Business Hacks

Jott for Outlook lets you create new tasks, appointments, and even e-mails using only your voice. It’s a new (and fantastic) addition to my beloved Jott, but it comes at a price: To use it, you must subscribe to one of the service’s new subscription plans.

Fear not, freebie lovers: There’s still Jott Basic, which delivers much of the voice-powered Jott functionality you’ve grown to love over the past two years. But to use Jott for Outlook, you’ll have to sign up for Jott ($3.95 monthly) or Jott Pro ($12.95 monthly). (Find out more about what each plan includes on Jott’s Getting Started page.)

I’m sad. I guess I should have known that Jott was too good to be free forever. Although Jott Basic offers most of what I need from the service, it doesn’t let me add Google Calendar entries or send text messages. And I can’t use the cool new Outlook plug-in (which you can see in action in the above video). What about the rest of you? Will you pay for Jott or stick with the ad-supported free version?

One sudden burst of gravity can ruin an iPhone owner’s day. The Speck SeeThru hard-shell case offers drop protection, rubberized side grips (so you’re less likely to drop it in the first place), and a clever two-piece design. Pop off the bottom of the case to sync your iPhone or prop it up for movie watching: The bottom end doubles as a stand.

Made from translucent polycarbonate plastic, the SeeThru is available in five colors: clear, black, pink, red, and purple. (No blue? No green? Helloooo.) It sells for $29.95, which seems like a reasonable price given its dual functionality. Of course, you could always take the cheap way out and turn a business card into an iPhone stand. Or, for something a little more durable, try turning a MiniDV tape case into an iPhone stand.

That said, every iPhone owner should have a decent case, and this one not only looks cool, it gets extra points for practicality. Agree? Disagree? Let me know in the Comments. [via Gizmodo]

If you’ve got a Blackberry, you can now read the Wall Street Journal for free. In a nice reversal for a newspaper that seems to pride itself on hiding its best stuff behind a pay wall, the WSJ has worked up a simple and useful app for Blackberry users that quickly lets readers scan article blurbs, read full-length articles, and even save favorites for offline reading (like on the subway).

Press once to read a summary, and twice to read the whole article. It’s as simple as that. The only trouble I had with the app was getting the WSJ to send it to me from their launch page. If that happens to you, just email this page to your blackberry and download it from there (thanks, Silicon Alley Insider). And don’t worry, iPhone users, the Murdochians assure us they’ve got a similar app coming for you guys soon.

If Paint.NET is the freeware answer to Photoshop and Creative Docs .NET to Illustrator, then Artweaver might just be the freeware answer to Corel Draw. It bills itself as a “program to simulate natural brush tools,” meaning it’s designed as much for creating images as it is for manipulating them.

In addition to an assortment of “digital brushes” including chalks, charcoals, and pencils, Artweaver offers the usual array of image-editing tools: crop, gradient-fill, transparency, layers, and so on. It also supports (and, in fact, recommends) tablet PCs for a more realistic pen-on-paper feel. (As real as a plastic stylus on an electronic screen can feel, anyway.)

Artweaver requires Windows 2000, XP, or Vista, but has fairly basic system requirements: a Pentium processor, 128MB of RAM, and 30MB of storage. That’s pretty impressive for a program that offers this much painting and editing power. Definitely worth a look. [via CyberNet]

From the software labs at Microsoft comes pptPlex, a PowerPoint 2007 plug-in that provides a new (and improved? You be the judge) way of presenting slides. Here’s the scoop:

This plug-in allows you to arrange slides on a canvas then zoom between the slides during the presentation. You can move around the canvas and show groups of slides, individual slides, or even zoom in to show a particular section of a slide.

The zoom feature in particular sounds pretty cool. Of course, a picture is worth a thousand words, and a video is worth even more — so peep the demo up above. What do you think? Neat stuff or not all that useful? Hit the Comments and opine. [via Office Tweaks]

One of Firefox 3’s best new features is the “bookmark star” that appears at the right end of the address bar: Click it once to instantly bookmark the current page, or twice to assign a name, folder, and tags. Tagmarks enhances Firefox’s one-click bookmarking by displaying multiple “tag” icons when you mouse over the star.

Clicking one or more of the icons performs two functions: It bookmarks the page and associates the page with the selected icon(s), thus giving you a new way to organize bookmarks. For example, you can quickly assign your favorite search engines to the little magnifying glass. Meanwhile, you can view all your Tagmarks bookmarks by clicking Bookmarks > View Tagmarks Tags.

Although this extension desperately needs some customization options, it’s an interesting idea, one I think will appeal to users who like the notion of “visual tagging.” What do you think? Is this something you would use? [via CyberNet]

Sending a Word file, Excel spreadsheet, or the like as a file attachment seems harmless enough — unless the file contains hidden data you didn’t know about or didn’t know enough to remove. Outlook plug-in SendShield analyzes outbound file attachments, alerts you to any hidden data it finds, and provides options for removing it.

What is hidden data and how can it hurt you? Take Microsoft Word (please!): The track-changes feature is great for allowing multiple users to make revisions to a document, but the final document frequently contains a full revision history. Thus, any recipient could inadvertently — or intentionally — view those changes, and that could be bad indeed. You know all those stories you read about big companies “inadvertently disclosing information” about financial plans, future products, CEO’s comments, and the like? That kind of hidden data is often the culprit.

SendShield scans your attachments for tracked changes, comments, hidden worksheets and formulas, embedded Excel data, and so on, then allows you to remove the unwanted info or convert the document(s) to PDF, which effectively strips all hidden data.

Note to Microsoft: Steal this product! Wow, is this a must-have for just about every business on the planet. SendShield is free while still in beta; pricing for the final product hasn’t been announced. [via gHacks]

Remember Yapta, the site that helps you get a refund on airfare if the rate drops after you buy your tickets? My only real complaint with the service is that you have to call the airline yourself to get the refund — a time-consuming and potentially aggravating process. Now Yapta can handle this chore for you as part of its new Premium Service. In a nutshell, they call the airline and lock down your refund.

This option is available Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. till midnight (ET). It costs $15, which is not a bad deal if you stand to pocket, say, $75 or more from your refund. To use the service, just click the Voucher link on any refund-eligible flight you’re tracking, then follow the prompts from there.

What do you think? Is $15 a reasonable price? Have you ever used Yapta to get an airfare refund? If so, how was it dealing with the airline?

Hofstadter’s law of planning states, “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter’s Law into account.” Merlin Mann  of 43 Folders claims that there’s no known reason for why we tend to be overly optimistic about our planning, but notes that the more detailed our visualization of the task is, the less accurate we are.

So how do we get around the fact that we’re going to be worse than we think? At a company I used to work for, we had a (semi-serious) acronym we used to follow: LEAST. As in, Lower Expectations And Surpass Them. After estimating where and when a project would end up, we’d always tack on a buffer of at least ten percent to our goals and times. Mann goes even further, suggesting adding 40% to your time-to-completion goals.

(Photo via Elusive.Ness’s Flickr Stream)

Want to make the move to Gmail? YippieMove helps you migrate your mail from your old provider. The service works with just about any IMAP account, and costs a reasonable $9.95 per account.

Using YippieMove couldn’t be much simpler. Start by specifying where you’re moving from: AOL, Apple .Mac, any of several dozen universities, or “other” if your provider isn’t on the list. Provide your account information, then your Gmail account information. Finally, choose the folders you want to transfer, then sit back while YippieMove gets to work. Note that you must use Google Checkout to pay for the transfer.

YippieMove doesn’t yet support POP3 or Web-based accounts (like Yahoo Mail), but apparently these options are in the works. In the meantime, this service could prove very handy for anyone who wants to back up their e-mail to a free Gmail account or move to the service outright. [via Webware]