The PDF2XL Birthday greetings contest is over and we have a winner!

In the past month, we celebrated the 5th birthday of PDF2XL – Cogniview’s flagship product. As part of the celebration, we invited you (our blog readers and customers) to leave a birthday greeting on the blog.

We also promised that the authors of the 10 best greetings will receive a $20 Amazon gift card. And that the two best greeters will win a Kindle 3G Wireless Reading Device. Well the party is over and it’s time to give out the prizes…

But before I reveal the winners, I’d like to say that we were really moved by your reaction. I’ve personally read the 170+ greeting several times, some of the greetings you left made me laugh and some were so exciting, they made me tear up a bit.

I’d like to thank you for letting us know that we make a real difference in your lives. It means a lot to me and the rest of the team here at Cogniview.

And now to the winners – the 1st place goes to…

Frank Kotulak said…

I was so happy to hear of your good fortunes, your longevity and your excellent product which we use daily.

I had worked for the County less than a month when I was given a 3 year old problem of transcribing state data that came in PDF form to usable information. Attempts had been made to duplicate the programming process with no success and it took 1 months of manpower to transcribe everything manually.

Rather than the programming approach I decided to look for and of course find a screen-scraping utility such as PDF2XL that could accurately and reliably transform PDF data into an Excel spreadsheet. PDF2XL did (and continues to do) the trick!

The work savings time for what was an intractable, unsolvable 3 year problem went from one month to one hour.

For my effort and good fortune to find your product, I was given a county based “make a difference” award because of it and no employee had ever received such an award after one months of employment!

So I say hear, hear! to your 5 year birthday and a great product! May you have a 10 year birthday celebration!

Javier Cobis said…

I am really convinced that one must find tools that reduce repetitive and boring activities in order to really focus on those important ones. Mankind has always tried to do so by many ways. Most machines invented have been created precisely because of this: printing revolution is a good example. Instead of worrying about making copies of the same book again and again… it permitted, on the other hand, to worry about creating new ideas, new books, and as a consequence, progress accelerated, as well less pain and healthier lives were possible, most of the time.

To me, this program has made things easier. Before knowing about it, I was thinking about how to extract a lot of very important digitalized data and I thought it would take too much time to do it in a practical way…..Can you imagine typing a huge overwhelming torrent of data sheet by sheet everyday for, as least, approximately, one year?. At that moment, I promptly started to find out a better way to do so, until…I found PDF2XL.

That day I was very impressed that the solution for that problem really existed, and for the first time I was convinced that I could accomplished my mission: an academic goal I had started to pursue at that time. Otherwise, it would have been almost impossible to do that without changing the subject of the investigation. It was a lot of data”asking” for somebody to understand them and about to say something to people.

Well, as a result of all that, I truly express my gratitude to PDF2XL for contributing to make life easier, minimizing those activities really repetitive and boring through a great, well-conceived program it really is, and even better people behind it: no many providers offer a really good, genuine care to customers and attention to details like Cogniview always does.

Thank you very much, Congratulations and Happy Birthday PDF2XL!

JCR

Second place winners – $20 Amazon Gift card…

David said…

Congratulations on your 5th anniversary! You have made my life easier and you deserve all the best. I hope you like the picture: http://kcy.me/el5

David Sanz, Account dpt. Barcelona, Spain

Steve Wells said…

No fancy thoughts here.  Just a simple testament.  I had PDFs containing data on literally millions of feet of drilling from a couple of gold mines in Canada.  I desperately needed to do detailed analysis on that data.  I needed to bring it into a SQL Server database in order to do that but doing it manually was simply not feasible.

Your product PDF2XL made that project possible and indeed not too difficult at all.  The data import was done and the analysis made me a good bit of money as it allowed me to invest in a nearby miner with confidence that the nearby miner was hitting grades in their diamond core drilling that were consistent with proven mines next door.

So, your product paid for itself many, many times over.  In effect, you created not just great software but also great economic value.  That’s not easy and it’s a hugely important thing.  Congratulations on a 5 years and here’s wishing you many more.  The money I spent on your product was some of the best invested money ever from my perspective.

David Said…

Wow, how times flies. It felt like it was yesterday that I tried in vain figuring out how to convert a pdf to excel. I tried this product and that product and they all felt out of place, incomplete, or too hard to use, etc. Then as luck would have it, I came across pdf2xl. I was amazed how smooth, fast, easy and very well developed the program was. Productivity wise, it’s a timesaver. Status wise, it amazes others that I can convert pdfs so quickly and accurately. Kudos to the developers for creating such a helpful program. I love it and will continue to support the product and spread the word.

The next evolution for the program would be to create mobile app versions, Android, iPhone, Windows Mobile for those quick on the go situations when a conversion is needed.

Happy 5th Birthday and hope for many more.

Chong P. Yun Said…

Congratulations for you, my Best Relationships……!!!!

Happy 5th birthday! I always try to find an easy solution to all my work problems. and then I found you, I tried it and the rest is history. You just don’t know how much easier my life has been. When your boss thinks you can do magic that’s just great. I just wish I had found you sooner.

Very happier, you make my life very important every day.

Thanks for helping users create data from PDF files.

I was so happy to hear of your good fortunes in the world, your longevity and your excellent product which we use daily.

So I say hear, hear! to your 5 year birthday and a great product! May you have a 10 year birthday celebration!

I think that you are the best friends in providing solutions in my work.

Congratulations on your 5th year!!! once again…….!!!!!!!

Chong P. Yun, Acropolis Appraisal, Real Estate Appraiser, Bellevue, WA

Shawn Setnicky Said …

I’ve said over and over how great of a product PDF2XL is. It’s not easy getting my company to buy things, but once I showed them how much time I save, they were ready to buy.

Among my other conversion jobs, the big one I receive each year is a 400 to 500 page list of about 7000 buyers. They give you the list free, but it’s in PDF format, which I can’t print labels from, and the information is spread across two lines.

One year we spent hours manually retyping the data (not my idea, I just work here). Four people typed for hours. Imagine the cramped fingers and errors that were probably made.

With PDF2XL was able to cut my time down significantly and reduce my error margin to none.

If you add up my hourly pay rate that I’d normally spend doing all this work and then look at the price for PDF2XL, the company is saving thousands of dollars each year.

Thanks! Happy Birthday!… by the way, I forgot to mention in my last message that the place we get our buyer list from DOES make one in Excel format, but they charge you .20 cents a name! That’s roughly $1400 saved right there.

Shawn Setnicky, Sonali Corporation, Administrative Assistant

Shasvat Sharma…

Really ? Only 5 yrs. old ? Honestly, it is rare to see any company create a product that is extremely useful at such a young age. Productivity can be measured in time and money and PDF2XL has saved us both in extreme quantities. We just upgraded and renewed our licenses because we now literally (and figuratively) cannot proceed without including PDF2XL in our project plans. PDF2XL is one of the greatest inventions, and if you see the person who invented the wheel … tell em’, “We said so”. Because we can still get by without a wheel (walk to work), but cannot work without PDF2XL.

Wish you a happy “5th” birthday and extreme success for the future.

Robert Del Riego Said…

I bought your program to deal with a specific client project and it was a life saver. The project completed successfully, and I thought great, that was worth it, now back to normal business. Next I know, another client comes along with a similar problem. Then another. Being a bit slow, I finally came to see just how widely useful this program could be. Now I’m using PDF2XL ALL THE TIME. I’m afraid I’m going to wear it out. I’ve even turned on an associate to it and she loves it. So, happy birthday? Hell yes, Happy Birthday! Glad you were born!

Chistopher Said…

Happy birthday! After reading books and articles saying that no more than 5% of new enterprises survive for more than a year, I know that PDF2XL is a story of success for Cogniview. So, what good points can you draw from that experience?

If you look through the theory, you can say a number of factors: risk analysis, pareto analysis, adequate planning and decision making… But every of this good characteristics remit to a essential factor for success: Good people.

And for them is the greeting in this fifth birthday: Not for the company, not for the sole management, not only for shareholders, but for all of those good people who had their impact in the success story you are living now. Congratulations and continue making our world a better world, not by your products, but by your good being.

Charles Rother Said …

Happy Birthday PDF2XL! Since you have come into to my life, you have brought me joy, happiness and fulfillment. I now can get my work done and still have a life.  Before you came into my life, I spent countless hours manually typing reams of data.  Before you arrived, I searched the whole world for you.  In fact, before I found you, I had several flings with much more expensive, but inferior products proclaiming to do what you do. After trying other products, I conclude nobody does it better than PDF2XL!

After you came into my life, you have helped me so much. In just a few mouse clicks, my hundreds of PDF pages are easily and accurately converted.  PDF2XL, you have saved me $15,000 and approximately 150 hours each year.  Happy Birthday! Thank you for being the best product in the category.

Chris Said…

Your story is an awesome example of how often our first attempts and ideas aren’t the most effective in generating income or growth.  I love how you turned to your customers and asked/saw what they wanted and used that to find a market that would pay for what you could provide instead of just throwing in the towel. I read about another company the other day that just said “well we’ve tried to make money and we just haven’t been successful” – on that blog post a whole bunch of customers were saying well if you would offer a yearly subscription plan we would pay you!  Had they gone to their customers they could have saved their business and years of work.  Nice work, great story, Happy Birthday and if you keep building your business the way you have thus far you’ll have many more birthdays to come!

Thank you all,

Hadar

This month Cogniview is celebrating the 5^th Birthday of PDF2XL – our flagship product.

It’s not that we always had PDF2XL, the truth is that Cogniview started as an Enterprise software company that aimed to sell its Enterprise-Level software products to IT departments in large organizations.

We spent a lot of money on flamboyant marketing campaigns, well-dressed sales people and a variety of other time/money wasters.

After 5 years of struggles that created a huge hole in our bank account, we woke up and realized we had to survive. So we turned to our customers that said…Make us a decent PDF to Excel converter. So we thought – why not, let’s give it a try … and this how PDF2XL was created.

Since then, PDF2XL licenses were bought by more than 20,000 companies in a variety of industries all over the globe.

We are thankful to our customers, our employees, our partners and our blog readers who have contributed their time, energy and resources to help Cogniview achieve so many successes.

So, Let the party begin. And here are the party gifs…

We would be overjoyed if you would consider leaving PDF2XL a birthday greeting on this Blog post. And to make the birthday even more festive, we are also giving $20 Amazon Gift Cards to the authors of the 10 nicest greetings.

And the best greeting will also win a Kindle 3G Wireless Reading Device!

So, we invite you to share your thoughts with us by leaving a comment on this post.

Sincerely,

Yoav Ezer

CEO

Here is how you can create and print your own personalized birthday party invitations in Word from a list of your friends compiled in Excel.

First, create your friends list in Microsoft Excel. It does not need to be anything fancy, just a straight list of names, but make sure you split the first and last names so you can address people by their first name if you want to add a personal note.

OK, the characters in Futurama aren’t really my friends, but you get the idea, heh.

Start creating a new file in Word and select the template you wish to use. Word will download any templates you select that you haven’t used before.

The template I selected allows you to print a folding invitation, so part of it is upside down. This feels a bit weird to edit but you can trust that it will come out ok on the printer!

Now go to the “Mailings” ribbon, press “Start Mail Merge”, and choose “Step by step mail merge wizard”

The mail merge side bar will open on step 1 of 6. Choose the type “Letters”, then click the link “Next” at the bottom

Now hit the radio button “Use the current document” and, again, click “Next”.

We want to “Use an existing list”, the list we created earlier in Excel, so browse for the file where you saved it on your machine and select it.

When you have browsed and found your Excel spreadsheet containing the names of your friends, choose the sheet from excel (sheet1), and click OK to load up the names into the Word “Mail Merge Recipients”.

If you look at the screen grab below, this is how Word sees our friends list. We could remove some of them if we don’t want to invite them to our party, by un-checking the box next to their name. Click OK when you are happy with the guest list.

To add a greeting line right before the invitation text, put your cursor above the text, and click “Greeting line” in the panel on the right of the screen.

You can customize the greeting line with various options and you get a preview before you commit yourself.

Before you complete your invites, you need to do some additional text modifications. There is some place holder text you do not want to publish (I don’t know who this “Stephanie” lady is, and it’s not 2004 anymore!). Click Next when you are done.

At this point you will see what the final product will look like. We can browse through the different invitations for each friend. If everything is all right, click “Next” again.

All that is left now is the final step, which is to print all the invitations!

Obviously we used an example that will be applicable to nearly everybody, but the same principle applies to all mail merges, from sales letters to other kinds of invitation.

Do you use Word mail merge? Please share your experiences in the comments …

It all started last month when the company that will market these cars, Better Place, opened its visitor center to the public, and I decided to go there with all the guys (and gals) from work, to get some questions answered as well as to see the prototype vehicles. As a side bonus, I got to drive one of the prototype cars.

It seems that the visitor center is still under heavy construction. A D-9 bulldozer was moving mountains of land around, and many construction workers were hard at work, probably building more showrooms and infrastructure.

Some of you probably haven’t heard about this company and their electric vehicles (EVs), or about their business model. In short, their short-term goal (~15 years) is to transform small countries to EV-only, and thus make whole countries independent of foreign oil.

Sounds a bit pretentious? Well, their plan is very detailed and seems to be well on its way, at least in their “pilot” countries, Israel and Denmark. With the help of the governments and some private investors, as well as the European car manufacturer, Renault, this company seems to be headed for a revolution in the transportation energy market.

The electric cars

Let’s start with some details! I am a beginner physicist and a professional programmer, so bear with me if I juggle some numbers from time to time. The technical data was taken from the company and its representatives.

What we saw were prototype cars, which used to be regular Renault models like the Megane and Laguna, and were converted to electrical ones by taking away the gas tank, replacing the engine with an electrical one of 115 horse power, and putting a large 250kg 250Liter Lithium-Ion battery pack in the trunk.

They told us that the first consumer model (the Renault Fluence) will be available to customers during 2011. These models will be specially-designed, so that the battery pack is at the bottom of the car, just under the seats. An equivalent of a gas station will have a device to replace the battery pack in under 5 minutes.

A new, fully-charged battery pack (supplies 400V, and holds 24kWh) under average Israeli-driving conditions has enough juice for a range of at least 100 miles (160km) of driving. They did not know how much the battery pack’s capacity degrades over the years, but that is not too important because of the business model.

How it works for us, the drivers

Their business model revolves around customers becoming subscribers for travelling from place to place. You don’t buy the battery charger, you don’t buy the electricity itself, and you don’t even buy the car or pay for mechanical service. You just pay as you go, per mile, and that is it.

When you subscribe, you get a new car and free installation of two charging sockets anywhere you want (for example, at your home and at work). The socket is a three phase 220V 50Hz AC, just like the regular mains, with 5 leads (2 for communication). It seems quite sturdy and simple. I would say even the least tech-savvy drivers will be able to handle it.

Charging is done at 3kW and it takes around 7 hours to fully charge a battery, in a process carefully controlled by the car’s computer. It comes out as less than 8 hours because the car’s computer prevents you from emptying the battery completely, so it won’t die before its time.

The subscription includes as much charging energy as you like, and as many battery replacements as you like. The only thing you pay for is distance travelled. If you think about it for a moment, it makes a lot of sense, because the travelling distance is the most important thing you actually get from using the car. It will not cost you more if you use the A/C, turn the radio on, go uphill all the way, or choose to drive especially slow or fast (within the limits of traffic law, of course).

The tour guide told us that the price per mile is not yet decided upon, but that it will be competitive to what people are used to today. Most cars is Israel are either privately owned or leased through a car leasing company.

On the way back we did some calculations. I own my car, while my colleague leases his via our company. He drives a bit more than I do, but running all the numbers, we came to the conclusion that the total cost of travelling with either of our cars is pretty much the same. We took into account (for me) the price of my car, its licensing and insurance fees, and car value degradation, (and for him) his monthly leasing fees, and of course fuel for both of us.
It sums up to around half a dollar per kilometer, or 75c per mile. If their subscription fee would be around that price per mile, it would be worth it even without taking the environmental-ideological aspect into account. I know some people who would be willing to pay a bit extra for that noble cause alone.

Environmental impact

The company emphasizes the idea of saving the planet and repeats that idea many times in the videos we saw. Let’s try to dig into that:

An electric car creates almost zero air pollution when it operates compared to gasoline cars. It’s not a 20% reduction; it’s more like 99% reduction. And it also makes much less noise (more on this in a moment). But it still requires a lot of energy to make it move, and this electrical energy has to be created somehow. Creating it in a power plant generates air and noise pollution, but elsewhere… not where the car drives. The environmental benefit for highly populated areas like city centers is considerable. We will breathe fresher air, no doubt. But the question still remains: Does the system as a whole really reduce overall pollution in order to save the planet?

Israel is a small country and has very little spare energy to waste on charging cars. The total electricity usage on hot days (when many people turn on their A/C around the country) can reach 96% of all the power plants production capacity combined (10GW out of 10.6GW). None of the various power plants are nuclear, so all of them are big polluters. The few solar and wind plants (in the Negev desert and in the Golan Heights, respectively) are not producing much energy, if at all, and are mostly for research purposes. If another coal/natural-gas power plant is built just for the purpose of supplying enough charge to the cars, the environmental benefit of electric cars might be lost completely.

The company’s answer to this problem is a smart charging system which profiles users according to their usage. If a driver (e.g. an IT worker) parks her car at work every weekday at 9am and usually only uses it again at 5pm, then her car’s charge cycle will be delayed a bit, and it might be 1pm or 2pm before her car starts charging.

Another driver (e.g. a sales agent) who drives a lot all day, will get priority every time she hooks the car into the socket, because she needs the energy more readily.

On the other hand, if the first driver has some unusual urgent matter to attend to (say, she has to fix a problem in a client site), and needs to use the car at 10am, she can instruct the system to “charge me now” and she’ll get priority, as well as a more rapid battery charge.

This is an interesting mechanism, which attempts to utilize the grid to its full potential while prioritizing customers according to their profile and/or other needs. I am eager to see if this will work as planned and if it will be too much of a nuisance to users or not.

My colleague asked them about the reduction of noise pollution. The prototypes we saw were just as quiet as a brand new “out of the factory” car, but not much quieter. On the other hand, when the engine is under load (such as going uphill) you could really feel the difference, as the electric motor is much quieter than a screaming internal combustion engine.

We were told that the consumer model will be fitted with a speaker and a “drive-tone” (an extended word play on ring-tone and true-tone), so that pedestrians will notice it and be less likely to get run over. In other words, the sound of a car that we are used to, will be artificially generated for the sake of safety. This makes sense, but I believe that eventually, if the whole industry converts to EVs, this feature could be taken off (not in the following 10-20 years though).

I asked them about the environmental impact of dead batteries, and in the behind-the-scenes operation required to periodically charge as many as 2 million cars, assuming all cars in Israel are replaced with their electric counterparts.

As with any lithium-based batteries, their lifespan is limited to around 10 years. This is longer than your standard cell-phone battery because of special sealing techniques. However 2 million cars still needs at least 2 million batteries (plus spares for changing), so the dead batteries might pile up to become a serious environmental threat.

When a battery dies, its contents (the electrolyte, the anode and cathode) can be recycled just like any other Li-Ion battery. However, I am not aware of any such recycling plants for these batteries in Israel, and when I asked them about that, they did not know where the recycling would take place either. Nor did they know how much energy it takes to recycle each battery.

It will be interesting to investigate this further, because off-shoring the recycling process might prove to be not economically worthwhile. Meanwhile it would be a big loss for the environment if the batteries are not recycled.

The test drive

The tour included a lengthy presentation (around 23 minutes) which included a hologram of the lead entrepreneur Shay Agassi, as well as colorful eye-candy entrance of a model car. It was too kitschy for my taste, and packed full of buzzwords and slogans.

Then we finally got to see a prototype car up-close and even drive it for a bit. They would not let us look under the hood. Apparently their refusal has something to do with a contract with the manufacturer, Renault.

When not moving, the engine is dead-quiet, but I could still hear a small hum from some ventilator, even after turning the A/C completely off.

Driving the EV felt just like driving my gasoline-drinking car. The gas and brake pedals, as well as handling the steering wheel felt just like any other car. It also accelerated nicely; there was no sign of it being “weaker” than a regular car.

One difference was on the dashboard: Instead of an RPM gauge, there was a power gauge. The scale runs from around -50kW to +200kW. Don’t be alarmed, negative power is still not defined. The scale works like that because when you let go of the gas pedal, the engine works as a dynamo to charge the battery! The negative values are there to indicate that the power is used to decelerate instead of accelerate (hence charging instead of discharging).

Another difference is in the gears, as in… there are none. The engine can produce the maximum torque at any RPM, which means that gears are not needed at all. One gear fits all. This is also why there is no “clutch” mechanism either (manual or automatic). It does boggle the mind a bit at first.

So there you have it. I believe this is a start of a revolution in the global car industry as well as the oil industry. I have a feeling that this will make a lot of headlines in the near future, and I am planning to be an early adopter of this technology, if the price won’t be too high.

Over the last few months I have been guest posting like a maniac, but it is time to offer it up again, so if you would like some free content, check this out now!

Yoav and I want to write free articles about Excel for your website or blog.

All we ask is that we can link back to our site(s) in the “about the author” attribution box. Seem like a good deal?

If so, simply fill out this short form and we will be in touch via email if we have something for you. (If you have multiple sites, please fill out the form for each one).

Click here to add your details and be on your way to getting some free, expert content for your site!

We have already written guest posts for several happy site owners. In the past we have written about all kinds of topics but now we really want to focus on Cogniview’s core expertise which is making your Microsoft Excel experience happier, easier, more efficient.

Cogniview’s expert developers have already supplied me with some absolutely awesome Excel solutions and code to share with you, I just need somewhere to write it up!

While we can’t guarantee that we will write something for everyone, we will think very hard to see if we can come up with something brilliant for you, so don’t delay, fill the form out now!

We only ask two things:

1. No foul language please. If your feedback is not positive – that’s OK. In fact it’s more then OK, we learn a lot from feedback. But please… no foul language.

2. If possible, please write your story in English.

And that’s it. Just scroll down to the end of the page and leave your comment there. I am really looking forward to your feedback.

It is a strange thing when you might regret making and adding friends!

The worst offenders are the stupid farm, mafia, and so on games and applications that spew random irrelevant rubbish into your news feed. When those appear, nuke them!

What if the rubbish is posted by actual friends and not the games they play?

Worry not, it is possible to silence the worst culprits without banishing them from your Facebook altogether. Some people you want to hear everything about, others you are quite content to go check in on them once in a while – this is a good thing and nothing to be ashamed about!

When an offending message appears, mouse over the right hand side and a “Hide” button should show.

Click the hide button that pops up next and you can then hide that person from your news feed.

Next time that person posts a status update you will have to go to their account to see it.

Obviously doing this might be considered “too little, too late” – best is to block people at the source. While you can not predict who out of your friends will turn bad, at least you can only add people who you know, like and trust!

If you change your mind and you find you are missing finding out about your friend’s high scores or most recent virtual flock, you can always go back to the options and allow those “Bejewelled” status updates back into your feed.

Back to the story… I was absentmindedly browsing through the search results when I noticed something funny right after Cogniview’s Wikipedia Article…

Well… It seems that for some reason, the Trinidad and Tobago foreign office was selling one of our products. And at a discount. Funny, I thought to myself, I don’t recall signing a distributor agreement with the Trinidad and Tobago government. And we NEVER sell at a discount. So I followed the link to see what’s up:

Click image to enlarge

Apparently, someone at the foreign office of Trinidad and Tobago has set up a store selling pirated software copies. I kept looking around and found out that all the software sold on this site was either bought at “an auction” or is a discontinued product line…

Click image to enlarge

Well… I can tell you that we never sell software at ‘auctions’ – whatever those are – and we did not discontinue any of our product lines. Besides, I am guessing that Adobe didn’t discontinue it’s Acrobat product line and it’s still being sold at huge discounts on the Trinidad and Tobago software store -

Click image to enlarge

Further investigation into the matter shows that the guys (or gals) at the ‘Trinidad and Tobago software store’ take fraud very seriously…

Click image to enlarge

I am pretty used to our software getting hacked and sold at a discount. That’s the price you pay when you sell software, I guess. But we found out that most people are decent and don’t go looking for pirated copies. (Either that, or they are afraid of the viruses that are installed along with those copies). But this is the first time an actual government office site was used to steal our products.

I tried contacting the Trinidad and Tobago foreign office several times but to no avail.

So… What do you think we should do next? Can we ask that the Trinidad and  Tobago official site be de-listed from Google? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

I know, crazy, right?

When we all want bigger, better, faster, more, to actually be happy something is running slowly seems … well, just wrong.

And I thought the same, until it happened to me.

Or rather, to my email.

This strange realization happened when I moved my email from an assortment of cobbled together solutions, to (mostly) Gmail. Or rather, Google Apps for domains.

Google has put out a cool software tool that allows you to upload your mail.app email up to a Google Apps email account. I took this as an opportunity to unify my ~10 years worth of email into one online, searchable, central database. Google search is very efficient, plus  the tagging and filters will be a real boon.

One weekend of uploading later and I had my email all ready and waiting at my finger tips. Awesome!

Turns out though there is one flaw I hadn’t considered.

Man, is my mail sloooooooooooow.

I mean, really slow.

Why is this happening? What is the cause? Could be because I am forwarding my chrisg.com email to the apps mail. Could be just that Google is a slow service. Maybe it is because their IMAP implementation is poor. Not sure yet.

What I do know is this whole slow mail situation has had a side benefit that I never expected.

When it takes ten minutes to get an email reply, I am less likely to get involved in email chit-chat, and I get more work done!

Previously I would immediately respond to any email that arrived within seconds, and again and again until the natural end of the email thread. I can’t do that now, the response times have been taken out of my hands. When I alt-tab to another application and alt-tab back there are no new messages waiting for me.

OK, yes, I should shut my email off (and that is probably the real situation), but being an email addict, I will take this solution for now.

Thank you slow email!

You can’t have missed the bru-ha-ha over the Apple iPad.

Apparently it’s all wrong …

• No camera
• No multi-tasking
• Not a full operating system
• Restricted to App store
• No USB
• … and on and on

Now, some of that stuff I think will be present in version 2 (the camera seems pretty much guaranteed) but it amazes me how so many geeks think this product is aimed squarely at them.

Not for Geeks

OK, so the mighty Steve made a big play about it being better than a netbook, but in my view this has always been a Kindle killer.

• The form factor
• The price
• The battery life
• The book store

It’s a colour Kindle that runs applications.

A computer Grandma will love

Regardless if you think this is an ebook reader (I do, but you do not have to agree with me), ask yourself what your parents and older relatives do with computers, or want to do. Think about your friends and relatives who are not IT savvy but would like to be more online for whatever reason.

• Web (which might mean eBay initially but even some government services are now online in many countries)
• Email (again, even some official communication is now arriving electronically)
• Facebook etc
• Photographs (who prints out photos any more? OK, only yesterday we did, but certainly not most folks under the age of 30)
• Crosswords/Suduko/Puzzle/stuff
• Knitting patterns and the like
• Recipes
• (ie. pretty much mainstream non-geek stuff)

Which of those things really need a fully equipped computer, operating system, or even multi-tasking? None is the answer.

Flash could help some of that, but it is by no means essential to the experience.

Geeks need not apply.

I think geeks need to remember that IT is not their sole territory any longer. When the iPod came out the geeks revolted saying it was all wrong, but those white earbuds soon became a badge of cool (something we geeks do not understand) and the geeks were silenced by sales data.

I’m not saying the iPad will be as big as the iPod. I am saying that the geeks need to butt out and let the actual target market decide.

Personally, I never buy version 1 of anything unless I absolutely have to. I’m waiting for the iPad 3gs like I did the iPhone