Ravi Blogs about IT Topics

I have been extremely busy with various things that I have not had time to write for a long time. As most of you know, I moved to a Mac, purchased an iPhone and have been playing around with some of the new features of Jott and I want to write about them all in this post..
I decided to move to a Mac because of an emerging trend amongst the students and faculty members to move to a Mac. Though I have had a reasonable understanding of the Mac environment, it is really not like using it on a regular basis. So, I have been using a MacBook Pro configured with VMWare Fusion to run Windows application. Needless to say that I am very impressed with the user interface, ease of use, abundance of applications, and above all the stability. As a long term Unix person, I will attribute all of this to the underlying operating system and rest my case.

You will be interested to know that over 90% of all the computers that our Cardinal Technologies sold this summer were Mac laptops…

Though VMWare Fusion provides me the windows environment (it is amazingly efficient and stable), I understand that it is not exactly the same as running a windows machine. But I have access to enough windows PCs that I am not worried about losing touch with that environment.

Another thing I did was to change from my blackberry to the new 3G iPhone. I needed to replace my almost 3 year old blackberry anyways… This again is a brilliant device in terms of user interface and integration with Microsoft Exchange for email. There are two major issues though – the battery life has a lot to desire depending on some of the settings, and the quality of phone functions such as sound and speakerphone. I am planning to use a headset while driving to be able to deal with the phone calls.

You also have heard from me about Jott, a voice to text translation service. I have been using it for a long time. They have come out of beta and while continuing to offer a free service, they also have a couple of paid services which provide enhanced services.

Finally my wife yielded to my constant “advice” that in order to avoid me messing up our family events calendar, she really needs to manage this electronically rather than the physical calendar in our music room. We set up a shared calendar in Google and it has worked out great. I am no longer agreeing to play golf with my friends on a day that we have to visit our friends or drive our son to his activities.

One application I was looking for was a way to add events to calendar through voice. For example, when I am at a doctor’s office and they schedule me for the next appointment, I refuse to take the little paper card (in line with my philosophy of paper reduction) and want to call in the appointment so it would appear in my calendar. Since none existed, I took advantage of Jott and Google. Google has a feature whereby it electronically scans your email and when it finds some specific constructs it will suggest that this may be a meeting request and if you agreed, the event will get inserted in your calendar. I love this feature. So, I would call into my Jott a properly constructed email which will then be automatically inserted into our Google calendar. But this is still a two step process.

In the new Jott, if you are willing to pay $3.95 a month, this feature has been implemented. Using the Google Calendar API, Jott has set up the necessary conduits. You can use Jott to set up a link to your calendar of choice in Google (Jott does not store your Google Password, instead it is used for the first time to construct an appropriate hash to connect to Google – this method of token passing explained in the FAQ). If you have multiple calendars, you can set them up separately. Then, when you call Jott, you send a message to the name you gave for your Google Calendar and leave the message. This works beautifully and I feel it is worth $4 a month for me. I use this feature a lot…

Other added features provide the same features for outlook calendar, tasks and notes. I just set these up and I intend to use them often. Finally, there is also a nice little application for iPhone which allows you to speak into the phone and the corresponding text gets stored in the iPhone as notes.

And yes, even with my accent, the voice to text translation is extremely good….