The thing about useful stuff is

Remember the Milk's gone sour Monday, April 28, 2008

For too long I've fallen into the trap of keeping emails in my inbox and re-reading them on different occasions to jog my memory on what I needed to do with them. A couple of months ago I installed the GTDInbox Firefox extension for Gmail, which is a productivity assistant designed to help you focus on reading and dealing with email at the first attempt i.e. action it or archive the email. Like many others, I found its' presence encourages you to be more disciplined by categorising the item on opening.

Last week I read an article about Remember the Milk ("RTM"), a simple online task manager service that had released a Blackberry companion, the attraction being that it wirelessly synchronised with the online service. I confess that the last time I'd looked at the offering, admittedly some time ago, it was a simple standalone online task manager. Since then, they've evidently invested considerable effort in linking it to numerous services, most notably Gmail.

My immediate reaction was that GTD Inbox and RTM would be excellent stable mates inside Gmail, performing complementary functions to enhance my productivity. I was therefore dismayed and astonished to find that these two Firefox add-ins are seemingly incompatible each other. After installing RTM for Gmail, whilst GTD Inbox continued to work, the RTM add-in continually kept logging itself out mere seconds after being refreshed/logged in.

Looking for a solution to what I presumed must be "my user error", I managed to contact ProductiveFirefox, creators of GTD Inbox to report the problem. Andy Mitchell, its' founder, responded quickly and said he knew of the issue, but would need to work with RTM to resolve it as evidently the two applications were competing for the same Gmail resources. Sadly without chatting the code through with RTM [which they don't publish] he couldn't easily resolve it. Positively, he indicated that he'd be delighted to collaborate with RTM to fix this as he too realises these applications are perfect complements for each other and not competitors.

Sadly, I've had less luck speaking with RTM but I do hope that they will be as open to resolving the issue, as I'm sure many people would like to use both and evidently there are some 80,000 users of GTD Inbox currently denied the chance to use RTM. Come on RTM, please freshen the milk.

Labels: E-mail, Firefox, gmail, GTD Inbox, Remember The Milk

posted by John Wilson @ 4:46 PM Permanent Link ,

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User heaven on a Blackberry Thursday, April 24, 2008

I confess to being a blackberry fan and have used one for about 5 years, finding it indispensable. For the last few years, I've also been free of the shackles of a large corporate IT department and hence able to determine what gets installed on my device [8820].

However, I've found relatively few applications worthy of installing other than
- the superb Google maps for mobile, which integrates well with the device's GPS capability, notwithstanding Google maps inherent capability to provide approximate location data via mobile phone cell information
- Gmail for blackberry which offers me a backup in case problems arise with the T-mobile blackberry email as well as to access old emails

Whilst I added Opera mini browser, I almost never have cause to use it, finding the native browser being adequate in most cases. This allows me access to all of my internet services when I'm on the move.

As for the Facebook blackberry application, it was installed and quickly uninstalled, matching my waning interest in that social network.

Lately, it has been great to see an increasing number of applications being developed for data synchronisation with the blackberry to the "cloud". The consequences of losing the device and related data has always been a concern to me.

For instance, Google recently released a free blackberry calendar synch application, allowing your device calendar to be directly synchronised with Google calendar. I'm not using it because I'm happy with my alternate configuration that I described here. Obviously, many corporate users will have real-time synch of their calendar over the air with their Exchange server, but very handy for SMEs.

Yesterday, I read about a blackberry synchronisation application for Remember the Milk, which is a task manager that also integrates with Gmail via a Firefox extension. Sadly this is a paid for application.

I was also excited to come across TellMe's offering. A Microsoft subsidiary, and only operating in the USA at present, its' blackberry application provides a voice interface to a location based search service e.g. find local services. My interest related to a start-up I dealt with a few years ago who were focussed on exactly this space but whose ambitions were inhibited by the widespread absence of GPS enabled devices and cell data. Right idea, but ahead of its time in infrastructure terms.

The sad thing, as ever, is that many corporate blackberry users are denied access to many of these superb offerings because of IT department inertia or paranoia. If you don't have google maps as a minimum on your blackberry you should definitely complain.