I stumbled upon a gem of an iPhone app – MoneyStrands – today. It is an Online financial application,  with a notable exception that it works with majority of banks in India (ICICI Bank in my case) The previous one which I tried -  Mint (Web and iPhone apps) does not have support for Indian financial institutions. The other one which supports – Buxfer (with an iPhone Web App)  – unfortunately does not have a native iPhone app.

I could successfully aggregate my Savings, Credit and Loan accounts with MoneyStrands. You can even unify accounts from different financial institutions. They support over 8000 of them.

MoneyStrands ICICI Dashboard

The Interactive Charts are great to use too.

MoneyStrands Interactive Charts

MoneyStrands even supports allocating/tracking a Budget and Alerts for Balance.

MoneyStrands various Tabs

MoneyStrands iPhone application (iTunes Link) is free, just like their web offering.

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Apple conspicuously did not provide any Task Management application for the iPhone, even with the latest firmware updates. For some, the default ‘Notes’ application itself provided a simpler way to manage tasks. There was expectations of iPhone featuring a default Task Management application with the MobileMe launch. But that did not happen either. Fortunately, with the AppStore featuring plenty of native Task Management applications, the void has been filled perfectly. One specific Task Management Application which I bought was ToDo by AppiGo. Interestingly You can setup ToDo to Sync perfectly with the Microsoft Outlook too.

First download and install the ToDo app on your iPhone through AppStore. Setup synchronization with the ToodleDo Service. Download the ToodlDo Sync Application and run it along with Microsoft Outlook. Automatically all your tasks will be synced across the iPhone, Cloud and Outlook.

Getting Task Reminders on iPhone!

Presently, Apple iPhone SDK does not provide for running background notification services. Hence by default ToDo will not be able to give Tasks reminders. But there is a simple way out!. You can automatically sync the dated Outlook tasks as a Outlook Calendar Entry using TaskToCal ($19.95). Thereon You get timely reminders of your ToDo’s!

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Xobni is just one heck of a utility!. It is helping me everyday on my corporate email communications. Xobni Organizes email by People. It provides you with excellent statistics and insights in to your Outlook inbox. There is a new update to the Xobni and during the installation process, it presented me with some very interesting Trivia about Corporate email communications. I have noted down a few to share with you.

Xobni Corporate email communication Trivia

• Microsoft Exchange Server has 59% market share in Corporate email
• 46% of all Xobni users Outlook 2007 and 54% use Outlook 2003
• Globally in the next 4 years enterprises will spend around $17 Billion on corporate email
• Enterprise email costs an average of $435.85 per User per Year
• By 2009 workers are expected to spend 41% of their time managing email
• An average human brain is capable of maintaining 150 friendships
• Xobni users communicate with about 1900 different people
• The average Xobni user has around 30,000 emails in Outlook

If you have not tried Xobni yet, I would strongly recommend you to try it once.

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.mac is an online storage and sync service offered by Apple. If you are an OS X user, .mac could be seen tightly integrated with the operating system. The service costs a slightly heap $99 annual fee. No more!.. with the DotMac opensource project, you can host your own .Mac service.

Currently DotMac supports:-

• Data synchronization for any application that supports .mac (iCal, Address Book, notes, etc…)
• iDisk/iDisk Sync
• iWeb Publishing
• Backup

This is a work in progress and expect to see a lot of improvements further.

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[Update: Here is a LifeHacker commentary on this article ]

The need

Here is a small tutorial on How you can safely backup your Outlook data on to a USB Drive. Most of us who work in corporate environment obviously have our years of communications and documents captured in .PST files. Microsoft Outlook’s PST file format is proprietary but serves as a portable archival data format. You can make backups of your old .PST files by simply dragging and dropping on to the target media. Or use a professional backup tool like SyncBackSE or Microsoft Personal folders backup .

The Issues

You cannot backup your .PST file while it is opened by Outlook. Most of the time this is the case as Outlook locks the respective .PST file. Your backup utilities will fail to backup your current Live Outlook data as long as Outlook is kept opened. This also does not allow us to further automatically schedule .PST backup too.

The Solution

The simplest solution is to instruct Outlook to simultaneously keep a copy of the incoming emails in a separate .PST file created in the external storage device. Even though you can password protect your .PST files , for additional security , you are better off creating a Secure & Encrypted Drive inside your external storage device.

Tools Required

TrueCrypt is my choice for a platform independent data security software. It is free, Open Source and runs on Windows, Mac and Linux with excellent speed and robustness. It has some of the performing yet strong encryption algorithm support. The user interface is very convenient too. It has the capability to make an entire drive encrypted or keep a huge encrypted file on any drive to be further treated as a virtual drive. I follow the later approach.

How-To

1) Create an encrypted volume within your USB Drive / External storage Device

2. Goto Volume->Save currently mounted volume as favourite menu item.

3. Goto Settings->Preferences->Check the [Start TrueCrypt] and [Mount Favourite Volume] items.

4. Create a .PST inside this volume using the Mail-Setup tools within Windows Control Panel.

5. Open this additional .PST file too in Outlook

6. Set an Outlook Rule to make a copy of the incoming email to this .PST file

Outlook – Tools->Rules and Alerts->New Rule->Rules Wizard->Start from a Blank Rule->Check Messages when they arrive->Check [On this Machine Only] , [Through the specified account = Select Exchange Server] -> Next -> Move a copy to the specified Folder( and select our new PST file’s folder).

Also make sure that this rule is the top of the other rules in the list.

7. Set an Outlook Rule to make a copy of the Outgoing email to this .PST file

Outlook – Tools->Rules and Alerts->New Rule->Rules Wizard->Start from a Blank Rule->Check Messages after it is sent->Check [On this Machine Only] , [Through the specified account = Select Exchange Server] -> Next -> Move a copy to the specified Folder( and select our new PST file’s folder).

Success :) Now you have all your incoming and outgoing emails backed up automatically and securely on the USB media. You have this backup copy of your email without you making any conscious effort.

Disadvantage

The only disadvantage with this method is that you will have to keep your USB drive connected all the time while you are working with Outlook. I think that is a reasonable tradeoff between convenience and security.

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Thought it would be interesting to see a cost comparison of the software between Mac and Windows. The fact is that Windows is having more ‘functional’ freeware for my needs – yet for the purpose of comparison I’ve picked some commercial alternatives. Let me know what you think!

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1. Top Applications worth buying on a Mac

gDocsUploader is a nice little OS X application for easy bulk upload of office documents to Google Docs. gDocsUploader shines with some cool drag and drop options. I have the program icon setup on the Dock for easier access.

Windows Users have DocSyncer which supports syncing and mobile access. A Mac OS X version of DocSyncer is expected soon too.

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Here is a list of applications which I’ve bought for the iMac running OS X. These are essential applications for me -used everyday- being milked for every penny spent. Given the amount of commercial and shareware applications available for OS X platform, it is very difficult to make a studied choice. I trial’d quite a large number of software before actually bought these applications. This adds to my previous list of favorite Leopard applications.

VMWare Fusion

I almost always have to connect to my Office VPN and work with Microsoft Outlook. Switching back and forth with the Fusion’s Unity feature is extremely productive. VMWare happily runs an instance of Ubuntu also for me. It is yet to crash or freeze on me. Fusion definitely falls under the essentials category for me.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac

The group photo merge tool is what created the initial interest on Photoshop elements 6. This program is so feature rich that I have made it a habit to learn a new trick every day!. PSE6 for Mac is Photoshop on essential steroids. My only gripe is the lack of the photo management tool as available on its Windows counterpart. But for now I have settled with iPhoto for Photo Management and use PSE6 as the external editor to edit the photos. The ‘Guided mode’ for carrying out main tasks are great for beginners like me.

Apple iWork ’08

As usual, Keynote was the selling point. I am a complete convert from powerpoint to Keynote. The wow factor you can generate in the audience with a Keynote presentation is unparalleled. I also bought the KeyNotePro Themes for that extra oomph ;) Pages needed some time to get used to and it works effortlessly with new Microsoft Office documents formats too. Ability to generate QuickTime Videos and PDFs are great for portability between PC and Mac. Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac ran way too slow for me and crashed many times.

1Password

SplashData has been my digital vault for many years on the PC. I found a greater replacement in 1Password. It syncs passwords and fills the forms automatically on the iPhone too. 1Password consistently syncs your confidential digital data with many different browsers on the Mac. I found it to be completely dependable and essential.
Leap

I am not a fan of the Mac Finder. It is too dumbed down. Leap fills in that void. It is not exactly a file system explorer. It works on top of the spotlight to bring you the digital contents as quickly and efficiently as possible. The tagging system is pretty much strong too. I do most of file/doc handling with Leap.
Little Snitch

The silent firewall which tracks software ‘calling home’ or making ‘unwanted’ outgoing internet connections. The default firewall of OS X is good to avoid anyone taking control of your Mac from outside. But Little Snitch supplements it to have complete peace of mind. Essential.

WireTap Pro

Records everything – Internet Radio, WebCast Audio, Skype talks – everything. It offers greater control over the recording process too.

Speed Download

DownThemAll firefox extension does the download quite well. But Speed Download does it even better.

MegaPhone

Helps me extract the Call/SMS history from the iPhone and manage the Music and Notes on it directly. Very useful for me to make the monthly telephone bills consolidations.

Pixelmator

A Great digital image manipulation program. But after the PSE6 for Mac arrived, I’m using Pixelmator lesser.

Ecto
The new Ecto 3.0b44 beta is comparable in stability and features to Windows Live Writer. Liked Ecto better than MarsEdit becasue of the RichText/WYSIWYG editing environment and nicer image handling.

Here is the pricelist of the above mentioned softwares:-

Vmware fusion – 59.99
1Password – 34.95
iWork ’08 – $79.00
KeynotePro Themes – $34.95
Little Snitch – - $ 24.95
Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac – $89.90
ecto – $17.95
Leap – - $34.95
Pixelmator – - $59.00
Speed Download – / – $25
MegaPhone – - $19.95
WireTap Studio – - $30

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When I Linux, I Ubuntu. My Organization does use CentOS and RedHat for running various servers too. Oracle Enterprise Linux is essentially RedHat Linux (CentOS claims a few pounds too!) with improvements and bug fixes. Oracle pledges to remain fully compatible with RHL. If are you tempted to try out, get your free DVD’s of Unbreakable Linux from Oracle through postal mail.

Oracle Unbreakable Linux support program delivers enterprise-class support for Linux with premier backports, lifetime support, comprehensive Linux server lifecycle management, full indemnification,extensive testing and more, all while significantly lowering the cost of support for users.

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If you are like me, you don’t like filing of emails too much. I just love the Google’s way of ‘Archiving’ the mails and keeping my Inbox Zero and clean. But without a proper Outlook Search tool, this method would be highly impractical. I have been using Microsoft Desktop Search all these while but it took my laptop’s XP to a crawling speed. My outlook data weighs multiple GB’s. So I was in the market for a better Outlook Search tool. Here is what I found:-

1) I checked out a new Outlook Search Tool – Lookeen - a fresh software which is being frequently updated.   I had a chance to speak up with the developers (from Germany) over FaceBook!. Lookeen on my Outlook seems to do the Job just fine.

2) Google Desktop Search – is just a waste of time. The search results were pointless. More or less it always gave me some generic results. I must admit that before the Windows Desktop Search days, I was a GDS fan.

3) Copernic Desktop Search – Could not handle the size of my Outlook Data I guess. It just vanished in to thin air most of the time. I cannot trust something which crashes this often. CDS was much better in the earlier versions.

4) LookOut – Yeah.. The world has come to a full circle once again. Circa 2004 thingie. LookOut was lightning fast and my favorite. Microsoft took over this tiny tool to make the MSN Desktop Search. Since then, most of us forgot about LookOut. But in these days of bloated Desktop/Outlook search tools, to see something like LookOut – which just does its job – is a rarity. Fortunately MajorGeeks still have a copy of LookOut 1.3 for download. I installed, indexed and was ready to go in just half an hour. Fresh Air!

LookOut works well with my Outlook 2003 install and there are ways to make it even work with Outlook 2007.

Related posts:

1. How to Sync Microsoft Outlook Tasks with iPhone and get Reminders
2. HOT backup your Outlook data securely and automatically with TrueCrypt