I’ve written in the past about both gwabbit and gwabbit for BlackBerry, nifty tools designed to help you capture and create contacts from within Outlook or on your BlackBerry device.
It turns out the folks at gwabbit are having a contest. I know I am always interested in the chance to win free stuff, particularly when the prize is a Flip MinoHD video camera, an oft-mentioned device here on WebWorkerDaily.
The contest is simple — the five folks who get the most friends to try gwabbit win the big prize. I don’t recommend spamming your friends and social-networking sites just for the sake of winning, but if you have some friends who might benefit from gwabbit, or are willing to help you out, this custom Flip cam is a nice prize.
Get full contest details to learn how to enter and win.
Does gwabbit help you with your contacts? What would you do with a Flip MinoHD?
New applications or enhancements to existing ones can provide big efficiency benefits, but there are also many simple tweaks, unsung tips, and new ways to think about the tools that you already use that can help you work better. In this post, I’ll share five ways that can help you accomplish more and experience less hassle. You can take advantage of many of these tips in minutes.
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TechHit’s OutTwit, a free Twitter client for Microsoft Outlook, hit version 1.0 this morning. If you’re a heavy user of Outlook and like to have everything in one place then OutTwit might be worth a try.
OutTwit downloads tweets to an Outlook folder (make sure you follow TechHit’s advice to create a new folder and tell OutTwit to use it, otherwise you will end up with with a very messy inbox). It incorporates all of the standard Twitter client features, including grouping and URL shortening. Today’s release adds support for picture posting services such as Twitpic, Posterous and Twitgoo.
OutTwit works, but it feels clumsy compared to a dedicated Twitter client. I certainly won’t be switching from twhirl, as I’d rather keep my tweets separate from my email; I think they fulfill separate roles. However, some users might like keep everything in one location and be able to use Outlook to manage, archive and search tweets.
Similarly to Spreadtweet, which is a Twitter client that looks like an Excel app, OutTwit can disguise Twitter usage, so I imagine it might be popular in workplaces where Twitter might not be looked upon favorably.
Have you tried OutTwit? What did you think?
Xobni, a very useful Microsoft Oulook plug-in that we’ve covered with glowing reviews previously, has droppped its beta tag with version 1.7, released today.
As well as dropping the beta tag, the latest version concentrates on performance improvements. According to Xobni, Outlook now starts 31 percent faster, while Xobni itself loads 42 percent faster. Users with large inboxes should notice even greater benefits. You can also now choose not to start Xobni until you need it.
Xobni is a free download, although the company is working on a premium service due to launch this summer.
Do you use Xobni?
I’m often surprised by the number of people who use Microsoft Outlook as their primary email and information manager who don’t also take full advantage of its contact capabilities. While I wouldn’t say it compares with a full blown CRM system, it is certainly a capable program for maintaining contact information.
I think the main reason for this lack of adoption is that the process for capturing and maintaining this supplemental information in Outlook is just too tedious. The information you need is likely included in all those email signatures, but it takes a lot of cutting and pasting to parse it out and place it in to the proper fields.
Enter gwabbit – an Outlook plug-in, launched today at DEMO, that makes this process ridiculously easy.
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If you use Outlook and sometimes get replies to your emails saying, “I think you might have forgotten the attachment,” you should check out Outlook Attachment Reminder, a simple VBScript macro. When you click the Send button it checks the body of the email for “attach” in the text (so it will also catch “attachment”, “attached”, etc). If “attach” is present and there is no attachment to the email a warning message pops up.
Outlook Attachment Reminder in action
This is a really simple yet effective macro. It’s something that I had actually been meaning to put together myself for a while but never got around to.
If you use Thunderbird, you can try a similar add-on: Attachment Reminder. Google has a similar feature in Gmail Labs — Forgotten Attachment Detector — but it doesn’t work for me.
(via Lifehacker)
Although I prefer and primarily use Gmail for the majority of my email needs, I do connect it via IMAP to Microsoft Outlook as well. And while there are many options available to extend the functionality of Microsoft Outlook including taglocity and Clear Context, Xobni is the one that I seem to come back to.
I’ve detailed my week with Xobni experience in the past and continue to find Xobni a nice addition to my Outlook experience. Recently they added LinkedIn integration and today they are announcing a whole slew of additional connections.
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Sometimes Outlook is a necessary evil. Personally I prefer Thunderbird if I’m going to be using a desktop client, because it’s less cluttered, not to mention free. Still, when I’m at the office working as a contractor for a professional services firm, Outlook 2007 on Windows XP is the standard email client, so I have to make do.
Making do just got a lot easier thanks to Taglocity 2.0, a plugin which brings some much needed functionality to Microsoft’s Office-based desktop email program.
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