Technology: July 2004 Archives
There is nothing to celebrate yet, but the presents are already rolling in... In Holland people don't want to arrive to a party with empty hands; the people from here feel better when they know that we have already received our present when they arrive.
Anyway, our gadget collection has increased a lot last week. After buying the Palm Zire 31, we received a Sony DCR-HC40E video camera.
I haven't had the time yet to try out all its features, but we are going to take it with us on our holidays in August. That means that I have two weeks left to read the huge user manual and make a list of all features I would like to try out.
Already for some months I wanted to bey me a palmOne PDA. Last week I finally found what I wanted: the Zire 31 was offered on eBay for a very good price. And now I have it!!!! :-D
I still have to research all the available options, study Graffity 2 and enter data, but I am already convinced about my purchase.
The billboard shown above is part of a recruiting campaing of Google. I am far from smart enough to solve this problem, and it this moment I haven't got any plans to move to the United States. But I am interested in the solution, so for the moment I wait until somebody has solved this problem, and publishes it on internet. After that, I will be able to find it throught Google.
[Update 2004.07.14]: Google already gives some answers. The best discussion about the answer ---7427466391.com--- is found at the FogCreek forum.
DiceLaRed ---TheNetSays--- has a nice tool: the Technology Barometer. They monitor several sites ---mostly weblogs---, and automatically create a graph of the subjects these sites talk about. Really neat. This is the current graph:
I have a confession to make: I use Microsoft Outlook.
Not at home, but in the office. I know many people are stuck with Microsoft Outlook because their company uses an Exchange server, but that is not the case with me; I am free to choose. I use Microsoft Outlook because it allows me to do some things I can't accomplish with other tools, even though there are many things I don't like about Outlook.
The main feature that has become indispensable for my is the fact that I can adjust any view to my needs. I have a huge list of contacts, which I have grouped in two levels (country and company). That way I can quickly find contact information. Unfortunately, when I select a contact from a new message window, all I have is a huge flat list of contacts. Another feature I use frequently us the ability to add fields to items. All my task fields have an additional field called 'project', where I put the name of the project this task belongs to. If I group my tasks by project I have a good overview off all pending items per project.
The features mentioned above are essential for my functioning in the office. Some other features are simply handy to have. For example, conditional formatting allows me to change the view of an item, so that I can see quickly which items have to be processed today or in the coming week, and which items are in progress.
As bloated as Outlook may be (partly fixed by some add-ons), I haven't found a better PIM.
Bloglines has redesigned!
The new user interface looks more beuatiful, and they also added some new functions. You can now blog about the items you read, directly in Bloglines!
I have been using the services of Mobical for some time now, mainly to back up my cell phone's contact list, and have been very satisfied. Once in a while I press the button on my phone, and I know that all my phone numbers are stored safely on a server in Sweden. They also supply a web interface to your data, so you can enter your contacts with more than nine buttons, but I never used that.
Today I visited them again, and noticed that they have created version two of their service. Version two is not backwards compatible, so I had to create a new account. After setting up my account, I uploaded the data from my phone, and looked around at the site. It all looks very professional, and I can imagine that some people use this as their main agenda contact list. It has a nice overview window with the upcoming meetings and tasks, and you can browse your contacts in an intuitive way. Notes have been implemented as post-it notes glued to each page, with the option to drag them with your mouse. Really neat... if you only have one note. I tend to store many small pieces of useful information as notes on my phone --- I definitely have to buy me a Palm --- and the pot-its became very annoying. I tried to close the 'windows', but a pop-up warned me that I was about to delete the note.
For the moment I continue to use Mobical as always: to back-up my data.
