bradKELLETT

(Yes, an update. I know it’s been a while, but I will try to blog more regularly.)

While I understand Google had to do a lot behind the scenes to ensure that actions mapped into Gmail properly, it has been a long wait for long-time Gmail users like me to get IMAP support in Google’s mail product. I’ve been using Microsoft Exchange for email for a while, but with my reshuffling of jobs, I found I no longer need the advanced features that it provides. Instead, with the new addition of IMAP access (a necessity in my books), I decided to save myself the money on Exchange and switch to Google Apps, and as such, back into Gmail.

This decision left me with a conundrum – how to get my bank of email out of the clutches of the MS empire and into the supposedly less evil Gmail. While my mailbox is not the largest around, weighing in at around 2GB, this was still a daunting task. IMAP support certainly made this easier, but finding the right application to do the move proved difficult.

I tried Outlook 2007 itself, Mozilla Thunderbird, Entourage, and Eudora with varying success, from Outlook’s constant timeouts on the IMAP connection, to Thunderbird ending up with messages without subjects or senders due to Exchange mangling headers. The solution came from an unlikely source: Windows Mail.

Windows Mail is the replacement to Outlook Express in Windows Vista, and was able to import email directly from the Exchange server through Outlook, then upload it to Gmail through IMAP. While the process was slow (around 10 hours for all my email), it managed to get the job done perfectly, without any timeouts and with the complete messages intact. I did not expect much from Windows Mail, but it pulled through in the end, and if Thunderbird wasn’t so damn good, I would consider using it as my full-time email client.

I now have Thunderbird with the Lightning calendar plugin syncing to my Google Apps Gmail and Google Calender, complete with all my email and calendar entries from Exchange. I still fire up Outlook and use the wonderful RemoteCalendars to pull down my Google Calendar for syncing with my iPhone and other devices, but other than that I am totally satisfied with the free alternative to Exchange.

I have been running with a sidebar (the aptly named Desktop Sidebar application) ever since I started using a dual monitor setup many years back. The added productivity from having so much at your fingertips certainly makes up for the small loss of screen real estate. I have tried a couple of different alternatives, but have always come back to Desktop Sidebar. My latest adventure was with turning on the sidebar in Google Desktop Search. The GDS sidebar would have worked perfectly for me, if it were not lacking one thing:

Auto fit.

The plugins for the GDS sidebar cannot be set to auto fit depending on the size of the information displayed. I use auto fit on several panels in my normal Desktop Sidebar, such as the Windows Live Messenger contact list and Outlook Calendar and Task viewer. These panels have content that varies in size, so they need to stretch when several contacts come online, for example. In the sidebar in GDS, if I get too many Live contacts online at a time, I need to manually resize the pane (which is a pain, with Google’s algorithms that resize every other pane to try to make room for your actions), or the contact list scrolls off the page – with no scroll bar!

If anyone can point me to how to turn on auto fit in the GDS sidebar, please do.

Greg Hughes writes about a great feature in Google where you can actually ask it what time it is in a certain place in natural language and get a response. This is cool, and something I’m sure I’ll be making big use of when traveling. Google keeps amazing me more every day.

I also make big use of Google’s conversion features where, for example, typing “11cm in inches” yields the actual answer. Handy.

This looks useful – Microsoft SyncToy Beta.

There are a lot of other offerings out there to do the same thing, but for the price (free) Microsoft’s new toy looks pretty cool. I especially like the fact that it recognizes when I rename a file, and subsequently renames the file in the synching directory instead of re-copying it.

After using X-Windows on Unix systems, you get used to some of their nicer features, and if your anything like me you seek out ways to get those features on Windows. Here are two programs to get two of the features I love from X onto Windows:

XDESK – the best virtual desktop manager I have come across for Windows. It has way to many features to list here. There is a bit of a configuration learning curve, but its worth the effort.

TXMouse – Ever used the middle click paste in X? It allows you highlight something in one window, then simply middle click anywhere you want it to be pasted, an voila! Its a lot more useful and beneficial than it sounds…