Tag: google

Gmail tip: Clear your inbox in one swell foop

The number of messages in your inbox is entirely a matter of personal preference. Having more in there does not affect the performance of your email or other any of your devices. The number of unread messages in any given mailbox is similarly left to the user’s habits.

That said, I myself have undergone a minor maturation recently, in that I finally recognize the value of keeping one’s inbox clear. I learned to change my ways because Gmail makes it so easy:

All you have to do is “Archive” your messages. That takes the messages out of the inbox but leaves them in the “All Mail” folder. (In Gmail-speak, it removes the “inbox” label.) Messages are still there, still searchable, but totally out of your way.

The Apple Mail apps are not great for this procedure, but the Gmail web site does it beautifully. You’ll see the Archive button right up top. I select multiple messages using keyboard shortcuts: first, the up and down arrow keys to move between messages, the “x” key to select, and finally I hit “e” to archive.

To Archive all of your inbox, click the Select checkbox — the master one, the little grey square that sits to the left of the “Refresh” and “More” buttons. That selects all the messages on the page, and you’ll see this text at the top of the message list: “All 50 conversations on this page are selected.”

Next to that, click “Select all xxx conversations in ‘Inbox.’”

Then click the “Archive” button that now appears above the messages, the little box with the arrow pointing down.

BOOM: Inbox Zero!

And now, here’s my newest new way of doing things: I’ve now started using an awesome free iOS app called Mailbox. It is one of a breed of mobile apps helps me process email much faster, by giving me a single button that will archive all my read messages.

J2 News: Save on Support!

NEW SAVINGS

J2 the Whole Year Through – Annual Memberships!

Many of you have expressed an interest in a regular, monthly checkup. You want to make sure backups are happening and everything is healthy, and you want to hear about the latest ways I’ve found to make the digital life easier. So here’s the plan:

30 Minute Plan:Each month, you get a half-hour of phone consultation with me, and a 40% discount on the next hour of J2 service, whether it’s in person, by remote, or over the phone.

60 Minute Plan:Each month, you get an hour of phone consultation with me, and a 40% discount on the next hour of J2 service, whether it’s in person, by remote, or over the phone.

Each of these subscriptions will net you a 40% savings on our initial service each month! And you can upgrade from 30 to 60 anytime.

 
Homes and Non-Profs
Businesses
30 Minute Plan
$360/year
$450/year
60 Minute Plan
$680/year
$870/year

I am really excited about this program, and about keeping in touch with you every month.

Call me today to sign up!

NEW BUSINESS

Bet you know someone who could use some Chicken Soup for their Macs! Tell a friend you know about us, and get an instant $20 for each household or non-profit you refer, and $30 for each business. Make sure our new client mentions your name!

To keep my business growing and evolving to suit your needs, I’d love to get your feedback. You know, how we doin’? You can help me a lot by writing a review either at our Yelp page or our Google Maps profile.

(Psst! Hey, business owners: Make sure your Google listing is accurate! Do a Google search for your business, then click on the link to the map, which should take you to the profile page. At the top of that, click “Business Owner” and follow the instructions to verify your ownership. Once done, you’ll be able to post pictures, hours, and other information.)

NEW FACES

Many of you have met my new cohort, the excellent Mr. Drew Moynihan. Drew has extensive background in tons of computing environments, but more importantly, he has infinite patience and a deep-seated need to see things done right — the qualities I most want for our clients. I’m grateful for the insight and experience Drew brings to my team.

As always, J2 is my business, and your satisfaction is my goal, and my responsibility. Please call or text me directly at 210.367.3420 for any consultation, and the best line for scheduling is still 210.787.2709 or schedule@j2mac.com.

Thanks so much for reading, y’all. I’ll look forward to hearing from you soon!

Your man on the Mac,

Jonathan

Posted via email from J2 Tech Blog

Simplify Media (also) shutting down

Service Termination

Apple has bought and killed Lala, and now Google has bought and killed my other favorite music-streaming and -sharing service, Simplify Media. I wrote about Simplify and Lala a couple of years ago, and while it was kind of clunky, I love Simplify greatly for letting me play my entire music collection on my iPhone, over 3G even.

Ah, well. I miss these for now, but I remain hopeful, buoyed by rumors and the nerd news, that the two behemoths are going to introduce their own amazing, fantastic, mind-blowing — and affordable — services to let me listen to all of my music, anywhere, anytime.

Fall is the rumor. Now would be better.

Posted via email from J2 Tech Blog

How do I work everywhere?

APC wrote:

I do some word processing on a laptop at home, and then need to do work on some of the same documents on my computer at work. So far, this has led to a jumble of back-and-forth emails and disorganized files. What’s the solution?

My favorite word of the year: Dropbox! Go to Dropbox.com, download the software on both computers. Create an account from one of the computers, and then sign into that same account on the other computer. Anything you put in the folder called Dropbox that’s now in your home folder on your Mac (or in My Documents on a PC), will appear in your Dropbox on alllllll your other computers — and iPhones, and iPads, or Android phones, and pretty much anything that can see m.dropbox.com. 

For what it’s worth, there are other services like Dropbox out there, including but not limited to SugarSync and Box.net, but through sheer simplicity and elegance, Dropbox has so far garnered most of the love. The iPad app is off. The. Hook.

Thanks for inspiring a blog post!

Posted via email from J2 Tech Blog

Rackspace’s newer, more affordable services + backup calculations

For the longest time, I had the perception that using the top-shelf service of San Antonio’s own Rackspace came solely at a top-shelf price. But their non-Exchange Rackspace Apps email service, at $2/user/year for 10GB email accounts, is the price level I’ve been seeking for non-free (read: non-Google Apps) hosted email. It’s a number my clients can quickly figure.

I have not yet tried the apps myself, but I wanna get these bookmarks up now, cos I think I’m going to be referring to them a lot:

http://www.rackspace.com/apps/email_hosting/rackspace_email/
http://www.rackspace.com/apps/backup_and_collaboration/online_file_storage/

Now, the data backup service — http://www.rackspace.com/apps/backup_and_collaboration/data_backup_software/ — is through Amazon S3, currently the go-to host for unlimited online storage. S3 exact pricing is found at

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/#pricing

but we can sum it up as $0.15/GB (gigabyte)/month storage, and $0.10/GB transfer each way. So…

Say you have 50GB of data on to backup. It will cost 0.15×50 = $7.5/month storage, and 0.1×50 = $5 to get all your data backed up the first time.

Now, let’s suppose you change 200MB (megabyte) of your data each day. That’s

0.2×0.1 = $0.02/day, or 0.02×30 = $0.6/month.

And after 5 months, you’re paying another $0.15/month for storage. OK, that’s an easily affordable fee for most healthy businesses to afford. But what if you have more? Say, 400GB:

0.15×400 = $60/month storage, and 0.1×400 = $40/first transfer
0.1×1 = $0.10/day for backing up 1GB/day, which after an average month is an extra $3.

60×12 = $720/year, growing by $36/year, is going to be totally fine for some, but it’s enough to give many business owners pause. Nevertheless, it’s among the cheapest cloud storage out there, excepting services such as Carbonite. I’ve been recommending and installing Carbonite $5/month “unlimited” service, but I was disappointed to run recently into their 200GB ceiling, above which they throttle upload to 1GB/day. So maybe we use Rackspace for the bigger data stores. OK, enough numbers. I just needed to get those up here. Point being, Rackspace has some good stuff to look at, and I’m going to see how it goes with them. A couple of clients have already signed up. And, BTW, apropos of a previous post, I like Rackspace’s “What is…?” page, too:
http://www.rackspacecloud.com/what_is_cloud_computing

Posted via email from J2 Tech Blog

Article: The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash – Charlie’s Diary

The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash – Charlie’s Diary
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/why-steve-jobs-hates-flash.html

(via Instapaper, which is soooo cool. Just bought Instapaper Pro [iTunes link] for the iPad. Makes reading the web fun and practical.)

I’ve about had it with on-site servers, especially the over-spec’ed variety. IT people think they have users over a barrel, and it’s only a matter of time before people wise up and discover how much they’ve been robbed, by technicians who don’t advise people about the most cost- and time-efficient uses of technology. I reserve judgment on whether the consultants don’t keep themselves educated out of laziness or selfishness.

I just spent two days bailing a business out of a wrongly configured server (it’s always DNS) — and that server was hosting their mail. I set ’em up with Google Apps, just because I needed them to have email while I was retooling their server. I’ve asked them to hang onto it for a while and see how they like it. At the very least, it’s still going to be the best method for calendar syncing. Meanwhile, I am anxious to work with them on finding alternatives for those time-worn, ubiquitous, and bothersome legal-practice apps such as Timeslips and Pro Docs. (A search for something like “legal” in Google Apps Marketplace is always fun.)

Posted via email from J2 Tech Blog

Reservations about cloud services

While I fully understand the pros of a web-based “cloud” solution, I also consider the cons. These being: 1) if our internet connection goes down, so does our database, and 2) less data security as the database would be stored on someone else’s server. We could still copy data over to laptops for use away from the office – it just wouldn’t be updated/synced with the office database until return.

I really really really encourage you to examine the online CRM options, such as SugarCRM, and the ones listed in the Google Apps marketplace (which is where I look to find services who are keeping up with the Joneses). 

Online apps are, without question or doubt, The Future. I cannot state this strongly enough. The services being designed now make both life and business transactions so easy and flexible. Businesses who don’t buy into this future are wasting money and productive time — consider the cost, time, and often frustrating effort of designing a custom database from scratch, on an expensive platorm for which you have to buy a seat for each workstation. With the online apps, there’s nothing to install or update, and you can use it outside the office. User training is way faster.

I started using an online invoicing solution called Freshbooks recently, which has changed my life; check out the list of online CRM add-ons that integrate with their service.

I understand the reservations about internet going down and such, but that brings up the larger issue that, just by dint of email, if you have a single internet connection, and it craters, it’s likely to bring your business to a halt, or at least a stall, anyway. Which is why everyone should have at least one backup connection, preferably starting with an iPhone or Android phone. The second one could be something like a MiFi, although some of the Sprint phones let you turn them into a wifi hotspot for a few computers, which is awesome.

You knew I was going to say the next thing, but the most amazing and satisfying alternative second internet connection is an iPad with 3G. I’m very excited about how iPad and Android tablets are going to change the landscape, and online, cloud-based, Software-as-Service solutions are big, snow-peaked mountains in that landscape.

Posted via email from J2 Tech Blog

New Mac, need more wireless, how about a mini media server?, and ready for Google Apps!

• I’m replacing my 2006 MBP with a shiny new one which will arrive this week – a fully loaded 15”.

Woohoo!

• What’s the best migration approach?

Your new Mac will ask if you have an old Mac, and instruct you through booting the old one to “Target Disk Mode,” and connecting the Macs via FireWire. Then you hit “Go,” and ALLLLL your stuff — user accounts and home folders, applications, support files, network configurations — will get brought over to the new machine, which will finish booting and reveal itself to be just like your old one.

• I use SuperDuper to back up to local disks at home and at the office.

I love SuperDuper, and really like to use it in conjunction with Time Machine. They can coexist on the same backup drive, even if you set SuperDuper to “SmartUpdate.”

• Shared drive for the family network – mainly as a music server – just hang a drive off the Airport extreme?

The main thing to consider about an AirDisk (disk attached to an Airport, or the built-in hard drive of a Time Capsule) is that there’s no easy way to run daily, incremental backups from the AirDisk to another storage device. So the AirDisk is really best (read: solely) used as a backup itself. For home media server, one of my top three most favorite projects currently — which, incidentally, also include setting up a Mac mini with OS X Server in a business, and hooking a business or household together with Google Apps — is putting a beautiful little Mac mini with Server in the central entertainment system of a household, plugging it into a big flat-screen with HDMI, and making it the kickass, full-throttled media jukebox for the whole family.

Plus, the mini becomes central file and backup storage for every Mac on the property. Time Machine from Mac to Server is so very sweet.

Important to say at this point that there are some great, small PCs coming out with Windows Media Center (ewwwwwww!) or, better, Linux. They can run a media front-end such as Boxee that is pretty easy to operate with a simple remote. But without question, even in spite of its high price tag, the Mac — running Boxee and Plex and Hulu Desktop and maybe an EyeTV One — is currently the best platform for the job.

• My colleagues and I are ready to transition away from an in-house Microsoft environment – we have an Exchange server for 4 people – to Gmail, cloud storage, etc.

I am, as I say above, fully ready to help any business of any size move to Google Apps. It, and services closely related, are the best thing that has happened to the internet since the Web. And we are very able to do work in Austin, and lots can be done remotely.

• Upgrade the home network – right now running one Airport extreme which is not sufficient to cover the house – at some point I may need a wiring guy to enable broader wireless coverage.

Certainly ethernet cable is always the most reliable mode of networking. Everyone with a home, however, should know about PowerLine adapters: run network through your home electrical system. Sometimes cheaper per drop, depending on the house, but always more convenient than hiring a cabling contractor, especially if you only need, say, one or two more drops to attach to Airport Expresses, which are great for extending an Airport network.

Posted via email from J2 Tech Blog