Webware

Postbox's latest update builds on the add-on functionality that was introduced in the previous beta, supporting Thunderbird's calendar plug-in Lightning, among others, and also comes with an announcement that the days of Postbox-for-free are coming to a end.

Postbox beta 14 for Windows and Mac has its own build of Lightning, which should allow users to communicate with both local and networked calendars. While Lightning works perfectly for me in Thunderbird, it wasn't able to talk to CNET's Microsoft Exchange server in Postbox. The Provider for Google Calendar plug-in, which gives users bi-directional Google Calendar access, works fine in Postbox--albeit with a slight hiccup when first loading the calendar.

Postbox gets it's own version of Lightning in beta 14, but it's still a bit buggy.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Postbox now natively supports Gmail-style conversation threading and e-mail message counts. So if you've got a collapsed thread, where you can only see one message, there will now be a number next to it telling you how many unread messages are in the thread. Unfortunately, when I clicked on the first message, even if it had already been marked as read, it automatically marked all the unread messages in the thread as read, too.

There's a new Contacts sidebar, although the old Address Book is still available by hitting CTRL+2 or going through the Tools menu. The new Web services option, also available from the Tools menu or the Advanced Settings tab under Options, gives you more granular control over which Web services you're logged into through Postbox. This is useful if Postbox isn't your main Twitter manager, so you can keep your API count from exploding and preventing tweet updates.

Postbox Inc. also announced that they're expecting to take the program to a premium-only status in early September, when the program graduates from beta development. A single-user license will cost $39.95, with a family pack option consisting of licenses for five people living at the same address costing an additional $19.95. A lifetime upgrades option can be bought for another $24.95. These prices are currently discounted for a beta sale good until August 31, at $29.95, $9.95, and $19.95 respectively.

Postbox isn't the only Mozilla-based software to charge for downloading, but the list of programs that do isn't exactly long. Rafael Ebron, spokesman for Mozilla Messaging, pointed out that some of them include TuneUpTwitFactory.

The full list of Postbox extensions is available here, and release notes for Postbox beta 14 are available here.

Google Calendar has quickly become one of my favorite online tools. I can schedule meetings quickly and it integrates seamlessly into my workflow. It's a great service.

But I want more from it.

That's why I've been sifting through Mozilla's Firefox extension database trying to find some add-ons that take Google Calendar to the next level. Whether they enhance its usability or just improve its effectiveness, there are a handful of extensions that work quite well.

Google Calendar extensions

Better GCal After I installed Better GCal, I was extremely impressed by what it offered. From a new skin to little extras like week numbers and collapsible headers, it makes Google Calendar just a little better. The extension not only made me more organized, but the calendar became far more readable.

Better GCal has a great skin to try out.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

GCal Popup GCal Popup is a really neat idea. Instead of forcing you to open a new tab to add an event to your Google Calendar, you'll only need to open the extension and it will display your Google Calendar over your current Web page. Input the event you want to add to your calendar and once you're done, you can close the extension and go back to work.

GCal Popup is designed to make it convenient to add events to your Calendar and it succeeds. But beware that it's an "experimental" extension, so it might cause some instability issues. That said, I haven't experienced any such problems.

GCal Popup makes it easy to add events to your calendar.

(Credit: GCal Popup)

ScheduleOnce, the service that helps multiple users find the best time to have a meeting, has new(ish) tool that lets users access its service without leaving the Google Calendar interface.

Using it requires installing a small add-on that currently works only in Firefox and IE with IE7Pro installed. Users then get a new ScehduleOnce menu in the left side of Calendar, either through Google Apps, or in the public version of Google Calendar. The control widget lets them see a list of meetings they have scheduled, along with the option to create a new one as if they were doing so back on ScheduleOnce.

What's really interesting about this add-on is that as of this week, it could no longer require the download to work. On Tuesday Google opened up a new API for developers to create sidebar gadgets in Calendar. A widget that makes use of this could let users keep track of tentative meetings they've set up, however any scheduling may still require going back to ScheduleOnce's site.

(Credit: ScheduleOnce)

This is how exciting my organizational life is right now.

(Credit: CNET)

In a move sure to please organizational fanatics, Google has graduated Tasks from Gmail Labs. In and of itself, it's not big news, since anyone's been able to enable the feature inside their own accounts since late 2008. It is, however, the first thing to graduate from Gmail Labs, which is a proving ground for features Google does not think to be ready for prime time.

In a blog post about the promotion, Google made it clear that less popular Labs features may eventually get the axe, however the company has not made a public listing of how the various features rank. To its credit, Tasks was not relegated to Gmail alone, which could be one of the big factors in its success. Google spun it out to Google Calendar, as well as making it a standalone widget that could be accessed off site.

Tasks is also one of the most vanilla, yet marketable of all of the Labs add-ons. It shares company with things like mail goggles--a tool that makes you do math problems when attempting to send late night e-mails, an instant message translator that can convert messages written in other languages, along with an add-on that lets users navigate their in-boxes with mouse gestures. While neat, these fully-functioning features are less marketable to enterprise customers looking to consolidate their organizational tools.

Google Calendar gets labs section

Along with the graduation of Tasks, Google has brought a labs section over to its calendar service. There are now six experimental features that can be used to enable additional features such as changing the look and feel of your calendar with a background image, or seeing when your next meeting is going to occur down to the number of hours and minutes.

Google has also created a public API that will let application developers create widgets that exist alongside the calendar. This will likely speed up the development of things users can add-on to their calendars, the same way it did when Google opened up development for its mapping applications. Google has still not done this with Gmail, and instead, has chosen to have developers come to it when wanting to create new add-ons such as the content plug-ins for sites like Yelp and Flickr.

The new Labs add-ons in Google Calendar let users tweak various parts of the service.

(Credit: CNET)

Google Apps have all grown up.

No longer must Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Google Talk carry the beta tag of shame; they are all now full-fledged members of the Google family of products. Google has been hinting this was coming over the past few months, but is finally ready to make the official announcement along with the news that Fairchild Semiconductor has decided to embrace Google's suite of Web-based office productivity applications.

In truth, it's hard to tell exactly what technical advancements may have prompted the decision to lift the products out of beta. Matt Glotzbach, product management director for Google Enterprise, said the removal of the beta status means that those products have all reached unspecified internal metrics in terms of reliability and usability.

But Google does not have a company standard for determining when a beta project has become a more fully formed product: Gmail was in beta for five years. And paying enterprise customers will still be provided with a 99.9 percent service-level agreement now that the products are out of beta. That's the same level of service Google agreed to provide while they were in beta.

Still, Google thinks there are a number of CIOs that will find Google Apps easier to sell to their bosses if it's not formally known as a "beta" product. "It's something that does send the wrong message," Glotzbach said, referring to the historical definition of the word beta as a not-ready-for-prime-time piece of software. Google is working on developing more formal company-wide standards for how to label products with the beta tag, he said.

In the meantime, Google has added a couple of more enterprise-quality features to Gmail, allowing executives to give their assistants permission to manage their mail and corporations to set e-mail retention policies for their workers, a key feature needed by highly scrutinized companies such as Intel.

Considering that it's based on Mozilla Thunderbird, it was a bit of a surprise that add-ons weren't available for Postbox when it debuted. That's now been remedied in Postbox beta 13 for Windows and Mac. Given Postbox's emphasis on social-networking technology and Mozilla's own success with add-ons, this move puts the e-mail client in an excellent position to attract more users.

The latest Postbox introduces add-ons to its users.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

A Webware 100 winner, the list of supported extensions isn't long at the moment, and notably it doesn't include Thunderbird's calendaring tool Lightning. Since Postbox doesn't have its own supported calendar, this could prove to be a deal breaker for some. However, the list does include several plug-ins that Thunderbird users should be familiar with, including ReminderFox, QuickText, and MinimizeToTray. MozBackup and Zindus are listed as "coming soon." There's new support for localized dictionaries from Mozilla, too.

Users who wish to install Postbox add-ons while running Firefox can either save the XPI file to their desktop and then install it manually, or drag-and-drop it into Postbox's open Add-ons window.

Other changes include fetching profile pictures from your address books in Postbox, Mac OS X, Twitter, and Facebook for the Inspector Pane. Settings can be imported from Mail.app. Multiple attachments can be dragged to your desktop. Along with a large number of stability and usability fixes, the security improvements made to Firefox 3.0.10 have also been folded in. Full release notes can be read here.

I'm a Google Calendar user. It's easy to use. And for the most part, it helps keep the schedules of individual users organized. But one of its shortcomings is in scheduling meetings. In my experience, it just isn't nearly as advanced as it should be when it comes to things like arranging meetings among a group of people in various time slots. And unfortunately, the same goes for Yahoo Calendar and Microsoft's Live Calendar.

So I've decided to venture out in search of online applications for scheduling. Some are better than others, but many are worth trying out.

Scheduling apps

Calendarfly: Calendarfly is designed for schools, small organizations, or families. After you register with Calendarfly, you're immediately brought to a cluttered page that's difficult to understand, at first. But after a while, you'll get used to it.

When you start adding events to your calendar, Calendarfly lets you share them with others. Parents can also have their child's events added to their own calendar in a different color, keeping them apprised of what's going on in their child's life. Calendarfly lets you input the location of the event you're planning, thanks to its new geo-coding feature. It can be a little buggy, but it usually works well. If you're a teacher, parent, or coach, Calendarfly isn't a bad scheduling option.

Calendarfly has categories for schools and families.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Divvy: Divvy isn't your typical scheduling tool. In fact, it's designed to help you make more money in your business. But its scheduling tool is really handy. When you want to create an appointment, the tool brings you to a simple input page that lets you pick the time, as well as add a description and a title.

If you're operating a business, you can also input how much the appointment will cost. Thanks to Divvy's vanity URLs, you can direct people to your personal Divvy page, giving them full access to your appointment availability. They can then schedule a time on your page in seconds. It works well.

Check your availability in Divvy.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Genbook: Genbook, similar to Divvy, is designed for small businesses that want to streamline their scheduling. The tool first requires you to input your business information. From there, you can list your services and input on the app's calendar when you'll be available.

Creating appointments is made easy with the site's appointment tool. But my favorite feature is Genbook's Customers module, which automatically saves pertinent customer information whenever one signs up for an appointment. It displays the customer's name, address, phone number, and e-mail address. It's really helpful. Genbook comes in three versions--Free, Solo ($19.95 per month), and Standard ($39.95 per month).

GenBook makes it easy to set up an appointment.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

If you've been playing around with the Postbox e-mail client for Windows and Mac, beta 11 has been unleashed upon the world.

Unlike March's beta 10, though, this update includes more performance issue fixes than anything else. Still, it's probably a good idea to upgrade.

Most notably, memory and CPU usage have decreased. Postbox claims that indexing is three times faster in this version, compared to beta 10, and that indexing uses about 75 percent to 80 percent less memory than before. I don't have statistics to do my own comparison of beta 10 to beta 11, but I did notice empirical improvements in performance.

AOL Mail account support has been added, and a bug in importing data from Outlook Express has been fixed. There's also support for usernames with special characters, and you can now add a contact to your address book with one click from the contact panel.

Beyond those changes, the full list is made up mostly of fixing annoyances such as LDAP and IMAP connections hanging.

Postbox had problems accepting a change in my network password from the last time I used it, when I had to re-enter it four times before the program remembered it. This probably has to do with how the program talks to the Exchange server, but it was irritating nonetheless. Thunderbird, on which Postbox is based, required my new network password to be entered only once.

Postbox is a finalist for 2009's Webware 100, awarded by CNET.

The open-source and cross-platform e-mail client Postbox rolls out another beta and has been quickly adding muscle to its abilities.

Postbox beta 10 introduces an HTML signature-creator in the Compose window.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Based on Mozilla Thunderbird and currently available for Windows and Mac, Postbox beta 10--the third update since I checked out the program for in the beginning of February--introduces several small changes worth noting.

Since then, Postbox has seen Hotmail support, Flickr integration in the Compose window, and a host of bug-fixes including two Firefox security updates. In the most recent version, users get the ability to create and edit HTML signatures from the Compose Sidebar's Signature panel and improved calendar attachment detection.

There's also a fix for the spell checker, which had been marking contractions as misspelled words, and a new feature that prevents a message from being marked as read until it's been viewed in the preview pane for a specific minimum time.

One feature that I've just noticed is that the Message pane lets you highlight text, which you can then drag into the search bar. Once you release it, Postbox will open up a search results page in your browser for the highlighted term.

These features continue to improve on the Postbox experience. Without support for extensions and the Thunderbird calendar extension Lightning, though, and keeping in mind Postbox's social-networking friendliness, it'd be interesting to see baked-in support for a Web-based calendar as an alternative to this major and missing feature.