Whilst working hard I stumbled across a site which mentioned yet another Mozilla project.

Prism (formerly Webrunner) is desktop based browser that doesn’t have all the baggage that a normal browser has, such as plugins and extensions. So much so that it is becoming known as a “distraction free browser”. It allows you to run one web application per one instance of Prism.

It works by creating shortcuts to Prism passing in parameters which you set in the shortcut creation panel, parameters such as application URL and various window settings. Then simply clicking on the shortcut opens up Prism and takes you directly to the application.

This means you could end up with shortcuts to your favourite sites and applications within your programs menu. Good eh?… I think.

At the moment, each window is the same. Which makes this a simple, cut down browser. Which you’d expect as it sits on top of Firefox anyway. I just can’t see why you would want this? It is being regarded as an application that sits alongside Adobe AIR and Silverlight (kind of..) yet it all it appears to do is load the web application as it does in a browser (admittedly, a hell of a lot quicker).

What would be great is if it could manage the toolbar by creating buttons based on the bundle. For example, the Gmail bundle would create buttons such as “Check for new mail” or “Compose”. Or a Facebook bundle for the many Facebook actions.

At the moment, I can’t see why anyone would want to use Prism over a normal browser. Development is still in its early stages so hopefully future releases will shed more light on the direction Mozilla are planning to take it.

More information:

http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2007/10/24/prism/
http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/10/prism/

As good as Gmail is at filtering spam. It would be nice if it would stop putting all emails sent from my web form into the spam folder. As you have probably guessed, enquiries are not actioned until I, by chance, browse my spam folder.

Setting filters and classifying emails as “not spam” makes no difference.

The only solution is to set the from address to be something like “contactform@mysite.com” and adding the email address as a contact. Gmail recognises it as a friend and doesn’t place it in your spam folder. (Remember to include the senders proper email in the body. :) )

Scenario
My email client is Thunderbird. It has been for several years. So that’s several years’ worth of emails, attachments, filters, junk training and plug-ins. The set up is exactly how I would like it to be, well…almost. A feature I really would like to be a touch less painful is being able to share my emails between machines. Up until now I have gotten around this problem by sharing my profile folder, this works ok as long as you remember to close the client on all machines, otherwise you get the dreaded lock file error message. This is where IMAP comes in.

What is IMAP?
Why bother when Google explain it so well.

The Issue
Like I said earlier, I have many emails, attachments, filters which I don’t want to lose. In addition to this, GMAIL has the ability to cope with all that Thunderbird offers. The plan then was to transfer all my emails to GMAIL and set up filters and labels to ultimately end up with that I have in Thunderbird replicated in GMAIL. The major task being copying thousands of emails from a Thunderbird POP account to a GMAIL IMAP account.

Below is an explanation of what I had to do to move from POP to IMAP.

1. Firstly, Enable IMAP!
For some reason, IMAP still hasn’t been enabled in my account. To enable IMAP you need to switch your default language to “English (US)”. This will display the “Enable/Disable” IMAP option AND automatically enable it for you.

2. Setting up IMAP in Thunderbird alongside your existing POP account.
Again, just follow this tutorial. (Other clients)

I now have IMAP enabled in my Gmail account and have set up the account in Thunderbird.

You will notice some new folders under a folder called [GMAIL]. These are standard folders that exist in your Gmail account.

3. Copying emails from POP to IMAP
By simply dragging and dropping the folders from the POP account to the newly created IMAP account creates a label in Gmail AND uploads all emails for you. It is really that simple. It can take a while as it also uploads all attachments.

4. Set up filters
This, I decided, to do on a case by case basis. As a new email arrives, set up the new filter in GMAIL. Tedious, if not annoying, but I want to transfer control over to GMAIL.

… and there you have it. Easy innit!

My POP account remains active as I use it to download all my emails which I now use as a backup.

Here are some hacks and tools that improve how IMAP and Gmail behaves.

Trash can
As it stands, when you delete an email, it will end up in your LOCAL trash can and not in Gmail. To make all deleted emails end up in Gmail’s trash can you will need to modify user.js. There is a way of doing this by adding a new string within config but I could not get this to work whereas this tutorial worked fine.

Folder Labels
If you upload a folder which has subfolders, Gmail creates a label separated with slashes.
e.g. if you upload a folder called “Friends” which contains a sub-folder called “Bob” then all emails in “Bob” are labeled as “Friends/Bob”. So as you can imagine, folders with long names make the labels pretty much unreadable. Fortunately, there are two ways around this:

Folders4Gmail is a Greasemonkey scripts that takes the nested label structures and turns it into a clickable tree.
Better Gmail is a Firefox add-on that does the same, as well as many other mods. Well worth a look.

Other useful resources:
lifehacker.com/software/geek-to-live/ turn-thunderbird-into-the-ultimate-gmail-imap-client

http://userstyles.org/styles/search/gmail

http://blog.persistent.info/2005/12/greasemonkey-christmas.html

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1320 (Gmail Manager)

http://lifehacker.com/photogallery/top-10-unofficial-gmail-apps/

In my quest to get fit, I needed a device that would distract me from the pain and anger I generally feel when exercising.

For a while I have been dancing between an iPod nano, Philips and iRiver (not literally dancing, merely sat on my arse browsing impartial, independent review sites :/ ). And I can finally say that the iRiver won.

My reason? Simply because it amounts to external storage with a music folder which allows me to simple copy paste music to and from WITHOUT the need for a proprietary music manager. Not to mention the bloody good sound quality you get with their shipped headphones. Has its own graphic equalizer, play options (random all, random one, random one then all, random some then maybe a few more, random none then one and then maybe a few more then none then some) and the sound recorder.

I attend many meetings, as you can imagine, I pay full attention and make copious amounts of notes BUT in case I miss details (which is highly unlikely since I pay full attention and make copious amounts of notes) then I can record meetings for playback later. Sweeeeeet.

Other reasons were the widely respected iRiver brand and the USB socket which is a standard one meaning I can reuse my digital camera’s dangling USB cable.

Generally, well worth the money.

Full review here: http://www.pocketables.net/2007/05/review_iriver_t.html

In the previous post i talked about how i liked ActiveCollab and decided to cough up the reddies for a copy. Well i have since requested a refund under their 30 day money back offer. Reason? Because having used it more and more i feel that the product was released 6 months too early. There is still a load of issues with functionality that need addressing before it can become a product that’s worth the money.

So the hunt continues… (or i may revert back to plan A and build my own!)