Geek Swagger.
Archive for July, 2008
This is my second post…
Jul 3rd
This is my second post from Jott, the first one was broken so I thought I give it a second try, let's see if it works. Thanks for reading.
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***Edit***
Okay so, the above text was brought to you by Jott obviously. I had to do two posts since the first one didn't turn out so well, but as you can see the only problem with this one is that it should say "I thought I'd" instead of "I thought I." Everything else is dead on.
I also wanted to send out an early happy 4th of July to anyone reading since I won't be putting up a post tomorrow!
Jott.com – useful or gimmicky?
Jul 3rd
I started using last week, and I have to say so far I'm really liking it. If you haven't heard of it before, basically it's a service that acts like a to-do application with a whole lot of other functionality as well. The nice thing is you don't have to be sitting behind your computer to add a new task, instead you can call Jott and add the task that way. The transcriber (I'm assuming it's done by a person?) listens to what you say and adds it to your Jott list. You can also get text and email alerts when a new item is added to Jott which is cool.
So then, say you're on your way home and you remember that you need to fill out a timesheet for work. You know that chances are pretty good that you'd forget if you waited until you got home, so with Jott you just call the number, say "Fill out your timesheet" at the beep, and you're good to go. Sure enough if you have email or text alerts enabled you'll get a message which says "Fill out your timesheet" in text. If you go to the site and login you can even listen to your recording back as well as view it in text. Obviously they have a nice setup for managing your to-dos, including the ability to have multiple lists for your various needs.
Where Jott becomes very powerful though, is in linking Jott to other services. Not only can you add tasks to your Jott page, but it also works with other sites like , , and . I had been using Remember the Milk as my primary site for managing tasks up until I found Jott, so one of the first things I did was start adding tasks to RTM from Jott. I've since decided to cut out the middle man and just use Jott itself, but being able to add calendar events and new tweets from my phone is awesome. There's even a Jott link for WordPress so in theory you could leave a voice message to your blog which would be transcribed into text.
So how accurate is Jott? As long as you remember to speak as clearly as possible in concise statements it does pretty well. The first couple messages I sent were off by a word or two but once I got the hang of it the errors were cut down quite a bit. A nice thing about leaving messages is that you can spell difficult words out instead of just saying them and expecting them to be wrong. My only gripe with that is when I spell words out they will be added with a question mark afterwards. For example if you were to say "Pick up the m-a-i-l" the actual message might say "Pick up the mail(?)" on your Jott page. Not a huge deal but I wonder if there's an option to turn that off somewhere since the spelling transcriptions tend to be pretty accurate as well.
The only question left, as with a lot of web 2.0 services these days, is will I be using it a few weeks from now. Jott is inherently cool, so cool that you might find yourself calling Jott when you could just as easily type out your message and send it to whatever site or to-do list you needed to. Once the novelty wears off is when the real test begins. I suppose that being able to leave notes for yourself when you're away from a computer will always be helpful though, so it might just have some sticking power. We shall see! As a testament to my dedication to Jott I think I'll try to add a short blog post here using their WordPress link, so look for that sometime later in the day. =)
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Firefox 3 a couple weeks in…
Jul 1st
So, it's been a while since the guys at set the record for in a day (I contributed 3-fold I think) and I figured since I wrote a post talking a little bit of trash about Firefox 2 a ways back I should go ahead and comment on Firefox 3. My biggest issue with Firefox 2, just like a lot of people, was the memory leaks. It wasn't a very rare occurrence that I would notice that Firefox had slowed to a crawl and I'd have to kill it via the task manager while it was consuming 150 megabytes of RAM or higher. That's pretty annoying, but I'm happy to say that since I installed Firefox 3 I can't recall having a single crash. Kudos for fixing that problem! Not only that but it's much easier on system resources. Right now the task manager says that Firefox 3 is using a solid 97 megabytes of memory. Not bad. I have the same thing open (Gmail) in IE7 and it's using 79 megabytes but at that point we're kind of splitting hairs.
The other biggest improvement I was looking forward to was an interface facelift. Firefox 2.0 was beginning to look a little antiquated, and when I heard that the browser was going to be optimized for the different platforms (PC, Mac) I was excited. Let me say that after seeing the OS X version of Firefox 3 the PC version left me underwhelmed. The most noticeable difference initially is the browser back and forward buttons. The back button is now stressed (read larger than the forward button) and you can easily tell whether you have anything to go back or forward to because the button will be lit green if that's available. I've found myself using it a little more frequently than I did in 2.0.
Past that the next noticeable feature is the new address bar. It sort of adapts to your browser's history and will "recommend" links from your history as you're typing them in. So for instance, say you go to gmail.com a lot. You can type just 'g' in the address bar and chances are it'll be in the top 3 suggestions so you can arrow down to it and away you go. I kind of like this feature despite it being a bit jarring at first. I've also heard some people complain that they don't necessarily want their browser history to be shown in big bold letters for the world to see. If you don't like it I'm afraid there isn't a really easy way to turn the history feature (dubbed "awesome bar") off, but it's possible by editing your about:config file. You can visit to learn more about that.
I'm sure there are a ton of other very useful features I'm overlooking but those are the ones that stick in my mind. There's some other aesthetic changes to the interface on PC (rounded corners, darker tab bar) but like I said the OS X version is a lot better. Under OS X (I'm still running Tiger on my Macbook) Firefox 3.0 has basically been skinned to look like Safari. I like Safari quite a bit and also didn't like how gaudy 2.0 looked compared to it, so the fact that 3.0 is more streamlined both technically and visually is great. It may just overtake Safari as my standard Mac browser, who knows.
So really that's it, a short post about Firefox 3. I'm pretty happy with the fixes and changes overall but, as with most things these days, it's not perfect. Still if you're a Firefox user and you haven't upgraded because you were (for some very odd reason) waiting to hear what I had to say about it - go ahead and . =P
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