Just a Leaf

Oh Sandy, mother warned me never to take on a girl as my secretary, but now it’s too late!

*ahem!

Sandy is a “personal assistant” that functions via email. You just send her an email with something you want to be reminded about, and when (if you want), and she’ll shoot you an email at the appropriate time, fifteen minutes early.

It may sound simple, but it seems incredibly useful to me. Not only will she remind you, but if you CC a friend in the email, she’ll introduce herself to them and send the reminder to them as well, so it also makes for a killer collaboration tool.

She can actually do a LOT more than reminders, but I’m still getting used to having a girl around my inbox, so I’ll report back on the other functions another time. This makes for an extremely simple planning system that I am quite excited about, because anything bigger just starts to feel clumsy.

Oh, and I also set her up for Twitter and I can access her from my phone. Very nice!

Where have you been all my life, Sandy?!

Just a bit o’ breaking news. Google Docs is sporting a very cool new interface and it works great. Log into your Google account and check it out!

For the speed buffs among us, here is a good page that details and graphs the raw speed of many web browsers.

For those who would rather I just tell you … here’s the five fastest (1 being best):

1. Opera
2. Konqueror
3. Firefox 1.5
4. IE 7
5. Safari

These are MY ranking. So don’t take them as technical holy doctrine.

Edit: Yes… Firefox 2 did NOT make the list. It definately lost some speed since 1.5. If you run linux, the SwiftFox build of 2.0 might perform very well, however.

Oh, happy day! ^_^

Thunderbird 2.0 is out

=)

Though I have long considered, and still do, Firefox to be the best workhorse browser out there due to it’s huge library of add-on functionalities, Opera has always been an attractive replacement to me. It feels faster, looks prettier, and does more right out of the box than either Firefox or IE.

But I was surprised to learn yesterday that out of those 3 browsers, Opera is the only one that passes the Acid 2 standards test (a test that determines how able a browser is in understanding and displaying standards-based code)! I always assumed Opera to be less accurate. Try it yourself in your favorite browsers. I’ve heard that Safari also passes, but I have been unable to test it.

Still, sites are not being developed with Opera in mind right now, due to their low market share, so popular sites, especially Google’s (blogger, docs, calendar), don’t work properly with it yet. Which is sad because I find Opera to be a much more comfortable ride. If you don’t regularly use the services mentioned, or can use alternatives, check out Opera, you may be pleasantly surprised.