Opera 9 Mail almost got me switched over…

I have spent most of the day learning about the new Opera 9 beta, features, and the related Opera website community content. I really like the browser, it seems to be solid, standards compliant, and fast. I have started using it as my primary browser, and then we will see if it becomes a permanent switch.

If you read my post about BlinkList, you’ll see that I’m looking for new software based on the tagging (categorization) pattern. I was therefore very excited when I saw that Opera Mail supports this concept.

Unfortunately, I don’t dear to migrate my thousands of e-mail messages from Outlook to Opera yet. The reason is the lack of import and export capabilities in Opera.

In order to import from Outlook 2003, I must first import my messages into Outlook Express. Then, import from Outlook Express to Opera. I tested the procedure with a small subset of my Outlook folders. Everything imported okay, except that my folder hierarchy was flattened to only 1 level deep in Opera’s Filter "view". On top of that, there’s no feature in Opera to move a filter to become a sub-filter of another filter. The only work around was to create new sub-filters and move the contents of the imported filters across to the new destination.

Maybe there’s no need for me to mirror the original folder structure in Opera. After all, the filter (tagging) concept is very different from the hierarchical folder view in Outlook. Nevertheless, I’m not yet confident enough in Opera Mail to think that I’ll never again need to migrate my e-mail database to another application. That’s a pretty good reason for maintaining a fixed hierarchy of messages.

Maybe the optimal solution is to use a standard hierarchical folder system as the permanent store for the e-mail messages, and then add the filtering/tagging/categorization system on top. That should give me the best of both worlds.

Oh, I almost forgot, I was unable to find a way to export e-mail messages from Opera Mail without loosing all the filtering information. The only solution I found, was to export one filter at a time into a .mbs file, but no information about filter (folder) names or rules would be included.

There’s of course no import of .mbs files in Outlook or Outlook Express either, so I would have to find some third party software to get it all back if, for example, I should want/need to start using Outlook 2007 when it’s out.

I will keep an eye on Opera Mail, and hope that a future version will add some of the features I’m looking for.

Disclaimer: it’s absolutely possible that I’m incorrect or inaccurate in some of my observations. I appreciate any feedback on the matter!

Try “BlinkList” for better bookmark/favorites organization

I’m in the habit of constantly adding links to the IE favorites list, and as a result my favorites list has become overwhelming large. It’s at the point where, after something gets added, it’s never again found.

 

Recently I have become more aware of the power of the "Tagging" pattern. Examples of tagging as pattern can be found in photo album applications (e.g. Adobe Photoshop Elements), as well as in other types of information management software.

 

In a nutshell, this is how tagging compares to the traditional approach of a hierarchical organization of information, using the IE Favorites List as the example: In my favorites list I have, over time, created many, many folders in a deep hierarchy. Whenever I add a new link to my favorites, I have to decide which folder to save the message in. Having to do this decision making is problem number 1; it’s just too time consuming. Problem number 2 is the fact that you can only add the link to 1 folder at a time. Problem 3 occurs when you need to find that link again in the future ("now, which folder did I add the link to?").

 

Using a tagging system, you could add all links to a single folder. Whenever you add a new link, you would attach one or more tags to the link, conceptually storing the same link in many "folders".

 

Problem 1 above is reduced since associating a link with a tag is much easier than having to browse for the most appropriate folder. Problem 2, of course, is removed. Problem 3 is greatly reduced, because by associating multiple tags with the link, I increase the chance of finding the link at a later point of time.

 

I believe the tagging pattern is very powerful and have decided to start looking for replacements of my most used information managers (e-mail, RSS, news, file system, etc.). This means that Outlook, FeedDemon, XNews, etc. all have moved into the "danger zone".

 

The first victim is the IE favorites list, as I today found out about http://www.blinklist.com. BlinkList is a free, web based bookmark manager that takes excellent advantage of tagging. I quickly signed up, and contemplated importing all of my favorites items before deciding to take a more selective approach. As of right now, I have reviewed all my ASP.NET, CSS, web design, etc. related links and added them to the new manager.

 

Take a look at http://www.blinklist.com/TorLanglo for the result.

ASP.NET Page Lifecycle

I’m in the process of learning about ASP.NET master pages and themes support. I’m trying to incorporate runtime switching of themes on the master page, and what seems to be a pattern in my learning process occurred again.

What I’m finding is that when I’m having a hard time understanding what’s going on in a partucular "problem space", it’s time to dig a little deeper and first understand the underlying architecture. 

There are many approaches to learning software architectures, but I’n my case using UML class and other diagrams always seems to do the job. 

So, here we go. The following UML class diagram show the classes involved with loading an ASPX page:

The diagram is not intended to be 100% correct or cover all related classes and relationships. Instead, the purpose is to communicate to me (and hopefully you) something that helps me remember how ASP.NET works.