Working smarter: Using Xobni to make Outlook social

Kevin Rapley — Sun, 04 May 2008 22:23:53 +0000

Xobni, pronounced zob-knee is the spelling of inbox backwards. Groundbreaking! It is also the name of new software currently in Beta and rated by Microsoft and Bill Gates. Xobni plugs into the Microsoft Outlook sidebar to bring a much more social way for relating to our contacts. Using a powerful analytics package it is able to show you who your top contacts are, send to receive ratios and map out the time of day you usually receive emails from a particular contact. The part that excites me most is the way in which it tracks conversations.

I spend far too many minutes during the day searching through previously received emails to keep track of current tasks. Xobni eliminates this by being able to search through an entire conversation from contacts on a particular thread of emails. This is all completed within the Xobni sidebar system so I don’t even have to leave the current email that I have displayed in my view pane. Xobni also has the ability to extract contacts telephone numbers and add them to a profile. If you are a Skype user, functionality is added to contact from the sidebar. This will be of huge use at both work and as a freelancer being able to search through emails as if it is a logical conversation.

Thanks to Gina Trapani from Lifehacker for the heads up on this. Watch Xobni in action.

Why aren’t experts like Microsoft being expert?

Kevin Rapley — Sat, 03 May 2008 22:32:54 +0000

It shocks me to see web programming examples breaking the rules of accessibility and common practices in published books. I don’t feel it sets the greatest of examples to anyone trying to get a foot in the industry when supposed authorities on subjects cannot even get it correct in their own publications. Take Microsoft Press for instance. Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 3.5, published 2008. This is written by Dino Esposito, an authority on ASP.NET and AJAX. When it comes to writing HTML he seems to have forgotten the fact that we keep the code in lowercase. All of his HTML examples begin with a capital letter. Now I understand that ASP.NET is different and uses some uppercase characters for server side controls, but please let us not forget the industry standard for writing static HTML. Long have the days passed when HTML tags were written in complete uppercase and contained now deprecated elements such as FONT and CENTER.Furthermore another example I have spotted failed to include a DOCTYPE and the appropriate XML format for closing a HR tag. I realise this is not the purpose of the book and that the level of reader will most likely have a full understanding of how we conduct ourselves as web designer and developers in 2008. But why do experts insist on writing poor examples?

Let me take this even further. Being an organisation that should be getting this correct, Microsoft will bear the brunt of this again for not. There are plenty of examples within the Microsoft website where use of inaccessible and erroneous terms such as ‘click here’. Going back to the Microsoft Press example too, I was studying a script for SilverLight where it would display a message if a user did not have the plugin installed on their machine. This was again ‘click here to…’. If these are such expert guides to the technology for developing next-generation websites, then I think more care should be put in to eradicating these poor phrases and terms so that the next generation of web designers know not to do it.

DigiKev » Microsoft

Working smarter: Using Xobni to make Outlook social

Why aren’t experts like Microsoft being expert?