Every year Donation Coder holds an event called “New Apps for the New Year” (NANY) where developers do some cramming in order to whip up small but useful apps. The NANY 2011 event came to an end on January 1st, and there’s no doubt that many of the 30+ apps available will only be downloaded by a very small subset of users. There was one, however, that really caught my attention: JottiQ.
Jotti, not to be confused with the new JottiQ application, is a website that is comparable to VirusTotal. You can upload files to the site and have it scanned against a bunch of antivirus applications. The JottiQ app, however, is a great replacement for needing to interact with the Jotti website. You can queue up files that you want to be scanned, but one of the super cool things is that you can have it scan all of the executables that are associated to processes you currently have running. Now that is slick.
Some other features of JottiQ include:
- Uses Jotti’s internal cache to speed up scans by avoiding the uploading of files that have already been scanned in the past
- Lists scanners with detections at the top of their list in red
- Open scan results in your browser
- Context menu integration lets you right-click and select “Scan with JottiQ” on a file
- Up to three files can be scanned (processed) simultaneously.
- Items that have been scanned and are deemed safe can automatically be removed from the queue.
After using this for a little while I’d say this is by far one of the most useful apps I’ve seen come out of any NANY event, and it is definitely worth checking out. These a few more of the apps available from NANY 2011 that I thought were at least worth mentioning:
- Webcam Video Diary – A program to help you quickly record, label, and manage videos and photos from your webcam throughout the day
- Quick Cliq – A portable menu based application launcher and productivity tool
- Auspex – Automatically replace and complete text strings as you type
- Duplicate Photo Finder – Find and delete duplicate photos
Kudos to all the developers who put in their own time to contribute all these apps!
Oh great, another review!
But more seriously, thank you very much for the review. It is really much appreciated. :)
If any of you are interested in seeing JottiQ developed further, do note that I currently have a poll outstanding on my website to see if people/users would like to see translations for their native language, or whether such a feature would be a waste of time to implement. There are other features I have plans to implement, and of course I am also taking all sorts of other requests and comments people wish to share under advisement.
Finally, one last thing I do want to point out is that I have noticed that JottiQ’s popularity comes and goes in spikes and that the effect on Jotti’s malware scan is pretty much mirrored by it. Since CyberNetNews and another large website picked up on JottiQ today, it needs mentioning to everyone trying the application that the last few times news sites picked up on JottiQ, Jotti’s malware scan ended up exceeding its capacity by far because everyone is scanning files ‘just to try it out’. While I fully understand this urge :) and don’t blame anyone for it, a fact is that any slow/non-responsive experiences are a side-effect of this phenomenon, and not due to the application or webservice sucking by definition. It is a free service for all to use, there is a maximum capacity, and JottiQ’s newer users have a tendency of finding those limits.
Seems my faux-HTML ‘sarcasm’ tags were stripped out on the first paragraph which might make the post above read a little oddly. I am truly thankful for the mention. :)
Ha, no biggie. I understood what you were going for. :)
Thanks for the update! I have been noticing the service slowing down a bit, but I’m sure that will go away after people get done trying it out like you mention.