Jamie's Random Musings
Various thoughts and adventures, including but not limited to Linux, Windows XP and Widows Vista, and assorted bits of hardware new and old.
Wednesday 17 December 2008, 2:27 PM
New Gizmo5 Utility - GizmoCall
I've just received an announcement from the Gizmo5 people of their latest feature - Gizmocall. It is an Adobe Flash based utility for making audio calls, either free PC-to-PC for other Gizmo5 users, or to PSTN (land line or mobile) numbers.
The difference between this and their full-blown Gizmo5 program is that there is no client download or installation, it runs entirely in a web browser. That can be extremely useful if you just want to make a quick call, or you want to borrow someone else's computer to make a call. Of course, since it is browser/flash based, it works on Windows, Mac and Linux.
This new feature is quite similar to a small test program that they made without much fanfare some time ago, called Giz5, which let you send and receive IM text messages from a browser. It is interesting to see The Gizmo Project producing these nice, useful little programs which unobtrusively do a good job, while Skype is still bumbling around with their "4.0 Beta" program (probably the longest "Beta Test" in history), trying to produce a program which takes over your entire computer, consumes every square inch of screen space (and more), and has so many links, and lists, and categories that you have to struggle to make any sense out of it at all. With these Gizmo utilities, you can keep them in a tab on your browser, or even just as a bookmark to jump to when you need them; with Skype's massively bloated client consuming all of your screen space and most of your resources, you can forget about using your computer for anything else when you have it running. It seems a pretty clear choice to me!
jw 17/12/2008
The difference between this and their full-blown Gizmo5 program is that there is no client download or installation, it runs entirely in a web browser. That can be extremely useful if you just want to make a quick call, or you want to borrow someone else's computer to make a call. Of course, since it is browser/flash based, it works on Windows, Mac and Linux.
This new feature is quite similar to a small test program that they made without much fanfare some time ago, called Giz5, which let you send and receive IM text messages from a browser. It is interesting to see The Gizmo Project producing these nice, useful little programs which unobtrusively do a good job, while Skype is still bumbling around with their "4.0 Beta" program (probably the longest "Beta Test" in history), trying to produce a program which takes over your entire computer, consumes every square inch of screen space (and more), and has so many links, and lists, and categories that you have to struggle to make any sense out of it at all. With these Gizmo utilities, you can keep them in a tab on your browser, or even just as a bookmark to jump to when you need them; with Skype's massively bloated client consuming all of your screen space and most of your resources, you can forget about using your computer for anything else when you have it running. It seems a pretty clear choice to me!
jw 17/12/2008
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