Back to Palm…again

Palm Treo 650

Michael at work just got a Treo 650 and because I have a Palm T|X (review roundup), he was wondering how to get up using the Palm features.

In my opinion the two are not the same product, there are a lot of cool things that I could do with a PalmOS that are too inconvenient when spread across two devices. The fact is, I bought my Palm T|X as a stop-gap measure for the stuff that I used to keep on my Palm m505 years ago. These apps are probably outdated now, but I figure I can coast a while with it until the cell-phone and PDA integration wars end.

Instead, a much better source for him will this blog series I found of a Windows Mobile user who purchased a Treo 650. It’s a fresh perspective from someone whose primary interest is having a Treo for the things the Treo does well.

Continue reading

Year of the Dog

Chinese New Year eCard - Dog 06

“Dog ’06” by Mnemonix

Michael Rowley whom I know from work designed some kick butt Chinese New Year images for Plaxo eCards. You can check them out here (they’re the one’s marked “new”).

He uses his mad pict-o-graphics skills on one of them. There is another clever one from with an image kindly provided by Marya Figueroa. Look for them.

I can’t wait to see more.

They’re all premium cards but you can send them via a 30 day free trial.

BTW, Chinese New Year is on January 29th, 2006, so you can postdate your e-cards to send on that day. (I really should make that automatic in a future release.)

Address Book sharing

Mac OS X Tiger is full of features you never notice until someone is looking over your shoulder saying, “What’s that?”

In this case, Joseph was looking over my shoulder and what he noticed was an accidental drop down sheet in Address Book that led me to realize that Address Book supports address book sharing through dotMac. I don’t think I ever saw it mentioned but is interesting given who I work for.

Address Book—Subscribe to .Mac Address Book

This is a sheet that pops up when you select “File->Subscribe to Address Book…” from the menu in Address Book. I had no idea it was there until today.

Continue reading

Plaxo and AIM

The opinions expressed here are the personal opinions of Terry Chay. Content published here is not read or approved by Plaxo before it is posted and does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Plaxo.

The beta 6 of AOL Instant Messenger, a.k.a. “Triton” has been released today. You can download Triton here.

The big new thing (from my perspective) is that this is the first version of AIM in which Plaxo powers the address book. For those who don’t know, Plaxo, the company I work for, is a contact synchronization network that allows you to synchronize your contacts between your computers, between your programs (in this case AIM and Outlook/Outlook Express), between people (so that I can update my information on other people’s address book). Did I mention that all this is free?

Continue reading

Bad AIM beta defaults

The opinions expressed here are the personal opinions of Terry Chay. Content published here is not read or approved by Plaxo before it is posted and does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Plaxo.

The AIM Beta a.k.a. “Triton” has been out for a while and one thing I’ve noticed that bugs me is that the default AIM message is unreadable in iChat.

screenshot of an iChat session with an AIM beta user

AIM beta-iChat issues, originally uploaded by tychay.

Continue reading

Controlling what Plaxo sends you

I added a “Plaxo” category yesterday.

In the event I forget, this applies to everything in this category: The opinions expressed here are the personal opinions of Terry Chay. Content published here is not read or approved by Plaxo before it is posted and does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Plaxo.

I suppose when most people create a category related to their job it is to gripe—I’m only good at ranting and ranting is definitely frowned on in the company’s blog policy. Instead I thought it would be more fun to post interesting things I find while using Plaxo. In particular, restricting it to the limited things I can do from my Macintosh, since that is where my screen capture software resides.

Plaxo has a rather complete support website but I don’t operate this way. Instead I thought for some of you who are like me it would be more fun to present things as use-cases as I learn them myself.

Hopefully, I can continue to do this until I accidentally “blog about company secrets” and get fired.

Continue reading

A new Plaxo log-in

The opinions expressed here are the personal opinions of Terry Chay. Content published here is not read or approved by Plaxo before it is posted and does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Plaxo.

Today I signed into my Plaxo account and was met with a pleasant surprise:

Plaxo-AIM signin

Plaxo-AIM signin, originally uploaded by tychay.

The new thing that wasn’t here before is that you can theoretically use your AIM account to sign into Plaxo. (I say “theoretically” because you have to link your Plaxo account to your AIM account and this can’t be done yet.)

I know most of you are thinking, “Well he makes the damn website so of course he knew this,” but the reality is that I’m not involved with the Plaxo-AOL deal, have not coded this new log in screen, and had only given one suggestion for the log-in screen.

I bring this up because it is a really good page.

Update: The AOL/AIM binding/login stuff is now live to coincide with the beta 6 release of Triton. You can now bind your AIM account to your Plaxo one.

Also, Joseph and Huy have added more NLP madness in the Plaxo login. It’s now super smart.

Continue reading