cooltools: Postbox
This working life
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Nov 052011
Just done the free download of Postbox 3.0, and yey, it’s solved the problem I was wanting to solve: managing multiple email addresses and signature. Specifically, easily sending email from different addresses and signatures. Difficult in gmail, but postbox gives you a dropdown menu once you’ve set it up, and … easy. I guess I’ll be forking over my $30 in a month’s time.
Meanwhile, had a look at MyLife, which lets you manage your social media from one url. Good idea, but it seems only to work in the USA. So no, I’m not even linking – a take on the old one about any publicity being good publicity. Any link is a good link?
post-umbilicalism
current affairs, Networked Media, This working life
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Sep 222011
At our place, we’ve just decided to dump our landline. What has been holding us up for a couple of years was our need for broadband speed, but it seems our carrier has finally worked that one out. And our phone bills should be cut in half.
Meanwhile, it seems that people are using mobile more and more for reading their email according to Litmus and summarised on ReadWriteWeb. Many interesting stats about email use, including the above extract from their infographic, have been supplied by Litmus, although as ReadWriteWeb points out, the data’s international and private applicability is limited.
Five years ago we were spruiking how mobile phones would deliver what was then called ‘rich media’, mainly by corporates wanting to to cash in on data costs. I guess its finally come true (although data has become cheaper, and many of the services free, so the corporates are relatively silent). One of these services that I’ve taken to, like a fish, or a bird, in the water/air, is Instagram, which has notched up 9m registered users and well over 10m downloads, according to an interview with Kevin Systrom on TheNextWeb.
Instagram’s design motivation was:
“The app store is 90% full of solution-based apps … But do they solve a problem?” A good question, but it was this concern that was the building blocks of Instagram. “Let’s focus on problems, not solutions” was the ethos as Burbn turned on its heels and morphed into Instagram.
The problems that Instagram solves are ‘beauty, speed and distribution. So true!
All this mobility, so little need for it. I should get a sleepbox, and give up home. Unfortunately they don’t yet make them collapsible or inflatable. And of course I’d need to put a baby change table in there.
The space bar
Issues in education, This working life
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Sep 152011
Yesterday I made a gmail email account for my mother-in-law. Established the account, logged on, sat her down and showed her the ‘subject’ line and the body text area and left her to it. She was writing in Spanish. This is a rough translation of what she wrote:
Subject: dearcristina
body: pleasesendmeemiliosemailaddress
I thought I had it covered. We so easily take for granted what we know!
I showed her the ‘space’ bar.
Next week: the shift key.
[wish i had a space bar. but would it be a spatious bar, or a bar in space? maybe both?]
