Jamie's Random Musings on Video IM
Having spent a good part of the last year struggling with a variety of video chat and IM programs, I have decided to write a few things down and see what other people have to say about them.
Thursday 10 April 2008, 3:23 PM
DimDim - Free Web Meetings
I've just been looking at a new product called "DimDim" (www.dimdim.com), for hosting web meetings. I haven't done much with it yet, but it looks very interesting. I'm going to run through a few of the highlights right now, and I'll fill in some details as I explore it.
Basically what DimDim provides is a way to host web meetings with video and audio of the meeting host/provider, shared presentation of a whiteboard, the host's desktop and/or PDF files and PowerPoint presentations, public and private chat between participants, and apparently optional audio from meeting participants. All this with no software download or installation by participants, and only a browser plug-in needed for the presenter! That's pretty impressive, if it works.
There are several versions - "Free", which will allow you to host up to 20 people in a meeting room, "Pro", which will allow up to 100 people in a room, with charges in steps based on the maximum number of participants allowed, and "Enterprise", which sounds like it will allow more participants than any rational amount of internet bandwidth would support. I have just been trying the "Free" version.
The way it works is that the meeting host/presenter signs up for a DimDim account (no charge for this), and then sets up a meeting, either to start immediately or scheduled for some later time. A list of participants is given, with email addresses, and an email is sent to each of them with a link to enter the meeting.
The first time a host starts a meeting, a browser plugin has to be downloaded and installed on their system. Once that is done, the meeting room is opened, and the host waits for participants to arrive. The host is broadcasting video and audio to all participants, and can select whether to send/share their desktop, a whiteboard, and PDF or PPT files. There is a public chat box on one side of the screen, and a list of participants on the other, with private chat buttons and such for each participant. I tried all the basics out, and it does seem to work - connection, participant entry, sending video and audio from the host, receiving by the participants, sharing desktop and whiteboard.
I will investigate and test, and report more later.
jw 10/4/2008
Tuesday 8 April 2008, 11:24 AM
Opera Browser "Speed Dial"
I have recently started using "Speed Dial" in the Opera web browser a lot more. If you aren't familiar with it, what they do is give you nine mini-browser windows within the main Opera window, each of which can be preset to a specific web page. You see a miniature version of the web page in the window, and you can go directly to that web page, in a new Opera tab, by just clicking the window. I find this extremely useful when I have a small number of web sites that I want to visit repeatedly (generally every day, or multiple times in a day), it saves me from having to go repeatedly to the Bookmarks menu, or give up space for the Bookmarks or Personal toolbar. Even better, you can set the Speed Dial windows to automatically refresh periodically, at intervals ranging from 5 seconds to 30 minutes, so if I want to just monitor a page for some significant change or update, it's easy to keep an eye on it.
Opera also makes versions for "ordinary" cell phones, "smart" cell phones running Symbian and Windows Mobile, and "devices", such as the Wii, portable media players, set-top boxes and the like. I just downloaded Opera Mini to my Nokia 6234 phone, and it's really quite nice. It does a good job of showing absolutely normal web pages on the ridiculously small display of my cell phone. The appearance and interface are reasonably consistent with the Windows version, and there is even a synchronization utility so that you can keep your bookmarks and Speed Dial between all of the various computers and mobile phones.
If you have never tried Opera, or haven't tried it in quite a while, it might be worth your time to have a look at it. Opera has always been know as a small, fast browser, and it is still that today. They have also always been very innovative, which they obviously still are with the Speed Dial feature.
I'm not quite ready to switch back to Opera from Firefox as my main browser, but I have the feeling that day is getting closer! Now, I have Gizmo5 on my mobile for text chat, and Opera Mini for browsing... a few more utilities, and I'll be able to get rid of my laptop...
Sunday 6 April 2008, 5:00 PM
Skype 3.8 Beta Release - Ho Hum, Same Old Bugs
Skype version 3.8.0.96 (Beta) was released last week. Don't rush to download it, because it appears to have pretty much the same bugs as Skype 3.6 has. Despite some of the "experts" on the Skype User Forums going through old posts and advising pretty much everyone to immediately download and try this new release (perhaps I don't understand what a "beta" release means, or else Skype has a different kind of beta than anyone else), there has yet to be a single reply from one of those Skype users saying "hooray, my (whatever) problem is fixed by the new release!".
According to the release propaganda, this version has "significantly better audio quality". Now, if you made a product which had literally thousands of complaints about video problems - freezing, missing, crashing, color bars, and on and on and on - would you put your development effort into improving the audio quality? Neither would I.
I downloaded it, installed it on my test system, and started it up long enough to verify that the "presence reporting" problem is still there. After that, combined with what I had seen (and not seen) in the User Forums, I just shut it back down and forgot about it.
Wednesday 2 April 2008, 10:08 AM
Gizmo5 - Powerful, Portable Messaging
I mentioned recently that I use Gizmo5 for most of my text messaging. This is in part because I like the interface, which is clean and easy to read, and in part because it lets me pull most of my different text message services together in a single interface. I have my MSN and Yahoo accounts configured in Gizmo, and it is possible to do the same with AIM and MySpace accounts today. Gizmo says that they will be adding Jabber and iChat interfaces soon as well. It certainly is nice to have only one messaging program running instead of three or more!
I made an even nicer discovery yesterday. I noticed on the Gizmo5 web page that the Nokia 6230i is listed as being compatible with Gizmo5 Mobile. My old cell phone was a 6230i, so I dug it out, charged it up, and had them send Gizmo5 to it. Sure enough, it worked! Not very nice to use, though, because of the small display on the 6230i (which was one of the major reasons that I replaced it). However, I believe that my current Nokia 6234 is not much more than a glorified 6230 in vendor-specific (Swisscom) packaging, so I thought Gizmo5 might work on it as well. I swapped the SIM card back to it, had Gizmo5 sent to it, and sure enough, it works just great - and it's a lot nicer to use on the larger display.
The contact list shown on the cell phone display looks the same as the Gizmo contact list on my PC. It even has the presence/status indication for each contact, and it's correct! (Which is something that Skype is still unable to do reliably even on PC-to-PC connections.)
Now, the 6234 and 6230i are really not much more than ordinary cell phone - they certainly are not "Internet Tablets" or anything of the sort. I'm sure that Gizmo5 Mobile is even nicer on one of those fancy new devices, but I am just really pleased and impressed that it runs on my plain old cell phone.
I also got to try out another new feature that Gizmo5 has recently added, message forwarding via SMS. If you send a text message to one of your contacts, and they are not currently online, Gizmo gives you a menu to choose what to do with that message. If the contact has a cell phone number registered in their Gizmo profile, one of the choices you will be given is to deliver the message via SMS. This can be very nice if you are trying to send a message to someone and you don't want to have to wait for them to get on a computer again to receive it. Of course, there is a cost associated with sending the SMS, so you have to have some credit on your Gizmo account to be able to do this. Likewise, if they have an email address registered in their Gizmo profile another of the options is to send the message via email, which once again might get it to them before they actually start up Gizmo again. If they have both a cell phone and email address in their profile, you will also be given the choice of delivering the message both ways - I guess this is the "Blunderbuss" option, for those who are determined to get through if at all possible. The other delivery option is to have Gizmo simply hold the message and deliver it via IM the next time your contact logs into Gizmo. In this case the message is held on a Gizmo server until it can be delivered - which is vastly superior to Skype's purely peer-to-peer delivery method, because it doesn't require both of you to be online at the same time for the message to be delivered. (In fact, when you combine the p2p delivery method with Skype's horribly unreliable presence reporting, the result is that you NEVER know if or when an IM text message might be delivered; the Skype User Forums are filled with people complaining about messages not being delivered for many days.) Oh, and the final menu option is to simply discard the message, of course.
In summary, Gizmo5 IM is pleasant to use, has a nice user interface, runs on lots of different platforms (Windows, MacOS, Linux, and various Mobile devices), can pull together your IM accounts from a variety of sources in a single interface, and has a variety of useful delivery options. It's all good!
jw 2/4/2008
Monday 31 March 2008, 10:17 AM
Vista SP1 - One Week Update
It has been a week since I installed Vista with Service Pack 1 (SP1) on this Fujitsu Lifebook S6510 laptop computer. I have said before that I like Vista, and I want it to be at least as good as XP on my laptop. I'm now pleased to say that I think it is so, and I am going to keep running it on my laptop. I think the fact that I have had Vista loaded twice before on this laptop, and both times decided that it wasn't stable enough or fast enough for me to use it rather than XP Professional, is evidence that I am not willing to just blindly accept Vista.
First, since installing Vista SP1 I have had no boot problems or failures, which I had at least twice with the original Vista installation. Not only that, but Vista seems to boot a bit faster than it did before SP1, and it certainly suspends and resumes faster than it did before.
Second, the general performance and "feel" of the laptop is quite a bit better than it was before SP1. There are no more of the long pauses that I saw previously, and I don't see the disk activity led on the laptop suddenly start flashing like crazy for no apparent reason.
Third, I haven't had any problems with applications or utilities, as I previously had. I haven't seen the dreaded "This program is not responding" window yet, which is very good news.
On the network side, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that Vista does not have the problem which I described recently with XP, where a static IP address on the wired ethernet interface interferes with routing on the wireless interface after a suspend/resume sequence. The bad news is that there is still some sort of intermittent problem with the wireless connection between the Lifebook and the Linksys WRT350N router. I wrote recently that I suspected this problem was caused by the Sierra Wireless AirCard, or the Swisscom software that came with it, but I have confirmed now that is not the case. The symptom is relatively simple; starting from a fresh boot of both the laptop and the router, the wirelss will always connect properly. If I then suspend/resume, reboot, or even just turn the laptop wireless off and back on, after some random number of disconnect/reconnect cycles, it will suddenly no longer be able to connect properly. The key word is "properly", Vista says that it has a "limited connection" to the network, but in fact nothing works. Once this happens, the only solution is to reboot the router - nothing I can do to the laptop or Vista will get a good connection again, but rebooting the router will always restore a good connection.
I contacted Linksys about this last Friday, and got a particularly unhelpful response of "sounds like a Vista problem to me". Sigh. So for the time being I am stuck with power-cycling the router from time to time. Ah well, where would we be if everything worked?
jw 31/3/2008
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