So here’s the report on the 1st day of the 30 days. Here’s what it looks like on my system:
And here are some details:
- I moved it from the far right hand edge of the screen to the far left. That feels more right for what its worth.
- I’ve seen a few window redraw issues and my windows programming experience says that that’s tied to applications grabbing the wrong screen contexts / sizes and making assumptions that they had the whole display area. Given that I didn’t see any of that before I moved it, there must be some bad fu associated with left hand side of the screen (and that’s likly why Google put it on the right). Still I read from left to right so having it on the left feels right.
- The internal notepad, “Scratch Pad”, is brilliant. All of my machines since 1995 have had a single file, todo.txt, launched at startup into notepad.exe or another editor. Why? Well its my equivalent of a sticky pad / writing on the screen. This is better since its moderately visual and I can always see it.
- So that’s great BUT their own search engine can’t find text you type into it. I started by entering “where doth these notes go” into the Scratch Pad but now 12 hours after I typed it in, its still not indexed. Consistency thy name is engineer!
- Not knowing where the data is stored for Scratch Pad bothers me a lot but that’s just me.
- The little todo list widget is nice. Very nice. I’m the classically disorganized guy who focuses hugely on what’s in front of him so having this is cool.
- The email widget is really, really nice but I don’t understand the filters UI at all. Here’s what it looks like:
![GDS Filters]()
- I know that’s hard to see but the idea is that you put in terms of what you don’t want to see in your list of emails. I like that because I don’t want a list of 10,000 messages in here. But what I don’t understand is how to use this dialog. Subject is a text field as is From and To. So do I put the words in the subject field or the Has the Words field. I suspect that what they wanted was a checkbox or radio button here. Recommendation: See Thunderbird’s filters dialog box. While I have many, many issues with Thunderbird, they really did get filters right.
- It seems hard to do filename searches or perhaps it was still indexing my disc. I wanted to hack the iPodder / Juice code a wee bit to help my snaky goodness (Python) and was looking for xrced and all it found was a mail message containing a reference to xrced but not the xrced script.
- I’m hugely biased towards currency in search results. Hey I founded Feedster right? For me currency is often all that matters. If I’m searching for *.doc what I want are the latest *.doc files NOT everything on my blasted hard disc. I’d strongly recommend to whoever writes this absolute gem of a piece of software that they read Gelertner’s papers on the Timestream / Lifestream approach to organizing data. Gelertner rocks.
But overall I still love this little beast. Its actually gotten me to respond to emails which any long time reader knows I generally don’t do.
