The one I have been using for a while on http://www.twitter.com/topazfiler is TweetLater. This is neat because it lets you setup multiple accounts.
Apparently a few people also rate Twollo, which i shall also try!
Funny, but by “desktop” I mean, “a piece of wood on which I have my monitors”…
For the past six weeks, I have been running an environment whereby I have XP on my main machine for development an Office applications, and use Ubuntu on a separate machine for doing everything else. As we’ve been working hard over the past year to make things we use less Microsoft-specific and less tied to our local network (e.g. SugarCRM for CRM, hosted SourceGear Vault, etc) this is working incredibly well.
Key to this is the open source Synergy application, which cunningly allows you to have a single keyboard and mouse across separate physical computers. So I have my Unubtu machine on the left with one screen, my development machine with two screens in the middle and right - all I have to do to activate my Ubunty machine is move the mouse to the left monitor and it’s ready to go.
Synergy is a little flaky however - sometimes it captures all mouse and keyboard input and refused to give it up. The only way to get around this appears to be to point a LogMeIn client session at the XP machine and kill the Synergy process. (An RDP connection won’t do it.)
I must admit to being hugely impressed with Ubuntu - if I didn’t develop everything on the Microsoft stack and be so used to using Office, I would ditch Microsoft on the desktop.
(We have our test lab running a bunch of Windows XP images on VirtualBox on Ubuntu. This works remarkably well too.)
Here’s a weird one… we were adding user properties to a message using the IUserProperties interface, but whenever we did this the property would render when the message was printed. This included whenever the message was sent to a recipient within the same Exchange organisation.
Last time I had to ask Microsoft PSS to help was 1992, and in that case they were nice enough to send me a handcrafted sample application on a 3.5″ floppy. This time however they got back to me in a day with this little code snippet:
void MarkPropNoPrint(Outlook.MailItem message, string propertyName)
{
// Late Binding in .NET
// http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;302902
Type userPropertyType;
long dispidMember = 107;
long ulPropPrintable = 0×4;
string dispMemberName = String.Format(”[DispID={0}]“, dispidMember);
object[] dispParams;
Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.UserProperty userProperty = message.UserProperties[propertyName];
if (null == userProperty) return;
userPropertyType = userProperty.GetType();
// Call IDispatch::Invoke to get the current flags
object flags = userPropertyType.InvokeMember(dispMemberName, System.Reflection.BindingFlags.GetProperty, null, userProperty, null);
long lFlags = long.Parse(flags.ToString());
// Remove the hidden property Printable flag
lFlags &= ~ulPropPrintable;
// Place the new flags property into an argument array
dispParams = new object[] {lFlags};
// Call IDispatch::Invoke to set the current flags
userPropertyType.InvokeMember(dispMemberName,
System.Reflection.BindingFlags.SetProperty, null, userProperty, dispParams);
}
Srsly… there is no way I would have worked that out for myself…
With the release of the iPhone 3.0 software, virtually all of the major gadget sites and most of the samll ones are falling over themselves to congratulate Apple on adding clipboard (cut, copy and paste) to the thing. Here’s an example http://technologizer.com/2009/06/17/iphone-3-0-its-here/.
Why on earth is this newsworthy? These same people should have been eschewing the iPhone since its inception *because* this basic feature was missing. I mean, come on people, every multitasking OS needs to be able to transfer user data between apps - Windows has had this for 20 years!
Grrr.
(Of course, I’m just irritated because my Google G1 can’t do it, and… natch… my old BlackBerry could.)
We have a new white paper up on the “Social” section of the Topaz Filer Web site called Email Archiving and Email Filing - What’s the Difference? (And Why are Both Important?)
Neat little tool: Voo2Do.
I tweeted this, but it is good enough to warrant keeping around in my blog. A list of open source applications for Windows.
On a simliar topic: http://www.osalt.com/.
In November 2005 The Law Society published their E-mail guidelines for solicitors. The document is geared to helping law firms make sense of how to handle e-mails within the practice.
I have written a paper critiquing this document here.
It’s an odd document. For me, even though I do not work for a law firm, it makes absolute sense that all e-mails we sent and receive should be properly filed against a project (a “matter” in law firm parlance), but the guidelines from The Law Society allow lawyers to make a judgement as to which e-mails are filed. It also only talks about record keeping for a few clauses, giving the rest over to more classic AUP type topics.
Anyway, it is good that a professional management/guidance body is putting advice on managing e-mails out there. I feel it just needs to be a little stronger in what they advise.
I love the term Googasm - meant to describe tech pundits falling over themselves to be unbelieveably impressed with anything that comes out of Mountain View.
In fact, with a lot of new things we are doing lately we are using a lot of Google applications, such as Google Mail, AdWords, AdSense and Google Checkout. One thing we haven’t used is Google Docs.
Now, I have heard Google Docs described time and time again as an Office killer, but I have never actually used it. In recent weeks a couple of times I have considered moving our SharePoint-based document store onto Google Docs and have chosen not to because it a) supports only a tiny number of file types and b) only supports teeny-tiny files. (Interestingly though I have gone through this process twice - the first time I forgot how limited it was but when the idea crossed my mind again I was like “Google must be looking to help me here”, only to be reminded of how limited it was.)
Anyway, in writing content for a new Web site I decided to give up trying to use our unbelievable slow VPN and thought I would use a small computer I have at home for browsing on. Upon discovering it did not have Office on it, I thought I would use Google Docs thinking, “Google did it, everyone is saying it’s awesome, it must be a competitor to Word.”
It’s a joke.
It is basically, as far as I can tell, the Gmail editor that doesn’t send e-mail. In 1995 Microsoft introduced red-squiggle background spell-checking. 14 years ago. Assume it was in pilot and beta for two years, that’s 16 years PCs have been able to underline spelling mistakes. Does Google Docs? No.
Does it give me fine control over layout? Does it basically let me write a proper document that I would give to a client? No.
It is, frankly, barely better than Notepad. In fact, I wish I had used Notepad and then I wouldn’t have to waste five minutes writing a blog post to rant about how crap it was.
And now I find myself feeling a bit sorry for Microsoft because they are getting the sh*t kicked out of them in the market with everyone fawning over everyone and everything, but at the end of the day, if I just want to write a nice looking document quickly, or build a cashflow forecast easily, or develop a little application… it has to be Microsoft all the way.
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