The Right Guy’s Blog

Gmail Updates Its Look, Adds Themes

Google’s beloved web-based email client has always been ripe for third-party design customization (we’ve always been partial to the Gmail Redesigned skin in Better Gmail, for example), but now Gmail is officially riding the interface customization train by offering 30-some new themes to spice up your inbox. Keep reading for a quick look at some of the cool new offerings.

Unfortunately I still don’t see the Themes tab in my Gmail settings, but Google is an expert of the slow rollout, so we can all expect them sometime in the next few days. I’m partial to the ascii/Terminal theme, though it’s probably a touch on the impractical side. Other than that, a lot of the offerings actually look really nice—especially compared with some of the lame duck skins Google offers in iGoogle. If I see themes in my account soon, I’ll update the post with larger pictures. Let’s hear which themes you like best—and whether or not they’re actually enabled in your accounts yet—in the comments. Thanks Mark!

Pipl Updates, Offers Better Organized Stalking

Previously mentioned people search engine Pipl has updated with a slightly tweaked look and better, more organized results. In a quick comparison between recently featured 123people and Pipl, the results at Pipl thoroughly outdid 123people on accuracy when I searched for myself, including much more accurate results for real email addresses belonging to me. Just enter anyone’s name and the city where they live and let Pipl dig up their online profiles, email addresses, photos, and more. With the abundance of people search tools available on the internet, it’s easier than ever to track down anyone online. If you’ve already got a favorite place to stalk, let’s hear about it in the comments.

Get $25 Restaurant Gift Cards for $1.50

Thanks to some sweet, sweet discount serendipity, $25 gift cards to restaurants around the country from Restaurant.com can be had through tomorrow, for $1.50 using a coupon code and a FatWallet link code. It’s pretty much the same offer as we previously posted, just a bit cheaper and, well, back again. The details: Head to Restaurant.com, see what restaurants are participating near your ZIP code (and what caveats a gift card might entail, such as a minimum purchase amount or menu restrictions). Use FatWallet’s 25 percent off discount link to actually buy the gift card, and enter the coupon code SURPRISE at checkout. You’ll need a FatWallet account to claim your 50 cent savings, and the coupon code is only good through Nov. 20, 2008. If you’re stuck for gift ideas for a food-loving friend, this is a pretty cheap way to knock one off the list. Tell us any catches or successes you find in the comments.

Battle of the Free Visual Voicemail and Transcription Services

Both YouMail and MessageSling have long offered free services that let nearly any cell phone user listen to and manage their voicemail online, in the style of the iPhone’s “visual voicemail.” The stakes were raised this month when both also announced new transcription services, allowing you to read that call you just missed in a text message or online before actually listening or responding to it. One offers a limited free service, while the other is offering one-week trials of its paid transcription plans. We’ve given both a try and compiled each service’s feature package for comparison, so read on to see if it might be worth ditching your plain vanilla voicemail for something a bit more useful.

Note: Both services use a basic voicemail-forwarding trick that works on any major carrier’s phone, and both respond fairly quickly to get you MP3-quality recordings of your voicemail.

I tested one of YouMail’s free transcription services, which the company says “vary in quality” compared to paid plans, and are limited to one contact or five messages from anybody, against MessageSling’s one-week trial of their 20-message-per-month “Basic” plan. I’d have liked to compare a YouMail paid service against MessageSling, but “ordering” a free plan from YouMail somehow blocked my attempts to buy a paid plan. If and when I can try out a paid plan, I’ll post the transcription results here.

YouMail

What’s free:

• Web-based visual voicemail listings and dial-in voicemail checking
• Caller ID service
• Customized greetings for specific contacts or groups
• Download messages as MP3s
• Folder organizing and archiving of messages
• Unwanted caller blocking (hang-up before voicemail)
• Non-Flash site for iPhone/Blackberry/WinMobile

Message notification: Email with direct link to Flash voicemail player, or text message with caller ID, number, and voicemail stats (left or not, duration), with transcription stub if enabled.

Ads?: Corner ad on notification emails (in-house at the moment), banners and right-side box ads on voicemail page, and text ads at bottom of SMS notifications.

Transcription Plans:

Transcription accuracy (free plan):
What was said (MP3):

Hi Kevin, it’s, uh, Kevin. I’m calling to test out transcription. See you in Tallahassee tomorrow. Bye.

What came in the text:

Hi Kevin it s uh Kevin. I m calling 2 test out transcription. See u (cut off).

Online transcription:

Hi Kevin it s uh Kevin. I m calling to test out transcription. See you in Tallahassee tomorrow bye.

Your web-based inbox:

MessageSling

What’s free:

• Web-based visual voicemail listings and dial-in voicemail checking
• Customized greetings for specific contacts and groups
• Download messages as MP3s
• Gmail-style message labeling and search
• Can edit transcripts of voicemails and update.

Ads?: None in emails, text alerts, or on site (so far).

Message notification: Email with message MP3 attached and voicemail stats, and/or text message with phone number (and contact, if in book), voicemail stats, and transcription stub if enabled.

Transcription Plans:

Transcription accuracy (”Basic” plan):
What was said (MP3):

Hi Kevin, it’s, uh, Kevin. I’m calling to test out transcription. See you in Tallahassee tomorrow. Bye.

What came in the text:

Hi Kevin, it’s Kevin. I’m calling to test out transcription. S (cut off).

Online transcription:

Hi Kevin, it’s Kevin. I’m calling to test out transcription. See you in Tallahassee tomorrow. Bye.

Your web-based inbox:

That’s enough from our side of the screen—let’s hear how users of the two services, and those just catching up on them, split the difference in the poll below. If you’ve got another similar service that does the job for you, choose “Other” and tell us about it in the comments.

Which voicemail replacement service appeals to you?
( polls)

Create a Live-Booting XP CD or DVD

The creators of the previously mentioned, versatile CD/DVD burning tool CDBurnerXP have posted a guide in their forums to using the program to create a live-booting Windows XP (or 2000/2003) disc. It’s a multi-step process that involves a lot of settings to tweak, but at the end you should have a Windows desktop that loads straight from the boot. If you’re going to roll your own live-boot XP, you might want to get familiar with trimming it down to the bare essentials for faster loads, or slipstreaming your installation to avoid Windows Update nags that will, frankly, never go away. I haven’t given it a thorough test yet, but online forum users seem to give it the thumbs up. Let us know your experience with live-booting XP in the comments.

30 Cliches You Should Basically Avoid (Going Forward)

Using a data analysis tool that monitors new books, research papers, broadcast transcripts and news sources, Oxford University came up with a list of the top 10 most irritating phrases. Headed by “At the end of the day” and capped with “It’s not rocket science,” it’s both an eye-rolling exercise in familiarity and a good lesson in phrases to avoid in your own presentations and writing. The readers of the BBC’s online magazine, however, add to the list with their own 20 most hated cliches, and while a few are British peculiarities, the majority make for good additions to add to your personal spell check or text replacement watcher. What meaningless (or management-friendly) words drive you up the wall? Share your distaste in the comments. Photo by StaR DusT.

ZoneAlarm 2009 Pro Free Tomorrow Only

Windows only: The popular Windows firewall application ZoneAlarm Free has a big brother called ZoneAlarm Pro, which boasts a handful of features not available in the free version—including integrated antivirus. Normally $40, ZoneAlarm Pro will be available tomorrow (11/18) for the low, low price of free. ZoneAlarm Free was voted one of the five best Windows firewalls by Lifehacker readers, so if you like what you’ve seen from that, a free upgrade to the Pro version sounds like a winner. The promotion link below will likely offer an active link to the deal starting 6AM PST tomorrow morning, but we’ll post the direct link as soon as it’s available.

DimDim Hosts Your Webinars for Free

If you work in a corporate culture that’s fond of meetings, or an industry that involves lots of long-distance collaboration, you’ve no doubt heard an increasing amount about “webinars” lately. The web-based meetings, usually involving collaborative editing, whiteboard brainstorming, slideshow presentations, and/or live desktop sharing, are helpful when teaching a computer concept or technique, providing a one-way presentation a la PowerPoint, or presenting ideas and getting feedback from clients. Lots of providers compete for the largely corporate market, but at least one site, DimDim, provides free web conference hosting for groups of 20 or less. We gave one of them a try and took a few screenshots, so read on to see what you can get for free in the webinar world.

DimDim not only offers free sign-ups for those wanting to host seminars for up to 20 participants, but offers up its hosting platform for free as an open source package, for those with the server space to do something with it. DimDim doesn’t ask much more than a username, email, and password, and only from the host—those you invite to join only need to hit a connection link in the email that gets sent out when your webinars are scheduled and then starting.

The system requirements for anyone participating are basically having a decently high-speed connection and be using either Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari. If a host wants to screencast their desktop, it usually requires a separate (free) program to be downloaded and launched automatically.

Each sign-up also gets a unique access key for conference calling—the old style of tele-conferencing. I tried calling in while hosting a meeting, but ended up being alone in a conference call, waiting for others to join. So either DimDim is offering this functionality as a separate enticement for lower-tech users, or I’m not quite doing it right (equally likely).

You can set up DimDim conferences in a lot of different ways, depending on your own setup and those of your participants. You can go audio & video, audio-only, or none of the above, if you just want to text-chat. You can rotate three microphone privileges amongst three other participants, choose whether your guests can see each other or not, and (perhaps the most helpful feature) set a time limit to your meeting, which ticks away in the upper-right corner and might help everyone stay a bit more focused.

I tested DimDim out with my (very patient) wife sitting in the same room and a friend connecting from across the city. Two were on residential cable connections and the third on DSL. The whiteboard, chat, and audio functions were surprisingly snappy and responsive, though I found out that using my laptop’s built-in microphone and speakers was a bad idea on many levels—everybody could hear the pounding of my typing, and there were a number of looping echos. The desktop view sharing from my system was a bit laggy, however, and occasionally required my asking the guests to manually hit “refresh” in the main window. That’s using residential upload speeds, though, and dependent on what else was uploading at the time.

Here’s a full shot of DimDim in action, scaled just a bit to fit on this page. (Note: I lack a decent webcam, so we used another participant’s camera to try out video conferencing, not shown in this shot):

In all, I found DimDim to give its free users a surprising amount of flexibility and functionality for the price, and would be interested to find out what options set apart the other webinar-hosting companies in the field.

Got any tips or experiences to share in hosting web conferences? Wish you weren’t invited to so many? Tell us your take on webinars in the comments. (Thanks to mostlybob</> for the inspiration!)

Install the Windows Vista Sidebar in XP

Windows only: If you’re in no hurry to adopt Windows Vista but you’ve taken a shine to the Vista Sidebar, Joshoon over at Deviant Art has uploaded a port of the actual application to Windows XP. Using a combination of resources such as Alky for Applications, a Windows Vista to XP compatibility client, and the sidebar extracted from Vista the port allows XP users to run Vista Sidebar. Users can grab additional sidebar gadgets directly from Microsoft and experience the same functionality as they would with the sidebar on a Vista system. If you’re running Windows XP and looking for something to round out real estate on your widescreen monitor this might just be it. For other sidebar candidates and general Vista goodness, check out how to get the best features of Vista in XP. The Windows Vista Sidebar pack is free, Windows XP only.

Five Best Video Chat Applications

When you really want to stay in touch over a long distance, a simple phone call or voice chat pales in comparison to a face-to-face video chat. You can look your long-distance significant other in the eyes while you talk; your parents can watch their grandkid grow up; and under the right circumstances, video chat can also be an excellent tool for work-related calls and collaboration. The question is, what tools should you be using to get the most out of your calls? Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite video chat applications, and today we’re back with the five most popular answers. Keep reading for a closer look at the best video chat tools, then cast your vote for the one you love best.

Google Video Chat (Web-based, Windows/Mac OS X)

Google launched video chat inside Gmail earlier this week, and already it’s become a popular option for video chat (that’s the power of the GOOG!). Its quick popularity is in no small part thanks to its seamless integration with Gmail—if you’ve already got a Gmail account, using it is kind of a no-brainer. You will need to install a free plug-in to get started with Google’s video chat, but this one works no matter what operating system you’re using. Video chat integration isn’t yet available on all accounts, but if it hasn’t already, it should be coming to a Gmail account near you very soon.

TokBox (Web-based, Supports all platforms)

TokBox is a web-based video chat application. Apart from its standard homepage, where you can login and initiate video chats with anyone through your web browser, TokBox has made its name by integrating with other services. For example, you can install the TokBox for Facebook Firefox extension to start quick video calls with any of your Facebook friends. Likewise, if you’re a fan of online instant messaging application Meebo, you can start a video chat from a Meebo IM session using TokBox. If you’d prefer a desktop component, TokBox also has an Adobe AIR desktop app available on their homepage.

Skype (Windows/Mac/Linux)

Skype is a popular VoIP application capable of making PC-to-PC and PC-to-phone calls; as long as you’ve got a webcam, any PC-to-PC call can instantly become a video chat. With the release of Skype 4.0 Beta on Windows, video chat on Skype has been bigger and better than ever. Skype’s cross-platform compatibility and generally smooth video are the key elements that keep users coming back to Skype for their video chat needs.

iChat (Mac OS X)

iChat is the default instant messaging application bundled with Mac OS X. iChat boasts multi-user video chat (up to 4 people at once), iChat Theater for sharing and viewing files during a video chat, and a Backdrops feature that allows users to customize what’s behind them (e.g., you’re in Paris). The downer: iChat is only available on OS X.

Vsee (Windows only)

Vsee is a free Windows videoconferencing application. In addition to VSee’s straight up video chat options, it’s also designed as a collaboration tool. So, as their demo video explains, you could collaborate with a colleague on a Photoshop document (even if that person doesn’t have Photoshop installed) through screen sharing, and you can share that file (or any document, for that matter) by dragging the file onto your chat video. VSee Free supports video chats with up to four people simultaneously, while the paid version supports up to eight at a time.

This week’s honorable mentions go out to Meebo and Digsby, both of which support video chat through the above-mentioned TokBox.

Whether or not your fave made the short list, tell us more about the video chat app you love in the comments.