iPhone: Visual speed dial is a nice idea, but when you have to launch a separate app to make a phone call it’s a little annoying. Here are two ways to add visual speed dial to your home screen.

There’s an app called Custom Dial 6 ($1) that lets you add six custom speed dial icons to your iPhone home screen. There’s also a free version that lets you add just one. This is kind of limiting, plus there are some bugs—both things they intend to fix in a free update—so I figured there must be a way anyone can just do this themselves with a little light coding. That happens to be the case.

While the video up top will walk you through the process, but here are the basic steps:

1. Download these files to start you off. You’ll find two documents: html_prep.html and autodial.php.
2. The HTML Prep document is basically just a very, very simple HTML page with a photo and a link. You’ll want to make a PHP page with this HTML code in it. You can just copy and paste it into, say, your_friend.php and change the image to point to one of your friend and the link to go to your friend’s phone number. The img tag works just like any HTML img tag, but the link tag is a bit different. Instead of http:// it’s tel:// followed by the phone number of the person you want this speed dial icon to call.
3. Once you have that page finished, upload it to your web server and open it on your iPhone. Test the phone link to make sure it works. If it does, zoom in on your friend’s picture until it fills up the entire browser window. Then tap the + button at the bottom of the screen. That’ll bring up your bookmark options. You want to tap “Add to Homescreen.” Enter your friend’s name and save. Mobile Safari will close and you’ll see your friend’s face and name pop up on your home screen.
4. Right now this is just a link to a page with a phone number. We want to auto dial, right? Now you’re going to want to replace the page you just made with some simple PHP code. You’ll find that PHP code in autodial.php. Basically, you’re just using the header() function to automatically go to the tel:// link. All you need to do is replace all the HTML code in the document you just made with the code in autodial.php (using your friend’s phone number rather than 818-555-1234 of course).

It’s kind of a round-about way to make a home screen icon, but it’s easy to change the phone numbers later and you can add as many as you want. Put them all in a folder and you’ve got some handy visual speed-dialing on your home screen. This method isn’t perfect because you still have to accept an alert window after choosing a speed contact.

We recently went through some of the best ways to share files with a nearby computer, and many of you noted that Dropbox can still be a viable syncing method, even over Wi-Fi. Here’s how to set it up.In our rundown, we noted that Dropbox, while one of our favorite services ever, isn’t ideal for sharing with your friend sitting right next to you. While you can use Dropbox to share files with anyone, you usually have to upload it and download it from Dropbox’s servers first (which takes longer than sharing over Wi-Fi, Ethernet, or the other sharing options we mentioned). However, if both you and your friend have a Dropbox account, you can, in fact, use it to share files over your Wi-Fi network.

All you need to do is share a folder from Dropbox’s web interface. From the My Dropbox view, hit “Share a folder” and choose the one containing the files you want to share. You’ll be prompted to invite your friend to view the folder. Once your friend accepts the email request, the folder will show up in his or her Dropbox and they’ll start to download the files. If you’re on the same Wi-Fi network, Dropbox will transfer the folder over Wi-Fi instead of the internet, thus speeding up the process.

Note that each computer also needs internet access for this to work, so it won’t work with the ad-hoc method unless both computers are wired up to the internet, or if one computer is wired up and sharing the internet over the ad-hoc connection. It’s generally most useful for the first method we mentioned, when you’re both on the same secure local network.

We still don’t know if this is the most useful method for everyone (after all, it only works if you friend also has a Dropbox account), but if the conditions are right, it’s probably the method that requires the least set-up—just create a shared folder, drop the files in, and go. Hit the link to read more about how it works.

If you’re a Mac user who relies on Microsoft’s Office suite to get things done with your Windows counterparts, the newest release of Office—Office for Mac 2011—will officially hit shelves on October 26. According to the folks at Macworld, the new Office (or at least the new Word) has a lot of promise.

The new version of Internet Explorer finally adds a new tab page that shows your most recently used sites, but sadly you can’t customize the display from the options panel. What you can use, however, is a registry hack.To make the change for yourself, you can simply head over to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\TabbedBrowsing\NewTabPage key in the registry editor, and then change the value of NumRows to the number of rows you’d like to see on the new tab page. You’ll have to restart Internet Explorer before the change kicks in.

If you’d rather not mess around with the registry editor, you can simply hit the link for a set of downloadable registry hacks for each number of rows. You’ll need to restart Internet Explorer after making the change.

Windows only: Portable, open-source backup utility Create Synchronicity is a tiny but powerful way to run backups or synchronize folders on your system, an external drive, or to another PC on your network.Once you’ve launched the utility, you’ll need to click on the New Profile icon and type in a name for the profile, which will open up the settings window where you can choose the source and destination folders and choose the other options you might want. Once you’re done, you can easily run the backup profile, or setup scheduling options to happen automatically. Create Synchronicity is free and open source, works on Windows systems only.