Personal Productivity Archives - Page 22 of 27

Microsoft Office 2008

Posted on June 29, 2006 ·

If it slips any further, Microsoft might as well call it Office 2008. After all, who wants a 2007 model in the middle of next year or later? 2008 car models start selling mid-year, Microsoft’s very own Money software does the same, so why not Office?

In the meantime, there is a growing camp of us setting ourselves free and enjoying Office 2.0.

Update: Sorry, if you came here looking for news on Office for the Mac. Read what happened here.

Tags: Microsoft, Microsoft Office, MS Office, Office 2007, Office 2008, WebOffice, Office 2.0, Zoho

Filed Under: Business, Personal Productivity, Software ·

HieroZlango? Zlanglyphs? :-)

Posted on June 28, 2006 ·

TechCrunch

profiled Zlango,

a cute icon-based SMS ZMS language. Nice, who knows what the outcome will be:

It will not take off, since to really use it, the receiving end needs to have

it on their phone, too.
Because of the above, it will spread virally
Since it’s so cute, it will spread among kids first, and the language

separation will be final: we can give up any hope of understanding the 10-year

olds ever again.

Either way, as Ethan

points out, the idea is not quite new: Zlango = ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs + modern

technology.

Tags: zlango, sms, zms, hiroglyphs, egypt, techcrunch

Filed Under: Humor, Personal Productivity, Software, Startups, Technology ·

Plaxo + Jajah = Nay, Nay!

Posted on June 28, 2006 ·

It’s that dreadful time again: moving all my files to another laptop. As much as I am a WebOffice advocate, I have not yet made a complete transition the way Ismael did: I still have way too much junk on my harddisk.

Every step of this painful process is yet another argument to move to WebOffice. For example, after moving my entire Outlook.pst file, why on earth do have to manually recreate all email accounts, fix the messed up in box rules..etc? What a joke!

But the real pain is Plaxo. No matter what they claim, every move is a potential data disaster. Plaxo will insist on duplicating your Contact, Calendar..etc data – the only variety is whether you get duplicates on your machine or in the online version. The only way to avoid this mess is to disconnect your Outlook data from Plaxo, then manually connect again – which is what I did, downloading the latest version of Plaxo in the process. What a surprise! I have these cute little phone icons in all my contact records. Could it be a direct link to Skype?

Ahh, no such luck, it’s a click-to-connect using Jajah. There’s a lot of buzz about Jajah today, as they announced free calls. It’s really free – sort of .. as long as both parties are Jajah users. Sorry, that does not cut it for me. Inexpensive calls to non-members? Thanks, but nothing beats free. I’ll be quite happy to use the Skype toolbar for my free calls. But I am really unhappy with the way Plaxo populated my Outlook with this Jajaj junk. Plaxo is free (well, they have a premium option, which I tried and found useless, and getting a refund took CEO intervention – but that’s another story), so it’s OK for them to try to push additional services. But there is a line, and in IMHO that line is drawn at going beyond their own product. I own my Outlook file, and Plaxo should at a minimum ask me before pushing a third-party plugin into my Outlook file. But of course I am not entirely surprised, considering Plaxo’s long history of “attitude problems“.

Update (6/28): The Jajah buttons in Plaxo can be turned off via Plaxo > Preferences > Advanced > uncheck Show Click to Call Icons. Of course this should be an option offered at the time of installation, not something I discover after digging around.

Technorati : Free Calls, Jajah, Office 2.0, Outlook, Plaxo, Skype, VOIP, WebOffice

Filed Under: Business, Personal Productivity, Software, Technology ·

The (Microsoft) Empire Strikes Back

Posted on June 27, 2006 ·

ZDNet reports that Microsoft’s already aggressive Windows Genuine Advantage “might be on the verge of getting even messier. In fact, one report claims WGA is about to become a Windows “kill switch” – and when I asked Microsoft for an on-the-record response, they refused to deny it.” Quote from a MS Customer Service rep:

“He told me that “in the fall, having the latest WGA will become mandatory and if its not installed, Windows will give a 30 day warning and when the 30 days is up and WGA isn’t installed, Windows will stop working, so you might as well install WGA now.”

The problem is that WGA is sneaky, installs without warning and breaks havoc on certain computers. It is also known to report perfectly legal installations as illegal. And now (actually from September) they can kill your Windows? What a mass. Too bad Robert Scoble is busy packing his house– he should shed some light on this.

Technorati : Microsoft, Service Pack 2, WGA, WinXP, Windows, Windows Genuine Advantage, Windows Update, Windows XP, XP, security

Filed Under: Blogging, Personal Productivity, Software, Technology ·

Another Excel Security Hole? Yawn… It’s Safer in the Cloud:-)

Posted on June 20, 2006 ·

“Attack code for a new security hole in Excel has surfaced on the Internet, just as Microsoft is scrambling to respond to a separate bug in the spreadsheet program.” – reports ZDNet.

Yawn…. same old story. I’ve lost track of the numerous bugs, patches that further and further disable my computer. I’ve told you: it’s safer “in the Cloud“

And yes, I know Zoho Writer, Writely or Zoho Sheet can’t match the capabilities of MS Word or Excel: so the 10% of the world who need all the sophisticated features… well you’re still stuck in Microsoft Prison. The rest of us enjoy the freedom of Office 2.0.

Technorati : MS Excel, MS Office, MS Word, Office 2.0, Writely, ZDNet, Zoho, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Writer, bugs, excel, microsoft, patches, security hole, weboffice

Filed Under: Business, Collaboration, Personal Productivity, Software, Technology ·

No Defrag-Hell in Office 2.0

Posted on June 15, 2006 ·

David Berlind makes a compelling case for Office 2.0 (or call it WebOffice, if you like) over at ZDNet.

He is a bit overwhelmed to explicitly say the words, and in the middle of his nightmare he is saying things like defrag-safe mode hell, thinkpad, blue screen of death, msconfig, Windows, Service Pack 2, pwrmonit, BMMLREF, BatInfEx & BatLogEx ( I think it’s still English?) – but deep down we know all he wants to say: Give Me Office 2.0.

I agree. It’s safer there.
Tags: zdnet, office 2.0, weboffice, thinkpad, defrag, blue screen of hell, windows, winxp, windows xp, sp sp2, service pack 2, zoho

Filed Under: Personal Productivity, SaaS ·

Picasa: It’s Really Not About the Web Album Only

Posted on June 15, 2006 ·

The importance of Google’s Picasa Web Album is really not in itself, as “yet-another-Flickr-contender”. It’s all about the integration (albeit limited) to Google’s Picasa photo management application on the desktop.

If you’re the type the likes to tweak your photos around, fine-tune them a little, doing it on the desktop is still far easier and faster then on the Web. And if you’re like me (i.e. not a pro) you probably find Photoshop an overkill. Picasa is just right for photo manipulation, doing more than the basics, but not overly complex, and the price of zero (standard for web-apps, not so for the desktop) is quite unbeatable.

While Flickr was an independent startup, I placed my bets on Google acquiring them; there was so much similarity in their approach to photo management, the (then) revolutionary breakaway from rigid folder/catalog structures to labels/tags made would have made it a perfect marriage. I still can’t believe Google let this slip away to Yahoo. With that deal all hope of easily uploading from Picasa to Flickr evaporated: the only theoretically easy way, emailing to Flick has never properly worked.

That’s the void that Picasa Web Albums fill, even if not-so-perfectly for now: have an easy way of working with your photos offline and online. Sure, it has shortcomings, no private albums, no synchronization …etc – I acknowledge all of these, but remember, Picasa 1.0 was not much to talk about and Picasa 2 came out as everyone’s favorite. At least we now have the same platform on and offline.

In fact I am sure that what started with photos will continue in many other areas, including the typical personal productivity / office type applications: we need seamless, continuous computing, whether on the web or locally. This is a subject I’ve been wanting to write about ever since my Zoho – the “Safer Office” article, and will come back to it with more detail in a few days.

Tags: picasa, web album, photo management, photo album, flickr, google, labeling, tagging, web office, office 2.0, zoho, zoho suite

Filed Under: Personal Productivity, Software ·

Is Evil More Readable than Good?

Posted on June 15, 2006 ·

Dennis Howlett recently ran a readability test on some blogs he follows. The Gunning Fog index is a rough measure of how many years of schooling it would take someone to understand the content. The lower the number, the more understandable the content is.

This reminded me of another test I wrote about, the Gematriculator, which calculates the Evil / Good ratio of a website.

Now for the shocking result: I took a sample of blogs I read, and ran them through both test. Blogs with a higher Evil ratio appear to be more readable! Wow! But of course the sample was too small, to really see if there is strong correlation we’d need a larger sample. So, in the name of science (?) please fill in the form below, using the results from the Readability test and the Gematriculator:

If the form does not work in your feed, please click through to my blog to complete it. When I have a large enough sample, I will publish the statistics.

Thanks for your participation!

Update (6/15): The form I created is fairly basic, but there is a lot more you can do with Zoho Creator, as this animated tour demonstrates.

Filed Under: Blogging, Humor, Misc, Personal Productivity ·

Effective Small Business Owner or Corporate BS-er?

Posted on June 13, 2006 ·

Even after the second reading of 10 Reminders for Effective Management I can’t believe my eyes. I wonder if it’s a serious article or a satirical piece. As if the article wasn’t shocking enough, I really have a hard time believing that it’s posted on Small Business Trends – a site I came to like and even quote from time to time.

Although technically it’s advice to small business owners, it reminds me of the 80’s corporate mid-manager’s survival guides, as in “how to BS your way through your career, looking busy while doing nothing“. I know I have entrepreneurial readers – what do you think?

Technorati : bs, corporate management, corporate survival, effective management, entrepreneuship, management advice, small business, startups

Filed Under: Business, Personal Productivity, SMB / SME, Startups ·

Microsoft Office 2008

HieroZlango? Zlanglyphs? :-)

Plaxo + Jajah = Nay, Nay!

The (Microsoft) Empire Strikes Back

Another Excel Security Hole? Yawn… It’s Safer in the Cloud:-)

No Defrag-Hell in Office 2.0

Picasa: It’s Really Not About the Web Album Only

Is Evil More Readable than Good?

Effective Small Business Owner or Corporate BS-er?

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