Anagram’s Free iGoogle Gadget’s Ten Minutes September 29, 2008
Posted by Jeremy Wagstaff in calendars, organizers, productivity.2 comments
Anagram is a program for quickly parsing copied text to fit into the correct fields of software like Microsoft Outlook. It does a pretty good job, too; I’ve been using it for years. But recently it launched a free online version of its software via an iGoogle gadget, allowing users to parse text into Gmail or Google Calendar (and Jigsaw, though I’ve not tried it.)
Verdict: Not bad, but needs work.
My ten minutes: You’ll need iGoogle—Google’s version of NetVibes and Pageflakes—and you’ll need to install the gadget. That’s easy enough: Click on the appropriate buttons and you’re good to go:
Now copy an address or an event and paste it into the gadget text box:
You’ll be prompted to allow access to Gmail:
And then, hey presto, the copied text should be in the relevant fields of Gmail:
You won’t see the contact (or event) until you refresh your Google Calendar (or Gmail) page:
This is not bad for free, and useful if you’re a big user of Google products. But it’s too many steps and browser windows for me, especially compared to the Anagram standalone app—one keystroke and you’re pretty much done.
And while Gmail is actually a very useful place to dump contacts, it’s not so good for getting them out—most synchronizing applications don’t take stuff out of Gmail, although they will put stuff in. So it makes more sense, for example, to capture contacts in this way and put them into, say, Outlook, and then synchronize those contacts with Gmail than try to do it the other way around.
Another grumble: It doesn’t seem to like it if you’ve already got a contact of the same name in your address book. An error appears:
And Gmail offers no easy way to merge contacts in your database so no hope there.
That said, kudos to the guys at Anagram for offering something of their otherwise excellent product for free.
Bottom line: useful if you’re a big user of iGoogle, Google Calendar and Gmail. Or, I suppose, Jigsaw. Otherwise, don’t bother.
GooSync’s Ten Minutes June 9, 2007
Posted by Jeremy Wagstaff in calendars, connectivity, web apps.1 comment so far
Intro: “Goosync.com is a web-based service for over-the-air synchronization of Google Calendar with mobile devices, powered by Toffa’s SyncWiseLive synchronization engine.” GooSync will let you synchronize multiple calendars with your smartphone calendar and do it without fuss. Oh, and Toffa is from Wolverhampton, a city I once knew, vaguely.
Exec Sum: Does what it promises, adding great value to Google Calendar and meaning you can ditch Outlook entirely. Implications for the desktop.
My tenminut.es: Check your phone works with their system. Most do. Setting up an account is pretty simple — synchronizing one calendar is free, with some limitations. You also need to give your Google account details, although it’s possible to do it without giving them to GooSync. Once you’ve set up your calendar(s) you need to send an SMS to your phone configuring it for synchronizing. Synchronizing there depends on your model, but should usually be via one applet — over 3G or a WiFi connection.
Verdict: Always been a pain for me, synchronizing calendars. This one works great, and even the payment option for multiple calendars was a breeze, which almost never happens out here. If you use Google Calendar and you’ve got a smartphone, do it.
Score: 8 out of 10
Ten Minutes With Highrise March 20, 2007
Posted by Jeremy Wagstaff in calendars, collaboration, contacts, organizers.add a comment
Intro: Highrise is another product from 37Signals, who make project-organizing, collaborative websites like Basecamp, Campfire and Backpack. Highrise focuses on organizing your contacts in a more imaginative way than an address book: “Highrise is your homebase for everyone that’s important to your business. It puts together all those little points of contact so you can see the bigger picture. It makes one history out of many interactions. Highrise helps you make sense of it all.”
Exec Sum: Quick to figure out, useful if you’re having problems keeping tabs on the people your company is dealing with. Not, though, if you don’t like paying for stuff, or hate entering data.
My tenminut.es: Having used 37Signals stuff before it all looked familiar, perhaps too much so. At first I thought it looked too much like their other services to be, well, different. But it doesn’t take long to figure out the distinguishing marks: Basecamp builds itself around projects and collaboration; Campfire is group-oriented chat. Backpack is a dumping ground for stuff. Highrise is a group database of who your business is dealng with. It’s built around “cases” – closing a sale, getting a jaded and elusive journalist to write about your product, etc.
To make it work, of course, you have to add your data. It’s easy enough, with all the AJAXy niceness you’d expect, but it could be easier. There are separate fields, for example for first and second names. That’s one extra step I don’t want to make if I’m dragging or copying from somewhere else. I could upload a vCard instead, but if I can do that, why not let me import my whole address book, or at least select from a list?
Once you’ve entered a few key contacts you can add notes, tasks and other information about them and about your dealings with them. Great if more than one of you is dealing with them. You can group these notes around “cases” as well as people; so, say, you’re trying to woo a WSJ columnist you can build a case called “WSJ wooing” and have colleagues involved in the wooing share their information (including emails) on one page. I couldn’t test this because the free version doesn’t allow you to add cases (prices go from $12 a month to $150 a month.)
Verdict: As usual a quality product from 37Signals that is intuitive and well-thought out. I’d like to see more generous features in the free version, and less legwork to get it up and keep it running.
Score: 7 out of 10
Update March 23: Impressively, 37Signals have listened to feedback and changed some of their plans. The free option now includes 1 case open at any one time, and increased the number of contacts from 25 to 250. More details here. I’d still like to see easier uploading of contacts, and of course synchronizing with other programs and devices. But this is a good start.
Ten Minutes With Calgoo March 6, 2007
Posted by Jeremy Wagstaff in calendars, organizers, social networking.5 comments
Intro: Calgoo is a service that a free online/offline software that lets you organize, synchronize and edit your calendars, whether they’re in Outlook or Google or iCal. Designed for business and family, it offers a way to coordinate disparate calendars, either those you own or those you want to share with others. In the fast-moving world of shared and public calendars, it offers a way to compose and coordinate schedules when you’re offline in a free standalone program that runs on Linux, Windows and Macs.
Executive summary: Nice idea, come back in six months when it works better.
My Ten Minutes: Things didn’t get off to a good start. Strangely the terms of use and privacy policy page didn’t load:
but that didn’t stop me signing up. (Who reads those things, anyway?) I wasn’t crazy about the problem signing up — it didn’t like my first two choices, but with the second one didn’t really explain why — which shaved another 30 seconds off the clock. The registration email came through nice and quickly though, and it’s then when you have to download — yes there is a Mac and a Linux version.
It was then I had to temporarily stop the clock to wait for the 14.7 MB file to download. A little large for my tastes. Anyway, once downloaded the software installs smoothly and then prompts you for your Calgoo and Google details. Then you’re in. Well, sort of.
The software itself isn’t exactly pretty. In fact, it’s pretty ugly. It’s the bog standard interface, with some stuff on the left (monthly calendar and lists on the left, and an unimaginative array of calendar views on the right (day, week, month, no customized views):
After you’ve synchronized your calendars — meaning Calgoo has downloaded the events to your computer, or imported them from Outlook — you can view and edit them in Calgoo. Supposably. In fact, I couldn’t. I loaded one of my Google calendars and couldn’t see anything. Nothing. It said it was loading, and it said it was it loaded, but not for me. I tried the same thing with my Outlook calendar, which it identified correctly, but then didn’t load anything. As far as Calgoo was concerned, I had a free month. Then it crashed.
Same with two other shared Google calendars I have. Calgoo figured I had the calendars OK, but didn’t load them. Then it crashed again. Finally, when I clicked on a month button for the fifth time, my appointments from some of my calendars suddenly appeared. In a violent shade of maroon and crimson. Or something.
The color scheme was awful. I mean, really awful. Seems the best colors had all been taken by the preloaded public holiday calendars, so all I had left were horror flick tones. The colors were so dark I couldn’t read the black writing on the labels. “I’m afraid I can’t attend any of my appointments this afternoon, because I can’t read them. I know I have some, and I know they’re today, it’s just that my calendar has been designed by someone who is color blind, so I’m going to have stay home.” (Yes, you can change the colors, and no, the feature doesn’t seem to work.)
I’m not saying Calgoo is a bad idea. I’m just not quite sure why one would use it. It really only makes sense if you don’t have something like Microsoft Outlook, or better Personal Information Managers (were they to exist) but who doesn’t have at least one of those? The real hole in the market is a decent tool that synchronizes all your online calendars with your offline calendars, not an interface that makes you think you’re back in the 1990s. (See SyncMyCal for an effort in this direction.) Calgoo’s best feature is being able to add Google calendar items when you’re offline, so that they can then be synchronized when you’re online, but it doesn’t make sense to do this in a single application (that doesn’t boast any features beside the calendar thing.)
Adding calendar items is straightforward enough, and you can add them on the fly from within the calendar itself (avoiding the old school way, with lots of fields to fill in.) I like the way you can quickly copy an item between one calendar and another with a right click. Synchronizing back to your online and Outlook calendars is just a question of clicking a button on the right hand corner of the screen. Still my default Google calendar wasn’t visible.
The interface needs a lot of work. And folk have gotten used to nice looking calendar interfaces, offline and online, so Calgoo needs to get with it and come up with something nicer. If they can they may be onto something.
Marks out of 10: 3
