In last week’s exciting installment of Gearhead I mentioned PhraseExpress published by Bartels Media GmbH and I need to correct something I wrote.
To refresh your memory, PhraseExpress is a Windows utility that, while its basic functionality is to store and organize frequently used text snippets and expand abbreviations as you type, it also runs macros for text manipulation and a range of system operations, launches programs, autocorrects, launches Web searches, closes HTML tags, can lock the CAPSLOCK key for you (prevents you from accidentally hitting the Caps Lock key which is annoying and something I do with monotonous regularity) … it’s a sort of a Swiss Army knife for the Windows user interface that’s linked to your keyboard.
Anyway, I wrote that “there’s a free version with limited features” but the free version actually has no limitations. What Bartels asks is for you to play the game: If you in any way make money from using PhraseExpress then they expect you to cough up. While they trust you, they also check for certain types of use which includes using the network feature (this allows you to share text templates with other users on a network) and frequent use of phrases such as “Your order”, “Dear Customer” or “Thank you for purchasing…”, in which case they pop up a polite nag. A very sophisticated way of dealing with the issue of building a market. Props.
Next, a follow-up to the column from two weeks ago in which I discussed tools for diagramming. After the column was published I got a message from the chaps at LucidChart LLC regarding their eponymous product, LucidChart, an online diagramming tool similar in some respects to the Gliffy service I covered.
While Gliffy is Flash-based, LucidChart uses AJAX to do the job and that’s an impressively technical way to go. To get an idea of what they’re up to, try creating a diagram in LucidChart and then check out the page source. These guys are using lots of Cascading Style Sheets and their own JavaScript along with JQuery and JGrowl.
JQuery is one of the foremost JavaScript libraries and “simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development.” It has a roughly 23KB footprint when minified and Gzipped, is CSS3 compliant, and works cross-browser. The other library, JGrowl, a JQuery plugin, is similar to OS X’s Growl framework.
What LucidChart achieves is very clever: A diagramming tool that doesn’t require plugins and works cross-browser. Of course the risk is that new releases of browsers that introduce new issues with standards compliance (and we all know which browsers are guilty) could break the functionality.
LucidChart is very clever and works fantastically well. It has a neat feature that, when you select a point on a symbol on a diagram and drag, a directed line is created and on release, a palette of symbols appears allowing you to add the next symbol about as easily as is possible.
There are only two templates, flowcharts and org charts, but there are also symbol collections for network devices, electronic components, and you can even upload your own images to use as symbols.
You can create multi-page diagrams and share your drawings as links via e-mail or publish them in PDF format or on the Web as a single page or as part of an existing page.
There are some minor bugs in LucidChart, such as how lines are routed, but other than that I’ve found little else.
LucidChart provides a variety of accounts that range from free (allows only 40 symbols per page, 5MB of storage and 1 user) to a $250 per year Professional version (unlimited symbols, 1GB of storage and 25 users).
LucidChart gets a Gearhead rating of 4.5 out of 5.
My final topic this week concerns the problem of being an e-mail packrat. If you’re like me and you’ve moved to Gmail and you keep everything but spam then eventually you will, also like me, need to do something about the gigabytes of messages that exhaust the space available.
The problem is how to get messages out of Gmail (or other IMAP server) so you can archive them, move them or do whatever it is you want to do with loads of old messages other than delete them (which is a cinch if you drink and administer your mail system).
The answer is a freeware, open source (GNU license) utility called Imapsync, which performs “incremental recursive IMAP transfers from one mailbox to another” (this means it can traverse an IMAP mailbox tree).
By only copying messages that are not on both servers, Imapsync reduces the amount of data transferred and it also preserves the read, unread and deleted flags. Imapsync can be stopped and resumed and transfers can be done one way with optional deletion of source messages after a successful transfer.
Written in Perl, Imapsync requires Perl (natch), the Perl Mail::IMAPClient module, the Perl Digest::MD5 module and optionally the Perl Digest::HMAC_MD5 module.
I’m setting up Imapsync in a VMware virtual appliance running Linux along with a load of other e-mail utilities as part of my regular toolkit. If you have any favorite messaging tools, let me know.
Gibbs is trying to stay dry in Ventura, Calif. Your forecast to gearhead@gibbs.com.
