Friday, July 04, 2008

RSS simplicity on the mac and gmail.

I'm a few months into using my macbook now and thought I'd pen a line as to how I was getting on with it.

It's not rocket science, and, as the strapline goes: 'it just works'.

It does work, and works really well. The email functionality is something I really like. I love the ability to keep your RSS feeds and mail in one place. I'm sure you can do the same on Windows, but this just seems perfect for me because it really is so simple.

When I see a site I like, I immediately subscribe to it by copying the RSS feed and pasting it into the 'file' 'add RSS feeds' tabs. It's dead easy and I love it.

The only bugbear for me is next having to sign into gmail and manually reading the 'unread' mail (currently around 160) over thelast few days / week. Does anyone know if there's a function on gmail to simply say that you can mark all mail as unread?

The mac is great but falls down for me on word procesing. The 'pages' tool is pretty thin and I find that the formatting goes to pot when you export to Word. I'm disappointed in that function.

The ability to manipulate film through imovie is exceptional and I love GarageBand too. Browsing is near identical as I use firefox - I've not made my mind up about Safari.

Apart from that - I've been neglecting the blog recently, which of course is unforgivable! I still use Twitter a lot and love updating that. If you don't use it, try it out. If you do use it, feel free to follow me at www.twitter.com/paulnicholls

I'm working from home today and have set myself a ridiculous mound of work to do. Thank goodness it's Friday. I'm so looking forward to the weekend - and to watching Dr Who with a very excited Harry on my lap!

Watch out for a podcast. I've some exceptional music to play.

2 comments:

Adrian Pegg said...

Paul,

Assuming you are already importing you gmail into Mac mail and you are using your gmail as a mail archive (exactly as I do) it is very simple to mark your mail as read in gmail.

You just need to set up a filter in gmail -

1. Go to gmail and click 'settings'
2. Select 'Filters'
3. At the bottom choose to create a new filter
4. Put an asterisk * in the 'From' field to select all mail, then Next
5. Choose 'Mark as read' and 'Skip the inbox' as well if you want to keep everything tidy.
6 Click 'Create Filter' to start it off.

Anonymous said...

No need for a filter, just hit:

* u: Select all unread conversations.

Shift-': Mark selected conversations as read.

These are in the help - Hit ? to bring up help.

Cheers!