Want to draft emails, blog comments and other little bits of writing online by speaking to your computer? I'm certainly intrigued by the idea and a newly posted userscript makes it easy to do for Google Chrome users. Userscripts are wonderful little bits of code that developers write to bring new functionality or interface elements into any webpage. One of the newest posted at Userscripts.org today is a speech-to-text script which I am using to write this blog post right now.
Created by Josh Mandel, who says he coded it with a broken arm, Speakable Textareas works pretty well! With just a few clicks, you can install the script in your browser and it will insert a little microphone icon you can click on to invoke the Google Chrome speech-to-text API. It's quick and dirty but it's still pretty cool.
Late last month Google launched a Gmail plug-in that looked an awful lot like popular startup service Rapportive's sidebar CRM app - but with additional functionality from Google services like Calendar. What's a little startup to do? Rapportive's plan is apparently to move faster and adds more on top of what Google can do. That makes a must-have browser add-on even better.
Today Rapportive is announcing a big upgrade to its baked-in Twitter functionality. You can do so much Twitter stuff in the sidebar of your Gmail now! Check out the demo video below.
A quick little experiment for you if you haven't tried this before: Go to Google Maps and ask it for directions from San Francisco, CA to Beijing, China. Now, you wouldn't imagine any other way than to hop on a plane, right? Instead, Google figures you'd like to drive, takes you to the beach and then, somewhere around step 32, advises you to make the 3,879 kayak trip across the Pacific Ocean. While the cross-Pacific directions are a perennial joke, they're literally useless for travelers.
Rome2Rio, a site built on top of the much-loved Google maps interface, offers up directions by plane, train and automobile rather than telling you to hoof it to the beach and get to paddling.
The RootsTech conference has challenged developers to mashup social media and family history APIs in the hopes that developers will recognize genealogy as rich area for exploitation.
Here's the challenge: use any open social media API, like from Flickr or Facebook, mash it up with any of the APIs from the five genealogy companies that offer them to create something which "demonstrates increased value to family historians."
Next time I'm looking to hit the town, I'm going to fire up the just-released BarBird iPhone app - a smart little interface that lets you map, view and filter Twitter updates from nearly 10,000 bars and restaurants in 50 cities around the world.
Twitter is a remarkably easy way for small business owners to use SMS or Facebook to publish their specials, event promotions and other information that makes it easier to identify spots that you might want to patronize. BarBird is like a geo-aware, semantically smart, venue-update browser on your phone. I like it. It's been fun to test so far.
ICantFindMyPhone.com is an adorable little website made by New York graphic designer Dave Dawson (whose personal site, IAmDaveDawson.com, implies that he has a habit of personal declaration URLs). The site simply calls your phone, so you can find it.
The site was highlighted by design blogger Tina Roth Eisenberg today and in comments there Dawson explains that he built it using the API of upstart popular telephony service Twilio. Update: It appears that Dawson may have run out of Twilio credits again...
It was National Banned Books Week here in the United States earlier this month and the organizations behind it put together a Google Map of bans and challenges to books around the country over the last three years. It's worth a good look.
Banned Books Week has been running for 28 years now and is backed by some very reputable organizations, but the campaign's Web presence is very simple. It's great that Google Maps makes it so easy for anyone to display sets of information on a map like you'll see below. As more and more content becomes available online, how will that impact banning of and access to literature?
Arduino, the programmable platform of sensors and corresponding device controls, will add ethernet connectivity and a web store of built products, the company announced this weekend.
Arduino is one of the best known companies enabling others to create what's called the Internet of Things, network connected physical-world devices with web interfaces. The organization announced a number of new hardware and software developments forthcoming in the short and medium term in a blog post on Friday.
The phrase "Internet of Things" got to be an overused misnomer even before the technology had a chance to become common, but at least we're on to everyday use cases: a developer has arranged for his thermostat to turn on when he's home and switch off when he leaves.
Hans Scharler's thermostat keeps dibs on his location, the outside temperature and the temperature inside the house, and decides when to kick on the air conditioning or heat.
Nearby Friends is a new Facebook application which taps into the recently launched Facebook Places check-in service to locate all your Facebook friends plotted on a Google Maps interface. The app, a simple tool that places Facebook profile photos as a pin on the map, doesn't limit itself to where your friends are right now, it actually displays their entire Facebook check-in history, as lines traversing the map. With the app installed, you can actually track a friend's travels, easily identifying their favorite hangouts, daily treks, their workplace and more. Is this the first Facebook Places cyber-stalking tool? Or just a handy way to see what your friends are up to?
