This week has been interesting for me on a variety of levels not the least of which is my switch to using Windows for work as I previously mentioned. As a result, I’ve been thinking about how to manage my digital bits across worlds and try to make things not only easy on myself but as seemless as possible.
For browsing I am using Firefox on Windows though on Mac I’ll stick it out with Camino instead as I like many of the Mac features embedded there. Email will be interesting to see… for now on Windows, I am running Thunderbird which can easily be run on Mac as well. I’ve been pretty partial to the Apple Mail program which I could easily continue to use thanks to IMAP, and will certainly use it for permanent local storage. This weekend I’ll probably spend my time in Thunderbird on Mac to see if I like it there as well. I could have certainly used Outlook as I am for my new work address, but figure I’ll keep the camps separate for now even though a small amount of personal connectivity is taking place.
RSS… This was a tough one at first. For the past few days though I’ve been living through bloglines and think it’s a total winner. While I really like NetNewsWire and have been actively working through the beta for the next round (exciting stuff coming!), the ability to seemlessly manage my subscriptions and what’s been read on any machine is very cool. There’s even a mobile version that works on the Palm which is even cooler allowing for total connectivity as well as total detail management with my pretty vast subscription file. Tonight I even discovered a nice feature which lets you use a random bloglines email address for newsletter (or anything really) subscriptions and pulls them through the UI as well. This rocks!! In an ideal world there would be a sync standard like IMAP for RSS but we’ve got a ways to go.
My Palm syncs to both well which is a nice bonus so I can maintain a sync to outlook as well as my mac on which I maintain a much more complex set of conduits. All good.