While I’m convinced that technology can help us accomplish more in our daily lives, it isn’t always obvious that this is the case. Take yesterday: I received 293 emails. And that doesn’t include spam, or either my Yahoo or Gmail account. If I get this many messages in a single day, how can I quickly navigate through weeks or months of archived messages? Of course, I usually feel that just as I solve any given PC-related problem, another issue soon emerges; computers are an endless source of delight and dismay. To help, I’ll occassionally profile a trick or idea that I’ve found useful.
Here are a few:
1. Anagram. Do you enjoy manually typing name and address information into your Outlook? If so, skip to #2. If not, Anagram is nice tool–it automatically transfers contact information into Outlook. All you have to do is highlight a name and address (or an appointment or task), hit the hot key, and Anagram plugs the data into the right fields in the appropriate Outlook template. No more manual entry. I like small tools like this that do one thing, but do it well. Nice time saver.
2. X1. I live in email. And, as I mentioned earlier, sorting through old messages can be painful. Desktop search products like X1 can be a great help. The idea is simple: index all important data on your PC (email, files, photos, whatever), and then make it easy to find any particular item, regardless of how old it is or where it happens to be stored. Google recently introduced a new desktop search product (which has received generally favorable reviews), but my favorite is still X1–I think it’s the easiest to use.
3. Power search. Google and Yahoo both provide interesting functionality unrelated to search. For example, you can find area codes, exchange rates, flight status info, and weather. Details here and here.
4. Firefox. Windows users generally rely on Internet Explorer to navigate the web. There are two main advantages in switching to Firefox. First, tabbed browsing is awesome. If you like to have multiple windows open, tabs will make the process much easier to manage. Second, Google search is built into the toolbar. Much easier than going to www.google.com and searching from there.
5. Greasemonkey. Now that you know about Firefox, you should know about Greasemonkey. Actually, I haven’t gotten a real productivity kick from Greasemonkey, but there is a certain feature which can be fun. The idea behind Greasemonkey is to let you change the behavior of web pages’ design or interaction. In practice, this is done via scripts. For example, you can modify the default Google Mail interface to include a delete button. However, my favorite script is the April Fool’s joke. Try it and amaze your geeky friends…
good
Left by 机柜 on April 1st, 2007