David from ironicsans sent word that his genius Google Voice bookmarklet for iPhone Safari has been given a fairly awesome update:

Now there’s a script people can run (with instructions) that will convert your entire Address Book into Google Voice Speed Dial bookmarklets. It saves them to an html file that can be imported into Safari Bookmarks, rearranged or edited however you like, and then synced with the iPhone. Easy.

Check it out and let us know how it works for you!

David over at ironicsans shared this little piece of inspired genius with us: Google Voice Speed Dial Bookmarklet Generator.

Bookmarklets are little snippets of JavaScript saved as bookmarks that, before there were apps on the iPhone, did all sorts of wonderful things (editor emeritus Mike Overbo whipped up a smorgasbord of them a couple years back). Since Google Voice apps are currently forbidden in the App Store, David’s solution works similar wonders for them:

With bookmarklets you can call your GV contacts with one tap, and keep them organized in Safari Bookmarks folders. [The] simplest way to use it is to point your iPhone browser to http://www.ironicsans.com/gv

If you give it a try, let us know how it works for you!

If you’re browsing the web on a PC, you can just hit CTRL-F or CMD-F and quickly find any text on a webpage. It’s great for finding things fast, especially on long reams of text, and Safari does a nice job of it — just not Mobile Safari on the iPhone, not yet.

Editor emeritus Mike Overbo brought something very similar to us two years ago (along with a ton of others — check that link!) when iPhone 1.x made bookmarklets all the rage. Since then, Apple has added a lot of functionality, but still hasn’t deigned to gift us with Find… on page. Rafael Cimatti (via App Advice) is keeping the handy Javascript bookmarklet alive via Cydia (though it works on any iPhone). It can’t fully replace a built in command, with next, back, etc. options, etc. but if it isn’t 100% right, it is 100% “right now”.

Here’s the bookmarklet: Find…

Either bookmark it on your desktop browser (drag it to the bookmark bar on desktop Safari) and sync it over, or on your iPhone copy the code after the break, bookmark a random page, edit it, change the name, and paste in the code (check the App Advice link above for step by step instructions).

And next time you’re on a page, hit the bookmark, type in your text, and find away!

Have an iPhone Pro Tip of you own to share? Send it in!

[via Daveizzle]

javascript:void%28s%3Dprompt%28%27Find%20text%3A%27%2C%27%27%29%29%3Bs%3D%27%28%27+s+%27%29%27%3Bx%3Dnew%20RegExp%28s%2C%27gi%27%29%3Brn%3DMath.floor%28Math.random%28%29*100%29%3Brid%3D%27z%27%20+%20rn%3Bb%20%3D%20document.body.innerHTML%3Bb%3Db.replace%28x%2C%27%3Cspan%20name%3D%27%20+%20rid%20+%20%27%20id%3D%27%20+%20rid%20+%20%27%20style%3D%5C%27color%3A%23000%3Bbackground-color%3Ayellow%3B%20font-weight%3Abold%3B%5C%27%3E%241%3C/span%3E%27%29%3Bvoid%28document.body.innerHTML%3Db%29%3Balert%28%27Found%20%27%20+%20document.getElementsByName%28rid%29.length%20+%20%27%20matches.%27%29%3Bwindow.scrollTo%280%2Cdocument.getElementsByName%28rid%29%5B0%5D.offsetTop%29%3B

We’re running a new series here at TiPb (Titanium Powerbook? No, The iPhone Blog!) that brings older but still relevant/interesting/noteworthy articles, reviews, and blog posts back into the forefront of the discussion. Hopefully, we’ll be able to uncover some great articles that you might have missed and offer further insight on everyone’s favorite toy.

Also, it’ll help transition our still new merger, PhoneDifferent fans will get a taste of TiPb writing and TiPb readers will catch up with what has happened in the PhoneDifferent world! Think of it as a blog within a blog or for the metaphorically inclined, dinnertime stories at a big happy family reunion..

Today, we’ll bring back the topic of Bookmarklets. Mike Overbo, our Editor Emeritus, found that Bookmarklets extend the reach and capabilities of the iPhone’s Safari browser. Essentially, Bookmarklets are small computer applications stored as a URL on your bookmarks bar. Examples would include a Find feature, IMDB search, eBay search, etc.

To use these Bookmarklets, simply store them to your iPhone’s bookmarks and when you are in need of, say a quick Wikipedia search, open that particular Bookmarklet and it’ll prompt you with a direct search screen rather than waiting for the page to open up. I use Bookmarklets everyday to quicken my online searching (darn that EDGE), take a look and see if there is anything you can use!

Read On For The Rest of the Links!

Collection of Bookmarklets There are a ton of links to Bookmarklets all across the interweb in this article. You can probably find a link to all the relevant Bookmarklets in the world here.

Bookmarklet / Favelet Smorgasbord The ever-so-helpful Mike even created some Bookmarklets on his own for the PD faithful! In this article there is a ton of useful Bookmarklets that range from math applications to simple general searches.

Tabbed Browsing Bookmarklet And to cap it off, we include probably one of the better Bookmarklets available, Tabulate allows Safari on the iPhone to re-create the ‘open in new tab’ feature. A great Bookmarklet that I use nearly everyday.

Well, that’s it for Bookmarklets and this edition of In Case You Missed It. Hopefully you’ll find these tools useful and we’ll come back soon for more great iPhone articles, neat iPhone features, and news that you may have missed!

figure 1: the most important feature is highlighted

There’s another password manager on the scene, and this one looks to be the most secure version that I’ve seen. 1Password is a mac-only application, so there unfortunately isn’t a password manager I could securely recommend to Windows iPhone users yet. The application has a little button that sends an encrypted bookmarklet to Safari that you can then sync to your iPhone. You can open the bookmarklet and view your passwords with a master password that you assign within 1Password.

The bit that gives 1Password the nod above others at the moment is that the bookmarklet is encrypted with good cryptography. The blowfish cipher is a well-respected cipher by Bruce Schneier, one of the most respected cryptologists out there, and 1Password uses blowfish’s maximum key length of 448 bits within the bookmarklet. So, if you’re looking to store your passwords with heavy-duty security, 1Password might be worth your look.

So, yeah. Favelets and bookmarklets. In the podcast, I promised a review article about useful bookmarklets and favelets, for the iPhone. And here it is.

I’ve written a few simple bookmarklets as well; it seems a lot of the bookmarklets are designed for web editors, and not always so much for the average web user. I’m guessing that not many regular folks need to edit CSS from the iPhone, and those that do already have those bookmarklets synched over. But still, there’s a void for popular sites. It seemed that all I found were eBay, Amazon, and Google sites. So I set out to make a few of my own, and edit a few others so that they’d work on iPhone Safari (henceforth, iSafari).

If you have any requests for a custom bookmarklet, put them in the comments. It has to be said that I make no guarantees that I can make the resulting request as I’m not an expert with javascript by any means, but the worst that can happen is that I say no. Okay, that’s not the worst that can happen. The worst is that I say no VERY IMPOLITELY.

As always, the best way to install these bookmarklets to your iPhone is to drag them to the bookmarks bar in Desktop Safari and give them a name you can remember them by. Then, it may be a prudent idea to organize them into a folder. I’ve organized my bookmarklets in the last bookmark folder in my menu bar, so it’s always the last folder I see.

General Searches

• Find in Page
  From the I-Don’t-Understand-Why-It-Wasn’t-Built-In Department. This updated version highlights searched-for text as bold with a yellow background it stands out a bit more. It is no help if the background is already yellow. There’s not much helping a site with a full-on yellow background, though. At any rate, for those rare occasions, here’s one that changes the background to orange.
  [via]

Entertainment Searches

• Yahoo! Movie Times by Zip code
  This one is pretty self-explanatory. I wrote this one quick to see if Yahoo! results are easier to read on an iPhone than Google results.

Writing & Blogging Related Bookmarklets

These are some of the tools that I use to blog and write, though they could be used for many other purposes.

• Post to Del.icio.us
  Of course, it’s always handy to have a bookmark to your del.icio.us bookmarks nearby. [via]

Math Tools

These are quick bookmarklets for math. Not something that I use every day, but every once in a while stuff like this is useful to have.

• Random Number
  This favelet asks you to enter a maximum integer, and generate a random number from 1 to that integer. [via]

Passwords

• Find Login with BugMeNot
  BugMeNot is a useful site where people can share logins for sites that require compulsory registration. I wrote this one for quick queries on the iPhone.