O Google, Hear Our Cries (For a Contacts Application)
In an effort to organize my life, I’ve been trying out various organizer programs, from Yojimbo to SOHO Organizer to Contactizer. That’s when I realized that I need Google’s help. If I do everything the Apple way, then I need to use Address Book, iCal, and Apple Mail. Then, I can make the most out of organization software like SOHO Organizer and Contactizer, but I don’t use the Apple programs. I use things on the Web like Gmail and Google Calendar. I could go back to using programs like Apple Mail, but Gmail has ruined me simply because of two simple features that seem so obvious I don’t know why other mail applications don’t have them: tagging and conversation threading.
So, what am I to do? As a member of the Cult of Google, I beseech thee, O Google, to overhaul your crappy contact system and make a full-fledged Google Contacts application to go alongside with your suite of productivity apps like Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. Follow your normal protocol and keep it beta indefinitely and open only to invitees (but invite me, first, please), and make it awesome, as usual. Help us to log our calls and all communication with our contacts, much like you already allow us to see all e-mail communication with a particular contact. Let us schedule meetings with a contact that show up on our Google Calendars, and allow us to define relationships and assign tasks.
Give us the tools we need for a complete virtual on-line office, and make it free! We don’t mind the text ads on the side; in fact, we love them. O Google, we love thee!
19 Comments
so a little humor is ok, lapsing into prose is just creepy ;)
Opera had built-in email program with tagging and threads and "search, don't sort" few years before google did.
Actually, google approach is so similar to Opera that... of course they could just be thinking alike, but anyway - opera did that few years before google.
To sum it up: try Opera :)
> To sum it up: try Opera
But then what about contact management/tracking, calendaring, and task management?
Thunderbird does conversation tracking..
The upcoming version 2.0 does this a lot more like google does and will also support tagging..(and you can use POP3 for gmail)
For calendaring you can use the lightning plug-in. It supports Webcal and CalDAV (thus, it supports google calendar).
The built-in addressbook is not bad.. A future feature is that its going to be integrating in the mac address book as well.
First off, you should use the tools you dig, so don't look at this as a "but, but, you should use !" religious-type post. I'm software agnostic like a mofo.
Tbird 2.0 Beta does tagging and convo threading, and the smart folders could be pretty handy for someone who isn't as lazy as I am. It's a little buggy still, but works well enough for my day-to-day use. The major problem with Tbird on OS X is that it won't use Address Book, opting for its own internal system. This, in a word, sucks balls. It does, however, kick the shit out of Mail.app as an IMAP client. It does not, however, integrate well with any Calendaring/Task tracking apps (Sunbird and related stuff seem not to be considered serious projects by Mozilla, judging by the # of devs and speed of development. This is, IMHO, fucking dumb).
Mail.app has some real problems, in my experience, as an IMAP client, but once you get it working it normally doesn't mess up too much. It integrates well with Address Book, and I guess kinda okay with iCal. Of more interest are a couple plugins for Mail.app: MailTags and MailActOn, the kind of crap hipster mac dorks who want to Get Things Done use:
http://www.indev.ca/MailAct...
http://www.indev.ca/MT2Beta...
This dude talks about his Mail.app workflow, which seems pretty decent:
http://ee.koruproductions.c...
My only real worries about buying whole-hog into web apps are:
1) Needing an internet connection to use them. There's no GMail offline mode.
2) You have to do everything in a web browser, which carries with it technological limitations and problems like your web browser crashing in the middle of making some crappy "mashup" in Yahoo Pipes (which happens a lot when you use OmniWeb, like me).
> Thunderbird does conversation tracking..
I'm using Thunderbird 1.5.0.4, and I can't find conversation "tracking." Do you mean the threading that most mail readers do? It threads messages, but it doesn't show your sent messages in those threads (at least I can't figure out how to make it do that). And it does show when you've replied to or forwarded a message, but I can't figure out how to easily pull up the sent message.
Viewing the Google Calendar is one thing, being able to track your contacts, conversations with contacts, notes on contacts, call logs for contacts, meetings with contacts, etc. is another.
I forgot to say that it looks like Leopard will add some decent stuff to Mail.app and iCal, especially if you are hooked into a CalDAV server. The OS X Server 10.5 will ship with a CalDAV daemon and the whole project is open source and will compile on other Unices.
http://www.apple.com/macosx...
http://www.apple.com/macosx...
http://www.apple.com/server...
http://trac.macosforge.org/...
I said "Tbird 2.0 Beta does tagging and convo threading." I believe you turn it on with "Group by Thread," although I don't have TBird on this machine at the moment. It does not do the linear, grouped message display that Gmail does, although I think what Tbird does is what I'd call "threading" (since I'm old-school and used tin to read usenet back in the day).
Oh, you were quoting someone else about "convo tracking," not misquoting me. well aren't I a dope.
Ed, thanks for all the links and insight. I'll definitely check out Thunderbird 2.0. But what I really need is something to connect the dots of my life together from e-mail messages to contacts to appointments, complete with the ability to store notes, etc. I'd love it to be a web app, since that means I can access it from anywhere, but, yeah, the downside is: if I'm offline somewhere, it's not very useful to me.
Yeah, sounds like to me you might want to try the "GTD" junk for Mail.app, and/or wait for Leopard (which might not be very long). No harm in reading up on sites like 43 Folders, who often have some good tips for organizational things.
Ben,
A quick answer to one of your minor points - I just have any outgoing mails moved to the Inbox so I see all the mail from an entire thread. Go to Tools>Account Settings>Copies&Folders and check "Place a copy in:" then select "Other" and point that to your Inbox. Voila! Threads everything and doesn't dupe them anywhere else.
BTW, TB is up to 1.5.0.9 now (several security fixes since 1.5.0.4 AFAIK), so you might want to update unless you'll have a known problem you're aware of. (You can have it check for updates and notify you without doing anything else - Tools>Options>Advanced, then Update tab.)
Hope this helped!
Chris
Contact management is built-in Opera and "notes" too (one of my favorite features actually). No calendaring though. Nothing is perfect :)
I'm interested in getting in on the beta of this for what sounds like a google integrated contacts:
http://www.etelos.com/store...
Gmail is one of the most useless things I have used. It needs a thorough revision of editing, sending and receiving and filing messages. It should be redesigned to eliminate conflicts with necessary security programs.
On the whole Yahoo provides much more than Gmail. If you are a Google/Gmail addict, you have my deepest sympathy, for you will regret it soon, I fear.
Agreed! I need some google magic in contacts... I am holding out for a few more months to see what might happen. 37 signals has a very compelling product in highrise http://www.highrisehq.com/ but no calendar at this point :-( A great contact app from google would be great. Then they can work on a GTD task manager that leverages mail, contacts, calendar.
The basics of contact management are simple. It's the integration that is elusive. I agree whole-heartedly with the theme of this discussion. So what if HighRise is a fantastic contact manager? If I use xyz mail program and I can't access my HighRise contacts, I'm out of luck. I do NOT want to manage contacts in multiple places or juggle manual exporting and importing back and forth to keep things synced.
For example, an employer decided to try out Salesforce.com. A lot of what they offer is very impressive. However, some of the coolest features were how you could track your email communications and generate sales leters, etc. BUT, it required you to use Salesforce to do your email, and none of the sales people were willing to give up Outlook. So in the end, it did not matter how cool the other features were--the lack of seamless integration with a popular mail tool prevented us from using it. (I've actually learned since that there are ways to make Salesforce and Outlook work together...but that's another story...)
As has been pointed out, we need our contacts available to us when
1. Creating email
2. Creating form letters in our wordprocessing programs
3. Scheduling meetings and appointments in our calendars
4. In any program where you can "invite" people to share or collaborate.
5. On our mobile phones!
6. etc.!
If you go 100% with one vendor you can get close to this. For example, if you do everything with Microsoft Office using Outlook for calendars, contacts, and email, Word for wordprocessing, etc. Or, the full suite of Apple apps on the mac. I use an iPhone, and it syncs with Outlook and of course the Apple equivalents (I'm not familiar with them.)
BUT, like the author of this article, I'm a huge GMail fan. (Regarding the negative post about GMail -- I think most people have that initial reaction because GMail breaks the barrier on some of the time-honored traditional ways of managing email....but in my opinion, once you embrace them, you think "why hasn't email always been like this?!") The big downside for me in using traditional desktop applications is that I'm either tied to my specific computer where my apps are installed or worse -- tied to the company office so I can access the Exchange Server. There are myriad half-baked solutions to make these services "mobile", but they have a lot of pitfalls in my experience. Web apps NATURALLY work anywhere from any computer as long as you have an Internet connection. (The internet connection requirement is a downside for some people.)
With latest innovations such as Adobe Air and Google Gears I think the barrier between online and offline apps will continue to blur.
Most contact programs do provide an export and import feature that can usually be imported into other contact programs. Some file tweaking may be required. For example, you can export your Outlook contacts to a CSV file to import into your Google Contacts. But this process is not automatic or seamless by any means--it's the technical mumbo-jumbo that COMPUTERS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE DOING FOR US. :)
Just stumbled across this ... did Google ever hear your plea? I totally agree. Gmail rocks, GCal rocks. And Gmail/Gcal sync for Blackberry really rocks. So why is Google Contacts such a lame app? Why can't I sync up my contacts with my Blackberry just like I do my calendar?
I just read the whole post - here we are near the end of 2009 and it sounds like Google are listening.
Every objection that's been raised above has now been answered (albeit in some unexpected ways). Google Gears was the solution to working off-line. Not being able to do that previously was a deal breaker. Now I can't imagine doing my work any other way and the collaborative tools have helped me create business in delivering training courses when clients have seen how I use the tools.
Don't know what I'll do though when Google Wave becomes a reality because explaining that is a real task.