Recently in Software Category

Pursuant to my talk of having my very own cloud, I have been investigating ways to sync my google calendars with my mobile phone. As I use Nokia phones, I need a solution that runs on Symbian. The device I use now is S60v3. I am wide open to sugestions.

For now, I have found GooSync. GooSync works like SpanningSync - it depends on a third-party server. I don't particularly like that model and will keep right on looking. The important thing is that there are options.

I've spoken about my personal cloud - my corner of the internet, reachable and usable from anywhere at any time. I've thought on it long and hard, and I think it's the right way to go. I should not be sitting at my office thinking to myself, "Gosh, I wish I had my personal laptop with me so I could look at this bookmark I have instead of having to track it down all over again."

And should it really be this hard to keep my calendar up to date? Remembering everything until I get home and updating things there and hoping not to double book myself, which is an inevitability for me.

And then there are tags - this wonderful new way of making my cloud searchable. It's the way of the future and you'll start seeing more of that here, too. Sure, they apply to bookmarks, but why not everything else? Why not email?

Google has really embraced a lot of this and has created a great set of tools accordingly. But even these tools have their failings and drawbacks.

First question. Is it better to stick with a unified solution, such as Google, rather than picking and choosing tools that might be a better fit but require more work to integrate? That's a hard question for me to answer right now.

Second question. Can device independence negatively impact the user experience? My answer is yes. By now anyone who knows me knows I am a happy Mac user and I love the core set of utilities provided. Unlike many of my friends, I do use Apple's Mail.app for my email rather than Thunderbird. I do use iCal and Address Book. I do not use Safari because I do not like its rendering engine, but that's another post. The point here is that I enjoy using client-side tools, and I don't feel good about abandoning that. I prefer to maintain local copies of my data and, when possible, manipulating that data locally when possible.

What happens if a server is down for maintenance, or for some outage. What happens if my internet connection is down. What happens if Google experiences data loss. We can reduce this to one big question - what happens when I give up control.

So I appeal to anyone who has read this far along. Have you chosen to trust Google with your personal data? What were your other choices, and how did you come to terms with such a massive change?

I've been writing a bit about Google's eMail and calendar solutions lately, and in my last post I mentioned that Gmail doesn't provide IMAP access. I think of this as a down side to Gmail and a black mark against it as I work to decide whether or not I want to use this as my primary source of eMail. I decided to ponder the reasons why a bit and eventually the answer seemed to present itself.

In my last post, I also mentioned that Gmail uses labels rather than folders. Google doesn't want an IMAP user creating a folder that their webmail application doesn't support.

I think the end of the story is that Google needs to release an API so that users can write a plugin for their favorite email client to allow access. Only time will tell whether or not they do it.

In the mean time, my decision has not yet been made.

I spoke earlier about the .Mac versus Google debate. In the end, I suspect that .Mac will win out six months down the road. Today, however, Google is winning out because it's free and provides the features I'd actually use. Tonight I'm looking at Gmail. I'll leave gCal for another day.

Gmail is Google's answer to email services. Google gives its members two gigabytes of storage - ample space for nearly any user. Its webmail software is excellent, providing many features one would find in a desktop-based application including threading and a separated spam folder.

But what if you, like me, prefer the use of a desktop mail client when it's readily available? Don't despair. Gmail happily provides users with POP3 access. It's not IMAP, and in their FAQ the answer to the question of whether or not IMAP is supported is a very gentle 'no.' I suspect we may see that support some day, though. Not today. In the mean time, Gmail does allow the user to toggle a setting leaving mail retrieved via POP3 in the webmail inbox. Handily, one does not have to leave messages on the server from their desktop client. While I have not yet tested my suspicion, I'll bet users still need to toggle this in their clients to use multiple clients.

Finally a word on labels. Gmail uses labels rather than folders to sort email, leaving everything in the inbox. This is a similar tactic to Mail.app's suggestions when they rolled out Smart Folders. Unfortunately, Gmail doesn't embed any headers in labeled mail like Mail Tags does so your tags don't get transferred down to your Desktop Client. That's a bit of a shame, but all in all no big deal.

I can't think of much else to say about Gmail, so I'll stop here.

The .Mac versus Google argument has gone back and forth ever since Google launched Gmail. With gCal, many agree that Google has beaten out .Mac. The only thing that gets me is the lack of two-way calendar syncing. I'd love to see Google implement CalDav when iCal does. That'd sell me in about half a second.

I haven't tested much with this latest release of Mozilla's Firefox for the mac, but I have seen one of my biggest complaints addressed. Command-M no longer opens a mail window, it now minimizes the window like all of the other OS X applications. Thank the maker!

There is a plethora, a regular myriad, of articles out there about the preview of Apple's latest edition of Mac OS X, dubbed Tiger, coming out. Okay, I admit it; I just wanted to say plethora and myriad. Truth be told, excited as I am about Tiger I still find it lacking some features I want, and quite frankly it'll take some getting used to. So if you want to read more about Tiger, I suggest you look here. That article's got plenty.

In the mean time, I am going to turn my focus to Safari. It seems that in this new version of Mac OS X will be a new version of Safari, version 2.0. And in this version will be RSS support. Yeah, you heard me. RSS support. And I'll tell you something else, when Safari provides RSS support I can only think of two aggregators that will survive it: Shrook and NetNewsWire.

I use NetNewsWire Lite myself, and would love to try Shrook out because it's just pretty and looks great. I haven't tried it because I don't want to pay for it and I'm not sure how their version of shareware works. We all know that shareware is a broad term which can mean anything from "free but please register it" to "crippled version that will only work for five days and then you're done." I may give it a try later on today, just to see, but I don't want to get into that. I think Shrook's best shot at survival is going to be releasing a Lite version as well as their fully functional one.

I would move to agree with Brent, author of NetNewsWire, when he said, "It also may mean that Apple will evangelize RSS to publications that haven’t yet adopted it. Which is great: it’s not something we have much time for, and when CNN hears from Apple it carries a bit more weight than when they hear from Ranchero Software." His blog can be found here. My apologies for not providing a permalink to this statement, but he does not appear to provide them himself. The article I speak of was posted at 3:18pm on June 28, 2004.

Of course, Brent also points out that, according to the demo, Safari's RSS reader will not be fully featured. And why should it? To be honest with you, I don't want it in Safari at all. Apple has been very good, thus far, at creating one application to do one thing. iCal for calendars, Mail.app for eMail, AddressBook for vCards. Forget about stuff like Outlook or Entourage. But now they're combining in Safari. I worry about what this signifies. I'd rather see Apple release a separate application. I think that's my final opinion on it, what it all boils down to. I love that Apple is putting their support behind Aggregators, and am thrilled that it may put pressure on folks like CNN to start syndicating, but I worry about the direction it takes Apple software as a whole. I also know that CNN will try to shove ads into their RSS feed if they create one; that's the reason they don't have one as it is -- so that they can serve us with ads when we go through the page.

Mozilla has released version 0.9 of their popular Firefox browser. This browser seems to have made a good many upgrades and changes. One of them in the Mac platform is that data is no longer stored in ~/Library/Phoenix/. You can now find it in ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/. This is important to note for all those who backup their bookmarks file and the like.

Mac OS X 10.3.4 (Panther) has been released! Version Tracker has a great summary of changes here. Thus far it seems to be running smoothly and, although none of the changes particularly impact me, I'm thrilled to see them none the less. Every one of them is a genuine improvement. Good to see.

So all of you Apple users, go run Software Update.

PulpFiction is a new RSS reader for Mac OS X. While I'd like to try it and then write a review for you, I'd rather point you at this review because I don't think I can do much better. I'm definitely going to try it out. The interface is beautifully clean, and I really like it very much. At this point in time, I use NetNewsWire Lite which I like very much. Still, this looks like it could well be better, and if that's the case, I want to use it!