After my last attempt, I was informed that the Google Apps edition of Gmail doesn’t suffer the Sender issue that so plagued me before. After almost a full day of work, the transition is complete. And I couldn’t be happier.

The only downside is the expense - all in all, it cost $78.95 to go through this process. This was spent on two tools that made the process possible:

• Aid4Mail - A key application used for converting the various mail-storage file formats.
• gMOVE - Used for importing PST files into Gmail.

The process itself was simple, once I had found the software I needed, which took some doing. Here’s an overview, and some notes if you happen to try something like this (this assumes that you have Outlook installed).

• Export messages to mailbox format. (If you are moving from Thunderbird this isn’t necessary as it already is stored in that format.)
• Use Aid4Mail to convert the mbox files to PSTs
• Load PSTs into Outlook and cleanup as necessary (remove duplicates, cleanup directory structure)
• Launch gMOVE and use it to import the messages from Outlook to Gmail

There are a couple major differences in this attempt, compared to the last. A few things annoyed me about the way things worked after the last time, not the least of which is that by using Gmail Loader you loose all meaningful timestamps. So you don’t know when a message was sent or received.

gMOVE eliminated that problem. It sends the messages to a special POP3 server, and automatically configures your Gmail account to use it. That way, they can control the timestamps, and set them to what they originally were ¹.

So after all is said and done; I think I’m happy with this system; much better than last time. I simply can’t justify using a desktop based email client anymore. It just leaves you too out of touch.

1). There is a security issue here, so I wouldn’t do this with anything containing sensitive information.

I’ve got thousands of pictures, hundreds of megabytes of source code, and documents dating back several years, all of which I’d like to ensure I never loose. So far I’ve shied away from all of the online backup solutions due to the expense. But JungleDrive uses Amazon’s S3 service for storage, complete with its rather inexpensive pricing model.

With that pricing model, JungleDrive has the potential to provide most of what I need, and some extras that are quite nice; all at a better price. So far, I’ve looked at two options:

1. Use an online service. Much lower startup cost, but comes with a recurring fee.
2. Build a backup server. This will require at least 1TB of fully redundant storage. I’ll also have to identify software that will meet my needs. Much higher startup cost, but only minimal maintenance costs after that.

JungleDrive has a few upsides, the biggest for me is that I can access it from anywhere that I can install the client, not just when I’m connected to my home network. With a low price, simple, but flexible interface, and a great storage system on the back end - it certainly sounds like a winner.

Though, there are some features I’d like to see, that it doesn’t offer:

• Access to files without installing software.
• Incremental backups. This would make backing up PST and similar files far more reasonable.
• Store multiple versions of a file.
• Compress data before uploading. This would save a fair bit of bandwidth for me, as I backup things such as conversation and chat logs.

Will these missing features be enough to not use the service? I don’t know yet, I’ll give the service a couple weeks to see how it goes. So far I’m fairly impressed, though wish it offered more features.

Once I hit the two week-mark, I’ll post a status update; and my final decision as to whether I’ll continue to use it.

Much interesting has happened in these months, a few co-workers left the company, a few new faces came in; there was also a promotion and a number of new projects. Oh, and there’s a new relationship, and a fair bit of time now going to my old profession and now hobby of photography. Between all of these, spare time isn’t something I have much of - if any.

With all this in mind, many people would give up and walk away - but I see this as being important enough to fight for. It’s a matter of priorities and time management. For a developer, being active in the community is important; it’s easy to be left behind once you find yourself outside the loop. So, I’ll simply have to make community involvement a higher priority than it’s been. As for time management though, the story isn’t so simple.

I’ve been using Tasks (which I highly recommend) for awhile now to keep track of what I’m working on, and for that it is quite effective. For time management though, I need to reevaluate how I work completely; find a method that allows me to be as productive as possible. I’ve seen a number of articles, guides, and books on the topic, so I believe I’ve a fair bit of reading in front of me. As I go through this process, I’ll write about my findings, and share any solutions I find.

If anybody has advice on how to make time for everything, I would certainly like to hear it. Hopefully, this time when I say this blog is coming back to life, it actually will.

We had a great product in mind, just not the resources to make it happen. I do believe that it would have been quite a success, but it takes a fair bit of time, and even more money to launch a commercial product aimed at mid-size businesses. It’s not a simple thing to sell software costing more than $10,000 per install; and being a company with no reputation, it’s almost impossible.

We planned the design, the marketing, the budget (even allowing for snacks & drinks), covered every detail, but when you don’t have the time to write code, or the money to pay people to write it for you; no amount of planning will help. We then delayed, then came up with smaller, simpler products, then scrapped all that and went back to the original idea.

Months of work, thousands of dollars in various expenses, and not a single dime as income; much effort, no reward. Many thousand lines of code, a few websites, countless meetings, and enough notes to account for the clearing of a small forest; but no money, no assets of value, nothing. It’s a bit painful to think about all the effort, and see that it was all for not.

It’s certainly possible to make an ISV work, it’s just a matter of being honest with yourself. Can you afford the expenses? Do you have the time? Will you be able to support the product yourself until it brings in enough money to hire people?

In some ways though, I’m happy that this is done, as it now leaves me free of any potential conflict of interest when it comes to pursuing future opportunities.

All my time since then has been spent managing between 2 and 5 developers, and trying to get a project that would end up weighing in at almost 50,000 lines of code completed and to production. Seeing as we started without specs, and made the deadline, I’m quite happy about how it went. I learned some interesting things on this project, if I can find a way to write about it without breaking my confidentiality agreement; you may see more about it soon.

There are more projects, with similar near-impossible deadlines ahead, but hopefully I’ll be able to keep my head a bit more above the water.

The model they had was interesting idea, just not one that could scale. Perhaps with a more restrictive subscription system, maybe if they had based it on invitations instead of being completely open, they could have slowed the growth enough. Perhaps, it was an idea that just would have never worked.

Either way, what’s over is over. The final issue has already sold out, so the party is officially over.

Hopefully there will be more signs of life here in the coming days, as I dig out of the pile of thousands of unread items in my RSS reader. Once I dig through that pile, there are a couple articles I’ve planned that I believe will be of interest.

• Software Branding
• Confirmations
• Warnings
• Toolbars
• Sound
• Icons

These guidelines are crucial to ensure the most consistent user experience possible. Though many don’t, this is a document that all developers should read. I firmly believe that consistency is the most important single factor in design, and following an established style such as this is a great way to ensure that a UI is as consistent as possible.

If you’d like some background reading, the XP version is still available.

As I didn’t see a package for just the changed files, I went ahead and zipped them up. These are just the changed files from 2.1, so this should make the upgrade process much quicker if you’ve already got 2.1 up and running.

Scott Hanselman provides a great review; check it out for the details on what’s new.