I bought two Bengal kittens last week - they are beautiful if a little smelly. Leaving my laptop on the kitchen table was not a good idea as it was attacked. It smashed on the stones leaving the screen ruined ! Expensive cats these Bengals .My company is launching a new application this weekend and its go live we a major client so this was not needed. New laptop urgently required. A thousand quid and trip to Coventry later its time to transfer over all the dev tools other software and get back up to working ASAP but i dont have office and of course the new laptop is VISTA so compatability is bound to be an issue at some point
So google to the rescue. Firstly I have just discovered Gmail which is very clever. 6GB of space at time of writing - my Outlook PST is about 1.5gb. I set up google mail to read my pop account and with a handy sidebar gadget have the mail coming through. Next to start getting the data from my Outlook onto GMail.
Gmail offer IMAP functionality - perfect ( this allows you to synchronise folders between client and server). Account set up was easy and over the next few days all my mail should be synchronised. I love the way gmail groups mail into conversations - its really efficient when you get used to it. Attachments can be opened and browsed using google documents - slick
I need a calendar and google has these two. A few minutes of messing and my blacberry now talks to gmail and sync with the google calendar - nice and easy. Contacts can go straight into gmail.
This is great - i can now access all the tools i really need anywhere. My old mail is archived and safe now -searching is rapid. My calendar is sorted and contacts online. The phone is synced -total cost in licensed software . . . £0
The WEB 2.0 aspect of the google software including this blogging tool is brilliant. Finally interfacing the web with a easier desktop experience- with not extra software required. Check out google web toolkit for one of the most impressive dev environments to enable UI coding and more
