software

There are 26 posts tagged software (this is page 3 of 3).

Managing browser bookmarks

I use many browsers and don’t know of any service or addon that permits me to keep bookmarks in sync between one browser and another.   There are online bookmark managers and I have an account at Pinboard.in, but that does not really solve the problem for day to day use.

But there are some points of light.  It used to be that browsers were less standard in the way they handled bookmarks.  I remember being able to import bookmarks into Opera, but not export them.  There were even different formats for saving bookmarks.  Perhaps there still are – I haven’t used Microsoft’s browser for many years. There were browsers that had folders in the bookmarks bar and those that didn’t.

Fortunately all the browsers that I use now permit the import and export of bookmarks as an html file, and all have bookmark bars with folders.  So it’s easy to create a standard usage for bookmarks, back them up frequently and then import the backup file every time I start to use a new browser.  To keep things tidy, I first delete any  previous bookmarks, so I always have only the most up to date version of my bookmarks stash.

Because it’s so easy to maintain bookmarks now, it also makes sense to invest a little time in organizing them.  So all my bookmarks are under folders and subfolders that I keep in the bookmarks bar itself.  I have master folders for News, Email, Services, Forums, Social Networks, etc. and then subfolders of those.  I don’t claim to have perfected the perfect organization yet, and of course it depends on my personal use case, but I can say that I’m a lot more organized than before, and it’s thanks to the fact that browsers themselves are more standardized in the way they handle bookmarks.

I still use Pinboard.in, but mainly for individual news articles that interest me, and to which I may like to refer later for one reason or another.

I don’t so much use sync between browsers on different devices.  Mainly because I don’t really need that and partly because it means creating a cloud copy of everything and then trusting the browser company to safeguard that information.

Fumbling with Salesforce for Nonprofits

Well, some people seem to speak highly of it. But it seems to require a highly trained staff – or at least a staff who are competent with software systems. So I’m wondering if I get into it, will anyone else in our small organization follow me into that territory? And, although I never thought of our organization as being much different from others, I see that it does not so easily fit the mold of Salesforce. Would it be better to adopt a simpler or more flexible solution? It’s still hard to say.

May 24 – 11:30 made some progress – understood how to link Opportunities to Products. phew.

Installed “Writer’s Tools” in OpenOffice

One thing I miss from MS Office 2007 is the ability to make documents in the Recent Documents menu “sticky”, i.e. make sure they don’t get crowded off the list. OpenOffice doesn’t have a comparable feature. I added “History Master” – an extension that groups “recent documents of same type” – but that didn’t seem to help me. Today I added the Writer’s Tools extension, which has a way to bookmark favorite documents. It’s still too many clicks, but maybe it will help. There a few more potentially useful features in Writer’s Tools – although this might be bloat. There’s another Bookmarks extension in OpenOffice, but when trying to install it on Linux, it gave me a warning I didn’t really understand, in broken English. So I opted for Writer’s Tools, and this seems to work well enough

I’d love to see greater stability in Google Docs

I have found it possible to create documents in Google Docs that it is impossible to convert to MS Word docs, or download or email. In such cases you can only copy and paste. Some Google docs can’t even be opened by Google Docs. If these are things that I’ve come across, as a fairly light user, it means that there’s a nest of other bugs waiting. Google needs to spend time stabilizing its Docs platform more than it needs to add new features.

But if Google is thinking of new features, user-customized templates should be introduced to standard edition Google Apps or regular Gmail users, and it would be nice to see shared folders. For both of these features I found workarounds*, but these shouldn’t be necessary.

* The workarounds:

– for templates, create a “Templates” folder, create a new template. Open the template as a document, and just remember to change the name to something else. If you make a mistake and change and save the template, you can always revert to a previous “version”.

– as a workaround for the absence of shared folders, I create folders in a shared Google Site, then place links to the documents there. Update: Google has just introduced a shared folder feature (see The Next Web article from October 12) This shares a folder with all of its files. But does it allow another user to place files there? If so, it isn’t clear from Google’s explanation.

Tags in document organization

Just noticed the tags feature in Windows 7, which corresponds to keywords in Office 2007. It would be possible to forego folder organization and just use tags. Folders are an old fashioned way of organizing files, and we really should no longer be using these today. With tags we could also bring together files which would normally be stored separately, like photos and emails.

However it isn’t possible to add tags to other formats like pdf, rtf or odt. Although keywords can be added to Openoffice files within Openoffice, these are not recognized as tags by the file manager in Windows 7. That’s a pity.

Win 7 file manager