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.
Google Talk’s Ten Minutes January 6, 2008
Posted by Jeremy Wagstaff in chat, email, organizers.2 comments
One of the most undersung corners of the Google empire, in my view, is Google Talk, the search giant’s chat application.
For one thing, it’s so uncluttered it makes every other chat application look like the aftermath of Christmas dinner. It’s smooth, fast and the sound quality is good. But what I think it’s best for are the features that aren’t really features. (Most of these won’t be useful if you don’t use Gmail.)
Google Talk as a Contact Database
For example, searching for a contact’s email address is faster in GTalk than other applications I can find. Outlook is so slow it’s horrible and Google Desktop won’t really help you since the email address you’re looking for, if it appears at all, will be via an email address or something, even if you’ve set Google Desktop to index your contacts:
Google Talk does this much better. So long as you’ve selected the Add people I communicate with often to my Friends List (Settings/General)
GoogleTalk will add these names to its list, so that when you start typing their name in the search line their names will appear below, even if they’re not a Google Talk user:
Move your mouse over one of the entries and their contact details will appear:
Clicking on the email address (in blue) will either create a new message in Gmail or a new message in your default email client, depending on whether you’ve selected Open Gmail when I click on email links or not in your Settings:
Now you have a quick way of scouring your contact book and creating emails. It’s possibly only marginally quicker than clicking on Compose Mail in Gmail, but I find Google Talk so fast it works well for me.
I feel Google could go further with this. What I’d love is if it could include in its search not just names but towns and other fields stored in your Gmail contact database. If I could quickly trawl through all my Gmail contacts for specific interests (who should I chat to about satellites and medical emergencies, for example) Google Talk would become a sort of first stop for organising my otherwise untamable contact list. (At the moment the best solution for this is my old favorite, PersonalBrain, which I’ve written about before.)
Still, even now, it’s an underused gem that I recommend you giving a shot if you’re a Gmail user.
Some other quick tips:
You can use Google Talk to update your Jaiku status messages (I can’t actually remember how to do this, but will try to find out). You can translate phrases via Google Talk (more here on that).
It’s not perfect, by any means.
Some gripes:
If you have more than a few contacts they slip off the bottom of the screen and there’s no way to prioritise them, or organize them into groups. (Removing the pictures is the best way to reduce the footprint of each contact. So if your list looks like this:
click on the View button at the bottom and deselect Show pictures
So your contacts will take up only one line (mostly; those who have set their presence will remain on two lines, but will still take up less screen space):
Another gripe: the built in Chat within Gmail seems to have features that aren’t replicated in Google Talk. Allowing you to include your AIM contacts inside Chat is one (unless I’m much mistaken this won’t work in Google Talk). The other is that when you add extra detail to your address book in Gmail — adding a photo, say — this information appears nicely inside the Gmail Chat:
but not in Google Talk:
I’d like to see Google improve on this.
You can’t select text within a Google Talk chat (you need to select it from the history of the chat.)
There’s no Google Talk client available for Mac or Linux, though you can load a “gadget” version that appears as a popup within your browser which does nearly all the things I’ve mentioned):
The other problem is that not many of my friends are actually on there. They prefer Skype, as, usually, do I. But if you’re a heavy Gmail user it may make sense to try to persuade them to switch.
For more information on Google Talk, check out the official blog, and an unofficial one called Customize Talk. Oh and if you’ve got suggestions for how to improve Google Talk, add ‘em here.
Todoist’s Ten Minutes June 13, 2007
Posted by Jeremy Wagstaff in organizers, productivity, task manager, web apps.2 comments
Intro: Todoist is a bare bones, but surprisingly sophisticated, to do list that allows you to not only quick add and organize tasks but create tasks directly from Gmail. The creation of Denmark-based student Amir Salihefendic.
Exec Sum: If you use Gmail and you find there’s a gap between receiving an email and turning it into a task that gets recorded somewhere, this solves that problem. Well. It does other stuff too.
My tenminut.es: Signing up is straightforward. Like a lot of these things it works around projects, which can be added simply — indeed most of the tasks are mercifully free of pointless steps (a hallmark of any Web 2.0 app worth its salt.)
Adding the Gmail functionality is relatively easy (especially if you’re a Firefox user: just install the plugin). Click on reply and you’ll see an extra option/button in the top layer of the edit window:
Select a project, add a name to the task, and assign a day (if you want), and the the task will appear in the corresponding project, with a Gmail icon and a link to the original email:
This isn’t the only feature of Todoist, but it was all I could explore in ten minutes, and was enough to reveal its value. Other features worth checking out are a Dashboard widget for Macs, widgets for iGoogle and Netvibes, accessibility from a mobile phone, and other stuff.
Verdict: Nicely executed. If you use Gmail, check it out.
Score: 8 out of 10
Similar services: Ta-da Lists Vitalist, Remember the Milk, stikkit, gubb
Thanks to the excellent Read/Write Web for pointing me to this.
BlueOrganizer’s Ten Minutes May 27, 2007
Posted by Jeremy Wagstaff in bookmarks, browsing, organizers.add a comment
Intro: BlueOrganizer is a browser-based tool for intelligently adding information to what you’re looking at in your web-page. Instead of this information being added “bottom up” by other users via services like del.icio.us, it’s added top down, via BlueOrganizer’s parsers, services and algorithms. The result: contextual links on the fly.
How the company sees it: “BlueOrganizer is the new smart-browsing technology for Firefox. It automatically recognizes things like books, wine, travel destinations and offers contextual shortcuts between your favorite sites.”
Exec Sum: Useful but confusing tool for adding contextual information to your browsing. Only for geeks and people who buy a lot of stuff online.
My tenminut.es: Installation was pretty straightforward, but after that things were less clear. BlueOrganizer is at its most basic a button on your browser toolbar that changes color when you visit a website it has information on. Even if it doesn’t you can still access further links by either right-clicking on the page or the pull-down menu next to your address bar:
Visit a web page like Amazon, or anything that sells stuff like wine, music, books, videos etc, and you should find links to relevant sites, along with pre-prepared searches on del.icio.us, Google etc. Select a word, right click on it and the BlueOrganizer contextual menu will offer up a smorgasbord of relevant searches. (There are other features that BlueOrganizer offers but that would have taken me way beyond the ten minutes to figure out.)
Gripes: It felt slow and sluggish on my computer. Thumbnails of websites were slow to generate (they’re still generating.) And the way BlueOrganizer adds itself at the top of my pop-up menu meant I found myself having to wait until its submenu had loaded before I could do anything:
More importantly, I found myself not really getting it. I had to go some way beyond my ten minutes to figure out what it was about; I was surprised it was less intuitive and, frankly, mind-blowing, than I expected, given I’m an admirer of Alex Iskold’s ideas. The help pages weren’t particularly helpful either: I quickly found myself on a “page not found.” Even the example given in the tutorial, the Amazon page on the Nintendo Wii, didn’t always do as advertised, instead throwing up an empty submenu.
Verdict: Nice idea, and popular among the Web 2.0 crowd for bringing the Semantic Web a step closer. Needs a bit of work both on the usability and on the range of stuff it has information on and, ironically, more contextual help to bring it out of the techie ghetto. BlueOrganizer, for all the vision of its creator and its promise, needs to find a way of conveying its usefulnes to ordinary Joes in less time.
Score: 5 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
