You may have noticed that the posts on DemoGirl slowed down a bit last week. One reason is that I went away for Thanksgiving weekend and the other is that I’ve been busy doing custom work for various companies and simply haven’t had the time to make any screencasts for DG. Sorry!
One of the recent projects I worked on was for the updated offline features for ZohoWriter. I’ve been doing work for the guys at Zoho for months now and it’s really been a great experience. You can check out the demo here and read more detailed articles about the updated ZohoWriter here, here, and here.
Friends and family who know me are well aware of my “little problem” when it comes to driving directions. Basically, my sense of direction is so bad that I get lost any time I turn off of my street. This fact was proven once again a couple of weeks ago when I was driving home from an event and was so turned around that I could have been in Texas and not known the difference. It was late at night and I started to panic after about 45 minutes of driving around – absolutely nothing looked familiar. I’m not big on stopping and asking for directions (especially in the neighborhood I was in) because it makes me feel like an idiot, which probably makes me an even bigger idiot. Finally I called a friend of mine and I told him the intersection I was at and he Google Mapped me home. What if no one was home though? What would I have done? I would probably still be driving in circles.
Today, all of my fears of getting lost in the ghetto again have been laid to rest thanks to the “get me the heck outta here!” service from Dial Directions. All you need to do is dial the letters DIR-ECT-IONS on your cell phone and tell the nice lady on the other end where you want to go and your current location. A text message arrives almost instantly with directions from MapQuest. You can also specify major chain stores and be given directions to the one closest to your location. You can even create directions to an event on Dial Directions and then tell your friends to call the number and say the name of the event. They’ll be given directions from where they are to the location you plugged into the Dial Directions website. Normally I only post screencasts on DemoGirl but in this case I thought I’d share this demo video they put together so you can see just how cool this service is. Just so ya know, I did try it out and it worked great.
There are some people out there who seem to be walking dictionaries. They like to use big words and can instantly spew out the definition of any word you throw at them. It’s annoying. I’m not one of those people but when I do hear a word that I don’t know the meaning of, I will almost always do the typical “define: insert big confusing word here” Google search. However, I think I’ve found something better.
Definr claims to be “an incredibly fast dictionary” – and it is. Just go to Definr.com and start typing in the word you want defined and Definr will use auto complete to make the search faster (especially if you don’t know exactly how to spell it). That’s it. Your definition is displayed and you can continue on your way. The reason I like Definr so much is because you don’t need to go to Definr.com in order to use it. You can use one of their tools and look up any word you come across while browsing the Web. Here’s my screencast tour of Definr:
