Qashqarian

A few months ago I installed Xobni and since then my experience of Outlook has improved tenfold. I was looking for something similar for Gmail in order to better navigate my bulging inbox, and I came across MailBrowser. This free little extension for Firefox and Internet Explorer adds an Xobni-style sidebar to Gmail, giving you a much clearer view of your contacts and allowing you to sift through attachments much more easily.

After installing MailBrowser, open up Firefox (or IE) and you’ll see the MailBrowser sidebar displayed on the right of the browser. You can toggle this sidebar on and off using the MailBrowser icon that appears underneath it. Click ‘Add an account’ and enter your Gmail credentials. The app will then begin indexing your contacts and files, which can take a while if you have a big inbox. Make sure you have plenty of memory, because all this data is downloaded to your hard drive.

Your contacts are displayed in the sidebar à la Xobni, and you can ’star’ any that you wish to mark out. Now, if you want to manage your Google contacts or schedule Google Calendar events with any of your contacts you can do so simply with the click of an icon.

Click on a contact and you can view all manner of information about your dealings with this person, including a log of previous conversations, exchanged emails, and details extracted from their email signature. You can even apply tags and notes to a contact to facilitate better searching in future.

There are a few settings you can tinker around with using MailBrowser, available via the ‘Preferences’ icon. For instance, you can choose to show only received files or display all inline signatures and images too. To further streamline your contacts list you can choose to show Google contacts only, or only display contacts to whom you have sent at least one mail. MailBrowser supports multiple Gmail accounts, and lets you set specific rules for each one.

If you’re looking for PDF utilities, you’ve got plenty of choice if you want to open and view without paying a fortune. What’s not so easy is creating and editing them, a problem that leads lots of users to avoid this handy file format altogether.

Just remember: creating PDFs may not be as easy as creating other types of document, but there are still lots of tools that will help you get the job done!

Creating PDFs is most easily achieved by using a PDF ‘printer’ like PDFCreator. Once installed, this program appears like another printer on your printer list. You create the document in your usual Windows application and once you are ready to turn it into a PDF, send it to the PDFCreator printer. This tool will convert your document into a portable, professional PDF, while PdfFactory Pro and Bullzip PDF Printer will do the same job.

What if you have a PDF that you’d like to edit or a form you need to fill in? This one’s a bit harder, as there are very few free apps that do the job well. Obviously there are master programs designed specifically for the purpose, but unless you have a spare $500, you can kiss that option goodbye.

If you have just one document that you want to modify, the trial versions of programs like PDFill PDF Editor and PDF Suite will do the job. If you need a less limiting - and free - option, PDF-XChange Viewer will give you plenty of editing powers. Also bear in mind that some office suites, such as OpenOffice, have PDF functionality built in.

As a final option, you could give online editors like PDF Hammer and PDFescape a try. Just remember that these tools get mixed reviews and only offer basic editing tools, especially in the case of PDF Hammer.