Proud Geek

My favorite on-line wordprocessor — Zoho Writer — has now made it possible to work on documents even when disconnected from the Internet. Makes it mightly useful when flying, or taking the (non-WiFi-equipped) bus or train, or otherwise when you’re (horrors!) not hooked up to the Internet.

A couple months ago, I wrote that Zoho Writer had incorporated Google Gears, a handy browser add-on that makes it possible for users to still use certain webpage features even when not connected to the Internet. But at that time, that incorporation was actually pretty basic — users could only view documents off-line and could not actually create or edit documents.

With the new update, announced earlier this week, Zoho Writer can now be used to view, create, and edit documents whether on-line or off-line. Just be sure to turn this feature on and allow it to download your Zoho Writer files before you actually go off-line!

Like I mentioned the last time, I find it so ironic that Zoho has been using Google Gears to its fullest capabilities, while Google has not yet used Google Gears to bring off-line capabilities to its own on-line word processing suite (Google Docs). But in Zoho’s recent blog post announcing that Zoho Writer is now fully available off-line, Zoho graciously commended Google for its product and its support.

A word of advice to Zoho, though: can you please, pretty please caption or subtitle (in English) your videos? I’d love to watch them, especially the YouTube interview of two Zoho engineers talking about Google Gears. You see, I’m deaf (and so are many of my readers), and even though I’m a faithful Zoho user, I can’t understand your videos - sigh!

Ever since Chatter Email on the Treo now works well with Google’s Gmail, I’ve been using Gmail heavily over the past week. Even though I struggled at first with it, I must admit I have fallen completely in love with Gmail.

Gmail is quite different from most email programs and email websites. We’re so used to the Outlook / Yahoo / Hotmail format, with folders on the left and all emails listed separately in your inbox. Rather, Gmail uses “Tags” instead of folders, and groups together all emails in the same thread rather than listing them separately in the inbox. And if you want to file away an email, you “Archive” it (even after you’ve already tagged it).

At first, I didn’t like having to tag an email and THEN archiving it (a 2- to 3-click process) if I wanted to file away an email on Gmail. And it felt a bit cumbersome to constantly hunt for the right button with my mouse.

And then I discovered “Better Gmail.”

Better Gmail is a Firefox-only extension that adds a good number (I think 25!) of Gmail-specific extensions and features — most of which were developed by other people and then collected under one application. I didn’t like keyboard shortcuts before (I prefer the mouse!), but now with Better Gmail, I love how a few keyboard clicks takes care of just about everything on Gmail. And I really like Better Gmail’s “Filter Assistant” that’s at the top of each email and which makes it easy for you to create filters. Now whenever I get an email to my mom, it’s automatically tagged as “Family” — and every time I send an email to her, my email is automatically tagged as “Family” and then archived. (Yes, I admit it, I’m a mommy’s boy.) Better Gmail also comes with several “skins” — or new looks for Gmail. And Better Gmail adds numerous other features to Gmail — I ain’t gonna list them all here.

But yes, Better Gmail only works with the increasingly popular Firefox browser. I use Firefox on my PCs at home, but at work I grit my teeth and use either Internet Explorer or Netscape — neither of which works with Better Gmail.

The best thing yet about Gmail (and Better Gmail)? It’s free. Even its IMAP functionality is free. Yahoo Mail charges you a yearly fee if you want to use its now-primitive POP functionality — and Yahoo Mail doesn’t even offer IMAP.

Gmail — it’s gonna be the start of a beautiful friendship …

I work with several people with visual impairments, and it has been an eye-opening experience (weak pun intended) for me to watch them work on computers. The things I take for granted — quickly steering the mouse to the exact button and then clicking on it — becomes a labor for some of them. One uses a screen-reader, and tabs from button to button or from text to text and listens until she finds the right button she needs (assuming, of course, the button has text on it with exactly what the button does, rather than just a mysterious “Click Here”). Websites I’m totally used to suddenly becomes a mysterious landscape when viewed through screen-readers or magnified 10 times.

And so it’s encouraging when I read that Yahoo Mail has made its classic interface (not the new AJAX-y drag-n-drop interface) more accessible to people who use screen-readers. I have not figured out yet exactly what has been changed, but it may be that frames (long the bane of screen-readers) have been eliminated in favor of columns that can more easily be scanned by screen-readers.

Good for you, Yahoo! Gmail, when will you do this?

(Thanks, DownloadSquad!)

(I couldn’t resist the slight joke in the title, OK?)

I’ve written several times in the past about MyPunchBowl, and recommended it as the best party-planning website. Not one to rest on its own laurels, the developers of MyPunchBowl has gone and updated it — giving it a new feel, adding a few new features, and making sure MyPunchbowl stays competitive on the crowded online party-planning landscape.

Among the updates, according to Punchbowl’s press release (and yes, I’m blatantly plagarizing here):

• New visual design throughout the entire site presents a tabbed layout for easy navigation and an attractive new layout for guest view
• Party theme selector enables users to select templates by category, subcategory, search
  terms, and even color
• New online invitation templates for Christmas, Hanukkah, New Years Eve, and other
  winter holidays
• Party theme selector provides a full-screen preview of the Save the Date or online
  invitation, including information input by the host
• Party planning ideas & advice by party expert “Penelope Plans” is now integrated into
  MyPunchbowl.com
• New email import including .CSV and others to quickly create a guest list
• Flexible display enables the user to show or hide the on-page help system

As Ted “Theodore” Logan would say: “Party on dudes!”

I’ve previously blogged about options for voice messages to be converted to text to be emailed or SMS’ed to you. (See my reviews or mentions of SimulScribe, Spinvox, and Jott.) But this one, folks, is free.

CallWave provides a suite of “outside the phone” services, and the one that’s of most interest to me (as a deaf person) is its free service transcribing voice messages to text. You can then read the voice message either via email, via a text message, or via a “PhonePage” — your own customized Internet page where you can go through and sort voice messages much like you would like an email inbox.

CallWave even provides a widget that you can put onto your iGoogle, Yahoo, Vista Sidebar, or Apple Dashboard showing your list of voice messages (that you should have already transcribed to text, right?). Very useful, very convenient. And for free. Waitamin, I just caught something — it’s free during its beta period. Ohhhh.

CallWave provides several other services — some at a low monthly fee — like virtual faxes and voice mail on your computer.

This seems to be an ominous sign for Yahoo: its Yahoo Next page now returns an error message.  (Click picture for a larger version.)

Next.yahoo.com is where Yahoo announces its new features, beta or otherwise.  It had been inactive for what must have been nearly a year before Yahoo posted a rather silly text graphic of two dolphins saying a new site is coming soon.

As Matt Drudge would say, “Developing … “

Got the perfect family picture that you want to share with all of your relatives and friends in your Holiday letter? Or are you jealous of how your friends turn their photos into a beautiful postcard with pilthy statements on the side? Or do you have a bunch of photos that you want to share with your kids’ grandma, but she lives 1,800 miles away and you don’t quite want to take the time to drop these photos at the post office?

You can do all these, and more, through Target’s excellent photo center.

If you sign up for Flickr, Shutterfly, or Kodak Gallery, you would be able to store whatever digital photos you have — and then you would be able to send it to Target’s Photo Center for super-easy photo processing.

Here’s what I’ve done with Target’s Photo Center in the past:

• Through the Internet, I ordered dozens of copies of a family photo for our Holiday cards. I was able to either have the photos be mailed to my home or pick them up at our local Target.
• Another year, I picked a cool Holiday “postcard” for our family photo, and these postcards even came with matching envelopes. Made mailing out these Holiday cards a real breeze that year!
• My mother — my kids’ grandmother — wanted copies of photos from our recent visit to her house. So, I uploaded them to Shutterfly and made an order for them to be printed out at Target’s Photo Center at my mother’s local Target. Even though my mother and I live 1,842 miles apart, she was able to pick these photos up from her local Target store just one mere hour after I ordered them via the Internet.
• Made a blow-up of a particularly cute photo for a birthday party.

Target’s Photo Center also provides many other services, like photo books, photo ties (don’t you dare get me one of those!!), stickers, aprons (hmm, maybe I’ll get my partner one of those), t-shirts, coffee mugs, collages, and many more.

As if Facebook isn’t already addictive enough!

A while ago, I talked about a way for you to video-chat via your (and your friend’s) Facebook profile via TokBox. And this Friday, a new (but beta) Facebook app allowing people to IM each other will be released. It’ll be called FriendVox, and you’ll be able to have IM conversations with your friends via your Facebook profile. This will apparently be totally separate from the usual popular AIM, Yahoo, Gtalk, and other IM networks.

What? You still want to be able to do IM conversations using AIM, Yahoo, Gtalk, etc? There is a way.

If you’ve been with me from the beginning, you might remember one of my earliest blog posts lauding Meebo as THE way to tie together all of your various IM accounts. If you’ve got two different AIM accounts, one Yahoo account, two Gtalk accounts, and one ICM account, why, you only need just one Meebo userID and then add all these different accounts to it. You can then log into all of these accounts at the same time, or only some, or even just one of them. And Meebo is used via the Internet only — no separate program need to be downloaded!

What’s even better: your friends can now IM your Meebo account at any time via your Facebook profile — and if you’re not logged in, they can leave a message.

How? Add the Meebo application to your Facebook profile, and follow the slightly complex instructions. Once you’re done, any of your friends (or even anybody in your network, if you so set it) will be able to send you an IM from your Facebook profile. If you’re logged into Meebo, you’ll get their IM message immediately.

But true, this doesn’t seem work from profile to profile. It only works from profile to your Meebo page. I wonder if FriendVox, the new IM application coming out in beta form this Friday, will alert you of new IM messages from profile to profile if you’re logged in to Facebook and viewing your profile. I wonder how that will work …

Stay tuned! And thanks, Download Squad, for the news about FriendVox.

I joined Facebook.

Latest cool Facebook app: a Bob Dylan video that plays in your Facebook profile. Bob goes through about 15 posters, showing each and throwing them on the floor. You get to customize what ten of these posters says. Too cool. At the moment, mine says “Hey World! / My two / daughters / want a / safer world! / Can / you / help / create a / safer world?”

 (Update 10/30/07: The Next.Yahoo.com website is down, and returns an error message.)

Next.Yahoo.com has been where Yahoo announces its new projects, beta versions of services, and experimental features. Much like Google Labs, but Next.Yahoo.com was first. However, Next.Yahoo.com has been languishing for quite a while, with nil new features or beta versions being added to this page in what must be over a year or more.

Just a few moments ago, the old Next.Yahoo.com site was taken down (see old cached version), and a “text painting” (reprinted below) of two dolphins was put into its stead. One dolphin is bemoaning the fact that next.yahoo.com is offline, and the other one hinting at good things to come. This retro sketch, and the humor in it, is so un-Yahoo that, well, it’s gotten me excited. What will the new next.yahoo.com bring? Hang on …

OH NOEZ, TEH NEXT.YAHOO.COM
                  SITE IS OFFLINE!!!11one1
                                    /
                          _.-~  )           No need for distress, Giles.
               _..--~~~~,'   ,-/     _      I believe the site will be
            .-'. . . .'   ,-','    ,' )         revived in due time.
          ,'. . . _   ,--~,-'__..-'  ,'
        ,'. . .  (@)' ---~~~~      ,'       __
       /. . . . '~~             ,-'        (  ~-._
      /. . . . .             ,-'      _     -,   `,~~~~--.._
     ; . . . .  - .        ,'        ( `,    `,`-,   '. . . .`-.
    : . . . .       _     /          ',  `-..__`-,~--,   _ . . .`,
   . . . . .          `-.:            `,      ~~~~--- `(@)  . . .`,
  . . . ./  - .          )              `-,             ~~` . . . .
 .  . . |  _____..---.._/ ____             `-,             . . . . .
                                                   _       . . . . :
                                               :.-`          . . . . .

    (the new next.yahoo.com is under contruction.  be on the lookout.)