Android on top!

An interesting little chart.  I guess I'm not the only one switching to Android.

http://www.androidcentral.com/gartners-q2-numbers-are-androids-huge

Sprint HTC EVO 4G - Android, the Journey Begins

In a forthcoming article, Craig Froehle and I "penned" a 16,000 word article comparing the Palm Pre and the HTC EVO 4G, in which one can find a lot of information about the EVO.

It's here:  http://www.androidcentral.com/comparing-palm-pre-htc-evo-4g-sprint

Since then, I've discovered a few things, and will set them down here.

1. It's not documented anywhere I've found, but it turns out that putting sounds in the <SD Card>\media\audio\alarms, or the <SD Card>\media\audio\notifications folders will cause them to show up in the calendar/alarm and notifications areas. 
2. There are three ways to save "favorites" with the EVO as it comes: 1) Put Direct Dial shortcuts on a page in the launcher, 2) Create a folder on a page in the launcher and put Direct Dial shortcuts in it, and 3) Create a People widget on a page and put shortcuts in it.  The jury is still out as to which one is the most productive and/or which one(s) I'll use.
3. Unlike previous Android devices (from what I've read) one doesn't have to do anything dramatic to have contact photos show up at good resolution.  A picture that comes down from Exchange is still just a little blurry (something like 96x96 pixels), but once you replace it with a picture on the EVO, it sticks at high resolution!

Android, here I come!

I bought a Sprint Evo this past Friday, and have been working with it,putting it through its paces, and co-authoring a review of it against the Palm Pre. I'll add the link to the article here when it's published!

Fun stuff!

Why Google Docs isn't ready, yet

I've been using Google Docs to collaborate on an article I'm writing with afriend, and to collaborate with a new employee on some summer activities,and it's very handy! 

There are two reasons I won't/can't use Google Docs for more that tangentialthings, however:

1. There is no security/privacy built in to Google Docs. OK, there'ssome, but not nearly enough to allow me to entrust any confidentialinformation to it.

And

2. This kind of thing:

Someday, though!

Don

A workable way to do tags in Outlook 2007

Prior to Outlook 2007, Outlook would let one type an arbitrary word in the Categories field, which served as an OK way to "tag" an item in Outlook, albeit a way that cluttered up the Categories field considerably.  In Outlook 2007, however, one can only assign categories through dropdown menus and shortcut keys, which means the categories have to be predefined. 

Those who know me know that this is sufficient unacceptable to warrant a little fiddling around, looking for a better way, which I've found.

In Outlook (all flavors) you can create new fields.  I created a new one, called, imaginatively, "tags" (without the quotation marks).   It's a field into which one can type text from the grid view (see my other post here regarding my "eureka moment" about how to to Tasks in Outlook (and the Palm Pre) that I use for managing tasks in Outlook.

Oh, did I forget to mention that this pertains to managing tasks?  Well, it does.  For contacts, using the dropdown and standard, already-defined (by me) categories works just fine.  I can't for the life of me figure out why one would want to categorize calendar items.  I do some minor categorization of incoming emails, but only to facilitate changing client emails to a different color so they stand out.  But I digress.

With this new field I can type in arbitrary tags.  This makes the task thus entered searchable.  I don't really care about tagging personal todos, although I might, now that  I can, but I *do* care about tagging client todos, since I use the Outlook task list (for want of anything better, more efficient or more effective) to capture and group client todos.  I also use the tag "client" to trigger formatting that changes the font and the color of a task so it's easily recognizable as a client task.  I put the client name, or an abbreviation, in as a tag so that I can search on that tag and display all the tasks currently associated with a given client.  Very handy when I'm working with a client and need to make sure tasks are being managed well for that client.

Lots of applications for this.

You're welcome!