Yovav (Jay) Meydad's Personal Blog

Do you know these house organizer services you hire to come to your house and organize stuff? Well, one of the best things that often happen when they organize your house & closets are the forgotten photos and other items they are able to find.  Things that you know are somewhere in the house but you have no clue where exactly.

Well, Xoopit is the same but for your Gmail (as long as you use Firefox). It is a great inbox search utility that makes it easy to find attachments (photos, videos) and browse through them inside Gmail.

You should give it a try.

I am big fan of Babylon and have been using this utility extensively. It is much more than a translation tool for me. It is the ultimate reference utility. I use various topical glossaries (technology, finance, sports), dictionaries, thesauruses and it is among the top 5 software I use most every day (only email, browser & IM/Skype are ahead of it).

But since switching to a Mac I had to find all kinds of workarounds that allowed me to keep using Babylon. Such as copy and paste terms from Mac applications into Babylon for Windows (I have a Virtual Machine on my Mac). But the experience was not the same.

Earlier today, and just by coincidence, I discovered that Babylon has finally released its version for the Mac. The Mac version costs exactly like the Window version ($89) so there is no "Apple Tax" in this case.

BTW, I wonder how this piece of news was not published on Mac/Apple related blogs and sites.

You can buy Babylon for Mac here.

Jake Levine who used to work at my team before he left for MySpace to become their search product manager sent me this note & screenshot of Chromoe’s death page. I thought it was funny and worth a share:

Chrome failed and here’s what it shows (homage to the best search ever!):

Globes.co.il published the results of a survey that was done by the Israeli research firm BDI-COFACE to rate the best Israeli high-tech companies to work for in 2008. BDI’s results were somewhat surprising (Intel first, Google ‘only’ second) so Globes decided to do their own survey.

But Globes forgot to include the “Other” category on the results page although it was one of the options. Oops.

So, let me fill the missing piece for you. Google does come first but the ‘Other’ category comes second with 23%. The remaining 8 behemoths (Intel, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, CheckPoint, Nice, Comverse and Amdocs) do not look that attractive anymore to many people.

So, if you are an Israeli start-up or an entrepreneur looking to build a team, there are plenty of people out there that might want to work for you.

This post was done using the new WordPress client for the iPhone, and my first impression is very positive.

The app is super simple to set up. It took me 30 seconds to put my blog’s URL, username and password, and that’s it.

Beyond a simple setup, the app has the popular feautres you would expect – write a post and attach photos (although it crashed when I tried attaching a few, but the recovery mode worked nicely).

The preview mode is also a great feature.

If you are a WordPress user with an iPhone, give it a try.

Can someone tell the folks at TheMarker.com that they should make their site compatible with Firefox 3. For some unknown reason, the site crashes the browser seconds after the home page starts loading.

This is really annoying, especially since beta versions and release candidates were avaliable for testing months ago.

P.S.

I did not link TheMarker simply because I don’t want your browser to crash as well…

No one can blame me that I am anti-Apple. I own more Apple products than Microsoft. I have 2 ipods, an iPhone, a Mac Mini in our house’s living room, I have some AAPL shares in my portfolio and recently I put my hands on a MacBook Pro. I thought that after 15 years or so on a PC, the time has come to fully migrate.

I’ve installed plenty of utils (thank you versiontracker.com). I’ve learned by heart tens of shortcuts. I’ve even got used to looking for the [x] button on the top left corner. But, after two weeks on a Mac as my primary work machine I have to admit that I still find it very difficult to get used to the fact that some basic applications, such that I have been using every day, are missing or partially available on a Mac, and that there is no good alternative. In many cases, I feel 50% less productive than I used to be on a PC.

Here are a few examples — in case you have answers or suggestions to some of these issues, please leave  them in the comments section:

1. Entourage is a terrible email client compared to Outlook. Plenty of basic features are missing (I don’t know where to begin…). It is also very slow and feels like Outlook Express v 2.0 to me.

2. Spotlight cannot index my Outlook PST files. From what I have been reading, the only way to overcome this issue is to import the PST files into Entourage. But then I would end up with a huge and slow inbox. Am I missing some hidden plug-in or am I expected to give up years of email archive?

3. MS Office in general, and PowerPoint in particular, for Mac is bad, really bad. On Powerpoint for example, If you need to edit/open/edit presentations made on PowerPoint you are in serious trouble. Fonts do no render properly, print is almost impossible and the overall experience is really slow. Yes, I have Keynote installed and it is amazing, but when you are part of a company that has a majority of PC users, I have no choice but using Office.

4. I need to have ability to run IE7 (or my favorite Maxthon). There are many sites that are not compatible with FF and Safari (at least Israeli ones). Also, my job requires me to look at everything we develop at Snap on all three browsers, especially the one with the largest market share. A side note: seems to me that Microsoft made a big mistake when it announced that it is not going to support IE for Mac OS any more.

5. My favorite desktop blogging client, MS Live Writer, does not have a Mac version. Anyone has suggestions for a really good alternative for Mac?

I know what some might say–just install Parallel and Windows on the Mac and use the PC apps that you like. But then I would work on Windows most of the day. Besides, what is the point. I could buy an apple sticker and stick it in the center of the cover of my IBM Thinkpad…

I am attending OMMA Hollywood today. Snap has a booth ad the exhibit floor and I am spending my time meeting people at the booth, and listening to sessions & worskshops.

The exhibit floor is pretty compact with about 50 companies that have a presence here. Once cool product has caught my attention so far. It is called Snaptell (no connection to Snap.com) and it offers image recognition based mobile marketing.

One of their offering is called Mobile Movie Explorer, which is a very impressive mashup of mobile & web technologies. Snaptell utilized Amazon’s web services and their image recognition technology to provide movie reviews sent back to the phone. Try it – simply take a picture of the cover any DVD movie with your camera phone, send it to dvd@snaptell.com, and check your email.

This children book makes me think I should probably take out the media center from our living room…

Interested in the hard cover version? Get it on Amazon… 

After two weeks of testing I decided to remove Xobni. I did it for two reasons: it slowed down Outlook and the end user benefits were not clear to me. For email email & desktop search, I stick with X1 which has superior capabilities compared to Xobni and other desktop search applications.