The New York Times’ ebullient tech columnist David Pogue handed out his awards for the best tech ideas of the year. Some of them I’ve covered already — like Bing’s pop-up previews, Droid and the Verizon MiFi wireless card — and some of them are very cameras that I just don’t care much about. But here are two very cool ideas that passed under my radar.
1) iType2Go
I don’t have an iPhone, but if I did I’d buy this app pronto. When
you’re texting, iType2Go superimposes your words over a live camera
view of where you’re walking. So rather than looking like a
half-klutz/half-jerk running into trees, cars, families with strollers
and so on, you can see exactly where you’re going as you text your
friend. For Droid phones, a similar function is called the Text’n’Walk.
2) Readability
Pogue calls Readability — a free button for your browser that renders
any online article as an ad-free, novel-esque page — “the single best
tech idea of 2009.” That was enough for me! So I downloaded the
function by visiting the Readability site here,
selecting my reading preferences (Novel-style text; Medium sized print;
Wide margins) and dragging the Readability button to my bookmark
Toolbar. Voila. Every article I read can now be rendered as a ad-free,
clutter-free page of crystal clear text on a sepia background. I urge
you to try it out.
