Microsoft's Xbox Live online service, designed to connect players together both in-game and socially, has become practically inseparable from the Xbox 360 gaming console itself. Not surprisingly, Microsoft has tried to copy this success elsewhere; a whole slate of Live Anywhere services was planned for multiple platforms, including Windows Mobile smartphones. The mobile Live service promised, among other things, the ability to take your Xbox Live friends on the go with you, to check up on what they were playing and compare in-game achievements. But to this day, Live Anywhere is still largely a theoretical concept.
360 Live (tested v2.1)
Xbox Live mobile application ($1.99) for iPhone/iPod Touch (Android version forthcoming) by Xavier Larrea
Leave it to independent developers to pick up the slack. Two free iPhone apps by 1337pwn offered the first vestiges of Xbox Live connectivity, allowing you to look up Xbox Live gamertags on your iPhone. 360 Live takes that functionality one step further by pulling the friends list from your Xbox Live account automatically. When your phone is held normally, you can see your friends as a standard list of people; turn it sideways and you get a deck of your friend's gamercards, reminiscent of the current Xbox 360 interface.
Pretty much everything you can see on a gamer's profile on a 360 is available in 360 Live—you can browse through a full list of their achievements and see their current activity. You can also send and receive private messages through the application. 360 Live also has a full database of 360 games, should you ever need a gaming encyclopedia at your fingertips. It can't compare to actually playing a game, but 360 Live keeps you connected to your Xbox Live buddies when you're away from your console.
There are plenty of endeavours where creativity is an asset; with very few exceptions, resume-building isn't one of them. Hand in a resume with an odd layout or a bizarre gimmick, and employers are less likely to give it—and by extension the person behind the resume—a second look. Conventional wisdom says resumes should be straightforward and easy to parse; you're trying to impress people with your qualifications, not your knowledge of arcane Word features or your ability to create byzantine print layouts for basic office documents.
There are lots of handy tips for building a successful resume, and most of them are easily encapsulated in a simple word processing template. JobSpice is the logical extension—now you don't even need a word processor or your own computer to create and send a resume, just access to a computer with an internet connection. You create a resume on the service by adding new sections like building blocks—an education section, for example, or an experience section—and filling in the relevant blanks.
Putting together a resume is quick and easy, but JobSpice's true power is in the ability to share that resume in many different ways. You can pick from one of several simple designs and print your resume or save it as a PDF. Signing up for a free account gives you more options; JobSpice can host your resume online at a URL of your choosing, which you can then send to various employers. You can even host multiple variants of your resume at different URLs, tailored to specific job descriptions. If you struggle with the task of putting together a professional-looking resume, leave everything to JobSpice so you can concentrate on all the other aspects of the job hunt.
Sikuli (tested v0.9.7)
Free screenshot-based scripting utility for Windows/Mac/Linux by User Interface Design Group, MIT CSAIL
It's generally accepted amongst more experienced computer users that if you want something done quickly, it's the command line or nothing. The graphical user interfaces that Apple and Microsoft created are mere window dressing, designed to shield easily confused users from the real guts of a computer—or at least, that's the attitude you'll see from particularly hardcore users. But while graphic interfaces are less efficient, they're also a lot easier for the novice user to understand.
So what happens if a novice user runs into a tedious task involving multiple commands and wants to automate it? Traditionally the answer has been to learn a scripting language, but that's only a real solution if you're willing to invest the time and effort necessary. Wouldn't it be easier if you could just tell a computer to click on the right buttons and open the right menus in the right sequence? That's the problem Sikuli attempts to answer.
Sikuli doesn't throw away the scripting language entirely; it's based on Python, a popular programming language. But the key is in how it figures out what to click on. Where older solutions usually relied on recording a user's actions and replaying them exactly, Sikuli is far more flexible: simply take a screenshot of the buttons, menu items or anything else you want it to interact with, and Sikuli will automatically seek them out. Though this functionality exists in other scripting utilities like AutoHotKey, it's never been easier to set up a script based on figuring out what's on the screen. You will still need a bit of a head for programming, but Sikuli considerably lowers the barriers to making your own scripts and freeing yourself from the tedium of mindless computer tasks.
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