bhavishya_KANJHAN

Let’s face it, Facebook has become a hub of daily activity for a large number of people, including me. This is specially true for university where birthdays and socials are organised over Facebook and if you’re anywhere as obsessed as me about having an organised calendar, you would have noticed the lack of a true solution to have that information automatically imported in your calendar and more importantly mobile device. This is because most mobile phone sync solutions only allow you to sync one calendar to your phone and while you may be able get an internet calendar running in Outlook you can’t update it on your device. I tried copying event information from internet calendar to local calendar but that would mean doing it periodically and it beats the purpose.

Fortunately, there is a, tricky but working, solution to that problem. In this scenario I’m going to use Outlook, Google Calendar and a Nokia E90.

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We’ve got a lot of people wondering why Google recently renewed the search deal with Firefox when they had plans to release their own browser. Why the answer to isn’t obvious is beyond me but hey I’ll take my own shot at the obvious answer anyway. So how do I put this simple, let’s see. How about, urm, because it makes damn business sense. Firefox drives a lot of traffic through Google. If Google were to decide to not extend the deal, it would lose anywhere between 15-30% – depends on what continent and service you’re looking at – of the browser share market.

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So Google Chrome has finally arrived; merely a day after it’s announcement. I’ve been excited for the product from the first moment I laid my eyes on the webcomic. As any self respecting geek would, I downloaded and installed the browser as soon as possible.

It seems fairly stable. Having launched more than 25tabs in lesser number of seconds seems to have had no effect on the browser. From the limited testing I’ve given it , it has worked quite smoothly and fluidly. The version of the browser is 0.2.149.27, but no beta tag anywhere. Tabs being on top only bother you for the first few seconds after which I didn’t have any problems getting used to it.

A lot of the shortcuts were supported out of the box including Shift + Ctrl + T (reopen last closed tab) and Alt + D (highlight the address bar). These shortcuts exist in Firefox so this makes migration a lot easier. I don’t have benchmarks but gmail opened up in roughly the same time as it does in Firefox 3.0.1

Downloads are shown in a bar below, which looks quite good. A blue arrow animation is displayed when a download begins. I captured a screenshot just in time for your viewing pleasure.

Ctrl + J (another Firefox native shortcut) brings up a nice little list of downloads which looks quite good in my opinion with pie chart style completion icons.

I tried running a few javascript annoyances on java-scripts.net. The browser has a box which ‘prevents this page from creating additional dialogs’ for websites which keep on throwing boxes at you not letting you switch tabs or close the browser without assistance from the task manager. The tick box didn’t work on the first time always and a second hit of the ‘ok’ button was needed sometimes. But it’s only 0.2 so the behaviour is forgiveable.

There is one major bug though; upward scrolling on touchpads doesn’t work. This is the case on many notebooks, not just mine. So Google take note.

Chrome needs a lot of work before it replaces your full time browser yet. But with Google’s hands in it I only salivate at the possibilities. More on that later.

I’ve been using Outlook for about two years now. It has done an excellent job at sorting my life out, whether it’s been keeping up with my calendar appointments, making sure my contact details stay upto date or I always have a copy of my current task list. In addition every mobile phone manufacturer supports synchronisation out of the box so setup seems to be relatively painless.

It’s only after the end of the honeymoon do you realise Outlook’s shortcomings. Like most software built by Microsoft, it’s highly functional. But the functionality comes at the cost of bloat. While most people get used to the sluggish nature, you really realise the difference when you try an alternate solution such as Thunderbird for email. Outlook crawls to its knees when using IMAP, presumably because Microsoft wants to push Exchange usage. However this is inexcusable when a relatively newer software like Thunderbird is lightning fast. Scrolling through contacts, adding calendar appointments do seem to have a considerable lag. All of this on a fairly decent machine (2GHz, 2GB Ram).

It’s a shame Outlook has had no real competition in terms of an alternative that would offer the entire PIM solution. Calendar and Contacts are only basic in Thunderbird when compared to that of Outlook. In addition there is no solution for synchronisation between Nokia and Thunderbird. Such a shame considering Nokia is the world’s largest consumer mobile phone manufacturer.

It’s almost a year since Thunderbird branched out as a seperate company and we’ve seen just two alpha releases of Thunderbird 3, which isn’t exactly impressive as their roadmap suggests we should’ve seen a beta release by Q3 and it’s only two weeks ago that a second alpha was released. However all this is secondary as Thunderbird has miles to cover in order to be a true alternative to Outlook. And until that day arrives, Outlook is king and will continue to rest on it’s laurels for a long time. And like all Microsoft’s products, innovation will only start when some real competition starts to kick in.