Application | Lowfokus

Plus One for Red Laser

Posted by technohermit in Apps, iPhone on 2009/12/18

I found myself at a Best Buy about three weeks ago, looking around for things to go back home and buy over the internet. What I was doing was my annual adventure into real world Christmas shopping. I hate the real world honestly, mostly because of shopping…at a mall. Anyway, I found this hard drive I’d never seen before, so I pull out my iPhone, and start searching the intrawebz for some reviews. I don’t see anything favorable, so I move on.

Next item, a flat panel TV. Samsung. Nice, so again I go about trying to find the model number and such, type it into Google, find some reviews. Onto another site to check for prices. Rinse, repeat. Boring, really, and somewhat embarrassing. You look like a toolbag standing there hunting items on your iPhone only to walk out of the store an hour later with nothing in hand. How is Best Buy supposed to keep their brick and mortar operation going?

I’ll tell you how, and they need to thank the folks at Occipital Inc for writing the application Red Laser. This handy application costs at present $1.99, and is worth ten times as much in my opinion. It scans UPC’s of products using your iPhone’s camera. Then it searches the web for the item, returning web prices, local prices (by GPS if you choose to turn it on), nutritional info, and more.

So if you’re in Best Buy, you can show them that Wal-Mart has the same TV for less, price match it right there and buy it hassle free for the best price. Sweet. I have been using this at places like Borders and Barnes and Noble, where it is tremendously helpful with books and pricing. Try it out, trust me you’ll use it!

Occipital also makes some other apps, which I’m probably going to check out since Red Laser rocks so hard. Keep up the good work guys, truly genius.

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LaunchBar, Quicksilver (OS X) or Colibri (Windows)

Posted by technohermit in Apple, OS X, Programs, Uncategorized, Windows on 2009/10/21

Apple’s notebook line has been selling like wild for quite some time now, and I think it’s appropriate for notebook users to know about these programs. Even desktop users should have them, but there is literally no excuse for a laptop jockey to forego them. My wife, a vested Windows laptop user, has the option of Colibri. These programs are interchangeable in what they do for the most part, so I’ll just go ahead and write about them as a group.

They are all handy little applications that index your files, programs, webpages and such so they are no more than a keyboard shortcut away. I cannot stress enough how much time and effort these programs save. They remove the tedious movements and tendon crippling one-finger clicking a mouse can produce. They save you countless hours per week of navigating through the Finder or Start Menu. You can launch pretty much any application within three keystrokes, which for a notebook user is indispensable. Imagine sitting on a plane and not missing your mouse. You can open songs, albums, files, pictures, you name it and it’s indexed.

LaunchBar has been my application of choice since I was on Panther, so I am a bit biased towards that one in particular. The downside is a license will cost you roughly €24. Quicksilver and Colibri are both free licenses at the time of this writing.

I’ll let you decide which is right for you, but be warned: this is like going from dial-up to broadband. You get the good stuff and you’ll never live without it again. So for those choices that are donationware, I strongly suggest you keep their development teams happy and throw them some coin.

Here’s the links:

QuickSilver

Launchbar

Colibri

As I said, I’m a huge proponent of LaunchBar, they give free updates, and have one of the fastest interfaces on the planet. See below for screenshots of the preferences panels, and if that isn’t enough go ahead and click on the link above and download the free trial. You won’t be sorry!