iphoting's Sink

I might have mentioned this before but I’ll do this again.

Spanning Sync is a awesome app at its 3rd version. What this application / service does is that it seamlessly syncs between your iCal and Google Calendar; Address Book and Google / Gmail Contacts.

As I sync all my personal mobile devices with Sync Services on my Mac, all my contacts and calendar entries flow from my iPod and mobile phone and to my Macbook automatically and beautifully, both ways. I have lived with this setup for a long time before my switch to Google Apps as I handled my mail on my own server.

With the dwarfing amounts of spam coming into my mailbox, to the tune of ~40 pieces a day (which works out to ~1000 pieces a month), my SpamAssassin setup was starting to fall behind. My once always clean Inbox started to fill up with false-negative spam pieces despite my dedicated training programme for the Bayes classification system. Having to spend a few minutes daily, looking at spam and repeatedly deleting rubbish is an inelegant chore; I bit the bullet and migrated over to the Google Apps hosted mail solution. Then, it was still in beta and there wasn’t a paid enterprise service yet, but the spam filtering system is top notch. Much better than Yahoo Mail and Hotmail combined. I had to admit, my SpamAssassin setup did a great job of filtering out more spam than Yahoo and Hotmail services then, but Gmail does spam management better.

With the move to Google Apps, all my contacts and events are no longer integrated into Gmail / Google’s interface. There were times where I clicked on the To: link and was looking forward to selecting a recipient from my Address Book, but I was disappointed. There is no link with my Mac OS X Address Book! Apple did come up with Gmail sync with the iPod Touch but it is still flaky.

In comes Spanning Sync and the missing link is solved. I now have my contacts and events, everywhere, updated and synchronised seamlessly. What elegance!

I did try out Spanning Sync previously, but then, the sync was flaky and duplicate entries in Google Calendar were quite common. 2 versions later, the algorithms became way more matured and I can trust it to do its job, with my hands off.

So, they’re currently running a promotion, giving out $5 promo codes and a $5 referral bonus. If by any case you do intend to get a subscription or a life-long license, use this link to save $5 or this promo code, KQR9TP, to be entered upon checkout. After which, for every friend you refer, you’ll get to save $5 also.

Full disclosure: I paid for a 1 year subscription to this service.

Something very good to watch if you haven’t already done so. It might change your life.

It’s the technological revolution.

And the ignorance.

I spend much of my time, fixing broken documents sent my way, commonly due to users misusing Word Processing features, manually doing what the processor can do automatically. There are times where I see people spent no less than 2 hours, trying to get their document formatting into shape, just because they didn’t let automation do their jobs.

I shall list a few very common usage scenarios, how people do it the wrong way, and how it should be done, efficiently.

Paragraph Spacing

The first I’ll start off with is ‘paragraph spacing’. Ideally, after every press of the enter key, a gap is formed before the next line, as follows:-

However, most people would just press enter twice, producing the ‘same’ effect. This will create consistency issues across a huge document and unsightly gaps at the top of the page would be seen when an empty paragraph spills over to a new page. Then, we’ll see the user, manually and arbitrarily deleting the empty paragraphs to work-around this problem.

The ideal solution would be to use the ‘paragraph spacing’ configuration parameters under the Paragraph Formatting dialogue.

Indentation

The next significant time waster is paragraph indents. Users would want to move their paragraph in and spam their tab key at every protruding sentence. This is where a disaster awaits when the paragraph is amended.

Here’s what I mean:-

The best practice way to do that nicely is to use the indent buttons:-

Keeping with the Next Paragraph

Sometimes, certain paragraphs, such as headings, list introducers, and titles, must logically follow the next paragraph and cannot be the last item before text flows off to the next page. Users tend to work-around this by creating unnecessary empty paragraphs (by pressing enter) right before the header, hoping to push it down to the next page. This might seem to work, but when text above is amended, stray blank paragraphs will start to pollute the document, increasing the amount of clean-up one needs to do before printing.

My recommended solution is to enable the following option (under Format -> Paragraph) for all headings and titles:-

This way, the headings and titles will stay on the same page as the next paragraph. This can also be applied to table headings if you don’t want your first header row to be alone at the end of a page.

Styles

If you’re a web designer, think of Styles as cascading styles sheets for your text documents. They inherit their parent styles and helps unify the formatting structure of your document with less clicks. In Microsoft Word, the ‘Normal’ style is used as your baseline style which all body text in your document would take dressing from to have a default look; it is intuitively named ‘Body Text’ in OpenOffice Writer.

Then, there are ‘Heading 1’, ‘Heading 2’ and all other levels of headings you’ll need in a generic and simple document.

However, if you happen to create the documents that I have a hand in, you might have to deal with numbered paragraphs with alternatively numbered child paragraphs. This way, the Bullets and Numbering feature can work hand-in-hand with the Styles capability of the word processor to relieve you of tedious formatting.

All the paragraph numbering and sub-paragraph numbering is automatically generated. The only buttons you need to click on is the indents button which assigns the paragraph a particular ‘level’. The exact details on how to set this style up is left as an exercise for the reader. I would leave the following screen shots below as hints.

This concludes my brief gripe about word processor misuse. In a future post, I might talk about version control and document management.

There’s this new social service concept that is quite interesting and it’s known as Aardvark. It is basically a question to answer matchmaker. You ask Aardvark a question and it sends your question to people within your social network (facebook, etc) that are on Aardvark. The people your question gets to has matching interests with your question, allowing the answers to your questions more focused and appropriate.

Schematically:-

I think this service has great potential and utility. Check it out!