What do you think?  Is WALL•E jammin’ or what?

1. Always online and availabe to me.
2. Doesn’t take up space on my webserver.
3. The labeling system is fantastic.  I didn’t really know this until I really started using it.
4. Integrated nicely with Mail.app or other email applications like Thunderbird and Outlook.
5. I can send and receive email from multiple accounts via one Gmail account.
6. iPhone ready.
7. Email is up even if website is down.
8. Google has the best spam protection I’ve seen.

So how did I move years worth of email to Gmail?  

1 - The first thing I did was organize my inbox.  This step is optional, but it helped me to have things in order.

2 - You either need to setup a Gmail account or Google Apps for your domain.  I did the Google Apps part as I didn’t want an additional Gmail account and it was free.

If you are doing Google Apps for your domain, make sure to move all your email into local folders in your inbox.  This includes your inbox, drafts and sent if you want to keep them.  Get them off the server so you don’t loose them when the MX records are changed.  Then go ahead and follow Google’s instructions on getting things setup and work with your host to get the email records updated.  Once that’s in place, continue.

3 - Go into your Gmail account and enable the IMAP settings.  
Settings -> Forwarding and POP/IMAP -> Enable IMAP

4 - Follow Google’s configuration instructions on getting your account setup in your email client.

5 - Once that’s done, you should now have two separate email accounts in your email application.  One for your old email and one for Gmail. 

6 - Setup Gmail labels to match your folder structure that corresponds with your email.

7 - Copy all your email from your old account to your new Gmail account.  Since it’s setup via IMAP, all the email will be copied to Gmail and available online.  This step may take some time if you have a lot of email.  It isn’t hard, it’s just time consuming to upload all those emails.

Really that’s all there is to it.  It’s quite easy.  It took me some time to complete, but that was because of the large amount of email I had.  

This will work on Mac or Windows or Linux; Thunderbird, Mail.app or Outlook.  The only real requirements are a Gmail account and an email application capable of IMAP.

Since moving my email over to Gmail, I’ve moved over to using Gmail as my email application via Mailplane. Google’s labeling system is just so smart!

Unfortunately the theme is Windows only. However, with a bit of investigating, I was able to extract the jar file and install it on my Mac.

The theme is pretty good. WALL•E is a bit hard to see behind the address bar and I wish the bar was semi-transparent so that he was more visible. It’s also a bit hefty at over 3MB. Other than that, it looks pretty slick and works well. Nothing to extraordinary, but fun none the less. As it makes its way to 1.0, the theme has a lot of potential to grow into something spectacular.

To get WALL•E in Firefox 2, head over to the WALL•E Addon page, log into your Addon’s account and then download. Or you can click here to link directly to the theme file. If you’re on a Mac, you’ll want to choose the direct option.

Thanks Disney for embracing Firefox themes and I hope to see more!

Ohh and If you haven’t seen the WALL•E trailers, you should treat yourself.

It’s really simple to do too.  Here’s how.

1 - Grab a cool iPhone background.  Here is the blue iPhone background I’m using.

2 - Open Adium and go to the preferences and click on the messages area.

3 - See that area for a custom background?  Check the box and drag and drop your iPhone background in there.

Wa la.  You’re done!

There are a few things to keep in mind.  

First, the width of iPhone backgrounds are a bit limiting.  Your window will need to be a fixed width or your background will need to wrap nicely.  The window is not to skinny though.  Also, most iPhone backgrounds don’t repeat well vertically.  Some do though, so pick a nice one.

That’s it.  Enjoy!

So how’d I do it?  Here are my keys to success.

1. Create folders for topics that best match your email style.  Like Friends, Family, Shopping, Wife.  Think of who you get the most email from or what topics you get a lot of email on.  Then create folders to file all those emails into.
2. Search and delete.  Not all messages need to be saved.  iTunes Tuesday emails for the past six months, Amazon Newsletters, Target ads and so many more emails are just un-necessary.  Find them, and delete them.  Search by sender or by subject to find them all at once.
3. Search and file.  I searched for all the email from my Mom and filed that in my Mom folder.  All my email from my wife when into her folder.  Searched all messages for iTunes receipts and they went into my Shopping folder.  The key here is to search search for email from people, for emails with the same type of subject to get a lot of emails at once.  Filing your email away one at a time will take forever.  By selecting 25 or even 100 at once, you’ll be able to knock out a of of email quickly.  
4. Mark as read.  As you’re filing things away.  Start marking emails as read.  I had a lot of email from last year, or older, that was still marked unread.  Sorry, I’m no longer going to email you back if it was that long ago.
5. Once you start getting down fewer emails, you may find your folders need to become more generic.  I have one folder named Friends for those that send me an email every so often.  I don’t have enough to make an entire folder, so I just drop them all into Friends.
6. If you’re like me and have email from 2004, then create archive folders.  2004, 2005, 2006, 2007.  If you can’t figure out which folder to stick an email in, or you just want to make a lot of progress fast, then go ahead and just archive it by year.  At least it gets out of your inbox.

Eventually  you should have a clean inbox.  It took me an hour or so to get my inbox under control, but it’s much nicer now to see less than 20 messages in my inbox.  Even that number is starting to sound high.

Keep it under control!  This is just as important as cleaning out your inbox.  With new email, don’t file it later or leave it just sitting around, take the time to keep your inbox organized.  I find this extremely easy to do with a combination of labels and filters in Gmail.  The system is setup beautifully.  Heck, I don’t even go back to my desktop application any more.

I think the biggest thing I get out of a clean inbox is the sense of accomplishment.  There are no longer hundreds or thousands of emails sitting there.  There are only a few and they seem really easy to manage.

Take some time and get cleaning.  You’ll be happy you did.

Do you have other tips you’d like to share on how you organized your inbox?  Share in the comments below.

1. Coverflow - It’s a really sweet feature, but the album art seems to only match the song that was playing when Coverflow as activated.  It doesn’t seem to update when the song changes.  Why not?
2. Google Search - Google has a great iPhone friendly versions of Google Search, yet Safari’s built in search doesn’t use it on my iPod.  It sends you to the regular Google Search results instead, which are hard to read.
3. Background - Setting the background is great, however it’s not really the background now is it?  It’d be nice to actually set the background behind my home screen and not just on the unlock screen.  Granted, there may be a few readability issues, but I’d at least like to try.
4. Notes - In MacOSX, the notes application comes along with a to-do list.  Not on the iPod Touch though.  I’d LOVE a checklist application for shopping so I can just check things off as I get them.  Super Target doesn’t have Wi-Fi so a web application isn’t going to work.
5. Sideways - Why can’t everything go sideways?  Safari can do it, and so can music and YouTube, but not the calendar or emal or a few other applications.  When I first got my iPod, I kept turning everything only to be disappointed.  It’d be nice to at least have Mail.app work sideways as it’s much easier to type that way.
6. Shuffle - On my old iPod, I could set it to shuffle, then choose a playlist, and a song, and it’d start with that sone and shuffle everything else in the playlist; regardless of where I started.  Now, I can hit shuffle and it’ll shuffle everything in the playlist, however, if I pick a song, it will only play from that song to the end of the playlist.  No shuffling.
7. Help - There seems to be no help application on the iPod.  Yes, the iPod Touch/iPhone is extremely easy to use, but things did get moved around.  It took me weeks to figure out how to rate a song.  And double clicking on the home button is a great trick, once you figure it out.  What else am I missing?
8. Web Apps Site - Did you know that Apple has a great listing of web apps for the iPod Touch?  Did you also know that it comes automatically bookmarked on your iPod?  And that it’s not optimized for the iPod?!  Wouldn’t it be smart to create an optimized version for those trying to find new apps and browsing directly from the iPod/iPhone?

It’s easy to give back.  You can donate online, by mail or by phone.  Details on the American Idol website.

You can also just open iTunes, click on the Idol Gives Back banner and purchase some music.  Songs from Snoop Dogg, Fergie, Carrie Underwood, Miley Cyrus, Heart and more are available.  That’s a pretty simple way to donate.

You don’t have to give a lot either.  If you just donate a $1, that’d definitely help.  Even a little goes a long way.

Give a little love, give a little hope.  :)

Have you checked out Dromaeo.com?  It’s a Mozilla owned site that runs a set of JavaScripts and test out how fast your browser is.  I tried it on my iMac, 1.83 Intel Core Duo with 1.5 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, and found Firefox 3 beta 5 to be the fastest browser.  Oddly enough, Firefox 2 was the slowest, even behind SeaMonkey!

Granted, this is no professional test.  Firefox 2 has the  most extensions on my computer and that could cause slowness.  There are always a lot of factors to take into consideration, but this is what my tests show.

Dromaeo JavaScript Testing

2173.00ms - Firefox 3b5
3499.60ms - Safari 1.3
8193.20 - Camino 1.5.5
10798.20 - SeaMonkey 1.1.8
10859.20 - Flock 1.1
12161.40ms - Firefox 2

Did you run your own tests?  What did you find?

That got me thinking, what would be even cooler? I work in a paperless office, so a paper holder isn’t exactly what I need. What about…

• iPod/iPhone Cradle - With charging capabilities of course.
• A cell phone holder.
• Pencil holder. Kinda lame, but I always loose my pen.
• Candy dispenser. Full of M&Ms for me please.
• Atomic clock with weather capabilities.
• A Timer
• Cord Organizer
• Light so that my iSight makes me look good when chatting or playing with PhotoBooth.
• Mini keyboard with only Expose and Spaces buttons.
• USB Hub
• Flower holder. You know, for the girls. They were really popular in VW Bugs.
• Microphone for those that do audio chat.
• A bigger, multi level shelf for post-it’s and knickknacks.
• A rear view mirror so people don’t sneak up on me.
• A whiteboard so I can write down all my cool ideas.
• Funny signs to warn people of my mood. Like “If it’s important, you’d have told me about it already.” or “I was having a good day, until I got to work.”
• Some sort of cool color changing orb.
• Trash can for my candy wrappers.
• Disco ball. Who doesn’t want a disco ball?!
• Memory stick dock.
• Picture frame. For my cats of course. LOL!
• A rolladex. These are coming back in style. I just know it.
• A piggy bank. Or maybe a swear jar.
• A cool glowing Apple.

The new theme structure with Firefox 3 is different than Firefox 2.  I knew it would be.  And, at this time, there is nothing out there to help a theme developer know what to change or what to update.  There is a long list of ongoing theme changes, but what does that really mean?  What are the steps to upgrading a theme?

I tried to pull out the Windows default theme and code from that, however it didn’t look or work well on a Mac.  So I pulled out the Mac theme and tried it on Windows.  Amazingly that worked, so it was a step in the right direction.  However, I have no idea if it works on Linux yet and I’m afraid of future compatibility issues.

Then I looked into converting iPox’s buttons to the new toolbar format.  On the Windows side it was pretty easy.  Their theme uses nice 24×24 buttons that matched up pretty well with mine.  On the Mac side, the theme uses mostly the same buttons for big and small, but they are long and the odd shape makes it look way to spaced out with iPox’s buttons.  Additional coding is needed there, or I need to mix and match pieces of each theme.

I then threw in some of my backgrounds and it’s a decent start, but it’s got a long ways to go.

I started the process of converting iPox to Firefox 3, but I doubt I’ll do much until the release clients come out or at least the Proto Mac theme is finalized.  If you notice above, the stop button is blue.  That’s not my issue, it was mis-coded in the Proto theme and who knows what other bugs it has. Never mind, it’s not a coding issue, I just need to learn how the theme works.

Additionally, if someone knows a good way to port Firefox 2 themes to Firefox 3, I’m all ears.

I am excited for Firefox 3, but not to excited about re-working all my themes.  A part of me does like the idea of re-coding them as I hope they’d be better then ever before, but there are a lot of other things I’d like to spend my time on too.

At this time I will tell you that iPox will make it to Firefox 3; eventually.  I know there are a lot of fans out there and I won’t let you down.  I just don’t know when I’m going to do it just yet.

Sorry about that!!

Thanks for MacManX for tipping me off even if he didn’t now he was doing that.

There are so may things to talk about that I just don’t have time right now to go through them all. From the revamped admin menu to the simplified post screen it’s just so much cleaner. The ability to add media such as video and audio is also a great addition. I just love this!

All my plulgins seem to be working fine, however there are some other plugins with issues. The plugin compatibility list can be seen over at wordpress.org.

So much new to play with, to bad I don’t have the time to sit an play all day.  My one tip though, after upgrading, clear your browsers cache.  That’ll help avoid any odd issues like the ‘add link’ window not opening.

Recently I ran across Hands Held High by Linkin Park, another song that really makes you think and holds nothing back.

The video above is an un-official video. YouTube is full of them and this is the one I liked the most.

If you like the song, you can download Hands Held High from:

☆ Support Our Troops & Support Peace ☆

Download the iPhone Socialthing! Sidebar extension. (right click, save links as)

How it works.
1. Download the extension to your desktop. Then go to Tools -> Add-ons and drag ist.xpi to your add-ons window. It’ll install and you’ll have to restart Firefox.

2. Log into Socialthing.com via your main Firefox window. Doing this before hand will make things a lot easier. If you log in through the sidebar, it won’t redirect properly. (Socialthing! developers, please fix this.)

3. Once logged in go to View -> Sidebar -> iPhone Socialthing! Sidbear, or hit control+alt+s, or customize your menu bar to add the Socialthing! button.

4. Enjoy.

The SocialThing! sidebar works in Firefox 2 and 3. Again, all features and programming have all been done by Socialthing! people. I just added the duct tape that makes it load in Firefox.

This is an un-official extension and I provide no warrantee or guarantees. But it works for me on my iMac.

If you don’t want to install the extension, then go to http://socialthing.com/iphone and bookmark that page in Firefox. Then go to Bookmarks -> Organize Bookmarks and get the properties of the iPhone Socialthing! bookmark. Then tell it to load in the sidebar. You won’t get a fancy button or keyboard shortcuts, but it works too.

I’ve also created an iPhone Facebook Sidebar for Firefox that does the same thing for Facebook fans. I almost created a Twitter one too, but then found out there are cooler Firefox Twitter extensions.

I was worried that it may expire when it hit the 100k mark.  You know, planed obsolesce.  But it didn’t, it just kept cruising down the highway.  Granted, it did leave us stuck on the side of the road over the weekend, but that was a relatively cheap fix.

At this point, I don’t see any reason to get rid of my Focus.  It has one feature that no other car can offer.  No monthly payment. 

Granted our seats weren’t that close, and digital zoom isn’t the best, but I was pretty happy with my pictures.  View them all.

And the concert ROCKED!  Daughtry is awesome and Bon Jovi sings non stop.  His vocal are great yet his dance moves are corny as can be.  Still, one Wild night.

I’ve finally got Ubuntu (7.10) up and running. I tried, and failed, to get it running under Paralles a while back and finally took the time to try again. This time on a Windows machine that had some extra space.

Overall the install was great, but once up and running there are a lot of items that are just to complicated. I understand that Ubuntu is a great alternative, but until it becomes more user friendly in some aspects, it’s going to be a hard sell.

First off, the install was simple. Easy and straight forward. Before to long, Ubuntu was up and running. Not as fun as installing OSX, but way better than installing XP.

The interface is clean and is a mixture of the Mac menubar and Windows task bar. It’s not overly complicated to get use to, but it does have it’s own way of doing things.

If you turn on the fancy window effects, the animations and Jello like windows are quite fun. It’s makes for some nice eye candy.

Ubuntu has all the basic applications like Firefox, Pidgen (IM), Evolution (Email) and OpenOffice (Word & Excel). It installs all the necessary applications to get most users up and running.

However, installing additional applications is to difficult. I wanted to install Firefox 3 and Prism, but once downloaded, it just showed the package contents. No application. Even when I tried to update Firefox 2 and that wasn’t an option in the browser itself.

It seems Ubuntu controls everything via an applications area and you either install or upgrade what they recommend or you have to go to the terminal and figure it out. This applications area is great for any applications in list, but if you want something that’s not in the list, you better know how to install it via the Terminal. And the terminal is uber geeky. I just gave up on installing additional apps.

I also wanted to install the Flash plugin in Firefox. Unfortunately it didn’t install through Firefox and I had to do it manually. After lots of Googling and trying to understand tutorials I finally got it installed via terminal commands and frustration. It’s actually quite simple, but no one tells you that.

How to Install Flash in Ubuntu the Easy way.

Go to Adobe.com and download the tar.gz choice. When the Ubuntu opens the tar.gz file drag the install folder to your desktop. Double click on flashplayer-install and choose run in terminal. Follow instructions.

That’s it! Now, everyone else’s way seems much more complex. But that’s my main issue with Ubuntu; it’s to geeky.

Now, I’m a geek and I’ll admit that. But having to do most everything via Terminal isn’t my thing. I will follow simple instructions, but I’d rather run an installer or copy and program to my applications folder.

I did have a lot of terminal fun though trying to get wireless internet via TrendNet’s USB adapter to work. It’s not officially supported, but through a handful of terminal commends, a lot of Googling and some swearing, it’s possible. This tutorial helped a lot to. Not as simple as it states, but maybe I screwed it up a time or two before getting it right.

Overall, Ubuntu is pretty nice. It’ll be interesting to see where they go with it and I’m just happy to try it out. It won’t be my main OS, but it’s fun to play with. Hopefully some day it’ll be a bit more user friendly for those that aren’t fond of the Terminal.

These are just my personal experiences and thoughts. This is not a professional, in depth, well tested review. Just my first thoughts. If I’m missing some importing things, do share in the comments below.

I was excited about Mozilla’s Prism application when it first arrived on the scene. But then Fluid came out and I realized how un-polished Prism was.  However, Prism 0.9 is quite a large step forward.

What’s new in Prism 0.9?

The big thing is that it’s based off of Firefox 3.   It’s got the speed and upgrades that the Firefox 3 betas have.  Also us Mac users now get native widgets!  It’s no longer got ugly checkboxes and drop downs.

The Firefox 3 rendering engine alone makes it feel much snappier and more responsive than the first Prism 0.7 release.

The file size has also been cut cut down a bit too. Prism went from 43 Mb to 30 Mb.  It’s still hefty, but smaller.  Each individual site is only a few hundred KB though so that’s good.

Another notable update is the ability to add custom icons.  By default it’ll grab the site’s favicon, or you can select your own image.  These can look much nicer than the old globes.  Hint: Head over to the Fluid Flickr group to grab some great icons to use with Prism.

There is also a Firefox 3 extension.  This will be handy once Firefox 3 goes live as it’ll give users easy access to creating Prism desktop applications.

You can now run multiple Prism programs at once too. There were conflicts before, but now each application is independent and you can run Google Calendar and Gmail at the same time in two Prism applications.  You can even run one Google account in one Prism application, and a separate one in the next.  This is very handy if you have more than one account for any online service.  I tested it with two Gmail accounts and it worked perfectly!

So what’s missing?

From what I can see, the only thing that bugs me is no keyboard shortcuts.  I’m so use to using a shortcut key for back in Firefox, that I use it all the time in Prism.  When Prism doesn’t go back, I get annoyed.

Overall Prism 0.9 is a great update and if this is any insight into what is to come, I can’t wait for Prism 1.0!

Here are the top 5 reasons why I dropped Entourage 2008.

1. No Hyperlink Support - You can’t link a few words in emails. This was one that really gets me. I’m always linking phrases to tutorials or additional resources so that people know what I’m talking about.
   • Official Microsoft MVP Support Answer: This function is not available.
2. No Table Support - Entourage 2008 can read tables, but as soon as you hit reply, the table disappears and you are left with a mess of text. I get a lot of messages with tables in them (copied from Excel and pasted into Outlook) and so I do need to keep the formatting.
   • Official Microsoft MVP Support Answer: Entourage can *display* complex HTML such as tables but it can not *compose* messages with HTML. That’s why when you reply the formatted is gone.
3. No Strikethrough support. - Another basic HTML item that is just not available. You can’t strikeout any text and Entourage can’t read it. When someone sends me a quick update to a webpage, if I can’t see what they want me to remove, I can’t do my job.
   • Official Microsoft MVP Support Answer: Neither bugs nor features. Entourage is simply working as it was designed to work. Its HTML capabilities are limited. Strike-through is not one of its supported text styles.
4. Calendar Syncing is OK - I often had conflicts when I had Entourage automatically syncing to iCal. I’d open up iCal and it’d ask me which even was right; the one in iCal or Entourage? Then, trying to update my Google calendar online was another issue in itself.
5. Not so friendly help. - There is a good community of Microsoft Mac MVPs (MVPs are not Microsoft Employees) over at the official Microsoft site (also syndicated via Google Groups) and their answers are sometimes not so friendly. It made me feel bad just to ask questions.
   • Official Microsoft MVP Support Answer:
   (on the subject of inserting links into emails)
   Plain text is the preferred method for emails by people who know the internet. It is efficient, safe, virus-free, will be readable by any mail client at the other end, doesn’t impose your font, size, style preferences on others, and has far smaller risk of being filtered out by spam filters.

   HTML email is dangerous because it may contain links to external sites that will do malicious things. For instance, a spammer can include a link to an image, but this link contains a tag as data. The server at the other end will get that request when your *read your email* and based on the tag, will be able to confirm that you’ve read the email and not only flag your email address as active/good, but also use your IP with geolocation servers to assign a location code so that they can then sell your email address to other spammers along with your general location. If everyone stopped sending HTML emails, everyone would block it, and then spammers would be left with very few means to escape spam filters because their messages would have to b simple and without tricks.

   HTML email is wasteful, dangerous, and rude, IMO. It’s just plain evil.

Overall, Entourage 2008 is a decent application. But it’s missing so many small items that eventually, I just got frustrated and moved back to Thunderbird.

Entourage was unable to perform in a business environment for me. If your company never sends, or receives, HTML in emails, than it might work out OK for you. However, I strongly suggest checking out Thunderbird. It is an excellent email application and I’m very happy to be using it again!

I was hoping for an easy transition from Firefox 2 to 3 but I’m not sure that’s going to happen.

Once the betas become release clients, then maybe I’ll start theming.  However, this looks like it could be a complete re-code.