Our friends at Lifehacker shared a heck of a tip today. Setting up Google’s Gmail, Calendar, and Contacts on your iOS device can be a multi-step process. This tip makes it all one step.

Thank goodness for this, because we know that the official Google Gmail App for iOS was a flop.

It’s a bit of a hack, but it definitely works:

The key is when setting up a new Email account, choose Microsoft Exchange instead of Gmail. It gives you access to contacts and calendars, and everything will sync on your iOS device seamlessly. Whenever you add a new contact or calendar invite, everything will move over in real-time.

• Open up the Settings app on your iOS device and go to the “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” section. Hit “Add Account”.
• From there, choose Microsoft Exchange as the type of account (again, don’t choose Gmail).
• Type in your Gmail address under Email. Leave the Domain field blank and enter your full Gmail address under Username (including the @gmail.com, @googlemail.com, or other suffix). Type in your password and give it any description you like. Mine’s just called “Gmail”.
• Press the Next button at the top of the screen. It should pop up a message saying Unable to Verify Certificate—if it does, just hit cancel. Then, type m.google.com in the new “Server” box that shows up at the top of the screen. Then tap Next.

After that, you should be ready to rock with no headaches. Everything will update in real-time so there’s no need to do manual syncs or worry about push notifications. Thank you Lifehacker!

If you’re a fan of the puzzle piece dropping game Tetris, then you’ll enjoy the app DropIn. It was created in a day by the LinkedIn team to show how useful the LinkedIn API can be.

The premise is simple, and very reminiscent of TweetBricks, which used your Twitter friends in a game of Tetris.

This game is actually fun, and can educate you on what your LinkedIn contacts are up to these days.

Playing DropIn

The blocks that are used in the Tetris game will be replaced by the avatars of your LinkedIn contacts. The neat part is that if you click anyone on the puzzle blocks, you’ll be shown the latest information about them from their LinkedIn profile.

Imagine telling someone that you learned about their new job during a game of Tetris.

DropIn is a fun way to pass the time and do a little bit of networking, too.

The controls are rather easy and use your keyboard for the interactions.

Unfortunately you can’t share or save your high scores, which kills some of the opportunities to get people to keep playing. However, for an app built in a day, what can you really expect?

I suggest playing DropIn on a larger sized monitor, as I couldn’t get the whole screen to show up correctly on my 11-inch MacBook Air. Other than that, the app is great, and might inspire you to develop new games or apps using the LinkedIn API.

Finding all of your online “stuff” is difficult. You have email, tweets, and Facebook status updates. You toss them all into the internet. If you were to try and find one of these items, it could be pretty difficult. Sure, search in Gmail is pretty great, but Twitter’s search isn’t so great, and neither is Facebook’s. Greplin is a “personal search engine that allows you to search all your online data in one easy place.”

Greplin says its goal is to “make Greplin the search bar for your life.” That’s a lofty goal, but we can immediately see why Greplin is such an important service. We interviewed the 19 year old founder of Greplin, Daniel Gross, in March.

The first thing you do is sign up for free. After that you can connect to your accounts, and the most popular ones are free, which is nice. Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Google Calendars, Google Docs, and Google Contacts should get you searching for things you thought were gone, fast. Greplin has other site connections available for a $4.99 a month (or $49.99 a year) upgrade. It’s all about your personal online habits though, so there’s no requirement to upgrade.

Once you’ve connected your accounts (it’s secure, Greplin promises), you should start seeing that your data is available to search on within about 20 minutes. The company does search indexes every 20 minutes after that.

The power of Greplin is that you don’t have to have all of these connected accounts open in other browsers or tabs. To find things, all you need to do is bring up the Greplin site, or use the Greplin iOS app to do so.

The search for “Zee” above, shows results sorted by “People” and “Streams”, and as of this writing, it was pretty much in real-time as you can see by the tweets.

Google is the king of search, most would argue, but not many people would trust Google with all of their internet logins, so Greplin may have found a huge niche for itself if the company can prove to be trustworthy and of course provide a great search experience.

via RWW