NewsGator, the Denver based company behind ever-popular RSS readers such as NetNewsWire for Mac and FeedDemon for Windows, announced updates for these award-winning products. The full list of the updated products include FeedDemon 2.6 (for Windows), NetNewsWire 3.1 (for the Mac), NewsGator Go! (for mobile platforms), and Inbox (a Microsoft Outlook plug-in). According to NewsGator, users will see improvements in peformance, usability, and relavance improvements.

The second part of NewsGator's announcment is the most exciting - all these products are available for free! Yes, you read that correctly - start downloading away.

NewsGator products' built-in selling point their ability to sync with Newsgator's internet based servers. That is, if you use NetNewsWire at home and FeedDemon at work, you won't have duplicate items to read between the two applications.

Why did NewsGator set these products free? They are obviously shifting gears add corporate resources to monetize their Enterprise offerings such as the NewsGator Enterprise Server. NewsGator wants to take the success they've enjoyed in the consumer market and apply it to the Enterprise environment.

Yesterday Microsoft released an update to Outlook 2007 to help speed up the downloading of messages and reduce the annoying and highly criticized freezing associated with moving or deleting messages.

Microsoft indicated that the problem stemmed from RSS feeds, email, and calendar files all being stored in the same .PST file which as one might imagine could grow in size rather quickly depending on the user. The problem lies not with the software, but how users are using the software. Jessica Arnold Outlooks Program Manager told ComputerWorld "Outlook wasn't designed to be a file dump, it was meant to be a communications tool...There is that fine line, but we don't necessarily want to optimize the software for people that store their e-mail in the same .PST file for ten years."

Along with the patch Microsoft released an updated set of recommendations to enhance Outlook's performance including moving older emails and files to a separate archived .PST file or splitting a larger .PST file into several smaller ones.

[Via ComputerWorld]

Outlook on the Desktop is a free application built on .Net by Michael Scriv. It allows you to pick any one of the main Outlook views (Inbox, Calendar, Tasks, etc), and display it directly on your desktop. The display is shown in a mildly opaque way, so that you can still see your desktop wallpaper (or in my case, icons) beneath the Outlook display. However, the coolest part of this utility is the fact that the view on your desktop is active; you can double click on a day if you're viewing the calendar, and up pops the standard appointment creation dialog.

It seems like there have been a number of recent attempts to set free the personal management information you've got locked away in Microsoft Outlook and expose it on the desktop of your computer. I personally have two problems with this. First, I almost never have all of my running applications minimized so I rarely see my desktop. Second, over the past 6 months I have been unable to reduce the number of icons on my desktop to the point where I can actually see the wallpaper I have set, never mind trying to read something displayed there.

If you're looking for an Outlook widget type of utility on steroids, Outlook on the Desktop may be just the ticket.

[Thanks Kevin!]

Dealing with spam in Microsoft Outlook used to be a pretty big problem. Outlook has had the "Junk Mail" feature forever, but until Outlook 2003 it was pretty terrible at comprehensively eliminating spam from your inbox. Outlook 2003, however, is a different beast when it comes to spam detection and elimination. In fact, it's gotten so good that I no longer advocate running a third-party spam filter in Outlook.

Part of the reason it's so good now is the ability of users to report email as spam back to FrontBridge, which is owned by Microsoft. FrontBridge will then analyze the reported email and if they determine that it is in fact spam, it will be added to their signatures to ensure the best protection possible for all Outlook users.

If you happen to be an Outlook user, I'd suggest setting your Junk Mail detection settings to High, and remember to scan your Junk Mail folder for the occasional non-spam message that gets filtered there. In my opinion, it's faster to scan through a folder of spam looking for an occasional message that you'd like to keep than it is to constantly have to be weeding out spam from your inbox.

To take part in reporting junk mail back to Microsoft, download the Junk Email Reporting Tool (which thankfully doesn't require you to run the "Windows Genuine dis-Advantage" utility).

[Via Windows Fanatics]

Evolution is a Personal Information Management program that has been popular in the Linux world for a few years. It looks startlingly like Microsoft Outlook, and in fact is intended as a replacement for Outlook. Evolution's claim to fame is the ability to connect to an Exchange server with most of the same functionality afforded to Outlook clients. And while I'm not sure how I feel about the blatant rip-off of the user interface, I was okay with it when I figured that it gives Linux users the ability to connect to an Exchange server, create and accept meeting requests, and basically be first-class citizens on their corporate network.

Well, now Evolution has been ported to Windows. Why do I feel differently about it now? I'm not sure. I guess since Microsoft Outlook already exists for Windows, it's hard to justify using a third-party application that replicates Outlook so completely.

The justification given on the Evolution site was that their company needed to be able to schedule meetings with external clients who used Microsoft Outlook as their email client. And rather than purchase Outlook for their staff, they opted to port Evolution to Windows to avoid paying for the software.

Although many publications have called Evolution an "Outlook Replacement", I'm not sure I would be comfortable building a company on what is almost certainly illegal software. Evolution's user interface is so similar to Outlook's that it's either infringing on Microsoft's copyright, or at least some form of intellectual property. I'm no lawyer, but I know in my gut when something feels wrong, and this feels wrong. But it's not for me to pass judgement, and who knows - maybe Microsoft is tacitly allowing Evolution to exist. Anyhow, as a technical achievement, it's remarkable. Even if it is fugly compared to recent versions of Outlook. Hmm, maybe that's why Microsoft doesn't mind?

I am not a user of Microsoft Outlook, but I know my share of people who are attached to it like they are to their own head. If you're such a person, you will perhaps be interested in a Windows Live Local add-on for Microsoft Outlook. The free add-on from Microsoft (Windows Genuine Advantage check required) integrates the Windows Live Local mapping service with the email/calendar/PIM client. It "enables you to add maps and directions to your Outlook meeting requests, calculate the travel distance between your start location and your appointment location, adjust your meeting departure time based on the estimated travel time, store custom locations, as well as print the map and step-by-step driving directions to take with you on the road." Sounds pretty sweet to me.

[Via Lifehacker]

Native Windows (offline-capable) software

Scope

While there are a great number of ways to put a Getting Things Done system into action on a Windows PC, I'd like to compare and contrast the benefits of using native Windows software like Outlook (arguably the most popular personal information management software on Windows) and handheld computers (in this case a Pocket PC) versus using online web-based software. Today's post will focus on the "offline" native Windows and Pocket PC software.