its own separate page (like every blog post having a separate page and a permalink), and your friends can go to that page to vote on the polls, comment or suggest a different date/time for the event.

When enough friends have taken a look at your plan, and when you think you’re done, just click on the Organize button and then click the ‘Finalize Plan’ link and nail down a date from one of the suggested times.

Your dashboard shows the most recent activity on your plans, listing the comments and other such things added to your plans by your friends.

Planyp.us Platform

That isn’t all. The Planyp.us platform can be hosted on your own site. It’s sort of like self hosted WordPress or Mediawiki and you can get more information here on how to go about using it.

Final Word

Planyp.us, I think, is going to take off – they will surely have a nice fan following just like Remember the Milk has. Planyp.us is not much party-centric, so I think it’ll appeal to a wider crowd. A lot of effort has been put into making the UI as friendly as possible (good AJAX usage and lesser pageloads) and I’m sure it’s going to pay off.

On clicking the Theater View option, the panels on the right move down immediately and the video expands to fill a larger area. Clicking on Lights Off, all the other parts of the page get dimmed down and only the video player gets highlighted, as you can see here:

I’m not sure if this feature was already present for some videos, or if it’s just being made available/tested via selected users. Did anyone else notice the theater view option for Youtube videos? Let us know in the comments. Update: This feature is currently available for all long videos on Youtube, as the Google Operating System blog reports.

iTunesKeys comes to the rescue though, and lets you create custom universal keyboard shortcuts to control iTunes playback. The app also displays song info including artwork near the system tray every time a new song is played, just like Winamp does.

Once you start the application, an icon appears on the system tray. By right clicking and going to Options, you can assign custom global hotkeys for your iTunes. As promised, you can assign system wide hotkey shortcuts for almost anything from play/pause to rating songs, as you can see from the screenshot below:

I tried it with the latest version of iTunes, and it worked like a charm. Make sure that you have Microsoft .NET 2.0 framework installed. iTunesKeys requires the .NET framework to run.

Username: Your STD Code excluding the zero and your phone number. For example, if your STD Code is 0461 and your phone number is 123456789, you should type 461123456789 in the Username box.

Password: Your Phone Number. Example: 123456789

Dial: 172222

Of course, you can get speeds of about 56kbps only. But free is good, isn’t it? Spread the message to everyone you know, because only a few thousand users have signed up since they launched this free dialup service. Update: You still have to pay normal call charges.

This little site up at Muzicons.com lets you upload your favourite song in MP3 format, and create a widget that can stream it over to your blog’s visitors. Just upload your MP3 song, customize the looks of the MP3 widget and choose an icon to portray your emotion or feelings. That’s about it. Not much of a productivity thing really, but it’s a little tool to add some fun and emotion to your personal blog or website. Visit Muzicons

You could still experience the wonderful features of this awesome antivirus application in the 100 day trial period. Here’s how you can go about availing the activation key, as described in Sizlopedia:

1. Follow the link below:
   http://www.coverdisc.co.uk/cs249/kis/index.php
2. Enter all details and click Submit
3. Now it will ask you to enter the fifth word of the sixth step from issue 249, enter “also” without quotes and hit submit.

Grab the free key as soon as possible, because it might expire at any time.

So I thought of writing this up so that in case anyone finds navigating the site wearisome, they can refer to this and get the application removed quickly from their profiles.

In order to remove an application from your Facebook account, here is what you need to do:

• First, login to your Facebook account
• Click on the Applications menu in the bar on the bottom of the screen and then click Edit

• Click the Authorized tab on the top of the page that appears.

• Click the Remove link on the right of the application’s name. Click Remove again to confirm the deletion

The application will now be deleted from your Facebook profile. You’ll not be able to use its functions unless you add it to your Facebook profile again.

Let us know in the comments if you have any questions.

Besides the revamped UI, plenty of new features like album art support, metadata tags editor have been added in this version of the popular media player.

VLC Player 0.9.2 now works with the Last.FM scrobbler and also supports watching Youtube videos directly – just key in the video URL, and watch it instantly from your desktop, on VLC!

I found this 0.9.2 version to be a bit slower than the earlier one that I had installed on my computer. Give it a try though, it’s available as a download from this web page.

Android, Google’s open source platform for mobile phones is now available for developers to download and to unleash its power to develop wonderful applications. With Android, Google has expanded his market to new horizons. Till now, Microsoft has built a strong up-hold with its Windows Operating System for mobiles and it would be very interesting to watch how Google penetrates the current market for the same.

As claimed by Google, Android is a true open source platform which provides complete access of all the resources which a mobile can offer to build the applications. Further more, Android is built on the open Linux kernel and a custom virtual machine that has been designed to optimize memory and hardware resources in a mobile environment.

The Android SDK provides useful and wide range of libraries and tools that can be used to build rich applications. Moreover, all the applications built on this platform will be treated equally which means there will be no difference between a third party application and android’s core applications as far as access privileges are concerned.

The Android was launched with a demo/presentation by Steve Horowitz in which he explains its basic features. The home screen consists of your favourite applications like browser, maps & contacts which are placed at the bottom of the screen resembling Apple’s OSX. If you want to call somebody, just key in his/her name and hit dial. Another good feature Android has is the feasibility among different applications.For e.g ., if u need to find someone’s address, just go to contacts and click on maps. Notifications from other users are shown at the top of the screen. The browser app is based on open source WEB-KIT and the pages are displayed same as in your desktop. The navigation through-out the phone is very easy. You simply have to drag the screen with your finger, pretty much the same as in an iphone. With more updates yet to come from Google regarding Android, I hope this platform shall revolutionize the concept of how we use mobile phones today!

SPECIFICATIONS:

Java virtual machine:

Software written in Java can be compiled into Dalvik byte codes and executed in the Dalvik virtual machine, which is a specialized VM implementation designed for mobile device use, although not technically a standard Java Virtual Machine.

Handset layouts:

The platform is adaptable to both larger, VGA, 2D graphics library; 3D graphics library based on OpenGL ES 1.0 specifications, traditional Smartphone layouts.

Storage:

The Database Software SQLite is used for data storage purposes.

Connectivity:

Android supports a wide variety of connectivity technologies including GSM/EDGE, CDMA, EV-DO, UMTS, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi.

Messaging:

Available forms of messaging are SMS, MMS, and XMPP including threaded text messaging. The XMPP implementation is based on Jive Software’s Smack

Media support:

Android will support advanced audio/video/still media formats such as MPEG-4, H.264, MP3, AAC, AMR, JPEG, PNG and GIF.

Web Browser:

The web browser available in Android is based on the open-source WebKit application framework.

Additional hardware support:

Android is fully capable of utilizing video/still cameras, touchscreens, GPS, compasses, accelerometers, and accelerated 3D graphics.

Development environment:

Android includes a device emulator, tools for debugging, memory, performance profiling and a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE.

This is a guest post by Praval who is a freelance writer/blogger and works for Uswaretech, a Django Consulting shop as Web Evangelist and Online Marketer.

“I am tired of receiving messages containing malicious computer programs, viruses from your email address!!!…”

Just In: If you’re getting emails with the above text and IPLOGS.ZIP file as an attachment, beware! Just don’t download/open it. The zip attachment contains an executable file going by the name IPLOGS.EXE and it’s been found to contain infectious malware that could harm your computer.

Reports on Virscan.org show that the file contains a virus / trojan horse.