Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Cory's move to L.A. might bring some interesting talks (link).  I'd like to stop by Venice beach and check it out sometime.  Will there be a sign up or forum about it? comment []  trackback []

Many better ways to tie your shoes. Cory Doctorow: Ian Fieggan is a virtuoso shoelace-tier, an enthusiastic inventor of knots of varying description and great efficacy -- on his site, he geeks out with an impressive array of better ways to tie your shoes. I tie my shoelaces with an "Ian Knot", the World's Fastest Shoelace Knot: Make a loop with both ends and simultaneously pull them through each other to form an almost instant knot. It's a truly revolutionary way to tie your shoelaces! Link (Thanks, Jonas!) [Boing Boing] comment []  trackback []

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Anybody forget about Brittney yet? I still think these are great! comment []  trackback []

The quest for perfect email.  We all do it.  Email.  We all spend A LOT of time reading, writing, sorting, searching, moving, saving, and thinking about email.  At work I'd say I use my email app at least ten times more than a web browser.  The problem is that email is a time-sucker and I've slowly grown to hate it.  I've been more likely to not tell somebody what's on my mind these days than email them. I have been talking with a lot of people recently about what we could do for email to more efficient in our lives.  The days of filing and searching for senders, dates, and folders is just over for me. Step 1: Indexing.  When I upgraded to mac os 10.4 indexing my email messages was a drastic increase in usability.  Now I have been searching through all my email rather than trying to remember who sent it or what the subject might have been.  Indexing has gotten so good that other clients (like Entourage) are supporting spotlight indexes. Step 2: Gmail.  The gmail search is even faster and easier then spotlighting my own mail.  It's really great but tagging can get old and after nearly two years I've found that I only search for my gmail and only use the auto-labels (in by rule).  Of course, those labels don't attach to the message as meta-data that then follows onto the client.  I don't believe that it's even possible to attach meta-data with pop3 or IMAP4 (gmail does not support this). Step 3: For the past month I just haven't been checking my personal email accounts.  I thought all was lost. After a really good conversation today with a client I emphasized again how great it would be to be able to take notes on email and add tags.  So I started searching around and found a very nice looking product for OS X that integrates with 10.4.  It's called MailTags (link) MailTags adds metadata to all of your email, integrates it's results into spotlight, and smart folders.  Need I say that I have added all my email accounts once more to start tagging! comment []  trackback []