As I noted over at TheAppleBlog, Google has turned on push for Gmail on the iPhone. That means that your incoming messages will be pushed from the Google servers to your phone, instead of your phone having to call in periodically to check for new mail. It means you’ll be more up-to-date, and your phone will use a lot less of your battery’s power than if you use Apple’s Fetch alternative.
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Like many web workers, one of my challenges is keeping my data in sync between the various devices and apps that I use. I stopped using my Palm handheld over a year ago, but I’ve continued to use the Palm Desktop application, because it’s one of the easiest-to-use and most mobile-friendly applications ever, even though I now have a BlackBerry. Finding a solution that can keep my data in sync between Palm Desktop, my BlackBerry and the other apps that I use has been difficult.
For a while, I’d sync Outlook and Palm Desktop, and then Outlook would update the BlackBerry (I didn’t actually use Outlook at all, it just acted as the middleman). It worked great. But then my dependence on Google Calendar grew, because I could access it from any computer as well as my BlackBerry, and it wouldn’t work with my sync setup. Read the rest of this entry »
There’s no shortage of options for those looking to manage projects using web-based applications these days. Manymoon is another recent entry in this expanding category, and they are a serious contender that doesn’t lack for professionalism and features. Question is, is there something you can get at Manymoon that you aren’t already getting with your current project management solution?
Manymoon is well-designed, with a clean interface throughout. Of course, that’s true of a lot of project management web apps, and especially the free ones targeted at the independent, rather than the enterprise, user. Commands and tools are housed in submenus and tabs to keep visual clutter on any given page to a minimum. And I do find that everything is located where I intuitively expect it to be, which is not necessarily always the case in other apps.
Last week ,we reviewed gwabbit, an app that aims to automatically pull contact data from emails in Outlook. Scott Blitstein was positive about gwabbit, but it didn’t work as well for me when I tried it: sometimes it was unable to extract my contact data, even though it was cleanly presented in the email’s signature block.
I really like the idea of being able to extract that useful information without having to manually copy and paste, though, so when Nicholas Maddix of Textual emailed me to tell me about Anagram, a similar Windows app, and it was also recommended by a couple of commenters on our gwabbit review, I thought I’d check it out.
Anagram is like gwabbit in that you can use it to extract contact data from emails. However, it’s more flexible, in that you can use it to capture information from any text, not just emails, and it’s not restricted to contacts: Anagram will examine any text you throw at it and automatically attempt to capture calendar events, to-do items and notes, too. Here’s a quick screencast of it in action capturing some contact data and adding a calendar event to Outlook:
Last week Mike shared some thoughts on some of the reasons he is thankful he is a Web Worker. With the announcement that popular apps I Want Sandy and Stikkit are to close, I thought I would take a moment to list the acknowledge the tools or services that I am most thankful for.
These aren’t the only ones I use, but they are the ones that make my Web Working experience the best it can be.
There’s a new application in town for those who want a simple approach to maintaining their appointments: Deadline. They boast of being “the simplest calendar ever made,” though a variety of features are already in place or being planned.
After signing up for a free account, you’ll get a web interface with a box to type. Put in something like “Feed the cat next week” and it will strip off the “next week” part, parse it to get the date, and make the rest the text of your reminder. Then it adds it to the rest of your reminders on the web page. A search box lets you find reminders with particular text, and brighter white is used to highlight the more immediate tasks.
Due to the nature of my work evaluating the Skype ecosystem’s software, web-based applications and a variety of smartphones, I not only have to use Outlook as a primary reference address book for synchronizing contact information but also end up constipating the registry of my Windows installation about once a year.
It eventually gets to a point where I have to backup all my documents and application data and rebuild Windows. I had reached this point a couple of weeks ago. But this time it happened at an opportune time when I found the local Staples was selling Office 2007 Small Business Edition upgrade at a 40% discount.
Having seen favorable reviews and had limited experience with other Office 2007 modules on a recently purchased desktop (that serves as a backup PC), I bought. Now my laptop’s Outlook operation runs much more smoothly and quickly as a result; it boils down to “search”.
Microsoft Office Outlook Connector provides Outlook users with the capability of synchronizing messages, calendars and contacts with Hotmail and Office Live Mail accounts, effectively providing offline access for those web-based services – and perhaps more importantly, the ability to make that data portable and transferable to other services, such as Gmail.
As I noted over at TheAppleBlog, Google has turned on push for Gmail on the iPhone. That means that your incoming messages will be pushed from the Google servers to your phone, instead of your phone having to call in periodically to check for new mail. It means you’ll be more up-to-date, and your phone will use a lot less of your battery’s power than if you use Apple’s Fetch alternative.
There’s no shortage of options for those looking to manage projects using web-based applications these days. 
Last week ,we 
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
