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Parrot is great voice recording app for BlackBerry Z10

June 3, 2013June 3, 2013 Max Limpag Leave a comment

PARROT ON BLACKBERRY Z10. Parrot is a beautifully-designed app that produces very clear audio recordings. (Photo by Max Limpag)

As a journalist, I use my phone extensively for news gathering. Apart from it being my camera, the phone is also my main voice recorder for interviews. I still carry an MP3 voice recorder but this serves only as backup, the quality of recording in smartphones is so much higher.

Whenever I set up a phone, one of the first apps I install is a voice recorder. On Android, my favorite voice recording application is Easy Voice Recorder, which has a free version that more than meets my needs. On iOS, my favorite voice recording app is iTalk, which produces clear and great quality recordings.

On the BlackBerry Z10, which uses the company’s BlackBerry 10 platform, I find Parrot to be the best voice recording application.

Parrot is easy to use and the user interface is beautiful and minimal. It’s easy to use the app for recording.

I used Parrot in several interviews, including the Tell It To Sun.Star roundtable interview of defeated congressional candidate Annabelle Rama before the elections and the sound quality is really exceptional. Play the clip below to check it out for yourself. My phone was on the table about 2 feet away from Annabelle during the recording.

INTERVIEW. I used Parrot on the BlackBerry Z10 to record the interview by Sun.Star journalists of defeated congressional candidate Annabelle Rama. The recording was very clear. Check out a sample clip below. (Photo by Max Limpag)

Parrot has a live graph of audio input to give you an idea of the sound levels so that you could adjust the placement of the phone.

Listen to this sample clip of the Annabelle Rama interview to check out the quality of Parrot’s recording.

The app is exclusive to the BlackBerry 10 platform.

Parrot also allows you to define the quality of your recording from Low (.awb files), Good (.m4a files) and High (.wav files). You can then copy the recording to the external memory card or share this via Bluetooth, email, BlackBerry Messenger or even NFC.

If you regularly do interviews or record voice memos whenever an idea occurs to you, Parrot on the BlackBerry 10 is an excellent free app for that.

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Enhance your mobile site with brow.si

June 2, 2013June 2, 2013 Max Limpag Leave a comment

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Brow.si is a website add-on that enhances your mobile site by adding a flyout bar and makes it act a bit more native and increase engagement with readers.

Brow.si is a free website add-on that enhances your mobile site by making it act a bit more native and increase engagement with readers.

When viewed on a mobile browser, a website that enables the brow.si add-on will have a flyout bar that contains buttons for saving the article via Pocket or Readability and sharing the article through e-mail or via Facebook, Twitter and Linked In. The bar also lets you control the font size of the site as well as subscribe to push notifications for updates via the brow.si app on the App Store.

Brow.si can be easily installed into any website and is compatible with major content management systems like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla.

In my tests with this blog and MyCebu.ph, the brow.si mobile flyout bar was very responsive and did feel like that of a native app.

But I encountered problems in connecting my Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts for the first time in order to share the articles. I clicked on share and chose a social network and was taken to the log in page to enter my username and password. After entering my credentials I just got a blank page. But when I went back to the article that I wanted to share, the flyout bar recognized that I was already logged into the social network I wanted to use and let me share the article.

Brow.si said they will be offering “really soon” mini-apps for the platform. They said in their site that website owners can either build their own mini-app for the platform or get one from their marketplace.

I think brow.si holds much promise because it bridges the on-going debate of site owners on whether to go the mobile Web approach or to build native apps.

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Day 1

June 1, 2013June 1, 2013 Max Limpag Leave a comment

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I’m setting 30-day challenges this month. Today is day 1. The challenges I chose are meant to help me improve my writing and fitness:

Run at least 5 kilometers every day
Blog every day

To start the month, I just finished a 21K run today, my first long run for a long time. One thing I realized that I really missed in running is the meditative state you are in when running longer distances. I used to be able to think out and outline column pieces during long slow distance (LSD) runs. In my solo run tonight, I was able to come up with several ideas for new projects as well as improvements on current ones.

I’ve been able to run nightly for 13 straight days and I hope to keep that up for this month’s challenge.

RUNKEEPER. The app for iOS and Android not only allows you to keep track of the distance of your run via GPS, it also serves as training log, resource and social network.

It’s a challenge to find the time to run but I realized it’s something I need to make time for not only to improve my fitness but also my writing. I’m able to think better after a run. Ideas come out, without fail, in my nightly runs.

As with anything I do, I use tech as a crutch. RunKeeper allows me to keep track of my runs while Lift reminds me of habits I want to build or change and keep track of these. You cannot change what you cannot measure, someone at Lift wrote (I can no longer find that link).

LIFT. The app allows you to sign up for challenges and keep track of your progress.

I’ve also decided to resume blogging – really blogging and not just making this site a repository of my newspaper articles and column. By working to be able to blog everyday, I hope to sharpen my craft (writing coaches tell you the best way to improve your writing is to keep doing it) as well as discipline myself into writing regularly.

Day 1 is about to end, a whole month awaits.

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Habits

May 31, 2013May 31, 2013 Max Limpag Leave a comment

“Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”
- Warren Buffett

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Taking on 30-day challenges

May 31, 2013May 31, 2013 Max Limpag Leave a comment

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Thirty days are “just about the right time to add a new habit or subtract a habit,” Google engineer Matt Cutts said in his TED talk in 2011.

“If you really want something badly enough, you can do anything in 30 days,” he said.

By taking on his 30-day challenges, Cutts said he found that “instead of the months flying by, forgotten, the time was much more memorable.”

He also said that “small, sustainable changes” were more likely to stick.

I am slowly getting back to running and have, according to the app Lift, an 11-day streak in daily runs. RunKeeper logs my mileage this week so far at 26.8 kilometers – a walk on the block compared to the mileage I racked up running ultra-marathons some years back but a veritable ultra compared to the zero mileage of recent months.

One thing I realized after getting back to running was the

My getting-back-to-running goal is to run at least 5 kilometers a day. A tall order but one I’ve managed to keep for a week. To make a habit stick, my favorite productivity site Lifehack says you must do it daily.

“Consistency is critical if you want to make a habit stick. If you want to start exercising, go to the gym every day for your first thirty days. Going a couple times a week will make it harder to form the habit. Activities you do once every few days are trickier to lock in as habits.” – Scott Young.

And with the free tools available in this age of the “quantified self,” tracking progress or regress is so much easier. My phone is a slave driver – it tells me every day to drink more water, run, blog more etc.

Today is the end of the month. Tomorrow, I plan to take on my first 30-day challenges. Apart from the daily 5K, I’m considering other health-, writing- or tech-related challenges. Spend more time with the family, travel more, stay away from fast-food, no more soda, eat less junk food, stop eating rice, blog daily, learn Git and consider moving to it from Subversion, interview people, build a mobile phone app, build an iPad magazine, write using Markdown, write a book, run another Linux distro, live “on the cloud,” learn another language, run another marathon, run another ultra, read my backlog of books, stay away from social networks, take a photo a day, learn a new word a day etc. These are some of the challenges that I want to take on. But which should I tackle first? I have the day to decide.

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