Everybody knows that Gmail is great for consolidating multiple email accounts into one place that’s easy to search, organize, backup, and get out of. What less people know is that it’s also a great place to consolidate your instant messenger accounts, too!
Watch out, this article is pretty long and gets quite nerdy at the end.
There’s been a lot of improvement in communications in the past few years, from better services to brand new ones, but I still feel like contact management is lagging behind. I mean, isn’t it important to be able to find how to contact somebody in the first place?
Here are a few things I think could be better.
I just realized that the 2 GMail Labs experiments “Go to label” and “Quick links” work together, which makes quick links all the more useful. So say you have 2 labels named “Newsletters” and “Notifications”, and one quick link named “ALT.NET” (which finds all the posts from the ALT.NET mailing list). If you summon the “go to label” popup and start typing “n”, it will show all three:
Now, you ask, when should you use a label, and when should you use a quick link?
The main difference is that quick links are only search queries, whereas labels can be both search queries (a filter that automatically assigns that label) or manually maintained containers. If you need the latter, that’s a no brainer. If, however, what you want can be expressed with a search query, you need to choose between labels and quick links.
My method, so far, is based on 2 criteria: complexity and scalability.
I hope this helps.
If you have an iPhone, or any other smartphone for that matter, you will probably by now have set up Google Sync with it so you can synchronize your contacts and calendar.
However, if you’re a bit hasty and follow the simple tutorial that Google provides, you will end up synchronizing only your main calendar with your phone. It’s easy to miss the fact you can actually synchronize up to 5 (at the time of this writing) calendars. If you go back to Google Sync from your device, you should then be able to select which calendars you wish to synced. This is especially useful if you want to sync your Remember The Milk tasks or your Facebook events.
To get Remember The Milk tasks in your calendar, go here.
To get Facebook events in your calendar, go to your events page, and click “Export Events”, at the top of the page. You’ll get an URL that you can then import in Google Calendar or any other calendar application.
Stephen Walther recently blogged about tricks that every developer should know about Visual Studio. Most of those he mentioned I use on a daily basis, so I highly recommend them. It actually surprises me how many other programmers don’t know about those features. Somehow, most programmers know Visual Studio as much as they know Microsoft Word: there’s a big space in the middle to type your text, and then maybe they know a couple of menus and shortcuts and that’s it.
Anyway, here are a few other features I use frequently:
Tip #1 – Use CTRL-I for incremental search
I’m a big fan of incremental search. It’s actually the reason I originally switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox, back when Firefox was in beta (I already had tabs with Netcaptor). By the way, I’m happy to see IE8 now also features incremental search but, well, I’m hooked on FF now… anyway…
In Visual Studio, the incremental search mode is entered with CTRL-I. Then you can start typing right away what you want to find. You can also use backspace and all, as expected. The only problem is that it uses the last search mode defined in the “Find” dialog, so if the “Match case” option is currently checked, it will only perform incremental search on what you type in a case sensitive way. This may be a bit confusing at first, but using incremental search really makes navigating code faster.
Tip #2 – Use navigate backward and forward
Like the first tip, this tip make it faster to navigate code (because we’re spending more time reading code than writing code).
CTRL— (minus sign) and CTRL-SHIFT— allow you to respectively navigate backward and forward. The first one is the one I use almost all the time: I’m looking at some code, see a call to a function, go to the definition of that function, search for something, and then I want to go back to where I was at first. Well, without having to worry about anything, I can navigate backward twice and I end up where I want. No need to find the correct tab, figure out if I stayed in the same file or not while jumping through the code, etc. Wicked!
Tip #3 – Define some external tools
You can define “external tools” with, surprisingly, the Tools > External Tools menu item. A common thing for me is to define revision control related stuff there because most of the time I don’t like how buggy and slow source control plugins are. I also do this in Visual Studio Express where there is no support for plugins at all in the first place.
For example, say you’re using Perforce. You can create a new external tool like this:
It will checkout the current file (the one you’re editing if the focus is in the text editor, or the one selected in the Solution Explorer if that’s where the focus is). Now you just need to bind “Tools.ExternalCommand2” (because it’s the second external tool) to the keyboard shortcut of you choice (mine is CTRL-K, CTRL-E for “open for edit”). Shazam! Just use your keyboard shortcut and you can checkout a file without leaving the text editor.
You can setup other commands, like show the history of the file or make a diff with the previous version. You can also easily adapt this to other systems, like SubVersion (except in this case you won’t need the “open for edit” command because SVN doesn’t lock files by default).