OmniFocus iPhone sync - on track?

I've been wondering if Apple was going to give iPhone developers the ability to sync through the dock connector.

I don't know the answer of course, but OmniFocus Sync development is apparently on track.

Yeah, the post doesn't mention the iPhone, but the "redacted" and "censored" and blurred iPhone-shaped icon aren't there to conceal plans to sync with Palm PDAs.

OmniFocus get a tepid Neuberg review, but I'll overlook some rough edges if they get iPhone sync working.

Google Alerts: tracking usenet topics w/ Bloglines email notifications

I've started using Google Alerts to track usenet (Google Groups) posts on topics of interests, and all posts that contain a unique string I attach to my usenet posts as a "tag" [1]. Alert search scope can be restricted to Groups, Blogs, Web, News and (shudder) Video.

Alerts appear in the form of emails however, and that's intensely annoying. I prefer to use email for communication, not as a general notification engine.

The cure is to provide Google Alerts a Bloglines' disposable feed reader integrated email address ...

Bloglines FAQ

...Bloglines free email accounts allow people to receive email newsletter subscriptions within their MyBloglines page. This helps to reduce traffic through your primary email inbox and helps to contain the spam menace. A Bloglines email account gives you a trump card when a newsletter breaks the rules of opt-in marketing. When you unsubscribe from a Bloglines email subscription, the email address disappears. You never have to worry about trying to find the unsubscribe instructions for an unwanted mailing list.

So the results of my alerts show up in my bloglines feed reader as event notifications, which is exactly what I want.

[1] I've done this since the launch of the original DejaNews in the 1990s. My usenet posts contain a unique string as a "tag" (keyword, meta term). I search on the string to find all related posts. The functional result is rather like a blog, but this method worked long before blogs existed.

Gordon's Tech: Monitoring Dyer with ChangeDetection.com vs. Page2RSS

Gwynne Dyer, an iconoclastic journalist and historian, notifies readers of new articles by updating his web page. He typically adds 4-5 articles every 3-7 weeks; the linked articles are the published as .txt files -- not HTML.

Yes, Firefox will render .txt files.

I've been tracking changes with ChangeDetection.com and receiving feed reader notifications through Bloglines email subscriptions. This has been working well, but now Phil Bradley tells us that Page2RSS will create a custom RSS feed for pages like this.

I'm running a side-by-side comparison, after a month or two I aim to return and update this post with my preference.

Update 5/16/08: Page2RSS is really neat ... so far!

Update 5/18/08: A comment on Gordon's Notes also suggests Feedity. Feedity also supports feed merges, Yahoo Pipes does this and more.

Update 6/3/08: On one page I was monitoring Feedity sent me a high volume of false notifications (false positives). On the same page Page2RSS sent me only one update, and that one was correct. So I'm favoring Page2RSS.

Gmail doesn't allow multiple people for one email address

You can't have two contact list entries with the same email address:

Error saving data: Contact already exists with the given email

I wanted to create entries for our baseball players, but the email is, of course, their parents.

Another annoying Gmail limitation. I would really prefer that Google fix their existing products rather than create new ones.

Gmail's Contact Import/Export - designed by Yahoo?

I challenge anyone to deny that Gmail's contact management UI is absolutely dreadful.

We ought to be able to post any one of several valid collections of names and email addresses into a text box and have Gmail chew them up and generate contacts.

Instead we have to craft a .CSV file to load contacts -- and there's NO process for uploading a group membership list.

The secret to the .CSV file, btw, is to fill out the fields on a Gmail contact, then add it to a new list, then export the list as CSV. That's now the template for your imports.

In my case I made a mistake on my first data load. I loaded all my list members -- but with NULL email addresses. The corrected upload was rejected because the names already existed.

Microsoft, lately, does much better web work than this. Heck, the original Gmail contact management/group management UI was far better than the current mess.

Only Yahoo! functions at this level.

Yahoo! must have build Gmail's contact and group management UI.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 6: unacceptable

Bizarre, but true. Adobe's latest verison of Photoshop Elements still requires users to run as administrator.

macosxhints.com - Run Photoshop Elements 6 under a non-admin account:

... Version 6.0 of Adobe's Photoshop Elements still has problems when running under non-admin accounts. On my computer, none of the effects or layer styles would appear in the Effects palette. It appears that PSE6 needs to write to a file called MediaDatabase.db3 in order to load the effects...

There's allegedly a fairly simple workaround for this problem, but that only lowers my opinion of Adobe.

Running as an administrator is like having an alligator filled moat around your castle -- and then draining it and eating the alligators. Nobody should run as Admin in 2008.

Adobe is not your friend. Heck, Adobe is working for the bad guys. Adobe is your enemy.

Don't buy Adobe products.

Survey of Outlook/Google Calendar sync solutions

Calendar Swamp: Which Outlook/Google Calendar sync is best? is a good summary of the options. The poll shows that Google's solution is the #1 choice of the readers of this hard core calendaring blog.

The Google solution works pretty well for me, though it can sometimes mess up all day events. I've read that this is related to an ancient bug in the way Outlook handles all day events. I haven't read the details, but I'm guessing that there's an old design flaw in outlook, such that an 'all day event' is really a midnight-to-midnight event rather than a 'day event'. This means that a time zone or savings time glitch will cause some events to spill over into another day.