Christian Geekery

This morning Google announced Buzz as kind of a country cousin of Google Wave integrated with Gmail.

The idea is to bring social networking into Gmail and even the rest of the Google apps.
Top list of features:

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I have been using Gmail as my central online communications hub for a long time now. I was using Mail.app to pop my mail from Gmail until about month ago. Now with all the improvements to the Gmail interface I even stopped using my local mail client with great success. All my email accounts get forwarded to my Gmail account with one exception that I kept out of the loop as a backup for when Gmail goes down (yes even the best systems will have downtime). I get far less spam this way since Gmail’s spam filters are better then any others that I have used. My iPhone takes advantage of Gmail’s imap service so that I have access to my mail when I am without a system.

Now with all these new fast browsers running around the net, the question becomes… Which is the best browser for Gmail? continue reading…

Today I was poking around to see if there were any new developments in QuickSilver, and came across a pointer to Google “Quick Search Box” for Mac. It is very early in development, but looks promising. Another interesting point is that the the author of QuickSilver is working on the Google QSB, so it is probably a safe bet that they want to make QSB to be the successor to QuickSilver itself.
Like QuickSilver, QSB will find and launch apps. It even does very limited actions on apps. QSB has not reached the point were it will do things like open Gmail in a tab, and start composing a message yet, but I would guess that this kind of thing is being worked on. For the next couple of days I will poke at it to see how well it works and if it has the possibility to replace QuickSilver down the road.

A few days ago I mentioned in this post that I was looking into an online app to help me maintain my Getting Things Done methodology when using Gmail as my only mail app.

The app in question has been Remember The Milk RTM, and so far I have been impressed enough to upgrade to the pro version. The basic version is free, and the pro version is subscription based for a mere $25 a year. What makes this so powerful is its tagging engine and the ability to save searches as task lists.

I set up RTM like this:
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I have always wanted to see web apps take off, but have been disappointed with the reality every time I try working with one. When Gmail came out I started to get my hopes up thinking that perhaps we have reached the point where the “Zero-Pound” computer was finally starting to become a reality. I then started using gmail as my backup mail client, and soon discovered that the Gmail’s spam filters are second to none. At this point started sending all my mail through Gmail and popping my mail from Gmail to mail.app, and soon after they allowed me to send mail as if I was using any of my other email addresses, and I started using Gmail’s smtp servers to handle my outgoing email. But wait, there’s more!
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