Zazu: Get the News (& More) Read to You
by Neo on October 28, 2010
Get Zazu!
While I was scanning through the ol’ Google Reader the other day, I noticed an article on a sweet little News/Personal Information Reader (literally, it reads to you) called Zazu. After my love/hate relationship with the other Text-to-Speech program I looked at on here (SayMyName Dessert, which may or may not have temporarily screwed up my phone’s Car Home app [all my doing]) , I immediately installed it, because I love TTS apps, no matter what they do.
That said, after spending 2-4 minutes setting up some feeds and linking my Twitter account, I was pleased to find that this app did pretty much exactly what I thought/wanted/hoped it would do: in oddly accentuated British English, read me the news, some tweets, all after greeting me by name, with the weather.
On initial startup, you are prompted to login/register (I think it was mandatory) with an email and a password. This also gets you registry on their website, www.getzazu.com, where you can modify your news feed settings, in a spiffy web ui. The main interface of Zazu is a nice little clock/settings button combo, granting you quick access to your included news feeds, as well as your alarms and your personal information (email, twitter, etc.). The menu hides the manual way to get it to read to you, whimsically styled “enlighten me”. The main way to get Zazu to “enlighten you” is to set alarms, which can be triggered at a time, on any specific day of the week. Weather data can either use the GPS or a manually entered ZIP Code.
According to MakeUseOf.com, the developer has plans to update the app with “calendar integration, advanced voices, advanced news feed settings, and full social media integration”. Additionally, they are planning on/already developing Zazu on other mobile platforms.
Update: according to the @getZazu, the official Zazu Twitter, calendar integration is live! [Twitter]
![[Twitter]](http://blog.neomelonas.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Selection_001.png){kind=link}
For now, it is Android Only, available FREE on the Android Market, or scan the QR Code, below.
Say My Name Dessert – Android App Of Note
by Neo on September 18, 2010
The other day, I was reading some posts on XDA and messing around with Tasker, a Locale-like app that enables you to run different apps or change different settings depending on such things as location, whether you’ve docked your phone, or even what time it is, when I saw the mention of an app called SayMyName Dessert (the QR code over there doubles as a link to the AppBrain page for this app).
SayMyName Dessert is a snazzy little text-to-speech app that can work as a Locale plug-in, so by extension, it will also work as a Tasker plug-in, that can read aloud several different things that makes your phone work like a phone. Specifically, with the Pico TTS engine installed, you can get your phone to speak to you when someone calls, to tell you who is calling, which is much better than setting a custom ringtone. When you get a text message, you can have it read you just the sender’s name, or the name AND the entire text, though you should probably set it to stop reading when it encounters non-textual things like emoticons, which can be done in the settings. You can have it read the sender of an email, or have it read sender and message, though that can get tedious.
Right now, I have mine set up to work with Tasker to read me the sender and body of any text messages I get when I have my phone in the car dock. If you want to try that, I’ve attached the Tasker config for you to import here (right click, Save As . . .). To import, just download the file onto your SD card to /sdcard/Tasker/profiles/Read_SMS.prf.xml, open up Tasker, hit the Menu button, select Profile Data and select Import One Profile. Pick the profile you want to import and import it!
SayMyName Dessert is a great application to use if you want to be alerted who is calling/texting/emailing instantly as it happens. The only negative about this app is that when you open the options pane to set it up, it will always nag you to buy the donate version, but that is really a small issue over such a great app.
Locale is around $10, and you can get it here: Get Locale
Tasker is around £3.99 (just over $6) and is awesome. You can see what Lifehacker had to say about it here, or you can get it from the market through this QR code:
CSS Primer
by Neo on September 11, 2010
CSS! Probably best thing to happen to the web since HTML, Cascading Style Sheets are what make the web (2.0) look like Web 2.0. In this, and potentially some subsequent posts, I’ll describe some basic Stuff to Know so you can get into making things look cool on the Internet.
The purpose of CSS is, among other things, to separate the format from the content; that is, HTML exists to get a point across, while CSS serves to make that point look good.
History, Briefly
CSS 1 was released (as an official W3C Recommendation) in December 19981. It has since been discontinued for CSS 2 in 1998, which in turn was updated in 2007 to bring us to the current Candidate Recommendation of CSS 2.1, whose full specification can be found here. Since 2005, CSS 3 has been in development, with many new (very shiny) features, a list of which is kept here. CSS 3 is written in a modular form, which only means that different parts of it will be done at different times, as such, here is a status list for the different modules.
And that is a (very) brief history of CSS.
Read the rest of this entry »
The Nexus One Experience
by Neo on August 18, 2010
Upon my graduation from WVU, I managed to get my hands on a new cell phone, which is awesome because the old one was kinda old, and not less than a bit abused. I opted to switch from my longtime carrier U.S. Cellular (who are AWESOME… though really only in the state of West Virginia) to get a T-Mobile account (who are substantially LESS awesome in WV, comparatively). The reason for this sudden change in the weather is due entirely to the HTC/Google amalgam in the Nexus One.
Undoubtedly, the greatest thing about the N1 is that it runs Google’s Android Operating system, which is not-so-secretly the AOSP, which allows people who tweak or modify the code that runs the OS to do some truly fantastic things to what starts out as an already amazing phone. One of the most prolific developer/modders in the fray is Cyanogen, whose builds of the AOSP are some of the most commonly used bases for the huge array of ROMs out there. In fact, his mods are so well known that he is one of the few people to have received a cease & desist order from Google for his incorporation of Google’s proprietary applications (like the GMail app, the Market App, etc.) into the CyanogenMod (CM) ROM. The whole of this licensing saga can be found with a quick google (look for Cyanogen C&D Google).
All that said, Cyanogen is by absolutely NO means the only Android ROM developer for the Nexus One (or any Android phone. See XDA for “details” XDA-Developers) At the time I wrote this post, I had tried out at least 7 different ROMs, mostly loosely based around the CM ROMs. If you have an N1, I would totally try out one of the SenseUI ROMs just to see if you like it and also to check out what shiny things can be baked into phone.
I’ve now had this phone for three months. The only major complaints I’ve heard or had about it involve battery life, which maxes, for me, at not quite one day, which really isn’t too bad for a non-Apple device. The upgrade to Froyo was snazzy, almost definitely worth more than the medium amount of press it received, and it certainly solved most of the issues present in the phone before it came out. I’ve not had anything occur that would make me even consider getting a newer, “better”, phone, and before Google pulled it from general sale, I recommended it to everyone. Now, if you feel like being a developer, you can still get the phone as a dev phone, but the price is up substantially, and I don’t know if you can get it with a plan, so, yea.
Google Nexus One: 9/10 Great phone.