Call me crazy, but I love to see what folks have in their gear bags. Personal computing is exactly that, personal. So I find gear bags like snowflakes: No two are alike. We all have differing needs in our travels, so that’s how it should be, right? After seeing Simon and others here at WWD spill the contents of their bags, I knew I had to jump in and share mine as well.
Unlike most people, my kit tends to change frequently. I vary the contents of my bag based on my needs, and my gear has evolved as I’ve ridden the trend from notebooks to UMPCs to netbooks and back again. Let me give you a glimpse as to what I mean, as my bag has evolved many times in the past few years.
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As a full-time technology writer, I repeatedly get the same question: “what’s the most empowering technology you use for your job?” Each and every time I respond the same way. It’s not a particular computer brand, nor is it a specific browser or operating system. For me, it’s a technology I’ve used since 2004: 3G wireless broadband.
I can work on practically any computer and of course, I prefer some browsers, operating environments and applications over others. However the ability to work nearly anywhere thanks to today’s 3G wireless broadband is as much of an enabler today as it was for me in 2004. Along the way these past five years, I’ve learned a few things that might be useful to you.
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There’s not much in a web worker’s life that beats a cheap or free phone service. Perhaps a supporting role in one of David Pogue’s next iPhone video musicals might, but odds are slim. Especially for me and my voice. Or maybe it’s because I have a face for podcasting, I don’t know. I do know however, that the iPhone Mr. Pogue sang about many moons ago can be a powerful VoIP tool if you have the right applications installed. Here’s a quick look, complete with links to the iTunes App Store, at four inexpensive or downright free solutions that are worthy productivity contenders.
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Recently, I installed Mac OS X Leopard on my MSI Wind netbook to get a feel for a 10-inch Apple notebook. The device came with Windows XP pre-installed and I have it running Vista for the moment. Yes, I’m generally OS-agnostic. One of the challenges I had to address with a small display using only 1024×600 resolution was screen real estate, so I did something I don’t often do: I set the Mac OS X Dock to auto-hide. It provided me more room for my tasks but it also took away one of my most important bits of visual information: the unread count from my two Gmail Inboxes in Mail.
I’m generally not a huge fan of plug-ins due to performance challenges, but I’m making an exception for Mail Unread Menu. This 2.2MB free application for Mac OS X 10.4 or better does one thing, but does it well. It places a configurable icon in the Mac menu bar that shows the total number of unread e-mails waiting for me. You can pick and choose which mailboxes it monitors, modify the menu bar icon and even show the subject lines of unread e-mails to give you a preview before moving your attention to the Mail application.
I also use Growl for e-mail notifications, but that’s more of a real-time information updater. Sometimes, I don’t want to see every single e-mail coming in and just want to check the count every so often. With Mail Unread Menu, I can ignore the Growl and the Dock on my smaller-screened device but still keep my finger on the pulse of my information lifeblood. Now if I could just convince Apple to make a netbook similar in size to my MSI Wind, I wouldn’t have to cobble together my own.
Gmail, a staple of our work environment, becomes a little more like “big-boy” IMAP courtesy of Google Labs. Hit the Labs button in your Gmail account and you’ll see a new “Advanced IMAP Controls” function. Enable it and you can begin to take advantage of the following new features:
- Auto-Expunge: it sounds like a dirty word, but expunging is a good thing for data that’s no longer needed. Up to now, Gmail would simply mark items for deletion in clients and not immediately delete them. Enabling the Auto-Expunge feature kicks those deleted messages to the curb and gets them out of your e-mail system.
- Delete Forever: one the benefits of Gmail is that like an elephant, it never forgets. All of your mail is archived in the Gmail / All Mail label or folder unless you manually clean it out. This often results in wasted space, messages in multiple locations and more bandwidth required for mail synching. You can now expunge mail forever by setting Gmail to simply move it to Trash upon deletion.
- Selective Syncing: you can now pick and choose which labels or folders you want synchronized between Gmail and your web or desktop client. This comes in handy for archived folders that don’t change much. For example, I still want my “CES 2008″ folder data, but I don’t need to see it every waking minute of the day. I’ve disabled that one for now because I’ve got an active “CES 2009″ folder for planning purposes.
Each of these features can be useful, but for me the ability to say good-bye to the All Mail label usage is key. I often work remotely over wireless broadband connections where there’s a 5GB monthly data cap and 1.5-hours of work already uses near 45MB. Why should I be synching the near 53,000 e-mails in my All Mail folder when I’m already managing the ones I need with custom labels?
Love it or hate it, iCal comes with the Mac OS X operating system, so I’m always on the lookout for how to use it better.
Once Google added synchronization support for iCal back in July, I did integrate the basic scheduler into my web work, but I always found it cumbersome to add events quickly. For a while, I actually found it easier to just create events in my Google Calendar since I already had my browser open. Then I stumbled onto FlexCal, a freeware utility that’s not glitzy, but does the trick.
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I hate carrying business cards. There, I said it. While so much of my work-time is spent on-line or at various Wi-Fi shops with coffee coffee shops with Wi-Fi, carrying business cards is a necessary evil in our world. Seems like each time I don’t have any is the time I need to have them, so I don’t leave home with out a half-dozen or so.
Earlier this month at the Mobilize conference, I must have passed out a hundred cards; doing so reduced my weight by about 3 percent because I have the heavy stock card type. Towards the end of the event however, I witnessed “business card nirvana”. Andy Abramson and I were chatting about mobile technologies over drinks when all of sudden he whips out his BlackBerry to send a text message.
Note: we don’t recommend nor condone drinking and texting here at WWD.
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Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
