Xobni - plugin for Outlook

Yeah baby! This thing rocks. The name (which is "inbox" backwards) is kinda weird, but the functionality is genius. Yes it indexes your mail (although only a small chunk of it until you go into the options and tell it to grab it all), but if that was it then Google Desktop would of course be the way to go.

But that's just the tip of the emailberg. It threads your conversations. By clicking any email from a user it shows every file you've exchanged with that person, and you're just one-click away from getting back to those files. It also displays this person's network: all of the people that this person has emailed before, by order of frequency. It grabs their phone number intelligently by scanning their signature file.

Interested? You should be. It's a private beta right now, so add a comment if you want an invite.

Want to copy that? Go to the paste menu

Ok, we all had a good laugh when Windows 95 came out and you had to "start to stop" because to shut down the computer you clicked the Start button. Personally, I never had much of a gripe with that. But now Microsoft really has gone too far in Office 2007. Say you're in Excel and you want to copy a range as a picture. Guess where you go? C'mon, just guess.

Yep, the paste menu.

Really.

Here's the full scoop, nicely written up by PC Magazine.

Killing the GUI softly, part 1: rotating PDFs

It seems that lately each new revision of desktop apps have gotten prettier and more useless at the same time.

Have you tried to rotate a PDF in Acrobat Reader lately? Version 8.0 has buried it so deep that it's 3 menu levels down at best and, at worst, almost unfindable (try pressing F9 and then ask someone to rotate a document). Worse yet, their left hand (the documentation) does not have a clue what their right hand (the program) is up to. Page 31 of their help tells you to just click the rotate buttons on the toolbar. Of course, the tiny problem with that is that the buttons aren't on the toolbar.

Maybe staying up nights rocking my son to sleep has made my eyes bleary, but I literally scanned the More Tools customization window about 10 times before I finally found the rotate buttons and was able to add them to the toolbar where the documentation said they would already be.

One last rant on this one: I just love their keyboard shortcuts: Shift-Ctrl-Plus and Shift Ctrl-Minus. Has anyone ever seen those shortcuts used before? What's so wrong with Ctrl-L and R for rotate Left and Right? I'm beginning to think that every time a new version of a product comes out these big companies go out of their way to invent entirely new ways to screw things up.

Yes, I know Foxit has the rotate buttons on the toolbar and is a nice svelte 2mb download. However, at the time of posting their website is down (you can still download it here) and the fact is that Adobe is what most computers will have on them.