Zhephree

My first paid app appeared in the Palm App Catalog this weekend. To me, it’s super useful, but the abilities of it may not be immediately apparent to everyone, so I figured I’d shed some light on some use cases.

First, you should pick up neato! for a cool $1.43 from the App Catalog here.

After downloading and installing the app on your phone, launch neato! and tap the “Generate URL” button. That’ll give you a unique URL that you need to visit on your computer, not on your phone. Visit the URL on your computer and drag the link it gives you to your bookmark toolbar in your web browser. You’re done!

Now, neato!’s core capability is sending the current URL in your web browser to your phone and having it instantly open on your phone’s browser. This will work on any website. It’s super hand for taking long blog posts on the road, or maybe there’s a site you’d rather have on your phone. But this functionality exposes lots more!

Transfer PC Bookmarks to Your Phone
Load up a bookmark on your PC, click “neato!” and once it’s open on your phone, bookmark it on your phone.

Use it as a poor man’s Read It Later
Say you’re reading a blog post somewhere and have to leave your computer, or maybe you want to go relax on the couch instead of sitting at your desk. Click “neato!” and start reading from your phone.

Use webOS’s multitasking to watch how-to videos while working or playing
There are lots of how-to videos for webOS and webOS apps available on YouTube, and since you can have a game or website open while having a YouTube video open on webOS, you can swipe back-and-forth easily! Great for Angry Birds walk-throughs.

Take driving directions with you on the go!
The neato! bookmarklet is smart: it knows when you’re on a Google Maps page. One problem with Google Maps is, since everything is handled with JavaScript, the URL in your browser never changes, so you can’t just send that URL to your browser. Luckily, neato! is smart enough to find the true URL to your current view or directions in Google Maps and it sends that to your phone instead! And the directions open in the Google Maps app, to boot!

Open Apps from the Palm website into the App Catalog on your phone
When viewing an App Catalog link on your computer, you see a page like this giving you some screenshots and information about the app. It’s handy, but then getting that app on your phone isn’t so easy. You can either search for the app by name in the catalog, or use Palm’s handy “Send to my phone” feature straight from the page. The problem with the latter method is that it sends a text message to your phone which, aside from possibly costing you money, can take a while to get to your phone sometimes. Clicking “neato!” while viewing an App Catalog URL instantly opens the App Catalog straight to the app you want, ready to download. (Thanks @acarback!)

Send short clips of text to your phone to SMS to a friend.
Maybe a joke or funny tweet, or a friend’s address needs to be texted to another friend. Normally, you’d have to re-type the text on your phone from your PC, but now you can just click “neato!” and have the text, ready to be edited and copy/pasted popped up on your phone.

Open PDFs on your phone
When viewing a PDF in your browser, neato! will open the PDF in the PDF Viewer app on your phone! (thanks, @linuxq!) 

Stream music on your phone!
If the URL of the page you’re on on your PC’s browser is an audio file, neato! will open it on your phone with the Music app. 

There are TONS more uses for neato! that even I haven’t stumbled upon. However, here’s some that coming soon, but aren’t yet active:

• Open homebrew apps listed on webOSRoundUp and PreCentral in Internalz or Preware on your phone to make downloading faster and easier
• When text being sent to neato! is a phone number, phone dialer opens with phone number pre-populated (but doesn’t dial it)
• When text being sent to neato! is a URL you highlighted and sent (i.e., an un-linked URL from a forum), URL opens in browser, like sending a normal URL

So, how are you guys using neato!? If you’ve come up with any interesting uses, comment with them below and I’ll edit this post with them here!

Thanks for downloading, btw!