Worst non-review ever!

I continue my quest to find the Worst. Review. Ever.

There have been many worthy candidates, but today’s entry from Om Malik deserves special praise.

Microsoft sent him a Zune for review. So instead of sitting down and actually opening the box, he reads a bunch of other reviews and in the time he could have been, you know, writing the review, he pens this:

It is now 10.09 AM and the box remains unopened. The reviews have soured me on the device already. Is there a point to another review of the device, given that the gigabytes of coverage already devoted to Zune? What do you think? Should I open the device, and give it a shot? I have a new Lenovo laptop sitting next to me, loaned by Lenovo people just for this specific review. (Now that laptop is seriously sweet, despite the WindowsXP!)

Gee. Maybe you could answer some of those questions if you actually opened the box. And your credibility might go up a notch if you formed your own opinion independent of all those other reviews you read.

I’ve never seen a more graphic representation of the Silicon Valley Echo Chamber in action.

News flash! My esteemed colleague Carl Siechert notes that Om has opened the box and updated his post. Carl calls special attention to the sentence I’ve bold-faced below:

I have opened the box, and set up the Zune and have played around with it for an hour or so. I need a few more hours to do an in depth review, but the initial reaction has been mixed. The device when it come to looks and usability is definitely though not quite as smooth as iPod, is still pretty intuitive. The software side of things, well that is another story. But need more time to make an honest assessment. More tomorrow!

Carl says, “He should’ve left it in the box.” Me? I am sincerely hoping that Om will give us a detailed account of the back-in-the-box experience when he packs the device up to return it to Microsoft. That would be the perfect counterpoint to this and this and this.

…Further update. That “more tomorrow” part? Hah. That was Thursday. It’s now Sunday. Not a word.

This has been another episode of Short Attention Span Theater.

Technorati tags: Zune, Web 2.0, Silicon Valley, echo chamber

Favorite software list updated

I’ve updated my Favorite Software list. These are programs I have installed on the computer I use every day. I trust and recommend every program on this list.

Since I last updated the list, I’ve added several programs and deleted just a handful. Gone are Napster, Hello (from Picasa), and Snapstream BeyondTV.

The list of newly added programs includes a few that I have been using a lot lately:

BlogJet is an amazingly useful tool for creating and posting entries to a blog, with support for just about every blogging platform out there
Laplink Gold 12.1, despite some ease-of-use problems, is still the most powerful file-synchronization and remote-control program around
Onfolio 2.0 is quickly turning into my favorite research tool, with excellent capabilities for keeping track of Web pages and RSS feeds
WinRAR Archiver has supplanted WinZip as my favorite archiving tool

Visit the Favorite Software page for the full list.

Online storage made simple

Back in the dot-com heyday, I reviewed five online file-storage services for an article on a Web site that long ago crumbled into pixel dust. Two years later, only one of those companies was still in business. Most people, it turned out, weren’t willing to pay for the privilege of saving files to a distant server.

Fast-forward to 2005, and take a look at Box.net. This new online service, barely a month old, is trying to revive the online-storage business. I was skeptical at first, but after a few days of using the service I think they might have what it takes to stick around.

Continue reading “Online storage made simple” →

Shoebox or file cabinet?

Old joke: The world is divided into two kinds of people, those who divide the world into two groups and those who don’t.

Heh. Actually, I think the world is divided into people who file stuff neatly and those who throw everything into a shoebox. I’ve historically fallen into the latter category, but I’ve always felt a little guilty about it. Which is why I was eager to try a new program called ClearContext Inbox Manager. It’s an add-in for Microsoft Outlook that is supposed to automate the process of sorting and filing e-mail.

How does it work? Well, let’s just say that yesterday, my inbox was overflowing with 4500 messages. Today, it contains 29 messages, all of them related to a project I’m working on now.

ClearContext is easy to set up. Deceptively easy, in fact. I was convinced I had missed something, because installation and configuration were so simple. The program works by examining your Contacts folder and prioritizing your contacts. You answer a few questions to improve the automated process. Incoming messages get assigned a priority based on the sender, the recipient (messages addressed directly to you are more important than those where you’re a bcc), and your level of involvement in the thread. Based on the priority level, each message gets a color code.

Messages get assigned to topics, which map to folders in your mail folder. In about 15 minutes, I set up Auto-Assign rules to automatically categorize messages from mailing lists and frequent correspondents and then move them into folders.

When all was said and done, my inbox was slimmer, all remaining messages were sorted so that the most important ones were at the top of the list, and I was able to quickly delete almost a thousand unnecessary messages.

Thanks to a new toolbar in the Outlook window, I can assign a topic to a message with one click and file it in its folder with another click.

I had done some of this stuff with Outlook message rules, but the ClearContext Auto-Assign rules are much easier to create. Likewise, it’s possible to file messages into Outlook folders, but this add-in makes it much easier.

I’ve tried other add-ins that promise to do similar things, most notably Getting Things Done, which Marc Orchant raves about. But that program tried to force me into a new system, and I wasn’t comfortable with the adjustment.

ClearContext Inbox Manager doesn’t insist that I learn its way of working. Instead, it makes it easier for me to use Outlook the way I always have. You can try it out for 30 days, and if you like it, pay $29.95 to keep using it.

Now, if someone can just come up with a program to file this four-foot-high stack of paper on my desk…

Amazing Taskman replacement

The collection of freeware (not to mention the commercial software) at Sysinternals is awesome. If you’re a Windows guru (or a wanna-be guru), you should have this site on your bookmarks list. Their latest addition is a wonderful utility called Process Explorer, which is now up to version 8.35.

Ever wondered which program has a particular file or directory open? Now you can find out. Process Explorer shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded.

The Process Explorer display consists of two sub-windows. The top window always shows a list of the currently active processes, including the names of their owning accounts, whereas the information displayed in the bottom window depends on the mode that Process Explorer is in: if it is in handle mode you’ll see the handles that the process selected in the top window has opened; if Process Explorer is in DLL mode you’ll see the DLLs and memory-mapped files that the process has loaded. Process Explorer also has a powerful search capability that will quickly show you which processes have particular handles opened or DLLs loaded.

You really have to see the Process Explorer window to appreciate how much more readable it is than the old Task Manager. (Oh, and it works with all versions of Windows, not just XP.) Choose Options, Replace Task Manager to make it pop up in response to Ctrl+Alt+Delete. Highly recommended.

If you use Outlook, you need Lookout

For the past few months, I’ve been using a beta version of an amazing Outlook add-in called Lookout.

Today, the folks at Lookout Software released the preview version of Lookout 1.0. If you use Microsoft Outlook 2000 or later (not Outlook Express, which is a completely different product), you need this add-in. It’s as simple as that. The fact that it’s free makes it even more enticing, but I’d say the same thing if the price was $29.95, as it will be when the preview period is over.

Officially, the folks at Lookout describe their product as “a Microsoft Outlook plug-in that provides advanced, lightning-fast search capabilities to your mailbox.” Unofficially, I can tell you it’s just magic. Installation takes a minute or two. (If you have the .NET Framework installed. If not, then you’ll need to budget for the time it takes to download and install that code.) When it’s done, Lookout adds a toolbar to your main Outlook window. Behind the scenes, it builds an index of your PST file, which it updates every hour. The indexing activities have no noticeable effect on performance, as far as I can tell.

To search for something in your Outlook store – an e-mail message, a contact, a meeting on your calendar, a file attachment – you type a word or phrase into the box in the Lookout toolbar and press Enter. The search results come back at Google speed. (Lookout doesn’t index the contents of file attachments, only their names.) If you want to fine-tune the process – say, looking for a message that contains a specific word that was received in the month of February – you can open the Advanced search box and build your query.

Lookout passes the “it just works” test with flying colors. It doesn’t mess with your data files, and it doesn’t play any games with your privacy. The people who build the software are responsive, too. During the beta testing process, I reported several bugs and made a few suggestions. I got quick responses from the developers, Mike Belshe and Eric Hahn.

The more you use Outlook, the more you’ll like Lookout.

Thanks to Marc Orchant for letting me know about Lookout in the first place.