Happy Halloween!

I’m a bit late, but I wanted to post a pic of the costume I wore this Halloween. I went as Marie Antoinette (although I think I look more like I swallowed Marie Antoinette.) I have always wanted to rent a nice costume, and this year I did. I used Frankel’s Costume in downtown Houston and well, see for yourself.

GooseGrade Fails But Gets an A for Effort

I’m a fan of The Next Web blog and when they mentioned a new copyediting service that they were using for their blog, I decided to check it out.

GooseGrade’s premise is brilliant: use web-based services to allow readers to copyedit online content. Unfortunately, the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

For example, in both Internet Explorer (7.x) and Firefox (3.x), the fields that contain the text to be corrected and the corrected text orient themselves vertically, not horizontally, which makes corrections very difficult as the fields are only a few characters wide. Also, having to enter one’s credentials each time one makes a correction is completely aggravating. Finally, it would be nice to be able to view and edit one’s corrections. (I made a correction to an article only to change my mind as I read further, but there is no way to communicate to the author that the corrected text should be left ‘as is.’)

I am interested to hear what other editors have to say about this tool. I love the idea and hope that the developers will continue their work, however, until GooseGrade makes their tool easier to use, I anticipate that users will be reluctant to use it with any regularity.

Update: GooseGrade gets an A+ for effort. Within hours of my post, I received an email letting me know that the size of the textboxes had been corrected. Although the interface is still a bit buggy, once I figured out to use the back arrow instead of closing the window each time, it became much less cumbersome to use. Also, I’ve been assured that they’re working on storing a cookie so even if one does close out the window, the app will recognize you for subsequent corrections.

A couple of things I think would make this really useful. First, if there was a way to communicate to the author why the edits are being suggested. This could be as easily accomplished by adding a notes field. Second, a way to view all of one’s suggested edits and the ability to change or delete them.

In any case, the text boxes being fixed go a long way to making GooseGrade more useful. I look forward to seeing how it develops.

Form-filling with Sxipper

First, let me qualify this by saying that I’ve been using Roboform for years, so there’s a natural reluctance to change how I do things.

I found Sxipper too much of a departure from Roboform’s unobtrusive form-filling to be a good fit for me. Especially annoying was the way the entire page dimmed when a Sxipper form-filler pop-up appeared. I also found it to be too difficult and time-consuming to train the majority of the forms that didn’t work with Sxipper (about half of all forms I encountered.) I register for a lot of sites and generally speaking, I only register once per site, so training a site-specific form is an exercise in futility. I find Robo-Form to be more effective for my needs in this area - just fill it out and be done with it.

I think that Sxipper is a beautifully designed product with a couple of neat features - the idea of training a form for the benefit of others who will use the form is nice - and I look forward to seeing the product when it is mature. For now, though, my heavy-duty form-filling requirements are best met by RoboForm.

Best Application Store Yet

I’ll admit that the last few months have seen me jealous of iPhone users, not because I coveted their phones (puh-leez!) but because I coveted their app store. Now comes the good news that not only is my carrier (Tmobile) releasing a dedicated app store for their subscribers, but RIM is releasing their own Blackberry storefront.

This is, of course, wonderful news, but the RIM store isn’t planned to be up and running until March of 2009.

Fortunately for me, I came across Fred Potter’s BerryStore application. BerryStore is an application that installs on your Blackberry and lets you browse, download, rate and review applications. Since the app is still in Beta, only free apps are being offered now, but even so, I’ve been turned on to a lot of free apps that I didn’t know about - like PacMan.(Shout out to Benny Chow - thanks man!) I especially appreciate being able to read the reviews and ratings.

Downloading and installing applications from within BerryStore is easy, convenient, and requires very little interaction on your part. Just click the Download button and the app is transferred to your device. If you decide you don’t like an installed app, it can even be uninstalled from within BerryStore!

BerryStore is true one-stop-shopping and the finest example of application shopping that I’ve seen yet.

BerryStore is free and can be downloaded OTA at m.berrystore.com.