My wife's blogging

So, Beth has decided to start blogging.  She's quite good at it: she has a great voice and with the new camera her camera skills and eye are really helping out.  I've been helping out on the technical side, and snapping the occasional picture of her baking endeavors.

But there was a problem she's been having that has vexed the living hell out of us.  It seems Blogger's new post editor is really screwing with her line breaks.  I got sucked into the problem last night, and it frustrated the crap out of me, too.  What she was typing on screen did come through in the preview; it would smoosh all the lines together so a line return like this

was showing up like this
and so it went through the whole blog.  And when she added pictures - it all just got worse.

And there was another problem with the pictures - she's been complaining that they aren't the right size.  The new photo handler wants to make everything smaller - so even the large size in Blogger is smaller than what she uploaded to Picasa.


Seriously, she's been thinking of booting the whole thing.  She kinda likes some of the features of Picasa, but has really been eying up Flickr, attracted by the community aspect of it.  And there was the Wordpress movement a few months ago that has resurfaced.  The only thing that kept her with Blogger/Picasa was that it was fairly easy and seamless to post, handle pictures and then pull them in.  Well, not so much anymore.

So, this is in part a test to see if I can figure out what the issue is.....

Zaggnut

Today I am going to talk about my favorite iPhone accessory: the Zagg full body coverage InvisibleSHIELD.  I've played with a lot of cases for a lot of different gadgets.  I've elsewhere confessed to being a case-aholic (despite my wife's assertion that I'm a headphone-aholic), and I don't think I have ever been as satisfied as I am with the InvisibleSHIELD. 

When Beth and I first bought our iPhones, we purchased cases to go with them. The sales associate at the Apple store suggested one - a fairly slim, slightly rubberized, black model where the bottom slid off. I believe it was this one, the InCase Slider. I think we also bought some cheapy screen protectors at the time - or I tried to use the WriteRight protectors, or we went without. But shortly after our friend Tony bought his iPhone, he showed us the brand of screen protector he used - Power Support's Crystal Film, and we went and got that.

And that's when I (at least) started to have a problem.

The combo of the screen protector - which, btw, was excellent - with the case tended to curl up the screen protector at the edges unless you got it perfectly on the iPhone. Which I couldn't do. And I couldn't stand the bubbles along the edges where the case pushed up the screen protector. I reckoned that the screen protector was more important than the "shock absorption" the case was supposed to provide. And besides - despite claiming to be 1mm thick, it really felt like it added bulk to the iPhone.

So I abandoned the case.

Beth stuck with hers. In part because - well, she sometimes gets a case of the dropsies. In fact, her iPhone is not only ensconced en case, it is also swaddled in a quilted, Etsy-bought wallet ... thing. But after the better part of a year, the slightly rubberized surface started to peel away from the case, and she had lost the slider portion. So I gave her my unused one. That went well for a little while - but then the complaints started. Chiefly, she really came to hate the slider. She had lost it in the first place, and it was a real pain to slide the thing off and stick it in a charger. And I'm not making light of this. In order to pull the rather secure slider off the bottom, you had to grip the iPhone in a death grip and pull - which half the time led to sliding the part that wasn't supposed to slide off. I mean, it's good and all that it's secure and won't fall off - even in a tornado. But I cringed every time I tried to pull the thing off.

Also - it was black. Now, while a basic black suited my tastes just fine, it did not suit Beth's.

And then, lo, a co-worker came in with this case one day. iFrogz: Colorful, whimsical, same slightly rubberized feel. You can slide it off, but the bottom is designed to fit into most chargers, so you don't need to. I was intrigued. And then, when Beth and I were walking through the mall, we saw that one of the kiosks had them. She was intrigued, too.

But - in actuality - there was something else that caught my eye....

Back when I used my N800 for my PDA, I had experimented with several different screen protectors, but was never really satisfied with any of them. I liked the Zagg InvisibleSHIELD, but it really was hard to use a stylus with, and eventually removed it. Problem was, nothing else really grabbed my attention, and I think I went back to the WriteRights before I ended up getting an iPhone and putting the N800 (sadly) in a drawer.

So, guess what I found at that little kiosk? Yes, my old friend the Zagg InvisibleSHIELD. So, I bought Beth a pink iFrogz case, and myself the full bodied Zagg InvisibleSHIELD for iPhone.

Again - the application process is somewhat laborious. Peel it off the backing, douse front and back with lubricating mist, slap it on there, position it, squeegee the water off, and wait. But doing it the second time. Not too bad. I did have a bit of a time with stray particles once I got the thing on, and at that point it's a bear to pull the thing off, remove an offending particle, and then put it back down. Let's just say my trigger finger got a good work-out with all the spritzing of lubricating mist, and my forearms feel a lot stronger now from trying to peel this stuff back; let me tell you, it really holds on. And, to be completely truthful, I now have a couple of barely noticeable but somewhat disappointing "creases" in the front screen and there are a couple of nicks and blemishes here and there because I couldn't leave well enough alone. (But they are better than the offending hair or little piece of whatever.)

But let me tell you - I love this "case." All the things that I had trouble with on the N800 are plusses here. The iPhone has no stylus - so there's no problem with the SHIELD's improved grip grabbing the stylus. A finger glides smoothly across the surface. The pebbled surface - actually it's the only thing that let's you know it's there. Crystal clear and 

somewhat glossy at the wrong angle, but I haven't had a problem with it in actual use. And let me tell you, the grip on the iPhone is vastly improved and ... warm. I guess it's because I'm grabbing rubberized surface and not cold plastic and aluminum. The screen also stays incredibly clean - despite oily fingers - much better than Power Support's Crystal. (Though the Anti-Glare was fine.)

I had some abrasions on the back of the iPhone, having eschewed a case and stuck it in my pocket for the better part of a year. The InvisbleSHIELD almost perfectly hides those scratches, and now my iPhone feels almost just new. No shock absorption (and just how much real "shock absorption" do one of those cases give you?), but it adds no additional bulk to the iPhone. You can't even tell it's there! And again - this stuff was designed to protect military helicopter blades - thus the helicopter on the packaging. From past experience, this stuff is tough and just does not scratch.

Outside of a less-than-easy application procedure, Zagg's InvisibleSHIELD is simply the best case/screen protector for the iPhone.

Quick update, because I've been busy

Quick update, because I've been excruciatingly busy in doing my real, day-job stuff - and other little ventures - and thus haven't kept up lately.

Just got back from vacation and there have been a number of little things to have happened lately.

iPhone 3.0 software came out. Pretty much liking it. I know other people have been complaining about hangs and lags and crashes, but I haven't had too many. I attribute that to a little app I picked up called FreeMemory. I believe there's a small price, but it does a couple of nice things: shows the actual percentage of battery power I had left (I can't tell you how many times I've looked at the icon and said - oh, I have like 60% still there, only to find it was 38%), the amount of memory I had left (and when the iPhone is getting laggy, it's because the memory has dropped to around 4M), and - if over 4M - allows you to free memory up - making it run more efficiently. This is a godsend, because as I discovered, 3.0 seems to reprogram what happens when you hold the Home button. Used to be, it force quit the app - exited out of the program and dumped it from memory, rather than closing the program down but still - while not exactly running in the background - retained a bit of memory back there. That's gone, and holding down the iPhone's button does nothing on the iPhone 3G. (A little research shows it's supposed to bring up voice commands on the 3GS, but ... erg.) This guy says you can force quit by holding down the sleep/wake button until the slider appears, letting go, and then pressing the Home button; yeah, I haven't gotten that to work. This post provides more detail - hold in the Home button for 6 seconds. This means it takes a long hold on one button, switch to another button, and hold that for even longer. It takes like 10 seconds just to quit the entire program; and that kinda blows. Yeah, FreeMemory.

I got Google Voice - which seems really cool. I'm still sorta configuring it and figuring out what I can do. But I really like the idea that I can give out one number and then I can do all sorts of stuff with it - have my wife ring every device I have, have a special greeting for her (I'm thinking "Hey there, gorgeous," in my best Barry White), block people I don't want to talk to (Omaha Steaks, are you listening?), have people send SMS messages to me that only go to my Verizon phone - but allow me to retrieve and send SMS messages on the iPhone (or computer for that matter). Many wonderful things.

I just took advantage of Verizon's New Every Two and got an LG Chocolate 3. I pretty much like it, but I'm still playing with it. Impressions: the ear piece and speaker are plenty loud, but almost too clear - in a way that kinda gives way to tinniness and distortion, and isn't at all natural. Harsh, in a word. The all plastic body feels cheap (especially compared to my old LG flip phone - RIP.) And I can see what they mean by the keys feel slippery and that's not helped by it being a smudge-fest surface. BUT, I'm liking this phone. It's light and thin, the keys are plenty big, I think I can eliminate some of that harshness by keeping the volume lower (especially if it's plenty loud), the front view screen is nice and large, and - AND - it has a full sized headphone jack. And works with my Decoy's (and my wife's enV2's) power jack - which is power adapter to USB to USB.

With the new phone, I've been playing with making ring tones to replace the ring tones I had ported to the old flip but got discouraged with the Decoy and never ported there. And along with that, found a snappy way to make iPhone ring tones for free off non-DRM'ed music. Excitée. WavePad has been a component of making the Verizon ringtones - and works well. Supposedly I can use that to make iPhone ringtones as well; we'll see.

Well, off to another meeting, so more detail later.

Quick on the Draw

I've been keeping some graphics programs on my iPhone, and it's time to trim the fat.

What I wanted with a graphics program was an "eletronic napkin." Back when I was teaching college classes, I also used to joke that I loved to draw, it was just that I wasn't very good at it. Drawing someone a picture sometimes goes a long way to explaining it to them, and I also find when I'm really stuck, getting that concept on to paper is a great way to sort out thoughts. And the iPhone would seem to be a great platform for doing just that.

I'm not looking to create art - fine or otherwise - here. I just want an app that will give me plenty of space to work, and allow me to have some fairly decent fine-grained control of lines and shapes. Color fills would be nice - though not necessary. And text capabilities (for labelling) would be great. I'm not asking for Visio here, but the basic ability to draw a bunch of boxes and cylinders, some arrowed lines connecting them, and the ability to label all the doodads. An undo capability - to correct those stray marks you make - and an eraser to just get rid of something that just doesn't work - is a must. Being able to export it somehow - email it, save it to the Camera Roll, push it up to a network - is a key feature, as is the ability to retrieve the drawing and keep working at it.

But so far, I haven't found a program that I like.

I had grabbed two graphics programs - Sketches and NetSketch - and I wasn't using either of them.

Sketches is a rather neat little app. Your pictures and drawings are presented as pictures tacked to a corkboard. Touch one of them, and it loads onto the screen. You have a rather rudimentary zoom in the upper right hand corner - zoom in, or zoom out. Across the bottom, there are a number of tools.

The first - a back arrow - allows you to undo your last several actions. Unfortunately, I see no way to redo what you did, if you decide you rather liked it the way it was - or if you mistakenly hit the Undo button (like I just did).

You then have the main drawing tool - Ink. You have the ability to select the opacity of the line - or, alternatively, to make the pencil into an eraser, the line thickness, and lastly the color (24 of them). The selector is pretty straightforward, but make sure you select your color last; that selection shuts down the dialogue and returns you, ink in hand, to the picture you are about to work on. It works the way you would expect it to. Make your choices, then drag your finger across the picture; a trail of the thickness, opacity, and color is left behind. The eraser is a little tricky. It erases the foreground only. It uses the line thickness, but doesn't give you any way of knowing what exactly you're erasing, so you spend a lot of time going over and over an area trying to remove the last little trace of that line.

Next up is the Shapes tool. You are presented with a grid of nine categories, two of which are your traditional drawing tools - geometric and text - and the remaining seven are more properly thought of as stamps. Geometric presents you with choices for line, arrow line, box, oval, and filled box and filled oval. These utilize the settings that you have selected in Ink - color, opacity, and thickness - to create these various shapes. You place them by using multitouch - two fingers define the diametrically opposed points of the shape. Spread or pinch to change the size and shape of the object. It's a good idea, and works a lot better on geometric shapes, but still feels awkward at times.

Text uses the same basic concept. You are presented with a dialogue that invites you to enter the text you want to place, and gives you a choice of three fonts: Helvetica (sans serif), "Times New" (serif), and the iPhone's default "Marker Felt." Once you type in the text and hit Go, you can position and size the text with the two finger approach. Again, it takes the opacity and color from the Ink settings.

The other stamps work much the same way - six predefined graphics for each of the other seven categories that you can place and size using the two finger multi-touch. The graphics look fine, and they're really made to enliven the photographs you take. Add text balloons, for instance, or put a party hat on your girlfriend. But in some cases they can be really frustrating. Just try shrinking down a game controller to get it between your cat's paws; your fingers are swiftly blotting out the picture as you pinch it to make it small enough, and you can't see where you have it, and the attitude (pitch and yawl) of the thing. And worse, once you take your fingers up - it's there to stay.

You have six types of backgrounds to choose from: snap a picture to serve as the background, pull a picture form your albums, fill with a solid color, specify a web-page, specify a map, or choose from a library of six backgrounds (sketch, leather, graph paper, yellow note, white note, or blue print). For the web, you get to specify a webpage to capture, but frustratingly you can only map your present location. The library images - rather than be helpful - are more gimmicky than anything else.

Lastly, there's a "forward" option which lets you export the image to the camera roll, email the drawing, push it up to Twitter(!), or push it to your desktop using a built-in web server (which is pretty cool).

The real purpose for Sketches, therefore, is fun. For example, the color pallette is, for lack of a better term, party themed. Its 24 colors are not exactly pastels, but light and bright. Gimmicks (the cork board, the backgrounds, the stamps) abound. The app is really designed to let you snap a picture of your cat, put a Santa hat on him, a text balloon saying "Ho fucking Ho," and then upload it to Twitter and email it to your friends as a holiday eCard. It does that well, but it's not really what I want in my drawing program; really difficult to draw database cylinders and application boxes.

NetSketch has one absolutely killer feature, and it's the reason I held on to it for so long. You can zoom in and out of a drawing without limit using pinch and spread, creating an infinite piece of paper. Scrolling around is easy, as well, utilizing two fingers. How and why do you want to use this? Well, imagine you want some really small text. You zoom in until the area is big enough for you to use your finger to "draw" the letters of the text, and then zoom out to make the letters small, and - for example - draw a box around your now really small text. It's really smooth, and works really well, and I wish other drawing apps would utilize this zoom approach.

Unfortunately, NetSketch is rather primitive in the rest of its toolset. It basically seeks to freehand draw everything, and it has what I guess is a pencil and paintbrush in a cup but looks more like the Flying Spaghetti Monster. In the FSM, you can configure three paintbrushes - in three tabs - with different thicknesses and colors. The color picker is expansive - allowing you to pick a color from a spectrum. Click OK and then draw away.

Next, you get an eye-dropper tool to pick the exact same color that's already in your picture (in case you chose a different color with the FSM). Next to that is a screen re-centering tool, which fits your entire image on the screen - sort of resetting the view for really big canvasses. The multi-stage undo is a little different, and well conceived: rather than undoing a brush stroke, you undo sections of the stoke. Draw a box in one smooth stroke, and you step through undoing the box in four distinct pieces. Sounds like a bit of a pain, but allows you to not throw the baby out with the bath water.

Lastly, NetSketch has an export feature which allows you to Replay(!) the drawing, send to your camera roll, email, or upload to NetSketch.

NetSketch's big selling point is that allows you to share your drawing over the internet, including only a select number of people you specify. Looking at the community drawings, it's fairly impressive what others have come up with. And that is sort of what NetSketch is about. It has some nice free-hand drawing tools, which - when combined with the infinite zoom - really allows you to get creative. And then it has tools for you to share your creativity with others. You can even share your drawing over your network so others can pick it up, duplicate it, see how you went about drawing it, and generally have at it.

But again - it's not what I'm looking for. To its credit, I used NetSketch to do the one useful drawing thing that I've done with my iPhone: sketch out a new Mobtown website. I had an idea, wanted to sketch it out in full color, and made a go of it with NetSketch. It worked, more or less, especially zooming in to enter the navigation labels. But it all looks really sort of ... melty and off-kilter. Again - it's all free hand drawing. There is no text, there is no way to generate a cylinder or a box or a fill. There are no backgrounds, there are no stamps. And while I don't need all those things, remember - I like to draw, but I'm not good at it. I really need the computer's help to draw a reasonable looking box, not something that looks like a stuffed Glad trash bag. And that's sort of when I stopped using it.

And that brings me to my latest attempt: iDoodle2. Once you get past the janky light blue coloring, this app has quite a few nice features that make it surprisingly nice. First, there's a User's Guide. Rudimentary, but very worthwhile. Next, the interface works quite well. Across the bottom of the app are four tools and a Menu button. The tools show you what the current settings are. The menu gives you access to a few very nice things: new, save, edit the background, replay (!), the gallery, preferences, and the user's guide.

While each one is a separate button, Tools, Line, and Fill work together as tabs. Under tools, you can choose the freehand pen (and control thickness and sharpness), a line (choose thickness), a blob, text (you choose size of font), rectangle, oval, erase (choose thickness, sharpness, and opacity!), and eyedropper (choose to select line or fill color). The line tab allows you to choose the opacity of the line with a palette of 16 colors - or you mix your own colors with an RGB slider. Same with fill. Your selections are automatically reflected in the icons at the bottom and the other tools, so you can see what a blob with fuzzy, mostly clear black borders and a grey fill will look like. Astonishingly, it appears that you can even select a color gradient for fills! Use the color preview near the top, and select either end to specify the colors in a gradient, or the middle to select a solid color.

What's it like to create a new drawing? At start up, the menu pops up; select New Doodle and you are taken to the Edit background screen. Editing the background allows you to select a fill color (including a gradient fill), snap a picture with the camera, or select from your photo albums. Once your background is set up, tap on Tools (or Line or Fill) and configure your drawing tool. For example, select Blob, with a green line color (for the outline of the blob), and a light green fill color (using the Advanced color sliders). Click done and start dragging your finger on the screen in a roughly circular, blobby shape. No need to connect the beginning and the end; when you pick up your finger, the blob completes, and fills itself in with the color you chose. The other tools work similarly. Choose the Oval, for example, tap on the screen and drag the oval out. Text is vaguely the same. Choose text, type in your text, select the text size via the slider, and then slightly tap and drag to place your text on the screen.

The zooming capabilities are a little disappointing: double tap and you zoom in. But here's a nice feature. The zoom icon works as a toggle; zoom in and then tap the zoom icon and now you can drag the zoom window around the entire image. The icon reflects what piece of the entire image the zoom window is looking at. To edit, tap the zoom icon again and go at it. Double tap to zoom back out.

A couple of other points about the drawing experience. Look out for the opacity settings! By default, all objects are at about 50% opacity. This is fine for most things, but when you start laying objects on top of each other, the results may not be what you expected. I found them rather interesting - an almost watercolor quality. Want to "deepen" the color? Just keep drawing over the same area. When you get the hang of it, it looks rather cool and you can get some interesting layering effects, but the first time you do it, you're left wondering what you did.

The undo/redo feature uses a rather creative approach. To undo (or even multi-undo) what you just did, you need to tip the iPhone to the left and return it to its upright mode. It's taken me quite a lot of practice and I still don't get it right half the time. It feels like you really need to whip the iPhone in order to get it to work, and a good chunk of the time, I end up redoing instead of undoing. (Redoing is accomplished by tipping the iPhone to the right.) In fact, sometimes I give up and whip it to the right to get it to undo. Interesting etch-a-sketch-like approach, but one that could be smoother.

Your export choices are limited: click Save Doodle and you can either save it to the gallery (to keep working on it), or "publish" the drawing to your camera roll. No, you can't share it over the web or email directly from the program or even post to Twitter. That's a small problem in my way of thinking; I've got Twitterfon, so I can post the pic to Twitter. I can email to anyone, including myself, from the Camera Roll. And besides, the drawings are in a proprietary format, so I'm not sure what good sending them to my desktop directly from the app is going to get me.

And, in fact, as I type this I see there is an update for iDoodle2 which promises better text support (including fonts and shadows), a smart pen offset (so your penpoint isn't totally obscured by your finger), multitouch zoom and pan (can't wait to see if that brings it closer to NetSketch's use of zoom), and Undo button, and a couple of other features, such as a Child Mode, saved tool settings, and rotation of background images. Stay tuned for an Update!

Stuff I'm taking off my iPhone

Well, long-winded Jott post aside, here's what else I'm taking off of my iPhone, and why....

iWant - It was my survivor of the "service location app" wars. I tried several of them, and this looked like it wasn't necessarily the best, but it did more things well than the other options - ATMs, pharmacies, bars and restaurants, movies, gas, etc. I think one of the reviews pointed out that everything it did could pretty much be done with Google Maps. Looking back at it, yeah - it does work pretty well, good interface - but again - I've used it maybe once, and that was right after I got it, I think. I have used the Google Maps search function to find more things, plus I have Urbanspoon to look up bars and restaurants and Now Playing for movies, and I've never really had a problem finding gas. But it's taking up space, so I'm going to get rid of it....

YouNote - I was searching around for a better notepad app, and this won amongst several other choices. I like the fact that it has several different types of notes (text, drawing, camera, voice, web, and multinote), that I can tag and color code and sort on three matrices. But it is less than ideal in that a) I can't rotate the screen, b) there's no formatting, c) I can synch my notes to my PC using a desktop app - but it doesn't really use the Cloud. I think I'll stick with Evernote, which is Cloud-based, even if I can't format the notes in the iPhone app (but I can in the desktop application and web interface, and it shows up fine in the iPhone app) or rotate the screen. Plus - Evernote also allows for a variety of notes (not a drawing note, alas - but voice and camera notes), and eliminates redundancy.

PanoLab - Neat functionality - stitching photos together into panoramas. But the fact is, I can do this with PhotoShop elements - and I can do it better. I will likely not be doing any major photo manipulation on the iPhone and wait until I can load the photos onto the main computer.

Photogene - Similar thing. Decent functionality, but photo manipulation is better done on the desktop.

Sketches and/or NetSketch - Both of these are drawing programs. I'm thinking I should keep one of these - I don't have this functionality. But I'm not sure which one. I believe Sketches has better functionality, but NetSketch does allow you to share with other NetSketch people and collaborate on drawings via WiFi. I doubt I'm going to use this feature, and I'll likely stay with Sketches. But I might remove both - I haven't actually needed to use either.

There are others that I haven't used much - Units, Truveo, Shazam, Stanza, USA Manual, Baseball, Geocaching, QwasiPad (which seems to have stopped working), Easy Wi-Fi (which has never worked, but I think there's something wrong with my AT&T account and my phone). Plus there are a slew of games that have lost their luster but I just don't want to get rid of, namely Koi and Ocarina. But given that I'm about to kill Jott, at least 5 of the above apps, and I'm replacing my on screen web bookmarks with iDash Pad (a total of 5 bookmarks) - that's a total of 11 slots, about 2/3 of a page.

Good thing, because I've got several new apps I want to try....

Phoning It In

So, here's the quandary I'm in right now.

I have too many iPhone apps. I have almost five full pages of apps, and by God, that's too many. I need to start cutting them down. It's not that I mind five pages of apps, but I put some thought into creating logical categories of apps - 1 or 2 per page - and now that's thrown to hell. So I have to start trimming.

I'm a pack rat - and I think the reason I'm a pack rat is I always think - well, what if I need that later on. It's the same with my apps. There are several that I haven't used in awhile, and quite a few of those that I keep thinking - well, what if I need that later on? Better keep it.

It has to stop.

Now, one of the reasons I think I might "need it later on" is, quite frankly, I paid for the bleeping thing, and even if it was only $1.99 I hate to waste money on it. After all, I can't get my money's worth if it's not even on my device, can I? It's a bad attitude, I think, and just leads to me not being able to find stuff and my productivity - the thing the iPhone and the Cloud are supposed to enhance - takes a hit.

Another possibility is that it has some decent functionality that seems neat. But if I'm not using it - I'm not getting the benefit of that functionality. It also leads to a situation where I have some ill-thought-out redundancy. For example, I have two apps that do drawing. Each one has a decent feature or two that the other one doesn't have. I've kept both because - I never know when I'm going to need that feature! But I don't need two programs for it. In truth, I might not even need one - since I haven't used either enough to be happy with it....

You might notice that this entry is tagged "Cloud" - and that might seem to be a bit of a stretch when ostensibly this article is about iPhone apps. But my dedication to the Cloud concept is such that I think it should also be a feature in my iPhone apps. Does this app represent not just synching, but does it include a healthy Cloud consideration? All things being equal, I should keep an app that addresses the Cloud in some way, and get rid of the non-connected or just synch-to-a-desktop-program apps.

So enough of a preamble. On to today's thingamabob: Jott.

First, I love Jott the service. I first was turned on to Jott by Nozbe (more on that in another post) and then a David Pogue article hit pretty quickly after it. As Pogue says, Jott is your personal dictation service. It's pretty cool. You call up Jott, it asks you, "Who do you want to Jott?", you make a sort of coded reply, it confirms your choice, and then you dictate your message. The Jott service takes that message and does a pretty good job of translating it into text, and then - and here's the real killer feature - it does something with it.

That something is largely up to the way you have it configured, and in part based upon whether or not you want to pay. Jott connects to a variety of services through what it terms "Links," and some of the things it can connect to are blogs (Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, Live Journal), social networking services (Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr), about a million To Do applications (my personal fave Nozbe, but also Remember the Milk, Toodledo, Mentat, 30 Boxes, 43 Actions), plus a few others - like Google Calendar and Trapster. You can also create a list of contacts and dictate text messages or emails to them. And you can group those contacts and send out dictated text messages to the whole group. Jott essentially adds an easy voice entry system to all these things - blogs, calendars, to do lists, text messaging, and email.

Jott also claims to be a literal feed reader. On the go, but want to sort through your Engadget articles? Huffington Post? New York Times? Yahoo! Weather? ESPN? Jott can hook you up. It works, but throws you into a different area. (When asked "Who do you want to Jott?" you have to respond "Jott Feeds," and after confirming, you're asked what feed you want, with a typical phone-based menu - "Say or press 1 for the New York Times....") The machine voice is also a little tough to understand sometimes, due to a combination of flat tone and even pace. A neat idea, but one that is far from its core functionality.

The bad news, however, is that Jott isn't content with serving merely as a conduit to all these other things; it also fancies itself as a listmaker/todo app in its own right. You can leave notes for yourself, and organize Jotts into myriad lists. And you can check them off. Jott can send you a reminder on these items, as well.

The cool thing is that these items are all housed in the Cloud, on Jott servers, and there are several ways to interact with them. First, you can create Jotts through your cell phone(s). While your account is linked to one phone, you can set it up to recognize multiple phones (I have both my Verizon and iPhone pointing to it). Real manipulation of Jotts can be done via the website, a small desktop dashboard, or a newly re-engineered iPhone app.

Neat ideas, but Jott really suffers in the execution of all this functionality. It's a pretty simple and straightforward - almost elegant - list maker. You make a Jott, either by phoning it in, typing at a full browser, or tapping away on the iPhone. You can say it's a priority. You can move it to other lists. You can check it off and delete it..... and that's about it. Jotts are really wedded to their lists, so much so that you can move a Jott from Notes (which seems to be the generic catch-all area) into a list, but you can't move it out of the list and into Notes. You can see "All lists" and in the website version you can look at all the Jotts underneath each list. But you can't see all Jotts irrespective of the list that they're in.

Inside a list, you can sort Jotts by Date, Done, and Priority. You can move completed items to the trash (where they stay around forever until you empty the trash). Even in the website's All Lists view, you can't sort across lists. You also can't reorder Jotts within the list other than the specified Sorts - and I found that crippling. Have three priority Jotts and 10 non-priority Jotts, but one of those priority items really needs to be done first, and half of the non-priority Jotts aren't really important at all? Tough. Date, Done, or Priority.

Now, this simplicity might all be fine with you - and I found the approach appealing. So much so that I decided to try it in a full test run. I had Nozbe - a GTD to do list application - for all my personal things; but I had just moved into a new position and was getting a slew of tasks associated with work projects. I didn't want to crowd Nozbe with both my personal things and my work things; I initially started to and found that my next action list was getting HUGE. So I figured, let's try Jott. The functionality seemed like it would work, a different list for every project. And I could press the phone input into double duty - for personal things use a Nozbe link, and for work things either direct it to the Notes box or into one of the native Jott lists. If I was at work, I could easily type in a text Jott. In a meeting? I could use the iPhone app.

Entry was easy, and it worked really well. The problem for me came in trying to organize the Jotts. The thing I really like about the GTD approach - especially as executed through Nozbe - is that I can create tasks and put them into projects/categories. I can thus organize and deal with them that way and I can also pull the tasks I need to do now into "next actions" and view those all at once. You can't do this in Jott.

But this was a small quibble, I figured. Jott doesn't bill itself as a GTD tool, and this approach is really one of the hallmarks of GTD. Where I really became frustrated was in trying to sort the Jotts. What I swiftly came to realize was that I was adding Jotts true to their namesakes - I just wanted to jot things down, without worrying about what order they were supposed to go in. Frequently, I'll jot something down and realize - "Ooh. But before I do that, I have to do this." No such luck in Jott: Date, Done, or Priority. Going by Date, that is going to show up before this. I can prioritize this, but what if this and that have to do be done (prioritized) before some other thing? Again, both being prioritized, that shows up before this.....

Now, I also had some quibbles with the first version of the Jott iPhone software. It's layout really caused problems, because unlike the website, I couldn't see all my lists, even. I could display the three most important lists as icons at the bottom of the screen (and keep an icon for Recording), but as I came up with more work projects, I was coming up with more lists, and they (and Notes) were buried in the "More" icon. It just got really difficult to manage. To boot, using the dictation never seemed to work right. I would make a dictation, Jott would tell me to come back in a few minutes, and I would come back days later and it wouldn't be updated. That seems to be corrected in this latest version, which is a lot slicker and has a much better layout. But, still, the basic problem remains - I can't sort anything. As a to do list application, it still has problems - not as full featured as something like Nozbe, and in point of truth, it lacks some of the functionality of Zenbe lists (also Cloud-based, also very simple - a check box and the item - but with the added ability to actually move and hand-sort the items).

So, I'm going to remove the Jott app from my iPhone - but I'm going to keep my (pay) service because of the killer ability to use my phones to jot items, on the fly, into Facebook, Nozbe, GCal, and yes - with this little hack (also referenced here) - my Jotts end up in Evernote, as well. And that means, I can bypass Jott's software service even for those random notes that aren't status updates, appointments, or to do items. And that alone is worth it.

Google Syncing ... with better Contacts

Just noticed this recently.  Well, noticed it before I knew about it.

Last week, Google opened up synchronization of calendar and contacts with a bunch of devices, including the iPhone.  Pretty damned sweet.  

I had been using Nuevasync to do just about the same thing (basically set up your Google account through an Exchange server so your iPhone could sync with it).  It worked pretty well, but I did have some qualms with giving these guys access to my Google account, but, you know ... gift horse.  This just did the calendar synchronization, and it worked pretty well.  I was overjoyed at a clean way to get my calendar entries from GCal onto the iPhone, and even elevated the native iPhone Calendar app to my front page. 

I had also purchased Sync in a Blink to synchronize my contacts between GMail and the iPhone.  Sorta worked.  It was a bit of a laborious process to get things to match, and I ended up with a ton of duplicates that I was trying to slog through.  And the merging function was pretty laborious.  But it worked - got my GMail contacts and iPhone contacts all living in one, happy, dysfunctional family.  

And then they went and made a French version of it and fried the English version, so I was waiting.

But then Google came along and solved both problems in one great leap.  I made the changes right away, and then repeated it for my wife's iPhone.  Huzzah!

The process is pretty simple.  You basically:

1. Set up an Exchange account on the iPhone in the Mail, Contacts, Calendar, area of Settings
2. for the server use m.google.com

And basically you're set.

The step I initially missed and created some frustration was this:

Access m.google.com/sync from your mobile device.  This will allow you to choose up to five calendars to sync between your device and GCal.

The one bummer is that you can't seem to control the colors your calendar appears in on the iPhone.  The first calendar - your personal calendar - appears to always be red.  A bit of a bummer when my personal GCal calendar color is blue, and my wife's calendar is a hot pink; those colors sorta get transposed.  Spent about 15 minutes playing around with ordering things a bit, and at best it seemed like a slippery eel trying to get the calendars ordered.

So, I started mucking around with my contacts.  Now, GMail's contacts have been much maligned.  They were originally designed as sort of an afterthought, and sucked in every contact you had any email contact with.  After awhile, they added a couple of standard contact fields, and allowed you to add custom fields. 

But it appears that along with sync, they've updated their Contacts functionality.  Now, some of this might be because - with the Contacts functionality so poor at the outset - I largely stopped paying attention to what they were doing.  Some of this might have been in place for awhile.  (Though I must say, I checked in only a few months ago when I was looking at how to get friends' Shared feeds into Google Reader - which included some reference to a Preferred Group or something which I never figured out; at the time, Contacts did not look this different.)

The long and the short, from what I can tell is:

1. They've allowed for better grouping of Contacts. Much easier.  I was dragging and dropping people around, assigning them to multiple Groups.  Though they really should stick with one metaphor and keep it as labeling your contacts.  They now have essentially the same functionality in GMail, Contacts, and GDocs - and arguably in GCal - and they call it something different in each one.  Labeling, Groups, Folders, and Calendars.  But along with this better Groupness, they now have a Group called My Contacts.  You can move contacts in and out of My Contacts.  It's this group that gets synced with your devices.  All the other flotsam is still there, under All Contacts, but nicely separated out. 
2. Merge.  Merge is very nice - much nicer than Sync in a Blink - though that's largely because you have the whole screen to look at and it's mostly a manual process.  You click the checkboxes on multiple Contacts, click Merge these x contacts...  and it does a pretty good job of merging all the details together, you just have to click OK.  

As some people have pointed out, this increased functionality now means that Google has pretty much the same functionality as MobileMe.  I don't know; I don't have MobileMe, but this is a pretty big step in terms of Google functionality through the Cloud.  Now, if only they'd allow me to edit my docs on the iPhone....

Eeeeew. Janky.

More news on the GMail new labels functionality front.

First, here's the page where they give more info.

But I just tried something that really didn't work.  I got an email that I wanted to reply to.  So I hit the reply button and typed my reply.  I had just installed the Send & Archive button from Google Labs, so I figured I would use that.  But first I needed to label the thread.  

Conveniently, GMail repeats the button bar at the bottom of the email as well as the top.  So, rather than scroll up to the top to apply the label, then down to the bottom again to hit Send & Archive, I figured - cool, I can just use the Label button here at the bottom before I hit Send & Archive - no scrolling!

I hit the Label button and the "menu" popped up; or rather, like the original drop down box - because it ran out of room at the bottom - it "dropped up."  No problem.  But rather than scroll through the list of labels, I started to use auto-complete, and type my label in the box.  

And that's when all hell broke loose.  The "menu" dropped to below the button, briefly showed what I had typed, filtered the labels to correspond - and then disappeared.  The screen had shifted up - so half of my reply window was buried at the bottom.  And I lost my I-bar cursor.  All in like .5 seconds.

I figured it was because the list had run out of room at the bottom when it tried to filter, so I scrolled all the way down to the bottom of the screen hoping to purchase a little more real estate, and tried it again.  Same thing.

So I hit 'l' to try to bring up the menu manually, only to find that, in fact, the "menu" was still there - the 'l' was the next character entered in the auto-complete box.   But it was way at the bottom of the screen, and the box was the only thing you could see - you couldn't see the filtered list of labels.  Sometimes, I would get the very first label in the list - but I knew there were others that should be there.  So I would grab the browser's slider to slide down and ...  the "menu" disappeared.

I tried a variety of ways, and found out that I could use the arrow keys to push the page down and see more of the list, but if I scrolled past the last, "create new" entry on the list - the screen sorta bounced....  I also found that if you clicked on some blank area and then hit 'l' to bring up the Label "menu," it took you to the top to draw the "menu" under the top button.

I gave up and scrolled to the top, selected my label, scrolled back down, and hit Send & Archive.

What I would have liked, and expected, was that - like the original drop down, which dropped "up" when it didn't have enough room to drop down - the "menu" would have stayed put when I started auto-complete, rather than trying to redraw itself under the labels button (or whatever it was doing) and totally reorienting the screen.  It basically scuttles what would have been some convenient functionality between the Label button (which appears at top and bottom of a thread) and the Send & Archive button (which only appears at the bottom of a compose/reply box), and instead creates a perplexed frustration. 

Some more thoughts on the labels "menu."  

1. I complained that, after hitting the Label button, if I wanted to use auto-complete, I had to remove my hands from the mouse, and start typing.  I would get a winnowed down list - which was cool.  Unless it brought up a unique label, I initially thought I then had to lift my hand off the keyboard to go back to the mouse and point and click in order to apply the correct label.  A nit - but it took away from the "smooth" feel of the previous More Actions drop down.  
   
   I soon discovered that - after using auto-complete to winnow down the list - I could use arrow keys to navigate to the one label I wanted, hit Enter, and apply the label.  So far so good.  
   
   But what if I wanted to apply multiple labels - which the new functionality makes provisions for with the check box?  The example I used was - I have multiple Friends labels: Friends/Bob, Friends/Charise, Friends/Dennis.  What if my email involved both Bob and Dennis, and I wanted to apply both labels?  Then I would have to do the awkward mouse-point-click-keyboard-type-type-mouse-point-click-point-click dance for a fairly simple thing.  I mean, using the keyboard is supposed to be faster - but I can't use the keyboard to its fullest.
   
   The reason?  I cannot use the arrow keys to select multiple labels.  Remember, you have to hit Enter, and Enter applies the label but closes the "menu."  In order to select multiple labels, I need to mouse click on their checkboxes.  It would be nice if, say, I could navigate to the label with the arrow keys and hit the space bar, which checks the box.  But I can't do that, because the I-cursor remains in the auto-complete box.  So if I hit space, not only does it not check the box, it inserts a space in my auto-complete "search."  And I don't have labels that start "fr " - so my list of choices gets winnowed down to nothing.  Not good.
   
   
2. There is something that is really cool about this functionality if you want to remove a label using the Labels button.  In most situations, it's likely more efficient just to click on the little 'x' to the right of the label, but if you're in the Labels "menu" and want to remove a label... the email's applied labels all appear at the top of the list, nicely checked.  In one operation, you can uncheck the label(s) that you want to remove, and then go and find the label(s) you want to add, and then hit Apply. 
   
   This is much better than the previous functionality, where you had to scroll all the way down to the bottom of More Actions to get to the Remove labels section.  And if you were removing multiple labels, you had to do it again, and again..... 
   
   I can see this being very useful when I erroneously label and archive something.  Previously, if I pulled up everything with that (bad) label, and removed the label first, well, it would sorta disappear into the ether.  I used to have to first label it with the correct label, hit the More Actions button again, scroll all the way to the bottom, and Remove the label.  Now, it's just a simple operation of checking and unchecking, in no particular order, and committing the changes when I hit the Apply link at the bottom of the "menu."

So final thoughts?  I am really growing to like this Label functionality.  (I doubt I will use the Move to button, and would really like a way to get rid of it.  Additionally, I think this functionality could be much better accomplished with a drag and drop, as it appears in most every other email program AND in Google Documents.)  There are some really nice things which, in general, are far superior to the way the old More Actions drop down worked.  I am quickly becoming enamored of the whole checkbox approach.  But the thing still needs work to really tighten up the functionality and make it consistently good.  It just doesn't feel like everything has been completely worked and thought out, and instead its potential is marred.  This wouldn't be a problem if it were, say, a Labs feature - I sort of expect that.  But the fact that this was treated as core functionality....  Well, I'm a little disgruntled ... and worried.   

Google just did something funny

Google just did something funny with GMail. I now have, on an open email, buttons for "Move to" and "Labels." "More actions" no longer contains labels.

I don't remember it this way, and my wife's email doesn't display the changes. Is it a browser thing - I run my stuff in Firefox, and she runs her's in Chrome.

"Move to" appears to apply the label and then archive it. "Labels" appears to ... label ... the email. Kinda dumb.... There's a search box at the top of each button to search through the list of labels, and a Manage labels link at the bottom....

Similar changes to the Inbox....

That's all the changes I can see right now....

Happens in IE 6 as well. And now in Chrome as well. (Signed out of wife's account and into mine.) And now that I've signed into my wife's account - it's there as well.

And here we go....

"But it's not always obvious how to use labels, especially for people
who are new to Gmail and used to using folders, and it hasn't helped
that some common tasks have been more complicated than they should be.
For instance, to move an email out of your inbox and into a label you
first had to apply the label using the "More actions" menu and then
click "Archive."

It looks like it's also supposed to have auto-complete. Okay, there we go. The little "search" box is the auto-complete feature; start typing and it winnows down the list to all labels starting with those letters. Sorta helpful, because I have like 10 million labels.....

And they've added some keyboard shortcuts: press 'v' to bring up the "Move to" button, and 'L' to bring up the "Labels" button.

Huh. Odd they should cater to "people who are new to Gmail" - and allow them circumvent the second best feature of GMail and return to the crappy old "folder-style" way of doing things.

Enjoy!

-----------------------------------

Update : 2/4/09

It also looks like they got rid of the Search the Internet button, which I kinda miss.  

And this is proving to be a bit of a learning curve, as well.  I can't find the Delete button half the time, and I keep hitting More Actions to choose labels.  

To boot, the new functionality of the Labels button feels weird.  I had to pull up the old version because I can't remember now, but it felt smoother previously.  I think it was because of two things.  In the old version, if I clicked on the More Actions drop down I could simply run the mouse up and down the list.  This was great if the label I wanted was in the first 25 or so labels.  (Remember, I have like 10 million).  If it wasn't, the slider on the list was right under the drop down arrow.  So it was really easy to drop down half an inch and grab the slider and go to the bottom bunch.  So really it only took like two clicks to apply most labels, maybe three clicks (or more appropriately, click, click-hold-slide, click) for the rest.   

The new Labels button behaves like a menu - not a drop down - and shows only the first ten labels, greatly increasing the chance that I have to click-hold-slide.  So just about everything means I need to take three clicks.  Additionally, that slider is over to the right about an inch, and a lot smaller - so now I have to pay attention to grab it.  

The auto-complete is a bit heavy, too.  To use it, I need to click the button, let go of the mouse and move my hands to the keyboard, and start typing.  If I can type a couple of characters and get to the unique label, I just hit enter - and I apply the label.   But if I get to something that has a bunch of similar labels - for example, I have several labels that I lump together as Friends, Friends-Bob, Friends-Charise, Friends-Dennis.... - I then need to take my hands from the keyboard, move back over to the mouse, and point and click.  I guess I can actually just use the up and down keys, but for some reason I feel like I have to click the label - maybe because of the checkbox doodad they have there now.....

I think it might take some getting used to, and then I'll think it's pretty nice.  I just discovered something pretty cool, for instance.  If I'm in auto-complete, I can start typing a new label name, and I get the option to create a new label of what I just typed at the bottom of the menu.  The addition of the Manage labels link right there is welcome.

But they need to clean it up.  There still seems to be some inconsistency with the Labels button if I don't have an email selected. 

• If I don't have an email selected, I still get what appears to be the full functionality of the Labels button.  I can start blithely typing away in auto-complete, get several good key strokes in, select the label - and get an error message.  
• I get the Manage Labels link - which is good, but I don't get a Create Label link.  That would be handy; I have gone into the old More Actions drop down specifically to get to the New label link to create a new label.  These two would thus be the only reason to open this button if there was nothing selected.  If you do it for one, why not the other?   
• If I choose a label checkbox, I strangely get an Apply at the bottom of the "menu" - but it does nothing....
  

Okay, I see.  If I click on the label name, I choose that label and that label only for the email I have selected.  If I choose the checkbox, I can choose other labels as well.  When I'm done, I click Apply or the name of the last label I want to apply.  Handy.

But a better execution - when nothing is selected - is right next door, where the More Actions button options are greyed out if I don't have anything selected.... 

For the Move to button, Spam and Trash are redundanct - they didn't remove the old Report Spam and Delete buttons.  That's not unwelcome - I like redundancy.  I'd rather they remove the Report Spam button, since the Spam filters are so good, I need to use it like once in three months - and now my button bar is feeling a bit long, particularly if I add the Mark as Read button from Labs.

Like I said, these are largely nits, and I'll likely adjust to the learning curve.  Just seems a little stange.

GDrive

Whoa!  Look at this  and that and this, too.  The GDrive.  Long rumored, it looks like this is pretty close.  Along with stories that GMail is getting the Gears treatment  and so will be available off-line - with automatic syncing - it looks like maybe Google is up to something.

It's an explosion.  I can't even keep track of how many times they reference the Cloud.  But it looks like - pressured by whatever Microsoft's doing with Windows Live and Apple's divided MobileMe and iWork - the Big G is looking to jump into the game.  And this might bring greater integration between the various Google apps.  I'll believe it when I see it, but it's looking like this stuff is happening fast.  

As a quick observation, I think this is great, despite my investment in Box.net.  Hopefully, they'll also figure out a way to let me access the documents and files - and edit them - via iPhone, as well.....  

GMail

Well, I had decided that my first real blog entry on Cloud details would be on GMail, but I want to write about something else Cloud related. So, in keeping with the original spirit, here are my thoughts about GMail.

One of the first appearances of the Cloud is really in the host of email programs that sprang up in the late 90s, with Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail being the biggest and best examples. Prior to that, your email client was just another program on your desktop, most likely Outlook. You had to configure it to hit a mail server somewhere, which was a rather painful experience of religiously following a list of arcane instructions dotted with references to smtp and mail servers, and where things would mysteriously go wrong. Very painful.

The first I became aware of an alternative was when some of the ISPs and hosting services I tapped into started allowing webmail - basically a website that you could call up anywhere and tap into your email account. Most of them were pretty plain and didn't work all too well. And they didn't get around the basic problem of sucking down your emails onto your desktop; if you were at work and wanted to look up a personal email you had gotten three months ago - sorry, no go; you had to be at your home desktop to do that.

But Hotmail and Yahoo! started changing the game. The web interface for both of them was fast, appealing, and - best of all - you could access your email from anywhere you had an Internet connection. Not a lot of capacity, but you could store them in folders, keep them around for awhile, search through them, etc. As internet connectivity became ubiquitous, these gained in popularity; by the mid-2000s, if you were on a computer, you were connected - and it didn't make sense to deal with Microsoft's Outlook to lock all of your email in one place.

Cloud-wise, there's not a lot of difference between Yahoo!, Hotmail, and GMail. And I'll confess - I switched from using both Yahoo! (for most of my mail) and Hotmail (for really personal mail) a few years ago. So Yahoo! and Hotmail may have matured some in the meantime. I, however, am hooked on GMail - for the way it tackles the Cloud.

Good Stuff

So, what's so good about GMail, and why won't I ever consider going back? Initially, I believe I got hooked because of the storage - which at the time was a robust 1G and then 2G and the promise that you would never have to throw anything away. It pretty much kicked everyone's ass at the time. In response, it seems as though Yahoo! created unlimited email storage, and Hotmail upped their limit to 5G, and GMail responded with 6G for everyone "and counting." I, however, bought space a couple of years ago for Picasa, with the result that the extra Google storage didn't apply just to Picasa, but also other Google apps - notably GMail. So, let's see.... I currently have 1.4G in GMail (and I've been keeping damn near all my email for something like three or four years now), which is 8% of my 17.1G capacity - for which I pay like $5 a year or something.

But storage was just "the hook." The reasons I stay or much greater.

Threading

Threading is the single biggest reason to stay with GMail, because GMail's threading kicks everyone's butt. Outlook says it has threading, but when I tried Outlook 2003 a few years ago, it was so horrible as to not really qualify as threading. Thunderbird has threading, but.... it just wasn't as good. It looks like Yahoo! and Hotmail still don't have threading.....

What is threading? Well, you know the situation where you send three friends an email (Subject: What's Uuuuupppp???) asking what they want to do this weekend. Friend A replies back to you that they want to go out drinking Friday. You reply back that Friday you have to shave the cats, but your band-aided and iodined self should be up for heading out around 9:00 or so. Friend B laughs at the joke. Friend X, who you haven't seen in year's, sends you an email (Subject: Long time, no ears) to check and see how you're doing. Friend C says they can't do Friday night; have fun; but they're going to see a movie on Saturday - who's up for tagging along. Friend B says they'd love to go. Business Associate W asks when you're going to be done reviewing that document he sent (Subject: Re: Document for your review). You gently remind Friend B that they haven't committed to the pub crawl Friday night. Friend D chirps in that they have strep, so won't be doing anything.

How that whole series of events is translated is vastly different in GMail versus just about everyone else. Regular email programs/services just spit out one email after the other, and often place your replies in the Sent folder.

Friend D; Re: What's Uuuuupppp???

Business Associate W; Re: Document for your review

Friend B; Re: What's Uuuuupppp???

Friend C; Re: What's Uuuuupppp???

Friend X; Long time, no ears

Friend B; Re: What's Uuuuupppp???

Friend A; Re: What's Uuuuupppp???

7 emails, not including the three emails that you sent which are sitting in the Sent Mail box/folder. It takes up a lot of screen real estate, and jumbles these things all together.

GMail attacks the problem completely differently:

me, Friend A, Friend B, Friend C, Friend D; What's Uuuuupppp???

Business Associate W, me; Re: Document for your review

Friend X; Long time, no ears

If you were to open that first email, you'd see the whole threaded email conversation, your original email, and the other 7 subsequent replies to it, including your replies, in chronological order; the ones you've read would be collapsed into just the author and first line. Along with Associate W's recent email, their initial email from three weeks ago floats up to the top, along with your initial reply asking for more info - which they never got back to you. It works very much like an internet forum thread, but even better.

Occasionally - and seemingly only from one particular person whose emails are delivered through a Yahoo! group - the threading gets a little screwed up. But by and large, this just works. It's revolutionary; and once you try it, you won't be able to go back to using normal email. It's painful for me to use the iPhone's mail app hooked to GMail. I use it, mostly because GMail's iPhone webapp version isn't great, either - but boy do I miss the full-on GMail experience, and for a lot of email processing, I need to be at a full-blown browser.

Labels

The second revolutionary email innovation is GMail's use of labels rather than folders. Labels are a much more fluid, better way to work than folders. I can tag an email thread (sorry, not individual emails) with one or two or several different labels. If my wife sends me something, it gets tagged with 'Beth.' If she's talking about something to do with the house, I will also tag it 'House'. And if it happens to be an email asking our family to come paint the house, I'll maybe label it 'Family' as well.

Why is this important? Well, it gives me a really handy way to look up those emails later. I know there was an email thread that was sent out about painting the house, so I look at emails with the House label. Generally, you can design a label system that's fine-grained enough to narrow your search, so it makes it relatively easy to find, and voila - because of threading, I have the original email and all the replies from everybody making excuses as to why they can't be there.

But isn't that just like folders, you ask? No, and the reason is - I can put multiple tags on the thread. That way I can go searching for it from different angles. Maybe I just remember that Beth wrote the initial email, so I can look for all those emails tagged Beth. Or maybe I remember that I asked my family, so I look up family. You can't do that with folders without making lots of copies all over the place. And how do you update all those copies when people email you back? Not to mention the fact that all subsequent replies get separated from their antecedents, and you have to file each and every one; I label the thread, and every email in that thread gets pulled together and labeled the same. Folders also tend to be for storage: you move an email into a folder, and out of your inbox. Not so in GMail; I can label an email and keep it in my inbox for further action.

Additionally, you can star email threads - which is really just a very specialized label. Don't remember a damned thing about the email other than you had to do something with it? Look under Starred. And with the newest Google Labs innovations, you can star it with different symbols. I label emails with some neat information that I'll want to reference later with a blue 'i' "star." One click - and there it is.

Search

What would a Google service be without Search? And the GMail search works very well. As initially touted, GMail allowed you to "never throw anything away." That gets you a lot of emails very fast, and it would be a problem if Google wasn't synonymous with Search.

Case in point. Last night there was a horrible ice storm. We don't get these days too often here in the Mid-Atlantic, and when we do - well, I never know where to look to find out if there's a delay or cancellation or what. Unfortunately, this morning, I managed to lock myself out of my email and Citrix accounts, so I couldn't find the policy or the number to call to figure out whether we had work. I made it into work to find that my boss had emailed the inclement weather policy - with the weather line number - at about 6:30 AM. Which of course I couldn't get to because I was closed out of work email. SO.... I forwarded the email to my GMail account, tagged it with my 'Work' label, and archived it. In two years when we have another ice storm that threatens to shut down the city, I can easily type in the search box 'inclement weather' or 'weather policy' or even just 'weather' and I should have a much reduced list of emails to sort through. (8 emails show up in the Search of 'inclement weather' - including the email I want and this draft; I can see the message I sent out 2 and half years ago explaining what we would do for my outdoor wedding in case of inclement weather....)

It's a powerful way to find emails, and so easy that you do it without even thinking about it.

Archive

The amount of storage space, use of labels, and great Search functionality allow you to archive emails. Press the button and they zip to a place out of your way. You access them by calling up their labels or searching. In essence, this is not that different from filing in a folder, but it feels different - it's a different way of thinking about it. It essentially separates categorizing an email from filing it away, so you can categorize an email the first time you read it, and hold it in the inbox or star it for later action. Later replies are also tagged with the same label. When you're done with the email - then you file it, not exactly getting rid of it - but getting it out of your sight.

Spam & other nasties

Spam sucks. But GMail has the best spam filters I have seen. Very little gets through. I currently have 588 spam messages isolated, with at least 150 in the last week. And I haven't seen one of them. Every once in awhile there will be a spate of spam that creeps through. I mark it as spam, and after a day or two the epidemic goes away. I seriously do not worry about spam, and I never have to configure anti-spam software on my computer. Additionally, GMail does a good job of catching and alerting you to phishing emails. Viruses? I don't worry about anti-virus software on my email (which is admittedly true of most on-line email services), either, because GMail gets rid of that, too. (I do have it on my computer.)

Integration with other services

Google isn't alone; I understand that Yahoo! has a particularly strong calendar, contacts, and RSS. And there are other surprisingly robust application suites out there - like Zoho, which I've used with my Box.net account (more on that one day). There are others out there that a Google search will turn up - things like 37Signals' BaseCamp and Backpack, or Scrybe. Even aspects of Apple's iWork and MobileMe, and Microsoft's Windows Live. Another that I came at by shank's corners is Zenbe - again, more on that soon.

But Google's "suite" of apps is nice. The contacts is really just an add on to GMail, and while it has made some strides, is still not the most robust out there, but it works (and I have it synching with my iPhone now). Google has a very nice integration with Google Chat - which pops up in the corner; conversations are archived and searchable like email.

There is some nice integration with Google Calendar (GCal) and Google Docs. GCal is a very nice program - I love it almost as much as GMail, but that's another post. And there are a couple of points of integration between the two. First, if someone sends you an email with date and time information, GMail makes an attempt to create an event out of it. Look over on the right, and there's a link to "Add to calendar." It's not great, and could use some tweaking - a recent "Add to calendar" link picked out a reasonable event title and got the date right, but chose the End Date listed in the email as the start date.

While composing an email you can add an event invitation, as well. And Google has released a nice little Lab add-on that gives you a peek at your calendar. You can configure it to show a mini-calendar, display one or more of your GCal calendars, and can do a quick add of an event from it. Quite handy.

As for Google Docs, there's a similar Lab widget, and if you get a spreadsheet or document or presentation as an email attachment, you are given the option to display (and save) the file in Google Docs.

A series of links at the top of the page allows you to launch GCal, Google Docs, Picasa (Photos), Google Reader, and additional programs (such as a To Do list, through a Lab add-on). Not much of an integration, and it could be more, such as a more seamless way to start a doc in GMail, import a picture from Picasa, save it to Google Docs, and ultimately publish to your Blogger blog. There are Firefox plug ins that allow you to do this - so maybe it's not too far off. Some of this stuff you can do thanks to a Labs add-on (to start a Doc from an email conversation), and Docs now allows you to publish directly to your blog. But it all has the feel of being patched together, not seamless.

Bad Stuff

But, there's some trade off.

Security

The Search capabilities create a problem. If Google indexes your emails so you can find stuff easily, it means anybody can find stuff easily. I personally find this a little overblown. Yahoo! and Hotmail also have this information indexed so it can be readily accessed; the difference is Google does it better. If you have security issues, well, perhaps you shouldn't use Google's services. But as I've mentioned earlier, perhaps you shouldn't use the Cloud at all, including Yahoo! or Hotmail.

Not as tight as it could be

There's a lot of potential here, but it's not fully realized. The bit of research I've done suggests Yahoo! is doing a lot of this stuff, as well; in several cases, doing it better. (Yahoo! bought, within the last year or so, a company called Zimbra that appears to do many of the same things as Google, but as a commercial enterprise product.) Google contacts are a little light. Google has yet to fold Picasa into the group as well as they have Blogger - and even that is a bit of an afterthought (as Lab add-ons, not as a full-blown feature of GMail.) Zenbe comes close to providing an integrated solution, but has some other problems. But, really, not many people are doing as much as Google in this area, and no one is doing it better or doing more.

GMail and the Cloud

So, bottom line, how is this the first really meaty piece of my Cloud investigation?

Gmail is the base of operations

It's my home in the Cloud, more or less. Now, I'm not saying everything is right there. But GMail is where I start every day, and more than likely where I end every day. The first consideration for any new service is, "How well will it integrate with my GMail?" If I can get something that leverages my GMail account, it's as near to in as it can be; if it would replace GMail - well, it's pretty much out. (Xobni held my attention for a little while, until it I realized that it did some similar things to GMail, and some things I'd like to see GMail adopt. But to get that functionality, I had to pass GMail through Outlook, and I just wasn't that into it.) Again, Zenbe gets tantalizingly close to providing an email platform that serves as a home for a variety of other applications, but falls a little short. GMail, on the other hand, supplies great email features and it seems to be gaining extensions and add-ons that allow me to do lots of other stuff, too.

GMail is a good example of Cloud computing

First, all my emails are sitting in the Cloud. I can access them through my computer at work, I can access them through my computer at home, I can access them at the library, on my friend's computer. I can get them on my iPhone.... And I'm not syncing (which I sort of consider cheating). They are stored on a server that I will never see.

And, likewise, the application itself is stored on and operates from a server I will never see. This has implications, as well. Google gets some stick for being in "constant beta," but that's sort of the hallmark of Cloud computing. Commercial Project Portfolio Management packages that are marketing themselves as Software as a Service (i.e., Cloud-based) tout the fact that features - while still dutifully tested - are rolled out as they are developed, and seamlessly. No reinstallations, no upgrades to download and install, the user never recognizes a thing, other than a "New Features!" link.

What GMail doesn't have - and most Web 2.0 services do - is collaboration. But that's as you would expect it; I don't want to share my email with people (that I know). (Though Zenbe allows for email collaboration in a rather interesting way.) Email "collaboration" takes the form of forwarding and replying; and in a way, GMail handles this better than most through its threading. At least, it's easier for you to figure out what's going on. But additionally, the other parts of the Google cloud - GCal, Google Docs, Picasa - do allow for a rather robust collaboration.

So, GMail. It's good. The benefits - especially threading and labeling - far outweigh the security concerns, the underdeveloped add-ons, and the lack of integration (that no one else does any better.) Would I like it to be able to do some of the things that Zenbe or Xobni can do? Sure - they both have some nice features: ZenbePages, a separate tab that collects your attachments, analytics.... But they lack the basic functionality, and - dare I say it - "just works"-ability of GMail.

The Cloud - Part 2

Yeah!  Like a week after I wrote the beginnings of my opus on Cloud computing, Steve Ballmer of Microsoft delivers the opening keynote for CES 2009. 

Why is this so cool?

As I said previously, this whole Cloud thing has been common knowledge to techsters for the last few years.  We've seen it coming (thanks largely to Google), we've been using these services on PCs with our browsers, and we've been trying out the first hardware forays into the Wild Blue Yonder.  But unless I miss my mark here, Cloud computing isn't exactly a household concept quite yet.

I just checked - the recent Macworld keynote delivered by Phil Schiller makes no mention of the word Cloud.  It skirts the issue - you can make documents in iLife and iWork and then get them to your iPhone.  And you can "share" documents that you make in iWork to iWork.com where others can take a look at them.  Then, of course, there's MobileMe which syncs calendar, email, and contact information between your PC, iPhone, and Mac through the Cloud.  (They mentioned that at the WWDC last year.)  I don't know how they both work, exactly; but already I see a split between MobileMe and iWork.com; one is for one type of information, one is for another.

Ballmer mentions the Cloud twice (at 6:45 and 7:39) to announce that Windows will be the lynchpin that ties it all together, and that families will be connected with "cloud-based entertainment content."  A chunk of this seems to be provided by the Windows Live service - which near as I can figure brings Hotmail, on-line storage, "People" (contacts?), Messenger, and Photos together and allows you to use them via your PC or phone.

Neither of these is exciting.  Google has been doing this for awhile now - with GMail (and its built-in contacts) as the mother ship - which nicely integrates with GTalk, a pretty decent integration with GCal, GDocs (which has some integration), Picasa (for photos), and Blogger.  Additionally, Google has started making forays into bookmark management (which is somehow mysteriously tied to GNotes) and at least half-hearted attempts at a slew of other things, like web authoring, social networking, and a wikipedia.  Oh, and a browser.

And there are dozens of other services that do things like this.  Box.net , for example, fills Google's lack of accessible on-line disk space, and hooks to a bunch of services, including Google and Zoho.com - which is a Cloud-based service allowing for storage and editing of documents and spreadsheets over the net and a whole lot more.

And indeed, Microsoft and Apple have some catching up to do.  I won't totally sell them short, but I will say - I'm not sure they can do it.  Microsoft has Windows, and all accounts are Windows 7 is going to be good.  Huge market-share there.  Apple is beloved by a large section of the tech buying public, as well - and has a reputation for just making stuff that is simple and elegant and just works.  But Google alone has a huge lead on them.  (I felt a little bad because Schiller was going on and on about how iPhoto can recognize faces - when this is technology Picasa has had out for the last 4 months or so.)  And both of them still miss the point somewhat.  I think the split between MobileMe and iWork.com is pretty big.  And note that this is syncing - the file resides on multiple devices and it pushes changes to the Cloud, Mac, iPhone (only), and PC that you have registered.  Windows Live doesn't even appear to try to address the problem of on-line document editing, but potentially comes closer to allowing a large array of devices (home PC, work PC, XBox, WinMo phones, and anything with a browser) to access content.  (I say potentially because I am disturbed by references to Windows Live as opposed to XBox Live - I'm not sure how well the two are integrated.)

But what's exciting about these keynotes is that "the Cloud" is about to launch into the public consciousness.  2009 will be the Year of the Cloud.  Both Apple and Microsofts efforts - as late to the game as they are - are the mainstreaming of a current that has been developing the last couple of years.  It's going to be a cool year.

Life in the Cloud

I've been threatening this topic for awhile, dancing around it, sizing it up....  Started a couple of times and I just couldn't get my thoughts on to paper.  But it's been getting increasingly difficult to think about this stuff without taking some sort of white paper approach to this, so here goes another stab.

One of the greatest things about the modern internet is the emergence of "the Cloud."  The movement towards Cloud Computing has been growing for some time, but - looking back now - it seems like it really made its emergence in 2008.

For those of you puzzling over what I'm talking about, "the Cloud" is really just the internet, so named because on network diagrams, connections to the internet are shown as a cloud. For some time the Internet has been used to serve information to each other.  Email is one such application: a user at a terminal on the left side of the picture above shoots a chunk of information to a user on the right side of the image.  Internet browsing is another.  A user on the right side sends a request for information to a computer on the left hand side, and that computer returns a chunk of information that the right-hand computer can composite into a web page.

Typically, we install programs on our computers and use those programs to write a letter on Word, crunch numbers in Excel, watch a movie or listen to a song in Windows Media Player or iTunes, play games, etc.  The program and the data reside on our hard drives and use our hardware; in some cases the application might go out to the Internet to grab some information, but all the processing was done locally.    But in the last couple of years, the Internet has seen the steady growth of Web 2.0 applications, where the program no longer resides on our computer.  Instead of making a request to a computer across the network for a static blob of information to be composited as a page, we are now able to make a request of a computer on the other side of the network and have that computer do something for us.  The code and the processing power resides on the other side of the Cloud.  This is great for software companies for a variety of reasons.  Delivery is made a lot easier - no CDs to burn, manuals to be printed, blister packs to prepare, shipments to be made; no big box store is needed to do the actual distribution, idiot end users who may do funky things with their install won't be calling tech support....  It also means that the software company can make updates a lot easier and get them out a lot easier and keep everyone on the same set of code. In fact because you control the environment, you can ignore many of the problems of developing for multiple platforms.  As long as they can access your server via the Internet through one of the handful of standardized browser's - your computers do the heavy lifting in whatever language you want; it's up to the client's browser to composite the standardized blob you send them back. And you don't have to worry about bootleggers copying disks and sending it to all of their friends, or their two laptops and desktop computer.  

And not only is the program code on a server sitting across the internet, but the data for that program is also likely sitting "in the Cloud."  The letter you typed, the numbers you crunched, the photos you uploaded and manipulated aren't on the computer you used, but are sitting on another computer linked to the computer providing the code.  And that seems a little weird - your stuff, your information isn't on some medium that you own or control.  It's on a computer many hundreds or thousands of miles from you, jumbled together with the data from a bunch of other people - but still, almost instantaneously available to you.

There are several implications to this arrangement.  One, it can be a bit of a security problem.  If you don't control your data, how can you protect it against being accessed by others, or used without your permission?  Two, if you need access to the Internet in order to retrieve your data, what happens when you lose connection to the Internet, or the server the data is on loses connection to the Internet, or the company administering the server goes out of business?  

In some ways, these problems aren't really all that different from problems that exist in the "real world" side of computing.  If all of your data is on your laptop and you don't have access to your computer - you don't have access to your data.  And what happens if you out and out lose your computer or get it stolen or the computer crashes?  Unless you've back up regularly - and which of us is confident that our backup protocol is airtight? - the chances are you are going to lose something.  And in terms of security, it is not a difficult thing to smash and grab a laptop and thus gain access to a whole bunch of personal information. 

In some ways, Cloud computing is a little more secure and stable.  The fail-safe abilities that these companies have is impressive; strong backup protocols, redundant servers, 24 hour maintenance.  If their hard drive crashes, it's already been backed up and was probably replicated on another server anyways.  You can't smash and grab these places - your data is generally split up and sent all over the place - so it's not in one easy location for a thief to access, and you need to have a password in order to get to the data.  I mean, given enough desire and know-how, a thief can capture your password and gain access - but it takes a lot more effort to do that than to break your window, grab your computer, and run out of the house.

It's my belief, however, that the big benefit of Cloud computing far outweighs the potential problems, and that's access.  It's a security risk (less of a problem and more of something that needs to be provided for), but because your data is distinct from your computer, you can get at it from many different places, computers, and platforms.  At work?  You can likely use work's internet connection to get to your data.  At a friend's house - ask for a quick couple of minutes on their computer.  On vacation - you wouldn't believe the number of internet cafes and business centers that are in major metropolitan areas.  On the go - most cell phones these days can access the data just as easily.

A case in point of one of the most popular Web 2.0, cloud-based applications: GMail.  Google controls GMail's code base, and they've adopted a little gimmick by having it in constant beta.  In other words, they can - and will - release features willy nilly, as they come available, rather than waiting for a big release.  Your emails reside on a Google server - or rather, several servers spread throughout the country.  I can access my email at work, at home on the HP media center, at Panera on my laptop, on my friend's Mac, on my Verizon cell phone, on my old Dell Axim PDA, on the old WinCE or 286 machines at the theater, on my iPhone, on my Linux-based N800.....  All I need is a modern browser and my user information.  As long as I keep my password secure, and Google upholds their end of the security bargain, it's pretty tough for anyone other than me to break into my source.  And I never need to worry about my laptop flaming out (as it did a few years ago) and losing access to everything everyone had written me.

The list of applications is surprisingly large, and as I mentioned earlier has been growing for the last few years.  Google has a bunch of them: GMail, CCal, Picasa, Google Docs, Google bookmarks, etc.  But there are lots of other applications out there.  There are services such as Jott - which transcribes vocal notes you make on a cell phone and turns them into electronic notes, reminders, to do items, and texts.  Or Evernote - which does about the same thing with pictures.  In fact, many banking applications use the same principals: you interact with password protected financial information from your bank, on a variety of platforms, where you can look up information, contact a representative, make financial transactions, view and report on transactions, etc.

So, that's cloud computing in a nutshell.  But there's so much more to it than just that.  My plan is to continue to revisit this topic and talk about some of the applications and services I'm using.  So stay tuned....