Pidgin is great Open Source instant messaging software for Windows and Linux. It manages multiple chat clients seamlessly, low overhead, no ads, no clutter. Get it free at www.pidgin.im
With some routers, it may have trouble making the initial connections to Google Talk.
Recent news that the China-originated attacks on human rights' activists targeted their GMail accounts have gotten many folks thinking about the security of GMail.
First, you should make sure that you have GMail set to use HTTPS connections. This is less essential if you always check email from within a secure network. Especially if you use public, unsecured wireless, you need to check this setting.
Chrome makes for a clean, speedy alternative to IE or Firefox, especially if you live a lot in the land of Google. One persistent challenge is memory usage. Chrome gobbles up tons of memory as you open more tabs and browse from one page to another. Here's some tips for Windows users at least.
* Shift-Escape brings up the Chrome task manager. You can see which tabs, including all those new extensions you might be adding, are consuming which amounts of memory. Closing tabs will release some memory.
If you use Gmail, you have probably had one or another moment where you wish you could take back the "send" click. Gmail now has an undo. Click on the tiny green beaker icon on the top of your Gmail page to open the Google Labs department for Gmail. Scroll down, or search for "undo send," and enable it.
Reload Gmail, and now, when you click send, you will gain a 5 second window to click "cancel" at the top of your screen. That will often be enough to catch those unavoidable "oops" moments. Try it on a test message to yourself. It works.
At Thanksgiving time of year, we are supposed to reflect on things we take for granted. I want to acknowledge that I tend to take some of my desktop tools for granted. Case in point this morning: don’t take your browser or you web mail for granted.
These days, having an “Intranet” comes up a lot as a requirement for website projects. I’m using the term advisedly to refer to a range of needs for private space for organizing campaigns and collaboratively developing ideas.
Google has now splashed into the social networking pond (hmm, ocean really) with its OpenSocial initiative. OpenSocial joins the set of free tools from Google that software developers can use to embed functionality in their web sites. Unlike other Google tools, OpenSocial doesn’t open up things Google like its Maps or News. Instead, the goal is to allow developers to get at social networking information that more and more of us have up on sites like myspace or Linkedin.
As reported in the New York Times, for $200, you can now buy a cool Linux-based personal computer with a well-designed suite of software right there on your desktop.
Sound like the one laptop per child program? It could be, and I liked the one of those I got to try out at a recent Ethos Roundtable meeting.
Global battles over computer technology’s future have spread from the server world to your desktop. It’s not just about whether your web site runs on Windows or Linux, it’s about how you will do your work day in and day out. And this new battle is not a two-way, but a three-way confrontation. The competition for the desktop will come to affect how we think about software and daily office work generally.
