Living Digitally

Widget Madness

Everyone has widgets these days. Or gadgets. Small, lightweight software utilities that do one thing, and one thing only. They try to stay out of your way until you need them, and then they are close at hand and ready to serve. Stock quotes, weather reports, words of the day, dictionaries, notepads. Widgets are the tapas of the software world.

Off the top of my head, I can think of about eight different widget implementations:

• Yahoo! Widgets (formerly known as Konfabulator, possibly the father of the modern widget, and shamelessly nicked by Apple).
• Apple Dashboard Widgets ("inspired" by Konfabulator).
• Windows Vista Gadgets (assuming they don't get dropped).
• Windows Live Gadgets (now that Microsoft suddenly gets the Internet).
• TypePad Widgets.
• WordPress Widgets.
• Google Desktop Widgets.
• Even Firefox Widgets.

In general, I like widgets. At least in theory. They make a lot of sense when you think about them. The problem is actually remembering to use them. As I see it, these are the main problems with widgets:

If you like flickr, you'll love fastr

Via this post on O'Reilly Radar, I came across fastr. If you like flickr, and you like word games and/or puzzles, you're going to love fastr. In their own words:

Fastr is a game that uses flickr images. It loads ten images that all share a common tag, one by one, and you guess what the tag is. When you guess right, the tag will turn blue, and you'll get points. The faster you guess, the more points you get. The points are reset every six minutes. You'll need to choose a player name before you can play. You can play using tags for multiple languages and for specific flickr groups.

Enough said. Try it. I'll probably see you there.

How voicemail should work

I hate getting voicemail. The last thing I want to see when I look down at my phone is that stupid little voicemail icon. My messages go unchecked for days if not weeks, and every time I finish going through a backlog, I consider changing my greeting to something like "Please DO NOT leave a message. Send me an email, send me an SMS, or even better, just hang up since my phone will tell me you called anyway." But I don't because as much as I dislike it, I know voicemail is necessary. And I also realized the other day that it isn't actually voicemail itself that I dislike so much -- it's the horrible implementation that every mobile phone carrier seems to use.

To get my voicemail, I have to call in, wait, enter a code, wait, listen to the stupid greeting, wait, then navigate through one or more messages using a very clumsy and non-intuitive numeric interface. Even with all the menu options memorized, it still takes far longer than it should.

So how should it be done? Here are two ideas: