I have subscribe to the Google network a fair bit. This means that I use

1. Gmail as my main email client
2. Google Reader as my main RSS feeds reader
3. Google Calendar as my consolidated calendar
4. Google Contacts as my main contact manager

The advantage of subscribing to Google’s cloud services or network, or whatever you want to call it is that

1. It is extensible. You can link data to your data easier than other platform. You can export data away from Google should you feel dis-satisfied with it
2. Because it is extensible and API is open to developers, many desktop,smartphone and other native device developers can build applications to increase productivity and performance
3. Google continues to innovate in their products to accommodate to a large number of users with different ways of calendaring, contacts management, reading and managing email

But the downside for using Google’s product

1. The look is always very ugly compare to Microsoft and Yahoo’s offering
2. Because applications are always in Beta, some people will feel turn off about experimental things and why it doesn’t have certain features

Google have taken a lot of efforts to address the UGLY portion. In the last year, their web applications and Android and iPhone applications have undergone a drastic beautifying.

Now there is a consistent minimalist white theme for almost all their applications. They have cut out a lot of the clutter and have given enough whitespace to enable the user to focus on the right subject.

Good user interface attracts users to come back and want to use it, and the more a person use it, it enhances them better.

The new Gmail resizes better when you change it to a smaller window. The email conversations look better with the picture of the person you are talking to next to it and overall feels more like a chat conversation.

The problem with Google Reader had been that it always look strange and its really not great at focusing on what matters – the content! This redesign removes a lot of the boundaries and ensures the user sees clearly between controls and content.

There is also a tighter integration with Google Plus which is good to grow the Google Plus social network. The more ways you make it easier for info sharing the more it becomes important.

What do you guys think? Do you like the new changes?

Here is a simple tool to resolve a problem that some of you would have. If you are using outlook and would like to move your contacts to Gmail or vice versa, this tool would be very useful.

Price

This Application is FREE

Platform

This Application works on Windows

Features

• Contacts Sync works with any Gmail account as well as Google Apps account.
• Synchronize from Outlook contacts to Gmail contacts or
• Sync contacts from Gmail to Outlook contacts.
• Runs in system tray.
• Option to choose a Outlook Contacts folder to sync.
• Retrieves all contacts from Gmail, including "Other Contacts" / "All Contacts" folders
• Whenever you send an email from Gmail, all email addresses are stored (with or without Names) in "Other Contacts" / "All Contacts". Contacts Sync retrieves such email addresses from Gmail contacts even with blank names.
• Sync Outlook Contacts with Gmail Use your Outlook contacts from anywhere in the world with your Gmail account.
• Transfer Gmail contacts to Outlook and use Gmail Contacts Offline.

Download it here

One of the most annoying thing about Gmail compared to Yahoo mail and Hotmail is that after you finish reading a mail, it brings you straight to inbox.

To me it seems to indicate that through its myraid of features it still lags behind Yahoo mail and Hotmail in this aspect.

Well, not anymore, this new labs feature is really not bad:

Today, whenever you open an email in your Gmail inbox and then archive or delete it, you’re taken back to your inbox. Many of you have asked for the ability to instead go to the next conversation. Keyboard ninjas will already be familiar with the “]” and “[“ keyboard shortcuts for archiving and going to the next/previous conversation. For everyone else (and for people who frequently mute or delete conversations rather than archive them) we’re offering a new feature in Gmail Labs called “Auto-advance,” which automatically opens the next conversation after you archive/delete/mute the one you’re on.

To get started with “Auto-advance” go to the Labs tab in Settings, enable it, and click the “Save changes” button. By default, “Auto-advance” will advance to the previous (older) conversation in your inbox — perfect for people who read their newest mail first. If you usually read your oldest email first and would rather advance to the next (newer) conversation, you can change the direction from the General Settings tab.

I will be activating this with no doubt that this will make life much easier.

Trust Google to improve their core software that is most strategic to them. When iPhone first came out, they optimize their web app for it. Now for the iPad as well. Will Microsoft be as reactive as them?

Google Contacts is one contacts organizer that i like using since it syncs with Android, iPhone, Blackberry or Windows Mobile.

But what happens when you have duplicated contacts in your address book? you would need to scan through then or do a search to identify which are the contacts with same email address.

Google contacts have come up with a way to sort this out.

To clean up your contact list in one fell swoop, just click the “Find duplicates” button in the contact manager, review the merge suggestions (and uncheck any suggestions you don’t want merged), and hit the “Merge” button.

[One button to merge all duplicated contacts >>]

We know how slick the Google Reader, Gmail and Calendar client is on iPhone and Android. They seem to be like a regular application rather than a browser. Its no disappointment that one of the biggest highlights this month which is Google Wave is now like the great Gmail web client. Techcrunch Noticed something special about bookmarking the Wave page though:

Just like with any Web page on the iPhone, you can save a bookmark on your Home screen, and it creates a little icon which launches mobile Safari to that page. When you save the Wave bookmark to your Home screen, however, something different happens. You go to Wave, but without the Safari wrapper which allows you to navigate to another page or search the Web. Instead, it looks more like a regular app and there is no way to navigate away from it. Everything else works the same as in the mobile browser version.

I haven’t gotten a Wave Account, but i hope someone would be kind enough to give me an invite for this! can’t wait to try it.

Folks will be interested to learn how you can push gmail instead of the usual exchange mail query that you have probably set up on your iPhone.

Instructions can be found in this article here

Push Mail for Google Gmail now on your iPhone and Windows Mobile Smartphone

It looks like we can finally have push Gmail together with Push Google Calendar and Google Contacts. This is gonna be good!

Those of you who live in your Gmail inboxes usually want to know what’s happening with your email more instantly than standard fetch mail on your phone allows. Sure, using Gmail in your mobile browser gives you all the benefits of conversation threading and starring, but you still have to refresh every time you want to check for new mail.

When we launched Google Sync for Contacts and Google Calendar earlier this year, an over-the-air, always-on connection to sync mail was noticeably absent. We heard your requests loud and clear, and starting today you can use Google Sync to get your Gmail messages pushed directly to your iPhone, iPod Touch, or Windows Mobile device.

You can set up push Gmail by itself or choose to sync your Contacts and/or Calendar as well. If you’re using an iPhone, make sure you’re running iPhone OS version 3.0 or above (on your device, click Settings > General > About and scroll down until you see Version). If your software is out of date, follow Apple’s upgrade instructions. Then, visit m.google.com/sync from your computer for set up instructions. If you’re already using Google Sync, you can just enable push mail.

Once you’re set up, new messages are normally pushed to your phone within seconds. While this type of speed is pretty awesome, push connections tend to use more power than fetching at intervals, so don’t be surprised if your battery life isn’t quite what it used to be. We’ve done a lot of work to optimize power usage, but if you prefer to save battery life, you can always turn off push in your phone’s settings and fetch mail every 30 or 60 minutes instead.

Introduction

For those new to this article, it is part of a series of articles where I share my GTD system.

Part 1 here talks about my plan and overview of my GTD system

Part 2 here talks about why i eventually chose iPod Touch 2G as my main to do list console

Part 3 here talks about why i choose Appigo ToDo for iPhone as my main task manager

Part 4 here talks about how to plan for big projects and smaller projects

Part 5 here talks about how to make use of Contexts, Tags to Execute your tasks

Part 6 here discuss about how you can review projects better using iThoughts mind mapping software

In this Part 2 of the series I will share about some of my past systems that i used to do organizing and planning as well as my default choice now.

My past systems

I tried quite a fair bit of systems before this since my school days years ago.

Microsoft Outlook

I have never know to use a to do list but find out Microsoft Office opens me to a software that almost every knows about in Microsoft Outlook. It was fashion as an email client, but it does provide a rather robust Calendar, Contact List and To Do list functionality.

Desktop Task Manager Outlook

Problem

I thought the first thing that i don’t like about it is how hard it is to clear off all the done tasks from the list! I never had problem with the Calendars and Contacts but that is one aspect that i cannot stand.

What got me off this system wasn’t that however. As a student then, it involves alot of moving to school and really i cannot sync my task management system when in school since during that time computer wasn’t that advance and not many schools have very fully functional computers.

PDAs – The Sony Clie and the Windows Mobile PDAs

As i approach university, i began to use my hard earned pocket money on PDAs. They were expensive then, but damn were they useful.  You can plan your time table and create reminders and read books on them.

Sony Clie SJ 33

I especially like my experience with the Palm based Sony Clie. Its very responsive and together with Agendus for palm it was enough for me then.

IPAQ 2210

O2 Mini

I subsequently sold off my palm when i decide to move over to Windows Mobile Platform. My options were to get a PDA and i promptly got a HP iPaq 2210. The windows mobile platform offers more software and functionality, but also more niggling problems such as memory leak, crashes and all. But with Pocket Informant, it turned out to be one of the best capturing and organizing platform. I got myself a second hand O2 Mini when i decide to try an integrated device.

Problem

However, it is during this period that i realise the flaws of the To-Do list. Even with a robust software like Pocket Informant, having a single layer task management system  without buckets or multiple lists just does not make sense, cause that is just so much you can put in categories until it overwhelms you.

It is also during this period that i realise i got alot of tasks note down but which one do i do first? Before GTD, I got to the point where i didn’t check on my list for some time and just got completely off the system

Web Based Remember the Milk Heaven

Learn how to use Remember the Milk to do task management (click image)

In the first years of my working life, I had a much earlier experience compared to my peers on cloud computing and one of the first software that caught my attention was Remember the Milk.

Remember the Milk is a web based To Do list software that is hosted on their private server. There are paid versions and free ones but really if you are using web based task management the free one will just suffice.

Its got to be one of the most extensive javascript application that i have ever seen. Everything occurs almost on one single page and it works because of the extensiveness of ajax scripting.

When i first saw it i was thinking why i will not use it. I wouldn’t be online most of the time, if i don’t have internet connection, does that mean i can’t plan and do stuff any more? Luckily, Remember the milk have incorporated Google Gears which allow offline viewing. (its really well done.)

I really feel this is the right system and i blog about it extensively here how i used to work with it. Do take a look at this article to find out more.

[Read the rest of this entry...]

Folks who are new to the site will know that i used to use remember the milk as my main to-do list /task management platform. Well, the good thing about using remember the milk or rtm for short is that they have a group of enthusiastic developers that really focus on what they do best and tries their best to make things easier for us to get things done.

Today they added a few new things to their already very sophisticated web task management platform.

Smart Add

An awesome feature. They are going to let you enter the due date priority tags and location url in one single field. This is a definite improvement for power users.

^ adding due dates by invoking  ^

^ adding priorities by invoking !

^ add list and tags by invoking #

^ adding location by invoking @

^ adding repeating by invoking *

^ add time estimation by invoking =

so to summarize you get somthing like this:

Pretty neat! Thats why i fell in love with remember the milk in the first place!

Smart Add support  for Twitter, Gmail and Email

Add support for the new Smart Add syntax in different Remember The Milk interfaces. Aside from the web app, you can also use Smart Add when adding tasks in Remember The Milk for Gmail, and when adding via email and Twitter. It’s also available in the API for third-party developers.

Clicking of task cell selects and checks task

Speed Improvements!

One thing that really gets me off was the slow speed due to the freaking number of lines of javascript they use. Man i could have swear if they come up with a desktop client it will be much better.

All in all, its a great improvement for Remember the Milk fans, task management never seems so fun before!

[Remember the milk Smart Add Feature Post >>]