[MLUG] Thunderbird, Firefox and Google

[Chris O'Regan]

I few months ago I wrote about a handful of Thunderbird plug-ins for
keeping in sync with Google. My goal is to have access to my calendar,
tasks, etc. from both work and home, and at home, from both my desktop
and laptop. The good news is that I am getting closer to leveraging
Google as my PIM. As such, here is an update.

First and foremost, Google itself has improved. Gmail Labs brings some
new (albeit experimental) features including...TASKS! Yes, Google
finally has tasks. Unfortunately their implementation is still a bit
primitive. It is not possible to create recurring tasks, and tasks
with deadlines do not show up on your Google Calendar. They do support
multiple task lists, so if you are looking for something basic to keep
track of your projects, then this might be sufficient.

If you need a task manager that is more complete, then I suggest
Remember The Milk (http://www.rememberthemilk.com/). While it goes
against the "put everything in Google" grain, the neat thing is that
the folks over at Remember The Milk have written Gmail Labs plug-in
that will put your task list on your Gmail page. So, no matter where
you go, your task lists are right there.

Actually this really is leveraging Google as it puts all of our PIM in
one place. One other Gmail Labs plug-in is the Google Calendar gadget
which adds a box to your Gmail page which displays upcoming events and
allows you to quickly add new events.


If after all of this you still want Thunderbird there is a lot you can
do to stay in sync with Google. I wrote about most of the plug-ins
before so I won't go into too much detail other than to plug my new
favourite extension: Google Contacts. This plug-in allows you to
synchronize your Google contacts with Thunderbird's address book. Of
course you can stick with Zindus.

There is an experimental Remember The Milk Provider that works with
Lightning, though I have not tried it yet. You need to create an
account at mozilla.org in order to download the plug-in. Reviews are
mostly positive so I may give it a try sooner than later.


I have been using del.icio.us for my bookmarks, but the point is to
have all of this in one place (i.e. let's leverage Google). Well,
guess what? Yes, you can store your bookmarks at Google! Go to
google.ca and you should see a link to iGoogle in the top right-hand
corner. iGoogle provides you with your own Google home page, where you
can display your news feeds, recent mail, upcoming events in your
calendar, the current date and time, the weather, ... and your
bookmarks. If you install the GMarks plug-in then you can access these
bookmarks from Firefox. I found that managing bookmarks with GMarks
was  a little buggy and ended up using iGoogle to reorganize my
del.icio.us bookmarks (unfortunately I lost my tags when
exporting/importing).


In summary, my dream of leveraging Google to keep track of my life is
slowly becoming true, and there are some great plug-ins for
Thunderbird and Firefox out there which will bring your life to these
applications if you aren't a big fan of web interfaces. It's getting
better all the time.


Chris