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Clever idea for using a smartphone with a landline
Last year I took a look at the Fritzbox router. It’s expensive, but an incredibly versatile piece of kit and great for making calls over the internet using ordinary phones, either plugged into the back or wirelessly using DECT.
Now it looks like the final kind of phone in the home, the mobile, is going to be added to the Fritzbox fold. AVM has announced the Fritz!App (scroll down to the bottom), which will be available for iPhone and Android. It will allow the smartphone to connect to the router and then use the landline or access the built in answer phones. Incoming calls can also be routed to the smartphone.
All sounds quite impressive so I’m hoping that this will be available for current models like the 7270 and not just the new ones announced at Cebit.
Punched out font
Here’s a clever idea. A font that is designed to be printed, cut out and then glued into 3D shapes.
Not something for a website or essay obviously but may prove useful for various creative products.
Download the font from dfont.com here.
Keeping files in step across different computers
Hopefully I’m not too far from normal with the challenge of working on documents across several computers, not to mention different versions of Windows and Ubuntu.
USB keys are one solution provided you remember to put them back in your pocket and online office suites like Zoho and Google Docs are best used when you’re, well, online.
Enter Dropbox. It’s an online service that offers 2GB of storage at no cost (or 50GB and 100GB for $10 or $20 a month respectively) with a clever program that updates files automatically. It’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux.
Folders can also be marked for sharing with other Dropbox users, which should come in handy when working on projects with several people.
Dropbox isn’t the only online storage service. I’m also using the paid for version of Humyo for backing up my work, but it’s handy to have a separate account just for working from and sharing with friends.
Fonts video
Fonts can be a contentious subject. Is there any place for Comic Sans in the Post Modern Age and are the Calibri and Cambria fonts with Office 2007 and Vista good enough?
FontShop has an interesting interview with Simon Daniels from Microsoft about fonts and the various standards that are competing online.
20 free fonts found by Smashing Magazine
If you’re planning to write the family newsletter soon and want it to stand out from the crowd, why not use a different font to the usual Arial and Times New Roman (please don’t even think about Comic Sans). Smashing magazine has a collection of 20 fonts that can be installed and used at no cost.
There’s a good variety covering fonts for the main text in a letter, such as the Nilland font above, and other fonts better used in headlines like Amadeus to the right.
Effective note taking
Given their mobility, most of us have probably tried to take notes in meetings/lectures/lessons with a notebook. The trouble is that Word is not particularly good at recording anything else than a stream of consciousness in these situations. Here’s some of the variations I’ve tried.
Word
As above, Word/Open Office Writer/insert word processor here, are good at recording notes. It can be hard to quickly insert headings or move around the document quickly. Outline mode is helpful for keeping notes organised.
I’ve been enthusiastic about this program and it gave good service the last time I took notes with it. There’s still the problem of needing to rearrange text boxes with the mouse, but this didn’t seem to be as much of a problem as I was expecting. OneNote also has the excellent idea of being able to record audio and remember when notes were taken on the track. So I was very disappointed that my notebook didn’t have a built in microphone.
Mind mapping
Not everybody’s cup of tea but once you’ve learnt the keyboard shortcuts mind mapping software like Mindmanager or Freemind (the latter is open source and free) can be very effective at taking notes. I also found that the visual method of laying out the notes helped me to remember what had been said.
I just found this app last week, and it does very well. And has the bargain price of nothing. It’s based on the Cornell note taking system. Section headings are listed on the left and the larger right hand side of the screen is used to write the bulk of the notes. Sadly it will only export the notes as a PDF rather than an editable format like RTF, DOC or HTML, but you can at least copy and paste out of the software if you went to.
New version of Scribus released
If you’ve been trying out software that doesn’t cost a penny, you’ve probably downloaded and installed Open Office. While very capable at what it does, it’ll be a little limiting for more desk top publishing (DTP) duties.
Enter Scribus, an open source DTP app, that has just been updated. It can now open more file formats and handles colour palettes better.
The big thing for me was the ability to import Adobe Illustrator .eps files. Having used sites like VectorStock for graphics, my biggest challenge was finding software to edit them with that suit my budget better than Illustrator.
Sadly the import of the first free eps on VectorStock didn’t go perfectly. I’m probably going to stick with Xara Xtreme (review of Xtreme 4, review of 5 coming soon) for eps editing for the moment, but the open source community does tend to keep improving features so hopefully it’ll
A full list of new features can be found here.
When productivity hits diplomacy
What can be done with emails that need attention but not for a few days? A separate folder is one solution but it’d be all too easy to forget all about it until people start shouting about deadlines. The Zimbra email software has an interesting alternative. A button to ignore conversations for 15 days.
I just hope that there is no notification sent back to the sender….
Clippy is dead but not forgotten
It seems that Office just can’t quite move on from Clippy, even when they make a promotional video so action packed that it doesn’t have a single screen from Office.
Outlook 2007 email controversy
One of the major changes in Outlook 2007 had nothing to do with the Ribbon but that Word was used to display and edit emails.
On the face of it, there are good reasons for this, though mostly if the majority of emails are sent between people using Office2007 (a fair assumption in an office). You can include SmartArt, charts and formatting is easier with the Mini Toolbar.
The problems start when emails start to come from people who don’t use Outlook 2007, myself included thinking of our weekly newsletter. In fact I’d been doing some unrelated research work and the feature comparison between Outlook 2003 and 2007 doesn’t look kindly on the new version.
With Office 2010 on the way, Microsoft confirmed that Word 2010 would be used for emails, prompting an online campaign at fixoutlook.org, complete with a Twitter feed.
Microsoft responded, claiming that Word is “the best e-mail authoring experience around” and linking to a white paper explaining the benefits.
What caught my eye in the paper were the features that won’t be available if Word 2007 is not installed on the computer: auto-formatting, native table functionality, background spell checking, thesaurus, grammar checking, autotext.
Personally, it’s the results that count, and I’m not happy that quite a few CSS standard formatting marks aren’t supported such as background-image. Perhaps the answer is to improve Word.
