I stumbled upon this pretty nice little application or service - depends how you see it. It is called reQall (obviously would have been recall, but recall.com as every good domain is taken.
What it does is that allows you to set a reminder in the future to do something - at given time and date: buy X, call Y, do Z. Nothing to earth-shattering about that.
What is neat is the way how you do it. Actually, many ways:
Here is my situation: I am using three different Macs (Macbook Pro and two iMacs - one at home and occasionally second one at work) and need to keep the contacts and calendars synchronized at least between two of them (MBP and home iMac). I use iPhone which also has calendar and contacts. And in the cloud, there is Google calendar. Actually, more than one: my own calendar and company shared calendar of my colleagues from Thinknostic. Quite a challenge to keep it all in sync.
Everybody seems to be crazy about Chrome, the new superfast Google browser. The odes on speed sounded quite exaggerated, so I had to try it. I opened up again my old battered Fujitsu Lifebook and after 3 reboots (it was not used for about 2 months and Windows update had to have its patching done) I downloaded and installed it.
The rumors were not unsubstantiated ... it IS considerably speedier than anything else, including Opera. I have not seen any issues on the few sites I have tried - everything seems to work just fine.
What does really big mean ? In my case few hundred megabytes, up to 1 GB. Clearly, too much for email attachments - most providers caps them at around 5-15 MB.
Since we started doing screencasts, I need quite often to transfer work in progress - screen recordings, rendered MOV files between me and my co-host of the screencasts. I tried to upload the file to the company servers using VPN, but the speed of the secure uploads is nowhere close to being practical.
I am using OmniGraffle for most of my diagrams. OmniGraffle is an OS-X platform replacement for Visio - only easier to use and better looking (in my opinion). On rare occasions I do not work on my notebook, it is quite useful to have free alternative that allows to create a diagram that does not look too awful, without going through the hoops of downloading and installing software. The bubl.us is exactly that tool.
Yes, such nice tool really exists and it's name is Remember the Milk.
At first sight, RTM is not extremely visually appealing, but very nice and very usable Ajax application. After some time using it, you may better appreciate the "less is more" design. The offline access is thanks to Google Gears magic. Just flip the small green arrow (which will download your data to local cache) and voila - you can go offline, keep editing or adding tasks - your changes will be remembered. Later on, after going online the changes will be synced back.
As seen in the video at http://sciencehack.com/videos/view/IDT2RMJNvSA#searchkeywords
The source code:
Very good explanation is in the video mentioned above. So far so good - unfortunately the technique, however cool it is, does seem to work in Firefox only. Or at least it does not work in the still most prevalent browser on the Net.
Here is how it renders (properly) in Firefox (tested with 1.5)
and here is how it looks in IE7:
Wonderful thing about Firefox extensions is the autoupdate feature. Go to Tools->Extensions, select Find update and for all installed extensions you get the latest and greatest .... usually.
One extension where the update did not work was the Del.icio.us button for Firefox. I was happily using version 1.2 of the plugin and would never found out about the update, if I had not set the new workstation. The latest version 1.5.29 did not show in the updates. Which is too bad, because it is so much better ...
DHH is (obviously) David Heinemeier Hansson (the creator of Rails) and RIA (in this context) means Rich Internet Applications. And here is the quote:
I think there's always room for new ideas, but I don't think that the whole fuss that's currently going on about RIA, rich Internet applications, is justified. I think we've been through this cycle so many times before that it in some ways amazes me how history seems to be ignored. We went through this with Java applets, they were going to rule the Web. Everything was going to be in a Java applet. HTML and CSS is history. And Flash came around, and Flash started focusing on applications. Now Flash is going to rule the Web and HTML and so on is yesterday. Now, Silverlight, Apollo, JavaFX, they're all bidding to take over the JavaScript, HTML and CSS [spaces], and I just don't buy it. I don't buy that developers by and large are going to jump into a proprietary technology and replace what HTML and CSS has given them.
Man lernt nie aus - as the German say - one never stops learning. Thanks to comment found on my blog I found out that there is very nice solution problem of disappearing emails (after you download it with one POP client, other POP client would not get it). It is even documented in GMail help:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=47948&topic=1556If you're accessing your Gmail using POP from multiple clients, Gmail's recent mode makes sure that all messages are made available to each client, rather than only to the first client to access new mail.