Using Gmail on a Mac? Then you may already know about Mailplane — if not, and you’re looking for an email client to use with Gmail, Mailplane is worth a look. The standalone software integrates seamlessly with multiple Gmail accounts and can make email wrangling far less of a chore. Version 2.1 is fresh out of beta and adds useful features like support of offline Gmail using Gears and image insertion within the text of your mail. Don’t forget that Google recently added a feature allowing you to tame your offline email — you can specify which folders appear offline and how much of that mail you really want to tote around. Also included in this release is support for multiple rich text email signatures.

Mailplane is $24.95, although this upgrade is free to all Mailplane 2.0 users and there is a free 30-day trial available. Still not sure what this setup adds over Gmail in a browser? Have a look at the two-minute walk-through for a better idea. Although I prefer a browser over most third-party apps, Mailplane is one of the few exceptions in my personal toolbox.

While you could use many of Google’s services in the browser, some folks prefer actual client software. I’ve been using a Google Voice client created in Adobe AIR and today I started to use Google Tasks in a similar fashion. This too runs on Adobe’s AIR, so it’s cross-functional for use on various operating systems. Although it’s just a an AIR wrapper around the mobile Google Tasks site, having my to-do list broken out in a prominent area offers a higher likelihood that tasks have my attention.

After spending a few minutes with it, I see that it supports Google Calendar as well. Lifehacker mentions that all of the mobile Google sites and services should work with this implementation, but I’m only getting the Calendar functions to work right now. Maybe my app has a flat and ran out of AIR? Regardless, it does work for Tasks so chalk this up as an option to running tasks in a browser .

I’m a sucker for nearly every kind of data synchronization tool on the planet — case in point: today’s news of Mozilla’s Weave Sync add-on beta for browser data. So when I read on Lifehacker that Microsoft updated their SyncToy power tool to version 2.1, I had to share the details. SyncToy generally does one thing, but it does it well: it replicates files and folders from one place into another. Using Echo mode, you replicate files on the left to files on the right, while the Synchronize mode syncs data in both directions. A third mode, Contribute, copies from left to right, but doesn’t delete any data.

Version 2.1 of the free tool doesn’t add much new functionality, but does include new features:

• Better Performance: The speed of file copy operations is significantly increased across the board.
• Improved Robustness: Much more resilient to transient network and file system errors and better error reporting which pin-points which file the sync failed on in case there’s a fatal error that stops the sync.
• Folder pair configuration backup: Folder pair configuration is automatically backed up under %localappdata%\microsoft\synctoy\2.0. User can replace SyncToyDirPairs.bin with the backup copy to resolve last saved configuration.
• Fixed the data corruption issue when using SyncToy with NAS drives.
• Fixed the issue that prevented uploading files to SharePoint when using SyncToy 2.0.
• Fixed the issue that prevented delete changes from being synchronized when the sync option is set to “Echo”
• Fixed the UI issue where reported file time were off by the difference between local time and UTC when destination is a FAT volume.

The free SyncToy is avaialble directly from Microsoft and is supported on Windows XP, Vista and 7. I have it installed on my netbook and use it to keep audio files in sync between the Windows XP and Windows 7 partitions.

After tracking Mozilla’s Weave project since its early days, it’s nice to see the effort mature. Mozilla is now offering the first beta of the Weave Sync add-on for the Firefox browser, which can be downloaded here. In case you haven’t been watching Weave, here’s a short recap — Weave is a method to synchronize your web browsing experience across multiple devices that use Firefox. Using Weave, your bookmarks, passwords, browsing history, cookies and more are sent up to Mozilla’s servers and back down again to any other instances of Firefox you use.

New in this first beta is more speed and relevance in the Awesome Bar, a simpler approach to getting started and incremental synchronization. Although I gravitate towards the Safari and Chrome browsers on my computers, I installed Firefox this morning and then added the Weave Sync add-on. Since I haven’t used Firefox in a long while, I asked Weave to replace the old data on the server with the fresher data from my current browser. All told, I think I spent 30 seconds configuring Weave. I then started typing a URL in the Awesome Bar and immediately saw the speed of the new Weave beta — as I typed the URL, the history of my prior visits to that URL and related URLs appeared instantaneously. And this was on a completely fresh installation of Firefox — most impressive! I had to sign in to the website I was looking for and Weave handled that as well.

My first impressions are very positive and the Mozilla team should be proud of their work to this point. It was a long time coming, but Weave is looking like a very solid web synchronization platform right now — it’s simple to use from and end-user perspective, it’s fast, and it helps replicate the web experience across many devices. And by many devices, I mean mobile devices too — Weave is meant for Fennec, which is Mozilla’s mobile version of Firefox for handsets and Internet Tablets. Think about that for a second: all of your bookmarks, cookies, passwords and more from the computer will be seamlessly available on a Nokia N900, for example.

If you’re using Firefox 3.5 or greater on more than one computer, I recommend taking a look at the Weave Sync add-on. It’s blazingly fast and highly useful. I’m not sure it’s enough to get me off of Google Chrome — which I still find faster, but is far less customizable — although I may give Firefox another shot in my day-to-day web work. After all, Mozilla just made it easy for me to switch — all of my personal browsing data is already in Firefox, so there’s no transition time involved.

Here’s a handy Ubuntu tweak that simulates one of my favorite Windows 7 features: Aero Snap. This is the user interface feature that automatically resizes application windows when you drag an app to edge of your workspace. Drag a window to the top and it snaps into a maximized view. Move an app to the left or right edge and it automatically resizes to take up half of your space. It’s one of those features that I originally thought I wouldn’t use, but I find that I hit a several times a day when using Windows 7. Like registry bloat, it grows on you.

Besides having a killer name, OMG! UBUNTU! has the specifics on how to enable this feature in Ubuntu. The directions look pretty straight-forward — you essentially need to enable Compiz and then tweak a few commands in the Compiz Config Settings Manager. The downsides? Lifehacker says you won’t be able to drag windows into other workspaces, which sort of makes sense since you’d be dragging beyond the edge of your primary workspace. And windows might get fluky on a secondary monitor. Neither of these would keep me from making the mod, but I don’t have Ubuntu on anything at the moment. My poor netbook is already dealing with a triple-boot environment with Windows XP, Windows 7 and Moblin. Adding Ubuntu would probably blow up the device.

I have demonstrated Parallels Desktop on the Mac that I use to run Windows 7 alongside OS X. A new version of Parallels Desktop, version 5, was released yesterday and among many new features offers better Snow Leopard and Windows 7 support. One of the new features of Parallels Desktop for Mac v.5 is the Crystal mode, which allows the Windows 7 environment to be “hidden” while running. In the video I demonstrate how this works, and show the ability to run Windows programs like Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer on the Mac desktop.

One of my mobile mantras — No. 4, actually — is to turn off wireless radios and work offline when I can. Solutions like Google’s Gears allows for that approach, but sometimes you don’t need your entire mailbox with you when you’re offline. Starting today, you get a little more control.

Google has now implemented a way to choose which mail you want to use offline with Gmail. Now you can tell Gears to only pull down mail from specific labels and from certain time periods. Only want your Inbox and two other labels from the past week? No problem. Once you have Gmail setup for offline use, just hit the Offline tab in Settings to pick and choose.

Fans of Microsoft’s Windows Live Sync using Snow Leopard can have a sync party tonight — the file synchronization application received support on Apple’s latest Mac OS X version today. Live Sync was born from the old FolderShare service, and offers a free way to sync files or folders between computers. But on the Mac side, Windows Live Sync lost official support when Apple introduced Snow Leopard. That issue is now resolved.

When it was known as FolderShare prior to its change to Live Sync, it was a must-have service for me — it offered one of the easiest and effective ways to sync data between multiple devices. The features are still pretty solid:

• Sync up to 20 folders with a maximum of 20,000 files each
• Folders can personal or shared with others
• Integration with Windows Live ID
• Integration with the Recycle Bin
• Remote file access to powered-on computers with the Live Sync software running.

Mac OS X 10.6.x users can grab the free software directly from Microsoft.

Smartphones are becoming more capable all the time, with features that are beginning to rival full mobile computers. I have been following a few people online recently that are making concerted efforts to leave the laptop at home and only travel with the smartphone. It’s an interesting proposition and while I think it can be done by some folks, there must be times when a larger screen and keyboard would fit the job at hand a little better. I keep thinking back to the Celio REDFLY that I looked at a while back, and it seems to be a decent compromise of mobility and functionality for these folks mostly using the smartphone while traveling.

The original REDFLY I looked at paired with Windows Mobile phones to simply extend the display and keyboard. My evaluation proved to me that it was perfect for those times when I needed to do more extensive data entry, such as long email responses. It was also a good tool for working with spreadsheets and Word documents, something I wouldn’t even try on a phone.

The folks at Celio, makers of the REDFLY, have produced a version of the little laptop that work with some BlackBerry phones. There is a good fit with this REDFLY, given the focus of the BlackBerry on strong messaging features. I can see how the ability to connect the BlackBerry to a notebook-like device could be a good tool for those trying to travel as light as possible. I’ll soon know for certain, as the folks at Celio are sending over a REDFLY for me to try with the BlackBerry. That means you’ll soon know for certain too, as I will share that whole experience with you. Until then, refresh your memory of the REDFLY with the video overview I shot of the original version.

Google Chrome’s bookmark sync has come a long way since I last looked at it. The latest Windows beta build now offers bookmark sync, which by itself may not sound glamorous. But at the tail end of the video demonstration it gets a bit more interesting. If you have multiple computers signed in to Google, adding a bookmark on one computer adds it to the other in a near-real-time fashion. Google is leveraging the XMPP servers it uses for Google Talk to make the magic happen. That’s pretty clever since the first word in IM is “instant.”

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