You would guess that the company offers this guy a job, right? Not so Creative. They blame the young Brazilian to "steel their goods". Oh man, no wonder those guys make losses. If they themselves would make their products work, this young programmer could do something more "creative" in his spare time, than fixing drivers of sound cards (that should actually work out of the box).

To me it seems like Creative designed those Vista drivers with certain flaws as a business strategy, so they can sell more "premium products", which are probably the same, just with a driver that actually works. From a legal point of view, it might be their right to "castrate" their sound cards (I am not a lawyer).

But from a business point of view I wouldn't call it clever.

The actions of their vice president of corporate communications, Phil O'Shaughnessy, might do more harm to the company than they might help. I am not sure if all those PR guys are already prepared for a world WITH internet. Things that might have worked for the last 20 years of PR might not working so well any more. Things have changed and PR guys should learn that, I guess.

Wake up! Welcome to the 21st century!

Customers communicate worldwide. We ALL have to live with globalization. I just hope for the guys at Creative that their shortsightedness might not have a too negative impact on their business.

I am not too sure if those things are really well thought by the companies. For my part I won't buy a sound card of this company. I don't like how they treat people that help others to make stuff work. I am not sure how long customers will cope with practices like this.

So, why not just using the single programs?

First of all, because I like the idea of a "information & communication center" which shows me the most important information in one place. I would have just one program to start in the morning and would defenitely not forget to open my calendar and miss important tasks or dates.

The software is still a very early version and a beta. However, I have installed it and with the current functionalities it works quite fine. On Phorolinux you can find a good tutorial on how to install Spicebird on Ubuntu 7.10. I was very easy to follow and worked fine on my computer.

On top of the application you will find 5 different tabs:

• Home (which is a configurable dashboard)
• Mail, News
• Contacts
• Calendar
• Tasks

Currently the most interesting feature for me is the dashboard, which you can configure to display different information, depending on what is important for you. The other tabs I have already in Thunderbird, more or less. Some examples for the applets you can add to the "Home" dashboard are:

• RSS Feeds
• Date & time (you can add the current time from cities all over the world, especially interesting when you have to work with people from different time zones and you do not really want to call them in the middle of the night )
• The last few emails of an inbox.
• A calendar view
• An agenda showing you the dates from your different calendars
• etc.

The instant messaging part I am not that much interested in. The messenger can communicate with Jabber only, at the moment. Might be interesting in a company evironment though to have a standard messenger based on an open protocol. At the moment for me it is not really important.

So far Spicebird does not offer anything too special, but I have high hopes for the future about this software. When you look at the roadmap, the Synovel seems to have a few good ideas for future releases. The following sounded the most interesting to me:

• Blogs as Email: Can make live easy when you are travelling, as you could use your email client as a desktop blog software and would not have to log in to your blog.
• Integration with a CMS (Drupal): This sounds very interesting. I would like to know what exactly is planned. But Drupal is definitely a good choice.
• Document management
• Microsoft Exchange connector: Interesting especially for those who would like to get rid of Outlook but depend on an Exchange server
• Multiple backends for tasks management
  • Partial project management features: I would even like "complete" project management features, but that might come in a later release.
• A more meaningful address book --> Meaningful is always good!
  • Last conversation/chat with a contact: To show the last conversations is a good start. I would also like to have the chance to add information about contact. E.g. what was the result of the last phone call, what was discussed in the last meeting, etc.

So, as I said, it sounds like a good start to me. Some things I would really like to see for this tool:

• VoIP functionality: Imaging something like Skype integrated into this thingy! This would be the first chance to create a serious competition for Skype. So far all software phones have basically the same functionalities. Integrated into this information and communication tool it would add additional value: calling your contacts by clicking on their telephone number in your address book, calling someone who sent you his number via email, see who of you colleagues is available for a call, etc.
• Bidirectional synchronization with Google Calendar and other on-line calendar applications
• ...

Give the software a try and let me know what you are thinking about. Do you have any features you would like to see in future releases?

The lack of a good desktop blogging tool for Linux seems not to be only an issue for me. Just while I was searching for new tools I stumbled upon the following posts:

• Five Desktop Blog Editors for GNU/Linux Users
• Five More Desktop Blog Editors for GNU/Linux Users
• Linux Blogging Sucks

During my short period with Windows Vista on my Siemens Amilo si1520 I had the chance to try Windows Live Writer, which I hate to say, was the best desktop blogging software I have used so far. It worked well with my blog and even showed me the blog posts within the layout of my blog while writing them.

However, I do not really need this gimmick (but would be nice), but I have a few requirements for a desktop blogging software:

• Offline support: I want to be able to write my blog posts, while I am not connected to the web and save the drafts. Once I am online I want to be able to publish them to the server.
• It MUST support categories and syncronize them with the server. The software must be able to create new categories.
• It should support the possibility to publish a post at a specific time.

I am writing I have tried to writ this blog post with a software called QTM. It looks promising, but there are a lot of things to improve. Most important issue: I was not able to publish my post to the server (!?). Additionally, there is no WYSIWYG-Editing, which is not a major problem. However, the code view is very basic (no highlighting), etc. The preview does not display unordered lists, too. Unfortunately it is also not possible to add new categories, which makes the software not very convenient. At least I can work on the articles off-line. The interface looks pretty improvised, too. Especially the icons are not very selfexplanatory, e.g. the symbol for setting a link.

My previous post "Bidirectional syncronization between Google Calendar and Mozilla Thunderbird" was written with a Firefox-Plugin called "Deepest Sender". From the first test I prefer Deepest Sender over Scribefire. However, as I did not manage to publish this post with QTM I have used Scribefire for this post. You can add new categories (called tags), you can see older posts and you can save your post as a note. Not sure if this will totally convince me. I am missing for example the possibility to upload an article which should be published only later (at a specified time).

During the next few weeks I will test many different tools, just to decide which one fits best for me.

I have tried it my own. WITH offline support!!! So, you can update your Google Calendar via Thunderbird and everything you change in Google Calendar will also show up in Thunderbird and can be displayed off-line (you have to choose "Work offline" from the "file" menu though). You can also make changes to Thunderbird and it will show up in Google Calendar after a while.

This made my day. I was waiting for this so long.

The respective links:

• Provider Plugin for Mozilla Thunderbird
• Mozilla Thunderbird
• Google Calendar

It might have some bugs still, but so far it worked fine for me.

It seems to work. I did not change anything. OK, today there was one update for Linux, but I do not think it was do to this update of Gnome utils. But who knows. It is just weird because I can not understand, why suddenly the "thingy" works.

But on the other hand: Who cares? Google Gears finally works!

It seems to work for Jon with Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon). He mentioned, that he had installed libc6 and libstdc++5. I have checked and both files were installed already on my system. So these were not the problem. My next try was to deactivate all other Firefox add-ons. This was not a major success, as Google Gears still does not work. But at least now a pop-up opens, when I click on "Extras" -> "Google Gears Settings".

Unfortunately I still can not change the settings. When I go to "Extras" -> "Add-ons" I can see "Google Gears" as a add-on, but the "Settings"-option is greyed-out.

Additionally the "Offline"-option in Google Reader does not show up in my account any more. This makes it quite difficult to use Google Gears for me at the moment. I don't know. It was there a few days ago.

I guess the guys in Mountain View do not really like me, so I thought I migh just give up for now.

Maybe once I have figured out my problem with my external hard drive (I think I will write a post about this too), I can make a back up of my data and then upgrade to Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon), where Google Gears seems to work. At least for Jon.

[UPDATE|22.11.07] Google Gears works now on my notebook! Read the story "Finally Google Gears works on Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn)" to know more.

My suspicion is that it has something to do with "glibc 2.3.5 or higher" and "libstdc++" which are required. In Synaptic on Ubuntu I can not find the glibc, it only offers me a glibc-doc. The libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2 is installed.

Maybe this is the reason why it does not work with my Firefox?

[UPDATE|22.11.07] Google Gears works now on my notebook! Read the story "Finally Google Gears works on Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn)" to know more.

Here a little update:

• OpenOffice: still a good alternative to Microsoft Office .
• Evolution Thunderbird: I am back with Thunderbird for a couple of days now. I use it at work, have used it before for quite a while on my old notebook and I just feel more comfortable with it. As synchronizing between Evolution and Google Calendar with MultiSync did not work, I thought I could just go back.
• Scribus: Nothing new year (Not really software that I use on a regular basis).
• Inkscape: I love it!
• Quanta Plus: Still a very good HTML editor.
  
• Gimp.
• Skype: Well, you have to stay in contact with the world, right? (Everyone uses Skype...)
• FileZilla: fTP client.
• Multisync-Gui: I just could not make it conect to Evolution and Google Calendar.
• CUPS: PDF printer.
• Hugin: panorama software.
• Liferea Google Reader: Unfortunately has no offline reading ability (yet).
• ^newgtk recordMyDesktop: This little piece of software records your desktop (or specific areas of it) to the .ogg format (I still have to figure out how to convert .ogg in a more common format)
• ^newcMapTools: A nice mind mapping tool.
• ^newGoogle Earth: Nice to see the area when planning a trip.

So at the end there are less changes than expected. I hope I did not forget anything.

Buy the Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Si 1520 12,0 Inch Notebook (Intel Core Duo T7200 2,0 GHz, 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD, DVD+- DL RW, Vista Premium)

However, when I click on the link Google is offering ("Offline New!") in the upper right corner of Google Reader it opens a window, gives me the opportunity to install the plug-in. The plug-in installs, but after restarting Firefox the "Offline" links still shows up and I can not download the feeds to my computer.

Is anyone running Google Gears with Firefox and Ubuntu 7.04? Any idea how to fix the problem?

[UPDATE|22.11.07] Google Gears works now on my notebook! Read the story "Finally Google Gears works on Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn)" to know more.