The Coburn Blog

Its been awhile since I’ve blogged. I’ve been so hectic with mid-terms coming up, and turning in homework assignments on time, I’ve neglected my poor blog readers a bit, sorry about that everyone

Aisquared came out with a new product called Zoomtext Scripting the other day.  What gets me, even though The Department of Rehab got me Zoomtext 9.1 like 6 months ago, aisquared wants $399 to upgrade to the scripting version.  I’m like, there is NO WAY I am paying another $400 when they just spent $600 not even 6 months ago.  It blows my mind they want that much for it. All the scripting version adds to the product, is it gives you greater control over what is spoken and what isn’t on the screen, by introducing programming language scripting.  I’m like, I’m NOT paying another $400 just for that, no way.  I wouldn’t even ask The Department of Rehab to pay another $400 just for that.

I mean, yeah its neat, you can use java, C, asp.net, whatever language you know, but I don’t think its worth another $400, on top of the already $600 for a single-user license, thats just crazy.  I think I’ll wait until 10.0, or a new major version, is released until I go for something like that. Personally, I think, its about time for a whole new rewrite of the product, instead of adding on and adding on like they’ve been doing lately.  They’ve added alot of new features since 9.0 was released, and what they need to do, is go back to the drawing board, and design a completely new interface for all these new features they keep adding,  something more compatible with XP and Vista for instance, that takes up fewer system resources.  Since 9.1 was released, its slowly turning into bloatware,  and they really need to start over with that in my opinion, from the drawing board.

I found another cool app the other day, for instant messaging, called Digsby. I don’t know if I’m allowed to post the invite code to download Digsby on my blog or not, but since CNET did on their blog, I am assuming I can too. The invite code is “CNET”.  There are several other invite codes floating around, but thats the one I signed up with.   Digsby is awesome!   Yeah, its like Trillian, except it adds Facebook, Myspace, and email support as well.  I like it, because all my facebook friends are right on my instant messenger. Now they just need to add Twitter and pownce, which I am told they are going to in the near future, pretty slick.  Hopefully they’ll blow Cerulean Studios out of the water with their product. I’m still mad at Cerulean Studios for how their support department treated me after having conflicts with Trillian and my virus scanner.  Its one thing not to know how to fix the problem, but its another to be downright rude and insulting to me because they didn’t know, so I won’t ever download Trillian again no matter what Astra is like, there was no excuse for that kind of behavior.

There’s another service that looks promising called Orgoo. Its supposed to be an all in one instant messenger, email, SMS, and video chat service.  I don’t know, video chat with multiple people at once would definitely be slick, Livve has had that for a decade now, but nobody else has repeated it yet except for the gaming community in quite some time, so it will be interesting to see how that one goes.

Lastly, I heard on weblog tools collection the other day, that wordpress is finally going to add gravatar support into its upcoming 2.5 release. Thank the Good lord!  Gravatar support has been buggy ever since gravatar 2.0 came out, and nobody else has really decided to look into the issue, so it’ll be nice that wordpress will be adding that in the near future.  Also, in regards to wordpress, there is a rumor floating around that Wordpress will be integrating Social Networkng into wordpress.  I’m not sure how thats going to fly right now,  but I read that on webware this past week.  I don’t know if thats a good, or bad, thing yet.  like integrating something like facebook into my blog? I don’t know about that one!