By: BOB & JOY SCHWABACH
Published: 18/03/2009 at 12:00 AM
A reader wrote to say he was fed up with his email program and was waving the white flag. We advised him to try Google's Gmail. We made this switch four years ago and have been happy with it ever since.
The one great fear that people have about switching email hosts is that they will lose the old mail and lose touch with everyone who wrote them at that old address. This doesn't happen. You can keep the old email addresses, just as we did, and check off the box to have that mail automatically forwarded to the new Gmail account. This fear of being cut off is so strong, by the way, that we have a friend of many years who refuses to make the shift despite our assurances. Believe us, there's no danger.
Bob has over 5,000 emails in his Gmail inbox. Rather than delete old ones, he uses the search function to find messages. Joy, who is much more organised than Bob, likes to use the "archive" button to get the mail neatly put away each day. The emails are all still there and can be searched, they just aren't in her inbox.
Joy uses labels to categorise her emails. For example, one group is labelled "Mary Schmitendorf" If a new note from Mary comes in, it is automatically labelled and archived, so she can reply at the weekend when she has more time. If you want to just label an email, without archiving it, you can tap the "v" key on your keyboard or click "move", to move an email to one of your folders. To reply to a message, you can just tap "r", and to reply to everyone involved, you tap "a". You can even have more than one email account visible on the same screen. There are dozens of shortcuts. You can find them by - what else? - Googling "gmail shortcuts."
There are many advantages to using Gmail, including an excellent spam filter and the ability to check your mail from any computer that can connect to the Internet.
Up close with your iPhone
We get pitched on more accessories for iPods and iPhones than any other product we have ever seen, and we ignore almost all of them. But one that caught our eye, so to speak, is a case with a sliding lens that lets you take close-up photos with your iPhone.
Normally, an iPhone shot has to be 45cm or further from a subject in order to get a clear focus. The Clarifi case from GriffinTechnology.com has a sliding lens that can be moved over the iPhone's own lens to reduce the focal length to as close as 10cm. When you want to take a close-up of a flower or an insect - or a business card, slide the lens into place; to return to normal focus, slide it out of the way.
Users say they not only get sharp close-up shots with this Griffin case but the colour seems better as well. The Griffin Clarifi costs $35 from their web site, but we found it for about half that price at Amazon and other Internet discounters.
The Godzilla of PDF editors
Anyone who has the free Adobe Reader can open a PDF, which is the most widely used method of saving documents in their original format. PDF stands for Portable Document Format and it means whatever you save that way will look exactly the same on someone else's computer.
You can look at a PDF document but you can't touch - meaning you can read it but you can't change anything, at least not without some additional software. Adobe invented the PDF, so understandably the granddaddy of PDF editors is Adobe Acrobat. But at $300, it does a whole lot more than most people need or want. In the past, we have used and recommended PDF Converter from Nuance (formerly called Scansoft), which sells for around $50. But recently we found something cheaper. It's PDFZilla, the Godzilla of PDF converters. We got it for $30 from pdfzilla.com
Comparing PDFZilla to the Nuance product, we found they did equally well on our test documents. We liked the fact that PDFZilla could convert a document to Word or HTML or even Adobe Flash (for animations). More importantly, you can try it out for free. You can only try out the Nuance product for free if you sign up for Netflix or one of a few dozen other offers. However, Nuance does some conversions that PDFZilla doesn't: It can convert PDFs to Excel or PowerPoint or WordPerfect, for example.
PDFZilla works with Microsoft Word as well as the OpenOffice word processor, which anyone can get for free from OpenOffice.org. This is good, because Joy's copy of MS Word hasn't worked since early in the Bush administration and we were getting desperate.
Gaming the mouse
Most advances in desktop computers have come from games. This is hard to believe but true. The popularity of the original Apple, called the Apple II (there was no Apple I), was because it contained a game called Little Brick Out. Steve Wozniak liked it so much that he programmed it into the onboard software. In Little Brick Out you use a paddle to try and keep a ball bouncing against some coloured bricks to knock them out. That meant the Apple II had to have colour. You don't need colour to do word processing or use a spreadsheet, but you need it to play Little Brick Out. Because the Apple II had colour, it forced IBM to put colour in their first computers as well.
Increased speed, more memory and bigger hard drives were also in large part driven by the need for more processing power and disk storage to play games, which kept getting bigger and more complex. Office programs don't need much processing power. Only programs using graphics and motion need speed and memory. All of which brings us to the subject of this little digression, the new Ikari mouse from SteelSeries.com, designed for gamers.
The Ikari mouse has its own LCD display and transmits clicks and movements five times faster than conventional mice. This response time can be tuned by the user to match their reflexes and reaction patterns.
That means, of course, that getting that creature with a single shot when he sticks just a bit of his head around the corner might require a very precise movement with the mouse, and you can do it.
Does this have any reference at all beyond shooting the bad guys in creature features? Well yes, actually. People who use CAD programs, like AutoCAD (computer-aided design), and art and illustration, need precise control over lines and dimensions. In the early days, precision mice and joysticks were big ticket items. (Bob had a joystick that cost $1,500.)
We found the new Ikari mouse for $70 at Amazon.com. Users have raved about it.
Readers can search several years of On Computers columns at our web site: OnComp.com. We can be contacted by email at JoyDee@OnComp.com and BobSchwab@gmail.com. You can hear us on Internet radio at BlogTalkRadio.com/oncomp.