Tech For Life

Mailplane is an email client for Mac OS X that allows you to use a lot of OSX’s built in friendliness and helpfulness with Google’s Gmail email accounts. I have been on the beta for quite some time, and the makers have decided it’s now time to recoup some of their time and resources by selling the application license for $24.95 ($19.95 for beta users ) which allows you to use Mailplane on up to 2 Macs. I can hear the question on your lips already, ‘Why should I part with my hard earned cash when there is a perfectly usable interface on Gmail’s website?’. And you may well ask…

Fortunately, there are a number of very good reasons why you should use Mailplane. The one that springs imediately to mind is that as an application, rather than a website, it integrates with OS X. If you want to attach a file, you just drag and drop onto the application window, rather than having to use the “Browse” button to snoop around your Home folder till you find what you want to send.

Another fantastic feature of Mailplane (Can you tell I like it?) is also to do with attachments. If you drag a large picture onto the application window to attach it to an email, Mailplane will automatically resize and optimise that picture based on settings that you can alter in the preferences pane. You don’t have to have this switched on, but I have found that nine times out of ten I actually do want the message to be as ’slim’ as possible, and this feature takes all the pain out of downsizing.

The integration with OS X goes further, you can use the application icon in the taskbar to start an email with a screenshot, just select “New message with screenshot…” and you get the option to select the screen area, it the optimises, and attaches the picture, and off you go. Want to send photos from iPhoto? No problem, Mailplane scomes with a plugin for iPhoto. All you do is select the photos, click “Email” and a new message box pops up with the photos optimised and attached.

It’s fully Growl capable, and perhaps best of all, it looks, acts and feels just like you are using Gmail inside Firefox or Safari, except it’s quicker. As an application, you can set it as the default for mailto: tags, and as the overall default email client.

I know that Thunderbird etc can now use Gmail through IMAP, but I think a lot of the usefulness of Gmail is in the tags, and the way it handles ‘conversations’, both of which are perfectly replicated in Mailplane, and not in Mail.app or Thunderbird.

So, I think it is well worth a look. If you use Gmail day in day out, then I think that $25 is an acceptable price for all of the additional features, and increased ease of use that Mailplane brings. To be honest, even if your use of gmail is entirely recreational, the iPhoto integration and the resizing of images are worth the money by themselves. I’m sure you will love it!

No, it’s not a Finnish battlecry. Nooka is a watch. Actually it’s a whole range of watches. The brainchild of Mr Matthew Waldman. Initially available as part of the Seiko range under license in 1999, the Nooka Zoo was so successful that Matthew took his patent and started his own watch company. The watches that the company now produces are purer and closer to his original vision - good for you Mr. Waldman!

Nooka watches are different. Most of them have no dial, and no digital…er…digits, thus removing the two most usual methods of communicating time. Nooka watches replace these concepts with several interesting, and to my eyes at least, fantastically cool ideas.

First, there is the original ‘Zoo’. Hours are shown in the big window on the lower left, and minutes count up in increments on a long lcd bar at the top. am/pm is shown by 2 dots, one for each, and seconds have their own little window at the bottom. To me, this is the least radical of Matthew’s designs, hours are still shown as a number, as are the seconds. It is the one that started the ball rolling though, so certainly deserves a mention.

Alongside the Zoo, the current range encompases the Zot and the Zen. The Zen is then split into the Zen-H and the Zen-V. The Zot (left) is by far my favourite. Hours are shown by filling in the dots at the top. Far from making things complex, I find the layout amazingly easy and quick to read. I struggled to think why, as it is so very very different to any other time-telling mechanism that I have used, and completely alien to either the analogue face or the digital…er…digits. Then I found this little gem on the Noooka website :

The visual mass increases as time passes, giving weight to an ephemeral and abstract concept

…and I agree. Somehow I need only glance at this layout and I instantly know the time. Minutes build up from left to right in the strip at the bottom, and seconds have a tiny window all of their own at the bottom left, the only ’standard’ representation on the face.

Finally we come to the Zen. This face didn’t gel with me as well as the Zot did, but it’s still great to look at. The Zen-v (right) has three vertical bars on the left. Two fill with hours and one with minutes. The Zen-h is the same, except the bars are horizontal (see the naming pattern?) and fill from left to right. I can’t quite put my finger on why, but neither of these layouts scream the time at me like the Zot does. I am sure that is a completely subjective thing, and Nooka watches are a subject that a room of 5 people will probably have 6 opinions on. This is a great thing. Blandness is the enemy of intelligent conversation.

The best place to get Nooka watches is from the internet, like most great geeky gear. Resellers include Cyberdog, Asos, and streetfusion in the UK, and loads of places in the US of A.

I’m not going to say much about these, anyone who gets the joke will think they are great. They aren’t tech per-se, but they are tech related, so only minor apologies for showing them here.

Anyone with a cute, html wizardess girlfriend, or any style (semi) conscious girl geek will love these. And there must be plenty of you out there because they are regularly selling out at Etsy. Keep checking to grab yours as soon as they come back in!

Tryphone is a brand new service that tries to show you what a new mobile phone handles like before you buy it. I say tries, because no amount of playing with a picture on the screen will give you the full feel of actually using the phone, tactile response and that ever indescribable ‘feel’ have so much to do with whether a phone feels right for you. That said, I think Tryphone.com is brilliant!

After just a few seconds I was grinning from ear to ear, what an amazing concept, why oh why has no one done this before!? In no time at all I was happily clicking through menus on my virtual LG Muziq (iPhone, Samsung Juke, and BlackBerry Pearl all also available - more to come, it’s only a beta at the moment) and getting an idea if I like the way it organises things. As it happens I do.

The application subtly shows you which buttons you can access from your current point in the menu system, and I do have to say that not all options are available from all locations, but its mostly there. As well as this fun tour, there are also a number of what Tryphone calls ‘demos’ but are actually more like ‘walkthroughs’ with instructions for you to follow on the cirtual phone. Still, an excellent idea, and it gets you using the phone and increasing that familiarity. Also, if you actually own the phone, and forget how to do something, this feature acts as a kind of handbook.

Also available are all the stats, specs anf feature lists that you would expect from the phone manufacturer, or a review site, along with user/reader reviews of the phones.

I give Tryphone.com a big huge thumbs up, limited phones on there at the moment, but as I said it’s only a beta, more to come I hope!

There are very much two sides to this blog. One side is the geeky tech loving button and screen fetishist lurking inside all of us. The other is what has come to be known as ‘lifehacks’.

Lifehacks are those tips or methods, like David Allen’s ‘Getting Things Done’ that help us get organised, or make life easier, or more fun, essentially anything that makes our work and play better.

One way of hacking your life (ewww that sounds…serial killer-esque…must remember not to use that ) is to alter the way you think about certain things, like your job. A recent article in stevepavlina.com shows this nicely. Essentially the key to advancement at work is to consider yourself self-employed, even if you actually work for someone else. Your business is you. You are providing services for that company, in the same way that you would if you worked freelance, except you use their office every day.

This makes a lot of sense to me, and touches a nerve that I find is often exposed with certain members of senior management in almost all large businesses which I have had the pleasure (?) to work for. They think they own you, and any request is reasonable because they pay you.

Repeat after me…I work for me, I am the boss of ‘Me Plc’.

The first benefit of this attitude is that all important vision of self worth. No longer are you at the bottom of a hill down which regularly slides all that cr*p that no one else wants to deal with. You are at the very top of the tree of your own private enterprise. You have as much to say about your own company as the managing director has of his. Maybe more, as you control every single employee with a single minded determination (OK so there is only 1 employee, and it’s you, but hey we are talking positivity here, not literalism)

Once you start thinking in this way, you can also make much more objective descisions about your working life.

Look at it like you would a small business. How do my customers see me? How is my ’stock value’ with my regulars? Is my own personal business growing, shrinking, or mund numbingly static?

One of the most important areas that this can pay dividends in, is deciding whether whatever you are doing for a job is time well spent. If it pays the bills, great! If it is fun (just sometimes, doesn’t have to be a constant barrel o’ laughs) then that’s a bonus. But put yourself at the centre of every single viewpoint. No longer will it be ‘Will my boss let me take 2 weeks off’, it becomes ‘I want 2 weeks off, what do I have to do to make sure my customers are catered for’. You see the difference?

All in all, I think this is one of the most positive shifts in thinking you can make in your working life. Those of us in full time employment for ‘the man’ so often feel downtrodden and helpless. Well bring the power back! You are your boss.

Go and read Steve’s piece, it left me with a set jaw and a determination to give it a good try, and it’s working so far.

I really like this. It’s subtle, it’s stylish(ish), and functional. All you do is connect it to your phone via Bluetooth, turn your phone to silent (Vibrate off too), and you will be warned of incoming calls by a gentle wrist massage. The winning element for me is that it keeps the notification silent, but removes the vibration from the phone. Even on silent, a phone dancing across the boardroom table as it happily vibrates to itself attracts a lot of attention. This wont.

No one would bat an eyelid at you wearing one of these round the office, it looks like a watch at first glance, except you probably have a watch on your other wrist. OK you can’t actually take calls on it, but for a discrete notification of a ringing phone, it sure as hell beats ‘Help Me Rhonda’, or god forbid ‘I Will Always Love You’. I have actually heard both used.

In the office.

I kid you not.

With a standby time of 100hrs, and 3hrs to charge, it’s easy to look after. And at £29.99 from NetPC it’s a good price for a Christmas, Birthday, or ‘Hey Steve, look what I found’ gift.