Web Worker Daily

I use a lot of Google’s applications to stay organized and productive, but I’m especially fond of Gmail. In its standard form, it’s a fine email client that makes it easy to stay on top of that mountain of email, but with a little customization you can use it to become even more efficient. Here are six super ways to send Gmail into productivity overdrive.

1: Enable super stars.

You know how Gmail has the standard Gmail star, enabling you to highlight certain emails in your mailbox? Now you can make it a super star! Enable Superstars within Labs (found in “Settings”). Once enabled, you can select the super stars you’d like to use by dragging and dropping them within the “General” tab under “Settings.”

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I use multiple computers throughout the workday and am always using Gmail. Sometimes, when I am in a hurry, I jump up from the computer and forget to log out of my Gmail. Usually I can just head back to the workstation to log myself out, but occasionally I’ll only remember hours later and am no where near the workstation. Luckily, Gmail has a “remote log out” feature so you can log out of all your active Gmail sessions from any computer or mobile phone that supports JavaScript and has access to the Internet.

1. Log into Gmail in any web browser
2. Click the “Details” button. It is located next to “Last Account Activity” below your Inbox (below your current mailbox usage info).

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Google Voice wants to be your phone manager, SMS and voicemail provider. The service is rumored to be almost ready for public access.

Google Voice germinated after Google acquired GrandCentral almost two years ago. The service was relaunched earlier this year as a private beta for GrandCentral users. I’ve been using it for a while, and am generally impressed. Google Voice offers a number of features that should make it popular with web workers. Read the rest of this entry »

I was recently introduced to Gmail aliases and am loving them. With aliases, you can receive email messages at “your.username+any.alias@gmail.com”. So if your email address is “jane.doe@gmail.com” you can receive mail at ”jane.doe+notes@gmail.com” and it will still be delivered to your inbox. Why would you want to do this? Well, you can use the alias to set up filters to automatically direct those messages to trash, apply a label or star, skip the inbox, or forward to another email account entirely.

Here are the aliases I use, together with the labels I have set up:

• “cl” applies the label “craiglist”
• “rec” applies the label “recipe”
• “p” applies the label “pics”
• “bb” applies the label “blackberry”

To create filters to auto-apply your labels: Read the rest of this entry »

Google announced that it has made some changes to Gmail Contacts, increasing the number of fields that it supports to be more in line with those commonly found in other contact managers.

Until these changes, announced yesterday, Gmail Contacts was quite limited in the number of fields that it supported. It didn’t have fields for “web site” or “birthday,” for example, both of which are commonly used in other email clients and contact managers. This meant that if you imported contacts from another program, Gmail would have to use the all-encompassing  “notes” field for that extra information. That wasn’t ideal if you did a one-way import, but was especially problematic if you were trying to sync data between Gmail Contacts and another program or device that did support those extra fields. These new fields, as well as being useful in their own right, should make syncing much easier. Unfortunately, if you’ve already imported all your contacts and want to use these fields, you’ll need to wipe your Gmail Contacts and re-import them.

The additional fields have been available in standalone Google Contacts for over a month; it’s surprising that it’s taken this long to roll out these changes to Gmail Contacts, too.

Do you use Gmail Contacts as your primary contact manager?

As web workers, we are often asked to help friends and relatives fix computer problems. For me, the majority of these problems seem to be related to email. It’s ironic, as email is now less popular than social networks.

So why is email such a hassle?

• It’s more than 30 years old. Email has come a long way, but its underlying protocols haven’t changed much since the 1970s.
• It’s really three different systems. Sending (SMTP) and receiving (POP or IMAP) are totally separate functions, and are often handled on different servers. That’s why I often hear comments like “I can receive, but I can’t send” from clients.
• It’s being used for a lot of things it was never designed to do, like send images and attachments, highly formatted messages, signatures and calendar entries.
• It’s been overrun by spam, and even well-designed spam filters aren’t perfect, and cause unwanted side effects, like messages that get misidentified as spam, or just go away.
• Email software is too complex. These programs that were originally built for offline use; that is, they were set up so that users could read and write messages without being connected to the internet. Sending and receiving would happen in batches. That made sense when internet connections were slow, expensive and charged by the minute. Now that most people have always-on connections like cable or DSL, that process is less necessary. Desktop email client software is a pain to set up and use; as someone who helps many people with email, Outlook is the bane of my existence.
• Many of us connect to the Internet in more than one place — at work, at home, and on cell phones. It can be very frustrating to realize that we’ve left the message we needed to reply to at the office.
• Many of us have more than one email address. I try to keep my work and personal email separate, plus I have a series of email addresses that I use when registering on websites that might try to send spam. And I have several email addresses that were given to me, such as the ones that are automatically created when signing up for instant-messaging services like Yahoo, AIM and Windows Live/MSN.

What can be done to overcome these problems? Here are some tips that might help you and your clients and friends be more productive. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes doing things via web apps is great. Everything is in one place: your browser. Even so, sometimes having everything in one place isn’t ideal. A browser crash could kill all of your work, not just one component, and it can be harder to keep your focus appropriately segmented if your tools are all mashed together. Here are a few great Mac applications that give you access to your web apps, but do so in nice, native software packages.

Propane

It’s a fine way to power a BBQ, but it’s also more than that. Propane is a new piece of beta software that does what I previously did using a Fluid browser instance. Specifically, it runs Campfire-based chatrooms, which are a popular tool for people who need to collaborate in real-time with a distributed team. I use Campfire rooms to coordinate with other writers at various blog sites where time and scheduling is a primary concern, but that’s just one possible use.

Like with a Fluid instance, Propane provides Campfire with the bare minimum of browser chrome, so that it does in fact look like a native OS X app. It also provides some nice bells and whistles that allow you to customize the how and why of notification sounds and messages, including Growl notifications. There’s also great tools for better file sharing, including automatic source detection when you drag content (text and images) from a Safari window into your active chatroom in Propane.

Mailplane

I’m not actively trying to rhyme these app names, it’s just working out that way. Gmail is great, and Mail.app is nice enough, but I’d rather not use the two together if possible. I love Gmail’s web interface, but I’m not crazy about trying to manage my email activities in a browser window. Maybe that makes me old school, but I grew up on Outlook, and old habits die hard.

Mailplane delivers all the Gmail interface goodness with a nice, native app wrapper. Basically it, like Propane, is just a browser instance with some additional features specific to the web app in question that makes it easier to use. It’s those features that make the app worthwhile, though. Mailplane takes advantage of Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts to allow you to view and create new messages, reply, attach media, and more using convenient buttons located along the top of the app window. It also badges the app icon in your dock with the number of unread emails, and can notify you of new mail using sound and Growl.

Those with Google Apps and multiple accounts are also in luck, because it supports easy account switching and storage. There’s also an option to display an icon in the menu bar, including new mail count. You can try it out for free for a month, but it is a paid program, and will set you back $24.95 if you do decide to purchase.

Gdocsuploader

This is less an app and more of a handy little applet, but the single, focused service it provides is incredibly useful: a simple drag-and-drop interface for uploading documents to Google Docs. It may not seem like much, but it saves a lot of steps vs. the traditional method, which can quickly add up if you do most of your document editing in Google Docs, like I do.

All you have to do to use it is keep the app icon in your dock, and then drag any document onto the icon to upload it. It’ll prompt you once for your Google name and password, and afterward it’ll just work. If you prefer, opening the app will automatically take you to a file browser for selecting a file to upload manually.

None of the above apps does anything that you can’t do using the web, but they do offer time-saving and usability enhancements that you won’t necessarily get using only the corresponding app for each in a normal browser window. Just because web apps are often convenient and user-friendly doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be more so with a more solid connection to your desktop.

Have any tips on how to make web apps more native? Share them in the comments.

Sitting here scanning my email, I shake my head at the worthless information I see in many “From” and “Subject” lines. Not only do the poor choices I see make it harder to figure out what’s in the emails without opening them, but also the senders are risking recipients skipping their messages altogether.

The following are examples of what not to do. Read the rest of this entry »