Still trying to get rid of Outlook entirely. Almost there.

Mail - gMail and IMAP access on the iPhone with the built-in Mail application.

Calendar - gCal on the PC and the iPhone Calendar app with real-time over-the-air sync via NuevaSync. NuevaSync seems to work pretty damn well.

Tasks - Remember The Milk (RTM) and Appigo’s Todo in the iPhone, which has over-the-air (but not real-time) sync. Would be great if this was RT, but in the meantime, it’s awesome.

Contacts - Outlook, with Anagram and a few AutoHotKey (AHK) hacks. The iPhone’s Contacts app sync’s to Outlook when I plug it in, which is often enough. But, since all my contacts are in Outlook, I can’t get to them remotely… For this, I do a once-in-a-while upload/sync of Outlook to Google Contacts. Clearly, it would be better to ditch Outlook entirely and just use gContacts itself, which NuevaSync will apparently sync to the iPhone as well. The main thing holding me back from this is that with Anagram and AHK I have one-key access to my contact database on the PC. Even if I give up Anagram for getting new contacts into the database, gContacts is lacking some major usability features - buried inside gMail w/ no direct access, no contact photos, no notes, no birthdays, etc. Alternatively, I could keep Outlook as the main database and UI, and use Kigoo to sync to gContacts (and NuevaSync to sync from there to the iPhone). Update: I managed to install Kigoo, but it just crashes Outlook. No surprise there.

Why is there no equivalent of IMAP for contacts???

I’ve griped about how slow Firefox can get, especially when loaded down with my standard trio of GMail, GCal and RTM, plus a few other tabs. I was struggling with this again the other day and happened to come across this post referring to the Mozilla Prism project, which allows you to run individual web apps (like GMail, GCal and RTM) in a separate instance of Firefox, without all the browser “chrome” of menus and toolbars. Giving the app its own window restores these web apps (that have taken the place of traditional desktop apps) to primacy in the desktop UI navigation - you can use windows Alt-Tab application switching instead of mucking around with Firefox tabs. And as a massive side benefit, each Prism webapp is a separate instance of Firefox, which means that GMail runs 5x faster itself, and doesn’t slow down all my other browser sessions. There are a couple of issues (the GMail compose field stops working once in a while, the right-mouse menus are missing, links don’t open in ‘main’ browser session), but I love the idea, and it’s working well for me.

Followup after today’s MacWorld keynote: Interestingly (to some, I suppose), this desktop/web app issue is one of my little gripes with my new iPhone: I don’t really feel like I’m using all of what I paid for, since I’m using gMail, gCal and RTM instead of the built-in Mail, Calendar and Tasks (wait a second, is there no built-in tasks application?!?), and those don’t appear on the iPhone desktop, nor are they integrated with each other or the iPhone OS. Today’s iPhone 1.1.3 firmware update does for the iPhone more or less exactly what Prism does for Windows, letting you create desktop icons for bookmarked web apps. I still wish I could sync the calendar with gCal and the notes with something (anything!).

The charging pins on my BlackBerry Pearl went south a couple of days ago, and instead of spending $79 to replace and upgrade that, I spent $399 for an iPhone. Whoever is doing the marketing over there… So now I’ve had it about 24 hours, and to be honest, I’m not sure how much I love it. It sure is pretty and fun to poke at, but there are a lot of things missing. Of course, it’s specifically designed to be crippled for Windows users, and that’s part of the issue, but I’m not sure if I’m ready to replace my PC with a Mac as well, just to get the complete iPhone experience…

Another one of those “thanks anyway, Microsoft” moments. You know how if you have a couple of images on a page in Powerpoint, and you paste in another one, and Powerpoint oh-so-helpfully f**king RESIZES and REARRANGES all the other images on the page in a futile attempt to make them all fit? How incredibly idiotic. And how do you turn it off? Google Answers doesn’t know. It turns out that the “feature” is called “automatic layout”, and the checkbox to turn it off is buried in the in the AutoCorrect Options dialog. Makes sense, no? Of course, since, AutoCorrect is a feature that corrects your spelling, why not name this waste of code “AutoLayout”, and throw it into the bottom of the “AutoFormat as you type” subtab of the AutoCorrect Options dialog, under the heading “Apply as you work”. Right. Perfect. Well, now you know. Amazing, the stupidity. Amazing!

The actually _is_ a Microsoft product that I _do_ like though. I just replaced my 10+ year old Compaq clickety-clack keyboard with a new MS Comfort Curve 2000, and I like it alot. Not only was it the cheapest one, but it has just enough of a curve with being one of those full-on “ergonomic” keyboards. The keys have a good feel and are pretty quiet. It’s got a play/pause and mute controls that work with iTunes, and a calculator key over the numeric keypad. It doesn’t have a bunch of other whiz-bang “media” keys or anything, but those are all useless anyhow. Nor or it wireless, but what’s the use of getting rid of the wire leading to your keyboard if you have to worry about replacing the batteries? Whoo, go Microsoft keyboard division.

One of the very few things that bug me about my Thinkpad X40 are the seemingly helpful dedicated “Page Back” and “Page Foward” keys that sit along with the normal 4-way arrow keys. The problem is that it’s way too easy to hit “Back” when I’m in the middle of writing something in a web-based input form, sending me into a panic, fearing that I’ve lost an hour’s worth of writing. (The fact that this is possible at all is a seperate issue, but that’s not IBM’s fault). It just happened again, and so I went looking for a way to disable those keys. Sure enough, after a little poking around, I found the Thinkpad Keyboard Customizer Utility, which not only permits you to turn those keys off, but also provides a way to create a virtual “Windows” key, which is missing from the X40 keyboard. This is nice because I have a few _AutoHotKey_ macros that use the Win key to launch programs (Win-C for calculator, etc).

Just one of those little tiny things that make a difference to some of us.