{"id":2174,"date":"2011-04-03T18:21:54","date_gmt":"2011-04-04T02:21:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/wordpress\/?p=2174"},"modified":"2024-12-14T21:01:39","modified_gmt":"2024-12-15T05:01:39","slug":"306-readability-growl-looktel-money-reader-chess-wise-cropper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/2011\/04\/306-readability-growl-looktel-money-reader-chess-wise-cropper\/","title":{"rendered":"#306 Readability, Growl, LookTel Money Reader, Chess-Wise, Cropper"},"content":{"rendered":"

George and Jim talk about the Safari addon Readability from readability.com<\/a>, in Dumb Question Corner, Adam Hobden asks about Growl (growl.info<\/a>). LookTel Money Reader looktel.com<\/a> for reading bills when you can’t see, and staying with the accessibility theme, Scott Howell shows us how Chess-Wise lets you play chess on the iPhone using Voice Over from marcelnijman.eu<\/a>. Josh brings us an Android rebuttal, and Caleb tells us about Cropper for Windows from cropper.codeplex.com\/<\/a>. In Chit Chat Across the Pond Donald Burr of Otaku no podcast<\/a> joins us to talk about iOS development.<\/p>\n

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\nHi this is Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast Mac Podcast, hosted at Podfeet.com, a technology geek podcast with an EVER so slight Macintosh bias. Today is Sunday April 3rd, 2011 and this is show number 306. Well I finally got our taxes done today – gee that was fun. I always enjoy it, you know? I especially enjoyed it while partway through the process TurboTax was insisting that I was going to owe $45,000 when I was done. That was really swell. I have used TurboTax for decades it seems, but I’ve got to say the upsell in the product was REALLY REALLY annoying this year. you’re going along clicking no, I don’t have any farm loans, no, I don’t have any Ottoman Empire compensation income, no I don’t produce any squid-based products in my home, and suddenly the next button turns into YES! I’d like to upgrade to the Premium version of TurboTax to make SURE I don’t have any squid-based income! Sheesh. it did it about 15 times while I worked on my taxes, and I’m just not in that good of a mood while I’m working on them, you know??? anyway, let’s get down to some more fun tech and forget about those icky taxes. Jim Sewell’s going to start us off with a follow up to his question last week.<\/p>\n

Jim Sewell on Readability from George<\/h3>\n

=========insert Jim==========
\nHello Allison and the Nosilla Castaways!<\/p>\n

Jim here again. After my rambling pseudo question about Safari Reader mode last week I thought I would follow up with everyone. Near the end of the show George from Tulsa mentioned the Readability plugin. I almost dismissed this as I’d seen that Safari’s Reader mode was based on the plugin but much like the Made for TV programs based on a true story, there is a lot of difference between the original and the copy. <\/p>\n

With a little more research I found that Safari even lists the Readability addon in the acknowledgements… but it’s not the same. When I try the Reader mode on the Podfeet home page the option is grayed out. Readability, however, does a respectable job on thinning out the page and giving me just the meaty parts.<\/p>\n

On another page, one of the mega news portals with ads everywhere, the Reader mode was grayed again, but Readability says “Readability is currently intended to be used on individual articles, not homepages. If you’d like to try rendering this page anyway, click here to continue.” The thing was that this page had no meat, like these portals usually are, so it was just gibberish, but it was readable gibberish!<\/p>\n

So, the problem to be solved was that I needed to send clean web pages to Evernote without all the advertisements and junk. The solution, thanks to George from Tulsa for making me take a second look, is the Readability plugin from readability.com. I love the Apple community, especially the cool ones that hang out at the Nosillacast Podcast hosted over at podfeet.com<\/p>\n

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\nVery cool that George was able to solve your problem on the spot, Jim! By the way, Readability is available from readability.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Dumb Question Corner<\/h3>\n

======insert music=============
\nAdam Hobden asked a dumb question on Twitter. He wrote,<\/p>\n

can you help me with a dumb question? What is growl and why do I need it installed? Thanks for your help, Adam<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What a wonderful question! Growl is one of those things that’s been around for so long and is woven into so many products that I actually forgot that it doesn’t come with OSX. Growl is an application that allows other applications to alert you when something happens. How about some examples? Let’s say you’re sharing a Dropbox folder with your sister, and you want to know when she drops the vacation photos into the folder, Growl will bring an alert up on screen. Or what if you’re using an FTP client to push some files up to your web server? Growl can show you an alert when the file transfer is complete. If your chat client is hidden, Growl will pop an alert to the front showing you that someone is chatting you up.<\/p>\n

So now you know why you care, let’s talk about how it gets installed. You can go to the Growl website at growl.info<\/a>, download and install it, but to be honest I’ve never done that before. I think most people get Growl because an application bundled it in. As I thought back I was trying to remember which application bundled it in on my latest install, but I couldn’t remember. It wasn’t that far back either, I did the new install in December.<\/p>\n

The way it’s supposed to work is you install an application like Adium (a great chat client) and it says, “hey, you wanna have Growl notifications? Click yes!” Since I enjoy the service that Growl provides, I assume I saw that request pop up somewhere in the installation of my 60 or so critical applications and of course said yes.<\/p>\n

So then I started reading the Growl website and learned something very<\/em> interesting. Right on their front page, in big, bold, underlined, red letters it says, “If Growl was installed on your system without you knowing about it, please see this page for an explanation.” The Growl installer is available to software developers in two forms – one that can’t install on it’s own, and one that offers<\/em> to install. Some application developers disobey the rules, and don’t give you a choice of whether to install Growl. The Growl people HATE this. They hate it so much that page gives you detailed instructions on how to delete it, and tell you which programs misbehave in this way.<\/p>\n

And guess what the first one they list is? My precious Dropbox. There’s quite an explanation of how egregiously Dropbox disobeys the rules, including installing an old version of Growl, and putting it in the wrong Library. Dropbox isn’t alone, Adobe Creative Suite 5 installs Growl without permission too. Another one of my favorite applications, ZumoCast, installs Growl without permission.<\/p>\n

I’m disappointed in those application developers, and have a much greater appreciation for the folks at Growl – that it’s very important to them that your rights be preserved, your right to install software when you agree to it, not when someone else tricks you into installing it. <\/p>\n

One of the things I really like about Dumb Question Corner is how much I learn when I double check what I thought I knew. Thanks for a great question Adam! If you have a question that you think is too dumb to ask, I guarantee there’s someone who has the same question, so send it in and let’s figure it out! <\/p>\n

ScreenSteps<\/h3>\n

This week I was chatting with Lore Schindler about the fascinating work she does at the Brooklyn Avenue School in East Los Angeles working with kids with visual impairments. She’s been creating podcasts to teach how to use an abacus as a way of tracking complex math when you can’t see. How cool is that? Anyway, we were writing back and forth and she mentioned how excited she was to learn during her One-on-One lesson at Apple this week that you can actually create screencasts using Quicktime. She then said that she’s planning on creating some video tutorials to add to the ScreenSteps tutorials she already makes for her teachers! She confessed that perhaps I’d had a slight influence on her in that! I can see how someone with the teaching gene would really love ScreenSteps and find ways to use it that even I’ve never thought of. In fact, now that she knows how to make video tutorials, I wonder if she knows that you can actually embed videos from online video sites, right into your ScreenSteps tutorials? That way she can have both forms of media in the same document. If you haven’t yet checked out ScreenSteps, head on over to ScreenSteps.com<\/a> and download the free, 30 day trial. Once you’re hooked, it’s only $40 for the Standard version or $80 for Pro! Oh, and check out Lore’s blog at svenlore.blogspot.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

LookTel Money Reader<\/h3>\n

I have a really quick review for you of an amazing application. Problem to be solved: you’re blind, and you have to identify your US paper bills. Other countries make bills different sizes, but in the US they’re all the same size. Blind people for years have employed techniques like folding them differently, and there are some expensive tools out there to read money. <\/p>\n

Pat Dengler from yourmacdoctor.com<\/a> sent me an application called Money Reader from LookTel. Launch Money Reader, and in a few seconds the camera aperture opens. Hold a bill in front of the camera, and instantly Money Reader will tell you the denomination. <\/p>\n

I read the reviews of Money Reader – it’s only been out for a very short while, and out of 47 reviews – it had 46-5 star reviews, and 1 4-star review. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that. many of the reviews mentioned other applications that required you to take a photo first before they can identify the bills, but with Money Reader it identifies them live without having to record an image. I bought Money Reader from the iTunes Store<\/a> and it works flawlessly<\/em>. I tested Money Reader by holding bills at ANY angle, showed it ANY part of the bill even the smallest part of the artwork with no numbers showing, I held the bill close and far away, and Money Reader flawlessly reported the size of the bill every single time.<\/p>\n

I did some reading on the LookTel website and they have some amazing products in work. One they’re working on lets you put a sticker on an object, say a medicine bottle, take a photo of it, make an audio recording of what it is, and from then on your iPhone can tell you what it is. Or what if you could take a picture of your house, record with voice that it’s home, and then have your iPhone identify it as your house for you? They have a lot of fantastic ideas, I can’t wait to see these applications when they come out.<\/p>\n

Money Reader is a grand total of $2 in the iTunes Store, and you can read more about all of their products in work by visiting their website at looktel.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Scott Howell on Accessible Chess-Wise for iPhone<\/h4>\n

========insert Scott=================
\nHere is a brief demonstration of the first accessible chess game for the iOS platform. Here is a direct link to Marcel’s site: marcelnijman.eu<\/a>. Link to the game in the iTUnes store: itunes.apple.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Thanks Scott – this is cool on so many levels. I love your delivery, I love that you’re highlighting such an awesome developer who took on an interesting challenge and wailed on it, I loved that you kept losing those pawns too! I’m fascinating by how fast you have the voice set on Voiceover. I always figured it must take forever to do anything if you’re blind because you’d be waiting for the computer or phone to finish reading to you, but at that speed I bet you’re as efficient as a sightling!<\/p>\n

Smile<\/h3>\n

I hate to waste time. I bet you do too. If you have to save a document, do you let go of the keyboard, and then draaaag the mouse all the way up to the far upper left, and the click on File, and pull down to Save? I bet you don’t, you simply hold down command-s. If you want a new window in Excel, do you use your finger on the trackpad go up to File, new window? no, you just hit command-n. How about a new tab in your web browser? command-t, right? You hate to waste time and energy when you’ve got important tasks at hand like watching the Friday video again on YouTube<\/a>, right? Well then why do you type the same blocks of words over and over again instead of using TextExpander to do it for you? Why do you type your signature? or answer the same question over and over again by hand? Why not let TextExpander type those things for you? It’s one of those things once you start using you’ll be amazed how many things you can use it for. I’ve expanded 4200 snippets since January saving me over 7.6 hours! Head on over to smilesoftware.com<\/a> and buy yourself a present of TextExpander, and while you’re at it check out all of their other cool products!<\/p>\n

Android Mocking<\/h3>\n

As you may recall, I did a little tiny mocking of the Android OS last week regarding how hard it is to do a simple screenshot vs. the iPhone. Josh wrote in with a quick note saying you just get an app to do it. I figured we should have more fun than that and asked him to record a rebuttal. He didn’t end up recording, but let me read to you what he sent in:<\/p>\n

\nAllison – I tried. I really did for about the past hour try to get a decent recording for an audio rebuttal, but there my apartment walls are thin and there is too much going on today. Between my ums, dogs barking, ambulances, and neighbors remodeling I can’t get anything decent and I’m running out of time.<\/p>\n

But your request did make me think more about the whole android vs ios thing. First I have been an Adroid owner since november 2008 with the G1 and I have had an Ipad since April of last year. I currently have the Tmobile branded G2, I believe that is known as the HTC Magic elswhere.<\/p>\n

So here we go…<\/p>\n