Jott Reminders: A Failure of Translation at a Higher Level

The service Jott is a terrific way to send yourself notes via the phone. It uses software and human ears to transcribe your notes aka Jotts. You can also ask it to send you a Reminder. This is where Jott gets a little full of itself: it refuses to follow your instructions. It always sends your reminder 15 minutes earlier than you request it. I looked into it, and discovered the reason: Jott assumes that when you ask it for a Reminder, you are really telling it about an Event. Based on that assumption, it assumes that your Event requires a 15 minute 'warning.' (And no, you can not adjust this default lead time in Settings).

As is, Jott cannot handle the fact that you simply want it to DO something at a particular time. It translates your request into a NOUN (event).. rather than leave the Nouns to you. What is worse, when Jott prompts you for a Reminder it Seems to be asking for a time to be reminded.. and does not mention that it views your request as a statement of an Event. Here is the Demo from the Jott web site:



Note the last (circled line): Jott's summary of just what happened and what Jott will do. Jott is not a Calendar or Event service, and yet in regards to Reminders, it assumes your Jotts are events.

Say you wanted a text reminder to move your car in 15 minutes. If you asked Jott for the reminder, it would immediately send you the word. Jott provides for a 15 minute "Snooze" -- which wouldn't be necessary if it simply sent the reminder on time. And it will require 2 phone texts (to and fro Jott).

For this to be fixed, Jott needs a "higher level" of translation. It's not enough that it can transcribe your words--it needs to UNDERSTAND what you mean by REMINDER. But unless Jott changes this Reminder System, you will have to get around it by requesting a reminder 15 minutes LATER THAN when you want it. Then, when Jott does its 15 minutes early-Big Brother-Father Knows Best translation, it will come out at the right time.

Here are 2 screens: one of me setting a Reminder for 5:30pm, and of me receiving the reminder at 5:15pm

Fix: YouTube Full Screen

In an August 2007 post I criticized YouTube's full-screen mode because it restarted your video rather than continuing to play as Windows Media does.

YouTube now plays continuously when toggling to full-screen.

Invalid Login: Don't Explain Why

Most web sites that require a login of username and password return an ambiguous error message when login is invalid.

The common message is: "Invalid username / OR password."

Well, which was it?

It's very easy for the program to give you more specific information. Here's what happens when you login:

The program searches the database for a record containing that username AND password. If no record is found, then login is invalid. Most programs just spit out that message "Invalid username OR password" because one of those 2 was the culprit. (Actually, both inputs could have been wrong)

To clarify the matter, the program only needs to do an additional call to the database, looking for a record of the username.

If it finds a record with that username, then it knows that the password was wrong.

If it does not find a record with that username, then both the name and password were wrong.

Then the system could return a specific response.

For examples of LAZY programming / ambiguous response, see Yahoo and Hotmail. (Hotmail screen is atop this post, here is Yahoo)


Google does a better job on this, by giving the message "Username and password do not match. (and then it displays what name you entered)"

But it's easy to offer 2 specific responses when login is invalid.
1. If both the name and password is wrong: "There is no record of a xxxxxxx"
2. If there is a user of that name: "The password you entered does not match..."

The only reason to withhold those details is as a privacy measure. Since most usernames are now equal to an email address, if any person in the world wanted to know if a given email address was a member of a given site, he could enter it and a random password, and then receive a yes or no.

In that light, the Google method is tops.

But anyway, here are 2 screens from a system I made: