Multitasking Mondays

Multitasking Mondays: Sync Contacts with Funambol

Computing, Multitasking Mondays, Tech/Gadgets No Responses »

May 182009

It’s amazing how much your productivity increases when you have all the information for all your contacts on all your devices.

There is literally only one service that provides this functionality. And its free.

Try funambol.

There’s an iPhone app. Which syncs with Outlook. Or your smartphone. Or your Blackberry. And with some modern mobile phones.

And, of course, with Thunderbird.

No guide here; your on your own (Sorry—time constraints, but Google is your friend). I just wanted everyone to know that this is out there, and that chances are, it will help.

Multitasking Mondays: Access Files on Your iPhone

Computing, Multitasking Mondays No Responses »

Mar 022009

The best kind of multitasking system is the one available to you anytime and anywhere. In today’s electronic world, that often requires having access to your files. What articles do you need to read? Or maybe you have some sermons or lectures you’d like to listen to? Regardless of your specific needs, if for whatever reason you want access to certain files (documents, music, etc.) on the go, there are several options available to iPhone owners.

Drop.io

The excellent and free web service drop.io is frequently mentioned on this blog. It is an easy way to securely share larger files with friends and colleges. But it can also be an excellent capture tool for storing ideas and tasks (read my guide to that here).

Either way, drop.io is now available on the iPhone, which means its usefulness has dramatically increased (for those lucky enough to have an iPhone, which I am not). You can find the app on the iTunes store here.

ZumoDrive

ZumoDrive allows you to access on online storage drive just like you would a hard-drive on your computer. It’s fast and it doesn’t take up any space on your computer or on your iPhone, which means you can keep a whole lot of information there without worrying about filling up your iPhone’s hard-drive. ZumoDrive gives you 1gb for free, and charges $2.99/month for 10gb. For a full review, check out this article.

Soonr

Another web-based storage service, Soonr, allows you to view and edit your documents online. Check out the details here.

Conclusion

All in all there are a lot of options available to those who need access to important files on-the-go. Of course, the options listed here are only available to those with an iPhone. In the interest of full disclosure, I don’t have one, and so cannot comment on these based on personal experience. Perhaps the fabled Google Drive will bring mobile cloud storage to the rest of us, and there is always Dropbox (any OS) or Microsoft for (Windows only) if you usually have a notebook or netbook on your person. Regardless, this is the future of multitask computing, so if there is an option available to you, consider setting it up now! You won’t regret it!

Multitasking Mondays: Use a Feedreader to Keep Up-To-Date

Computing, How to, Multitasking Mondays, Research Tools, Webapps and Websites 1 Response »

Feb 232009

News travels fast, especially on the net. You probably use a variety of web sites to stay up to date, so let’s make this simple: if you regularly check more than one website, then a feedreader will make your life much much easier. Whenever a site you want to follow—a blog, the New York Times, or jcrew.com—publishes a new article your feedreader will download it and have it ready for your viewing at a moments notice. This is a great way to stay up-to-date, and you don’t have to worry about a bunch of notifications junking up your email-Inbox because feedreaders operate independently (though Outlook and Thunderbird have native feedreader modules). You just open your reader and skim through the headlines, much like you would a newspaper, until you find an article that looks interesting and give it a read.

Most websites offer a “feed” (nerdlets.org is no exception). Just look for this icon and click on it. That icon is the universal-symbol for a feed that you can subscribe to in your reader of choice. You may see a lot of variations on the same theme (for a whole collection, go here; any of these would be great additions to your own website).

There really is no reason for me to go on and on about this because many people already have. Here is a great introduction by TechSoup—a website devoted to technology tools for non-profits.

Reader Recommendations

Perhaps you’re ready to get started (the best introduction to a feedreader is to start using one)!

My personal favorite feedreader is Google Reader. It is a web-based reader, so you use it within a browser like IE or Firefox, but it also has offline support, so you don’t always need a web connection to stay in touch. Google reader has a wealth of viewing options. You can view your feeds as a mail-like list or as mini articles. You can group your feeds into topics, which allows you to check only the most important or interesting sites during the week, leaving the sites-I-follow-because-I’m-bored until later. You can star items you like, share them with friends (but only if you want to!), bookmark and email to your heart’s content, and if you decide to change your mind you can always export your feeds and switch to a different application. Best of all, Google Reader brings Google’s wonderful search functionality to your feeds, so if later down the road you remember an article you read but did not bookmark it, you can search away and soon you’ll be in business.

There are a whole host of other applications that might better fit your needs. I have heard good things about bloglines and newsgator, but have not used those myself. Many folks like things like Netvibes or Feedly. Both services, the former a website start page and the latter a Firefox plugin, allow you to view all your feeds in a magazine-like style, spread out across the page in columns rather than as a list. If you have a lot of feeds then this can be inefficient, but for a selection of important sites it can be helpful. Snackr is a fun little application that turns your feeds into a news ticker, and it can also integrate with Google reader. You can also use Firefox, Internet Explorer, Outlook, or Thunderbird as readers, but personally I like to keep me feeds away from my emails.

Conclusions

A feedreader is a great way to get information. What are your favorite feedreaders? What are you looking for in a feedreader?

Multitasking Mondays: New Features in Gmail

Multitasking Mondays, Webapps and Websites No Responses »

Feb 092009

In honor of my 200th post here at Nerdlets, I am introducing a couple of new segments. The first, Multitasking Mondays, will feature posts designed to help you use technology to get things done. The second, Security Saturdays, will feature posts that help protect and secure your data. You will have to wait a couple of days for the latter, of course, but today marks the first Multitasking Monday here at Nerdlets, and I thought we would spend some time talking about Gmail.

If your not familiar with Gmail, read the next section, otherwise, skip to the New Multitasking features below.

Use Gmail

Gmail is bar-none the best email solution out there. Now I know what you’re thinking—”I already have an email address (or two/three/etc), I don’t need another!” Well that’s one great feature about gmail. You can forward mail from your regular addresses straight to Gmail, or if your service provider does not allow forwarding (shame on them), you can set Gmail to download your messages via POP. You can even set up Gmail to send mail via your other email addresses. No one ever has to know your Gmail address if you don’t want them to—Gmail can just be your email “Hub” where you can manage multiple online identities. Or you can take the full plunge, there are many easy tools that can help you migrate to Gmail.

There are a whole host of reasons for taking the time to set all this up. (1) Gmail gives you a huge amount of storage, so you never have to delete an email again. (2) Gmail allows you to archive and easily search for old emails. Never loose an email, even if you received it 5 years ago! (3) Gmail has the best spam filters around. (4) Gmail allows you to use IMAP instead of POP to get your mail, which means your Gmail account is always in-sync no matter how you access your email (for an intro to IMAP, go here; once you set it up, you won’t know how you went without it!). (5) Gmail is always accessible from the web and works with almost any device (6) Gmail will easily interface with your existing Email software, like Thunderbird, Outlook, or whatever you Mac people use. (7) And that’s just the beginning.

A full explanation and guide to Gmail is in the works (subscribe today!), but the real point of this post is to notify you of three wonderful productivity features that have recently been added to Gmail.

Three Important New Features

Google has been hard at work providing excellent new features to Gmail. Three are worthy of notice for those wanting to use Gmail to multitask and get things done.

(1) Gmail Offline. It used to be that you needed Internet access to interact with Gmail. This meant that if you wanted/had to work offline you needed a Desktop applications (like Thunderbird or Outlook) to read/write/file your emails, which would sync with Gmail once you were back online. No longer! All of this is now possible in Gmail itself through Google Gears. This was announced on the Gmail Blog, and you can find a guide to setting things up here.

(2) Gmail labels/folders. It is now easier to label and file your email. For details, check out this post. As an addendum I will mention this: the folks at Gmail recommend archiving or filing your old email, rather than deleting them. Archiving email removes the email from your Inbox but leaves it in a special Archive folder just in case. The email will never be deleted. In addition, if you labeled the archived email (say, for example, with the label “Travel”), those labels will not be removed, so you can always view archived email by label at a later time. None of this is true if you “Delete” the email. It will be eradicated from the system in 30 days.

(3) Multiple Inboxes. A new Labs feature allows you to have multiple Inboxes on your Gmail homepage. Read about that here. Some background: Gmail allows you to filter incoming emails into specialized folders/labels. You can, for example, create a filter with the email addresses of all your family members and tell Gmail to send all incoming mail from those addresses to the “Family” folder. The new labs feature allows you to view this label on your homepage. You can also set this up for multiple Gmail accounts.

Other Features

There a number of other handy features available to Gmail users. Check out this helpful list.