May 2007 - Posts
So I just watched all the videos on Microsoft.com/surface. It really looks like great stuff. This is the technology you might have played with if you've visited the Microsoft Museum on campus in Redmond.
After looking at the nice site, and some rounded/moving video, I thought --- oh great. A perfect use of Silverlight. To my surprise, I right click and see it's flash player.
I don't get it. So many people at Microsoft have had access to Silverlight for many many months. Obviously some of these people were privy to the surface project.
Why not use Silverlight for this? Lack of adoption? Would it be considered bad practice to launch a product (surface) and have the home page force a Silverlight download? I guess I can see both sides, but my initial reaction, was disappointment.
I've heard from several people that memory over 2 gb is rarely used. I'm wondering if I should look into an extra gig of memory for my new machine (MacBookPro 17").
I run 100% of the time
- OS == Vista Ultimate
- Outlook 2007
- SQL Server process is on autostart
- snag it (in tray)
- efax (in tray)
- several other minor autoruns
and then for most of the day I have
- VS2005
- Another VS2005 (sometimes three)
- Trillian Chat
- Adobe Premier 2.0 for video editing -- I think the memory would really help here.
Those are the titles that I use most often, and I think would comsume the most memory.
Is it worth it for me to upgrade to 3GB of memory from 2GB?
In Yesterday's post, I talked about a great feature of www.ClearContext.com (an outlook add-in) that I really love. I'd like to make a feature request.
I would call it Folder Filtering. It wouls simple serve the purpose of finding a foder very quickly. As you saw yesterday, and in today's images, I have a ton of folders. It's just the way I organize my mail. I'm sure there are others with 100's or 1000's of folders in some cases. In the image below, where i've imposed the word "filter" would be the input (or anywhere really, this was just already there as an input so I used it as example). As I type, the folders below would hide, if they did not match.
The best part of this is that it may already be possible, and I just haven't found the feature (that would be so great).
This would TREMENDOUSLY help my find messages in specific folders. Basically it's the same feature that is used when "Filing" a message to a topic (which is mapped to a folder), but going the other direction. The message(s) are already over in that folder, and I need to get to that folder as quick as possible.
I have a 30-45 minute drive each way to work, depending on traffic. And luckily I have an www.Audible.com account, that feeds me more than enough listening material. I've just gone back and listened to "Getting Things Done". Ironically I'm not done listening to it.
But, I started looking around for outlook add-in's that compliment the GTD method. A bunch of my online companions pointed me to www.ClearContext.com. They have a free version, which I'm using, and I have to say .... I LOVE IT.
But I don't think I love it for the right reasons. OK, it has a ton of cool stuff that converts your messages to tasks and appoitments. It keeps track of conversations (although still not as nice as gmail).
Here is the reason this product is SO NICE for me. I'm not sure if there is a right or wrong way to store outlook emails, but this is how I do it. BY project or by person. Mostly by people. This means that I end up wtih hundreds of folders. Literally hundereds. Here is a snap shot of my people folder. Notice this is only A-D. And it's only the People folder. It works nicely for me, but it's difficult to file a message. I can either use the drag-n-drop method, or I can use CTRL+ALT+V, which brings up the outlook Move Message Dialog.
ClearContext brings me the solution. They have a "File Message" button. It pops up a dialog that shows me all my folders. Then I just start typing, and it limits the folders displayed to what matches my filter.
In a single second, I can file a message (or a whole thread) where before it would take me at least 5 seconds to file a message.
Here is a look at the popup for File Message.
It's a great time saver. I'm really really glad they have a free version. Now that I know there are time savers in there, I'm interested to see what's in the paid version.
I've recently upgraded to Vista, and the chat program I use for MSN, AOL, Yahoo is Trillian. It's a great piece of software, but it's not very Vista friendly. Or I don't have it setup correctly.
I'd love to see a Vista Version of Trillian, but I can't find one.
I've heard of GAIM (I think that's the name) and a few others, but I thought I'd ask for opinions on what others use like for cross-IM platform services.
TIA
If you were unable to make Mix, you can still watch all the sessions.
http://sessions.VisitMix.com
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