To-do bar of Outlook 2007
I am not a big fan of Microsoft Outlook. When I was using Windows computer, I used to have Outlook Express, because this light-weight tool provides all the functionalities I need: Sending and receiving emails. The calendar of Outlook takes long time to load (on my humble machine), and I can't stick into using it.
It's simple: I don't have confidence on it, so I can't check it every day, so I can't use it.
Last week I started using Outlook 2007, and I found the To-Do bar was so useful that I can actually use it seriously!
This bar includes a mini calendar and shows 3 (configurable) incoming events. Below that, pending tasks are shown. You can either type in your task quickly and mark it "Tomorrow", or flag the email you received. The tasks will always be there, until you fulfill it and check it off. So it can be very helpful for people like me, who is always forgetful. It shows your pending task from calendar, email, and manual input task in one window.
I don't see such a bar in Evolution yet. The evolution email client can group the topics together: You can see the conversation in a tree-like structure. I like this very much. I might start building such a plugin, if I have nothing better to do.
Posted at 9/22/2008 04:05:00 PM Permalink Comments(3)
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3 Comments:
It's weird to pack calendar and mail functions together. To me, Mail and Calendar in my Mac work seamlessly, smoothly, quickly--and independently.
M: I am not sure how your Mail in Mac works, but in Outlook, you can setup an event and invite several persons by sending email. When they receive that email and click "Accept", the same event is marked into their calendar. So email and calendar have very strong tie. Also, in working environment, you should have both running all the time, to make sure you address any email and meeting on time.
(I never used Calendar to organize my life before. Now I think it's time to do so.)
Of course Calendar has the guest invitation function! What I meant "independently" is that one's crash won't affect the other--though I do have both running all the time (well, not true, I will switch off Mail when I need to focus)! And you know the frequency of crashing of those M$ products is quite...well, not low...
This is the reason of my disdain of the so-called "IDE" (ok ok ok, I am old and old-fashioned). You can have emacs (though it's quite extensive now...), gcc, gdb, make etc. work for you together, quite smoothly, but they are independent!
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