A Gamer’s Manifesto

This is the greatest piece of writing relating to video games EVER.

May 26, 2005 | Filed Under General |  

How To Start Using BitTorrent

Common Bits has a great introduction on how to start using BitTorrent. I’m going to start pointing people to this post when they ask me what this “BitTorrent thing is all about”.

May 25, 2005 | Filed Under General |  

Get ClearContext - For Free!

Now this is brilliant. ClearContext, The Outlook Add-In that I’ve written about previously (here, here and here) has a new program. If you write about ClearContext in a public forum of some kind (i.e. a blog), you are eligible for a free license. To learn more about it, view the announcement here.

This is a great plan. As they state in the announcement, getting the word out is the biggest problem for a new product. Marketing is expensive, and these days word of mouth carries far more weight than advertising does. But there’s another component as well; to give away software licenses means to still offer support services to these “customers”, even though they didn’t have to pay for the product. This could be very expensive, unless the product you’re selling is rock-solid. It takes some serious guts to start giving away a product like this - especially an Outlook add-in - for free. Kudos to the ClearContext team. It really excites me that I can recommend an email overload solution, and know that if people are truly interested, there is a way they can get a license without having to pay. Very cool.

May 20, 2005 | Filed Under General |  

Outlook Woes - What To Do?

Well, I’ve decided to give ClearContext another go, after being reminded about it when Scoble mentioned he might give it a try. Robert, I recommend you do; ClearContext is a quality product, as I previously wrote about here.

For the past three weeks I’ve been using NEOPro, and I really like it. It has some killer features, and I truly hope the Outlook team takes a long hard look at what NEOPro does really well that Outlook does not do well. Here are the highlights, in my opinion:

  • Hotkeys that make sense - the space bar marks a message as read; the backspace key does the equivalent of automatically filing the message. Neat; efficient.
  • Very smart automatic search folders - instead of having to file a message in one folder, messages are tagged with certain properties. So if I want to see all messages to and from my wife, I click on the Correspondents tab and choose her name from the list. And there’s a search field at the top of the list that searches as you type.
  • Powerful filter bar - show only folders with unread messages, show only unread messages, show only messages going out or in, show only messages that have you in the To: line alone, etc. Quickly see your messages in many ways.
  • Built-in searching - I still think X1 / Yahoo Desktop Search and even Copernic do better email searching overall, but there’s one feature in NEOPro that I would call a KILLER feature: right click and choose Search For Conversation. This jumps you to the Search tab with the subject of the current message as the search criteria, and the entire thread comes up instantly. Outlook’s built-in ability to search for messages in a thread is as pathetic as the infamous XP search. The little dog is there to represent how dog-slow it is.

    • This next list is a short one, but they’re ultimately important items… What I don’t like (why I’m not continuing to use NEOPro):

  • Runs in a separate window from Outlook - I suppose this is a pro and a con. Realistically, it needs it’s own window because Outlook’s UI would just get in the way of all of the useful functions provided by NEOPro. The toolbars are more useful and infinitely more intuitive than Outlook. But the problem lies in the fact that although NEOPro is a wonderful email tool, Outlook is a comprehensive Personal Information Management tool. And although NEOPro is linked tightly with Outlook (there are multiple ways to jump to Outlook when necessary), it really creates a disconnect between email and other information such as tasks or appointments. I can probably live with this due to all that NEOPro offers with respect to managing my mail, but…
  • Price is the other issue. - I just can’t justify $69.95 USD for what amounts to a replacement for the Mail screens in Outlook. To be fair, there is a more reasonable $39.95 USD non-Pro offering, but it doesn’t contain the filter toolbar, or the ability to search for a conversation, making that option worthless in my opinion.

    • So, as I said above, I’ve decided to give ClearContext another go. I own a license for it (from a promotion they were doing), and it offers some of the features I like. For example, although I found it possible to not worry about filing messages by project using NEOPro, ClearContext allows me to use a single keystroke to file messages in the appropriate folder for their project. One-click filing is crucial for me.

    ClearContext also does some really nice manipulations to the way your messages are displayed in your inbox, taking a bunch of different criteria and deciding on a priority level for each message. Personally I prefer to sort by date, but allow ClearContext to colour my messages based on their priority. The best feature of ClearContext, for my money, is that it groups messages in the same message thread together in your inbox. Although I’m a proponent of the “Getting to Zero” ideal in the Getting Things Done methodology, there are times when multiple messages in the same thread start to pile up in my inbox. ClearContext makes it a simple matter for me to see them all for what they are, and it even has a button to file all messages in a thread, or even all messages for a given topic (for me that means project) with a single click. Nice!

    One last thing: how am I going to handle the lack of the ability to search for a conversation? I believe the ultimate solution will be a combination of Yahoo Desktop Search and ActiveWords. I haven’t started to try to build this yet, but I’m going to (try to) build an ActiveWord that will take my text selection (which will be the subject of the email, without any “RE:” or “FW:”, and do an email subject search for that string in Yahoo Desktop Search. Definitely not as elegant, but in the end a fully functional solution. Really, I don’t understand why X1 / Yahoo don’t already have a button that will do just that.

    With that, I’m done with my Outlook meddling for now.

    I hope.

    May 19, 2005 | Filed Under Email | 4 Comments 

    FeedDemon to be Bought by NewsGator

    This nearly made me fall out of my chair. Not for any real reason; it’s not a bad thing at all. In fact, it’s probably quite good. I’m hoping the FeedDemon gets the full-synchronization features that NewsGator 2.0 is touted to have. I’ve been accepted as a NewsGator 2.0 beta user, so depending on the requirements (e.g. NDA) I’ll post my thoughts on it.

    May 17, 2005 | Filed Under General |  

    Next Page →