techscorn

I’ve been in the market for a bluetooth speakerphone for the car for awhile now. So far, my experience with my previous Garmin Nüvi 650, and my current TomTom 720 has been less then stellar in the actual phone call department. In general, I can hear the caller fairly well, but they can’t hear me. Which seems to be due to the fact that the GPS is a good distance from my face and the ambient road noise certainly doesn’t help. Sure they both have microphone options, but who needs yet another cable routed around their car? So I thought a visor mounted bluetooth speakerphone would do the trick.

I’ve had my eye on the well rated BlueAnt Supertooth3, but haven’t gotten around to ordering one yet. Instead, on impulse, I picked up the super cheap Roadmaster VR3 at Costco this weekend. Somehow I got it in my head that it was a Motorola product, which made me feel better for some reason. As it turns out, cheap applies to more than just price with this product.

Pairing was simple enough, and making and receiving calls was a no brainer, but here are the deal-breaking issues for me:

• There’s a bright blue light that flashes repeatedly. I suppose it’s indicating that your phone has an active connection (in addition to the indicator on the LCD display), but with this thing mounted on your visor, it’s horribly distracting. Particularly at night time. I thought for sure there would be a way to disable this light, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
• Even with the thing probably 8 inches from my face, I couldn’t be heard by the caller.
• The flip down, backlit LCD display is almost useless. Caller ID numbers that pop up are somewhat hard to decipher because they’re so closely kerned together, and there’s no logical spacing for the area code and prefix.
• General build quality is weak. From the creaky construction to the sickly sounding audio feedback when pushing buttons; it’s embarassing to have hanging in your car.

So there ya go. I’ll be returning this POS to Costco ASAP. Honestly the built-in speakerphone on my iPhone has been better than all other speakerphone devices I’ve tried in the car. So ultimately, I’ll probably stick with the iPhone and occasionally using the earbud headset for longer calls. I really can’t be bothered with one more device to charge anyway.

Wordpress released a native iPhone application today. Now if only typing on an iPhone didn’t kinda blow.

Ever since upgrading to Leopard, I was surprised to find that screen captures of windows now include a drop shadow. If you’re not familiar with OS X’s built-in screencap utility, you can hit cmd-shift-3 to grab the full screen, cmd-shft-4 to get selection crosshairs, and if you use cmd-shift-4 then hit the spacebar, you’ll be able to grab any screen elements (windows, menus, etc.). In Tiger, the latter method would grab just the window, and in Leopard, it grabs the window plus its drop shadow. I found this extremely annoying, because I often need to put together instruction sheets for users, and I found I was always having to crop-out the shadow.

Since Leopard was released, I would occasionally google to try to find a solution to this problem, but have never been able to find a fix. Until today, when I had an epiphany. OS X has a command line screen capture tool. “Perhaps I’ll find a clue there,” I thought. Sure enough - pay dirt. Look what I found in the man page…

-o In window capture mode, do not capture the shadow of the window.
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With my best sarcasm voice: ‘IDG has really outdone themselves again with their stellar MacWorld Expo website this year.’ To say nothing of the issues with the code (the footer was in the middle of all the pages a week or so ago), but the site itself is so hard to use. I’m attending the MacIT Conference again this year, and I’d love to have a PDF to download so I can read through the descriptions and figure out my schedule. Instead the only way to get this info is to click through each link on the site, either back and forth or via a bunch of browser tabs. You’d think downloading the “MacIT Conference-@-a-Glance” PDF would be useful, but what you get is a PDF print out of a schedule produced in Excel. No information about conferences at all aside from their start and stop times. It’s painfully obvious, the whole thing was put together with a shoestring budget, but why? Are Expos going the way of the dinosaur, or is it just bad management? Or both? It’s hard to say, but complicating such a simple task isn’t helping anyone. This site could stand a healthy dose of Web 2.0, stat!

TechScorn is now iPhone-ready thanks to the handy iWPhone Wordpress Plugin and Theme! The guys over at Content Robot frickin’ rock. Thanks guys!