The new version, released to coincide with Macworld earlier this month, includes a number of new features that really up the ante in terms of Mac integration. It’s a significant enough release that I’m giving Postbox another go as my primary email client, since I still have an emotionally draining relationship with Apple Mail and would love to kick that habit once and for all.

Address Book

Maybe most useful among the new features, at least for those coming over from Mail, and most definitely for MobileMe subscribers, is the new Address Book app integration. By default, the new 1.1.1 release of Postbox for Mac will use your Address Book contacts instead of creating its own database. You can opt to turn this feature off if for some reason you’d rather keep things separate. Any new contacts you create from within Postbox will also create new Address Book cards for those individuals, so it works both ways.

Spotlight Search

Also important for people making the jump from Mail is complete Spotlight access to all of your Postbox-stored mail. Message bodies, header info and attachment names will all now show up as hits when searching using Spotlight (as long as it’s enabled in Postbox. You have to turn this feature on, since it’s off by default). Spotlight integration is also a two-way street, since you can now right-click on any highlighted word in any email and select “Search in Spotlight” from the contextual menu to run a search.

iCal

iCal integration is now a two-way street in this latest release, too. Meeting notifications will automatically be sent in the background, and choosing “Mail Event” from the right-click menu in iCal should open a new Postbox message, so long as you’ve set the app as your default email client. Mail.app may still open too, but if this happens, Postbox has a quick fix to ensure things work properly the next time:

• Within the Finder, right-click on the iCal icon and then select Show Package Contents.
• Navigate to the “Contents” folder, then the “Resources” folder. Right-click on the folder called “Scripts” and select “Get Info.”
• Expand the “Sharing & Permissions” box and click the Lock icon in the lower right-hand corner to unlock this setting. Change any permissions that are listed as “Read Only” to “Read & Write.”
• Restart Postbox.

iPhoto

Something I always really liked about Postbox was its easy to use, built-in content filters that would allow you to see all your images, links and attachments at a glance with a single mouse click. The Postbox developerss have taken that functionality a step further with this new version, allowing you to export any image attachments in your mailbox directly to iPhoto. You’ll need to go through the somewhat lengthy process of completely indexing your inbox before you can do this, but it’s a really nice little feature that’s well worth the wait, especially if you have a lot of shutter-happy relatives and friends, as I do.

Many Other Improvements

There’s lots of little additions and under the hood improvements in version 1.1.1 of Postbox, too. One of the better ones is the ability to drag any icon to the Postbox icon in the dock and have it automatically create a new email with that file as an attachment. It’s a small thing, but it’s also indicative of the kinds of refinements put into this version aimed at making it more than a match for its native Apple competitor, and for other popular options like Mozilla Thunderbird, too. Postbox is free to try for 30 days, so give it a shot, especially if you’re a Mac user who’s had enough of Mail.

Are you a Postbox user? What do you think of the new version?

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Email: The Reports of My Death are Greatly Exaggerated

I want to find the perfect flash drive like baseball pitchers want a perfect game. The perfect gadget is elusive and amazingly rare, and I’ve often come tantalizing close to finding it without actually getting there. I think I’ve found the perfect drive now, but I’ve thought that in the past, too. So, here’s a run down of where I’ve come from, and where I’m at now, and why I think I’ve come as close to perfection as possible.

Monarchs of Old

Two flash drives come to mind when I think back on the long parade of USB keys that have come and gone over the course of my life as a gadget-addicted web worker. Both shared some similarities, but I liked them more for their differences than for what they had in common.

Lexar FireFly

The FireFly represents the first time I paid attention to the case design of a flash drive. Before this, it didn’t matter what it looked like, and to my mind, none really looked that good anyway. It didn’t matter that there were complaints about the speed of the drive, and even some murmurs about high failure rates. It felt solid, had a blue glow, and genuinely resembled its namesake.

When I started using a FireFly, a 512MB capacity drive was all that I really needed. I still have the neon green one that I had back then, and it still works, though I don’t use it any more because all of my documents are now online, and at that capacity there’s very little else I can carry on it. They’re still available from Lexar, but the capacities don’t seem to be increasing and keeping track of the cap started to become a nuisance, so I moved on.

SanDisk MicroCruzer

To escape the tyranny of caps, I moved on to the MicroCruzer, which again boasts a pretty attractive form factor, but with a retractable USB connector to eliminate the need for protective covers. A reassuring orange glow lets you know it’s working, and you get the reassurance of using a SanDisk flash product, a company I’ve found to be tremendously reliable. Many of my MicroCruzers are still in service.

But not all. The retraction trick may prevent the connector from getting damaged and reduce the need for a cap, but with lots of repeated use it seems to wear down, and now some won’t catch when extended, making it much harder to connect them to the computer. And it shares the same small but chunky design with the FireFly, which means they still feel like a bulky imposition in my pants pockets.

Current Ruler

LaCie CooKey/IamaKey/WhizKey

The flash drive so nice they made it thrice. LaCie originally released the IamaKey model of this drive, which I bought as soon as I became aware that it existed. It’s a USB key meant to resemble an actual key, thanks to a housing designed by 5.5 Designers for the Mac-friendly accessory maker. When that model took off, LaCie introduced two further designs that essentially replicated the form factor.

Which is a good thing, because it’s actually perfect, insofar as my current flash memory needs go. The keys come in a range of capacities, from 8GB to 32GB, and they sport a rugged metal design. They’re as thin as house keys, so they fit can on your key ring. The connector is one-sided (doesn’t have the traditional box of a male USB connector, only the business side with the contacts), which allows for the thinness of design.

A little plastic cover is provided for those who are paranoid about damaging the contacts, but as someone who promptly lost that cover on his first key, let me tell you that it isn’t at all necessary. The construction of the contacts is such that they seem impervious, even when kept with the rest of your keys in a pocket filled with change and other bric-a-brac. They’re easily portable, functional, unobtrusive and stylish. Plus clients and people I meet in the course of doing business almost always fall in love with them, so they help with networking and they make great corporate gifts, too.

Have you found the perfect flash drive?

Related GigaOM Pro Research:

• “Do Consumers Care Where Their Content Is Stored?“
• “Bringing Moore’s Law to the Data Storage Market“

Luckily, Facebook recently opened up its API to allow third-party developers more access to core features, which gives them a chance to rework the web app and deliver something a little easier on the eyes and potentially less frustrating. That’s exactly what Microsoft’s done with its new Silverlight 4 Beta Client for Facebook, available for Windows and Mac. It’s also demonstrated that Microsoft can sometimes make something I actually like.

As you can see from the screenshots below, the Silverlight Facebook client does something visually striking with the content it pulls from Facebook itself. It uses a fairly sparse dark theme with big, easy-to-read type that borrows just enough from the standard web-based Facebook layout that you won’t find yourself hunting for commands and interface elements.

Your main view shows your news feed (the live feed, not the “News Feed,” which is completely useless and should not be the default for any reason). You can filter your news feed results using the same filters you’d find on Facebook.com, which appear down the left-hand side. Commenting and “liking” is enabled in the news feed, and you can post status updates by clicking the “what’s on your mind?” link at the top. Clickable selections from your friends’ photo updates appear slightly blurred on the right-hand side, providing even more functionality.You can also switch to either “grid” or “photos feed” modes. Grid displays your news feed in a columnar view, so that you can see more at once. Photos feed brings the partially-obscured photos backdrop to the fore and displays a mosaic of your friends’ recently uploaded images. It’s quite nice looking, and it provides a way of looking through your contacts’ images that’s far more appealing than Facebook’s standard method.

The photo browsing in general is very cool, and it feels much better checking out albums than it does on the web. The only downside I’ve found is that some albums, for whatever reason, aren’t browsable in the app, because of some setting the uploader has used in creating them.

What really puts this client over the top, in my opinion, is that it gives you access to both Events and your messages. Thanks to the inclusion of both of those features, I no longer have to visit the web-based Facebook at all. You won’t be able to use Facebook chat through the Silverlight app, but there are other solutions for that, too, including some web-based clients and multi-client apps like Beejive for the iPhone (which is what I use).

Other limitations include some control issues –you have to click on a column’s arrows to scroll, instead of using a mouse wheel, for example. This may be a limitation of Silverlight itself, or it could just be because the client is still in an early beta stage at this point, but it does get a bit annoying. You also can’t hide things you don’t want to see without visiting the Facebook web site, and some types of links will take you back to the web, though I didn’t encounter this very often because those are mostly Facebook app links, which I don’t generally use anyway. There are also some obvious bugs, but again, this is an early beta.

By far the most useful aspect of the Silverlight Facebook client is how it treats Facebook more like a CRM system and less like something to use for idle distraction. For example, whenever you view messages between yourself and someone else, it populates the right-hand side of the app with the latest updates, links and photos posted by that person. That way you can refer directly to that contact’s recent activity. It isn’t providing you with any information you can’t get on the web site, but it is combining and presenting it in much more useful ways.

It’s a solid Facebook client, and it makes the service feel much more professional. If you use Facebook during the course of your work, and you aren’t happy with how it works on the web, the Silverlight Client is definitely worth checking out.

Post your thoughts on the Silverlight 4 Beta Client for Facebook below.

Dictionary.com does the job in a very straightforward way, as does using a “define: term” search in Google, but I always felt something was missing, and it wasn’t clear what that was until I recently stumbled upon Wordnik. With the simple but boastful tagline “All the words” I was understandably expecting a lot from the new dictionary web application. What more could I really expect from a dictionary, though, and what more could Wordnik possibly deliver?

A Dictionary With Social Features

You don’t have to, but with Wordnik, the option is there to sign up and become a registered member. Doing so allows you access to additional features, ones that resemble the features of social networking sites. You can create and curate word lists, comment on definitions, tag words with relevant terms, record your own pronunciations and track your search history. Also, you can use Facebook Connect to sign in, so you don’t even need to create a new profile.

Registering also allows to you to edit your profile, which you can make publicly visible. So far, there’s not much info you can share via the profile, but it is an interesting way to find out about other users, especially if they actually take the time to curate lists and assign words as favorites.

You can also comment on the profiles of people. It seems like this would be useful for having word-related back and forth conversations, especially since there’s built-in custom code for linking to words and to the comments pages of words.

The People’s Dictionary

Clicking on “Zeitgeist” at the top of the Wordnik interface takes you to a page that tracks the latest activity on the site, and its here that you can see how the app is more than just another dictionary web site. You can tell what terms have been recently added to lists, check out open lists (which can be edited by any user), view comments and check out user-recorded pronunciations, and see some interesting statistics about the past week’s activity.

Of course, as with every site with user-generated content, not everything people add to Wordnik is useful. There’s some spam, some flaming — and some questionable words and definitions. That said, it’s a far more accurate representation of the living language than is Dictionary.com, or other more traditional dictionary web sites.

Statistics, tags, examples, constantly updated Twitter and Flickr streams, and an ongoing, on-site conversation about words, their usage and their meaning provide not only a comprehensive look at how we define things, but about how fluid that definition is. Whether you’re a copy editor or a linguistics student, there’s something on Wordnik for you.

A Better Word

If you’re trying to find la mot juste, you can depend on your old paper sources, or the online versions of those traditional tomes. On the other hand, Wordnik is an interesting alternative that not only provides you with up-to-the minute definitions and usages, but also makes you complicit in language making in a very real and immediate sense.

While the social aspect may not lead to the most efficient work process, it is a welcome and truly useful distraction. Language is not created in a vacuum, nor does it exist in one, and Wordnik is the first dictionary site I’ve see that not only acknowledges but embraces that. There’s still more potential in web technologies regarding dictionaries, but for now, if words are important to your work, you should make a habit of frequenting this site.

What other features would you like to see on a dictionary site?

Idea Organizer is an app for the iPhone that I recently discovered that makes logging those ideas incredibly easy. There are other ways to do what it does, some via built-in tools offered by Apple itself, but no other solution brings all the features and functionality together in the same place.

Idea Organizer combines an audio recorder, a text notebook and an image capture tool to help make sure that you can not only keep track of any ideas that pop into your head, but also the ones you get from the world around you. You can create an idea using any type of media mentioned, and then add other types of content later to provide context.

The other reason I prefer this app to any other is that it keeps thing simple and has an intelligently designed user interface. The app opens directly to a screen that presents you with a button that gives you access to your most recent idea, and three big buttons that allow you create a new idea based on text input, photo or audio. Idea Organizer’s developers were clearly thinking about the fleeting nature of good ideas when they designed the app.

Finally, you can email any ideas to yourself at any time, for easier editing on an actual computer. You can also batch email all your ideas at once, which is a terrific convenience feature.

For $1.99, Idea Organizer (iTunes link) is great bargain for a very handy little app. Sure, you can approximate its function for free, but in many more steps and with a lot more hassle.

How do you make sure you don’t lose track of great ideas you have while out of the office?

Seesmic apparently saw the wisdom in that idea, because it recently revealed a new Windows-only Twitter client that doesn’t require AIR to run. I jumped at the chance to take the software, which is currently only available as a preview edition, for a test run.

Feature-rich

Seesmic for Windows has just about every bell and whistle I could ask for in a professional Twitter client, but without a lot of the unnecessary frills that I feel get thrown in with something like TweetDeck. It seems closer to Tweetie for Mac, which is still my favorite client, independent of platform concerns.

You can use multiple accounts, and customize your columns in the main window however you like. By default, your Home feed will display tweets from all the accounts you have registered with Seesmic, which is a great thing for people who use different Twitter accounts to organize the people they follow, like groups. For those who don’t, Seesmic includes support for Twitter lists, so that you can organize those you follow that way instead.

My personal favorite feature of Seesmic is how the compose window uses your first-entered account by default. That means regardless of what post I reply to, and in what stream I find it, the reply originates from my main account. This is ideal for me because it’s my primary publishing identity, while the others are mostly for monitoring.

Searches can be initiated at any time using a field intuitively placed at the top right-hand corner of the Seesmic window, but I couldn’t find any way to find trending topics. While I don’t generally have cause to check the trends, not having the ability to do so does rankle a bit.

Good-looking and Functional

This is the best-looking Twitter app I’ve seen on Windows, and possibly one of the best-looking Windows apps I’ve seen, period. Especially using a dark-tinted Windows 7 glass visual theme, it just looks designed to fit its surroundings, which is more than I can say for any AIR application.

The tabbed sidebar and light-colored stream backgrounds make it a very usable interface, in addition to helping with aesthetic effect. I would appreciate an option to turn on color-coding for @ mentions or conversations between two people you follow, but with columns designed for the purpose, I guess the Seesmic team figures that isn’t necessary.

Advanced controls for each tweet can be brought up by hovering over a user’s portrait, or by right-clicking on any individual post, so you have options in terms of replying or retweeting. You can also create user lists on the fly from anyone in your stream, or add people to existing lists, which makes it very easy to create functional groups quickly. You can even drag a user’s profile pic to the group of your choice to add them to it.

If there was a feature I’m missing most with Seesmic, it’s the ability to follow/unfollow people from within the client. It’s something I use regularly with my iPhone Twitter clients, and something I enjoy being able to do at a moment’s notice without visiting the web-based interface for Twitter.com.

Client of Choice for Windows

I won’t mince words: Seesmic’s dedicated Windows app has become my go-to software for using Twitter on a PC, even though bugs are present in the preview version. It’s just that good, and it’s not Adobe AIR. In fact, it might be reason enough for me to spend a little less time in OS X, and a little more time working in Windows 7. I’ll stress the might in that last statement, though. If you want a copy, for now you have to sign up for the Seesmic newsletter at Seesmic.com, but turnaround time for a download link seems to be less than a day for most.

Have you tried Seesmic for Windows? Let us know what you think of it below.

But the problem with Twitter is that it’s kind of unwieldy. I follow a lot of people, and even though I have multiple accounts to follow different groups of people, a lot gets lost in the stream. Twitter clients with built-in search help, but at a glance, Google Alert-like results would be ideal. Thankfully, there’s a service that does almost precisely that. It’s called TweetAlert.

At first glance, it seemed to me like a way to quickly and easily create your own spam bot, which obviously isn’t something I’d be interested in doing. Upon closer inspection, though, it actually offers a very manageable and unobtrusive way to create a tweet stream with a razor-sharp focus that should prove much more effective than the catch-all net fishing that is Twitter search.

What TweetAlert does is retweet any status update it finds that contains a hashtag of your choosing. For example, you could use #apple, and it would automatically search and retweet any post containing that variable using the account you register with the service. Obviously, you don’t want to use your main account for this otherwise you’ll end up spamming all of your followers; TweetAlert recommends that you create a new account specifically for this purpose.

Once you’ve created an account and set it up on TweetAlert, you can use it in two ways. First, you can follow that account with your main identity to keep on top of that topic. This is especially handy if an account on TweetAlert already exists looking for the same thing you are, so you don’t have to set up a new one. I’m more interested in the second use, which is to add the new account you create to your Twitter client of choice. That way, it’s a simple matter of viewing its timeline whenever you want to check your results, all in one place and without any static from your regular account.

Is it a perfect solution? No, but TweetAlert does go out of its way to make sure it isn’t being too spammy. When it retweets the updates it finds, it changes the hashtag to avoid clogging up regular Twitter search results. That means it isn’t particularly pretty to look at, but it could help you catch something important to your work that you would otherwise have missed entirely, and that’s nothing to sneeze at.

Are you using TweetAlert? Share your thoughts on the service below.

For some tasks, you absolutely need network access, but for others, a rich and varied stock of offline-accessible information and research resources should provide plenty of fodder for getting things done. Your iPhone or iPod touch can be a great supplemental resource for exactly this kind of thing. Here’s how to turn your device into an offline road warrior.

Instapaper or Read It Later

These apps are great because when you do have connectivity (if you get a signal briefly, for example), you can quickly save articles for reading in extended blackout zones of little or no coverage. Both these apps allow you to capture and store web content as offline pages. What’s more, integration with both of these apps is often baked into other iPhone gems, like Tweetie, the popular Twitter client that recently got a brand new version with lots of extra bells and whistles.

Instapaper comes in two flavors: a Free version, and a Pro version for $4.99. The more expensive app allows for Folders, article recommendations, background updates, and more, and really is worth it if you’re an avid Instapaper user. Read It Later also comes in Free and Pro flavors, with the Pro costing only $2.99. It features full-screen reading, sharing, and the ability to send articles to other iPhone apps.

Dictionary.com or WordBook

Despite having impeccable spelling skills (quiet, Simon), even I can see the value in a dictionary app. For instance, I often have an overwhelming urge to look up the origins of words. Not necessarily of tremendous professional value, but still. And of course, I’m kidding about the spelling thing. I often need to double-check words, especially ones for which I seem to have a mental block like “aesthetics.”

Both Dictionary.com (Free) and WordBook ($1.99) offer offline access to more than 200,000 definitions. My personal preference of the two is WordBook because of the UI, but both provide a thesaurus, word of the day, audio pronunciation guides, and more.

Encyclopedia

Wikipedia is a great on-the-spot reference for background and contextual information on new and unfamiliar terms and concepts. Which is fine when you have an active network connection, but doesn’t help much when you’re on a train in a 3G dead zone and you’re looking to provide a quick overview of the USB 3.0 standard for a client report.

Enter Encyclopedia ($8.99, iTunes link), an iPhone/iPod touch app that stores a complete full-text offline version of Wikipedia on your device. All internal links function, and you can navigate your history and backtrack when you need to. Beware, references are excluded in the interest of usability, and it will take up a full 2GB of your device’s storage space, but it’s much simpler and more convenient than the alternative.

myPANTONE

Web designers, and people who just take an interest in the finished look of their documents and web work, will truly appreciate the usefulness of the recently released myPANTONE app. The app gives you access to Pantone’s color libraries, and allows you create color schemes on the go. You can even use colors from photos taken with your device to find matching Pantone hues. Even if you’re not a professional print designer, this app can still be very helpful in coming up with pleasing color combinations for documents, personal websites and more.

It’s a little on the pricey side at $9.99, but it does let you do really cool things like GPS tagging, and voice/text annotation of palettes you create. If color is important to the work that you do in any way, there might be no better way to spend otherwise unproductive time out of network range.

The Pocket Reference Re-imagined

Imagine how crazy the idea of having an encyclopedia in your pocket would’ve seemed 20 years ago? Plenty crazy, I’d say. Thanks to the versatile platform Apple developed for its mobile devices, you can now have multiple encyclopedias on hand in a package slimmer than most people’s wallets. And it doesn’t end where I’ve stopped here. There are plenty of very specialized reference apps available via the iTunes App Store, for little or no money.

What reference apps do you carry with you?

You can always provide a covering letter in the body of your email when you send something along, but a recently launched web app provides a tool that’s much more useful in sharing that context along with the web content you choose to share. Layers.com allows you to layer images, text and video on top of any site of your choosing, and then to share your annotated version with whomever you choose.

Initial Impressions

At first, owing maybe its noisy interface, Layers.com seems a little overwhelming. There’s a lot of visual static going on, but if you can get past the initial shock, you’ll find it surprisingly easy to use. If you know how to find an article or blog post’s permalink, then you’re already well on your way to mastering Layers.com

To take full advantage of Layers.com, you should sign up for account, which takes no time at all, and allows to create and manage as many identities as you want for sharing your annotated pages with others. You can keep a separate identity for work and for your friends, or even create multiple work identities for different lines of business or if you wear multiple professional hats. You could also create individual client-specific identities.

Layers of Research

The obvious application of this new site, for me at least, is with research-intensive engagements. Especially if you’re doing a literature survey for a larger company, the ability to not only provide links and an attendant context and analysis document, but to incorporate said document directly on top of the information in question (which ups its relevance considerably for a reader) might provide enough of a “wow” factor to ensure a client comes back to you for similar work again and again. It should make analyzing individual pieces much easier for you as a researcher, too.

Layers of Creativity

Of course, there are many other applications, too. As on editor of online content, and as someone who knows a lot of web designers, I can see how helpful layers.com could be for the creative process, too. You could provide direct feedback on top of the content you’re editing, including mock-ups via your own image files, screenshots of other sites for comparison, and/or video and audio feedback for that added personal touch, or if you’re more comfortable formulating your thoughts that way than in writing.

Layers of the Everyday

And then there’s the applicability on an everyday basis for sharing links among your network of colleagues, coworkers, and peers. You can share a Layered link via Twitter or any other social network, so that if you’re inclined to do so, you can provide more than just 140 characters worth of contextual explanation with something you’ve flagged as interesting. You could even provide additional related content as a Layer, like a video interview from YouTube from a few months back atop a print piece that’s just been released. In your textual comment, you could point out the apparent contradictions between the two.

Layers.com represents a new, more interactive way of browsing the web. Best of all, it encourages people to do more than just read and accept web content in a passive way. Instead, it actively seeks out your opinion, your perspective on things. It’s sort of like the idea behind CNN’s iReport, but more democratized and without the implicit patronization. Obviously, writing an essay to accompany every link you share isn’t practical, but having the ability to do so is a welcome development.

I’ve outlined a few possible uses of Layers.com in this post, but what would you use it for?

The Bamboo Touch is an interesting product for me because it brings the multitouch gestures  that I’ve become so used to on my MacBook Pro to my desktop Mac and PC (though not all of them, more on that later). I wondered how, as a user interface device, such a thing could stack up against a traditional mouse, or whether it would just add another dimension of input instead of replacing my existing pointing device.

Look and Feel

Right away, I noticed that the Bamboo Touch (and the related products in the Bamboo line) was a fantastic looking addition to my gadget arsenal. It’s a simple, black tablet, with little in the way of bells and whistles. It has a matte finish, except for the piano key gloss on the express key buttons and the bar on the left edge with the “Bamboo” moniker printed across it. A single glowing white light lets you know it’s on, and flashes slightly when input is detected.

The Touch model takes up little space on my desk, approximately being about 8″ by 5″. I’d say it occupies approximately the same amount of space as the area I normally use with my traditional mouse. The way I have my desk set up, I can still use a mouse and the tablet concurrently, and my keyboard, while still not having things feel cramped.

The surface is smooth, but not overly slippery. It feels like a good laptop trackpad, which is ideal considering the Bamboo’s usage in my workspace setup.

Buttons and Gestures

ExpressKeys, despite there being only four, are a godsend on this device. My Cintiq has 10 versus the four found on the Bamboo Touch, but honestly, I only ever use four on the larger pen display anyway, so I think Wacom’s right to aim for simplicity with its more consumer-oriented devices. You’ll need to assign one Key as single click, which I’ll explain later, but the others can be configured according to your needs (I have back/forward for the middle keys, and Exposé All Windows for the bottom).

The Bamboo’s Mutli-touch features will be familiar to you if you’ve ever used a recent generation Mac or an iPhone before. It uses two-finger gestures only, not the three- and four-finger gestures available on the most recent Macs, but that’s probably enough for most users.

A single finger controls your pointer, and left clicks. Tap two fingers for a double click, and drag two fingers for scrolling, both vertical and horizontal. You can also flip through files or pictures by moving two fingers left and right. Pinching your fingers will zoom, and rotating them will rotate images and documents on your computer, if the software you’re using supports the feature.

What I Like

I like the seamless transition from my laptop to my desktop the Bamboo Touch provides. There’s never that brief adjustment period that occurs when I’ve been using either a trackpad or a mouse exclusively for an extended period of time. That said, I’m not sure it actually offers a better user experience than a mouse with a desktop, just a different one that I’ve no grown used to. I know my girlfriend, who only uses a laptop most of the time, says she still prefers the mouse with the iMac over the Bamboo.

Regardless, multitouch is terrifically intuitive, and when you’re used to both an iPhone and a MacBook Pro, it can be frustrating at times not to have those features at hand on a desktop. Especially for scrolling-intensive tasks or while working with Photoshop or iPhoto, the Bamboo Touch is my preferred interface device. It’s even incredibly useful when you’re trying to browser and/or organize your files using Finder in OS X or Explorer in Windows.

What I Don’t Like

As mentioned above, one of your ExpressKeys must be assigned to single click if you don’t plan on using a mouse with the Bamboo Touch. That’s because otherwise, it’s very difficult to click and drag, or to make text selections. There’s an “Add Touch to the Left” feature where you click with your thumb while your pointer finger is already touch to select or drag, but as of yet, it doesn’t feel natural to me.

I’m also concerned about the ergonomics of the device and the long-term impact of using it as a mouse replacement. Without a suitable wrist rest, it seems like it could potentially lead to some kind of RSI pain. That’s a completely uneducated opinion, but rational or not, it is a fear I have.

Conclusion

For the time being, I’m continuing to use my Bamboo Touch as a total mouse replacement. I like the option of using multitouch, and for now, I welcome the novel feeling as compared to standard mouse work. I have a sneaking suspicion that for 80 percent of my work-related tasks, a mouse is more efficient, but even if I do go back to my old ways, I’ll still keep the Bamboo Touch on hand for organizing my media libraries or working with Photoshop, which are both things it does fantastically well.

Have you tried a touch tablet as a mouse replacement? How did it go?

I haven’t used Bento since it was first released, so a lot is new to me. For the purposes of this review, I won’t be detailing what’s changed so much as what strikes me as most useful about the program from a web working angle, since I imagine many of you will be new to the software as well.

The Basics

By default, Bento looks somewhat unassuming. It lists databases that already exist on your computer, whether you were thinking of them as such or not. That includes your Address Book contacts, your iCal events and tasks and your iPhoto library. It also lists a category called “Projects,” which starts out with dummy content for demo purposes. So, out of the box (pardon the pun), Bento is a convenient, all-in-one storage spot for all of your existing work and play-related Mac data that looks great to boot. But it can be more than that, too.

You’ll notice that in addition to the nicely-designed interface, the entry screens associated with items in your databases provide more customizability than their counterparts in the apps themselves. Address book entries, for example, can be browsed in an Excel-like list view, or in a grid-style view that’s reminiscent of one of the ways of browsing your albums in iTunes. Each entry has all the data that your Address Book card includes, but you can customize them further, adding photos, objects, text fields, or many other things.

Bento for CRM

That comes in handy when you want to use Bento as a CRM application. You can include details like known family members, business partners, and associates, all through your own custom fields. Add a preferred meeting place, best time of day to contact, corporate gifting schedule, or whatever else you may need to keep track off. Attach meeting notes or agenda files to keep a record of your interaction with said customer. It truly can be as powerful as you need it to be.

Bento for PM

As project management software, Bento is equally versatile. You can attach the same sort of custom fields to your projects here, and tie them to your address book and other collections for easy, single location access. If you need to open iCal or another app to check or change something directly, Bento can do that for you, too.

Keeping track of complex, multi-staged projects can be difficult, but Bento has a Smart Collections feature which should allow you to navigate even the most treacherous of prolonged endeavors. Set filters to catch all entries under a specific budget, for example, or by end or start date, or by the PM assigned to the task in question. It’s a great way to make sure nothing falls through the cracks without having to manually comb through every entry.

Bento for Everything

There’s countless uses of Bento for those working from home, so I won’t go into much more detail here, but it does feature handy, pre-made templates for time-tracking, inventory management, expense monitoring and issue tracking. It might take a little more setting up than tools designed specifically for those purposes, since it is made to be a jack-of-all-trades, rather than a master of one, but that also means it could become an end-t0-end solution for all of your business needs if you put in the time and effort to make it so.

Bento 3 is available as a free trial from Filemaker. The full version will run you $49.99 U.S. for a single user license, or $99.99 for a five-user family copy. Those who already own previous versions of Bento (either 1 or 2) are eligible for a $20 rebate. The way I see it, $50 is not a very high asking price for something that could easily do the job of three or four other programs, but try it out first to see if it fits your working style.

What programs do you currently use to manage your work-related databases on Mac or PC? Do you think pleasing aesthetics affect your database-related work one way or another?

For Gmail users with an iPhone who work from home, this is great news. Often, those of us not plugged in to the corporate world miss out on the little niceties like Exchange information syncing. Google Sync, now that it includes Gmail, offers a great free alternative for those of us who’ve left our office working days behind. And it uses Microsoft Exchange technology to do it.

Now you can manage your contacts, calendar and email all from your smartphone, and have that information synced back to the cloud in real time, so that wherever you access it, you’ll be looking at the same thing. I’ve been using MobileMe to do that for about a year now, but since many people already use Gmail, and since Google’s alternative is free, this is much more useful for most people.

If you’d like to set up your iPhone or iPod Touch to work with Google Sync, check out the instructions posted by the official Google Mobile team. Some may prefer to continue using Gmail on IMAP with their device, since it means you can set the schedule by which you’re notified of new mail, instead of having incoming messages dictate to you. Also, keep in mind that the iPhone supports only one Exchange account at a time, so if you have one already for work, you won’t be able to take advantage of Google Sync.

Are you using Google Sync?

FormSpring now has one more feature to recommend it, and it’s a big one for web workers: extensive third-party integrations. Using said integrations, you can now use any form you create in FormSpring with a laundry list of web apps that many readers of this blog will immediately recognize.

I want to take a look first at what FormSpring offers as a forms creation suite, and then go into a little more detail about the new third-party integration feature.

Creating a Form

Making your first form with FormSpring is not very complicated at all. You can start from scratch, use a template, copy an existing form from another web page (ethically questionable?), or upload a pre-existing HTML form. FormSpring’s template list is fairly comprehensive, without being overwhelming, and it’s broken down into categories to make it that much easier to find what you’re looking for.

Once you’ve chosen a type of form, you’re presented with the form editor. The editor’s clean layout gives you a WYSIWYG view of the form you’re building, including preset fields if you chose to start building from a template. Any field can be edited using a convenient pop-up window, where you can customize the field type, size, label and a number of other options. Fields can be dragged and rearranged, and you can add new fields, sections, and extras using a convenient sticky toolbar at the bottom of the editor.

Form Extras include options like global layout settings, form progress indicators and saving options for end users, submit button customization and CAPTCHA options. The nice thing about these options is that they exist for people who need them, but if beginner users don’t notice or take advantage of them, it really won’t detract from the quality of their final form.

Using a Form

Having a great form creation engine is great, but it’s all for nothing if you can’t get that form out to the people you want to use it in an easy and effective manner. FormSpring provides you with a number of easy-to-use options for distributing your creations, so that you can target different users in the way you deem best.

You can choose from having FormSpring generate a unique URL at which your form can be reached, embedding the form using JavaScript code or HTML, installing a widget in your TypePad-enabled blog, or using an intermediate form that gathers data from your user before forwarding them to the form you’ve created.

Providing so many options ensures that you can tailor your form distribution strategy to specific target respondents, and also allows users with varying levels of technical expertise to take advantage of what FormSpring has to offer.

Third-party Integrations

As I mentioned earlier, FormSpring recently introduced new third-party integrations that makes it easier to use forms created via the web app, and to use the data gathered with said forms in other popular online applications.

The list of new integrations includes Campaign Monitor, FreshBooks, Google Apps and Salesforce.com, among others. For Campaign Monitor, integration allows you to add subscribers from your forms directly into your email marketing software. FreshBooks integration allows you to create clients, invoices and estimates automatically using data collected with FormSpring forms. Salesforce.com integration means you can make web forms for any Salesforce object, and update existing records using web form data.

Integrations finally allow some of the promise of a web-based information management system to be fully realized. “Synergy” is an old buzzword that’s been stripped of much of its significance over time, but it truly applies here, in a good way.

Let us know your thoughts on FormSpring on the comments.

When Aliza originally reviewed the software, it was free beta release software. Now that it’s reached version 1.0, it comes with a $39.95 price tag for registration. Users can still download a free trial, so you can take Postbox through its paces before deciding to make a purchase.

I tried Postbox back when it was still in beta, right around the time Aliza originally reviewed it, and there are some definite improvements in the 1.0 release.

Better Search

One of Postbox’s main selling points is its advanced search capabilities. In Aliza’s original review, she talked about how you can search for all emails within a certain time period, or search for attachments and links within emails. Postbox also now boasts a number of search operators usable without opening the advanced settings panel, including “from:name” and “subject:keyword” if you prefer doing things all from one window.

Search and email indexing is also much faster than it used to be. Even with a large archive of messages, many of which are heavy on images and links, it took almost no time at all to download and make available my entire MobileMe archive; much less time than Mail takes to perform the same task.

More Add-ons

Add-ons like Lightning for Postbox, which brings your calendar into your Postbox window via a new tab, are a big part of the program’s appeal. There are utilities for Google Calendar access, message import/export, to-do lists, backup services, Growl notifications, and managing multiple identities on a single account. More are being developed every day, so expect the list to continue to grow.

One of my favorite Postbox-compatible plugins is ThunderBrowse, which allows you to view web pages directly in the application, without having to switch over to your browser of choice: great for digging in and really trying to conquer your inbox during a marathon session.

Easier

It’s hard to put my finger on exactly what usability changes occurred between earlier betas and this final release, but in general things seem redesigned with greater ease in mind. One great example is the ability to drag and drop email messages across accounts in the sidebar. It’s great for keeping your inboxes organized according to how you want to respond to messages, instead of according to how misinformed senders might try to reach you.

Postbox’s already impressive Conversations view for threaded viewing of replies also got easier, with on-the-fly notification of updates sent while you’re reviewing. That way, if someone sends an email continuing a conversation you’re currently reading, you need only click a button to view the latest response.

A Lot More Social

Maybe the biggest change since Aliza’s early experience with Postbox is the addition of multiple social network support. Postbox users can now sign in to their Facebook, FriendFeed and Twitter accounts via the application’s web services menu.

Doing so will not only allow you to post new status updates to those services via Postbox, it will also enable profile photo matching in the links/additional info sidebar to the right of the message reading window. If, for example, you get a DM from someone, Postbox will automatically retrieve that person’s current Twitter profile pic and display it. Messages you receive directly from contacts you also have on Facebook or Twitter will likewise display their profile pic from those services, though I’m not sure which takes precedence in the case of double matches.

For Aliza, the problem with switching to Postbox was that she had become so used to Gmail that learning a different system seemed like re-inventing the wheel. For me, it was that the early betas were actually fairly buggy, and just didn’t feel like something that could be a full-time solution for what is a core tool in my web working arsenal. This final version seems much, much more capable, and will definitely see full-time service on my Windows 7 machine. Will it replace Mail.app? As Aliza pointed out, old habits die hard, so we’ll have to see if I can avoid a relapse.

Let us know your thoughts on Postbox in the comments.

Sprouter, like many web apps these days, takes some significant cues from Twitter. In fact, at first glance, it appears to be pretty much Twitter designed for a specific target audience: entrepreneurs.

Unlike Twitter, at Sprouter you have a dedicated profile page. It still keeps things short and sweet, rather than presenting a wealth of info like you might find on Facebook or LinkedIn, but you have enough space to let other entrepreneurs know a bit about you. You also get access to a follower/following count, just like you have with Twitter.

Also borrowed from Twitter is the 140-character limit for your posts, for which Sprouter provides the slightly more business-oriented prompt “What are you working on?” You can use hashmarks to flag posts with specific tags, and this is where Sprouter really starts blooming. Hashtagged terms automatically appear as tags at the bottom of your post composer, and they form the basis for two things: topics and events.

Clicking on any hashtag will automatically return a page for that term, which will tell you what it signifies, who its owner or creator is, and whether it’s an event or just a general topic. You’ll also see a list of posts containing that hashtag, and have the option to follow the tag itself, right from within the app, which is something you definitely can’t do from the basic Twitter app.

If you’re a fan of tweet-ups, industry-specific chats and online conferences, Sprouter is for you. It also has great promise for people looking for real-time collaboration and feedback from other entrepreneurs and web workers, without the static, background noise and spam that comes along with Twitter.

While Sprouter is in private beta for the time being, its creators are aiming for a launch in the fall, and the service seems to be pretty solid in its current state, so I wouldn’t anticipate a long wait before it goes public. The people behind Sprouter are also planning on integrating the service with desktop applications and outside services, so it stands to become even more useful down the road.

Have you tried Sprouter? Let us know how you think it compares to Twitter in the comments.

What Concentrate provides is different than most apps, though, in that it takes as its core philosophy reduction, rather than addition or enhancement. It’s basically like a task scheduler that works similarly to Automator actions in order to provide you with efficiency-boosting shortcuts to setup programs, block web sites, and run and kill apps, all of which lets you focus on the task at hand. 

What Do You Want to Do?

That’s the question that drives Concentrate.The idea is that you set up “Activities,” each of which is comprised of a number of individual processes or sub-actions. An Activity could be something like, say, “Work on Novel,” in which case your the sub-actions could be to kill your Twitter client, block Facebook, set your iChat status to Do Not Disturb, and open WriteRoom. You can do that for an indefinite period of time, or if you like to set aside two hours a day for novel writing, you can add a timer to the Concentrate activity that will automatically remove the restrictions on what sites you can use when your chosen amount of time expires.

In practice, Concentrate works as I expected it to, and also performs some unexpected handy tricks, like hiding all open apps not directly mentioned in any of the sub-actions associated with the activity that’s running. It also has some preset categories of web sites to block, including a social networking group that probably eliminates 75 percent of the causes of my procrastination. Unfortunately, when it kills applications, you can always just reopen them. It’d be nice if you could actually block an app from opening at all, but I’m not even sure if OS X would allow that.

It’s The Little Things

Concentrate not only provides OS X users with an extra jolt of willpower, it does so with style. Little features, like being able to play a sound to signal the start or end of an activity, or continually throughout (a ticking sound in the example activity), or the option to customize the icon for each activity, really make me feel like Concentrate is something worth paying for. You might be able to duplicate most of the app’s functionality by creating your own Automator actions, but you couldn’t do it nearly as elegantly or with as much efficiency.

You can also integrate your own Automator actions directly in Concentrate, in case there are things the program can’t do on its own. A convenient menu bar icon allows you quick access to all of your activities, without having to access the main window, and Application Groups allow you to kill multiple apps at once, the same way you can with web sites.

Concentrate is free to try for 60 hours, which should give you plenty of time to determine whether or not you enjoy taking your marching orders from a piece of software. After that initial period, it’ll cost you a $29 one-time fee for a license, which comes complete with a money back guarantee according to their site. It might be a small price to pay if you’re having a hard time blocking out distractions on your own.

Do you use software to achieve singletasking nirvana, or do you rely on willpower alone?