I have now have seven email accounts operating from Thunderbird – the excellent, free email client from Mozilla. As you can imagine sometimes recalling what email was from a particular account can become quite tiresome. As good as Thunderbird is as a client, the search facility is ancient and the indexing of Google’s Desktop Search offers exactly what I want (privacy issues aside), instantly . I am not a fan of the sidebar that comes with the Google desktop, it reminds me too much of the Office sidebar they inflicted on us a few years ago, and floating deskbar just gets in the way. While the deskbar is more possibility it is still intrusive, what I really need is an extension to integrate my Google desktop search directly into Thunderbird. There is implementations of this available for Outlook and even Outlook Express but an extension could be done so much better and seamlessly integrate into this great app at the same time. Is there anything out there?
I am pleased to say that the guys over at Flock have released their next version of their browser and it feels a much slicker, more polished product. Based on Firefox 1.5, Flock is still in very much in the beta stages but anyone who liked the first public beta should check it out (or anyone who didn’t for that matter – its definitely improved). Check out my review of the first one (0.5) and stay tuned for the update when I have had more time to offer a fair opinion.
37 signals officially launched Campire today, a real-time chat service that can add further productivity to your business or support for your products. After the last month of testing Campfire joins a stable of other great 37 signals web based services such as Basecamp and Backpack.
Offering a number of different pricing plans to suit your needs there is a free 30 day trial available that offers up to 4 chatters and 10 MB of space. It appears that they are sensibly limiting sign ups to 500 a day to monitor performance, although I was fortunate enough to try this while spaces were available.
Adaptive Path’s Measure Map has been snapped up by Google according to Google’s Blog. Measuremap, though still in private beta, came to prominence as a free blog stats service that has been attracting great reviews. Using a great combination of Ajax and Flash, Measuremap gives you your information put into digestible chunks that is in layman’s terms. A product clearly with much potential there has been reports of performance problems recently though on larger sites which is ironic given the recent issues that Analytics had when first launched. The integration into Analytics is sure to follow and it will be interesting to see the results and how competitors like Mint respond. Their homepage has already been updated to reflect this takeover; with a link to Google’s blog at the top and a ‘Measure Map is a production of Google’.
With Apple’s OSX and the advent of Vista, Windows XP has begun to look really pretty stale and dated. This is understandable for an operating system that has been available for nearly 5 years but there’s a pretty simple stop gap solution that can keep us going until the next big Windows release.
The Energy Blue Theme originally came with Windows Media Center 2005 and then was released as part of an ‘Enhancment Pack’ for Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005. This slick and fresh theme has since been made available as a seperate download (one of the Tablet PC’s power toys) from Microsoft, but still no release for XP Home or Pro.
