Posts Tagged ‘outlook’

Bye bye, Outlook

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

As a major GTD nerd, it’s a temptation to constantly tweak and tinker with my personal productivity systems.

But I normally resist. This week, I’ve had a major overhaul, so thought I’d share what I’ve been doing and some of my reasons why.

I should mention that I nicked a lot of these ideas from Gareth, so big thanks to Gareth!

Why the change?

There were a number of reasons that motivated this.

Part of it was because I’m switching from mainly using Windows Mobile phones to my new shiny Palm Pre.

Part of it was a desire to move my main workstation from Windows XP to Ubuntu, after seeing so many friends and colleagues rave about it, hearing an inspiring talk on Linux from Bob Sutor, and getting so much abuse from people I’m too polite to name 😉

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Posted in web | 5 Comments »

Custom properties in Outlook Mobile

Sunday, May 25th, 2008

As part of my plan to write a location-based reminder app using Bluetooth devices, I need a way to assign tasks to people, and people to specific Bluetooth device IDs.

I’ve decided to do this using custom properties in Outlook Mobile – the default PIM that comes on all Windows Mobile smartphones and PDAs.

I’ve not used this API before, but after a little playing, I’m impressed with how straightforward it all is.

The idea is that items in the Outlook Mobile PIM have pre-defined properties – so Contacts have fields such as ‘First Name’, or ‘Postcode’. But you can programmatically add new fields, and then store whatever you want in them.

For my purposes, I can add a “Bluetooth Device IDs” property to Contact items in my address book. I can also add pointers to Contact items to Task items in my to do list.

As this is just meant as a quick hack / proof-of-concept, I’m doing this in C#. The code looks something like this:

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Posted in code | 6 Comments »