Productivity

Internet, The Cloud And Personal Empowerment

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Internet Cloud

The Internet has always been a passion for me and over the past 30 years, I have helped it blossom. It’s 1995 and I am standing in a queue at Heathrow Airport waiting to go through security. I have an overnight bag with enough clothes for my three days in Brussels, plus a bag carrying my newly purchased pride and joy laptop computer. Back in the day, you had to ensure that your laptop battery was fully charged before going through security because the uniforms made you boot the machine up to show them that it was indeed a laptop computer and not a bomb that would take the aeroplane out of the sky  – and this was way before Islamic suicide bombers came on the scene.

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Postbox Email, Power And Flexibility

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Postbox Email
Postbox has been my primary email client of choice for many years and nothing else has appeared to make me change my mind.  The app is a paid-for derivative of Thunderbird, but the relatively small charge for a lifetime subscription gives you plenty of bells and whistles to enhance the way that you work. Over recent years it has seamlessly handled up to nine email accounts, including Gmail and IMAP services, plus Protonmail through ProtonMail Bridge. So why a separate email client rather than web browser access? The key reason is that Popstbox enables me to manage all my email accounts in one place rather than skip from account to account via a web browser.  Also, some years ago, Gmail was down to browser users but the emails came sailing through to Postbox.

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Evernote – Can I Rekindle The Romance?

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Evernote

Evernote and I had a slight falling out over the last 18 months or so. So much so that I refused to renew my premium subscription and deleted my account.  This was pretty dramatic stuff since I had been a premium member for more than 10 years.  And I wasn’t alone. People all over the web were criticising Evernote and looking for alternatives such as OneNote, Nimbus and Notion to name but three. So where did it all go wrong for me?

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Aqua Mail Gets My Perfect Email Vote

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Aqua Mail

Aqua Mail has completely ruined the old epithet that it is better to travel than arrive.  Over the years I have liked nothing better to try out a wide range of Android email apps and finding their strengths and weaknesses before moving onto the next one. Aqua Mail has screwed that by being the best email app I have come across and will probably always be my email app of choice. The reasons are many and varied.

First, Aqua Mail has so many configuration options you will be lost for choice, well around 300 choices to be accurate. Whether it is changes in the interface you want to make or the way the app itself handles emails, there is an option that you will eventually find that suits you. I say eventually, because it took me several weeks of tweaking to get it just right.

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Android Apps I Cannot Live Without

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Android Apps

My life is on my Android mobile devices and, thankfully, most of them rely on cloud storage. So, in the event that I lose the phone, I can remotely wipe the phone and still access the data that the apps generate. Looking back at my Google Play account, it is startling at the number of apps that I have downloaded and, in some cases, paid for and rejected. But, over the years, a number of apps and services have become indispensable, and here they are.

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