Going portable, moving online Dec 01, 2006 11:15
Over the past 6 months, I've been reading my email from a USB flash drive. I use a portable version of Mozilla Thunderbird that's available at portableapps.com. I can't tell you how happy I am with this solution.
Before switching to Portable Thunderbird, I was using Outlook 2003 at home and Outlook Express at work. I have a handful of POP3 mailboxes, and although I could try to use IMAP, I tried it with Outlook 2003 and it was just a big hassle. Besides, I don't really mind POP3 and it works for all my domains.
I would configure Outlook Express to "leave the messages on the server" so I could have a centralized message store in Outlook 2003 at home. I did use Outlook Express as my newsreader at work, and used Omea Reader for my newsreader at home. The problem with this setup is that any time I sent something, it would end up stored in one place or the other. This isn't such a big deal for newsgroups, since the message itself would be retrieved from both locations, but for email, it wasn't ideal.
Now I simply use Portable Thunderbird in both places. It's a good all around mail and newsreader. Its spam filter actually works well as opposed to Outlook 2003's which I thought was pretty useless. Is it the best mail client? Is it the best newsreader? Perhaps not. But it's portable, simple and is very effective for my usage patterns. FWIW, it does support RSS feeds, but I don't use it for them. I found that it's a bit buggy and I've started to use Google Reader, which is really, really nice.
I bought a nice SanDisk Cruzer Micro 4gb drive to run things off of. I had the 1gb drive, but it was too small. (:biggrin:) I like these drives because they don't have a cap, they are physically very small, and the design of it fits cleanly on my key ring (I paid far less than the suggested retail price and you should too). It also supports U3. I have to admit that although I like the idea behind U3, I prefer using PStart or the new Portable Apps menu. U3 doesn't always work and there are more complex "rules" involved in getting an app working with its launchpad.
I've installed some other notable goodies on my USB drive like: Open Office, Password Safe, Abstract Spoon's ToDoList and I'm typing this blog entry in Notepad++. FWIW, portablefreeware.com is a site worth mentioning. These are extremely useful applications that are easy to install (unzip and run), have minimal dependencies on host services (registry, .NET, etc), and are easy to backup (no ghosting required). They make my life more simple. All software should be like this.
What about my calendaring/scheduling? Well, I use my Windows Mobile phone and Google Calendar. I'm still looking for a direct synchronization solution between them; if someone knows of one (not RemoteCalendars, it's nice, but it requires Outlook), please feel free to email me or comment here. The reality of my life is that I don't have too many scheduled events going on that I can't live with double entry for a while (eradicating Outlook from my life is worth it!). I'll be writing about Windows Mobile in subsequent blog post RSN.
Anyway, the point of all this is to say I'm changing the way I work. I see two trends: 1) more portable/mobile applications 2) more online applications. Essentially, the desktop PC is becoming less relevant for me.
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