Oct 13, 2008 | blog
Its no secret that I’ve long been a fan of Gmail. In fact, I moved my main email domain to Google’s hosted service about two years ago. I’ve loved the flexibility, space, search, and tagging that are tightly incorporated into the service.
The only problem was a few niggling odds & ends. Not big issues mind you, but a few things that just make it hard to switch 100% to a web-only email environment. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been about 87% of the way there already. When out & about I use the web interface daily for most email tasks. When I need to find something – use the web interface for searching. I’ve used both POP and IMAP to view mail on my Windows Mobile phone since I signed up – and much more.
The few items have been enough for me to keep an email client installed, and here they are:
- Creating HTML emails
- Custom HTML Signatures
- Contact Synchronization with my phone (the real biggie)
A number of these I’ve gotten around. Early on I found that I can cut & paste an email signature from a web page to a Gmail email when composing. Simple, but not convenient. The number of specialized HTML emails that I send are small and the Gmail editor is up to 99% of the tasks. The contact thing is the hardest to get past though.
I have a Windows Mobile phone, and contacts in Outlook sync right to the phone easier than anything else that exists out there. Period. I’ve had Nokia, Samsungs, Motorolas, and BlackBerrys – and all had sync tools that worked, but none as easy as Outlook to Windows Mobile.
At any rate, the real issue with contacts is getting them synchronized between Outlook and Gmail. It’s extremely tough. With the upcoming release of the T-Mobile G1 “Google phoneâ€, it looks like all that might actually be ending. With built-in Gmail support it also has the ability to sync your phonebook with Gmail contacts. Sweet!
So I’ve been debating whether to throw down on this device or not. It may be the one, the final piece that let’s me go web-only for email management.
Oh, the signature piece – yeah I found this great Firefox plug-in called Blank Canvas Gmail Signatures which allows you to have up to four HTML signatures for each Gmail account. Highly recommended!
So is this the final piece to my text communication puzzle? It very well may be.
And 3G to boot! 😀
Oct 8, 2008 | blog
True Tools. That’s how I think of software & utilities that end up being indispensible. From Microsoft Windows & Office to Google & Expedia, to Gmail to Twitter. These are solutions that simple do what they were supposed to do without any fuss or muss.
We all have our favorite tools that end up work out well for us, some may prefer Linux or Mac over Windows, or Yahoo! over Google, or OpenOffice over Microsoft Office. The point being that once we stumble upon something that simply works and really solves a need we have for a task, we tend to stick with it. There are many good reasons for this, the most important one being that they save time.
That doesn’t exclude us from exploring new options, which is how we find the hidden gems anyway. There’s always going to be a better way, sometimes it takes longer for a significantly improved solution to evolve.
Take office productivity for example. For my purposes, Microsoft Office has no equal. That’s not to say there isn’t competition. Only that for the work I do in the time I have available to do it, there are few viable options. The few options that exist require compromise in one way or another that I simply can’t accommodate at this time.
Social tools are a neat example of continuously experimenting with new ideas as well as technology. For the last couple years, social media types have been watching for that next big, better social network to join. The reality is that there may not be one for some time. Looking at the main options that have any value, it’s clear that Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn are the heavy hitters. Because of the number of people (user base), you can get value out of these networks. It’s likely that you’ll find associates and friends on these networks.
So, while it’s fun to explore and discover new software, new ideas, and new tools, it’s the ones that get the job done with the least amount of effort expended that we stick with.
Photo credit: Jim Frazier
Jul 17, 2008 | blog
The more time I spend working in the Information Technology field, the more I see opportunities. Usually, it’s simply a an old technology being consumed by a newer one – like traditional telephones being taken over by VoIP phones on the corporate desktop. I’ve championed that notion for nearly a decade, and only now is that really happening at an increasing pace. Cool stuff if you get a chance to use it too.
However, that’s not what I see happening right now. It’s much simpler and much more fundamental than another Microsoft Windows server taking on another role from another team or technology. The changes that are afoot are at the root, the foundation of enterprise computing and it has a social media tie-in. I have a message for my peers in the Information Technologies field. Your world is already changing, and if you don’t see what’s happening, you’ll be left behind.
The change that’s taking place renders the corporate desktop as we know it, obsolete. The disparate servers, inefficient. This is something that I’ve been watching for some time, but only recently have seen some indications that convince me that the world has turned the corner.
What are these things that change the entire game? Why, virtualization, thin clients and “web 2.0” software of course. You already are talking about these things. You are probably working with a couple of them if not a combination of all in some way. What’s convinced me that IT ten years from now will be a wildly different landscape than it is today is the fact that virtualization works, thin clients are actually viable now, and “web 2.0” software is past the “wow” stage and into solving business needs. Add the idea that many software solutions don’t care if they run on Windows/Unix/Linux and you now have a broad base of reliable, sustainable open source systems to choose from.
There is also the introduction of Gen Y into the workforce, who bring a different expectation to work. By being more mobile, working remotely via the web, and having social media & networking as second nature, this workforce alone will bring an impressive amount of change.
So what is the bottom line I’m saying for corporate IT? I’m saying that the desktop as we know it is dead. Windows “7” may be the last “legacy” operating system to be deployed. Desktops will disappear completely as well as individual servers. Servers in general will all be virtual machines run from high availability clusters (OS does not matter) in remote data centers. If you don’t have room for one, it’ll probably be cost-effective to simply lease them from companies like Amazon and such.
While Microsoft Office will still be the “gold standard” that we compare things to, it will become irrelevant in the coming years as open source and online versions of this type of software bring more options faster, and simply chip away at the venerable office suite.
Windows itself will still remain – remaining a popular option for the consumer computing device, all of which will end up being the laptop format. Windows, along with OS X and a couple popular Linux distributions will continue to drive these machines, merging more business and entertainment functions together.
The coming change is huge, and with it the opportunities as well. Like the change that started 20 years ago where mainframe and minicomputers were starting to be replaced with microcomputers, our current definitions of enterprise computing will change radically in the next few years. Are you ready? Will you be a part of it? What else do you see?
Jun 20, 2008 | blog
My migration to Firefox 3 has been fairly painless. I specifically put off trying out most all the beta versions until the last release candidate. Since I’d embraced the plug-in feature of Firefox and installed upwards of two dozen of these spiffy enhancements to a great browser I knew a few (or many) would not be updated right away.
And I was right, many plug-ins were not updated when I installed FF3 rc3, and I had to do without a lot of functionality. The only thing that allowed me to ride it out from the release candidate to shipping code was the fact that Foxmarks was updated to work with FF3 – it’s my absolutely most needed plug-in.
But in the three weeks I’ve been running the latest versions of Firefox 3, I’ve seen updates to plug-ins on an almost daily basis! out of 21 plug-ins, I’ve only 4 that aren’t yet updated: Blog This in Windows Live Writer, coComment!, ColorZilla, and Thinger.
UPDATE: I just found the latest ColorZilla beta here that works with Firefox 3! In addition, I removed the coComment! plug-in as I see that the folks at coComment themselves will be getting their plug-in updated shortly. I’ve kind of given up waiting for any update to the Blog This in Windows Live Writer plug-in. That leaves Thinger, which I really do hope gets updated, because I really need a second (third?) bookmark toolbar.
Jun 18, 2008 | blog
Yep, upgraded to the final version yesterday. Pretty happy that I did. Performance is noticeably improved, memory usage improved, and several dozen plugins where upgraded yesterday in sync with the new release.
You can find the download for Firefox 3 here. Good stuff!
