Nice big cocktail

Originally uploaded by bdwelle.

half a liter of vodka + one liter of tonic makes a damn fine cocktail

I’m still stuck using MS Outlook, and to be honest, it’s leaving me hanging. Or hanging me out to dry. I’ve stayed with it mainly because I haven’t found a full-featured substitute for the calendar and task features, and because I I need a single source of truth for contacts, and it’s nice to be able to link contacts to tasks and calendar entries. But since I’m now using Thunderbird, I don’t get *any* meaningful contact/email integration beyond a once-in-a-while export from Outlook to TBird, and adding new contacts to Outlook is a full-on cut-and-paste affair.

1) Why hasn’t someone done a good open source/web 2.0 PIM? GCal? Backpack? Sunbird? Or should I just _switch_?

What’s missing? For one, an open repository and less opaque scripting. While Outlook _can_ be scripted (see below), it’s very tricky to find the application-specific details that are necessary to do so. More importantly, the closed repository _requires_ you to go through the app to get at the data. While that’s the intrinsic model for shrink-wrap software, it’s (arguably) not the most productive way to build a platform. I suppose MS will probably sell you a developer’s API to the Outlook repository, but I’m much more inclined to favor applications that add value on top of an *open respository*. Del.icio.us is a great example.

Another big thign missing from Outlook is web-based access and ICAL/RSS support. ICAL support would solve the web access issue itself, I think.

2) Why hasn’t someone written an extension for TBird that grabs contact info from an email sig and creates a vCard or hCard on the fly? Any pointers to apps that handle this more elegantly?

update: I may have found it — Anagram

3) I would give $100 for a the ability to hover over a name with some modifier key held down and be linked to the contact info from my preferred contacts source-of-truth. That’s probably easy enough to do in MacOS w/ Spotlight and scripting, but with Outlook? ugh

update: After finding Anagram, which makes it _so_ much easier to get data _into_ Outlook, I realized that I could use AutoHotKey to script what I described above. Now if I select a name and hit F11, AutoHotKey activates Outlook, runs a search on the name, and pulls up the contact record. Another AutoHotKey macro allows me to run a Google search from anywhere, and another pulls up Google Maps. So, even though Windows doesn’t have built-in scripting like MacOS, there are great little utilities like AutoHotKey that do the same job. Very nice! PS – you could use VBA, Perl, and any number of other scripting languages that run on Windows to do the same thing.

UPDATE as requested by Paul Farquhar: Here is the relevant AHK code: <pre> ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; Activate MS Outlook search box (F11) ; use $ for global F-key, since F11 is Outlook's own native "search" hotkey $F11:: IfWinNotActive, Outlook { ActivateOutlook() } Sleep 300 ; 300ms ; send local F11 to Outlook itself to focus in search box Send, {F11} return ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; Look up selected contact in MS Outlook (Ctrl-F11) ^F11:: CopyToClipboard() ActivateOutlook() Sleep 300 Send, {F11} Send, ^V Send, {ENTER} return ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ; activate MS Outlook function, handling Office 12/11/10 ActivateOutlook() { IfWinNotExist, Outlook { IfExist, C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\OUTLOOK.EXE Run "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\OUTLOOK.EXE" Goto, Activate IfExist, C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11\OUTLOOK.EXE Run "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11\OUTLOOK.EXE" Goto, Activate IfExist, C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office10\OUTLOOK.EXE Run "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office10\OUTLOOK.EXE" Goto, Activate WinWait, Outlook } Activate: WinActivate, Outlook } </pre>

I finally got around to reading The Tipping Point. Gladwell’s book is a quick read and it would be easy to chalk it up as “common sense,” but it’s definitely worth the 2-3 hour read. My notes:

p160 FAE (Fundamental Attribution Error): I agree that we tend to avoid attributing behavior to context. Gladwell believes that we want instead to attribute behavior to “fundamental character traits” — true, but I think what’s more important is that we want to believe that we’re in control of our actions — that as humans, we may observe our environment and it might even make us feel but that we can overcome our surroundings (and our feelings) by conscious, deliberative, rational thought. I tend to agree with John Gray that this is largely nonsense.

*p163 Character:* ‘… is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent on circumstance and context. The reason that most of us _seem_ to have a consistent character is that most of us are really good at _controlling our environment_.” Agreed! I’m pretty good at this sort of control myself, but boy is it tiring. I think it’s time for a break, for a lot of us.

*p179 Rule of 150*: Gladwell pulls out some great examples showing that the natural limit on the size of socially functional groups is about 150 people. I’ve always been proud of the way that AdMonsters exemplifies bigger isn’t better, and I think that _the_ reason for our unique success is that we’ve pursued a purely social approach, and kept the size of the [attending] group below this critical threshold.

*p198 Early Adopters*: “the attitude of the Early Adopters and the attitude of the Early Majority are fundamentally incompatible. … All kinds of high-tech products fail because the companies that make them can’t find a way to transform an idea that makes perfect sense to an Early Adopter into one that makes sense to a member of the Early Majority.” Quite so, and someone to keep in mind.

*p241 Parenting*: Gladwell notes the lack of evidence for parents’ ability to influence their childrens’ behavior, and proposes that kids learn behavior primarily not from parents but from social peers. Perhaps, but let’s not forget that families are social too.

There are a bunch of other books I’ve been meaning to write up… maybe I’ll get to that over the summer.

There must be others out there who agree that an ultralight PowerBook is a big hole in Apple’s hardware product line. If you do agree, please sign the petition!

I’ve been thinking about tagging UI as well, and this discussion about tags, commas, spaces, etc got me thinking a bit more today. For one, I tend to agree that spaces are bad delimiters, and I agree that “what’s wrong with commas, anyway?”. More importantly, however, is how to get users to understand how to use a delimiter. As others have noted, they do understand the comma as a delimiter for email addresses, but search engines have trained us to use spaces to seperate words in free text fields.

So, here’s an idea – what about a dynamic UI that provides some visual feedback as I type. If I type without any delimiters, each word is highlighted seperately (two "tags"). A visual cue (perhaps a comma fading in to the right of the text field?) reminds me of the delimiter. If the user then adds a comma -- -- then the highlighting changes to show that the words are treated as a phrase, or single "tag". Here's a crude illustration of how I'm thinking it would look:

I'm sure someone can figure out how to do this sort of word-by-word highlighting inside an HTML form field...

Ted and I (finally!) sold the house. Things are defintely on the upswing for him at the moment. He’s been using an old Quadra or somesuch that I gave him. I got the machine from Wired one day when they were giving away all the old macs. I took him down to the Apple store and he walked away with a new 15″ powerbook. I spent a few minutes fooling with Spotlight (rad) and the massive LCD displays. Nice stuff. One of these days soon I might get one too, but at the moment it just seems silly creating another reason to spend more time at the computer.

I’ll reiterate my plea for a subnotebook PowerBook, sans optical drive. What’s the holdup, Apple? That’s some thing I would wait in line for — and I’m not the only one. I don’t understand people that say they need an optical drive — my Thinkpad X40 doesn’t have one, and I’ve never missed it. Optical is already obsolete except for those editing movies, etc — and you’re not going to do that on a subnotebook anyhow.