Today's Featured Article

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) 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.

2) 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.

3) 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!

I also found a new tool - Lookeen - which is actively being developed. LookOut works well with my Outlook 2003 install and there are ways to make it even work with Outlook 2007.

If you like the TaskPaper way of GTD - which is nothing but a plain text file - , you might be interested in the following developments too:-TaskPaper for Windows - ToDoPaper - ToDoPaper is inspired by HogBay’s to-do application for the Mac ( See the comments section for author email id)                    Read the rest …

It has only been a few days since I’ve started using OS X Leopard as the primary operating system. The OS itself took only a few hours to get used to and be comfortable with. Most of the things looks more streamlined with Mac. But not everything is so rosy though - definitely there is a lack of quality Free applications out there. Yet a few of the good ones I managed to find are enlisted further.

Information Applications

1Password - Password vault
Keeps my software licence information, web logins and other wallet data securely. I bought this application because it has an excellent way to sync the desktop data with the iPhone using Smart Bookmarks.

NeoOffice  - Office Suite
NeoOffice did not run well  on my Mac. I would definitely go for iWorks ‘08 or Microsoft Office 2008. The KeyNote application of iWorks is just too good. iWorks is priced at Rs.3800 and is available at the Reliance iStore in Bangalore. Office 2008 for Mac is yet to arrive in India.

SideNote
I found it better than the default ’stickies’ app. Really useful to take study notes.

TaskPaper
This is a GTD application for Mac. I have been using Lifebalance earlier with my PC and Palm before moving on to MyLifeOrganized and Windows Mobile. Unfortunately MyLifeOrganized won’t be available for Mac. Now the task was to setup a simpler GTD system working with my office laptop, home Mac and iPhone. I evaluated quite a few available GTD apps like iGTD and OmniFocus. Though they are all well executed programs, I could not find a way to easily integrate them with my iPhone. I use the default Notes.app on the iPhone for a lot of note taking and ToDo lists. But having the iPhone Notes data to sync with a Mac application was the issue. Fortunately a good friend from scotland found a way to do that - Sync TaskPaper GTD App with iPhone Notes. I am yet to purchase TaskPaper as the cost is way too high for me. Fortunately the TaskPaper data can be opened in any text editor. I found another application - Things - which is nicely designed and I hope to see iCal Sync / native iPhone client for Things in the future.
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Well.. I knew it was time to make a move. I replaced my home XP and Ubuntu system with an iMac couple of days ago. Here it is!

Mac’s a different beast and sure its going to take me a while to get adjusted to. A few quirks like the ‘control’ button on the keypad, the Expose circus, QuickSilver commands etc.. are going to take a bit more time. More over, with this iMac, I think I will be doing more of Productive stuff, than trying to tweak and treat the computer endlessly :). The Wide screen display is very impressive and the noiseless performance within such a slim casing is truly great engineering. Hope to share more in the coming days..

Looks like things are going good on porting the Java VM on to iPhone. The fact is that iPhone is very well poised to run Java applications better than any other phone. Jay Freeman has been successful in porting the JamVM on to iPhone. JamVM is JSE 1.5 compatible. The core java classes has been ported already and Graphics and Media frameworks are being actively investigated. The current port is not optimised for the iPhone CPU. So expect it to run tad bit slow.

The iPhone offers a built in relational database in the form of SQLite. This is used to store information by the iPhone’s Notes application. Efforts are under way to offer a JDBC driver for this database too. The JamVM itself is pretty small - around 150k and uses the GNU Classpath libraries(9 MB). Compiling java source on iPhone is also possible now with Jikes ( upto jdk 1.4) or by using the Eclipse java compiler.

Please checkout the Java on iPhone development page for more details.