The blog has got a little side-tracked over the past couple of days after I visited a new local bookstore and walked away with 40 Euros worth of books! But while I'm reading Ken Follett's new 1,100 page masterpiece, I finally decided to stop procrastinating over something that I have been considering for months. I finally installed Mozilla Thunderbird.

I have always never been able to decide about whether my email should be online or offline. For years I used Microsoft Outlook until I realised I liked email to be online and portable. But then Gmail went through its beta "oops, your email isn't available right now, try again later!" phase so I thought it would be best to download email to the desktop so I'd have access to it at all times. Plus everyone I bump into seems to love Thunderbird. So last night, I thought "screw it, just do it" and I downloaded the email client to see what it is like.

But I gave myself a rescue hatch. I told Gmail to keep a copy of everything in its archive. So if I decide that Thunderbird is not for me, I can switch back to web-based mail in an instant.

On first impressions, Thunderbird IS impressive. It is easily customisable and setting up your email accounts is a snap. Everything seems to work as advertised. Writing and sending emails is pleasant and I can attach different signatures for different email accounts (a feature I wish the web-based Gmail would have). The add-ons for Thunderbird are numerous and interesting and you can customise the noise a "new mail" notification makes (although I disabled this). You can also make filters to send email to different folders and you can even set up a "conversation view" of emails, just like Gmail.

However, I do have 2 negative comments :

1. Thunderbird couldn't import my Gmail address book. It all came through garbled. The thought of having to manually type hundreds of contacts into my Thunderbird address book is depressing.

2. The RSS feeds ability is not easy to handle. I tried to unsubscribe from a feed for example and nothing happened. I tried to manually delete RSS folders and nothing happened. Plus instead of showing you the text in a new feed, it loads the source webpage which really slows things down. Another problem was that instead of downloading all RSS feeds, it downloaded everything from my Google Reader archive - thousands of old posts which I had to manually delete from Thunderbird. Tedious and time consuming.


I'll keep experimenting with Thunderbird and see if it grows on me. I normally give new apps a minimum of a week to prove themselves. However, since I check my email from various computers, I may end up deciding to continue using the portability and convenience of web-based email. But we'll see. Thunderbird has many good things going for it that I am starting to get attached to it.

How about you? When it comes to email, online or offline? Do you use Thunderbird?

Despite the fact that it has a nasty habit of slowing down my PC to the point that the CPU is at 100%, I am nevertheless starting to become a fan of Google Desktop's sidebar feature. This comes as a big relief to me as I was looking for some kind of desktop widget and I had finally run out of patience with Yahoo Widgets which was malfunctioning on a regular basis.

There are two apps which I have on my desktop sidebar which are rapidly proving invaluable to me in my quest to be more productive with my time. One is a notepad which I am using to jot down random tasks / thoughts. Up until a couple of weeks ago, I was using Todoist and that worked well enough. It even had a Gmail integration and an iGoogle module. But the reason I ultimately gave it up was the fact that I had to open an internet browser to use it. Sometimes if I am running another program, I first shut down all non-essential programs, including internet browsers. So if an idea comes to me that needs to be noted down, I want to be able to note it immediately. Not wait until the current task is finished and hope that I then remember to open Firefox then Gmail then write whatever I was thinking up to a hour before. So having a notepad on the desktop is extremely useful.

The other app that is rapidly proving its weight in gold is the ability to access my Google Calendar also without having to open my Firefox browser. I can add appointments via the Google Desktop "Quick Add" function and view my appointments on any day I choose, with the aid of a very cool looking pop-out window. The only downside to this feature is that I can't delete appointments from my Google Calendar using Google Desktop. For that, I have to open the browser and do it directly on the calendar website. I hope that Google offers a delete function in the future for users of the calendar app on Desktop.

Now what would be really good would be a Gmail module where you can send emails from the desktop without opening a browser. You can already view your emails on Google Desktop but the whole module is in a real mess. Old emails come first with new emails at the bottom (when ideally it should be the other way around) and emails that I normally have sent straight to archive appear in the desktop module with no apparent way to make them disappear. Can somebody please make a much better Gmail module for Google Desktop? I promise I'll be your pal forever!

Has it ever irritated you that when you want to shut down your PC, you have to go to the "Start" menu? Well I found an easy way to make a shutdown button which sits on the desktop along with a "reboot" button and an "abort" button which cancels the shutdown or reboot if you change your mind.

Just follow the instructions here. Normally I would post screenshots but since I use a German computer, I figured it was pretty useless showing German language screenshots if you don't know German. But I think the following instructions are clear enough :

1) Right-click on the desktop and choose New then Shortcut.
2) When the box comes up, browse to the file C:\Windows\System32\Shutdown.exe, click Next, name the shortcut, and click Finish.
3) Now right-click on your new shortcut and choose Properties. In the Target box (the box which shows the location of the Shutdown.exe program), attach one of the following commands at the end : -l (to log off), -s (to shut down), or -r (to reboot).

If you also add the command -t xx (where xx is a number of seconds), your shutdown procedure will display a warning and countdown before activating. I chose 10 seconds which is more than enough time.

You can also specify a comment to be displayed with the warning by adding the command -c "Your text". This is quite amusing as you can give yourself a personalised shutdown message such as "Goodbye Mark!"

Once the shutdown / reboot button is activated, the only way to stop the computer from shutting down / rebooting is to launch the shutdown program again with the -a (for abort) command in the target box of the shortcut. So it would be best to repeat the above process and also make an "abort" button for your desktop too.

I even gave my new buttons nice South Park icons :