PIM

I always used to be a big fan of the Personal Information Manager (PIM) , I have been using PersonalBrain for almost 8 months and I dump all info in to the brain file so that I can refer them faster when needed

My wish list for PIM software:

- scalable enough to deal with heavy data

- mobile app to search information on mobile

- easy to search

- online syncing

- shortcut keys for managing information

E-series blog

http://www.e-series.org/

Found this blog on net, it talks about various e-series phone from nokia. If you are new to nokia e-series phones, than have a look at this blog for getting more out of your phone.

Flickr Images:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/e-series/

technorati tags:e-series, nokia, mobile, technology

E61 - my nightmare

Yep, I got a nokia E61 phone two weeks back and I am addicted to it now. I was searching for a perfect business phone which allows document,spreadsheet and presentation creation and after a big research on net, I narrowed down to 3 models which suits my need well.

1. Nokia E61
2. Sony M600i
3. Blackberry Pearl

Blackberry - Handle with care

One of my friends had a brand new blackberry pearl and it was in a bad shape since my friend dropped it accidentally, he was cursing the black beauty comparing it with his other phone nokia E61 which  was solid rock. Now blackberry pearl is off my list since I don't want to spent more money on a less rigid phone.

M600i - no demo

Next I tried to get Sony M600i black piece and I never found a demo piece on any shops to make up my mind and some of the reviews cursed M600i for its slowness. Now M600i is out of the list.

E61 - Way to go

Apparently I met a demo guy from Nokia who came all the way to my hotel to explain about its features and its connectivity to my laptop. Pingo! I found what I looked for. But I knew that E61i is going to be released sometimes in future and both the nokia support  and the nokia demo guy gave me the wrong estimates on its release date in India. I was waiting for some weeks and finally made up mind after seeing the mail from nokia saying that they are not sure about the immediate release dates.

Well finally I brought a nokia E61 2  and to my nightmare, the prices of the e61 phones dropped rapidly the next day after I brought one.  To add more to my nightmare nokia has released the E61i (my favorite model) in India by the next week. How dump was the nokia support for not knowing  about their next week release plan in India.

In spite of all these, I enjoy using E61 just because of its features.

I am back

I am back after a big break.  I am at Pune now working for a online collaboration suite product and certainly learning a lot.   As usual I  am thirsty for finding latest trend and gadgets which make our life easier and I am going to share my findings in this blog.

Launchy

I found this interesting windows utility program through blogs. It is called launchy, it allows to launch programs,folders and other files easily on desktop.

Launchy

Latest Release : Version 1.0 Beta

Features:

Index all the menu shortcuts on Programs Menu of desktop

Customizable new folders / file types for indexing

Customizable short keys (I don't think that the default ALT+SPACE shortcut will be liked my most)

Updating Version:

When I tried to update to new version of launchy the old data related to indexing settings were lost and I started everything from scratch.

My Usage:

I used to keep shortcuts in a common folder which I indexed using launchy

Launchy for Web ?

I love this idea very much that I have even started looking for the web site navigation version of launchy, which can be provided as a firefox/IE extension.

Certainly this is one of the best desktop utilities that I have found so far.

Blink List

Well it has been a long time since I wrote some in depth technical analysis blog. Recently I came across a service called blinklist, a service for social bookmarking, just like del.icio.us and bluedot

Blink list is an interesting service which I missed few months ago while covering bluedot. It is entirely done on PHP and supports rich set of features for social bookmarking. But I have always noticed some friction in the usage. For example everytime I tried to blink some web page, I see a significant delay in loading the entry form. This is because of the fact that the URL loaded inside the dynamic iframe changes everytime with the new blinking. Actually the blink form comes from the server side for all blinking which makes it slower.

Current Model

 

New Model

For a service which loads heavy AJAX engine (gmail, blog editor) this delay may not be a big deal (things are expected to happen fast after the first loading), but for a social bookmarking service this makes a big difference.

The New Model which is mentioned here takes advantage of the cache for loading the blink form again

When compared to other social bookmarking service blinklist sounds more promising

To Demo or Not to Demo ?

Whenever I try some new webservice , the first thing I will look is the Try Demo link/button. I am really lazy to register by giving  my email id without knowing how that service suits my need. Most of the companies offering demo will create a dedicated account for demo and hard code its username & password for demo login. The problem here is that it might not scale for heavy traffic.  They do handle this by disabling certain sensitive features in demo login, but this might reduce the  value of service in user's perception (after all it's not possible to expect a user to be intelligent & patience enough to understand everything). One more solution is there where a smart proxy agent filters demo requests alone and manages demo login.

1. Create a dedicated account whenever a new user tries a demo and reclaim all the resource when the user exits so that it can be reused. (This might slow down the login time)

2. Proxy Agent manages demo account by mapping the new demo user to one of the free account in demo cluster. It also keeps track of no of users accesing a demo and balances the load.

 

It is interesting to see that those services which claims to have huge userbase never had a demo for their service. It is always good to have 100 real users than 1000 junk users.

ALE - AJAX Linking and Embedding

Using OLE (Object Linking and Embedding)  Microsoft has managed to insert one of its component inside other, for example you can embed excel documents inside word. With the Web 2.0 trend more applications are trying to bring desktop components on web. Now ALE one can insert other AJAX components inside one component.

Zimbra's spec for ALE

This is really a innovative idea for the AJAX developers. Think of the possibilities that one can get using this concept especially at this point of time where Web 2.0 is booming